The Expendable Few: A Spinward Fringe Novel

by Randolph Lalonde

  The rest of my team know I screwed up an opportunity. Not even Mary looks at me in the awkward minutes that follow as we wait idly. Then, just as Remmy is opening his mouth, about to offer some silence shattering quip, Omira returns. “You have his attention,” she says. “Even after all the time I’ve spent with him, he still manages to surprise.”

  “That’s good for us, right?” Remmy asks.

  “Yes,” Omira replies. “He’ll show you how to kill frameworks one on one, from there your government can develop whatever mass weaponry it wishes to overcompensate with. First you have to do something for us, something very important.”

  “And dangerous,” Mary adds. “Just guessing.”

  “Your companion is right,” Omira confirms, sitting down across from us. “There is a ship called the Fallen Star, it was hidden in the Silvermane Belt, this solar system’s outer asteroid belt. Doctor Marcelles wants you to download the contents of the lab computer system and collect some samples that should still be in suspended animation.”

  “That’s what you were after when you came here,” Remmy says. “It’s what led you to this solar system in the first place, isn’t it?”

  It was like he picked the question right out of my head, only I wouldn’t have asked it. Omira’s tense smile tells me it’s too soon for details, and I make sure we don’t push. “Why can’t he go himself?” I ask. That’s the important question.

  “Something aboard the Fallen Star broke containment. A being that was in storage for another scientist’s work. The Fallen Star was a Freeground research vessel, one that was never meant to be this close to any civilized area,” Omira replied. “Once he provides your people with the information they’ll need to kill frameworks he knows they’ll start asking about what was left on that ship next.”

  “So he wants to be prepared,” I reply. “What was he researching there?”

  “You haven’t earned the right to that information yet, sorry.”

  “When do we leave?” I ask, watching Mary’s reaction in my peripheral. I can tell at a glance that she agrees it’s the right move. I’m convinced there’s no other way to get what we need out of Marcelles, so it’s the only way. I promise myself that I’ll gather as much intelligence about the Fallen Star as possible before we make hard seal on her airlock. There’s a nagging, bad feeling about the whole thing that just won’t go away.

  Chapter 14 - Part 1 - Approaching The Fallen Star

  Freeground’s training focuses on what happens between the stars. In the dark expanse between distant points of light, where anyone could disappear forever in the endless cold vacuum. Boarding missions are the most risky venture in ship to ship combat. I have no shame in admitting that boarding the Fallen Star makes me more nervous than I’ve been on a boarding mission since I was a trainee. If you’re in the infantry, more general purpose marines, or any part of Fleet, you’ve had at least a hundred hours of simulation time, and many hours of practical time at boarding and disembarking.

  As Isabel flies our aged shuttle through the slowly moving outer solar system asteroid belt, none of that training matters. We pass through a clutch of brown and black stone and the more active part of the inner asteroid belt comes into view. A dark shroud of fine, whirling dust surrounds a ring of highly magnetic stone. If it weren’t for the scant light from the distant sun, we’d barely see it at all.

  The situation is completely different on the scanner readout screens. The fine dust caught in the magnetic ring show up as bright blue and green arcs, clearly illustrating the safe course, and perfectly obscuring anything in the whirling ring’s midst. “Are you sure you accounted for drift and collisions?” I ask Omira.

  “If you enter where I specified you’ll come in right behind the Fallen Star,” Omira replies. “The magnetic fields here obscures her perfectly.”

  “Can we get through without being pulled off course?” I ask Isabel.

  She takes a moment to verify her position and trajectory before answering. “I’m going to use a part of the field ahead to pull us in. We should get to a magnetically stable pocket here,” she pointed at one of the displays, indicating a place behind a large dark spot. “A magnetic planetoid. I bet the Fallen Star is shadowing behind.”

  “If we’re lucky,” Remmy says. “With all that magnetic activity, there’s no telling what condition she’ll be in.”

  “She will be largely the way Doctor Marcelles and I left it,” reassured Omira.

  She wears her confidence like armour. It is almost difficult to speak to Omira, since we entered the belt she seems smug.

  The sound of fine particles grating against the hull makes any further discussion difficult. For a moment the shuttle begins to turn sideways. I glance behind me into the main hold and catch Mary’s eye. She’s beyond nervous. Her gloved hands grip the hand-holds above her seat tightly, and her old fashioned pull-down helmet faceplate is fastened tight.

  The dim safety lights and instrument panels are the only illumination as we move deeper into the magnetic ring. I watch as two types of scanners go offline, protecting themselves from being overloaded by the energy surrounding us. I monitor the basic navigational, thermal and field sensors unblinking. We pass into the calm centre of the ring and the rasping of sand against the hull quiets to almost nothing.

  Scanning for the Fallen Star’s energy readings or for materials that could match her hull are impossible, so I start looking for man-made shapes. Omira is over my shoulder, looking on. At long last she highlights something. “Follow this, it’ll lead you to the Fallen Star.”

  I forward the information to Isabel, shaking my head all the while. “I see a charged rock formation, but nothing that looks like a ship.”

  “Doctor Marcelles foresaw that,” Omira says. “It was part of his plan. Once we’re closer and you can get a better image you’ll see the Fallen Star.”

  We follow the magnetic fields like a current. Isabel makes a fine art of carefully applying thrusters and keeping us drifting in the right direction. As we drift towards the large asteroid ahead I look closer at the image of its tail. Long minutes of searching finally lead me to a artificially square angle, at the rear of the ship, I assume. “It’s become part of the asteroid,” I explain as I zoom in and try to find a docking port.

  “The asteroid is a formation of particles from the belt,” Omira explains. “They covered the Fallen Star, hiding it perfectly right in the middle of magnetic fields and dust.”

  “Is it intact?” Mary asks.

  I scan for air pockets inside the ship and come up with a floor plan of the three hundred metre long vessel. “A bit of minor hull damage but no breaches. There are two docking ports we can access at the rear.” My apprehension and suspicion are starting to become excitement, but I still can’t help but let my more prudent instincts lead me. “Isabel, hold here.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she replies, firing forward thrusters to slow the shuttle’s approach.

  I turn in my seat to face Omira. “Now you’re going to tell us what to expect when we board, and what we’re going after specifically.” My question prompts Mary to release her passenger restraints. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this part of our trip could become an interrogation.

  “You are after the secret of defeating framework soldiers on the battlefield,” Omira replied. “You’re trading your services for that information. That’s all you need to know.”

  “We’re not boarding unless you tell me how this ship ended up here, it’s not like Marcelles could pilot it himself, or as if an entire crew would abandon a ship this size because he left. So, what are we after, and why is this ship abandoned?” I ask. The truth behind my threat is that I’m willing to take Omira to the Sunspire instead of Doctor Marcelles. She may not be our target, but she might be good enough for Intelligence for the time being.

  “The answers to your questions will involve you in a much larger situation than you’re interested in. Suffice it to say that the administrators aboard didn’t wa
nt to see their research destroyed, but they wanted the ship to be hidden and protected just in case they could never make it back,” Omira says.

  That just piques my interest, and I’m about to pursue the issue when Remmy pipes in. “So you’re saying that something happened that made all those scientists and officers decide to leave at the same time?” he asks dubiously. “Come on, start making sense, lady.”

  “I can’t tell you everything, there just isn’t time,” Omira tells us, looking defensive for the first time since we met her.

  “Why was the ship abandoned?” I ask. Mary doesn’t look impressed by any part of the situation.

  “For you to understand that, I have to go back into the Fallen Star’s history. It was built by Lorander, during their first alliance with Freeground at the turn of the last century,” she started to explain.

  “So about ninety years ago,” Remmy says. “You’re not kidding when you say history. I didn’t even know Lorander had an alliance with Freeground back then.”

  “You aren’t meant to,” Omira replies. “The Lorander corporation allies itself with whoever will serve its long term interests, or fits their long standing philosophy. Freeground entered into a partnership with Lorander during that alliance, a scientific one, and they began to research a species that evolved quite differently than humans did on Earth. By the time Doctor Marcelles joined the scientists aboard the Fallen Star, she had been in service for over sixty years, and there were fourteen different races aboard. The majority of the crew consisted of issyrians.”

  “That’s the race Lorander and Freeground wanted to research?” Remmy asks.

  “One of them, but they were more interested in a distant evolutionary relative of theirs - the edxians. Doctor Marcelles’ type of research into high speed living tissue regeneration was more than welcome, it helped them understand the few creatures they’d managed to capture on some of their brood islands. Land masses where edxians deposit their young during early adolescence into adulthood, so they can develop physically, socially and mentally undisturbed.”

  “I’ve never heard of edxians,” Isabel says.

  “They’re from way out of the sector,” Remmy replies. “Intelligence has almost nothing on them, just that they like to capture ships that wander into their space and the crews go missing. There are a few horror movies that show ‘em eating humans, but they’re not that great. There was this one part in Meat Adrift where an edxian uses this big sharpened spoon to-”

  “We’re getting off point,” Mary interrupts. “Everyone knows, if you hear clicking and hissing on comms planet-side that your translator can’t make out, it’s time to call for a pickup. That’s what they tell us in the marines.”

  “Right,” Isabel says with a nod.

  “Did they get far into their research?” I ask, trying to press things on.

  “Yes. While Doctor Marcelles was aboard they made great strides. His work forced him to seek out different colleagues after a few years. He was captured along with several other researchers while on a collection expedition on Myo. By then Lorander had been completely uninvolved for decades, and Freeground did not have the military might or ambition to mount a rescue mission against a superior force. It took years for the Doctor to escape, and that is when he was recovered by the First Light and the Triton.”

  “Then he was sold to Vindyne,” I added. Everyone in the shuttle knew he was held captive again, so he could continue work on the Framework project. “I know he managed to escape after a few years, but no one knows exactly what happened after that.”

  “He was able to secretly signal the Fallen Star from the Vindyne research facility, and they were instrumental in his escape,” Omira explains. “That is where we met, and I’ve been assisting him since. Things had changed aboard the Fallen Star since he was a part of the crew. The research into the edxians had intensified. Researchers who hadn’t been caught for years had become brave, almost brazen in their first hand research. It wasn’t long before the edxians caught the Fallen Star leaving one of their brood territories and marked by an entire tribe. They see outside contact with their broods as the worst kind of insult. The Fallen Star war forced to hide. The issyrian crew led the scientists here, where they hid the ship and all their work. They suspended most of their research and put their specimens into hibernation before making landfall on the planet.”

  “Is there anyone left aboard? A custodial crew?” Mary asks.

  “There was,” Omira replies.

  “Oh, here we go,” Remmy says, throwing up his hands. “Let me guess: you haven’t heard from them in a while.”

  “Your snarky friend is right,” Omira confirmed. “We haven’t heard from them in over a year.”

  “All right, what are we after, and how much of that ship do we have to get through to pick it up?” I ask, looking through the porthole into the near complete darkness outside.

  “From the rear airlocks it’s only one deck up and nineteen frames forward. We’ll be going to the rear cold vault.”

  “Cold vault,” Remmy says. “Meaning we’re going after something in stasis?”

  “There are subjects in stasis there, but we won’t be retrieving them. We’re going after a crystalline data storage unit, very small, very easy to move. It was stored there as a backup by one of Doctor Marcelles’ colleagues and now it’s critical to his work going forward.”

  “You’re coming with us,” I tell Omira.

  “I was planning on it.”

  Part 2 - Boarding The Fallen Star

  Omira fills me in on other details about the Falling Star as we’re making sure the shuttle has a hard seal with the docking system. It’s a mess. Fine particulates have found their way into everything on the outside of the ship, even the clearest of the docking ports.

  She tells me things I’m glad to hear. She has all the access codes, that the researcher who owned the data we’re collecting has been dead for two years and they wanted Marcelles to have their work, and that Omira knows exactly where to find it. I don’t know if I believe all the good news.

  Omira also tells me several things I don’t want to hear. The fastest way to the cold vault is through a different stasis lockup. The ship’s anti-intruder systems were disabled over twenty years ago because it used to incorrectly identify specimens as attackers. She also tells me that hand scanners won’t work reliably. I choose to believe all the bad news and expect that she’s holding several things back.

  Remmy is busy doing an echo scan of everything past the pockmarked outer airlock door and at a glance I can see that he’s actually getting what we need - an updated schematic of the nearest fifteen metres of the ship. He flashes me an uneasy smile. “Sometimes the oldest tech does just fine when the new stuff just can’t get it.”

  “Good work,” I tell him.

  Omira looks over her shoulder at me as she manages to finish uncovering the manual locking switch for the door. The black and brown dust that was covering it grinds under foot more like sand. “We’ll be through in a minute. The key sequence is very simple.”

  “We’re taking this at full speed, right Clark?” asks Mary.

  I think for a minute. There are a few ways to approach this kind of situation. One is to take it slow, try to understand your surroundings and make note of every little thing so you can operate using as much information as possible. The other extreme is to rush the problem, only paying attention to what you absolutely have to, with the goal of getting in and out as quickly as you can. I already don’t like what I’ve heard about this ship, and the objective is simple. “Any motion on echo, Remmy?”

  “Nothing,” he replies. “May as well be a mausoleum.”

  “We’re taking this at full speed then,” I tell Mary. “Isabel, you’re staying here. Keep the ship sealed until we’re back.”

  She looks over her shoulder at me. “I’m going to have to, the airlock coupler is telling me that the section you’re breaching is set up as a issyrian fluidic environment.”
<
br />   “What?” Remmy asks.

  “You’re going for a swim,” Isabel tells Remmy with a grin. “What did you think those flow jets on the back of your suits were for?”

  Remmy looks at the arm length, low profile rectangular boxes on the back of Omira’s suit then at me. “You sure I’m not needed more here, boss? I mean, how complicated could their computers be, really?”

  “Secure your helmet so we can start our suit check and get going,” I tell him.

  Remmy got the ship’s lighting and basic environment systems working within minutes of us boarding. I’m still surprised anything works. The lights running in lines down the middle of the floor and ceiling barely pierce the murky soup we propel ourselves through. The hum of the mag-jets on my back remind me that this isn’t just water, it’s a thicker, nutrient rich compound the issyrians use in most sections of their own ships. I don’t know anyone who has ever been aboard and issyrian vessel, or has gone for a swim in a place like this.

  The stuff doesn’t touch me, thanks to the environment suits Omira set us up with. Judging from the brown and green streaks running through the stuff, it looks like something went bad while the ship was in hiding. “What would an infection from this stuff do to us if we caught one?” I ask.

  “You could end up with an easily treated skin disease, or develop an aggressive phage. Just don’t get it in your eyes, that’s where the worst infections start,” replies Omira.

  “Environment systems are purifying the flooded areas,” Remmy replies. “Looks like this stuff will be clean in about twenty minutes. Pretty good system.”

  “Issyrian environmental systems are almost as good as Freeground’s,” Omira says as she takes a corner.

  With the jets on it’s more like flying than swimming, the suit keeps most of the pressure of the liquid running over it off of us. I can still hear the viscous stuff moving across my helmet though. We move too quickly for comfort. Boarding operations happen slowly because you’re supposed to clear rooms as you come across them, follow a schematic, make sure you don’t leave systems or closed doors behind to bite you in the ass. We move like we’re raiders following Omira like she’s about to lead us to a treasure hold.