The Admiral rose from his seat and stared at the display with a defiant look in his eyes. He had known from the beginning that this would be the likely outcome should the plan fail.
He had seen the logs from the survivors of the Second Fleet Massacre and he knew how the Zenith had defeated an entire fleet. The Zenith would perform a short range tactical Burst to point blank range and then fire its main gun, ripping anything in its path to shreds and often taking out multiple ships with one shot. It was a truly deranged tactic against which there was no counter. It was impossible to avoid the blast and by the time the fleet could get a weapons lock another ship had already been lost. The process repeating over and over until there was nothing but ashes in the void. This was how the Second Fleet had been lost to just one enemy combatant and this was how the Admiral knew his life was about to end, with history repeating itself.
The Admiral raised his head defiantly, the countdown for launch still ticking away in the background. He knew the fleet was too close together for any ships to survive what was about to happen and there was no time to evacuate.
It seemed fitting somehow, that the First Forward Fleet was about to share in the fate of the Second Fleet, in the same area of space which had claimed it almost 100 years before. But this time the enemy was going down with them.
The countdown hit zero and the crew of the Regent readied itself for the end… but nothing happened. Not only had the nuclear warheads not launched, but ship systems throughout the fleet had begun inexplicably failing one after another.
The Admiral looked around the room as the lights flickered on and off and the crew struggled with unresponsive consoles.
“What’s happening? Have the warheads been launched?” The Admiral demanded to know.
“No Sir. The Fleet is in complete disarray. We’re getting reports of wide spread malfunctions on every ship. All fire control systems appear to have been taken off-line somehow and… now we appear to have just lost our link to the other ships Sir,” Ashlyn reported.
“The enemy is hacking our systems? That’s not supposed to be possible. And how can it be hitting every ship in the fleet simultaneously?” The Captain asked with a pensive expression as he calmly tried to understand the situation.
“Sir! Engineering reports that all of the remote access points on the ship’s network have been forcibly activated. The enemy is tapping directly into our control systems,” Ashlyn reported.
“One enemy ship can do all of this? How?” The Captain asked with a stunned expression.
Meanwhile, on board the Zenith…
Jude said enthusiastically, “Well I’ll be damned, it actually worked!”
“Am I the only one that’s in the dark here?” Kade asked as she looked at Drake’s satisfied grin.
“I have just created the first ever, remote capital ship systems breaker! Hell yes!!” Jude shouted with her hands in the air. “Just don’t tell the Union or I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail.” She smiled.
“You did what?” Kade asked with an incredulous expression. “Is that even possible?”
“If you’d asked me that an hour ago I would have said no. But this Core is great! I can process information in my mind a hundred times faster than by using my engineering console on the Icarus. I managed to up-scale the operating principles of my system breakers to make use of the Zenith’s advanced sensor arrays. In short, I gave the Zenith the ability to hack into an enemy ship’s closed networks,” Jude said, positively beaming with pride.
“So…” Kade started to say as she chuckled. “This entire manoeuvre was designed around the assumed success of Jude’s untested up-scaled design?” She laughed. “That’s insane! No offence sis.”
“None taken, I agree,” Jude said.
Drake said confidently, “Jude managed to hack into the Zenith with her breakers and that’s no small feat I assure you. The principle was sound.”
“Still insane. Just what would we have done if it hadn’t worked?” Kade asked.
“Same thing we would have done if we hadn’t tried. Died a rather painful death,” Drake replied.
Shocked, Kade said, “What! What do you mean? Did I miss something?”
“I’m a bit lost as well, Nexus didn’t really tell me why we were doing this,” Jude said.
“Oh! Yes… that, it… it’s not important,” Drake said, having forgotten the sisters hadn’t been aware of the impending nuclear strike.
“Sounds important!” Kade said.
“No… we just, huh… needed to… reduce the enemies offensive capabilities… yes, that’s it!” Drake said, though Kade looked thoroughly unconvinced.
Jude’s custom designed system breaker technology had been used with the Zenith’s advanced sensor arrays in order to give the ship the technological advantage which all military forces had been drooling over since computers were first invented: the ability to remotely disable enemy ships. But the breaker had merely opened the doors, it was Nexus who was walking through them and doing the real work.
Nexus was steadily working her way through every ship in the fleet. Taking all offensive systems off-line and keeping them that way.
The effective hacking range was limited, but the fleet’s tight formation ensured that every enemy was in range. The only real issue was the sheer number of ships, as this was taking Nexus to her limit. She could keep the fleet from taking direct offensive action but there were just too many ships to deal with in order to keep them all permanently subdued.
“Nuclear warheads disabled!” Nexus said, not having been paying attention to the conversation. This causing Kade and Jude to go almost completely pale at the revelation of what they had just avoided.
Kade said calmly, “Tell me I didn’t just hear that.”
“OK. You didn’t just hear that,” Drake replied without shifting his focus from his console.
“Not funny Drake! They were gonna nuke us?” Kade asked in shock at the revelation.
“Fusion or fission?” Jude asked.
“What difference does it bloody make?”
“About 10 million credits per warhead… but that’s not what you meant is it?” Jude smiled.
“Not really, no,” Kade said.
“Apparently, they were planet crackers,” Drake said without a hint of distress in his voice.
“Wow… those things aren’t cheap. They’re like a billion a pop. They seriously don’t like us,” Jude said.
“I thought they were illegal. How did we even know they were carrying them, let alone that they were gonna fire them at us?” Kade asked.
“They’re not technically illegal, though it’s a bit of a grey area. The Union does not ban their production; they ban their use within allied territories. As to how we found out about it, we received a warning and acted on it,” Drake said.
“A warning? From whom? You have spies in the fleet?” Kade asked.
“No… at least not that I’m aware of. We don’t know who issued the warning yet. We’ll look into it later, once the Union’s no longer trying to kill us.”
“OK, better question: why jump in front of the fleet? If we had the ability to perform tactical jumps all along why not just leave?” Kade asked.
“Tactical jumps, much like the phase out, use up a considerable amount of the ship’s energy reserves and replenishing the reserves takes time. We only had enough energy for one jump and that wouldn’t have gained us enough distance. So in short, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Drake grinned mischievously.
Jude said excitedly, “That phase out was surreal! How did we do that anyway?” She had never heard of any ship with such an ability before.
“That’s a bit harder to explain, it’s a… hmm. I suppose the best way to describe it would be that it’s a ‘side-effect’ of our Vortex drive. You are free to look up the specifications for the thing later on,” Drake said, making Jude positively giddy with anticipation.
Meanwhile, the Regent, the pride and joy of the Solarian Uni
on, had been reduced to a multi mega ton paperweight; a sight which Static found strangely appealing as he observed the now disorganised crews through their own security systems, as they worked to restore the ship’s systems.
The immediate threat had been prevented, though Static still found it hard to believe that there was anyone alive dumb enough to consider using such despicable weapons in this day and age. Then again, he had never been very good at understanding the military mind-set.
Static cursed their luck. If that last probe had arrived just one minute earlier then all of this could have been avoided, but there was no point in dwelling on what ‘could have been’. At least the defence platform was now permanently out of commission.
Its power was impressive, Static thought.
The beam cohesion wasn’t great and the stabilisation engines obviously needed a lot of work, but the design itself was almost as good as that of a genuine Goliath platform and this worried him.
This loss would probably not deter the Union. They would eventually build a new platform and refine the design, but that was an issue for another time.
Right now the current situation was almost ideal, Static thought as he swiped his hand across his consoles’ interface, wiping all the information from the screen. The display quickly filling up again with data streams as Nexus kept the fleet’s capabilities in check.
Meanwhile, on the bridge of the Regent…
“Sir, engineering reports we have navigation systems back online, we’ve also restored partial sensors: short range only,” Ashlyn reported.
“What’s the status of the fleet?” The Admiral demanded to know; afraid that the fleet was being decimated around them.
“As far as our sensors can see… the fleet has sustained no damage. The enemy is not attacking.” Ashlyn said.
“What about our weapons? How long before they’re restored?” The Captain asked as he reviewed engineering’s report on the systems hack.
“All fire control systems are still out of commission Sir. As soon as our technicians manage to restore partial control the systems are disabled again just as quickly as the first time,” Ashlyn reported.
“I don’t understand this. We are being made to look like complete amateurs by this one single ship! There is no way the Regent should be so vulnerable. We have redundancies in place to allow us to remain 70% combat effective even if we lose our central computer.” The Captain shouted in frustration, “So why can’t we fire the damned guns?”
“The central computer is locking the fire controls and we can’t gain access to the computer room in order to shut it down. All of the emergency bulkheads in that section have been sealed shut,” Ashlyn said.
“Tell the crews this is not the time for finesse. Have them cut the control lines if they have to, just give me back control of our weapons!” The Captain ordered.
Tactically, the enemy was making little sense to the Captain of the Regent. The enemy had jumped directly in front of the fleet, a normally suicidal move by just about everyone’s book but this had given it the ability to disarm the fleet. It was an overwhelming advantage, so why was the enemy just sitting there, he wondered.
The Captain’s eyes widened as he suddenly realised he was overlooking one tactical possibility. The enemy had been sitting in the system for months, probably gathering intelligence and now it had a direct link into the Regent’s computer banks and all the secrets stored within. They were being bled for information.
Back in the tactical virtual environment…
Static had finished going over the records of the Regent and had found nothing even remotely relevant on Nova’s location. In fact there was no mention of her at all in any document. There was also very little information about the ‘Defender’ platform, what little there was indicating that the project had been ongoing for a few decades but had only made any significant headway in the last few years.
Nothing else seemed even remotely interesting; it was just a lot of military operation reports which made for some excruciatingly boring reading.
This fleet, like most military units, was just a pawn in the grander game, controlled by someone else up the hierarchy. There was no useful information here.
Just as Static felt as though he was about to pass out from sheer boredom, something caught his attention. It was a communications file, the content of which was completely uninteresting, but the file itself had the same digital signature as the files which had been sent to him almost 6 months ago.
Static performed a new search on the Regent’s computer system. He was now looking for anything that had come from the same source and what he found was troubling. The same signature was present over almost countless files, all of which had utterly insignificant contents. They were all low priority communications which had been issued from different departments of the Union’s military. There was no common source.
“What does this mean?” Static asked rhetorically.
“What does what mean?” Toby asked as he stood there with arms crossed, having nothing else to do.
“This is the same signature on the information I received, the information which brought us to this system in the first place,” Static said.
“Why did you come here anyway?” Toby asked.
“The information I got said that the ship which had taken Nova had not been destroyed in the battle; that if we came here we would be able to find a clue as to her current location. We scanned every metre of this sector down to the smallest detail and found nothing. Then the Icarus showed up, bringing you to us, so I thought you had somehow found a way to call us in,” Static said as he looked at Toby with a confused expression.
Toby said with a concerned look, “Nope, wasn’t me. You think someone is playing you?”
“Someone that knew you had found Nova? Someone that knew how to send a message all the way to the Zero Core? And what frequency and encryption protocol to use. Someone that could manipulate the Solarian Intelligence Service to make them stall the fleet and bring Kade to this ship, literally carrying you straight to me? Someone who is doing the Union’s military secretarial work by pushing all of these low level reports around their systems? Who?” Static asked, completely stumped.
“Don’t ask me, I’ve been dead for almost 8 years now. I’m not exactly ‘up’ on current events. But if the message was routed to the Zero Core then it would have to be someone intimately familiar with our technology. And he or she, would have to be very well informed if they had the current encryption protocols. Don’t they still change at least once a year?”
Static said with a worried look, “They do. There’s no way an outsider could have gotten their hands on that kind of information.”
“So… who did you annoy this time?” Toby asked.
“What?” Static replied, somewhat confused.
“If I had to guess, I’d say someone wants you dead. Exhibit B is right there,” Toby said as he pointed at the fleet hanging right in front of the Zenith. And then said, “We kind of blew up exhibit A.”
“That can’t be it. The message was sent to the Zero Core. Whoever sent it must know that destroying the Zenith wouldn’t harm me,” Static said.
“You little bastard! We can hear you, you know!!” Drake said.
“Sorry! I meant in a physical sense. I have no body left to kill. If someone wanted me dead they would have to destroy the Zero Core itself. Destroying the Zenith wouldn’t accomplish that. And even if it did, neither the platform nor the fleet would be up to the job,” Static said and then tried comparing the signature against the strange warning message Nexus had received.
“They match! Whoever brought us here is the same person that warned us against the nukes, so they’re not trying to destroy us. But then what…” Static paused as he tried to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but there was still something missing.
Static asked with a suspicious look, “Toby, you said that during the battle you lost track of the ship and ended up amnesic for your efforts.
So how did you find Nova’s location after all that time?”
“Well… technically, Jude found her,” Toby said.
“What?” Static asked with a stunned expression.
“She hacked her way into the GAIA network core a while back and that’s where she found her,” Toby said.
“Found her? The GAIA network? Are you freaking kidding me?” Static nearly screamed, “They built the damned thing around Nova’s matrix?”
“That’s the theory. Jude gave me a pretty good description of what she had seen when she hacked in. But according to her, what she found was not a sentient AI. It had no free will and was shackled with enough security layers to restrict all but the most basic of behaviours. I tried to follow up on the information, but my body was starting to fail me by then. All I ever managed to get was bits and pieces of information, but it all seems to fit. GAIA is Nova,” Toby said.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“All I had was little more than speculation. Nexus was double checking my findings before we acted on them. And then, all of this crap happened,” Toby said as he pointed at the fleet.
And almost as if by some kind of warped divine intervention, at the exact moment that Toby pointed at the fleet the Zenith’s sensors started registering explosions inside the Regent.
“That wasn’t me… I swear!” Toby said with a sheepish look, weirded out at the timing of it all.
Nexus screamed, “We need to leave, now!!”
“What’s wrong?” Static asked, worried about the panic in her voice.
“The crew of the Regent has destroyed the control lines to the ship’s main guns. They will be able to fire the thing manually. I can’t stop them anymore. At this range even the Zenith’s armour won’t be enough!”
Toby didn’t wait for orders, quickly uncrossing his arms and extending them forward as status screens flashed before his palms at an absurd rate. The Zenith immediately fired its manoeuvring engines, causing the ship to quickly spin around its centre of mass as it engaged the main engines to full power.
The Regent’s main gun fired, sending a yellow plasma beam into the flank of the Zenith that punched clear through the ship’s heavy armour.
Shadow Core - The Legacy Page 23
