Scrapyard Ship 3 Space Vengeance

by Mark Wayne McGinnis

  “I am but a low-level officer. The decision to join the Craing was a political one. A decision that affects billions of Mau.”

  “Live or die, it’s your choice. But it’s a choice you’ll have to make right now.”

  Ti held stationary for several long moments, then spoke. “I communicated with the other officers on this vessel, as well as with those on the other two. We choose life.”

  The Mau bridge crew moved slowly, gliding back to their respective stations. Five Craing light-battle cruisers came into view on the bridge’s central display.

  Orion stepped in closer to Jason and spoke to him via NanoCom. “Cap, do you trust her? They may be sacrificing their own ships here.”

  “We could easily have self-destructed at any time,” Ti said, turning back in their direction.

  Orion made a face behind her visor, evidently not liking her thoughts being read so easily.

  The Mau crew moved somewhat more quickly now, and bony fingers tapped quickly at their station consoles. The Mau ship vibrated and Jason saw multiple missiles now targeting all five of the Craing warships. The Craing, without hesitation, fired off salvos.

  “Go for Cap,” Jason answered an incoming hail.

  “You want us to phase-shift The Lilly out of here, Captain?” Perkins asked, his voice nervous and several octaves higher than usual.

  “What’s the ETA on the incoming?”

  “Less than one minute, Captain.”

  “Stay put, but keep this channel open.”

  Ti moved closer to Jason and put a hand on his wrist. “You fear our missiles won’t penetrate the Craing shields and that our own shields are inadequate. But you need not worry.”

  Jason listened to the open channel audio feed coming from The Lilly’s bridge and the excited exchange of verbal commands and updates from the various bridge stations. All the chatter was in stark contrast to the near-silent battle updating on the Mau bridge. Jason watched as they continued to work at their stations. Perhaps what was exchanged in their telepathic relay wasn’t all that different.

  A second, and then a third barrage, emanated from the three Mau destroyers. Plasma fire erupted from both sides—Craing and Mau alike. One by one, incoming missiles were targeted. Jason listened and watched his HUD. He heard Perkins yell for everyone to brace for impact. Both Jason and Orion reached out and grabbed for something solid to hold on to. The ship lurched as each incoming missile connected with the Mau ship’s shields.

  “Shields are holding,” came McBride’s voice back on The Lilly, but he’d spoken too soon. The display flashed white; blast debris, with large chunks from one of the Mau ships, flew into view on the display.

  Immediately, Jason hailed Rizzo, his heart pounding. Losing the young SEAL would be a crushing, sad, blow. Thinking about it, Jason knew Rizzo and his team were still on board one of the Mau ships. No reply.

  Two more flashes. The display showed two of the Craing light cruisers were now mere space dust. Then three more consecutive flashes. All five Craing vessels had been destroyed.

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 27

  A security team of three armed SEALs now stood at the back of the bridge. Ti was being adamant and now hovered uncomfortably close to Jason as he prepared to leave.

  “Locking us out of our own helm, and other key ship system controls, exhibits bad faith. With our latest actions, haven’t we shown we are committed to helping you? Isn’t it obvious we’ve passed beyond the point of no return?”

  Although her expression never changed, it was clear to Jason she was furious.

  She continued, her frightening white face mere inches from his own: “We have alienated ourselves from our own fleet, from our own people! What more confirmation of loyalty do you need?”

  Looking at her, Jason remained calm, wondering how she managed to speak when her mouth was frozen into an opened-wide perpetual grimace. Perhaps she was communicating through something at the back of her throat?

  “I appreciate that, truly I do. But taking such an action when held at gunpoint is far different than doing so voluntarily,” Jason said, really needing to get off their bridge. “Give it time. Prove yourselves.”

  “How do we do that when our freedom is so restricted?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it—I promise. But right now I need to attend to my dead crewmembers.”

  “All six of them? And what about the two hundred of our own lost crew?”

  That stopped Jason. He’d been insensitive with regard to the tremendous sacrifice Ti and her crew had recently made. But this was war and right now he needed to attend to the needs of his own crew.

  “We won’t forget what happened here today. What you have sacrificed. But I have to go. We’ll talk later.”

  Orion and Jason phase-shifted back to The Lilly.

  * * *

  Orion and Jason entered the bridge together. Jason felt the heaviness that came from losing not only a close friend but a valued seaman too. The XO stood and Jason took his place in the command chair.

  “So what happened exactly?”

  Ricket turned away from the Mau remote piloting station. “The Mau destroyer took multiple nearly simultaneous hits, Captain. First her aft shields went and then the others.”

  Jason needed to accept the inevitable. Rizzo and the others were gone. At least it was quick, he thought, or fairly quick.

  “So, the destruction wasn’t really instantaneous?”

  Ricket stared, but he didn’t comment.

  “How long do you think it would take a trained SEAL such as Rizzo to access his HUD’s Return to Last Location function?”

  Everyone on the bridge stopped what they were doing and looked at Jason. Orion furrowed her brow and turned back to her station. As she started to enter something, Ricket moved in, pushing her aside. She moved over to the next station.

  Ricket spoke while he worked: “Return to Last Location function would not necessarily bring him back to The Lilly. With multiple catastrophic explosions, and the fact that both Mau vessels had drifted in space—”

  Orion beat him to it. “He could have phase-shifted into open space.” She leaned in and continued looking at the display. “Yes! I’ve got him! Got a signal.”

  Ricket continued, “We had checked for life signs. None of the team’s combat suits showed signs of life, or anything else, for that matter. But checking Nano—”

  “Right there,” Orion interrupted, pointing up to a new video feed segment on the display. There, among countless chunks of debris, some the size of automobiles, others smaller even than a deck of cards, was a small, man-shaped object floating stationary in space.

  “It’s intermittent, but Rizzo’s nano-devices are definitely showing faint signs of life.” Orion got to her feet. “Request permission to take a shuttle out there and pick him up, Cap.”

  “Granted, but I’m going with you. We’ll get Dira on the way.”

  * * *

  Lieutenant Wilson was at the helm of the Caldurian shuttle. Orion, next to him in the copilot’s seat, watched out of the forward window. Seated behind them, Jason watched Dira opening and closing her assortment of medical bags, checking their contents, and readying her supplies. She glanced up and caught Jason looking at her.

  “You’re staring again.”

  “Nah, maybe I’m just making sure you’re doing everything correctly,” Jason replied with the hint of a smile.

  “Oh, okay. Well, let me know if you see anything amiss,” she replied, continuing with her work.

  “There he is!” Orion said, pointing straight ahead.

  Jason and Dira, both dressed in combat suits, headed aft. Jason took one of the larger medical bags from Dira and waited for her to pass by him into the cramped airlock.

  “Cramped in here,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll all fit with Rizzo, especially if he can’t stand.”

  Wilson’s voice announced over their comms that Rizzo’s body would soon be right outside t
he airlock hatch.

  “Stay in here and I’ll pass him in to you. Get to work on him. After the airlock closes, I’ll join you.”

  Dira nodded and watched through the aft porthole as Wilson backed the shuttle in close to Rizzo’s body.

  The airlock depressurized and the rear hatch slid open. Tethered with a line and pulling along a second one for Rizzo, Jason pushed off. Not more than ten feet away, Jason was upon Rizzo’s body in seconds. He reached out and grabbed Rizzo’s arm, pulling him in close so he could clip the other tether line onto a metal ring at his torso.

  Rizzo’s battle suit was badly pitted, which was caused, no doubt, by shrapnel from the ships exploding apart all around him. As he pulled Rizzo back toward the shuttle, Jason got his first opportunity to look into Rizzo’s visor: a visor not only pitted, but cracked right down the middle.

  “Crap!” Jason said.

  “What is it, what’s going on with Rizzo?” Dira asked him, excitedly.

  “His helmet is cracked. I think moving him is making it worse. Shit! His helmet is breached,” Jason replied. He still had several feet to go and even then the airlock would take another minute or two of precious time. He hailed Ricket.

  “Go for Ricket.”

  “I need to phase-shift into Medical … he has only seconds to live.”

  “Hold on to him and phase-shift to the coordinates I’m providing.”

  “Give them to Dira too—we’ll need her.”

  Almost forgetting to unclip their tethers, Jason took a firm hold of Rizzo’s arm and phase-shifted to Ricket’s new coordinates.

  They phase-shifted to Medical on The Lilly. Both Jason and Rizzo landed on their sides in the middle of the room and hit the deck hard. Jason moved over to Rizzo and started to remove the latches that secured his helmet to the collar mechanism. Rizzo’s eyes came open and he struggled, seemingly unable to breathe. As he jerked and flailed, Jason couldn’t catch hold of the last latch. Eyes bulging, Rizzo stared back at Jason terrified. Then Dira was at his side.

  “Hold him still!” she barked.

  She got her fingers under the final latch and it sprang free. She pulled his helmet up and away from his head and Rizzo sucked in a long breath of air. His eyes closed and his body went limp.

  “We need to get him out of this suit and into the MediPod,” she said.

  Jason was already at work doing just that.

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 28

  “This thing was never meant to cloak something the size of a fucking luxury liner,” Bristol yelled down from the catwalk. “You should have two, or even three, toric-cloaking devices for this to be done right.”

  Keeping his eyes on the device, Stalls didn’t bother to look up at his brother. “That wasn’t my question. Again, will it work?” he asked, while eight of his men continued trying to position the unwieldy device into its designated compartment on board Her Majesty.

  Bristol shrugged. “It’s a crap shoot. Look who you have installing it. I wouldn’t want these morons moving a couch, let alone one of the most advanced technological devices ever made.”

  Stalls temporarily lost his condescending smile and glanced up at Bristol. “Do not disrespect your fellow crewmembers; it’s not only rude, it’s a good way to get dead.”

  Bristol realized that several of the sweat-drenched, out-of-breath pirates below were now looking up at him. Shit. He really needed to watch himself. He was already hated by most of the crew. He could very well end up with a knife in his throat.

  “How long before we can test it?” Stalls asked.

  Bristol stood back and surveyed the progress. “Well, the hardest part, securing the micro-webbing around the outside of the hull, is done. The optical power converters have been installed and tested. An interface and control panel has been added to the bridge. So, it’s basically up to these geniuses of yours to finish up mounting the device.”

  * * *

  Bristol tried to look disinterested but had to admit that he too was excited to see if the thing would work. He watched his brother growing more and more impatient.

  Captain Stalls had changed his clothes for the big event. Now, wearing a buttoned white shirt, with an elaborate ruffled collar and overly snug black trousers, Stalls strutted back and forth in front of the now-installed control device.

  “Surely we must be ready to try it out now?” Stalls erupted, first looking at the control panel and then to Bristol.

  Bristol shrugged. “How will you know if it’s really working? Can you deploy a probe, get an off-ship perspective?”

  “Yes, of course we have a probe,” Stalls replied, but he glanced at Pike just the same. Pike nodded almost imperceptibly, and returned to what he was doing at his station.

  “Good … okay, we’ll send out a probe,” Stalls said.

  “Captain, we’ve got an approaching freighter ten light minutes out. Looks to have a full load. Shall we intersect?”

  Stalls gestured for Pike to put it up on the display. “What a relic. No, I’ve been more than explicit. We’re en route to Earth. The sooner we can get underway, the better.”

  “We could disable her, grab her cargo on the way back,” Pike suggested.

  “Are you all seriously that obtuse?” Bristol chimed in. “Why not try out the device on a real subject?”

  Stalls let that sink in for a moment and nodded appreciatively. “Yes, that’s an excellent idea, Bristol. Pike, have the rest of the fleet hang back. Set an intersecting course for the freighter.”

  * * *

  The freighter’s bridge was dingy and Brian felt claustrophobic. The bridge crew consisted of two guys in dirty T-shirts and Betty, who in any normal situation would have definitely caught his eye.

  He wiped at something wet on his cheek and saw a trail of yellowish-green pus smeared on his sleeve. Terrific, he thought to himself, my eye … no, that’s gone—my eye socket is infected.

  “You need a medic,” Betty said, dropping a tray of food down in front of Brian.

  “What’s this?”

  “Same stuff we eat,” she replied.

  “What about him?” Brian asked, nodding toward the hopper.

  “What about him?” she retorted, looking at the scaly green alien with contempt. “He’s already eaten.”

  “Yeah, I guess he has.”

  As foul a creature as the hopper might be, he was the only thing keeping the crew at bay. Brian had even been able to catch a few hours of sleep.

  Betty crossed her arms and continued to look at the hopper. “We don’t want him on the bridge.”

  “Then you’ll have to get used to it. Where I go, he goes. Anyway, he’s not doing anything.” Brian looked over at the hopper, who had curled up into a ball, apparently asleep.

  “What do you call him? What’s his name?”

  Brian shrugged. “I don’t call him anything. If he has a name, I don’t know what it is, or care.”

  She shook her head in the hopper’s direction, then looked down at Brian. “That eye of yours. You’ll be dead soon. What are we supposed to do with him then? We all saw what he did to the captain.”

  “To start, I’d be nice to him.”

  “Vessel’s approaching,” the T-shirted guy on the right said. “It’s coming up as a luxury liner.

  T-shirted guy number two made a face. “I’m getting significant weapons signatures. If it’s a luxury liner, it’s packing some major firepower.”

  “At what point will someone actually pull it up on the screen?” Brian asked nobody in particular.

  Betty moved to the nearest station and the front display flickered and came alive. Sure enough, it was Her Majesty. He couldn’t imagine a less welcome sight.

  “Do you have weapons capability on this freighter?”

  “Nothing substantial. Nothing that would make a dent in that liner. Why would we want to, anyway?” she asked.

  “Because those are pirates. The same ones that captured me—and your captain too, for that matter.�
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  “They’re charging weapons.”

  “Can’t you take evasive moves, get us out of here?” Brian asked with urgency.

  “We’re a freighter, remember? What exactly did you have in mind?” Betty snapped back.

  All eyes were on the display when Her Majesty disappeared.