by David Adams
Seconds later, he almost tried again, but just closed his mouth and rested, half standing and half kneeling, against the command console. There was nobody to hear his orders, or able to respond if they could. Instead, he simply watched the few remaining active consoles, staring at them with an odd calm.
The deck below him trembled, shaking slightly but with a growing force. A dull explosion, distant but coming from within the ship, caused a vibration to run through his whole body.
He’d lived for nearly two years on board the Sydney and had come to know it intimately, like a child. Just like any parent, he could tell when she cried, and somehow, instinctively rather than logically, know where the pain was coming from and the source of its distress.
The reactor cores, lodged deep in the heart of the ship, the source of their power, contained nuclear fire, bottled and harnessed for electrical power. Eight of them in all… stored behind strong walls and multiple redundant systems, but any one of them holding more than enough force to turn his ship to ashes. Now, with the ship bleeding and broken, that fire wanted to be free.
Another rumble confirmed the suspicions of his dazed mind. The ship’s containment was breached, and that nuclear fire was soon to spill out and engulf them all in its heat, as though they were unleashing a tiny piece of the heart of the sun. His ship was mortally wounded.
He didn’t need to make a general announcement, either. The crew knew what was happening. The collision avoidance radar showed the ship’s escape pods launching, little life rafts breaking free from the sinking ship, ferrying his crew to safety in tiny capsules with white-hot exhaust trails to mark their flight.
The arrowheads of the Toralii strike fighters turned like a pack of hounds after rabbits, closing with the speed of hungry predators, and in brief flashes of weapons fire, the life rafts were annihilated.
The pain in his body grew fainter, more distant, and Knight slumped forward on the deck, the concussion and blood loss taking their toll.
His mind drifted back, for some strange reason, to his days playing for the Geelong Football Club. Of the roar of the crowd that one single time he’d stepped onto the playing field of the MCG as a midfielder, taking the place of a much more skilled player with a torn hamstring. He’d never even touched the ball, nor gotten close, and very few people knew of his one single glorious day, but he’d treasured it for all his life.
Once a Cat, always a Cat, he liked to think.
The Sydney’s reactors could no longer contain the pressure within and exploded, the thermal reaction consuming the ship in a vast, silent fireball It blew scorched chunks of debris out in every direction, fading a slowly expanding ball of white hot gas in the Karathi asteroid belt, a second sun for the system that slowly faded away to leave nothing but a spherical debris field. The wreckage, its course set by the atomic blast, was slowly pulled by gravity’s inexorable tug into the same elliptical path as the asteroid field, the pieces of wreckage floating forever amongst the stars.
Chapter VII
“Plan A”
*****
Operations
TFR Beijing
Meanwhile
Liao felt strange to be in Operations with another person in command, but in every other way, it was exactly as she had remembered it.
Commodore Vong had, thankfully, permitted her to stay in Operations with the rest of the command staff despite her role as observer. It was a little move of solidarity which, she felt, helped mend the harsh words Vong had for her during the briefing. She suspected that Vong had meant what he had said, but also had a little bit of respect for her. It was a strange feeling and hard to articulate, but she did feel that, while he may have disagreed with her command style and with many of the decisions she made when she was in command of the Beijing, Commodore Vong meant her no ill will.
It was nice to be back in Operations.
The Beijing floated in the Lagrange point Cerberus guarded. The coordinates Avaran had programmed into their computer would take them to the L1 Lagrange point of Belthas IV, the same place the Alliance fleet had jumped to. Liao watched as Kamal removed the small key from his chest pocket and Vong did the same. The keys were inserted and turned, a procedure she had performed dozens of times herself, and the ship jumped.
It was normally a completely imperceptible thing that, apart from a few blinking lights that lit up on consoles scattered around the dimly lit Operations room, passed by without incident.
Not this time.
There was a terrific scraping noise as though long fingernails were being dragged at high speed across a chalkboard. Immediately, proximity alarms and thermal warnings began sounding. The crew reacted quickly.
“Jump complete, Captain!” came the call from Lieutenant Dao, the navigator. Instinctively, Liao turned her eyes towards the man and opened her mouth to reply, but forced it to close. “We have arrived at the Belthas system!”
The new chief of engineering, a short, stocky man with a completely shaved head named Au, called out as well. “Jump drive status nominal. The device is cooling. Hull temperature has increased by four hundred kelvin but is falling.”
“What the hell happened?” asked Vong, leaning up against the command console in almost exactly the same manner Liao expected she had once done. Was this what it looked like to be one of the crew? Liao tried to imagine herself in that role, seeing it through another’s eyes.
“Captain?” Ling, the radar operator, stared at his radar screen. “Captain, we appear to be in the middle of a debris field. I’m reading almost... It must be ten million tonnes of debris spread out over a spherical region approximately four thousand kilometres, but very little beyond that. We appear to be in the exact epicentre of the debris field. Various metals and alloys, dense materials. It’s not rock or asteroids. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Ten million tonnes was a lot of material.
“It’s a graveyard,” Liao said to nobody, “the ruins of the Toralii ships. Whatever happened to that fleet, it happened fast. They were probably destroyed as they were jumping in, one by one, and it happened so quickly they couldn’t even jump away.”
Vong strode over to Lieutenant Dao’s chair. “Well, let’s ensure we don’t meet the same fate. Move us away from the jump point. Make best speed away from our point of origin straight down, avoiding any obstacles if you could. Jiang, charge the hull plating.”
She felt the ship move, descending, a familiar feeling. She had served as a submariner before her time in space, and it felt just like the descent of a Han class submarine, despite the efforts of the ship’s complex antigravity systems to compensate. The ship moved forward slightly, then back.
“Sorry, Captain, there’s a lot of debris.”
Vong gave a wet cough, thumping his chest. Liao watched the gesture with concern, de Lugo’s words coming back to her. Perhaps the highly oxygenated air really wasn’t good for men Vong’s age.
Recovering quickly, the Commodore looked to the engineer. “Mister Au, what was the nature of the disturbance we experienced on jump-in?”
“Captain, it appears we displaced a small amount of debris when we jumped in. There wasn’t enough to disable the jump point, but since the displacement occurred at a significant fraction of C, friction on the hull has caused moderate damage to the outer plating.”
“Can it still be charged?”
“I believe so. There’s a good chance it should only have a small effect on the performance of the hull plating, but we’re definitely going to need a new coat of paint.”
They scratched my ship, thought Liao, even though her aggravation at the situation was completely unreasonable as she would have ended up in the same predicament.
Vong nodded. “Good. Lieutenant Jiang, what’s our tactical situation?”
“Autocannon turrets are reporting damage from the debris, Captain. I wouldn’t fire them under these conditions unless we absolutely had to. Rail gun two is offline, naturally, but our missile launch tubes should sti
ll function.”
Liao wished that the rail guns had been fixed. Not that it mattered; there was nothing they could do about it now.
“Mister Ling, what’s the status of the long-range radar?”
Liao could hear the frustration in Ling’s voice. “The debris is screwing everything up. I’m plotting a course and feeding it to Navigation, but radar is soup. There’s a lot of small dust and fine particles, and that’s obscuring the bigger picture here, but by and large, there doesn’t appear to be a great deal of larger pieces. Whatever happened here, the large majority of the debris is dust.”
“What kind of weapon could do that?” Vong asked, and this time, he looked directly at Liao as he said it.
“Absolutely no idea,” Liao answered honestly. “The Toralii used their worldshatter devices on our ships at the battle of Kor’Vakkar to devastating effect, but it was always limited, three or four shots, maximum five… It caused too much heat buildup to be used regularly. And even then, the Sydney took a direct hit and was still able to return fire. To turn a Toralii cruiser to dust, let alone dozens of them… it doesn’t make any sense.”
Ling spoke. “Captain, I’m detecting an active radar.”
“Distance?”
He tapped on his keyboard. “One moment, Commodore. I’ll find out. Application of the inverse squared law to previously observed Toralii radar signatures gives a distance of approximately 400,000 kilometres. Inverse Doppler effect suggests that the emitter is stationary.” He pointed at his monitor. “It’s coming from Belthas IV.”
Vong nodded his agreement. “We don’t have a lot of time then. Assuming they can see through the debris cloud, it’s likely they can see us. Mister Dao, are we clear of the Lagrange point?”
“Two minutes, Captain.”
Liao saw Hsin, the communications officer, cup his headset, then turn around in his seat. “Captain, we’re receiving an automated request to open communication from Belthas IV.”
“A beacon?”
“The request is for a two-way channel, sir. No idea what it could mean.”
Vong nodded. “Open it. Find out what they want. And put it on speaker.”
Technically, Vong was following protocol, but Liao usually preferred to take important calls one on one using her headset. As an observer though, she was grateful she would have both sides of the conversation.
Hsin touched the talk key. “Unidentified contact, this is the TFR Beijing. Communications open, over.”
Immediately, a thin, low voice filled the Operations Room, speaking with a crisp English accent, the same voice that had called her phone, unprompted, the night Tai had arrived. It was flawless in the way it articulated every word as though it were a living creature, but Liao knew better.
Ben was not a living creature at all.
“Good morning, Melissa Liao. It is a pleasure to see you again… I was wondering when you would finally show yourself. I do trust that your arrival was not significantly hampered by my redecoration of the jump point?”
Liao felt as though there were cold water running down her spine. The flawless way Ben was able to mimic the vocalisations of biological organisms seemed to have improved since she last heard his voice, and it was rich in tone and texture, playful and energetic.
“Belthas IV, Beijing. We’re investigating the nature of what’s transpired here.”
“Oh come now, Melissa. That’s not your style… having your lackeys speak for you. Tsk, tsk, tsk. You’re surely not still angry about Velsharn, are you?”
“Let me talk to him, sir,” Liao asked Vong, but the man shook his head.
“I think it’s important that we keep our distance, Commander. It would be unwise to bring excessive emotion into this.”
Liao grit her teeth subtly, but nodded. “Of course.”
Hsin continued. “Belthas IV, we’re requesting a liaison to try and talk through this situation. If we could meet at a neutral location, or if you would accept an ambassador, we could begin negotiations. We would prefer a peaceful outcome.”
A low, amused chuckle echoed through Operations. “So you are angry. Believe me; I can understand why. I am, of course, speaking to Mister Hsin, aren’t I?”
“Belthas IV, that’s correct,” said Hsin.
Vong shot Liao a confused look.
“Ben copied our entire computer’s records,” Liao explained, “including crew manifest.”
“Very well,” said Ben, his voice decreasing in pitch slightly, “make your way through the debris field and open communications with me when you have. I know what sticklers you military types are for protocol, so here is my offer: I’ll permit your commanding officer to come aboard for negotiations. No diplomats, I haven’t time for the petty lies of talking men.”
Hsin looked to Vong for confirmation, which was given.
“Very well, Belthas IV, we’ll radio when we’re clear.”
A faint buzz of static, then the line closed.
“Mister Dao,” Vong said, “plot us a course through this junk.”
*****
Later
It took the Beijing hours to clear the ever expanding debris field. The dust was too fine to consider moving it by any means the crew possessed, so Vong had them charge the hull plating, and the ship ploughed through the cloud using its thin bow to cut through the mess, until the cloud of pulverised metal finally began to thin and Dao announced that the particles per cubic metre had reached a sufficiently low volume that they could call Ben.
“TFR Beijing to Belthas IV, we’re clear of the debris field.”
Only a moment after Hsin took his finger from the transmit key, Ling spoke up.
“Radar contact, Captain. A ship has appeared, bearing zero-zero, a hundred kilometres distant. It appears to be… an unknown configuration, 200,000 tones.” He frowned, glancing at the thermal cameras. “Almost no heat on thermals, Captain. It looks like most of its systems are offline.”
“Bring up the optical camera,” Vong ordered. “I want to see what this thing looks like.”
A monitor on the command console lit up. Liao, without asking permission, walked over beside Vong and watched over his shoulder.
It was the Giralan, ripped from the sands of Karathi and thrown back into orbit. Liao drank in its mismatched composition, a disorganised, horrific disagreement of freshly installed parts grafted onto the rusted hulk of a starship that had been bent and warped from its impact on the unforgiving desert sand. Under normal circumstances, a ship like this would never be spaceworthy; even through the low-resolution, blocky monitor output, Liao could see the holes in its hull, some patched with heavy metal sheets or weapons, others exposed to the void like the rot of a living creature.
This was the ship that had destroyed a third of the Toralii fleet and conquered one of their worlds single-handedly. This was the ship that had the Toralii Alliance quivering in their boots, willing to come crawling to the lesser species for a cease-fire, willing to negotiate with those they saw as criminals. For all the rust and corrosion and impact damage Liao could see on the Giralan’s hull, there wasn’t a single impact that looked like weapon damage.
They hadn’t even touched it.
From the base of the vast, dead ship a tiny vessel slipped from a hangar bay, a shining light against the black fabric of space and crowned with a faint blue light, the illumination waxing and waning on a steady frequency as it slowly floated, clearly under power, towards the Beijing.
“Captain, incoming transmission.”
“Put it through,” said Vong.
Ben’s voice filled Operations once again. “Your chariot to my home has arrived, Captain. Come, let us discuss matters like civilised people.”
The line crackled and went silent. Liao gave Vong a subtle nod, glad, for the first time since coming aboard, that the title of captain did not refer to her.
*****
Hangerbay
TFR Beijing
Lieutenant Yanmei Cheung watched with some degree of hesi
tation as the depressurisation of the hangar bay completed its cycle and the large double doors that lead to the launch bay opened, granting entrance to the ship’s large flight deck.
She didn’t trust things she couldn’t see, and that included the thick perspex that separated her face from the airless nothing on the other side. Her work as a marine often took her places that she felt uncomfortable, including the inside of pressurised spacesuits and alien spacecraft that any sane operator would have long ago consigned to the scrapheap, but she always swallowed her fear. She was able to control her mind’s protests and focus on her duty, but although the perspex was hardened and specifically designed to resist the forces of the void, it seemed so frail and humble to have something invisible separating one from nothing.
Cheung focused on the small ship as it drifted through the doors to the hangar bay, holding her high-powered rifle comfortably in both hands. Bug-like and fat, rusted and decrepit, the transport appeared almost inert except for a single blinking blue light fixed on top. The tiny ship, seemingly under power, came to rest on the metal of the landing deck, balancing precariously upon thin, spindly metal legs. A long ramp ominously descended from the mouth of the ship, silently beckoning the two of them to enter.
Her suit’s radio crackled in her ear, and Commodore Vong spoke. “That really doesn’t look safe.”
She smiled slightly at that. “No, sir, I have to admit it doesn’t. Still, if Ben was trying to get us killed, I think he’d have a better way to dispose of us than letting us die a rusty ship-related death.” She wiggled a hand. “Spacesuits protect from tetanus, too.”
They walked together towards the ramp, Cheung moving in front of Vong, the classic bodyguard position.
“I’m not sure how things were with Commander Liao, Lieutenant, but I think it’s important we maintain a professional distance.”
