Strike Battleship Engineers (The Ithis Campaign Book 2)

by Shane Lochlann Black

  “Aye,” came the soft reply from Fury’s signals officer. A moment later, the flagship’s bridge alarms went off like the noon hour at Notre Dame Cathedral. The threat board, proximity, missile defense and general alert signals all flooded the ship’s communications systems with urgent warnings, both audible and visual. At least ten members of the officer’s complement in the executive conference leaped to their feet, ready for anything.

  Jayce Hunter didn’t move.

  It all happened so fast the Fury bridge crew didn’t have time to process what was taking place. What they did know, for a blood-curdling interval of just over 11 seconds, was that an unidentified pinnace-class ship had appeared out of nowhere on their starboard quarter at a suicidal range of only four miles and had obtained a six-point hard waveform and bearings lock on Fury’s primary engines. Junior Lieutenant Amy Sutherland, Commander Hunter’s fourth watch signals officer, was the only person who saw what happened next.

  Sutherland was posted at her station, staring in white-fingered horror through her scope as the killer starship uncloaked close enough to be visible to the unaided eye. Far in the distance, as if she were hearing something happening on the surface from a depth of several feet under an ocean, the lieutenant heard the jangling threat board alarm. Someone shouted “vampire! vampire! vampire!” loud enough to be heard over the resulting cacophony of alert signals and the bridge had suddenly been submerged in red colors by the deck alarm indicators, but Sutherland couldn’t move. The entire battle took place within the narrow interval of her fight or flight reflex.

  She could actually see the missile that was about to vaporize her, the Perseus flagship and more than 260 officers and crew. It was affixed to the ventral launch apparatus of the stealth ship. It was as if she had seen light reflecting from the poisoned blade of an assassin in the flash of reality between a surprise attack from the shadows and a mortal wound.

  It was all sickly visible on her scope. She was looking at the sharp bow of the murky pinnace-class ship head-on, just as if she were looking down the barrel of a gun. Then, like a tiger emerging from the underbrush behind a teeth-bared wolf, the destroyer Rhode Island seemed to materialize out of empty black space right behind the pinnace. For a heart-pounding moment, it looked as if the larger ship would simply devour the attacker.

  There was a sudden violent flash of light.

  Sutherland shrieked.

  Fury’s bridge was plunged into total darkness.

  Whatever took place during those several seconds must have registered on the bridge of the stealth ship, because it made a desperate attempt to escape Captain Walsh and his lethal weapons. A concussive explosion ripped a fiery gash in space over the Perseus formation. A moment later, the attack pinnace screamed out of the deflection zone and ran for the relative safety of the task force perimeter so fast its hull glowed red with the feedback energy from its drive field. For reasons unknown, it had apparently chosen to save itself rather than accomplish its mission.

  The sensor echo of DSS Rhode Island that had seemed to appear behind the attacker faded into the darkness as if it were never there. The color drained from Lieutenant Sutherland’s face and her skin froze. It was a ghost!

  “The wicked flee when none pursueth,” Darragh Walsh said calmly. The image of the attack pinnace grew larger and closer on his viewscreen. As suddenly as it had vanished, Rhode Island appeared again.

  This time, the deathly black shape was directly in the path of the fleeing attacker. The pinnace crew scarcely had time to draw breath to scream.

  An apocalyptic burst of Mantid ASCONF fusion warheads exploded from the powerful destroyer’s wing launchers. All eight missiles obtained identical waveform locks on the pinnace less than a tenth of a second after being fired. Enormous globes of pure white-hot energy appeared one after another in the silence over Commander Hunter’s formation, then faded.

  “Rhode Island to Force Command, come in please.”

  “Report, captain,” came the reply from Jayce herself.

  “Enemy vessel down.”

  “Acknowledged, Rhode Island.” Jayce drew her blaster and whirled, raising the weapon with a two-hand grip and aiming it directly at Lieutenant Ria Cooper.

  “On your feet, ‘lieutenant,'" Hunter growled. The other officers in the room scrambled back, staring at their commander in bald-faced shock.

  “Ma’am, I–” Commander Huggins was trying to form a coherent question, but didn’t have time.

  “Now!” Jayce barked.

  Lieutenant Cooper carefully rose from her chair, hands raised. Her expression might have been less concerned than it should have been, but the other Perseus officers seemed more fixated on their commander than the possibility she might be a threat.

  “Where is Lieutenant Cooper?”

  The other officers looked back and forth. Their expressions were those of people who had arrived in the middle of a heated argument.

  “Do you have any idea what this blaster will do to you at this range?” Hunter growled. “You’ve got ten seconds.”

  “All due respect, ma’am, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cooper replied in an unrecognizable tone of voice, hands still raised. The inflection was completely out of character for the officers who knew her.

  Commander Hunter tossed the blaster on the conference table. It clattered loud enough to make more than a few of the assembled officers flinch. She stalked around the chairs so quickly few would have had time to react or defend themselves. With her teeth bared she grabbed Lieutenant Cooper by her uniform collar and backed her against the far executive conference wall. Cooper’s shoulders and head slammed into the hard surface.

  “So it’s subcutaneous. I don’t care. I’ll reach down your throat and remove it with my bare hands,” the commander hissed. “Then I’ll jettison what’s left of you into the nearest primary. You think I’m kidding? Try me. Five seconds.”

  Maybe it was the look on Hunter’s face. Maybe it was just that the intruder had no alternative. Whatever the reason, he deactivated whatever mechanism had given him the appearance of the Constellation’s tactical officer. More than a few gasps swept the room. Standing there in the commander’s grasp was a man roughly Ria Cooper’s height wearing a gray uniform nobody in the room recognized.

  “How did you know?” he asked with a repulsive grin.

  “Your ship just happens to attack when my entire command staff is aboard? Atwell underestimates me. I hope he thinks I’m that stupid.”

  “He thinks you’re overmatched. You really have no idea what you’re up against, do you?”

  “A traitor.”

  The other officers watched in stunned silence. The man’s gaze turned cold.

  “Your brother is a dead man.”

  Commander Huggins recognized the superhuman effort his captain exerted to keep from executing her prisoner right there in the executive conference. She practically threw him into the arms of the nearby battalion marine corporal.

  “Search him and put him in the brig. Twenty four hour watch.” Hunter turned to Cleghorn. “I want four heavily-armed MPs assigned on a thirty minute rotation. Report directly to me on the bridge.” Hunter stalked back to the head of the table and holstered her blaster, then strode out the door.

  The rest of the Perseus command staff looked back and forth at each other. None could say what they had just witnessed.

  Sixty-Four

  “This thing right here is the same unit Diamonds found aboard Argent before the Agamemnon attack,” Captain Hunter said. “We know how to use this now. It’s fully powered, correct?”

  Field Electronics Engineer Sergeant Ben Foley turned the strange looking device over and over, trying to acclimate himself to a first-hand look at alien technology. It had a strangely biological texture, much like damp lizard skin. It was elongated with points at either end and some kind of electronics built inside. “I read the lieutenant’s report, sir. But I–”

  “Captain?”

  Jason
moved across the lab. Petty Officer Healy and Sergeant O’Carroll had opened a large storage cabinet. Inside were six more of the alien devices along with a collection of Skywatch field equipment ranging from portable terminals to powerful transmitter-repeaters to handheld lamps. Two tac-suits were hanging near the equipment.

  “What the hell is this?” Hunter snapped. “Where are they getting all this hardware?”

  “My guess is they found a stash somewhere inside the base,” O’Carroll replied. “Some of this stuff looks a little weathered.”

  “Should we run a life signs scan, sir?” Corporal Martin asked.

  “Negative. No handhelds without my direct orders. Only the sweep beams for IR, affirmative?”

  “Aye,” Mac replied.

  “SRS emissions are dangerous around this stuff. We’ve learned that much at least,” Hunter said.

  “This one is operational, sir,” Sergeant Foley reported. “But it appears to have a different control mechanism than the one Lieutenant Tixia found.”

  “Explain.”

  “We know from her report the first unit was specialized for transport. All of the most accessible items in its command table were linked to different locations, both aboard Argent and at Barker’s Asteroid. This one seems to be keyed to things and people.”

  “People?” O’Carroll asked.

  “I’ll show you,” Foley said. “This is the first reference in the command table.” The unit the sergeant was holding shifted its control lights once, then twice more. An image of Vice Admiral Charles Hughes appeared in the lab.

  “Who else?” Hunter asked, an intense tone to his voice. The sergeant activated the unit again. This time Lieutenant Ria Cooper materialized.

  “Who is that?”

  “That’s one of the Constellation’s bridge officers, sergeant,” Hunter replied angrily. “Who else?”

  The other eight images the electronics engineer was able to draw from the mechanism weren’t immediately familiar to anyone in Hunter’s landing party.

  “Why would they key a mechanism like that to people?” Corporal Martin asked. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does if your plan is to use the device to trick my crew into drawing the wrong conclusions,” Hunter said, his mind racing. “Get those other devices out here, petty officer. Put them on this table. Let’s go through the command tables item by item and see just how far through the looking glass we really are here.”

  “Sir, there’s something else you should see,” Foley said. “Here’s the telemetry we received from the Copernicus base when Lieutenant Curtiss detected the power systems. Here’s what I get when I read this device. See the pattern?”

  Hunter compared the two energy signatures. They were an exact match, except the power systems beneath the base were five orders of magnitude more powerful.

  “They’re identical.”

  “Not just identical, sir. One is magnifying the other. These portable units are drawing energy directly from whatever power system they have down there.”

  “How deep did those readings go?”

  “Copernicus was able to read gas mixture, air pressure and temperature differentials a mile down.”

  “Why? Why would they dig a mile into solid limestone just to build a reactor?”

  “Maybe there’s something other than the reactors, sir. We haven’t had a chance to confirm the 117th’s readings. If we could get a decent vantage point, we might be able to see what else they are hiding down there aside from their power system,” O’Carroll replied.

  “We can’t do that from here?”

  “Negative, sir. Copernicus has far more sensitive instruments. Handhelds aren’t going to cut it, especially if we can’t use the SRS wavelengths.”

  “Spades theorized an energy scattering field, and Zony confirmed it. Whatever affected the crew of the Argent originated at this location.” Hunter brandished the alien device. “What if they built a larger version of this thing down there? What if they found a way to duplicate the electronics inside this thing and just amplified the effects with more power?”

  “We know the portable version can teleport humans a considerable distance. There’s no telling what something with the size to match the power down there could do” Foley replied.

  “Transport a starship?” Petty Officer Healy offered.

  “There’s got to be more than one of these then,” Hunter mused. “Perseus had ships appearing out of nowhere all the way out at Station Nineteen. That’s six light years from here. I don’t care how many alien bugs you pack into your gizmo, there’s no way you’re going to make me believe you can transport a full-sized starship six light years and back.”

  “I think you’re going to want to see this before you bet money on that, sir,” Foley said. He activated the control mechanisms on the second of the alien devices. An image of the Skywatch War Destroyer Excalibur appeared in mid-air over the lab’s workbench. It rotated on its z-axis as if displayed as part of a library computer entry. Foley switched the device and the frigate Thunderhawk replaced the larger ship.

  “Petty officer, I stand corrected. I think you’re right. I think they can transport a starship,” Hunter said. “They made Dunkerque appear and disappear. They made us think we were getting instructions from Commander Doverly. They made Colonel Moody think he was in some kind of galaxy-sized cave with a planet stored in it.”

  “But what’s the connection, sir?” Mac asked.

  “It’s not just the power of illusion. It’s energy transmission. That’s the key,” Hunter replied. “It’s the folded space Zony and Yili were theorizing. They want to get a big object from one place to the next, so they fly it through some kind of interdimensional tunnel, and it winks out here and appears instantly over there without having to fly the full distance in normal space.”

  “And if they have that kind of localized control over energy, they could even bend light,” Foley concluded. “They could make one person look exactly like another. They could even project a three dimensional image into the open air. I doubt anyone would recognize the deception until it was too late. The only limitation is the amount of power they can harness.”

  “Or the amount of power they can transmit,” O’Carroll added.

  “Take a look at this,” Healy said. He activated the third unit. The lab vanished. Hunter’s landing party looked around. It was as if they were standing on the bridge of the battleship Argent. It was abandoned.

  “What the hell–” Hunter walked over to the conn and placed a hand on the arm of his command chair. It was as solid as the real thing. “Why would Atwell want a fake projection of my bridge?”

  “That’s not all,” Healy replied. He switched the unit again and the flight deck of a Tarantula Hawk gunship replaced the Argent bridge.

  “Black Seven,” Hunter said. “This is the gunship that tried to launch itself this afternoon.”

  “Maybe this has something to do with your crew, sir,” Mac said.

  Hunter tapped his knuckles on the workbench, his mind hard at work. Healy started cycling through the control systems on the fourth unit.

  “Let’s say I want to abduct eight hundred trained Skywatch officers, men and women. How am I going to keep them confined and fed unless I’ve got an army of guards and a massive detention facility?”

  “You’d have to freeze them or keep them unconscious. But even then, time would be working against you. Passed out or not, humans have to eat, drink, breathe,” Foley said.

  “What if they’re not passed out? What if they’re wide awake?”

  “Then you’d have to lock them up, otherwise they’d be trying to escape,” Healy replied.

  “Or–”

  Petty Officer Healy interrupted the captain. “Or, you could use this.” He activated the fourth unit. An electrical access corridor from DSS Argent’s life support mechanisms appeared.

  “It was staring us all in the face the entire time,” Hunter said. “The reason my crew isn’t trying to es
cape is because they don’t even know they’re being held prisoner!”

  O’Carroll opened an access port to one of the universal consoles. It worked just like the real thing. “I don’t believe this. They built a duplicate battleship Argent?”

  “They used this technology to build a fake version of my ship, then transported my crew there and just let them go about their duties. With the ability to produce fake commlink transmissions, they could make them believe the officers were planet-side or anything they wanted.”

  “But how?”

  “Atwell had access to all the information he needed by virtue of his rank and assignment,” Hunter mused. “It’s a big project, but with this kind of technology available, I doubt it was out of reach.”

  “Seems awfully elaborate,” Foley said. “Why go to all the trouble teleporting ships and crews all over Gitairn space? Why abduct entire crews?”

  “Because it keeps us chasing our tails, sergeant. While we’re occupied, Atwell is hard at work elsewhere,” Hunter said.

  “What now, sir?” Mac asked.

  “We find out where.”

  Sixty-Five

  “This is all wrong.”

  Yili Curtiss rarely spoke extemporaneously, but when she came across something that didn’t make sense to her finely tuned engineer’s mind, she occasionally thought out loud.

  “Ma’am?” Gunnery Sergeant Hall asked, looking up from the control console next to the reactor level blast door.

  “These doors are standard stuff,” Yili replied, walking along the base of the door’s subterranean frame. “We have a facility to build structures like this aboard ship for damage control. I can pull up all the specs on a portable terminal, and I’ll bet you next week’s paycheck this thing is wrong.” She reconfigured her handheld scanner to expose the contact panels on the back of the device. She placed it against the three-story metal door and watched the analysis scroll by. “Take a look.”

  Hall and Able Crewman Tackett watched over Yili’s shoulder as she performed a variety of basic materials tests on the door. The first one concluded uneventfully, but the second displayed occasional highlighted data. “The mass changed,” Tackett said. “That’s impossible.”