The Infinity Brigade #3, Stone Breaker

by Andrew Beery

  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed… especially in my current state of perpetual befuddlement… but I recognized a shower when I saw one. Given the unpleasant slime covering me from head to toe… I decided a shower was not a bad idea.

  A few minutes later and a whole lot less stinky, I began to wonder how to turn the damn thing off. I seemed to realize that water was a valuable commodity and should not be wasted. No sooner had the thought occurred to me than the stream stopped to be replaced with a vigorous flow of warm dry air.

  Shortly thereafter a drawer opened next to the shower stall. In the drawer I spotted neatly folder cloths… underwear, a uniform of some type and a pair of combat boots. I dressed quickly. The shirt had a name on it... AG Stone. I assumed the AG was short for Agnes. Did I mention my head was not firing on all cylinders?

  “Agnes… my name is Agnes Stone?” I muttered to myself. What type of name is ‘Agnes’ for a guy? No wonder I apparently went by AG.

  Of course, all of this just reinforced the big question of the day. Why the hell couldn’t I remember anything?

  The uniform also had a rank designation… a silver oak leaf. Apparently, I was a Commander. Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered that hundreds of years ago I would have been a Lieutenant Colonel. The Marines, like all branches of the military, had adopted uniform rank designations. Officers O1 and above utilized naval rank designations while enlisted personnel and warrant officers W4 and below utilized Army ranks.

  How in the heck did I know that… and yet could not remember what I had for breakfast this morning? That final thought caused me to realize just how hungry I was. On cue, my stomach growled, and I began to question whether or not I had even had breakfast.

  My muscle coordination was improving quickly so I decided this was a good time to start exploring. It seemed even with a befuddled mind, I had a knack for finding trouble.

  The med-bay had a single door that was currently closed. If there was food to be had… it would be on the other side of that door. I approached the egress. There must have been some type of sensor array in the wall because the door swished open.

  I was immediately besieged by the smell of smoke and roasting meat. It smelled like somebody was having a barbeque. My stomach continued to rumble. I headed towards the smell of cooking food.

  The ship… and I was convinced that it was a ship… did not seem very big. I started to become concerned when I saw increasing signs of fire damage. More importantly, based on the amount of exposed metal, it seemed the ship had taken some damage. A wall-mounted status display showed multiple failure alarms. It seemed to be a minor miracle that grav-plating and lights were still functioning.

  I ran a quick sweep of ship systems. It wasn’t good. Engines were offline. Environmental was operating at fifteen percent. The ship itself was operating on batteries and only had about eleven hours left. Whatever had happened, it had made a mess of things.

  The short corridor ended in a bulkhead hatch. The hatch was heavily singed and appeared warped as if something had struck it hard from the other side. The status panel showed a breathable atmosphere, so I decided to try and force the hatch open.

  The deformation made the mechanism extremely difficult to move but I was able to slowly rip the hatch from its frame. To be honest, I was somewhat baffled. There is no way I should have been able to do that. It was as if I had superhuman strength.

  As the hatch tore open, the smell of cooked meat intensified. My stomach continued to rumble… until I realized what I was smelling was very likely a crew member. Suddenly I was glad my stomach was empty because there was a very real possibility that I would have been sick otherwise.

  My worst fears were realized when I finally made my way into the cabin. There were several badly burned bodies in the room. The compartment seemed to be the bridge of a very small ship.

  An automated repair bot was welding a plate over a section of the hull. It looked like the hull had been penetrated and the bridge torn up as a result. My guess was it was the explosive decompression that had killed the crew. The fire would have started after the emergency systems sealed the breach and atmosphere was restored.

  There were four bodies visible. There might have been more but as I said, the place was trashed. Two of the corpses were so badly burned that I knew nothing short of DNA matching was going to identify them. The third body was still strapped to the navigator’s station. Although she was clearly dead, it was obvious that the fire suppression systems had spared her body the indignity of the fire. The last person on the bridge was a lean muscular man who appeared to have a piece of the ship’s hull embedded in his chest. He was sitting in the captain’s chair.

  The man looked vaguely familiar and I had the nagging feeling that I should know him. I moved a piece of debris to get a better look at his face. In hindsight, I wish I had left it alone and just left the wrecked bridge. As I said… I had a knack for finding trouble. The man’s uniform had a name on it… AG Stone.

  ***

  It took me several hours, but I eventually located a small escape craft. It didn’t have hypefield jump capability, but it did have a working FTL communications system. I activated the device and toggled the broadcast button.

  “Any station… any station… please acknowledge.”

  I waited a few seconds and tried again. I had no idea who would be on the other end. FTL comm links were point to point devices. The signals routed through a central distribution hub and redirected to the desired end station based on metadata riding on top of the primary data stream. In my case, I had no idea who would be at the end point or what my relationship to them would be.

  “Any Station… any station… please…”

  Before I could finish, I received a response.

  “We read you Dante. I’ve got to admit, I’m surprised to hear you. What is your status?”

  The voice was vaguely familiar but like most of my memories, I couldn’t place it. The fact that I got a response and that they used the name Dante was promising. The disabled ship’s name on the charred bronze placard located on the bridge had indicated the ship’s name was the GCP Dante.

  “The ship has taken heavy damage. We’re running on emergency power only. I estimate I’ve only got about six hours of life support left.”

  “Understood. Well then, I expect we will see you shortly.”

  “Negative,” I responded. “My engines are down, and I have no hyperjump capability.”

  “Again… Understood Dante. I hope you have an easy death.”

  I got an uneasy feeling about where this conversation was going. “I’m actually keen on avoiding that,” I answered hopefully.

  There was a sizeable pause. The next time the mysterious voice on the other end spoke, he sounded concerned and confused. “Dante, please confirm your identity.”

  Now I had a problem. I wasn’t sure I could trust whoever I was speaking with. The Dante had taken some serious abuse. I still didn’t know the why and how. Was it possible that they… whoever they were… were the ones that had attacked me? I decided to play it straight for a while. It’s not like I had a plethora of options.

  “This is Commander Agnes Stone,” I answered with what I hoped was an authoritative tone.

  The response I got was somewhat unexpected. The person on the other end said… and I quote… “Well, I’ll be buggered.” He then proceeded to laugh for the better part of three minutes. I think the only reason he stopped was to catch his breath.

  “Did you say… Agnes Stone?”

  “Affirmative,” I confirmed.

  The laughing resumed. The next voice I heard was a female. Her voice was familiar too. I had the feeling we were friends.

  “Commander. This is Admiral Kimbridge. Cat Kimbridge. Do you know who I am?”

  “Negative that Sir… Ma’am… Admiral,” I stuttered.

  “Commander Stone, it is imperative that you trust me. Your life depends on it. I need you to tell me what has happened to the be
st of your ability.”

  I proceeded to tell the Admiral what little I knew. I could hear the first voice in the background laughing again. The Admiral yelled at someone named Lieutenant Hammond to shut up or leave the bridge. The laughing tapered off and then finally stopped.

  Admiral Kimbridge proceed to explain to me what she believed happened to me. I must admit, absent being in the middle of this nightmare, I wasn’t sure I would have believed what she was telling me.

  “Commander,” she started, “You are part of a reconnaissance team that was investigating a possible Fabricator AI fleet incursion in the Deniva system. The Fabricator AIs are a massive extra-galactic force that has invaded our galaxy for the purpose of eradicating any race that has had contact with the Ashtoreth. Unfortunately, that means just about the entire Galactic Coalition. Your ship must have been caught in a firefight and you and your crew died.”

  I interrupted the Admiral at this point. “With all due respect Ma’am. This isn’t my idea of heaven and it’s not hot enough for hell.”

  “It’s certainly not the first… but it may well become the second if we don’t find a way to stop this invasion fleet,” the Admiral agreed before continuing.

  “When your new body was being built in the regeneration chamber something must have disrupted the process. Your memory engrams started to transfer to your new body, but the transfer was aborted before they could finish downloading. You are Anthony Grant Stone, but you are an incomplete copy. I know that’s a lot to wrap your mind around, but it seems to be what has happened.”

  “Then it turns out I was right,” I mumbled.

  “I’m not sure I follow,” Admiral Kimbridge said in response to my muttering.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I had been thinking earlier that I felt I was three beers shy of a six-pack. Turns out I was right.”

  Chapter 14: Processing Unit Two-One-Eight-Eight…

  I had been alive for less than a day and apparently, as was suggested by my remote compatriots, I was supposed to die again at the soonest opportunity. The thought was that in doing so, I could be resurrected onboard a ship called the Yorktown… this time with a full set of marbles.

  Now I’ll grant you that my thinking might have been defective. Scrambling somebody’s neural pathways has been known to do that. That said, I had some issues with this plan.

  My problem was that there were a whole host of spiritual and theological implications with this whole resurrection thing. I believed deep in my soul in a Creator… but was it my soul? What happened to my soul? Was it connected to my body or connected to my mind? Once I was resurrected, was it even my mind anymore… or was it somebody else’s? Perhaps most concerning, what was the Creator’s take on this whole defying death thing?

  The fact that I had apparently already dealt with this issue… was of little comfort. In the end, I decided all I could do was take what time the Creator had given me and try to do some good with it. If the Dante was on a mission to reconnoiter… then reconnoiter I would do… especially if in doing so I could save lives.

  I spent a few hours seeing what I could do to bring the Dante’s systems back online but eventually I realized that I had neither the time nor the talent to effect reasonable repairs. Whatever had happened to the ship… it had fried (literally) most of the ship’s systems.

  The air was already getting stale. All I had been able to do was to raid the galley for freeze-dried MREs, a portable air rebreather and a water recycling unit. You don’t want to know how that last item did its job… trust me on this.

  I moved the aforementioned items into the escape pod. The pod had a number of advantages over the disabled Dante.

  First, it had a working comm system which meant I could report anything I was able to discover. Second, the pod was designed to support six people for a week. That meant that if I rationed myself and made good use of the extra supplies I was bringing on board… I might be able to get two months out of the thing. That was a lot of time to reconnoiter… or at the very least… contemplate the nature of my navel.

  Perhaps the biggest reason for needing to move into the life pod… aside from survival… was the lack of odor. I knew that would change over the coming weeks as the pod was not equipped with a shower. This was preferable to the current condition aboard the Dante because the depleted and damaged environmental systems on the Dante meant that the smell of overcooked Marine permeated the entire ship.

  You need to understand, what few screws were still in my head after the semi-complete engram transfer… told me that the AG Stone I used to be… was a committed carnivore. Vat-grown beef was apparently my food of choice. Enjoying the smell of cooking meat was, or at least had been, an indelible part of my psyche.

  The Dante was filled with that smell. Now that I knew the source, I found my stomach getting queasy the closer I got to the bridge. I was beginning to associate the smell of meat to that very same queasy feeling. This had the effect of forcing me to rethink my dietary choices. Not to put too fine a point on it… I would be dining on the vegetable lasagna MREs for the foreseeable future.

  It took me another hour to launch the escape pod. It seemed nothing was ever as easy as it should be. Whatever or whoever had taken out the Dante, they had been too inconsiderate to spare the pod ejection systems. Ultimately, I had to fix a repair bot and send it outside the ship to remove a glob of hull metal that had melted and hardened around a release clamp.

  As the small pod finally drifted free of the ship, I got my first complete view of the damage. There were no windows in the escape pod, but it had a complete range of external passive sensors built into its exterior surfaces. I had a holoprojection system that allowed me a 360-degree immersive view. I could rotate and zoom anything in the display. I used the system to inspect the damage to the Dante in the hopes I could learn more about what had happened.

  To be honest, it was a miracle that I survived… well, I guess technically I hadn’t, but you get the idea.

  There were scorch marks running up the entire side of the ship. In many places the hull metal was completely blown away and interior decking was visible. Normally, the nanite-infused hull would self-repair but as I had observed earlier, powerful EMPs had fried many of the ship’s systems. The escape pod had survived because they were designed and hardened to survive close proximity to fusion containment field breaches… as might happen when a ship exploded.

  As far as I could tell the Dante had been one of several ships involved in the firefight. Two other marauder class ships, like the Dante, floated nearby. If anything, they were in worst shape then my former ship. I confirmed with the Yorktown that their crews had all been killed.

  During my conversation, a man who claimed to be my friend, a JJ Hammond, encouraged me to investigate more closely via an EVA… without the benefit of an EVA suit. I may be wrong, but I suspect he was encouraging my early demise. I ignored him, which in some subtle way, seemed consistent with whatever long-term interactions I had had with him in the past.

  I used the escape pod’s attitude adjustment thrusters to maneuver the pod to the other side of the mortally wounded Dante. As I cleared the upper part of the hull, I was treated to an unexpected sight. Sixteen behemoth starships were visible in orbit around an Earth-size blue-green moon which was itself in orbit around a colorful gas giant that looked like a Neptune-sized Jupiter. I had learned from my conversation with Admiral Kimbridge that the moon was Deniva. It had been the home to a moderately successful human outpost of several hundred thousand settlers.

  To the naked eye the sixteen massive ships appeared to be insignificant rocks orbiting the moon. There were, however, several tell-tale signs that indicated that they were more than that. Periodic energy beams flashed from each of the orbiting ships. Moments after each flash, a mushroom cloud would appear on the surface of the planetoid. Whoever they were… they were bombing the moon into the dark ages or beyond.

  Zooming in on the source of the flashes confirmed that they were indeed artifi
cial… and they were huge! The AI onboard the escape pod estimated the ships were fifteen to twenty-six kilometers in length and about half that in width and depth.

  I recorded the scene for transmission to the Yorktown. There was nothing they could do at this point. Anything that had been living on that moon was well and truly dead. If what the Admiral had shared with me was true… then this scene was being repeated all across our piece of the known galaxy. Sadly, to my admittedly limited knowledge, we knew precious little about our foe. That could all change if I could only find some way to get closer to those ships that were sterilizing Deniva.

  The escape pod I was in was not meant for interplanetary travel. It was little more than a life raft waiting to be picked up by a passing Good Samaritan. That said, there were options for getting it to move. Depending on how aggressive you were willing to be, those options could get it moving quite quickly.

  One such option was to maneuver the life pod to a position between the desired destination and a large explosion… say the type of explosion that might result from a deliberate fusion containment field breach. Did I mention I was not playing with all my marbles?

  I used a small fraction of my very limited reaction mass to adjust the position of the escape pod with relation to both the moon and the Dante. I had one more service for the doomed marauder-class vessel to perform.

  I sent a signal to the AI onboard the Dante instructing it to shut down the containment field. A few milliseconds later a 50-megaton explosion vaporized the Dante and pushed my little escape pod in the general direction I wanted to go.

  Now, to properly utilize this type of trick to successfully propel oneself from point A to point B requires preparation… and a knack for running simulations to make sure you are set to handle any potential contingency. I just winged it.

  One of the problems with ‘just winging it’… and trust me, there are many… is that one tends to overlook things that, in the clarity of twenty-twenty hindsight, seem to be obvious. One such thing is the small matter of inertial dampeners. Escape pods don’t have them.