Voyage of the Hayden (The Adventures of Christopher Slone Book 1)

by Donald Nicklas

  “Captain, report.”

  “Major we took fire and they used some kind of gas in the compartment. Glad we had our space suits on but this stuff is corrosive. If they keep using this our suits will be trash and we’ll be breathing vacuum.”

  “Captain, over here.” Takeda’s report was interrupted by one of the marines calling him to the other side of the room. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw. There, leaning against the wall was a being the like of which no one had ever seen. The creature was dead and appeared to be wearing some type of clothing. The skin was hard to the touch and covered with thick, knobby projections. Where the head should be there was an appendage. What appeared to be the head, identifiable only by a mouth-like structure, was at the base of this upper appendage. There were two more upper appendages and two lower, though none had anything that resembled feet, but rather all had a hand-like structure that could hold the weapons strewn around the body. All the marines could only stare, with mouths agape.

  “Captain, what is going on up there? More resistance?”

  “No major, we found one of the crew. I think it was the one who fired on us.”

  “Good, any idea what corporation he’s working for.”

  “I guarantee, Major, none of the ones we know. Major this ship is crewed by aliens.”

  There was a long pause and one could feel everyone one from the marine units to the bridge of the Hayden looking at each other and wondering if they had heard correctly. When humans first went to the stars there was great anticipation of meeting other sentient beings, but nowhere in all the explored regions did they ever find sentient life forms. If this was finally the long awaited first contact, then it turned into a hell of a mess. “Say again, captain. I am not sure we heard you right.”

  “If you heard me say there are aliens working this ship, then you heard right. Hayden, look at your monitor and tell me what you think.”

  The Hayden bridge crew looked at the monitor. During combat, the cameras are designed to shut off to avoid being a distraction. Captain Takeda now turned his back on and the Hayden got their first glimpse of a true alien. It was not a pretty sight. “Captain, did you kill it in the fire fight?”

  “No sir, I don’t think so, Captain Slone. I can't see any marks on the body that indicate wounds. It looks like it just died. Suppose, that gas in the compartments is their atmosphere, and not a counter measure? Every compartment we open will kill any of them in it”

  “Major, the captain may be right but I have no idea how to communicate with them and we have to secure that ship. If they get power going they could still do damage or self destruct with you on it.”

  “Understood, Captain, we will continue to clear the ship. What the . . .?”

  “What’s going on, Major?”

  “Not sure. Captain Takeda do you feel that.”

  “Yes, Major. There is a heavy vibration coming from deep in the ship but nothing has changed up here.”

  “Major, this is the Hayden. We are detecting ports opening along the sides of the ship, towards the mid section. Get your people off in case we have to return fire.”

  The marines were quickly ordered to remount their skiffs, with the bridge units grabbing the alien body. The tail units hoisted a piece of the ship onto a skiff for later analysis. As the marines were evacuating and moving away from both vessels in case of an exchange of fire, multiple large, cylindrical objects propelled out of each side of the ruined dreadnought.

  “Incoming fire.” Was shouted on the marine com units and the Hayden fired her engines to take evasive action. However, it soon became apparent that what looked like missiles were some kind of escape pod and they began to form into a double line and head for the restricted slipstream. “Hold your fire,” Captain Slone shouted at the weapons techs. “They are abandoning ship. Looks like they're heading for the restricted slipstream. At least we now know it has something to do with them. Major Sardac, get your marines well clear of that ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As the marines put distance between them and the dreadnought, the latter vessel began to shake and seemed to bulge outward. With a bright flash, it shattered into billions of pieces. “Sardac to Hayden, we will not get any more info from that. Returning with samples.”

  “Were we able to retrieve that body?”

  “Yes, sir. Captain Takeda grabbed that as a souvenir on the way out. Request permission to send a skiff to retrieve our casualty.”

  “Permission granted. I don’t think there is any more risk at the moment. Secure from general quarters. Hans, secure the CIC and then you have the con. I want to head down to sickbay to see this alien for myself. It wouldn’t be the first time someone wanted us to think we were dealing with aliens.”

  Before Commander Stueber came to the bridge, Slone ordered repairs to begin at once so they could get back to Purgatory as soon as possible. Lest they forget, there were two destroyers identified with the dreadnought attacking the base. If they are still there, then they needed to get back to Purgatory and deal with them. As he was thinking about this, Hans Stueber came onto the bridge. “Hans, we still have to deal with possibly two destroyers back at Purgatory. I have a thought on how to do that. Whoever these people or creatures are, they thought the ore hauler was a greater threat due to its size than we were. That tells me they really have little idea about our vessels. We can use that to our advantage. Navigator, regain control of the ore hauler and let me know what her condition is. I will be down in sickbay.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Slone left the ship in his first officer’s hands and left the bridge to take the long walk to the center of the vessel, amidships. This was the safest place on the ship and was double armored. Here was the sickbay. The wounded did not need to worry about getting wounded a second time, since it was difficult for shot or missiles to penetrate that deeply into the ship. The marines had retrieved their comrade and were just arriving in the hangar bay. Engineering techs took possession of the piece of the dreadnought they brought for analysis. This did not cause the stir that the second group of marines caused when they arrived with the alien body. The dead marine was also taken into custody and went to the morgue to join his comrades who and sacrificed their lives for the ship.

  As Slone awaited the alien body in the isolation portion of the sickbay, he remembered the yacht they had been sent there to rescue. He went over to the ship’s com. “Captain to bridge.”

  “Stueber here, Captain. What can we do for you?”

  “Have Major Sardac take a shuttle and some marines and check out that yacht orbiting the first planet. Tell her to be careful, that could have been the bait for this trap.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Captain.”

  Before the alien body was brought aboard the Hayden, a containment unit had to be run out to the marines and the body put inside to prevent contamination once it left the sterility of space. The unit was then taken to a special hatch designed for such occasions and the container and the marines who had touched the body were taken in and decontaminated. The other marines entered a larger hatch where they were also decontaminated, as per standard procedure. Biological weapons had long been a staple in human wars and all military vessels followed a strict decontamination procedure for returning boarding parties. When the marines had been thoroughly decontaminated, Major Sardac picked ten of her best and they boarded a shuttle with combat gear and headed to the yacht orbiting the first planet.

  “Bridge to Captain Slone.”

  “Slone here.”

  “Captain, I have control of the ore hauler again.” The navigator reported.

  “Excellent. What’s her condition?”

  “She is none the worse for wear. There are several breaches of her cargo holds and she is shedding some ore, but she’ll fly normally and her sails are intact.”

  “Excellent. Program her for a return trip to Purgatory and send her on ahead. We will lay in a course to follow her. Calculate our relative speeds. I wan
t us to enter the Purgatory system about an hour behind the ore ship.”

  “Yes, sir. Calculating that now. I will start her on her way when the timing is right.”

  “Sparks. I want you to prep a communication capsule and send it to Purgatory. I want you to have it send a message with our call signs to Purgatory in Morse code.”

  “Morse Code? I’ll let the computer figure that one out.”

  “Yes, Morse Code. I am going to assume we are dealing with aliens and that they are unaware of our history. Have the message read only ‘We’re coming.’”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Slone was satisfied with his preparations thus far and, like a good commander, he was already mentally in the next battle. The bridge informed him that the escape pods from the enemy vessel had reached the restricted slipstream and had entered without deploying sails. This last was odd, since it suggested they could travel faster than light without sails. He would try to capture at least one of the destroyers for examination.

  The medical techs took the alien body into a sealed lab for biological risks and the chief medical officer donned a biological suit along with the two techs. Commander William DeFleur was new to the Hayden. He had been the assistant medical officer of the mining base on Purgatory, but wanted a billet on a starship. When the chief medical officer of the Hayden retired, he jumped at the chance to get into space. As he was about to enter the isolation chamber to perform humanity’s first autopsy on an alien, he was certain he was about to become part of history. After he and the techs had carefully checked that each suit was intact, they left the airlock and entered the isolation room. The techs carefully broke the seals on the transport container and opened the lid. Inside they saw the strangest creature ever seen by man. The torso was almost round and from it arose five appendages. Four of them were obviously extremities, though from the description given by the marines on how they moved, it would appear they could function as either arms or legs. They were equally spaced around the torso and the fifth appendage defied description. It was bulbous at the base where it came out of the torso and then became more slender, culminating in a whip-like structure longer than any of the other appendages. There was what appeared to be an opening of some kind in the bulbous part of the fifth appendage, but what this was, a mouth or an anus, could not be determined. In the center of the torso, there was a larger opening, also of undetermined function. The entire surface of the body was covered in hard, scale-like bumps. They almost did not feel alive and were as hard as rock.

  DeFleur spent the next several hours trying to penetrate the outer skin with little luck. Before using actual metal cutting tools to enter the body, he decided to get samples of the alien and do some non-invasive scans. The scans were easy to get, but the samples proved more difficult, and they were finally obtained by using a hammer and chisel.

  Slone was fascinated with the difficulties DeFleur was having getting into the alien. He had left several times to check on repairs and to visit the wounded in sickbay so they knew their captain cared. The ore hauler was sent on its way and it would have about a ten-hour head start. The Hayden would keep its speed through the system down to maintain that head start for the ore hauler. Time would be made up in the slipstreams. The message pod with the Morse code message had also been sent and there was no further activity in the system. Nothing made a ship’s captain feel more helpless than when his ship was down for repairs. No matter how many orders he can give, he cannot circumvent the laws of physics and time. It took as long as it took to get the ship underway. Upon returning to the isolation lab for the fourth time, he saw DeFleur outside and looking at the scans.

  “Well Bill, find anything interesting?”

  “Captain, just looking at that thing is interesting. I am beginning to learn some answers, but every answer leads to a huge number of questions. This is a career making examination.” The doctor fairly beamed with that last statement. “Have a look at this.”

  Slone moved over to a monitor on which there was a jumble of structures, none of which he could identify. He saw no bones or anything that looked like the many scans of humans he had seen. “So what am I looking at?”

  “You are looking at a silicon based life form with an exoskeleton and no identifiable internal organs.”

  “And in laymen’s terms that would be?”

  “All life as we know it, even the microbes we have found on other planets, is made up of hydrocarbon molecules. We are carbon-based organisms. This creature is based on silicon, the same substance that makes up rock. It has always been theorized that silicon could act as a base, since it shares many properties with carbon, but we have never found any life based on that molecule, until now. The reason this alien is as hard as a rock is that it is made of the basic building block of rock. The alien also has an exoskeleton, like an insect and no internal bones of any kind. I’m not sure our projectiles would have penetrated that exoskeleton even if we had hit it.”

  “If we didn’t kill it then what did?”

  “Loss of atmosphere. He’s not wearing a space suit. As near as I can tell, they are methane breathers. I suspect this because the oxygen in the room seems to be burning the body, even in death. A marine tech analyzed that gas coming out of their compartments as nitrogen and methane. There was no oxygen and they thought it was a boarding countermeasure. I think it was the atmosphere in that ship. My guess is if they have methane-breathing apparatus, not much in space will affect them. They could go into hard vacuum without a spacesuit.”

  “Good to know, Bill. I want you to find out what will penetrate that exoskeleton. We have two more of their ships to deal with. Good work and pass that on to your techs.”

  Slone left the sickbay and headed towards engineering. As he passed from deck to deck, he began to see the extent of the battle damage. Some of the crew was crawling over the exterior of the ship like insects, putting patches on the hull breaches. The interior area where the shots exploded could not be fixed on the fly and the ship would need a shipyard to repair them. Some of the crew would be sharing bunks. Since the ship took almost five percent casualties, there would be some available space. Priority was given to remounting the guns damaged in the fight and fixing the sails. Smaller internal repairs could be done during the long trips through systems and slipstreams. They had several days of travel ahead of them, since there was no direct route back to Purgatory. Slone found the Chief Engineer and the Crew chief huddled together near one of the bulkheads. They snapped to attention when they saw Slone approach. They exchanged salutes and Slone said, “At ease and carry on. What’s so interesting with this bulkhead?”

  “Do you see that slight bulge near the top? Just above the last cross beam.”

  “I think so. Very subtle.”

  “That is why most would miss it. That bulge extends to just under the top skin. If we are hit on either side of the bulkhead and that bulge cracks, the hull will lose integrity here and may implode. If that happens we could break in half.”

  “Can we fix it while underway?”

  “We can shore it up and hope for the best, but fixing needs a shipyard. We will have to wait till we’re back in Purgatory.”

  “And fight another battle before.” Slone did not like their chances. “What about the rest of the repairs?”

  Horst Stravinsky was a great ship’s engineer and he knew it. The bulkhead was not something he could fix on the fly, but he was always proud of how fast he could repair what was fixable. His father and grandfather had been ships engineers and his son was already following his example. Pride of work was what mattered and he always gave a hundred and ten percent. “The sails are repaired and we are just putting the finishing touches on the hull and the engine. We can get underway within the hour.”

  “Good work, Horst. Your reputation remains unblemished. Slone nodded to the crew chief and to Stravinsky, and then left the compartment for the bridge.

  Stravinsky watched the captain leave and then turned to the crew chief, Salima H
alac, and smiled. Both had been on the Hayden for many years. They had started by respecting each other; this soon became affection. Before they knew it, they had become lovers. Space command forbade relationships between officers and enlisted, but Purgatory was their home and space command rarely looked out this far. However, the relationship had cooled of late and they were both starting to move on. Salima was a child of deep space. Her ebony skin spoke of old earth Africa, but she spent her life on the outer rim of the wedge of galaxy explored by man. Only about ten percent of the galaxy was explored with earth at its center and the exploration radiating in all directions, but most towards the rim of the galaxy on the side facing the Andromeda galaxy. Of necessity, exploration followed the slipstreams. Salima was at the top of her game and knew how to keep her crew in line.