Eternal Frontier (The Eternal Frontier Book 1)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tag unstrapped the mini-Gauss and scanned the barrel across the bridge. The pirate was nowhere in sight. The terminal near the pilot’s crash couch was blinking, and he ran to it. A progress bar showed the fusion reactors had been ordered to run at maximum capacity, but the power wasn’t being diverted anywhere. The main impellers were still offline.

  Pangs of worry gripped Tag as if someone was wrapping their fingers around his stomach and twisting. The surviving pirate was still hell-bent on ensuring the destruction of the Argo. Without any power diversion, the fusion reactors would initiate meltdown. Normally, the ship’s AI system would act as a failsafe and shut down the reactors if the power couldn’t be diverted, but the power levels continued to rise past the safety shutoff thresholds. Tag input a terminal command to shut off the reactors, and the command was manually overridden almost immediately.

  Tag knew what that meant. There was one other place to shut off the reactors now. He sprinted through the passage and jumped down the ladders to the lower decks. There, a narrower corridor took him to the reinforced hatch leading to the power plant, and he pulled down on the manual hatch release. But the hatch didn’t budge even as he tugged on it, throwing his body weight at it.

  The hatch remained staunchly fixed, and the ship started to shudder. Warmth started to permeate the hatch, making the handle hot to the touch. Tag didn’t have long. Panic surged through him, urging him to hurry.

  But now was not the time for rashness. His mind spun, searching for answers, searching for a solution.

  A thought sprang to him, and he ran to the engineering bay. He searched for the tools he’d passed up earlier, and he snagged a set of chem-catalyst cutters. A sustained groaning echoed through the corridor as Tag ran back to the reactors. He turned the cutters on, and a spike of hot blue plasma spurted from the tool. Clenching his jaw, he directed the tongue of plasma into the lip of the hatch. Sparks flew and sputtered as it cut through the thick metal.

  Another loud rumble shook the ship. Tag was almost halfway around the hatch. With his brow furrowed in determination, he fought to steady his hands and finished cutting around the hatch. He set the cutters aside and wrapped his fingers around the manual release again.

  With a grunt, he yanked it with all the strength he could muster. Metal screeched as the edges of the hatch scraped, held in place by friction alone. His muscles burned, and he continued pulling as the hatch inched out. It finally fell free, and he jumped to the side as it slammed against the deck, clanging loudly. Almost as soon as it hit, a spray of blue pulsefire spattered against the bulkhead.

  But Tag had been ready. He ducked under the pirate’s gunfire and peeked above the edge of the fresh hole shorn into the reactor chamber. Boiling waves of heat rolled over him, and the din of alarms singing in an unholy chorus hit him just as hard. More pulsefire grazed the opening, but Tag wouldn’t be stopped. He spied the pirate barricading himself behind the control panels in the power plant, beyond the two huge central drums that were glowing orange. The pirate’s wild pulse rounds smacked haphazardly against the reactors and the bulkhead.

  Tag’s only solace was the fact that the reactor chamber was built to withstand all-out naval assaults. Everything from the bulkhead to the reactor shields themselves was reinforced to withstand all manner of kinetic and energy rounds slung from enemy ships. They could endure a fair amount of abuse before crumpling to such weapons. Small-arms fire might not even dent the damn things.

  Tag shouldered the mini-Gauss and sighted the pirate through his optics. He fired. The pirate ducked, and the slug slammed into the bulkhead. He used the opportunity to jump through the hatch. After hitting the deck and rolling, he brought the mini-Gauss up to fire another round. The pirate flinched but this time fired both wrist-mounted weapons. Rounds whizzed by as Tag sprinted between the reactors and dove behind a wide pipe. The reactors themselves started to vibrate, and the din of reverberating metal filled the room, drowning out the sound of the alarms.

  He crouched for a moment, recollecting himself and his thoughts amid the chaos. But there wasn’t time to deliberate. There wasn’t time for a well-thought-out plan.

  There was only time for immediate action.

  Tag burst from behind the pipe, pulling the trigger rapidly. A salvo of rounds flew past the terminal and the pirate, his wild shots missing as he ran. But he didn’t care. The pirate had ducked, and that was all that mattered. Tag made it to the ladder leading to the control platform and jumped to it, firing all the while. The recoil of the rifle shuddered through him over and over.

  Once at the top of the ladder, he continued his assault on the cowering pirate. He stooped under a fresh blast of returning pulsefire then leapt at his adversary. His arms wrapped around the pirate, knocking him backward, and they rolled onto the deck together in a jumble of limbs. Tag smashed the stock of the mini-Gauss against the pirate’s helmet, and the man’s head twisted violently. He battered the pirate again and again until the visor cracked and spiderwebbed.

  “Don’t you ever give up?” Tag snarled.

  The pirate struggled to raise his wrist-mounted weapons. His arms trembled as he aimed. Tag kicked one of the pirate’s shaking wrists and easily dodged the other weapon as it fired. He took a step back, directed the mini-Gauss at his enemy, and eyed the largest hole in the pirate’s chest armor. Black fluid leaked from the busted plating. It was the spot where Tag had shot him earlier, back on the bridge. Whatever damage he’d caused had only been enough to wound the man. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He pointed his rifle at the pirate’s head again then fired. Rounds lanced through the cracked orange visor. The black power armor went still as the pirate within it let out a long, rasping death rattle.

  Strapping the mini-Gauss over his shoulder again, Tag twisted to the controls. The reactors thrummed louder now and glowed almost white hot. His fingers tapped across the terminals, searching for some kind of emergency shutdown. The malicious red alarm lights swirled around the increasingly hot room. It was as if Tag was in the very bowels of hell. Damn, he thought once again. I need that AI working!

  The holoscreen gauges reported increasing temperatures within the fusion reactors, far beyond safety thresholds now. Soon enough, the core would burn through its containment shielding, and it would melt straight through the belly of the ship, spilling intense, devastating radiation everywhere and causing a chain reaction of explosions that would send pieces of the Argo back into orbit. His eyes searched the terminals. Finally he spied a button labeled MANUAL SHUTOFF. He pushed it, praying it was the right one.

  He waited several seconds as the heat and power continued to build. They started to level off. But the alarms still wailed, and the emergency warnings still flashed on the holoscreen. Eventually the intense heat and power would dissipate, but the longer the containment shielding of the fusion reactor was above safe limits, the more Tag put himself and the ship at risk of destruction. He needed to divert the rest of the power.

  And there was only one way Tag knew to unleash so much.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Tag ran back through the passageway. He felt a twinge of guilt leaping over the bodies of his fallen crewmates. But there was no time to pay respects. The passage led into the bridge, and Tag jumped into the pilot’s seat once more. A corner of the display flashed the continual warnings from the fusion reactors.

  His heart pounded harder against his ribcage with each passing second. Sweat matted his hair, and his shirt clung to his back. The heat from the reactors was permeating the rest of the ship.

  Not good.

  The most efficient way to burn off the excess power was to activate the T-drive. But Tag was in no position to fire the Argo into hyperspace. Setting off a T-drive so close to a large mass like Eta-Five would be devastating to the planet, and the debris from the force it took to bend space-time could just as easily crush the already injured ship. Instead, Tag eyed the controls for the impellers. The altitude and attitude
adjustment impellers were fully functional, but the small impellers were meant only to make slight course adjustments or aid in docking. They stood little chance of sending the ship airborne against Eta-Five’s gravitational pull. The only impellers capable of pushing out enough g-force were the three damaged mains.

  But Tag wasn’t looking to fly anywhere. He just wanted to divert energy, and the damaged impellers would only dissipate so much. And if Tag wasn’t careful, siphoning off so much power from the reactors into the impellers might ruin them for good, eliminating any chance of him getting the Argo off this planet.

  Well, being marooned here is certainly better than disintegrating in a fusion reactor meltdown, Tag reasoned. And at the very least, he owed it to Kaufman to make it out of this alive. Someone needed to stop those pirates, to warn the SRE so others didn’t end up like her.

  He threw the ship into full thrust. The Argo vibrated. Power coursed through the impellers as the ship rocked against its icy tomb. The main impellers whined, and the Argo jumped from its position before it belly-slammed against the snowy ground again. A massive roar resonated through the bridge, piercing Tag’s eardrums. Then all he could hear was a high-pitched ringing. But a message across his terminal told him what had happened. One of the three main impellers had blown.

  The other two continued to vibrate, sucking up power. Tag imagined them glowing a fierce purple, trying desperately to lift off, but instead of creating the gravity waves they usually used to direct the ship through space, they would expend the energy through heat.

  The ship lurched to port. The second impeller was about to blow. But a quick glance at the fusion reactor reports showed the power levels were still dangerously high, and Tag kept the power churning at full blast.

  Water surged around the ship, and the Argo dropped. The intense heat emanating from the broken impellers was melting the ice and snow encasing the ship, and it dug itself deeper into the white blanket covering Eta-Five. But to Tag’s great fortune, the more the Argo embedded itself in the frozen environment, the faster the impellers dissipated heat.

  After several agonizing minutes, the warnings flashing from the fusion reactors disappeared. The temperatures and power levels had returned to below the safety thresholds. Tag kept the two remaining impellers going but reduced the power to them. He disengaged the adjustment impellers, and the ship settled, no longer being shoved back and forth by them.

  Tag caught his breath. He hadn’t realized how much the anxiety and adrenaline had taken from him as he slumped in the pilot’s seat. With the back of his hand, he wiped a bead of sweat rolling across his forehead.

  He had done it yet again. He had forestalled his death and that of the Argo. But what now?

  With his thumb and index finger, he massaged his temple. His eyes traced the deck of the bridge until they caught Captain Weber. The man’s body was still crumpled near the viewport after having sacrificed his life for only the gods knew what. Tag needed to find a way off the planet’s surface and return to the Montenegro. But he had no idea how he would accomplish that. He could use the third and last escape pod to shoot himself out through the deluge of snow and ice, but he doubted it would even fire off with enough thrust to make it beyond the planet’s atmosphere.

  And even if it did, what then? Drifting in space waiting for the pirates to return and finish him? Or hoping that a rescue squad from the Montenegro eventually came? Even if they did though, they would have to fare better than the Argo against the pirates that had come to claim this part of the universe as theirs.

  Maybe he could send a lightbeam message to intercept the Montenegro’s rescue squad as soon as they came out of hyperspace. It might be a long shot, but if he put an encrypted distress message on repeat, the rescue ship could be warned of the pirates before they ever ran into the assholes.

  Then Tag’s heart dropped.

  He recalled the electrical anomaly coursing through Eta-Five’s atmosphere and the inability of comm systems to pierce it. He slammed his clenched fist against the pilot’s terminal again. There’d be no way to send a warning through that shield.

  But another courier drone maybe. He could shoot one off now with his warning. Surely it could propel itself out of the atmosphere and then hit hyperspace on its own. If he launched it fast enough, it might reach the Montenegro not long after the one Captain Weber had sent did. That would of course be the simplest and smartest course of action.

  Tag logged into the courier drone interface via his terminal. He activated the drone’s AI to plot a course off the planet and into hyperspace, but when he tapped the Execute button, the drone didn’t acknowledge the command. The terminal simply reported the drone was offline.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Tag tapped at the terminal and reentered the command.

  Still, no luck.

  The pieces started to click together in Tag’s mind. The rudimentary AI on the regen chambers didn’t work, the ship’s course-plotting AI hadn’t responded, and the ship’s network AI had stopped receiving commands.

  He brought up the AI logs. All AI-driven components aboard the ship were now offline. He tried to cycle them, but they remained offline. At once he knew what had happened. The pirates had somehow subverted all of the Argo’s AI systems. Every last system relying on a modicum of AI had been sabotaged.

  He combed his fingers through his hair, desperately fighting the urge to send his fist through the terminal’s holoscreen. While he could—and had—piloted the ship himself, he could never engage the ship’s T-drive without it. There was no way for him to manually map out every subtle calculation necessary to travel faster than light through hyperspace. Hence, the name of the T-drive, or Turing drive, so named after the godfather of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing. Without AI, Tag couldn’t get the Argo to the Montenegro.

  As he scrolled through the logs, the painful knot around his stomach only tightened. A single line reported the SOS courier drone Captain Weber had initially launched had gone offline. And worse yet, it had never reported a jump into hyperspace. The last report before Tag had crashed through Eta-Five’s atmosphere stated the drone was still floating somewhere above the planet. It was completely lifeless.

  No one knew the pirates existed. No one knew the Argo had been attacked. No one knew the ship needed saving.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Without the ability to repair the AI systems on his own and no idea of how to contact anyone beyond the Eta system, Tag resigned himself to a single hope: finding the extraterrestrial anthropologist. He had about a week before the scheduled rendezvous with Lieutenant Vasquez. Maybe, just maybe, she’d have a surprise courier drone waiting for use—or maybe the species she’d studied had some alternate means of communication they could use. It wasn’t much to hope for, but it was all he had.

  In the meantime, he had no idea where she was, and no intraplanetary comm system responded to any hail attempts. He didn’t want to risk getting lost in the unforgiving arctic environment of Eta-Five in a fool’s errand of a search for her. Instead, he would wait until closer to the preordained date to take the Argo’s exploratory air car to meet her.

  For now, he had plenty to keep him occupied aboard the ship.

  There was one particular task that stood out above the rest. He picked his way through the corridors of the ship, barren of life but filled with the bodies of those he’d known. Morgan and his charge outside the medical bay. Engineers with whom Tag had shared many a conversation, ranging from cryopreservation for long-term stasis to the ethics of manual genetic manipulation in humans to the future of faster-than-light travel. The bridge with its officers who’d valiantly made their last stand at the helm and passageways full of marines who’d died trying to prevent the ship from falling in the hands of their captors.

  Tag couldn’t simply ignore them as he tried to make what repairs he could to the vessel. He returned to the medical bay and took one of the hover gurneys. Without the med bay’s M3 droid, he had to load each body himself. The
work was grueling, both emotionally and physically, and he had trouble finding a place to put all the bodies. The thought crossed his mind that he could leave them planetside where the extreme cold would keep them preserved for an eternity, but no one in the crew deserved such an ignoble fate. The men and the women of the SRE navy had earned a proper burial in space, and he vowed to get the Argo spacebound. If for nothing else, he wanted to pay the proper respects to all those who had given their lives. Ultimately, he decided to store the crew members in the torpedo bay for the time being.

  From a terminal within the bay, Tag adjusted the local environment to chill the air. Once the temperature dropped, the space was cool enough to work like a vast morgue. There was also plenty of room for the storage. Too much room, Tag noted inwardly. There was no sign of ordnance anywhere within the bay, which was empty except for the two defunct torpedo-loading drones near the launcher tubes. Tag had never found a reason to spend any time in the bay, as it was off-limits to most crew members, but he was surprised to find no torpedoes of any kind. Maybe the pirates had taken whatever the Argo had carried.

  Regardless, the large space and lack of ordnance provided ample room for the deceased crew. If the Argo made it off this godforsaken planet, Tag would launch them out of those tubes as befitted their honorable deaths.

  It took the better part of a day for Tag to transport the crew to the bay. He made his rounds from the bridge to the crew quarters to the galley and everywhere in between to ensure he hadn’t missed a single member. Stowing Kaufman’s body proved to be the hardest. He fought the illogical urge to check her pulse just one more time. His eyes brimmed with tears each time he looked down at her still form, and he brushed away a lock of her blood-matted hair.