by Andrew Beery
“Shall I go active on the weapons systems Captain,” Commander Martinescu asked.
“Negative that Number One! They must have been hit with one hell of a hyperfield wash as a result of our emergence. From their point of view, we just dropped a 100-megaton antimatter bomb on top of their heads. As far as they are concerned, we fired the first shot. I don’t want to escalate things before the get out of hand.”
“Counter-measures deployed,” the First Officer reported. “The bogeys are not going for them.”
“Ziggy, try to open a channel to them. Let’s see if we can talk our way out of this… and kill that klaxon. Mister Colson, plot a short jump, three au out of the elliptic. Shut the snowplow down for the moment… we’ll take our chances with micro-meteors if we need to.”
“Captain, they are not responding to our hails. Yorky cannot identify the configuration of their ships,” Ziggy interjected.
Cat stood up and walked down to Ken’s command chair.
“Their technology is a confusing mix.” Cat whispered to the Yorktown’s captain. “Their ships are small by GCP standards and most appear to be using crude chemical thrusters… others, on the other hand are using top-shelf ion thrusters.
“Captain,” Commander Martinescu interjected. “Their missiles are easily ignoring our countermeasures and are utilizing some type of phased ion pulse drive.”
“It’s almost as if there are multiple technological infrastructures at play here,” Cat added.
Ken nodded. He had been thinking the same thing.
“Ziggy, drop a pair of cloaked sensor probes. Mister Colson, as soon as the probes are deployed jump us out of here…”
That was as far as Ken got before the locals unleased the first of several surprises. Cat was the first to notice something was wrong. Her Heshe-enhanced senses noted a marked increase in background neutrino emissions. This coupled with the sudden white-out of the forward viewscreen seemed to indicate one or more of the missiles were never intended to reach their target.
“Local subspace is flooded with massive hyperfield perturbations,” Colson reported. “Four of the five missiles just detonated. Number five, the biggest, is still advancing. Its sixty seconds out.”
“Whatever they just hit us with has knocked out both our jump drive and our active shields,” Martinescu reported.
“Navigator, best speed. Get us out of here. Weapons systems online. Engage and take out that last missile as fast as you can,” Ken barked.
The GCP Yorktown began a slow turn. Her massive VASIMR thrusters could move the ship at up to 20% the speed of light but without a stable hyperfield to nullify the ship’s mass, the VASIMRs needed time to counteract the vessel’s inertia. Time was the one thing they did not have.
Railguns and plasma turrets began to target the incoming missile but it had some type of active shielding in place that shrugged off both the kinetic and energy based weapons.
It was obvious that they were not going to out run the missile and they were not going to be able to destroy it before impact. Cat signaled Ken via her implants that she was ordering the Yorktown to engage in an emergency spin to put her thickest ablative armor between them and the last remaining missile.
Ken responded by toggling the ship-wide comms. “This is the Captain. Brace for impact. Seal all decks. Damage control teams on full standby.”
What happened next would depend on the nature of the threat the missile represented. If it were a conventional chemical explosive the neutronium armor would barely be scratched. If the missile was nuclear or even worse… if it was antimatter… the situation would be considerably more dire. The Yorktown could be looking at a significant depressurization event with the resulting loss of life.
The only good news in this last scenario was the ubiquitous use of replicant resurrection technologies by the entire Yorktown taskforce. The Big-D, as the Infinity Brigade Marines now called death and dying, was no longer a permanent condition. Bio-generation chambers in the med bays could rebuild a body from stored templates and reload archived memories. Thanks to quantum entangled communication links between the Yorktown and Marine City on WhimPy-101, these archives would survive even the complete destruction of the Yorktown should the worst occur. Still no one in their right mind welcomed death.
“Impact in three… two… one…” Colson counted down.
WHOOMP!
The entire ship shook with an impact that while large, seemed much smaller than anyone had anticipated. The impact did not seem to be accompanied by an explosion.
“Status?” Ken asked while he looked around the bridge. Every face, except for Cat’s was dead white.
Chapter 4: Boarding Party…
“We have a hull breach on deck four. Whatever hit us has lodged itself about twenty meters into the ship. Internal sensors are down in that area. Damage control teams are on their way,” the First Officer yelled above the emergency klaxons.
Cat was already at the turbolift door. Her intent was to survey the damage first hand. She knew her Heshe enhancements meant she had the best chance to avoiding trouble. If the missile had been intended to explode and had simply malfunctioned, then the ship could still be in extreme danger.
The lift refused to open on deck four. Cat forced the doors open with her hands. Aside from her cybernetic Executive Officer, Ben First, there was probably not another soul on the ship capable of such feat.
Immediately Cat felt the onrush of heat. The ambient temperature seemed to be roughly 43 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t deadly but it was decidedly uncomfortable by human standards.
She couldn’t see the breach point but there was an undulating light reflecting off the wall further down the corridor. She would have said it was the flickering of flame from a fire except the hue was wrong. It seemed to be far too blue… almost the color of an electric arc.
Her link to the Yorktown’s AI fed her a continuous stream of intel that confirmed her worst fears. The device that was embedded in the forward bulkhead was not a conventional missile. It seemed to be some type of boarding pod. The real question was what type of adversary was on the pod when it imbedded itself in the hull of the Yorktown.
She had become suspicious that the weapon had been a boarding pod the minute the Yorktown’s shields had been knocked out. It had been a logical first step if the attackers had wanted to take the ship intact.
She had noted the odd mix of technologies in use by the local denizens. Whoever was attacking them had made short work of the Yorktown’s defenses. Given the battle-tested nature of those defenses, this was quite an accomplishment. The level of technology used by their attack against the Yorktown was at odds with the simultaneous use of crude chemical thrusters for their spaceships. It was as if the two came from different cultures at different points in their understanding of science and engineering.
The logical answer to this technological hodgepodge seemed to be a blending of industrial bases from disparate societies. This implied that one or more alien societies were gifted in the same way humanity was… that they were adept at identifying, and harvesting technologies from other races.
Cat’s fear was that the Yorktown was being targeted for just such a technology harvest. She couldn’t let that happen.
Before she had moved the three meters from the turbolift to the first hatch in the corridor, a dark metallic and armored shape emerged from around a bend in the corridor. She tried to duck out of the way but the spider-like intruder was faster and raised one of its seven appendages and fired a weapon at her.
A blast struck her right arm as she dove into the open hatch. The agony she felt threaten to overpower her. It was like plunging her entire arm in hot scalding water. Her encounter unit’s AI immediately shut down the regions of her brain that responded to pain.
She took a moment to look at her arm and what she saw shocked her. There were no indications that she had been hit by anything. By all external indications nothing had happened. Experimentally, she tried re-engaging her
pain centers. Immediately she was flooded with pain again. At this point she had a pretty good idea what had happened and instructed her medical nanites on how to best address the situation.
Hundreds of years ago the United States Army on Earth had experimented with microwave pain beams that penetrated a few hundredths of a centimeter below the surface of the skin to induce agonizing and debilitating pain by stimulating the subdural nerve ending just below the surface of the skin.
Apparently, this aspect of human physiology was similar enough to her adversary’s normal opponents that the weapon was still effective.
The good news was such a weapon was designed to be non-lethal. The bad news was it appeared their opponents wanted to capture both the ship and the crew… for what purpose she couldn’t fully guess.
She heard the armored multi-ped approaching the hatch she had ducked into. Playing a hunch, she collapsed on the deck. She suspected most creatures hit by such a pain-beam would be rendered unconscious. Her hope was the alien would expect to see her in such a state and assume she was no longer a threat. She was confident that her Heshe enhancements would protect her should her assumptions prove in error.
A metallic rustling sound approached. To Cat, it sounded like tin-foil being crumpled. A silver appendage peeked around the corner of the hatch. A tiny black orb protruded from the appendage. Cat watched the activity, even with her eyes closed, using the passive Heshe sensors embedded in her skin. They fed their data into her visual cortex.
The orb rotated as if it were scanning the room. After a few seconds and some additional rustling the main body of the robot… and Cat was sure at this point that she was indeed dealing with a robot… entered the room. Two of its appendages nudged her. She remained motionless. A third smaller appendage with various sensors on its surface extended and placed itself just above her sternum between her breasts. The probe did not apply a great deal of pressure but it did rest firmly on her xiphoid process or breastbone. It was almost as if it were measuring her heartrate… this would or course presuppose a knowledge of human anatomy. Cat adjusted her heartrate to an irregular twenty to fifty beats a minute to simulate an irregular heartbeat.
After a few moments, the probe delivered a precise 200 joule electrical charge. Cat’s Heshe systems shunted the currently safely away from her heart and she allowed her heart to return to a normal cardiac rhythm. The probe remained in place for a few more moments and then withdrew.
The robot shuffled up closer to her and with several arms picked her up as easily as a dog picks up a tennis ball. If the fact that Cat weighted considerably more than her apparent size would indicate was a cause for concern, it was not apparent in the way the robot handled her.
Once she was in continuous contact with the machine, she took advantage of the opportunity and snaked a thin line of specialized nanites from her hand into the robot. The nanites’ mission was to establish a beachhead and infiltrate the alien mechanism.
Whoever controlled robot… assuming it was not sentient in its own right, thought that she was their prisoner. The reality was… they were becoming her Trojan horse!
The robot shuffled down the corridor from whence it came. As they proceeded at a steady pace, it became apparent that their destination was the breaching pod.
Cat allowed the robot to carry her while she continued to scan the area and feed the results to the Yorktown’s AI. Captain Kirkland and the security team would be analyzing the data and determining the best counter-attack based on the data she was collecting.
When they approached the bend that led to the pod, she got the first of two surprises. First, the nanites that she had released into the alien robot had confirmed the technology was of an unfamiliar construction… that was not the surprise. The surprise was a communications line the nanites had tapped into.
Apparently, the device utilized a very familiar, if antiquated, circular polarized radio frequency modulation. The circular polarization was subdivided into one thousand and twenty-four channels of angular delineated data packets. It was virtually the same communication system used by the GCP over three hundred years ago. Even more surprising… the information being carried over one of data channels was in a heavily stilted form of English!
The second surprise was the breaching pod itself. Its surface appeared to be a shimmering electric-blue mirror. Waves of heat radiated from it. Cat suspected she was looking at a ring-gate. Ring-gates were hypothetical devices that established semi-permanent hyperfield conduits. The GCP had experimented with them briefly as a means of creating teleportation links between member worlds but as far as she knew… nothing had ever come of the effort. It appeared somebody had both solved the technological challenges and learned how to weaponize it.
***
Commander AG Stone stood in the Operations Center of Marine City onboard the Massive WhimPy-101 battlestation. He stood next to his friend, Master Gunny Sergeant Jeremy James Hammond. He and JJ were reviewing the live FTL feeds from the GCP Yorktown.
The irony that the Yorktown was literally lost in space… and yet they were still in constant contact with it, was not lost on the Infinity Brigade’s commander.
“Frustrating isn’t it Mate?” JJ said as he nodded at the live feeds.
“Completely,” AG agreed. “And to be honest, it pisses me off. They are in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight as we are stuck on this rock with no way to help them.”
“Yeah,” JJ grumbled. “Why should they have all the fun?”
“Decent men would reach out to help their friends in a time of need like this,” AG added cryptically.
JJ smiled. “Arr ya think’n what I think yer think’n?”
AG returned his smile. “Probably. Assemble a volunteer platoon. I think it’s time we schedule a tragic live-fire accident on the shooting range.”
***
Commander Ben First was not a patient man. To be fair, he wasn’t really a man. He was a D’lralu cyborg, currently in human form, with a hybrid mind composed of an emulated human host engram and most of the higher-reasoning portions of a six-chambered D’lralu brain. Bottom line… he really wasn’t human and he really wasn’t D’lralu. That said, the Yorktown… and more specifically, Catherine Kimbridge… were the closest thing he had to family.
Standing with the security team one deck away from the action… doing nothing… while his friend and mentor was in the custody of the enemy… was not an easy task him to accomplish. He knew, with his enhanced strength, that he could literally tear through the deck plating to get to the Admiral. Unfortunately, his orders, from Cat herself… were to stand ready but take no action. It was the very definition of frustrating.
This was why he welcomed the communications link with Commander Anthony Grant Stone. AG shared his lack of enthusiasm for patience. More to the point, AG had a plan… a plan that involved action. Ben had to make his way to the med-bay… and he needed to do it quickly and quietly.
***
Cat eyed the glowing portal. She was quickly getting to the place where she would be forced to take action. Did she allow herself to be carried through the gate-ring to learn what was on the other side or did she fight the intruders here where she had allies and a knowledge of the layout?
In the end, it was her duty to the ship that decided her actions. As her capturer made for the portal, she flexed her back and followed it up with a tuck. The robot responded instantly and attempted to secure her with additional appendages. She was ready for this however.
She send a silent command to the tens of thousands of Heshe self-replicating nanites that had invaded the robot’s systems on her orders. They proceeded to disrupt critical systems within the mechanism. The result was she managed to free herself from its grasp as the robot’s systems attempted to compensate for the disruptions.
Once free she used her considerable strength to shove the invader back through the shimmering circular nimbus. Hopefully the nanites would be able to report back from the other side of the gate. Th
ey had instructions in place that prevented them from being studied… they would self-destruct the moment she lost control of them. This was a Heshe-mandated safety protocol established to keep the technology out of the hands of factions that could not be trusted to use it responsibly.
Before she could verify the fate of her Trojan probe, her attention was diverted by a massive jolt of energy striking her mid-section. Fortunately, since she now knew the types of weapons the enemy was utilizing, she was able to tweak her Heshe defenses to counter them.
She turned to face her attacker. In the corridor, just past the ring-gate, stood thirty identical twins of the multi-ped robot she had just tossed through the portal.
Chapter 5: Battle for the Yorktown…
Cat raced down the corridor as fast as her legs could take her… which, given the billions of Heshe nanites augmenting her natural abilities, was quite fast. The back of her uniform was charred, soldering and in many cases simply burned away… leaving the skin of her back seemingly exposed. This was, of course, not the case. The fabric of her uniform was not designed to withstand energy blasts. Fortunately, for her, her Heshe nanites had erected a thin protective force field that hugged and shielded the surface of her skin.
The boarding party that had invaded the Yorktown had switched to more lethal weapons once they discovered their stunners were having little to no effect on her. Fortunately whatever the invaders were using to suppress the Yorktown’s hyperfield shielding, it was having no effect inside the ship itself.
An energy beam lashed out and struck her as she dodged around a final corner on her way to the turbolift. The beam was easily repelled but succeeded in destroying more of her uniform. She supposed there were times when an open back might be a desirable fashion statement but certainly not as part of an Admiral’s duty uniform.
Ahead she could see the turbolift but her augmented senses and internal AI calculated the chances of reaching it before she was overtaken by her pursuers was minimal. Deciding on another plan of action, she used her link with Yorky to instruct the Yorktown’s AI to lock down the turbolift instead. There was no point in making things any easier for the invaders.
