by Gabe Sluis
“Do you have a favorite star?” Jane asked after a moment, still unsure of what to say.
“Have you ever seen the Great Ladle back on Tellus? It's only visible from the Northern Hemisphere.”
“I am from Moldavia, so yes.”
“Well, if you look at the second star down the handle, there is another much smaller star, almost looking like it is orbiting it. That one is my favorite. It’s not in fact orbiting the star, but much further behind. Have you ever seen the star I’m talking about?”
“I’ve never noticed it,” Jane said. “Why is that one your favorite, of all the stars in the sky?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I just feel drawn to it. It feels familiar and it is my favorite.”
“Hmm,” Jane mused. The silence, this time much more comfortable, settled on the room.
“I’ve got SRT.” Aros said, abruptly unbuckling and moving to the hatch. “Enjoy the stars,” he said and left Jane before she could reply.
***
Two hours into red shift of the twenty-sixth day of their mission, the Prime Meridian reached the second planet of the Unknown Field.
“Call the XO to the bridge,” Captain Bartlett ordered. “Place us in a high orbit of the planet. Communications, if you pick up anything, I want to know immediately.”
In order of the commands, Internal Control, the Pilot and Communications gave their acknowledgements. Despite the high stress environment of the bridge, each officer and the select specialists working the consoles responded with complete composure. Next, the Captain turned to Sensors.
“What can you tell me about the planet?”
“Sir, as seen on the main screen, the cloud cover is planet wide. The atmosphere is thick and the electromagnetic field is making it difficult to see what is going on down on the surface.”
The XO entered the bridge and took a place beside the weapons station and Lieutenant Veldt.
“That’s fine,” the Captain said, after noticing the XO’s arrival. He turned his gaze to the main screen that was dominated by white and tan swirls of clouds that encompassed the world below him. “We will complete one rotation of the planet before we close our orbit and drop terrestrial probes.”
A chime went off to the Captains right. The Communications officer punched furiously at his console and then looked up at the Captain.
“Sir, Massive bursts of electronic transmissions, from all over the planet. Major bursts are also emanating from both of the planets satellites,” he reported in a calm manner.
“I thought we cleared those as we crossed them!” The XO said in disbelief.
“Sound full readiness!” The Captain said.
Another chime and more activity, this time from the Sensor station.
“Sir. We have incoming craft. Five and counting. Emerging from the planets surface, on a course directed at us. Moving fast.”
“Why didn’t we detect these before!?” The XO growled.
“QuadDAR is having trouble penetrating the clouds…” Tech. Specialist Gorra, one of the four personnel working the station, reported.
“Weapons! Set up a snap shot,” the Captain said, cutting off the specialist. “What are the configurations of those craft?”
“Sir, they don’t directly match any known enemy craft.”
“Get a visual on the screen.”
Rising quickly up from the clouds were spike shaped craft with yellow electric-like arcs propelling them to their targets. Staggered, and in no obvious formation, the craft split from their original trajectory and looped in at oblong angles towards the long sections of the Prime Meridian.
“My snap shot solution has been blown, Sir. They made drastic changes in their flight paths.” Lieutenant Veldt said, managing to keep control of his voice. “I am compensating. We only have a few seconds until they are too close.”
“They are too large to be warheads. There are internal cavities… Best guess is boarding craft.” Sensors reported.
“Then fire on what you can! Pilot! Take evasive action and prepare for egress.”
The sound of friendly missiles being fired barely registered on the bridge crew as they all worked furiously on their stations. On the screen, the Prime Meridian’s missiles attempted to block access of the incoming craft, but most had no major affect on the incoming spikes. The ship was rocked by the first of the eight spikes crashing into the thick hull.
***
Aros sat in his very small officers quarters monitoring the bridge channel on his rooms computer screen. When readiness was called, he opened his scroll and disabled his prompt to report to his secondary duty station. He sat staring at the edge of his screen while the action unfolded on the bridge, experiencing the action peripherally, but primarily locked in decisive thought.
As the Captain gave the order to brace for impact from the incoming craft, Aros snapped into action. He unbuckled himself from the chair and hovered mid air, finishing entering commands into his scroll. While the whole ship shuttered from the peppering of impacts, Aros was unaffected in free-fall. With alert sirens echoing throughout the ship, he opened a wall locker and pulled out the tough case he brought with him from Tellus. He punched in the code on the lock and popped the lid. Inside, he pulled out two leather sheathed hand weapons. They were shaped like the letter ‘H,’ with the center handgrip low and parallel double-sided blades reaching away from the wielder. He slung them on a belt, with each sitting on an outside thigh, handle up.
With one last look at the computer screen monitoring their situation, Aros pulled his scroll from his shoulder pocket. Leaving it closed, he punched the voice command button on the top end.
“Enable Gamma response. Activate persons one and nine. Disable persons two, three, six and eight.”
***
Lieutenant Jane Novalis was in a submerged resistance training tank when readiness was called. Her program went black mid exercise and she was alerted to the situation. She quickly got out of the tank and moved to the changing area where she began to peel off her SRT suit.
She felt calm enough, but was jittering slightly as she raced to get back into her uniform. Is this a real attack? she wondered to herself. I got to get to my station and find out what is going on.
The crash of multiple impacts from the incoming ships made Jane jump in the zero gravity and loose the boot she was about to pull on. She looked around wide-eyed at the shaking walls in front of her, cringing with each impact. After what seemed like fifty bone grinding crunches, Jane began to search for the boot that was in her hands before her world started rolling.
The boot was drifting toward the suction grate at ‘bottom’ of the room. Jane turned to go for it when it suddenly changed directions of travel. It took her brain a second to react to what she was seeing. The boot was falling to the wall.
And so was she!
Jane’s shoulder touched the same wall and she began to press harder. It felt as if the wall was pushing on her and she was doing nothing. Rolling over to the floor, Jane lay with her back to the wall. What is happening? her brain raced. She looked over to her scroll and saw the message light was flashing. Still pinned to the wall, she pulled it from her pocket and slid it open.
LT. JANE NOVALIS
!! CHANGE IN SECONDARY ASSIGNMENT !!
REPORT TO THE S-28 GUNSHIP ‘AURORA’ FOR IMMEDIATE DEPLOYMENT.
END.
Jane sat up, closing her scroll. Gravity, that’s what I’m feeling, she realized. We must have landed, that’s what the crunches were. But why am I going to a gunship?
In a dazed state of confusion, and not having experienced real gravity in close to a year, Jane finished dressing and made her way out of the SRT room.
***
Back on the bridge, the calm was starting to break. Internal Control was reporting damages to the XO. Secondary crew assignments teams were beginning to log on as active. Every station was busy dealing with different aspects of the situation. The Captain was letting his people have stro
ng control over their jurisdictions. He sat observing the action when he noticed his hand hit the armrest of his chair.
All in the same moment, most of the chatter died down as the bridge crew watched and felt the effects of gravity settling over the ship.
“Do we have the gravity detector up and running?!” Captain Bartlett demanded, breaking the silence.
“I’m spinning it up now…” Sensors replied. “Sir! I’ve got a craft coming from the backside of the planet, polar west! It’s large, larger than us… Oh merda, a second inbound! From polar east. Same configuration as the other. Both on an incoming vector.” The sensor L.T. went silent as he worked with the others at his station.
“Alright,” the Captain said quite loud. “We will deal with the threats as they come. Sensors! Designate the new targets as East and West. Apprise us of any changes. Now, tell me why we are feeling gravity! Are they trying to anchor us in orbit?”
“Those spikes!” The XO shouted, stumbling over to the Internal Control station. “Show me the points of impact!”
“There! Eight impacts, all on our ventral side. It looks like from exterior cameras that they are all still protruding from our hull!”
The XO looked up at the Captain. “We’ve been boarded!” he shouted. “Activate the bulkhead sonic shields! Alert security to begin sweeps!”
***
In the rear of the ship, the flashing light on top of another crew members scroll blinked.
TECHNICAL SPECIALIST BRYAN CRESCENT
!! ALERT !!
PREPARE THE S-28 GUNSHIP ‘AURORA’ FOR IMMEDIATE DEPLOYMENT.
AUTHORIZATION TO LAUNCH UPON ARIVAL OF ADDITIONAL CREW.
END.
***
Jane climbed heavily through a half open hatch into a secondary corridor in the main body of the ship. The lights were flickering further down the long corridor, but emergency lighting was on. She stopped to check the map feature on her scroll to confirm her direction of travel, feeling unsure of her turns with the addition of gravity. Smoke was drifting along the floor from a small fissure in the circular corridor. It smelled of a strong chemical as if a fluid was dripping on a hot surface and becoming a gas.
There was a snap and hiss, followed by a high-pitched whine as the ships newly installed sonic shielding was activated, covering the entrance she just came through.
“Great,” Jane said aloud to herself. “How am I supposed to get all the way back to that gunship now?”
She opened her scroll and attempted to activate a communication channel to Internal Control. She began to walk as she waited to request a drop of the shields in her corridor, so she could get past. A chime, signifying an attempt at connection, chirped away. Jane figured that she was not the only one with this same problem.
It came to the front of her mind that she had been hearing thuds that were coinciding with the chirps. Her eyes again went wide as she began to hear scratching and strange deep shrieks coming from further down.
More smoke rose from a wall blocking most of her view, fifteen feet ahead. The emergency lights were out beyond the smoke and the thudding was getting louder. Jane realized she was clutching her scroll hard and let it go. The channel to Internal Control was still attempting to go through.
Why aren’t they answering? She wondered in a panic. An exhaust vent kicked on, causing her to jump, sucking out the smoke collecting in front of her. Jane was about to activate the emergency switch on her scroll when the smoke was vented enough to be seen through.
Just past the clearing haze, on the other side of the bulkhead, were two monsters, slashing at amber tinted air.
She screamed when they saw her. She screamed again when she saw that they were scratching away at the bulkhead where the projectors were hidden. She went quiet when she saw the tip of their craft that had sliced through the Prime Meridian. The vile spike was jutting through the wall of the corridor behind the Scalies.
And that’s what the monsters were, Scalies. The weight of the realization hit her harder than simulated high gravity.
The creatures had oval, flat faces, with sunken black marble eyes. Jane thought they looked very much like barn owls from back on Tellus- almost sweet. That was until one opened its mouth, a slit running all the way across the bottom of the oval portion of its face. Matching rows of razor-sharp, uniform teeth were bared at the small human just out of their reach.
Jane was small compared to them. They were nearly twice her size, with their size being locationally-appropriate and covering their entire body. Both were light grey with regular swaths of black coloring, reminding Jane of the interesting patterns of bright colored tropical fish. The aliens had two tales, about two meters long, emerging from the one point at the end of their spine. They walked upright, but slightly hunched over. The Scalies large feet and hands had four digits each. Small horns and ridges adorned their backs and shoulders, rounding out their overall reptilian appearance.
Petrified, Jane all but refused to flee from the nightmares before her. She was not the type of human to travel so far from her own home, only to run away. She crouched down and worked on her scroll. She activated the emergency switch and continued her attempt to get a communication line established.
Either something isn’t working or they have no time to answer my call for help, Jane thought. If I can’t report that we have been boarded, at least I can take video for when they find my body.
The Scalies were trying in earnest now to take down the shield projectors. One projector was already on the way out as the Scalie vocalizations came flickering through intermittently.
As Jane was filming and narrating what could have been her last seconds, the Scalies both sharply turned their heads away from her. They paused and the one on the right turned to investigate, as if it had heard a noise. Jane watched it move with a questioning walk, as if it had been spoken to. The one on the left stopped its work and turned to watch the outcome.
Out of the shadows, Aros rose, and struck the Scalie on the side of the head. His hand was on fire, his fist surrounded by a dark blue halo of non-light emitting energy. The reptile took the blow and lunged back with a swipe of his own. Dodging beneath the blow, Aros pulled a hon-ra from the holster on his hip. He stabbed out with the weapon, bracketing the alien’s ankle between the blades. He twisted and drove the blades into the wall of the corridor.
The Scalie was left upside down, pinned to the wall by a single limb. Both tails went up to the hon-ra in an attempt to free it's caught foot from the snare.
Aros spun around, kicking the reacting Scalie in the head, halting all movement.
The second Scalie now turned and began to charge. Aros, at a half crouch, drew his remaining hon-ra and heaved it overhand at the beast. Two steps from his intended target, the Scalie fell. The blades dug deep into the area below its face. Jane did not hear any gargling, but a puddle of milky, pink blood began to pool around the upper body of the reptile. Aros crossed the creature, lifting up the body slightly and pulling his weapon free. He wiped the blood on a wall crash pad that was now useless under gravity.
Jane stopped recording and stood up, unsure if she really wanted to get his attention. Aros snapped his eyes over to where Jane stood and moved to the shielded bulkhead. He drew his scroll and activated a command, dropping the shield.
“Are you ok? There are more forward of us, where are you going?”
“I got redirected to the Aurora of all places,” Jane said, half thinking. “What the hell was that? How did you take down that shield? Did you kill both of them?”
“Your scroll must not be working. We need to get moving, quite a few of them got a good distance away from their crafts before the internal shields went up.”
Aros left Jane standing, staring at the bodies. He went over to the intruding ship. The tip was hinged off, which had allowed the Scalies to disembark. He jumped up onto the tangle of pierced starship and reached into the encroaching object. After a second, Aros emerged with a lantern shaped
object that had a dark blue orb suspended behind a solid transparency.
“What are you doing?” Jane asked. She kept asking questions as if her brain was in shock from the things she had just seen. “What were those knife things? What was with your hands. My god… we didn’t land did we? Where are you going?”
“Get it together,” Aros said. He turned fully toward her. “We are in a bad place. We were both reassigned to the gunship. We must act like Space Service officers and perform our duties. Now, lets go.”
“Alright,” Jane said. She was coming back to herself. It was the first time she had been exposed to such violence and it took her otherwise well-trained mind a second to take over.
They began to jog.
“I’ve just never seen a Scalie up close before, only diagrams and photos of the few that were killed attacking Tellus twenty years ago. How did you find me?”
“I was coming from my quarters when I heard them. So I took them out to get at their ship.” Aros stopped at the next sonic shield and deactivated it with his scroll. “I knew they must have had something on their landing craft that would generate gravity. You were just lucky, I guess.”
“You killed them both so quickly…”
“That’s what I do.”
“But no rifle. What were those things you used?” Jane said.
“Didn’t have time to stop by the armory,” Aros grinned. “I brought this along,” Aros said pointing to his remaining hon-ra, “and it sure came in handy.”
“I heard you were from Northern Columbia, are they aboriginal weapons?”
“An old man, from back where I grew up taught me how to use them.”
***
Jane and Aros arrived at the Aurora’s dock soon after the massive Scalie starships were spotted coming around from the planets far side. The two ran up to the control terminal situated in front of the Aurora’s nose, which was poking into the room. The docking collars, angled against the top and bottom of the wedge-shaped ship, provided the resistance needed to utilize the power from the ships massive engine. Tech Specialist Crescent descended a short ladder from the bottom hatch of the ship.
