Starck's Lament (The Shadow Wars Book 11)

by S. A. Lusher

  Which was fine, he respected that. In fact, he envied her. Ever since leaving the war and his military lifestyle behind, Eric had felt adrift, uncertain of anything except for the vague notion that he liked helping people. Or, even if he didn't really like it, it was something worth doing. And that was about as close as he'd gotten to certainty.

  “What's up, boss?” Seth asked.

  “We've got one,” Marco replied, stepping back from the screen. Eric and the others crowded around it, studying it.

  A holographic image of what appeared to an installation set into an asteroid took up most of the screen. A single, red dot was had appeared somewhere in the installation and it was pulsing slowly on and off.

  “Looks like an asteroid,” Eric murmured.

  “It is. Deep space truck stop, basically. It serves as a service and repair outpost for isolated shipping lanes in that sector. Pretty far out there. The distress call is generic, not details encoded in it, and they don't respond to communication attempts. We're the nearest S and R ship, or any ship really, for quite a ways. We're also three hours out. That's how long you've all got to get ready. You've got an hour to grab breakfast and whatever else you need to do, then we'll have a briefing on the mission. Then we'll do mission prep. Got it?”

  There were a string of affirmative replies.

  The team began to leave the bridge.

  * * * * *

  Breakfast, at least for Eric, was a simple classic of bacon and scrambled eggs, (with some hot sauce) and a large glass of milk. He and Autumn sat opposite of Ronnie and Amanda. Seth and Marco were the earliest risers among the crew and likely had already had breakfast at least an hour ago. And now Marco would be preparing their briefing.

  “We were so close,” Ronnie said, staring unhappily into his breakfast.

  “We'll be fine,” Autumn replied, rolling her eyes. “What would you have done with your vacation time anyway? All you do is hang out in your room all day doing...whatever it is you do.”

  “That's because there's nothing to do on this ship,” Ronnie replied vehemently, looking up. “No entertainment save for the entertainment we bring for ourselves.”

  “It's not so bad,” Autumn said, glancing over at Eric.

  Ronnie rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

  “It will be nice to get away from the ship for a while,” Amanda said.

  “Where will you be going?” Autumn asked.

  “Home,” Amanda replied. “I haven't seen my family in almost a year.”

  “Ugh. If we'd just gone another five days...but no, we had to get a damned call.”

  “Come on, don't be like that,” Eric said. “It's a chance to help people.”

  Ronnie shook his head. “I don't know. It just seems like...I mean, there's how many people out there? Billions and billions, right?”

  “Last census I heard put us at something like twenty five billion,” Autumn replied.

  “Yeah. And, it's just, what can we do? We're seven people. There's always going to be people hurting, people dying, people needing help.”

  “Doesn't mean we should just give the fuck up,” Autumn replied.

  Eric was staring at Ronnie now, considering his words. On the one hand, he did seem to have a very valid point. With a population that large, on a galactic scale, it did seem like they were just grains of sand on a beach.

  But...

  Well, he wasn't sure what, except that he instinctively didn't agree with the sentiment. Or he didn't like it, anyway.

  But he didn't really have a clear counter argument.

  Feeling vaguely afraid and isolated, Eric returned to his breakfast.

  * * * * *

  When breakfast was finished, Eric still had a good forty minutes left, so he went down to the shooting range near the engine room. It was a small room, with just two alleys for shooting. He was still a good shot, though it had been quite a while since he'd had to draw his gun in self defense. The missions they usually received were typically not hostage situations. More like natural disasters and environmental instability. Meteorite strikes or decompression accidents. Only one of the missions had been a case of cabin fever.

  An isolated research outpost had found itself under attack from within. Four of the ten staff had suffered some kind of breakdown. That hadn't been a pleasant one. It had only been his second mission in and he'd almost called it quits. It brought up memories of the war and hit a little too close to home. But he'd stuck it out.

  So far he couldn't tell if he was happy or not with that decision.

  After some time on the range, he'd spent some more time sitting and talking with Autumn in their bedroom. The conversation was light and distracted. They both were a little on edge and in that mode of being where you didn't really want to start doing anything because something big was coming up and you were just killing time. The fact that each mission they received was basically a roll of the dice would put anyone on edge, Eric often told himself. You could get anything from a malfunctioning comm unit to an all-out bloodbath.

  So far he'd come out of it clean, they all had, with a few exceptions where they had to spend some time in the infirmary, recovering.

  Eventually, they were all called to the briefing room.

  It was a small room, standard issue for most small military operations. Just a simple rectangle of a room taken up mostly by a table surrounded by swivel chairs. In the middle of the table was a holographic projection unit.

  Marco took his position at the head of the table and began.

  Although the briefing lasted for close to an hour, Eric thought that it was a bit light. There just wasn't much to go off of and he felt that Marco was trying to compensate for that by really drilling in the few facts they did know. He talked mainly about the facility itself, why and how it had been built and then they'd gone into a detailed examination of the installation's layout. It was a fairly large facility. It could hold easily a thousand personnel, though Eric very much doubted that there was even half that given its isolation and poor turnout rate.

  Finally, Marco laid out how the mission would play out and the likeliest situations they would find themselves in.

  He figured that, chances were, there had been some kind of natural disaster. Eric's money was on a meteorite collision, though he didn't feel he could rule out mishandling of fuel. A lot of these old installations still used cheap but unstable liquid fuel. In the end, with about an hour left in transit, Marco asked them if they had any questions and, when no one did, told them to go suit up and prep for the mission.

  * * * * *

  “Maybe it'll be nothing,” Seth said. “I've been doing this for ten years now and every time we get a false alarm, it's these old bases.”

  “Doubt it,” Ronnie replied unhappily. “It's probably going to be some godforsaken nightmare. Blood and death everywhere-”

  “You must really be a blast at parties,” Autumn said, interrupting him.

  “I can't remember the last party I went to,” Ronnie replied.

  “Gee, I can't imagine why,” Autumn muttered.

  They were in the armory, gearing up with pressurized suits meant to stand up to all sorts of stuff. They were basically suits of power armor, though not quite as good as the stuff the military typically got their hands on. They'd do fine in the vacuum of space and they could stand up to extreme temperatures, some explosions and most gunfire. At least, to a point. They were all a light green color, the color of the Search & Rescue branch. They were also prepping their own personal loadouts, determined by their jobs.

  Eric and Ronnie had tools and spare parts, Seth had guns and ammo, and Amanda was packing all sorts of emergency medical gear. Although technically Autumn was second in command under Marco, she was also kind of a jack-of-all-trades. Eric knew that she had extensive combat training, and she'd gained at least some technical knowledge in her thirty-one years, but her main secondary role was to be the backup medic.

  And, on top of their regular gear, they all ended up wi
th some kind of sidearm. Eric had found a pretty solid pistol to tote around with him. It had a nice kick to it and a decent magazine size, as well as a silencer and a built-in flashlight. Although they'd be relying largely on Seth to handle any kind of combat-related issues, it was prudent (and comforting) to be able to rely on themselves in case something really serious came up.

  While the others continued to chat in the background, Eric focused on getting his own gear ready. It was a ritual that normally soothed him before a mission, but this time it wasn't helping abate the feelings of anxiety and subversive dread that were welling slowly within him. As he finished putting the last of his gear into place, Autumn came over.

  “You doing okay? You look...scared,” she said.

  Eric laughed softly. Autumn had never really been anything but very blunt. He liked that about her. “I'm okay. I mean...I'm nervous,” he replied. “But it's not just nerves, it's...I don't know what it is. Just something about this mission. About that asteroid...”

  Autumn smiled and kissed him. “You're just being paranoid,” she said.

  He nodded and shrugged, hoping she was right. Despite this hope, as he pulled on and secured his helmet, then began to run a system check on his suit, the feeling didn't go away. If anything, it got worse. He jumped slightly as a chime inside his helmet sounded, informing him that the suit check came back positive.

  All systems go.

  Eric took a deep breath and let it out slowly, telling himself that it'd be fine.

  He didn't believe it.

  CHAPTER 02

  –Cold Silence–

  Eric stood on the bridge with Marco, both of them standing behind Jensen, who was trying to raise the facility on the comms.

  The asteroid itself was in clear sight by now, slowly growing larger as they approached it. Eric couldn't take his eyes off of it. From the second he'd stepped onto the bridge and laid eyes on it, that gray, isolated mote had ensnared him with a cold, petrifying terror. He couldn't give voice to it, even inside of his own mind he couldn't rationalize it. The thought that came when he stared at it was, at least, a simple one.

  It was like looking at death.

  Eric had stared death in the face enough to know what it looked like, and he was looking at it now. And as much as it filled him with a whispering, petrifying terror, there was also an equally horrifying longing, buried in the substrata of his psyche. For some time now, Eric had been cautiously excavating the inner workings of his own mind. The war had left it a confused mess, a bloodied quagmire of razorwire and darkness. It was as if someone had detonated a powerful explosive deep in the core of his soul and, even to this day, he could still feel the aftershocks of that eruption, and things were still settling down in new configurations.

  Something he had discovered was that he may very well be suicidal.

  “I repeat, Theseus Station, this is the Search & Rescue vessel Liberation, we picked up your distress call and are responding. What is the nature of your emergency?” Jensen asked once more, his voice sounding strained and a bit grim.

  He paused, then sat back and sighed.

  “I'm not getting anything,” he said, glancing up at Marco. “I mean nothing. The distress signal isn't even active anymore.”

  “What does the BioScan say?” Marco replied.

  Jensen checked another one of his screens and shook his head. “Still getting scrambled results. There's something interfering with the scan down there.”

  “Any idea what it could be?”

  “Honestly? No.”

  “Eric?” Marco asked, glancing over.

  Startled, Eric broke his intense gaze at the asteroid and glanced over. “What, Captain?” he replied, feeling a little embarrassed that he'd been caught off guard.

  “The BioScan, something's wrong,” Marco replied.

  Eric nodded and leaned over Jensen, studying the results. They definitely looked odd and it was certainly some kind of interference, but, after a moment of studying it, he realized that he didn't recognize what he was seeing at all.

  “I have no idea,” he said, perplexed. “I've...I've never seen anything like this before. It isn't any kind of radiation interference, no solar storms or flares, definitely not equipment malfunction. It's showing life signs, but not how many or what kind or even where they are...sorry Captain. I'm completely stumped.”

  “Fantastic,” Marco murmured. “Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I suppose. Jensen, appraise S and R Command of our arrival and inform them that we're landing and preparing to investigate.”

  “Captain...” Jensen replied, making both men look at him. Something in his voice sounded off.

  “Yes?” Marco asked.

  “If something goes wrong...we're pretty far out here. It may be a while before someone comes to help,” Jensen answered.

  “We'll have to take that risk,” Marco replied. “Begin landing.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Marco turned on his heel and strode out of the bridge, looking big, professional and vaguely intimidating in his suit of green armor, helmet under one arm. Being a bit paranoid, Eric never put on his armor without also putting on his helmet. He followed the Captain out. As they walked through the ship together, back towards the airlock, feeling the subtle vibrations of the ship as it began moving into a landing procedure, Eric quickly checked over his various pockets, making sure that he hadn't forgotten anything.

  By the time they reached the airlock bay, he was sure that he was good to go. He finished by patting the butt of his gun, held tight in its holster. He hoped he wouldn't need it. All of the others were in the bay, suited up and waiting for them. Captain Marco secured his helmet. “All right, everyone, we're going in. No comms chatter from the installation and life signs are...unsubstantiated,” he told them.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Ronnie asked.

  “It means we're getting readings but...we have no way to know what, where or how many of them there are,” Eric replied.

  “Oh great,” Ronnie moaned.

  “Stow it,” Marco said. “Suit checks. Sound off.”

  Although they'd all run suit checks as soon as they'd suited up out of habit, they quickly complied to do it once more. Given the high-tech nature of their gear and armament, it was easy for something to go wrong almost without you noticing. But, after a moment of still silence, all the suit checks came back positive.

  Eric found himself wishing something was wrong.

  Anything to delay leaving the comfort of his vessel and going into Theseus Station. Even that name filled him with a cold dread. And yet, buried beneath that, was the urge to get on with it, to plunge through the airlock and into the unknown. He knew himself well enough to know that this feeling couldn't be passed off as an eagerness to 'just get to it'. No, this was something darker and deeper and deadlier.

  He turned away from that thought.

  “Everybody ready?” Marco asked.

  They all responded positively, or at least affirmatively, in Ronnie's and Eric's case.

  Marco nodded. “Good. Jensen, where are we?”

  “Landing on an exterior pad. Touchdown in twenty seconds.”

  “Affirmative. Switch over to suit mikes and internal oxygen.”

  Eric made the adjustments to his suit. He felt his vents clicking closed and the soft chatter of static as his suit mike came on, connecting to the network of radios between them and the ship. Almost as soon as the vents clicked closed, he heard the soft, almost inaudible whisper of oxygen beginning to filter in from his suit's air tanks. The air smelled clean and crisp and slightly cold. It was time to get down to business.

  All around them, the ship shuddered to a halt as it touched down, coming in for a perfect landing. All was suddenly still and silent.

  “All right,” Marco said, “Eric, Seth and I will go out first, clear the area and make sure it's safe. Then the rest of you will come through and we'll head for the facility.”

  There was another str
ing of affirmative replies. Eric felt his pulse quicken as he and Seth began following Marco across the bay towards the airlock itself. He tried to make himself relax, focusing on his environment, on the map he'd memorized, or tried to memorize, the facility had been pretty large. The three of them stepped into the airlock, which was just large enough to hold all of them in their suits of pressurized armor.

  Once they were inside, the airlock clanged shut behind them.

  Eric swallowed, feeling tremors shifting through his musculature. He still couldn't pinpoint what about this mission had him so worried, so afraid. He'd dealt with fear before. He'd dealt with mortal terror before. When you were in the combat zone, you either dealt with it or you died. Well, sometimes you dealt with it and you died anyway, but it was a good idea not to get easily shaken or petrified in a warzone.

  The airlock went through its hissing cycle as it evacuated the atmosphere from its interior, matching it to the exterior atmosphere. That was to say: none. It was an asteroid, after all. Suddenly, all fell silent. The cycle had completed. The airlock's exterior door slowly opened up, revealing a dusty expanse of gray rock and the landing pad itself.

  “Let's go,” Marco said, his voice sounding tinny in Eric's helmet.

  Seth went down the short ramp first, gun in hand, no doubt scanning the area for any threats or signs of life. Once he gave the all clear, Marco and Eric followed. They spent a moment using the limited scanners built into their suits to check the immediate area out for anything strange, any life signs or power signatures. When that turned up nothing, Marco called for the others to come out. While Eric waited for them to cycle through, he studied the bleak landscape they'd come to. The Liberation had landed on a huge landing pad of dusty metal that rested up against the side of the installation itself. It seemed to tower over them.

  There was a short road established between the pad and the installation. It led up to a large airlock that no doubt led into a hangar bay. There was another, smaller airlock door beside it. No doubt the one he and his team would be using. Eric could easily imagine simple land rovers trundling along between the facility and the landing pad, hauling cargo or personnel. Now it was empty, haunted by the powerful but oddly muted white work-lights set up along the exterior of the building and his own vessel's running lights.