James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 03

by Bodicea

  That we would enter the ship was a foregone conclusion. However, we did pause at this point to consider what we were dealing with. The other ships had paid us no attention whatsoever, and we detected no life signs in the ship we had attached ourselves to. We considered that these might be a fleet of uninhabited probes, like Caliph. Medical Technician Partridge speculated that the alien inhabitants might not register life signatures our instruments scanned for. Specialist Broadway, on Hector, speculated rather fancifully, that the ships themselves could be a life form, either evolved or bred specifically to live in space.

  The only way to resolve our speculation was to enter the ships. We consulted with Honeywell on the best strategy for entering and exploring. Ng and I put on environment suits. We considered the possibility that whoever built or inhabited these ships might take an armed entry as an act of aggression. Nevertheless, we decided it was prudent to carry some means of self-defense. Specialist Ng and I armed ourselves with pulse cannons and descended into the hole.

  Immediately up passing inside, we were both overcome by violent nausea and disorientation.

  It took us several seconds to regain our footing and allow our environment suits to clean themselves. We realized our disorientation was partly caused because we had believed we were entering from the top of the vessel, instead, we had come through the floor. Also, this part of the ship was not completely shielded from the fluctuations created by the gravity drive engine.

  So, we were feeling conflicting pull from the walls and the floor. Our stomach and our inner ears, consequently, were receiving mixed signals and responded the way human bodies are programmed to respond in such a situation: violent up-chucking.

  Specialist Ng and I remained stationary while we recovered our equilibrium and activated our helmet and arm-lamps. We saw that the interior of the craft was as stark as the outside. We were in an empty cell, about eight meters around. The walls were dull gray. The structure supports were silver and glittered slightly in the light. The whole interior looked like it had been hewn from solid rock, and it was more like walking through a cavern than a ship. We picked out a kind of ladder leading upward. The ladder was very wide. I remember standing in the center and barely being able to hold the rails on both sides. Specialist Ng had to pull her self up on one rail. The rungs were twice as far apart as we would have expected. The ship seemed to have been built for creatures of enormous proportions.

  We proceeded upward through several cells more or less identical to the one we had entered. We were concerned about losing contact with Prudence, so we left a trail of micro-transceivers along our route. Then, a set of horizontal rungs led away from the ladder we had been ascending toward the centerline of the ship. That was where we had wanted to be.

  As we made our way along the passageway, Ng remarked that our environment and circumstances had an eerily cinematic quality to them, and this did not bode well. Whenever a space crew in a holo-drama entered a dark alien spaceship, they had about a 96% chance of having their face chewed off by an alien. We didn’t think this was likely, but we both had a bad, bad feeling about the ship we were inside.

  As we exited the passageway and entered a large chamber in what we guessed was the fore of the vessel, the character of the ship changed, somewhat. We could see the internal structure, and how it had been hewned from rock, then infused with the composite material that coated the outside. Maybe it was just because it was larger than the chamber we had been in before, but it seemed different in a way we could not place except to say that, we had a sense that this part was intended to be inhabited, while the other areas existed solely for utility.

  Before going further, we needed to have some idea of where we were going. We were already beginning to doubt, between the gravity and strangeness, that we could find our way back to the airlock, even with the markers we had laid down. Ng had a resonance mapper –

  one of those things that sends out sonic pulses and can map an interior space based on the echo returns. She pressed it against the wall and it built a three-dimensional map of the ship’s interior.

  We saw from the model that had accessed a kind of antechamber near the front of the ship, separated from a series of far larger chambers. The section through which we had entered was self-contained, but behind it stretched a row of large, jettisonable chambers down either side of the hull.

  It was as though the ship we were on were a kind of carrier vessel, to which two-dozen smaller vessels were attached, but ingeniously designed to function as one ship. Each one roughly shaped like the egg of a bird, neatly arranged along the horizontal access, contained within a separate superstructure. They were enclosed by an intricate mechanism. I studied the mechanism intently, but was not able to determine its purpose until I had more time to contemplate it. I believe each of the segments on the underside of the ship is capable of being launched at a high rate of speed, where it would function as either a warhead or landing craft.

  An engineering and drive section occupied the middle of the last third of the ship. The gravity drive was fairly conventional, but based on the old Diminishing Wave principle, rather than the limited effect principle. It meant the gravitational effect was not contained to a defined area, like the ones use in our ships, but rippled throughout the cosmos.

  The forward section on the other side of us was heavy with weaponry. We both recognized the return signatures, long, pointed metallic objects slaved to the primary power-plant with direct energy conduits. We know weapons when we see them, and these were powerful ones. They harnessed directed energy, accelerated, amplified, and phased to act as molecular disrupters.

  Nasty stuff, but, as I estimated in the ship on the way back, well-within the tolerance of Pegasus’s shield grid.

  Aside from the large chambers, the ship was divided into a propulsion segment, and a weapons section as I described previously. There was no central control area, and I subsequently identified the propulsion area as a control locus for the ship operations, as though they combined their bridge with their engineering section. However, I detected no life signs there. It was also possible all ships were directed from one ship, a master control vessel.

  We decided to proceed toward the propulsion chamber in order to explore it further. At close inspection, we thought we could analyze the equipment and determine how the ship operated.

  We might also gain access to a central braincore, if there was one, which would tell us where the ship came from, who built it, and what their motives were. We mapped out a path and programmed it into the guidance system of our environmental gear. Ng activated a motion detector, to scan the pathway in front of us, but the only thing she got a reading on was us.

  We found a hatch separating our antechamber from the rest of the ship. The design was strange, like multi-layers of thick, oblong material joined into an irregular shape. It took us several minutes to figure out how to disengage the latching mechanism. Opening it was like peeling an orange. Then, we had to push the pieces of the hatch apart in order to gain entry.

  We were not prepared for what was on the other side of the hatch.

  The Chamber was as large as an auditorium, extended four decks above and five decks below, lined and stacked with hundreds of vertical glass tubes. They were clear, like glass, and shaped like sarcophagi. There was a metallic band around the center of each one with some kind of instrument attached to it. It was covered with a light coating of frost.

  There were catwalks running throughout the chamber, and we carefully stepped out to the nearest of the chambers. The chamber was dark, and we could not see what was in the capsules. We brushed off some of the frost off the first one and tried to look inside. It was filled with a murky liquid, and it took multiple vision enhancements before we could see what was inside.”

  It was a creature, and it looked exactly like the creature we found in the bunker on Medea.

  It had the same elongated head with the teeth. It had the same arms and claws, the same thick hide. It was immersed
in some kind of cryo-stasis fluid, and there were at least a thousand of them on that ship.

  Naturally, we were somewhat perturbed at that point. We had broken contact for several seconds, and anyone listening would have heard nothing except Ng and screaming “Oh, slag” at each other. Finally, Honeywell broke in on my com-link, demanded to know what was going on. I described the scene to him and told Partridge to scan for the pathogen and break the umbilicus if he detected it anywhere on the alien ship.

  We inspected the capsule to see if there were some way it could be detached from the ship and brought back to Prudence for additional study. We spent about forty minutes examining the connections, trying to determine how the capsule was connected to the ship’s systems and if there were alarms. We concluded that we did not have the knowledge or technical resources to attempt such an operation. We decided to attempt a complete molecular-resonance scan of the chamber and its contents, that would at least give us a complete picture of what was within, down to the molecular level. We would have to go back to the ship for the equipment to do this.

  We told Partridge to prepare it for us.

  Ng and I also decided to continue onward toward the engineering center. I was more determined than ever we must find a computer core or communication equipment that would let us access and confirm what their plans were. I didn’t know if we would ever get this close again, and I wanted to learn whatever I could.

  We proceeded toward the aft part of the chamber, where we found another hatch. We began peeling back the closures when I received a message from Honeywell. His ship had detected several types of energy beams being directed at our ship, at Prudence. He concluded we were being probed and suggested we evacuate as soon as possible.

  Ng and I debated moving on and pulling back. At first, we agreed that the value of potential strategic or tactical data outweighed the potential risk. However, we also agreed the risk factor was almost critical, and that even if we reached the braincore, we might not be able to find or retrieve such information.

  At that point, Honeywell informed us that two of the alien vessels were altering position and closing on our ship. We decided to evacuate and made our way as quickly as possible back to the airlock.

  I can not say for certain whether our presence inside the alien ship had been detected.

  There were no internal alarms, no flashing lights, and no attempt to pursue us as we escaped.

  However, the aliens may have required a lengthy re-animation sequence.

  We reached the umbilicus and re-entered Prudence. I quickly apprised myself of our tactical situation. I ordered Xerxes and Hector to move off, and said we would catch them later. I ordered Flight Lieutenant Driver to detach the umbilicus. We pulled away from the alien ship on thruster power and engaged the main drive engine as soon as we were free. The alien ships were shifting position, moving in around us. I ordered Driver to find an escape route.

  I stripped my environment suit off and joined Driver in the command module. From there, you could very easily spot the alien ships moving in on our position. We had detached the umbilicus without sealing the hole we had made in the hull of the ship. Even though there was very little atmosphere inside, it was still enough to kick us further away from the ship than we had calculated, almost directly into the path of another. Driver put the ship into a crash dive as the other ship passed just barely over our top quarter.

  I determined our sole priority was to get out of there with our lives, so that we could give Pegasus such information as we had already acquired. That meant putting as much distance between ourselves and those ships as quickly as we could.

  There were four closing around us in a diamond formation. We continued our crash-dive, trying to go below them. They slowly realized what we were doing and began dropping with us.

  They were not as maneuverable as Prudence, and we were able to evade them by continually altering course.

  Honeywell had been monitoring our situation and sent a message indicating that an additional eight ships were also shifting position and giving chase, making for twelve ships on our tail, not counting the one we had evacuated.

  Driver was completely focused on his task, and ably trying to navigate our way out of danger. He took us backwards, then down, then up, then hard to starboard in an effort to shake our pursuers. It looked like he was going to succeed.

  Then, the alien ships began firing on us. They were little pulses of charged particles, like our phalanx guns but only a fraction as powerful. Our shields activated and were able to hold their own against the barrage. However, there were four to six enemy ships firing on us, and they rapidly increased power and altered the energy signatures of the weapons. The cumulative effect began to weaken our defensive shielding. Their attacks were concentrated on our propulsion systems. They may have been holding back in hopes of disabling us without destroying us, and trying to ratchet up the amount of energy necessary to do that.

  Still, we were managing to pull away from them. More ships started dropping out of formation to try to block our exit. They were trying to move around us, to box us in until they could wear us down.

  I told Driver to go to stealth mode and alter course. I recognized a tactical limitation to the enemy vessels. As heavy assault ships, all of their weaponry was locked forward. They could only fire from the front of their ships. I told Driver to position himself accordingly, staying in the blindspot of their weaponry.

  With our ship invisible to their sensors, they began firing blindly. I can not say how many ships were involved in the assault at this point, but we were hemmed in by fire, and one of the ships was closing on our position. Our room to maneuver was diminishing by the second, and getting out would require a tight squeeze between the alien ships.

  The next thing I knew, Xerxes was coming in from overhead with guns blazing. They blasted away at the front of the nearest ship that was firing on us, and when they got in close, fired off a brace of missiles directly into its gunnery. The guns exploded.

  Apparently, this explosion, caused some kind of feedback surge, because a few seconds later, the entire ship exploded and spewed out debris in every direction, some of which struck some of the other ships.

  Meanwhile, the first ship was ablaze and spiralling out of control. The destruction of the ship distracted the enemy and as they maneuvered to avoid its runaway course, they created a breach in their lines. We passed through it, up and out. We managed to climb above the line of ships, with Xerxes hard on our tail.

  We thought we were home free, but the alien ships then adopted a new tactic. As our ships retreated, they began combining their assault into powerful energy pulses. We saw patterns of energy leaping from ship to ship like lightning in stormclouds. The charge would build to a critical mass then explode outward in a massive front of charged plasma that slammed everything in its path.

  One of these fronts overtook Prudence and Xerxes as we retreated. The waves dispersed over range, and the hit we took did not seriously damaged our ship or the hardened propulsion, sensor, or short-range systems. The plasma-energy fried some of our unshielded sensors and destroyed our long range communication transmitter.

  Xerxes dropped into stealth mode and we both altered course to stay away from the enemy fire. We transmitted to Hector, ordering them to go into stealth mode and follow evasive maneuvers, but it was already too late for them.

  Hector had tried to run ahead of us. Honeywell had ordered them to proceed back to Pegasus at maximum speed while our ships distracted the aliens. However, the aliens locked onto Hector with their pulse weapons while they were still fleeing. When they combined their weapons again, Hector was too close to bear the combined energy. They took a hit at close range that took out their shield and primary propulsion. Another hit and they were finished. We lost their telemetry link. I wanted to move in and try to rescue them, but it was already too late.

  We saw an alien ship moving in on Hector’s last position, but I couldn’t see Hector. Alien ships closed
around their last position and we lost visual contact. Ng tried to raise them on inter-ship, but there was no response. Whether they were dead, or their communications were disable, we were never able to definitively determine.

  I still wanted to go after them, and Flight Lt. Driver was willing. However, our sensors were fried, and we had no way of detecting them. Our systems had been moderately damaged already, and the aliens, having realized the potency of combining their weapons, were already preparing another pulse.

  Honeywell convinced us that we would only succeed in being destroyed ourselves, and our key objective was to warn Pegasus.

  Reluctantly, I ordered Flight Leutenant Driver to lay in for Pegasus at maximum speed. I ran a diagnostic on ship’s systems, and set about making repairs. Long-range communications were completely destroyed. We had a ship-to-ship link with Xerxes, and learned they were in the same situation.

  Alien ships were still chasing us, still firing on us. We were picking up speed and increasing the distance between us, but those plasma waves were still hitting us, though the intervals between were growing longer. The charges were weaker each time, but wreaking havoc on our systems.

  I ordered Flight Lieutenant Driver to Redline the engines to get us clear while we still had propulsion.

  Flight Lieutenant Driver expressed a concern about over-stressing his ship’s engine and systems. Nevertheless, over the next eighty-four hours, he managed to accelerate his ship to

  .935 lightspeed. The record speed for an unassisted Aves is .9372, by the way (and, presumably, that ship had not been attacked by aliens). The best speed Honeywell’s Aves could manage was .83 lightspeed, and we soon became separated. I have since been informed his ship was recovered by search and rescue, and is proceeding back under escort.

  As we high-tailed it back to Pegasus, I contemplated what we were facing out there. I meditated on what we had learned on their ships, and also what we had learned from studying the ruins of Medea. That they wiped out the entire human population suggests that they are intent on extinguishing human life. They did not conquer the planet, and they did not remain on it. One would have expected them to at least exploit the planet’s resources, but there was no evidence that this had been done on a wide scale. They did not bother even to loot through the ruins, they extinguished every human life on the planet.