Scrapyard Ship 7: Call to Battle

by Mark Wayne McGinnis

  Jason’s eyes scanned further down and caught on the name Ot-Mul. He read the line again:

  It is now confirmed—Acting-emperor Ot-Mul survived the attack on Chrimguard. He, along with four battle droids, has escaped. He is now firmly in command of all Craing forces in space.

  “Damn it!” Jason spat under his breath. That was one piece of information he hadn’t been aware of. He looked up to see Gunny watching him.

  “Ot-Mul?” she asked.

  “Yeah … it’s like he has nine lives.” He scrolled down to see if there were any more messages from Ricket and found none. “Anything else new from Ricket?”

  Gunny shook her head. “Last confirmation we had they were heading back to Halimar on board a small shuttle … that was two weeks ago.”

  “We’ve been able to contact the AI on board the Streamline … they never made it back.”

  “What are our options? Can we communicate directly with Zay-Lee?” Jason asked, concern in his voice.

  “Communications have been spotty, at best. He did confirm the two had indeed been loaded onto a shuttle and sent on their way. He, too, is worried. I guess Zay-Lee and Gaddy became close … she was talking about returning to the Craing worlds permanently, to be with him.”

  Jason sank back in the command chair and thought about the situation. What have you gotten yourself into, Ricket? He didn’t want to overly speculate on what may have happened. The truth was, Jason had few friends in life … real friends. Billy and Ricket came to mind. First Dira, and now Ricket too, lost? The heaviness in Jason’s heart must have shown on his face.

  “Well, if it isn’t our long lost leader.”

  Jason looked up to see Billy’s smiling, concerned face. He returned the smile, stood up, and shook Billy’s outstretched hand.

  “Tan … relaxed, probably drank Mai-Tais poolside … you sure you want to be back here?” Billy asked.

  “All good things come to an end … plus the peovils, what my kids call the zombies, were getting a bit too close for comfort.”

  “Well, it’s good to have you back. It’s time we get out there and kick some more Craing ass.”

  “That’s the plan … but we have some other business to take care of first.” Jason’s mind then flashed back to Ricket. What have you gotten yourself into, Ricket?

  Chapter 4

  The sheer size of the vessel, if that’s what you could even call it, was on a scale that rivaled a small planet—certainly a planetary moon. Dreathlor prison barge was well over one thousand years old. One of their first bounties of war, some two hundred years earlier, the Dreathlor’s immense value and potential had quickly been obvious to the Craing. First of all, it was impregnable. With an outer hull hundreds of feet thick, and made from some kind of iron-carbon composite, the prison barge had never been breached. Not even close. The sight of the barge alone instilled fear and dread in all those coming anywhere near it. Dark, rusted, and always moving slowly in space, the prison barge was more than what it functioned as: It was a clear message—no, more like a warning. Go up against the Craing Empire, or what was the Craing Empire, and you’ll find yourself confined in here—a fate often worse than death.

  Superintendent Gettling was not Craing. He was human. A slender man of average height, with a tightly, impeccably trimmed beard, he was fastidious: a quality that was in direct opposition to the chaotic, and all too unpredictable environs around him. Dreathlor prison barge was his domain, his purpose in life. And where most beings would find such a dark existence intolerable—exiled, as it were, among the misery and depravity—he relished it. There was a place in the universe for Dreathlor. There was a place in the universe for people like him. He would probably never leave the ship. He had no desire for conventional relationships, or to live among his own kind. Here, among the distant moans and screams of the exiled—and routinely tortured—was home.

  Deep within the maze of tight, intersecting corridors at the prison’s mid-starboard section, Gettling sat at his desk and reviewed the interstellar correspondence one more time. It was short and concise, something he liked about the Craing—always to the point, no wasted sentiment or formalities:

  To: Superintendent Miles Gettling

  Directive 1: Continue to interrogate prisoners Gaddy Lom, and her friend, Nelmon Lim. It is essential that more information be harvested from both of these dissident traitors.

  Directive 2: You will alter course to the new heading provided. Expedite disposal of all non-essential prisoners before reaching the intended destination—Corpus-Lang, within the Orion star system. Make haste. No stops or deviations from provided route.

  Immediate commencement of these orders is a directive of Admiral Ot-Mul.

  Gettling smiled. He’d been traversing this same quadrant in space for nearly four years now. Time to mix things up. He inputted the spatial coordinates into the terminal on his desk and waited for the methodical, slow-thinking AI to respond.

  A heavily accented voice, guttural and menacing, filled the confined office space. “Superintendent Gettling, your course change has been approved by Craing Command. Shall I instigate?”

  “Yes, of course you should. Do so now!”

  “Course change instigated. Affected departments will be notified. Superintendent, I was told to remind you of the importance of this morning’s other directive.”

  “I’m well aware of the other directive. Mind your duties, AI—I’m quite busy here.”

  The truth of the matter was Gettling was unable to think about anything other than the two dissidents currently held in pit-11141. He’d never held higher-profile prisoners in confinement, nor had his actions been so closely monitored. Gettling had no family of his own that he was aware of, but he wondered how the late Lom would feel, knowing his niece had been sent to this unholy place—would he be doing summersaults in his grave? Gettling always knew Ot-Mul was beyond ruthless—his exploits as commander of the Vanguard fleet were notorious. But sending Lom’s niece here, among these realms of despair and torture—this place of pain … Gettling stood while pondering the question. He spun the cold metal wheel on the hatch and heard the internal latching mechanism disengage. Using both hands, he pulled the two-foot-thick door open, stepped into the corridor and secured the hatch closed behind him. The sounds of Dreathlor prison, the sounds of misery, had just increased in his ears by a factor of ten.

  Pit-11141 was on the far side of the basically circular, slightly oblong prison barge. He calculated the distance in his head, somewhere around six hundred miles away from his current location. Although the prison was anything but high tech, and for good reason, its transportation system was state of the art. As superintendent of the prison, he was not only afforded a personal transport terminal, but also his own anti-grav railcar. One of his few perks.

  The superintendent made his way to the group of terminal buildings and entered the smallest one. His railcar was still there, waiting from when he arrived on it in the morning.

  “To the pits, 11141,” he said. He sat and felt the car immediately start to move forward—G-forces pushed him back into his heavily cushioned seat. Within moments the anti-grav car was speeding along ten times the speed of sound. Although muffled, sonic thuds resounded off the tunnel walls and vibrated up into his buttocks. A sensation he’d come to appreciate over the years.

  The car slowed and came to a stop at a terminal similar to the one he’d left minutes before. He got to his feet and exited the terminal building. He didn’t make this trek to the pits as often as he used to. Standing there on the metal catwalk, his breath caught in his chest. The view before him, the spectacle and enormity of what encompassed the Prisoner Isolation Trenches, even now, was mesmerizing. Black as obsidian, there were thousands upon thousands of thirty-foot-deep holes—each with a surface smooth as glass. Like well-organized craters on a lunar surface, the hole-pocked landscape stretched out as far as the eye could see.

  Adjacent to the crisscross of security catwalks were constantly moving,
and stopping, tram-plates. Nothing like the high-tech anti-grav cars, these were nothing more than moving plates of metal, primitive but effective in moving someone from one pit location to another.

  Gettling pressed a series of buttons that would take him to Pit-11141. Holding tight to a metal cross bar, the tram-plate jerked forward then changed direction at the first intersection it came to. Gettling swayed as the tram-plate gained speed, his eyes catching movement and then momentarily tracking indecipherable figures along the base areas of several of the pits.

  The tram-plate began to slow and changed direction again. Each pit was sectioned to three others, and tied together by a center-hub management station. It was there that the tram-plate came to a stuttering stop. Gettling jumped off and headed for the hub station that managed pits 11140 through 11143. A winding metal staircase led down to the hub management station. The superintendent’s soft leather boots made little noise as his feet stepped from one rung to another. Thirty feet below the surface, he entered the clear, cube-like station. Opening the hatch, he was greeted by a familiar smell. Trancus was a Mollmol. And, as far as Gettling knew, all Mollmols smelled the same: like rotting fish. It was quite unpleasant until one got used to it.

  “Trancus! I’d forgotten you’d been assigned to these prisoners. Splendid!”

  Trancus was standing at one of the clear partitions, looking into one of the confinement pits. At close to eight-feet-tall, and an interesting mix of reptile-serpent, and perhaps some human, components, his muscular system, beneath black, always glistening, wet skin, evoked fear from virtually everyone he came in contact with. Add in his disgusting smell, and Trancus was the complete, fear-evoking, package.

  “Superintendent. I didn’t expect you for several more hours,” he said in a wet, lisping voice. “As I told you earlier, I have yet to retrieve any new information from her.”

  Gettling stood at Trancus’s side and watched the lone pit inhabitant trying to climb the sheer curved walls. It would be impossible for her, of course. Completely open thirty feet above, the top beckoned, seemingly reachable. But, as with the barge itself, the pits were totally secure.

  Gaddy, her clothes soiled and bloodied, continued to move in a circular direction around the base of the pit.

  “It’s always amazed me how prisoners think escape is possible … why they circle around and around as if that will make some kind of difference, evades me.”

  Trancus did not respond.

  Turning around, Gettling walked to the other clear partition. “And this one, the one called Nelmon Lim. What about him?”

  Trancus joined the superintendent and both peered across an identical-looking pit inhabited by a young-looking, unconscious, Craing male. Sprawled awkwardly in the middle of the floor, Ricket opened his eyes.

  Chapter 5

  They’d phase-shifted from the subterranean base to two hundred feet above the scrapyard. Jason was on his feet and standing behind McBride. “Hold here a moment, Ensign.”

  Jason walked around the helm console, not taking his eyes from the overhead, 360-degree virtual display. The large scrapyard property sprawled hundreds of yards beneath them. The impressive newly built house, with its rectangular aqua-blue pool, stood like a sentinel. Perched on a raised hillside, it occupied the southern quadrant of the acreage. But what held Jason’s attention was the recently repaired turret gun. Series of bright blue bolts of plasma were spewing from its muzzle. That, in itself, was surprising. He’d instructed Teardrop to reconfigure the weapon to fire only when the peovils physically encroached onto his property. Obviously, the fence was not a determent to their advancement. No less than ten bodies, some still smoldering, lay prone within the confines of the scrapyard acreage. What would the scrapyard look like in a month from now … two months? How many bodies would be piled up here. Hell, he probably had known some of these people. This isn’t working.

  Jason put a hand up to his right ear and contacted Teardrop via his NanoCom. “Teardrop … is there a way you can disengage the scrapyard turret weapon remotely?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Do so, now.”

  Jason watched the turret gun become still. He took one more glance at the house on the hill and turned away. He hoped it would still be there when they returned. “Take us out of here, Helm.”

  * * *

  The Lilly descended, flying above Washington, D.C. and right over the White House. There, too, a new encircling, steel fence had been constructed. Far more elaborate than the one at the scrapyard, this walled barrier was easily sixty or seventy feet in height and erected at an approximately thirty-degree angle. It seemed to be effective, since none of the peovils presently climbing it progressed any further than halfway up before falling back to the ground.

  The Lilly settled onto one of the large landing pads at the back of the property. For the past year, landings by space vessels as large as The Lilly, or larger, including light and heavy Craing cruisers, had become commonplace. A painted white Craing cruiser, U.S. flag emblems affixed to its wings, and along both sides of the hull, took up the only other landing pad.

  “Want to get some air?” Jason asked Billy, standing near his side.

  “In the White House? Sure … you bet I do,” Billy replied.

  “You too, Gunny,” Jason said, to Orion’s obvious surprise. “XO, you have the bridge.”

  * * *

  They were met at the end of the gangway by a small team of Army Rangers. Jason spotted two other armed teams also patrolling the rear grounds. The threesome were still wearing their spacer jumpsuits, their SuitPacs at the ready on their belts.

  With the security team now positioned in front and behind them, they headed into the back of the White House through a small, wood-paneled vestibule where they made a quick right turn toward the West Wing. The presidential seat of government was bustling with activity. Jason had visited here several times in the past and today there were two or three times more people scurrying around than normally.

  The security detail stood back at the open doorway of the Oval Office. Orion and Billy exchanged quick glances as they were prompted to follow Jason. Nan was seated in one of the armchairs, positioned across from the couch. Jason’s father occupied the other armchair. Jason recognized Secretary of Defense Benjamin Walker, who was seated on the couch. Nan and the men were dressed in casual clothes and stood when Jason and his two team members entered the room.

  Nan got to her feet, rushed forward, and pulled Jason into an embrace. He held her tightly and realized she was crying—sobbing onto his chest. He placed his hand at the back of her head and gently held her close. Over her shoulder Jason acknowledged Walker. He was pleased to see that the gruff old Secretary of Defense was still around.

  Nan pulled herself away, wiping the moisture from beneath her eyes, and looked up at Jason. “Sorry, must have needed that.”

  Jason then caught the curve of her belly. She really was showing now. She saw the direction of his stare and smiled. “I guess I’m just a baby-making machine.” She shrugged and moved over to Billy and Orion, giving each a quick hug. “I’m so glad to see the three of you … you have no idea.”

  It occurred to Jason that Walker actually had seniority over Nan. Shouldn’t he be the acting president?

  Walker moved a step forward and took Jason’s outstretched hand in both of his own. “Young man, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

  Jason smiled and turned toward his father, who acknowledged him with a wink and a smile. Nan said, “Sit … let’s all sit and get down to business.”

  Billy and Orion took seats next to Walker on the couch as Jason brought an antique chair over from the wall.

  Jason figured he might as well express what was on his mind. “So who is the acting president of the United States?” His eyes looked between Nan and Walker.

  “She is …” Walker hesitated. “They found me … my cocoon … several days ago and I seemed to be in relatively good health. Fortunately, I’m type O. Now, even
though I am technically the senior government official in line, tomorrow that could change from me to the chief of staff, or perhaps even the vice president … if either of their respective cocoons are found. But what our country needs today is stability. What we need is a president the country already has faith in, and that person is Nan Reynolds. Keep in mind, nothing about these present times is normal … this certainly won’t be the last break from usual presidential procedure.”

  Jason caught his ex-wife’s eye and saw something there he couldn’t remember ever seeing before. More than just confidence—it was more like an emanating force that seemed to be growing. Not only was she the acting president, she was actually owning the position.

  She sat up in her chair and looked into each face. “We have no time to waste with chit chat. Our country is on the verge of collapse. With much of the populace infected … roaming the streets like zombies—medical services, utilities, our nation’s whole infrastructure, is barely operational. We’re in deep trouble. And that doesn’t even address the impending troubles we’re facing in space, with three fleets of Craing warships ready to attack us.” Nan hesitated, then continued, “I’ve been talking with the admiral and the truth of the matter is there’s very little we can do about the Craing. Steps are being taken to bring the Alliance together again … but that’s a slow, methodical process. We don’t know why the Craing have held steady. We can only hope it’s a good sign. So, to bring us up to date on the situation here at home, Admiral, can you tell us about the progress being made on the science front?”

  Jason turned in his seat to look at his father. His salt-and-pepper gray hair had grown longer, hanging well over his collar. He also seemed to be growing a full beard.

  “In Ricket’s absence we had to solicit help from that Caldurian, Granger. As you all know, our history with him has not been smooth. None of us are under any illusion about him and his self-serving motivations. With that said, his scientific capabilities are probably on a par with Ricket’s. He’s agreed to work with our own top-level scientists and to utilize some of the Minian’s advanced technology to see if there is anything we can do to treat those infected.”