by Dean M. Cole
The colonel slapped Jake's jutting knee and pointed through the fighter's canopy. "It looks like we're almost to the back of the ship."
The long, thin carrier had a pointed bow and a wide stern, giving it a wedge-shaped aerodynamic appearance.
Just like the Turtle, the skin of the huge ship absorbed starlight, earthshine, and almost all of the sunshine that fell upon its surface. The effect gave the impression they were flying over a hole in space. However, a new, closer horizon now appeared ahead. In the direction of flight, more stars became visible as the squared-off stern began to slide into view.
As Newcastle rounded the back of the massive Argonian carrier, a huge opening came into view.
"Yes!" Jake said.
As they continued drifting aft, a second opening appeared to the right of the first. The small portion of the interior that he could see at the oblique angle gave the impression of a vast hangar facility.
Inside, Jake saw dozens of landing pads and several structures. Spread throughout, pieces of apparent ancillary equipment still sat waiting for the fighters to return.
Jake pointed over the colonel's shoulder. "It looks like we should be able to fly right in." After a brief pause, he added, "As long as one of your hypothetical self-defense laser batteries doesn't vaporize us at the slightest misstep."
Colonel Newcastle nodded. "We'll try not to look too menacing. Let's give it a shot." Decelerating, he maneuvered the space fighter toward the center of the left bay door.
As they neared it, the hangar opening slowly expanded to fill the forward field of view, gradually eclipsing the stars visible around the ship.
Just as Jake was about to say they were in, the ship bounced back. Aside from the visual change, he did not sense the course reversal. The fighter's gravity drive isolated their inertia, preventing them from perceiving the vector change. The small fighter's hull creaked in protest but otherwise seemed undamaged.
"I thought that might happen," Colonel Newcastle said. "The Argonians probably have a system in place that prevents non-Argonian equipment from entering."
Jake nodded. While he had hoped for the best, he'd suspected the same thing.
He looked down to the fighter's lower right. "I've got an idea." Pointing, he said, "The hangar floor extends outside of the force field. See? It forms a lip below us. I'll bet there's a gravity field generated on it."
"Yeah, but how's that going to help?"
Jake pointed to his chest. "I'm wearing an Argonian spacesuit. Hopefully, it has IFF built into it," Jake said referring to the US military's ubiquitous Identify Friend or Foe computer transceivers. They prevented friendly fire … most of the time.
It was then that Jake noticed that laser cannons adorned all four corners of each bay door, all eight of which appeared to be aimed at the space fighter.
Not wanting to point, Jake said, "Um, sir, I think your slow approach was a good idea. Take a look at the corners."
"What cor …? Oh shit."
"Well," Jake said. "We're still alive. So far, so good."
Newcastle nodded. "Hopefully, their computer remembers that we were an ally during the battle."
"From your lips to God's ears," Jake said. "Mind lifting the lid, sir?"
Newcastle turned halfway toward Jake and gave him the fisheye again. "Are you sure about that, Captain?"
Jake nodded.
After a long pause, Colonel Newcastle nodded as well. Then he grabbed something off of the far panel. "Take this." He passed a handheld radio back to Jake. "Keep it as a backup. It probably has greater range than your suit radio. Try to find a way to drop the hangar bay's force field. Otherwise, you're going to have to do this on your own."
Taking the radio, Jake nodded.
"Deploy your suit's helmet," Newcastle said. "I'm going to pump the air out."
"Go ahead, sir. It activates automatically."
Newcastle shrugged his shoulders. After donning his spacesuit helmet, he pressed a button.
In spite of the assurances he'd given the colonel, Jake held his breath.
A hiss superimposed over the popping in his ears. Then the clear dome of his helmet flowed into position like a reverse time-lapse video of melting ice.
Jake released the breath. Then he stuck the radio to his right hip. The suit's intuitive nanobots held it like velcro. It stuck next to the pistol he still carried. The empty shotgun he'd used to kill the Zox commander was on the Turtle with Richard.
All sound followed the atmosphere out of the cockpit. Newcastle's voice shattered the deafening silence as it blared over the suit-to-suit radio. "Well, son." He paused, gesturing to the nearest laser turret. "Don't come crying to me if that thing zaps you into a pile of smoking ash."
Jake grinned sardonically. "Thanks, sir. I'll try to remember that."
Colonel Newcastle's reflection smiled. Then the canopy shot open.
Both Jake and the colonel twitched.
Fortunately, the laser had not.
"Son of a bitch!" Newcastle said. "I really need to talk to the engineers about slowing that down a bit."
Jake climbed over the colonel. Since the fighter had its own gravity well, Jake easily climbed out of the cockpit and onto the small craft's smooth titanium skin. As before, its internal gravity caused him to start sliding toward the edge. However, this time Jake didn't fight it. He let the slide take him over the precipice.
When he reached it, the Argonian ship's gravity field took over. He landed firmly on his feet.
Casting a wary eye at the nearest laser turret, Jake turned and gave the colonel a thumbs-up.
As the fighter's canopy lowered, Newcastle returned the gesture.
Taking a moment to enjoy the view, Captain Giard nervously inched toward the ledge's rear edge. Standing as close as he dared, Jake braced himself against the fighter and craned his neck. Peering down, he looked at the Atlantic Ocean two hundred miles below his feet.
As Jake had learned all too well, if he stepped from this stationary ledge, he'd fall straight down.
A chill ran up his spine. His heart pounded out an echoing cacophony audible over his rasping breath.
He shifted his gaze up, to the top of the planet. Ahead of him, beyond the horizon, lay the north pole. To his front left, the southern tip of the snow-covered island of Greenland cut a jagged white notch into the arcing blue horizon. On his lower left lay the east coast of North America. To his lower right, Spain, the Strait of Gibraltar, and North Africa finished the image. To his distant right, across a couple of hundred thousand miles of space, the Moon peeked from behind the back corner of the massive ship.
"Anytime now, Captain."
Jake nodded and waved his free hand—his other still had a death grip on the edge of the fighter.
After a cautious backward step, he released it. He was almost surprised that his fingers hadn't left indentions. Jake flexed blood back into them.
Turning from the panorama, he walked toward the hangar's opening.
As he approached the point where the force field had blocked the fighter, he extended two querying hands.
Squinting his eyes, Jake spotted the membrane. Barely perceptible, a thin, milky film stretched across the bay door. His gloved hands passed through it without resistance.
Flickering electrical discharges formed a ring around each finger and then his hands.
In spite of the suit's protection, Jake felt a pressure differential across the plane of the force field.
He pulled his hands out. Stepping back from the paper-thin membrane, he shook his head. Somehow the force field held back the massive atmospheric pressure applied across its significant surface area without deforming. It was a perfectly flat plane.
Holding his hand at eye-level, he studied its metallic covering. It looked normal. The force field hadn't damaged his spacesuit.
"My hands passed through the force field. There's atmosphere on the other side," Jake said over the radio. "Now's as good a time as any. I'm going to try to step th
rough."
"Roger. Call me back from the other side." After a chuckle, he added, "If it doesn't fry you to a cinder."
Turning his back to the colonel, Jake waved. "Thanks again, sir."
He faced the opening. After a brief pause, he took a deep breath.
"Here goes nothing."
CHAPTER FOUR
"Admiral, all ships report battle-ready," said the Helm Warden's tactical officer.
Admiral Ashtara Tekamah gave her a single nod then returned his attention to the display. He studied the holographic rendering of his fleet and the rapidly approaching star system.
He shook his head. There were too many damned unknowns.
Sector 64 had gone dark, and now the Chuvarti system in Sector Nineteen had followed suit.
"I hate blindly flying into a potential battle!" he said for the third time.
In his EON's virtual vision, Tekamah toggled Admiral Feyhdyak's icon. "Any contact with your bio-half?"
An hour earlier, the computer-based portion of the commander he'd sent to intercept the Zoxyth fleet in Sector 64, Admiral Thoyd Feyhdyak, had informed him of a loss of continuity. He reported they had been seconds from dropping into Earth space when the disconnect occurred.
"Nothing yet, sir," computer-based Thoyd said. His synthetic voice had a panicked edge. Disconnected intelligences usually did.
As a combat commander, Ashtara communed with disjointed personalities all too often. They always seemed on the verge of panic, as if the time separated from their organic id would lead to irreparable psychosis.
Tekamah knew it wasn't an idle concern.
Long term, untethered parallel existence could create a permanent schizophrenic duality. It happened, and the longer the separation, the rougher the reconnect. Bonding with a fresh, tank-grown body was easier than re-merging with a divergent copy. He'd seen relief in the virtual face of more than one computer-based personality when they'd discovered their bio-half had indeed died.
The practice of placing copies of combat personnel into the network began for the obvious reasons. To prevent that duality, they had dedicated a percentage of each ship's nanoscale wormhole communication link to enable real-time galaxy-wide connections between network-based and organic-based ids. Otherwise, the loss of continuity rendered one merely a copy.
If a person's body died while connected to its computer-based self, his or her stream of consciousness continued without disruption. Their consciousness remained intact within the network.
If someone died during a period of disconnection, the individual experienced true death. The portion of their id residing within the network continued as a separate person.
An earth-based Argonian from the 1970s or 80s would ask, Is it live, or is it Memorex?
Computer-based Thoyd's virtual eyebrows hoisted higher. "I've consulted with my subordinates. None of them have heard from their bios either." Feyhdyak's panicked tone matched his rendered face. "What do you think happened, Ashtara?"
"Calm down, Thoyd," Tekamah said. He'd known the man for over a century. Ashtara found Thoyd's uncharacteristic trepidation disconcerting, corrosive to his own calm.
"I'm sure there is a reasonable explanation," Tekamah said. "You were still in parallel-space. The Zox don't have anything that could touch you there."
Admiral Feyhdyak's avatar looked ready to say more, but Tekamah held up a virtual hand. "Thoyd, I have to go. We're approaching Chuvarti. Hang in there, friend. I'll let you know as soon as I hear anything."
Thoyd nodded.
Ashtara closed the connection.
He turned to the communications officer. "Have we received any further distress calls from the Chuvarti system?"
"No, sir, nothing since the initial call. It's fortunate we were so close to Sector Nineteen."
Tekamah nodded, but he knew fortune had nothing to do with it. The intel he'd received placed half of Thrakst's fleet in this sector, while the other half had deployed to the far side of the galaxy, to remote Sector 64. He had a nagging feeling there was more to this situation than met the eye.
"Place all battlecruisers on a weapons-free status," ordered Tekamah. "All fighter squadrons are to launch as soon as we drop out of parallel-space. If we're flying into a trap, I want the Zoxyth to regret it."
He studied the fisheye lens of the squeezed star field in front of the formation. The fleet's superluminal speed compressed all light from the front half of the visible universe into a sphere Tekamah could cover with a hand held at arm's length. The light of the stars to aft traveled too slowly to catch up with the ship, rendering a virtual black hole of the rest of the universe. Brightest at its center due to the Doppler-shifted starlight, the fisheye faded at its edges, shifting through the visible spectrum like a round rainbow, finally dwindling to red and infrared at its periphery.
A tiny, bright blue point at the fisheye's center, the planet Chuvarti, grew into a discernible sphere as the fleet closed.
The navigation officer broke the silence. "Normal space in three, two—"
***
The undersized Zoxyth crewmember nervously peered at Thrakst from behind the communications console, unease evident in the way his dark green, horn-shaped ears folded flat against his scaled skull.
The razor-sharp talons of Lord Thrakst's right hand curled into a fist. "What is it?" he roared.
That a communications officer cowered before him came as no surprise—after all, the pitiful excuse of a Zoxyth had chosen a non-combatant position—but Thrakst couldn't abide weakness in any form.
"No response from Commodore Salyth, my Lord."
With lithe fluidity, Lord Thrakst's massive bulk exploded from the cool embrace of the carved black-rock throne and flashed across the damp stone floor of the Tidor Drof bridge. Sliding to a stop, he allowed the mottled gray-green scales of his forearm to graze the idiot's neck, grinning internally as the coward flinched away from a retaliatory blow that didn't land.
Raising the forearm to eye level, Lord Thrakst watched its black, razor-sharp dewclaw talon extend and retract, the underlying muscles of his huge arm rippling its sheath of dark scales. Shifting his focus beyond the claw's gleaming sable edge, he glared at the visibly shaking officer.
In spite of his evident unease at the Lord's proximity, the officer held his ground and repeated his report. "Commodore Salyth has not replied to our calls," he swallowed hard, "my Lord."
At least the fool stood his ground. Had he not, Thrakst would've used his dewclaw talon to relieve the junior officer's shoulders from the burden of carrying the idiot's head.
After a moment of silent menace, Thrakst retracted the talon and returned to his high-backed, black cathedra. Dropping his enormous bulk into the dark throne, he said, "This is our day. I will deal with Commodore Salyth later."
To the right of Lord Thrakst, his long-time friend and confidant, Raja Phascyre, growled. The deep rumble rattled through the wizened warrior's massive chest. Turning his scarred face to Thrakst, the Raja grinned. However, the expression didn't reach his sole eye. In the mixed tones of the Zox language, Phascyre's voice rumbled and screeched as he whispered, "I don't trust Salyth. Too eager to ascend, that one."
Thrakst nodded. "His silence concerns me as well."
The Raja's smile evaporated. "I told you he thought his time had come. I fear he has overreached, my Lord." Looking forward, he said, "You should've let me take the hatchling down a notch when I offered."
Nodding again, Lord Thrakst turned from Phascyre and scanned the bridge. Images of his fifteen dreadnoughts filled monitors across the bridge of the Tidor Drof. The first fourteen asteroidal vessels had already completed their attack. Displayed on monitors across the cavernous room, they lifted from the planet, hammering vertically through the thinning atmosphere, a roiling trail of superheated plasma in their wake.
Thrakst turned his attention to the primary display. The fifteenth dreadnought hovered over the last target, blocking most of the Argonian settlement from view. As with t
he Tidor Drof, the dreadnought's intimidating bulk came from its collection of massive ferrite asteroids held together by enormous trusses and iron works. Matching the rest of the fleet's ships, a grinning face glared from the vessel. Chiseled into the likeness of a Zoxyth Forebearer, an arena-sized head with an Argonian skull clenched in its jaw formed the dreadnought's bridge.
Modified to provide living space and moist, breathable air, the multilevel interior of the giant, hollowed-out iron boulders felt like the home world. The zoxaformed environment rendered the decks of the asteroid an adequate simile of Zoxa's huge caves and humid atmosphere.
Thrakst's steel-reinforced talons scratched longingly at the wet floor. Its slimy surface reminded him of home. Studying the layer of green algae covering the cathedra's armrest, he thought of all the blood spilled in the fruitless war with the Argonians.
After the loss of his wife and son—a loss that Thrakst blamed on Admiral Tekamah—he had sworn to avenge them.
Even when the High Council had ordered him to withdraw back into Zoxyth space, he'd struck at the heart of the enemy. But the GDF quickly reversed his early victories. Star systems started falling back into enemy hands.
However, in spite of the loss of all but the last thirty-two dreadnoughts, victory now lay within Thrakst's reach.
As the first phase of the two-pronged attack drew to a close, the Zox dreadnought that currently dominated the image presented on the primary display prepared to deal the final deathblow to this colony. The events to follow should bring the Argonians to their scrawny knees.
All Zoxyth would soon be home, especially if Salyth had realized the same level of success in Earth space as Thrakst anticipated in Chuvarti's.
The Lord cast a sideways glance at his old friend.
As if reading his mind, the Raja said, "I hope the hatchling didn't squander his opportunity."
Through Phascyre's words, Thrakst saw something disturbing flicker across the warrior's face. It almost looked like hope.
