by Shane Black
“I’m sorry, ma’am, access to records storage must be authorized by the station commander.”
Commander Huggins interrupted. “We already checked. The best we could come up with was the approach officer. Apparently there’s nobody in charge out here except a couple of accountants and a guy with a flashlight.”
“Corporal?” Hunter’s expression made it clear she wasn’t in much of a mood for litigation.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry but I have my orders.”
“Corporal, can you identify my rank insignia?” The Fury Skipper borrowed Lieutenant Sutherland’s tablet device and started looking up the emergency regulations.
“Yes ma’am.”
“And what rank is that, marine?”
“You wear the insignia of a Skywatch Commander, ma’am.”
“And the opposite device?”
The corporal hesitated. Tom gave him two extra moments and then cut in. “That’s the badge of a Task Force Commander, corporal.”
The marine swallowed, trying to emphasize his regulation-perfect attention posture. Somewhere in his adrenaline-hazy memory he recalled the qualifications for that particularly rare designation. The star-spangled gold insignia would be hard to find on a command officer two ranks higher. Nevertheless, here she was. Judging by the numerous tightly-packed pips, there were at least nine ships including two ships of the line under her flag. The difference in firepower between a marine sentry armed with a blaster rifle and this slender young woman was roughly the difference between an underfed earthworm and an angry Bengal tiger.
“How many rank insignia is that, marine?” Hunter asked, still scrolling through the regulations on her tablet.
“Three, ma’am.”
Hunter stepped forward until she was nose-to-chin with the young but taller marine. “That’s right. That means I’m so close to being a Captain I can smell that fourth insignia. Now you either open that lab and let my people in there or I’ll snap you back so hard your hair will change color. Do you read me, marine?”
Her voice had that tone particular to officers with experience leading thousands of men and women in battle. The sentry marine correctly recognized his authority, whatever its justification, was not going to successfully compare. He could only imagine the cosmic levels of hell someone roughly six hundred ranks higher could rain down on his life. The images of ten-foot-tall admirals and courts-martial crawled out of his blackest fears before he finally decided to favor discretion over valor. It was one thing to bravely charge the enemy. It was another to choose to die on a hill targeted by an entire artillery division with nothing but a time card punched by a junior lieutenant for protection.
Jayce watched impatiently as her signals specialists unpacked their gear in the records lab. Commander Huggins stood nearby.
“Last thing I need today is a lengthy debate with some rifle-lugging grunt over who is allowed where,” Hunter muttered. “After this is over I’ll tow this entire station back to Core Ten and drop it in a box.”
“When we find out who abandoned their post out here I think you’ll have a hide to go with that tow job,” Huggins replied.
“Hunter to Fury, report all contacts.”
“Fury, Mallory in CIC, ma’am. No contacts except King One. Bearings unchanged.”
“Very well. We’re in the records lab. We should have some answers shortly. Stand by.”
“Affirmative, Skipper. Standing by.”
“Hunter to Echo.”
“Hi Jayce! Isn’t this station the coolest?!”
Tom smiled. Commander Hunter’s self-built team of miniature robots all had the personalities of children between the ages of about four and seven. Despite the fact none of them were larger than a gallon bottle of milk, as a group they were a surprisingly effective outfit, capable of acting on their own up to a point. Echo was their combination early warning alarm and medical unit.
“Yeah, it’s pretty neat. Are Rebel and Butterfly with you?”
“Uh huh! Do you wanna talk to them?”
“Not right now. Keep me advised. If you get any weird readings, you make sure to tell Rebel and Butterfly first and then tell me, okay?”
“Okay Jayce! See ya!”
Sutherland and the other officers were well into their work by now.
“Do you always bring your robots with you on landing missions, ma’am?” Amy asked.
“She certainly does, lieutenant.” Tom was examining a large map of Gitairn space behind the records consoles. “I’ll never get over Fleet Officers who ask why you travel with a group of remote controlled toy cars and aircraft,” he said. “Always a source of entertainment when we drop in at Scary’s.”
“I’ve been dealing with raised eyebrows since cybernetics school,” Hunter replied. “High ranking officers have a bad habit of not checking the records before they start barking at us.”
“I learned my lesson in a hurry,” Tom said. “After I found out both Rebel and Wave had been nominated for valor awards and that Echo has an Indian Forks campaign ribbon I’ve been earning a fortune making odds on the next admiral to step in it.”
“Ma’am?”
The Task Force Perseus Officers gathered around Sutherland’s console. She had called up the historical records gathered by the many sensors and scanners Station Nineteen had been operating continuously for many weeks.
“There,” Tom said, pointing at a spike in the electromagnetic signatures at system’s edge. “Those are the same readings we got from Ajax.”
“And right here are the readings that confirm it,” Jayce added. “Those anomalous datasets are following a lateral line. Station Nineteen has been tracking them for over a month. There aren’t sixteen ships out there. There’s more like forty ships, and some of those power plants are our designs.”
“Why would Skywatch ships be cloaked on the far edge of Gitairn? We don’t have any bases or spacelanes this far out,” Tom said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that’s a--”
Hunter keyed her commlink. “Fury, this is Hunter. Bring fleet up on the Z-pack and patch it to my personal designator.”
“Affirmative, Commander, you’re on.”
“Hunter to fleet. Set emergency condition three. Stand by battle stations.” As the acknowledgments poured in, Hunter switched channels. “Mallory, re-plot our course to rendezvous with Argent and prepare for departure.”
“What’s on your mind, Skipper?”
“That’s an interdiction formation, and they’re not prepping a defense. That fleet is massing for an attack on someone or something, and I’m betting it’s populated Core worlds. Skywatch would have to muster our entire strength on this side of Boomtown to match that kind of firepower.”
“How could they keep this off everyone’s radar this long?” Tom asked.
“Unknown, but I can guarantee you we’re going to pull the really loud fire alarm in the hall in about twenty minutes.”
Five
Echo rolled about in the station cafeteria and then down the long corridor. All her short range scanners and sensors were on maximum gain, looking for anything unusual on the virtually abandoned station. There was a brief moment of excitement when she came across a maintenance crew member doing inventory on cleaning supplies, but he was wearing a proper fleet ID badge, so she said hello and moved on.
The little vehicle’s onboard sensor suite had an audio component which continued beeping softly as she traveled from place to place. If those watching didn’t know better, they would think she was a toy ambulance or truck of some kind. Until they heard the beeping and the sing-songy humming. She sounded like a girl of about five dressing up her stuffed animals for a pretend tea party.
What made Echo particularly dangerous to potential enemies was the fact she was patched in to the Task Force command net, and had the same authority as Commander Hunter to sound general alerts, activate the threat board, engage security protocols and so forth. On more than one occasion, Echo had been the difference between a prepared
crew and a lot of casualties.
She had been engaged in a long-running conversation with Butterfly about whether pink or yellow was a prettier color, and just for fun, she had kept her audio patch open so anyone nearby could hear both sides of the discussion.
Those sounds were just confusing enough that Echo saw the intruders before they saw her. There were five of them. They were heavily armed and they had no identifying signals of any kind. In fact, Echo’s on-board radar tried to ping their location for range and got no signal back.
There was a brief, soundless moment as the little vehicle looked up at the darkly dressed humanoids and they looked back at her.
And then all hell broke loose.
“Emergency! Emergency! Intruders! Requesting assistance! SOS! Survey Station Nineteen deck six! Mayday! Mayday! Sound the alarm! The British are coming!”
Echo lit up like a pachinko machine. Her strobes, spinning lights, flashers, power-loss lights, threat indicators, targeting lasers and tiny little red light bars went into full operation. She looked like the ground floor of a casino on wheels.
“Red Alert! Battle stations! Code Three! Abandon ship! Evacuate! Keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle! Man overboard!”
As the torrent of high-pitched panicked noise poured from the little vehicle, she peeled backwards with a startling rate of acceleration, turned sharply and roared back down the corridor at an unsettling speed. After a few more seconds, a full power ambulance siren went off and mixed with her chattering alerts. The most annoying car alarm ever invented would have literally deflated if put up against the storm of sound Echo produced. Her voice was audible all the way up and down the curved corridor, reflecting off the metal surfaces and making it sound like she was running into a canyon. She definitely lived up to her namesake.
Two of the unidentified intruders gave chase, only to find another vehicle parked right in the center of the corridor and blocking their path. This one looked like a camouflaged gas can on tank tracks. It was pointing a non-trivial-looking gun of some kind at them.
“Identify yourself!” it shouted. The voice was that of about a seven-year-old boy trying to start an after-school fight. “You better listen ‘cause Echo already said you were intruders!”
One of the men made the mistake of pointing a weapon at Rebel. His first shot ricocheted off of the tiny tank’s shields. The little armored unit returned fire. The painfully bright blast tore a six-foot gash in the ceiling fixtures. Ripped and blasted metal clanged on the floor. Sparks rained down as the corridor lights flashed and strobed, then went out.
The two intruders fired wildly in Rebel’s direction and quickly retreated. The little tank gave chase. It was basically an iguana pursuing racehorses, but Rebel did his best.
“Butterfly! Butterfly! Where are you?!”
A small helicopter fluttered into the corridor just as Echo screamed past, lights still flashing brightly enough to illuminate the corridor for ten feet in all directions.
“Where did you go?” Butterfly said softly, pivoting around and flying back into the medical lab just as Echo came roaring back out.
“Butterfly! Where are you?!” Echo skidded out the door, swerved and continued down the hall, shouting for her friend, sirens blaring.
“I’m here, Echo! I’m here!”
Finally after a couple more near-misses, the two little craft found each other.
“Butterfly! We have to tell Acey! There’s intruders! And they’re wearing all black clothes! And they have guns! And they’re not supposed to be here because Acey said nobody except people with fleet IDs are supposed to be on the station, and we gotta--” If Echo weren’t built on wheels she would have been jumping up and down while shouting.
“Echo! I can’t understand you when you talk so fast! Do you remember the code for Acey’s designator?”
“Uh huh!” Echo sounded like she had just run the length of a football field.
“Okay, then can’t we use that code to call her for help?”
“Uh huh!”
“Okay, then why don’t we do that? She can help us.”
“Okay!” Echo was operating on a completely different energy and panic level than Butterfly was. The little helicopter was far less excitable but was also far more likely to fly somewhere and hide rather than get involved in the action.
“Acey! Acey! It’s Echo! Remember when you said to call you for help when there was trouble?”
It would later be viewed as fortunate that Echo had engaged the fleet-wide emergency channel. Her transmissions sounded in the pickups of nine signals officers and the entire landing party at once.
“Echo, this is Acey. Go ahead.”
“Intruders on Deck Six! Rebel shot them! And I sounded all my alarms! Even the really loud ones! And then Butterfly said we should call you, and--”
“Okay, Echo. Calm down. You did fine. We received your alert,” Hunter said reassuringly.
“Then everything’s okay?” Echo asked. “Are you okay? Do you need help? Butterfly and me will come help you if you need help!”
“No, Echo. We’re fine. Go to alert condition four, can you do that for me?”
“Okay!”
“Then what I need you to do right now is monitor the intership and tell me if any of our signals officers calls. Can you and Butterfly do that for me together?”
“Okay! We’ll tell you if anyone calls!”
“Affirmative, Echo. Hunter out.”
The other officers stared at their Skipper. They had never heard someone reassure a robot before.
“She gets... excited,” Hunter said. “Tom, raise the Exeter. I want a marine shock platoon down here in sixty seconds.”
A small metal object rolled into the records lab.
“Grenade!” Commander Huggins grabbed Hunter and dove towards the mainframe cage.
A violent explosion shook the entire deck!
To Be Continued in the Adventures of Captain Jason Hunter and the Bandit Jacks Book Four: Operation: Barricade!
Also available from Palace in the Sky!
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Battle Collection One
Shane Black
8.1 Copyright © 2014
Palace in the Sky Productions LLC.
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