Randolph Lalonde - Spinward Fringe Broadcast 08 - Renegades

by Randolph Lalonde

  On the one hand, I was relieved. I didn’t want fighting to break out between you and the Carthans. On the other, I had to wonder how my failure would affect my son’s status, his lifestyle. Not two weeks later, the Council was dissolved and there was a sudden movement of resources, ships, and troops along with a recruiting drive. The Carthans suddenly believed everything I said about Haven Shore making a move to push them off this world, and after I laid out my hypothetical scenario about how the Rangers and Triton Fleet soldiers would start by murdering the Carthan officers, well, they didn’t hesitate. That brings me to today, and this terrible tragedy.

  I have no love for the Carthans, and I truly hoped that Triton Fleet would defeat them with minimal casualties. I don’t know the Order’s motivation behind causing friction between your governments, but I truly believe that Haven Shore is better off without Carthan interference. I thought everything would go better than planned, and I could sneak off, finally join my son.

  Then three shuttles left Haven Shore, under a banner of surrender. I tried to stop it, they were distressed parents and their children, and I told them they would be escaping into terrible danger. I tried to stop them. I even held on to two children, clutched them to me until their parents finally knocked me down and tore them away, loading them into those defenceless ships. If I had more time I could have sabotaged them so they’d never take off, but there was nothing I could do in the end.

  Two of those shuttles are gone, taking the civilians who panicked with them. I retreated to my room, and in pursuit of solace I played back recordings of my son only to discover, upon playing them all back in succession, that they are fake. Your Crewcast system, which I never used until today, found markers that indicated that they were fabricated. Now I know that he is dead. My actions have cost the community I’ve come to love several families, and there will be no more good days for me.

  I can only say that I was misled, and I hope my death provides some comfort to the people I have wronged. Thank you for listening.”

  The image disappeared and Ayan stood silently, surrounded by the sounds of rain and a pristinely kept room. Her head throbbed under the pressure of her fury at the man. “Coward,” she spat at the ashen-faced corpse of Sunny Zinnes before turning on her heel and leaving the room.

  “Lock this room down,” Ayan said. “Only commanders and higher ranks can enter until one of us releases the scene. When that time comes, bag the body, his possessions, and transport them to the British Alliance,” she told the guard.

  “Is it true?” Lacey asked, her expression fraught with worry.

  “He betrayed us. If it weren’t for him, we could have negotiated with the Carthans. This may have never happened. This is all done now,” Ayan said with a glance at the door closing behind her. “We have more important work to do.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Enemy Sighted

  Alice could never decide what her favourite simulation type was. In fact, it was difficult for her to find one she didn’t like. They were still all new to her. Even the fuzzy memories of her time travelling aboard the Clever Dream couldn’t shed light on the topic. Even then her tastes were always all over the place. The only sims she seemed to avoid were based in social drama.

  What Alice loved most about the few simulations she’d had time for on the Warlord and in Haven Shore was that there was no end of players to enjoy them with. Whether they be combat based, historical, scripted, or awe-groove oriented, if the simulation allowed her to be herself and there were enough players around, almost any sim had the promise of becoming an incredible experience. Many of the Warlord crew had earned their way into unlocking the level one entertainment simulations, and Alice was one of the first in. She let the computer choose which simulation she tried next and was dropped into one called “Uxxa Crisis” and several crewmembers she didn’t know followed her in.

  “Welcome to Uxxa Station,” said a disembodied, garbled voice. It sounded like an alien who had never heard humans speak tried to create an announcement system that could communicate in English. ‘Welcome’ sounded more like ‘Wee-lum’ and ‘Station’ sounded more like ‘Shay-shun.’ The voice continued on, its intonation building to a gleeful climax towards the end. “It brings us sorrow to announce the usage and expenditure of all escape vessels. The administration has been killed and feasted, the station is abandoned, and you should flee for your own safety. Advisory: you are biologically unsuited to the environment outside the station. Have a good cycle!”

  “Great, the Edxians have landed, eaten the staff, and good luck finding a ride out, have a good year. Something tells me this is a horror sim,” Alice cracked as she checked her surroundings. The corridor looked old, pitted by corrosion and scarred by errant disruptor rounds. “Oh, yeah,” she said to herself with a nod.

  Remmy appeared behind her, a late entry into the sim. “We got teamed up,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a weapon?”

  It had been only a short time since she realized that Remmy wasn’t stalking her but reciprocating her perceived interest. The realization was still a little too fresh, and she couldn’t help but feel embarrassed at her mistake, even though she knew he probably had no idea she’d made it. “Huh?”

  “I don’t have so much as a slingshot,” one of the new Warlord crewmembers said as they appeared behind her. “Cool sim though, wow, the resolution is so high I can smell the mould spores.”

  Alice realized then that she wasn’t wearing anything she would call protection under the heavy cloth coat her avatar was wearing. She pulled the top of the coat open to reveal luxury pyjamas that were modest, but as useless as they were embarrassing, covered with sleeping cartoon pink bunnies. The closest thing she had to a weapon was a self-heating curling iron in a floppy coat pocket.

  Remmy wasn’t as lucky. He was assigned the role of a human spa-goer from a neighbouring building, and wore bathing trunks. One of the other new crewmembers was dressed similarly, and the pair behind her were in some sort of leisure climbing gear. “Okay, so this could be an elimination or an escape sim.”

  “Won’t know until we open the door,” said one of the crewmembers, Oscilla, from maintenance.

  Alice braced herself and pressed the button beside the door. It slid to the side to reveal a lounging area. A sizable transparent dome enclosed the area, decorated with soft seating for fifty bipeds. Through the dome they could see a lake of molten lead with rust coloured hills beyond. The remnants of dozens of humans were strewn across the room, torn and gnawed to pieces. The dim yellow light and long shadows only made the scene look more foreboding. “Cheery,” Remmy quipped.

  “Okay, so we won’t be escaping on foot, that atmosphere isn’t breathable, and judging from that lake, it’s a little too hot,” Oscilla said.

  “I don’t think this is an escape map,” Alice said. “This is what I get for letting the computer select a random scenario.”

  “I think it’s a re-enactment,” Oscilla said as she gingerly walked into the room, her oversized plush puppy slippers flapping their dog ears as she walked.

  The sound of her shuffling feet set Alice on edge. “Stop moving, that noise may as well be a dinner bell.”

  “Whatever came here moved on a while ago,” she replied, kneeling down to inspect what was left of a torso. “These bite marks are actually pretty small, I don’t-“

  Creatures with long legs leapt from every shadow and crevasse to grasp and bite Oscilla, pinning her to the floor. Their sleek, furred bodies twitched excitedly as they tore at her with long fingers and sharp claws.

  Alice and her leftover comrades ran back through the door, closing it behind and running without thinking for the length of the corridor. “More evidence that humans are just soft and slow food without our technology. I get the feeling that this is gonna end quick,” Remmy said. “Might be one of those sims we have to play half a dozen times before we learn how to beat it. Those things weren’t Edxi though, I’m going to have to look them up. I figure they
were about thirty-five, forty kilos, maybe five feet long from tail to nose?”

  “I’d say between four and six.” Alice was absolutely thrilled; she hadn’t been frightened in a sim since she could remember. “I’ll be ba-“ the sim closed down unceremoniously and she received an alert message from the bridge. All leisure sims were suspended. “The worst timing!” she screeched as she kicked her feet against her bunk mattress.

  “Shh! Use your privacy curtain!” whispered Tamera, a woman barely out of her teens in the bunk across the aisle from her. She closed her curtain with a jerk.

  “Sorry,” Alice replied. She put on the armour under-layer of her vacsuit, the form-fitted suit that her metal emitter armour would fit to, much like her father’s only more modern, and dropped quietly from the top bunk. “Something’s up, just checking it out.”

  “See if you can get the sims back,” Wilda said from the bunk below hers. “I was just starting to have fun in an anon-date room.”

  “Sure,” Alice said, rolling her eyes. Anon-date rooms were supposedly one of the ways around the no fraternizing rule on most ships. There was no such rule on the Warlord, though it was frowned upon to date up and down the ranks, so Alice didn’t get the point of a simulation that let people take on a different appearance to anonymously date other crewmembers, when they wouldn’t be able to carry a good match into the real world. It was like baiting yourself for trouble. “It’s just weird that the sims are closed even though we’re not on alert.”

  “You go check in with daddy,” Wilda said. Alice would change bunk mates if she could; Wilda was already annoying, with lips that looked too big for her face and a tendency to remind everyone around that Alice’s father was the captain. The support systems technician had become a thorn in Alice’s side in a matter of days, and she spent every spare second in her bunk, so it seemed like she was always there. “Run along now,” Wilda said.

  Alice did her best not to react and left berthing L3, which stood for Ladies Bunkroom Three. There were twenty bunks in each compartment, which made things interesting when two thirds of the privacy curtains weren’t working properly yet, including hers. They were supposed to cancel out noise, so the only snoring you heard was your own, but they were finicky to set up, and it would take days or weeks longer for the facilities team to fix all of them. Alice promised herself that she’d take a look at fixing hers on her own when she got back to her bunk, not that she could break out the tools and get to work right then. Too many people were trying to sleep, and if she woke them all at once her sin would be remembered for days.

  It didn’t take her long to get to the bridge. The watchman nodded at her, suppressing a yawn. “I’m clear?” Alice asked.

  “Yeah, Commander Buu is in the hot seat, busy for third watch,” the tall watchman said. He was an older member of Stephanie’s boarding team, with broad shoulders, a powerfully muscled chest and grey mixed in with his blonde hair.

  “Thanks, Denver,” she replied.

  “Call me Den,” he told her.

  The heavy hatch slid aside to reveal a bridge filled with the full third watch crew. These were the least experienced, most recently qualified people aboard the Warlord, but they seemed surprisingly competent and busy. Minh-Chu had the holographic displays on the small bridge set up much like they were on the Triton, only smaller, with a semicircle of command data in front of the captain’s seat. She could immediately see that the Warlord was tracking a pair of parallel wormholes within scanner range, an unusual thing.

  “Good morning, Alice,” Minh-Chu said over his shoulder. “What has you up?”

  “I went to bed too early,” she replied. “A lot of people are up right now, I think it’s going around.”

  “About forty percent of the ship,” Doctor Messana said from the operations station. It was the first time Alice had run into the new ship doctor, a woman who groomed herself bald, but had a fairly kindly face. It was a surprise to see her on the bridge; Alice thought she would be busy enough doing one-on-one check-ups with every member of the crew. “It’s normal for people’s sleep patterns to fall in line with the watches when they trust that the ship they’re serving on is safe.”

  “Okay, I guess,” Alice said as she passed by and stopped to stand beside the command seat at the centre of the bridge. “What’s with the parallels?” she said, pointing at the wormhole trajectories marked in the tactical hologram.

  “It looks like a big cargo train with a destroyer escort,” Minh-Chu said. “Headed to the same section of the Iron Head Nebula we’re planning on hitting. There’s more to it though, maybe a Corvette class following close behind, I can’t be sure.” He turned to the tactical station. “Engage non-energetic cloaking measures and internal scan seals.” The sounds of heavy hatches in the exterior and interior hull closing echoed across the ship, and the skin of the Warlord began passively warping scanning signals and light around the vessel. Activating the rest of the cloaking systems would interfere with the wormhole and the exotic matter surrounding the ship, leading to a catastrophe that would most likely kill everyone aboard, so they weren’t turned on. “All right, if they scan us they’ll see that something is in the middle of a deceleration cycle, but they won’t know what, or who we are.”

  Lieutenant Commander Kadri Dunn entered the bridge and headed straight for the main scanning console. “Okay, this was worth waking up early for,” she said over her shoulder to Minh-Chu. “Sorry for cursing at you when you woke me up.”

  “No problem,” Minh-Chu replied. “What do we have here?”

  “Well, they can’t change course,” Kadri replied. “And the scans you ran on their wormhole tells me that if they fire a shot, their wormhole will destabilize.” She looked at Alice then with a smile. “Taking a few lessons, young one?”

  If it were almost anyone else, Alice would have taken offence, but Kadri was a mother figure to a lot of the young women on the ship, and she extended that warmth and friendliness to her whenever they bumped into each other. Besides, she’d never seen anyone scan ships through wormholes. Normally, vessels didn’t get nearly close enough for a good scan. Space was vast, and nearby long term parallel courses were rare. Kadri was the best scanning officer aboard, so if anyone could tell Alice what was going on, and what would probably happen, it was she. “You don’t mind?”

  “Pull up a stump and learn a thing,” Kadri invited, pulling a secondary seat out from under the console. “These are definitely ships constructed by Regent Galactic or a close ally, headed for the waypoint we’re planning to monitor. You were right to think one is a destroyer, the other one I’m not so sure about. Good job adjusting our scanners to account for the warp in our wormhole, but you have to re-lens the image.”

  “I know, I don’t even know how to do it with the new system,” Minh-Chu said. “Neither did the scan officer on watch, we’ll have to add it to the training.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ensign Lane Tram said. “All I know how to do is make sure we’re not going to hit or cross high speed trajectories, so scanning through one wormhole is as far as they taught us when I was training.”

  “Watch,” Kadri said. “You lock the lensing you set up to clear the view up outside our wormhole, then enlarge and start re-lensing to correct for the wormholes we’re trying to scan through. That’s the easy bit there,” Kadri said as a blurry image of the larger ship became almost clear. “Relative to them, we’re decelerating a lot faster, so you have to correct for the time differential. At these speeds, there’s a fair difference.” She made a few calculations and adjustments and a clear image of an Order of Eden destroyer appeared. It’s name, The Barricade, was printed clearly on the side of the hull. Power level readings, density by compartment, weapon analysis, crew compliment, and detailed topographical scans of the ship’s port side appeared on the tactical display. “All right, now watch as I do the other one,” Kadri said.

  “That’s amazing,” Ensign Tram said, shaking his head. “I never thought to adjust for a time diff
erence inside of the wormholes.”

  “It’s all math,” Kadri said as the other wormhole’s contents became clear. “Looks like that cargo train is being shadowed by two corvettes and our hauler is a four-hulled transport. Readings show one hundred and forty-two on the destroyer, probably a skeleton crew, and ten thousand fifty-one passengers on the transport, all reading in stasis. I can’t get a reading on how many souls are aboard the corvettes.”

  “Could that hauler be a slave ship?” Minh-Chu asked.

  “I’ve seen it before,” Kadri nodded. “These folks are probably being transported so they can be sold to the Order.”

  “How long do they have left to their deceleration phase?”

  “Nineteen hours, maybe seventeen? Best ask someone who can figure out what those thrusters can do to get a better estimate, Sir,” Kadri replied. “I could look up similar thruster profiles and give you an estimate, though.”

  “That’s all right the ensign can handle that. Thank you for the help, Lieutenant Commander Dutta,” Minh-Chu said. “Sorry for kicking you out of bed. Get a few more winks if you can.”

  “You’re welcome, and I’ll try,” Kadri said. “It’s all yours, Ensign,” she told Tram.

  “Good-night,” Alice said as Kadri left. She moved to Minh-Chu, where he was checking the course of the wormholes and the Barricade. “We can come out of our wormhole in seven hours if we really push our thrusters, and we’ll be in combat range when they come out of theirs.”