The Kepler Rescue

by James David Victor

  Unless it’s powered down, Solomon thought. That would explain the lack of radio frequencies to detect, but that still left the unexplained lack of unique metal signatures that made up the Kepler.

  Oh, of course… Solomon suddenly realized. “Karamov, run a chemical analysis on that field, will you?”

  “I’m already scanning for poly-steel, carbon-glass, and titanium alloy, Commander,” Karamov said. “Even if the Kepler has broken apart, we should be reading signatures.”

  “Show me everything,” Solomon said. Why couldn’t everyone think as fast as he could, he thought in exasperation.

  “Okay.” Karmov did as instructed and overhead, the green circle radiated once more before a line of scientific jargon began to scroll down the side just beside it. Solomon’s eyes scanned over the results.

  “Carbon, iron, nickel, water-ice, magnetite, I knew it!” he said. “That’s why we can’t find the Kepler. The asteroid field is full of iron and magnetite. The whole thing is generating a low-frequency charge, messing up our sensors!” Solomon said. He was no engineer or scientist, but he knew basic chemistry, both from his stealing days and his strategy lessons on Ganymede.

  Magnetite was especially conductive of electrons. As was iron, he knew. Put the two together and you created an almost permanent-loop battery, which emitted a wave of ‘static’ that would effectively hide any ship that was inside it.

  But it hasn’t affected our scout ships, because we’re all keeping above and below the field, not entering into it, Solomon thought.

  There was really only one answer to the dilemma, in that case. “Kol? I want you to set a course for the darkest, largest bit of the field over there.” Solomon indicated the mess of asteroid boulders that were untouched by any of the ship’s scanners.

  “As soon as we go in, we’ll lose contact with the rest of the group,” Karamov advised.

  “We’re not going to find the Kepler hanging around out here on the edges, either,” Solomon said grimly. “Look’s like we’ll have to do this search the good old-fashioned way.” His hands flickered over the controls, and floodlights turned on all over the small scout’s hull, casting an eerie, sublime glow on the rocks around them.

  “Take us in, Kol,” Cready said.

  “Aye, Commander.” Kol’s face was set in a pinched mask of concentration as he engaged the main engine thrusters, and they moved forward into the dark.

  “Twelve-percent injection,” Malady’s voice confirmed Kol’s recent request over their suit comms. The Marine scout slowed to barely a crawl, as all around them the large bodies of the asteroids rose like floating mountains, or icebergs.

  There were whole canyons and gulleys in here, Solomon thought as they moved their careful way forward between the rocks. It was a landscape that was constantly changing, constantly moving, but at least here in the center of the asteroid field the movements were much slower and more sluggish. The high electron charge created a very weak gravity field, keeping these rocks moving only meters at a time, not tens of meters in the more disturbed edges.

  The asteroids were much larger here as well, only a few smaller than the scout craft. Most were many times larger. Solomon saw the tracks of meteorite scars on the rocky walls, as well as impact craters and cracks through the schists of reflective rock. It was an alien place he was traveling through, and he couldn’t understand for the life of him why the super-large station-ship had ever dreamed that it could navigate through here.

  Tock! A small sound made him look up at the screen. A tiny metal knock somewhere on the hull from outside.

  It must have just been a bit of rock bouncing off the hull, he thought, thinking nothing off it until it happened again.

  Tock-tock.

  Solomon would have ignored the noise as everyone else was doing, peering at the screens or out of the portholes around them to see if they could get a visual on anything that could be a part of a Confederate deep-field station-ship.

  But there was something about that small metal noise that was bugging Solomon.

  Tock-tock-tock.

  “Just a few rocks,” Solomon muttered to himself. Who goes into an asteroid field, after all, not expecting to get hit by bit of passing rocks?

  Just not in the exact same place.

  “Wen, get eyes on our rear starboard hull,” Solomon called out. That was what was bothering him. That those sounds were all coming from one position on the vessel. Which was crazy. What were the chances of them being hit in the exact same spot multiple times in a row?

  And we’re under propulsion, as well… he thought. Which meant that either something must have come untethered and was attached to their outer hull, or that something was keeping pace with them.

  “On it, Commander.” Wen jumped to the task, moving down the length of the small bay to the trapdoor that led to the low hold and external docking ports. While her voice disappeared from Solomon’s hearing, it re-emerged a moment later in his suit-to-suit radio.

  “Standard hold configuration,” she reported as she moved. “Lots of spare emergency equipment down here. Portholes on both sides, and decompression chambers that must lead outside…” she announced.

  “Moving to the rear starboard porthole. What am I looking for, Commander?” Jezzie asked.

  “Oh, anything that could have come loose, or—” Solomon was halfway through saying, just as he heard a small intake of breath and Wen’s radio suddenly crackled into static.

  TSSSSSSS!

  “Jezzie!” Solomon said, unclipping his harness and jumping up, just as all hell broke loose in the small hold of the craft beneath them.

  BADA-THAB-THAB-THAP!

  The bright flashes and the snapping bone cracks as someone fired weapons down there. “Wen! What the frack is going on?!” Solomon had already run to the bay trapdoor, just as there were loud CLANGS from all around.

  “What the—” He looked up, just as Kol suddenly shouted.

  “Holy frack!”

  There, emblazoned on the front cockpit screen and clinging onto the outside of the vessel, was the figure of a human. Another silhouetted head and shoulders crossed in front of the wall portholes.

  What’s going on? We’re being boarded! Solomon grabbed his Jackhammer in an instant.

  The figures on the windows outside weren’t Confederate Marines. If anything, they didn’t look to be soldiers at all as their spacesuits bore no regalia or military emblems. Solomon did see that each one had some sort of red design on their chest. A smuggling gang? Mercenaries?

  “Raiders!” Karamov called out in alarm.

  Solomon cursed. He should have known. The raiders were notorious for doing this—lying in wait in out of the way asteroids or nebula fields, before launching lightning-fast raids to dismantle and overpower any ship deemed valuable. He’d heard that most of them were disgruntled colonists who had managed to steal a ship or two, but there were conspiracy theories out there that said that some of the raiders were actually funded by the colonies as a sort of illegitimate navy. Or even by various mega-corporations, as a way to target their competitor’s ships.

  Whatever their origins, it didn’t change the fact that Solomon had to find a way to get them off his ship before they could do some real damage like cutting some vital cable or air supply.

  “Hyurgh!” There was a grunt of exertion over his visor’s speakers, and the shooting from below stopped.

  “Commander, I think we’ve got a problem,” Wen panted.

  “You’re telling me!” Solomon growled as he jumped down through the trapdoor. He saw Jezzie holding one of her poly-steel blades, dripping red, onto the body of a raider on the cold metal of the hold’s floor.

  “Came out of nowhere. They must have breached the airlock,” Wen said, nodding to the pressure hatch at one end of the hold.

  “Which means they could blow a hole through that hatch and depressurize the whole ship at any moment,” Solomon realized. It was a standard raider move. As soon as they figured out that you w
eren’t scared of a fight, they would just plant enough explosives to blow a hole in your hull, starving you of oxygen or at least gravity, before they came in and cleared up the mess.

  The dead raider wore a motley collection of suit parts, cobbled together to form an incoherent whole. Here was a breastplate from some sort of colonial security firm. An ex-industrial undermesh suit, still complete with the extra pouches and pockets, and with its original factory identifier stenciling. His gear was topped off with large metal storm boots some decade out of date and a slim-fit helmet with front-loading air canisters.

  Only now, the undermesh suit had a dirty red tear in its side from Wen’s blade.

  “Come on.” Solomon had already moved to the pressurized hatch, checking the seal and controls. “It’s still reading that the chamber outside is intact. We have to act fast.” He raised his voice to shout over the suit radio. “Kol! Evasive maneuvers, as fast and hard as you can. Let’s shake ‘em about a bit!”

  There was a distant, muted ‘Aye’ and suddenly, Solomon and Jezzie were thrown to one side to thump into the wall, as the scout craft started to spin on its axis as Kol fired first one set of positioning rockets, then another.

  “That should give ‘em something to think about.” Solomon grinned inside his suit, hanging onto the metal bulkhead as the scout vessel shook and rolled.

  After another nausea-inducing turn and a thump, Kol had apparently cleared the hull of the interlopers, and instead fired the rear engines to throw themselves forward.

  Not that it got them out of trouble.

  “We need to call this in,” Jezzie was saying. “The rest of the fleet will need to know it’s an ambush.”

  “Our ship-to-ship communicators won’t work in here. We’ll need to leave the asteroid field to get a clear connection,” Solomon countered, just as the scout ship’s alarm split the air, and the ship shook from several much larger impacts.

  AWAOWAOWAOOW!

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Warning! Marine Scout Vessel 17 is Under Attack!

  Assigned to: Gold Squad (Sp. Cmdr. CREADY)

  Hull integrity: 52%

  The alerts scrolled over Cready’s visor in a warning orange as Scout Vessel 17, which they were inside, connected with their Gold Squad channel.

  “Someone’s firing at us!” he heard Kol shout in alarm.

  “We’ve got two raider ships coming up behind at our starboard four and seven o’clock,” Karamov announced a moment later.

  Looks like they weren’t content with trying to swarm us. Solomon growled, racing back with Wen to the top deck, leaping over the body of the dead raider. Of course, the raiding party had to have been launched from somewhere, and as soon as he got to his seat, he could see on the screens just where that had been.

  There were two craft flying toward them as Kol tried to swerve and dodge out of the way of their rockets. They weren’t heat-seekers or auto-guided missiles, at least, Solomon saw. They were single-thruster propulsion rockets launched from any one of the four ‘arms’ of the raider craft.

  The enemy ships looked a little like dragonflies—a large ‘X’ with a long bulbous body sticking from the center. At the end of each of the arms was a positioning thruster, as well as a weapon’s pod that apparently fired salvos of their small rockets at them. On the screens above him, Solomon saw the raider craft rolling and swerving around the body of asteroids to try and get into a better firing position.

  They’re just going to try and blow us up and pick through the carcass for anything useful, Solomon thought as the ship swerved and rolled once more.

  “What kind of weapons do we have on this thing?” he growled, checking through the controls. Surely a Marine vessel—even a scouting one—had to have some kind of armaments, didn’t it?

  MARINE SCOUT VESSEL 17:

  Operational:

  Guide-Laser (small-object orbital particle generator)

  Weapons Pods x 2 (3 seek-and-destroy missiles per pod)

  “Now that’s more like it!” Solomon found the interface between his suit and the ship, and used a series of eye movements to pull up the details on his visor screen, matching the graphics to the ones on the desk in front of him.

  Guide lasers would be no use in a firefight, he thought, although they could pack a pretty powerful punch, as they were designed to send a super-heated radioactive particle beam to destroy rocks and obstacles in the way.

  No, it was the seek-and-destroy missiles he knew that he wanted, as he clicked open the targeting window and swiveled the firing stick until it held one of the racing raider craft in its sights.

  “Firing! Weapon Pod 1, full salvo!” he called out as his fingers pulled the trigger and there was a slight judder of recoil through the ship.

  Outside the cockpit, on the underside of the scout craft, a bulbous dome of metal broke open to reveal the nasty, snub maw of a missile holder with three darkened ports set back at an angle. There was a glint of light and then suddenly—

  WHOOOOSH!

  Steam and fire burst from each of the three tubes as three small missiles—barely bigger than Solomon’s arm—erupted from their sanctuaries and performed an almost immediate turn in space in front of them, swinging back to dart underneath the scout and straight toward the first raider craft that was right on their tail!

  “It’s a hit!” Karamov called out from his chair behind Solomon, watching as the small vectors of the heat-seeking, seek-and-destroy missiles smashed into two of the out-flung arms of the craft, while the third scored a direct hit on its central body.

  Sensor screens don’t do justice to ship-to-ship combat, as all Karamov, Kol, and Solomon could see where the vectors and the sudden disappearance of the attacking raider craft. Their scout vessel was suddenly rocked by the first bow-wave of the explosion as outside, the four-armed raider craft broke apart in a plume of disappearing flames and escaping gases.

  That left one raider ship.

  “Spin us around, Kol!” Solomon called with a savage grin. “I want them running from us this time!” And I also want them to lead us back to wherever they’ve stashed the Kepler, Solomon thought. He felt the G-force pull on his body as Kol hit the forward propulsion rockets—which would normally make them go backwards—at the same time angling the rear engines and firing at the same time. The result was that they flipped end-over-head and were now facing the oncoming raider craft.

  Guide Laser: Activate.

  Solomon didn’t want to destroy this raider craft, not yet, so instead of firing the second weapons pod of missiles—which would surely destroy it at such close proximity—he hit the front nosecone’s guide laser button instead. The lights along the interior of the craft flickered as the engines experienced a momentary drain of energy, and then a scintillating beam of white, yellow, and red light burst out, missing the raider craft by ten meters or so, and burying itself in the asteroid wall behind it.

  “You missed!” Karamov said in dismay.

  “I wasn’t trying to hit it,” Solomon said.

  His ruse worked. The sudden burst of a high-powered particle weapon, accompanied by the sudden loss of its fellow craft, were enough to make the raider vessel think twice about attacking this smaller, but clearly very well piloted, Marine vessel. It spiraled on its propulsion arms, performing a spaceship equivalent of a handstand before spinning off between two asteroid boulders.

  “After her!” Solomon shouted, and Kol was only too eager to comply.

  The scout burst into motion, spinning to avoid a narrowing gap between asteroids as it followed its spiraling target. The raider was fast, and clearly suited to maneuvering in tight spaces such as this, but the Marine ship had the advantage of far more sophisticated engines. The scout narrowed the gap between them, only for the raider to suddenly turn and duck down the flat rock face of an asteroid, screaming underneath it.

  Kol matched his positional thrusters perfectly, but still, they came close to slamming into the asteroid wall, before they too were racing u
nderneath the giant asteroid and then coming up the other side.

  And then there, in front of them, was the deep-field station-ship known as the Kepler.

  11

  Ghost Hulk

  “Whoa…” Kol sounded a little awed, and Solomon didn’t blame him.

  “Is that it?” Wen was peering over their chairs at the cockpit screens in front of them.

  “Not just it, apparently,” Solomon said, as it seemed that they weren’t just looking at a ship, but at a graveyard of ships.

  The raider craft had spiraled high above the twisted and mutant metal in front of them and was even now disappearing up into the asteroid field above.

  “Shall we go after them, Commander?” Kol asked distractedly.

  “No need. We got what we came for. I think,” Solomon said, looking at the mess in front of them.

  That was the thing about space, Solomon reflected. It held infinite wonders like folding space-time, or time itself slowing to almost nothing around a blackhole. There were the wonders of particle fission in the hearts of super-massive star.

  And yet, for the most part, it obeyed natural laws.

  The Erisian Asteroid Field was out beyond the reaches of one of the furthest planetoids of humanity’s Sol System. Out here, the gravity of the sun was weak, and objects easily lost their drift towards the solar center. Instead, they congregated like flotsam around the nearest densest objects or formed their own instead.

  What had been holding this field together was a graveyard of dead spacecraft, their dense metals and slowly decaying reactors creating a slow gravitational pulse that drew the Erisian asteroids to congregate around it.

  Solomon wondered how many people knew this was here. He saw the partial remains of a large, blocky tanker-style ship, as well as several smaller tubes of the fast messenger-style rocket ships primarily used for super-fast planet-to-planet travel. He wondered if this had once been a decommissioning site, or a work yard for some corporation, before the asteroids came. Maybe the raiders themselves hauled all of their seized victories here, to better hide their presence?