by Will Crudge
Thirty Years ago…
The Throat-Slasher was caught in a flat spin, and the enemy gunship began to change vector. The transport vessel is known as, the Mercy, and the UAHC Frigate, Nova, had both transitioned into slip space. The lone LRF-90 was now low on ammo, had a damaged thruster array, and was then a prime for the taking.
Throat was taken back. He’d never experienced the hull maintenance entity speak with so much passion before. He even scoured his memory stores for several microseconds. He soon realized that Slasher had never expressed an overt level of emotion. Although capable of emotion, Throat knew that most hull systems aren’t prone to express themselves. They weren’t designed to interface with anyone but the ship’s NAV, and typically that was relegated to spurts of algorithms and parody data.
What is with him? Throat thought to himself. Is he experiencing fear for the first time? The entire sequence of thought was in the course of eighty-seven nanoseconds, but it might as well been an eon for an artificial sentient entity.
Slasher sent a series of diagrams to Throat’s tactical display. Although he may not have eyes to see, the tactical display’s OS was an ideal platform for breaking down proposed maneuvers in any format.
Throat toggled the thrust array controls to isolate the individual thrusters that Slasher managed to get back online. The control thrusters began to respond to the unorthodox rerouting of resources, and they flared to the right the flat spin.
The enemy gunship never expected the abrupt recovery of maneuver and had already begun to cut velocity with retro-thrusters. The LRF-90 lined up to a new vector and fired its thrusters at full power.
With only a fraction of its normal speed, the super fighter buzzed the superstructure on the top of the gunship and burned passed its aft thruster array.
The gunship seemed to continue on with its original maneuver. The non-AI controlled ship would rely on human decision making and hand-jamming before it could do much else. That was all factored into Slasher’s plan.
The LRF rotated one hundred and eighty degrees and lined up a particle beam solution on the gunships thruster array. The cannons fired, and the thinly powered stern shielding flared out in a split second.
The particle beams cut into one of the main thrusters, and it began to disintegrate. But the target of opportunity wouldn’t last forever. The gunship rotated hard to port and denied the LRF of a straight-on shot to allow the beam to form for maximum effectiveness.
Once again… All part of the plan.
The energy shielding on the gunship’s fore-section began to ripple with boosted energy. Instead of trying to re-energize the stern-shielding, they had elected to take the quicker approach, and dedicate more resources to the fore-shielding.
The LRF’s damaged thrusters were still more than enough to outmaneuver the near mega-ton warship. The fighter’s array fired brightly and arced downward to force the enemy vessel into another change of vector. At this point, the gunship was forced to devote all of its thrusting resources into countering the movements of the more nimble fighter. No forward or reverse thrust was being utilized. It couldn’t. That was the plan.
The downward arc in relation to the gunship’s orientation was a ploy to divert steerage thrust to change rotational direction. The fore section of the gunship was slow to cut rotational velocity and had to almost come to a complete stop by the time the fighter had reached the relative apogee of its arcing maneuver.
The steerage thrusters of the smaller vessel flared to point the nose cone at the gunship’s keel. This time, the distance had been closed, and Throat selected the dual phase electron beam. Normally, this beam would be useless in an exo-atmospheric environment, but Slasher would not be denied.
A pencil beam of energy shielding diverted from the fighter’s hull and created a makeshift tunnel of energy and charged particles. Now the electron beam had a medium by which it could project it’s deadly subatomic payload amidst the vacuum of space.
The beams lanced out and were a sight to see. Normally energy based weapons were invisible in space, but the pseudo-atmospheric tunnel allowed the beam to flare brightly with its concentrated barrage of electrons. The gunship’s shielding flared out in a matter of microseconds. Spaceship engineers never factored in the effects of a strictly atmospheric weapon system, so the shielding collapsed violently.
Throat switched to the plasma cannons. The Gatling Guns in each weapons cradle began to spin at max speed, and bolts of blue plasma peppered the soft underbelly of the enemy ship. Normally the coldness of space would severely limit the range of plasma weapons, so thanks to the good folks at Unum’s industrial complex, each plasma bolt had its own short-lived energy shield to provide insulative properties to the projectiles.
Now the metallic armor of the gunship’s keel would feel the brunt of this deadly recipe of plasma and impact energy. Superheated bits of slag were hurled into space, as thousands of plasma bolts strafed the hull. Defensive turrets exploded before they could line up their own counter fire. Both main fighter bay doors were reduced to molten slag. But all good things must come to an end.
The arcing maneuver had enough momentum to keep an optimum firing line on the gunship’s keel. Especially when the crew of the ship had unwisely elected to try and force the bow of the ship downward to project the shielding. This maneuver helped to increase the time on target for the bar
rage of plasma to do its job with maximum efficiency. However, the LRF’s velocity would close the firing angle over time.
Now back to a stern shot, the particle beams came to life. The gunship’s thruster array was exposed again, and the beams burned into a tertiary array of docking thrusters. The docking thrusters were for use during flight in the controlled areas of a space station but had very little tactical value. Two of them were heavily damaged before the stern shielding came back to full array.
By now the reactor on the fighter was being taxed. The fighter was designed to prevent overloading the reactor by using a variety of missiles, and ballistic cannons to off-set the energy taxation of sustained energy weapons use. The weapons would now have to go cold. Maneuvering was now the order of the day.
The LRF changed vector, exposed its thruster array to the enemy, and diverted what meager shielding resources it still had to cover their tail. The gunship responded in kind.
The fighter banked to port and then gave a slight zig-zag to the starboard side. The pattern repeated itself in ever decreasing arcs. As was planned, the gunship pointed its bow away from the galactic core, and the ripples of shielding flowed forward once again. Now the LRF was too committed to its velocity and vector to make an abrupt run of the gunship’s thruster array.
Target lock indicators began to light up the cockpit.
<’Conditioned’ them? How?>
[IDENT: Death-Nail, LRF-90 Atmospheric Variant, Unum Registry]
The gunship lurched into an abrupt list, and then a ball of fire burst out of the prow. Burning atmosphere erupted into space, and debris flickered on the HUD’s display in the form of thousands of proximity warnings.
The Fireball coalesced into a brightly flared energy shield that resembled a comet. The comet-like object rushed passed the Throat-Slasher with seemingly impossible speed, and then was out of visual range seconds later.
A bright flash ignited the blackness of space, and the gunship was no more. A burning husk of slag in the graveyard of the cosmos.
The End OF Book 2!
PART 3
KATHERINE: I AM VENGEANCE
SPACE DONKEYS
Marbles and I make it to the hold of the wrecked civilian vessel. The hold is more like docking bay, than a traditional cargo hold. The polished aluminum bulkheads are mangled and dangling off the frame studs. Tool boxes and parts bins lay scattered about. Racing skiff frames and miscellaneous hardware are either secured to the remaining undamaged bulkheads or are in locked cages.
“This place isn’t what I expected at all,” I say.
“Well I have no expectations, so I’m neutral,” Marbles says dismissively.
“No expectations, huh?” I ask. I’m a little confused by his assertion. He typically has some kind of opinion or forethought about anything.
“I’ve only been inside one other ship since I’ve been self-aware, remember? This is the first civilian vessel I’ve ever seen also.”
“I suppose your right. I guess I figured you’d have ship specs and tons of archived data inside you. It sometimes makes me forget that you’ve never been this far from your ‘birthplace’ before. It must be new to you.” I say.
“I have immense files, schematics, deck plans, and everything in-between, but no first-hand experience.”
“As much as I’d love to soak up all these memory-making moments with you, we need to sift through all this shit and find something useful!” I say. We have to stay on task. We are dangerously low on food and water for me. Marbles has plenty of charge on his SC batteries, but that will dwindle rapidly if he has to carry a passed out human for sixty-seven kilometers back to the Nova.
We methodically clear several paths through the debris. We inspect every gadget, gizmo, and widget as we go. Much of it, Marbles tells me, are commercial grade hardware thingies. They’re either parts for small racing ships or pieces of testing equipment for ship maintenance. Piles and piles of parts, tools, and nude girl cut-outs lie before us.
A few hours pass, and we’re barely a quarter of the way through the heaps of racing donkey parts. Yes. Racing donkeys. Apparently, Marbles has extrapolated enough data to identify what type of ship this thing is. We were correct in our original assumption when we discovered the logos for the LISD. League of Intergalactic Space Donkeys.
Marbles found a flash drive that had a full-length documentary on the sport, and it answered a lot of questions. I’m not about to give you the long, detailed lecture, but here’s the basics…
When humanity began to stretch out into the stars by use of the first commercially available FTL systems, terraforming technology was still behind the power curve a bit. The first colonists needed to bring livestock with them on their journeys. Without the full-spectrum of agriculture at their disposal, colonies weren’t likely to thrive for more than a decade. But due to conservational mandates, occasionally the colonists would have to bring along endangered wild animals with them. Some of those animals were predators. Donkeys would be needed to protect the livestock, as well as provide labor.
You wouldn’t think about donkeys protecting other livestock unless you had an agricultural background, huh? But they do. They are very protective and will kill a coyote without hesitation. They’re not only stubborn, but they’re protective of other animals that grow up within their territory.
But early methods of terraforming did little to change the forces of gravity on terrestrial rocks with a different mass than our mother Earth. Donkeys had to be bred with insanely strong legs and shoulder musculature to be able to maintain their usefulness. They also had to be able to adapt to constantly changing g-forces during their voyages in space. Many colonial missions took decades to reach their destinations, so the donkeys were genetically engineered to be tough as nails.
It didn’t take humans too long to discover one beneficial side-effect of a space donkey’s genetic engineering. Huge lungs, and massive amounts of fast twitch muscle fibers. Space donkeys are fast. Very fast.
In fact, many predatory animals that were endangered on Earth soon became endangered throughout all of human-occupied space. The cause? You guessed it! Fast moving, ground shaking, badass space donkeys!
Space donkey races were organized in the tiny outposts of humanity, but soon spread, and eventually became formalized. But laws always show up to fuck up a good thing.
Eventually, terraforming tech caught up to the agricultural world, and gravity well technology was able to be harnessed to adjust the gravity of most habitats to near 1g. Without an agricultural need to engineer space donkeys, animal rights activists pushed to ban the practice. Existing space donkey populations were allowed to remain, but after several generations, they began to lose their gifts of speed and endurance.
The multi-trillion credit space donkey racing circuits would have to find a new form of racing to survive. Within a span of one century, space donkeys went from being actual donkeys to nothing more than small racing ships that retained the space donkey designation.
So here we are. In a crashed ship. Surrounded by parts of space donkeys. See? If I opened up with tha
t last sentence, then you would have either been confused, or disgusted by the mental image. You’re welcome.
“Jackpot!” Marbles yells. I look over at him, but I can only see him from his chest up. A pile of random crap obscures what he’s excited about. I give the pile of crap a wide berth and come around for a better vantage.
“Is that what I think it is?” I say with a tone of excitement and anticipation.
He turns his head nearly one hundred and eighty degrees around to lock eyes with me. “Yes! A bonafide space donkey!”
KISSING THE DONKEY
Marbles pulls the dusty old tarp away, and there it was in all its glory. A space donkey. It looked like a small version of a Mark-4 through Mark-6 space fighter, but at a smaller scale. It had a sleek black coating, two-seater cockpit, and two stubby wings that seemed to morph from either side of its wedge-shaped hull design. It was resting on some kind of cradle. The cradle was a metal tubular frame with retracted caster wheels. It must be how the vessel is moved around the hold while it gets maintained.
It had bay doors for the three landing struts it boasted, but they were currently retracted. It made sense. The landing struts would make it difficult to move it around. You don’t have to be a seasoned spacefarer to understand that a racing craft would be constantly maintained, modified, or tested. This ship was not only its mode of transport between races, but it was likely the primary facility for keeping it in top racing condition.
There were other space donkeys in the wreckage, but this was the only one fully assembled. It didn’t appear that the others were destroyed in the crash, but were in various degrees of an overhaul at the time. This space donkey must have been in the final stages of prep for an upcoming race. A race that happened a decade ago.
“Well, do you think its flight worthy?” I ask.
“Very much so!” Marbles replies. I notice he already has a data cable connected from his chest plate to an access port on the side of the tiny ship’s hull. “Not only is it flight worthy, but its SC batteries are at ninety-seven percent charge!”
