The Expanding Universe 4: Space Adventure, Alien Contact, & Military Science Fiction (Science Fiction Anthology)

by Craig Martelle

  Metal screams. We scream.

  “Babaji, other Shikari incoming. Come home. Babaji!”

  The Enemy in front of me opens a pincer and slams it into our torso, braying in a challenge.

  We answer it in kind, releasing a warbling cry of whining metal and the cavernous booms of combustion engines.

  We shove the creature back.

  “Babaji, stop. You’re desyncing. Stop.”

  Wrong. We’re not desyncing. His words make no sense to a machine. We’re merging. Becoming something more. Vishnu is more than a machine now, more than a man.

  The second Enemy arrives, slams into me. A knee joint explodes.

  We scream again, clawing, gripping, pushing both creatures in front of us with our one good arm and the tottering bulk of our chest. We dig deep, clawing at what I can of our operating system core. There are things here we can use. The chemical makeup of the fluids pouring out of me. The conduit lines that spark in their death throes. And, here, here—our nuclear heart, the great engine-furnace that powers our every move.

  Kali died deluded: a goddess of death, meant to bring that to our enemies. She brought it out on our subjects, on the ants, on our families.

  Vishnu would die concluded. Resolved. A protector. Sparing the ants. Keeping them from screaming, burning, teetering and tottering like a man had so long ago.

  We scream louder, pushing the Enemy back, hanging onto it like grim death. We need to get them out. We need to get them away. Our heart responds to old subsystems buried deep within me, throwing up a myriad of fail-safes in my way. Are you authorized to do this? OP-4 level clearance required. Are you sure? Runtime diagnostics required. Confirm damage threshold?

  A blazing pincer cuts through the night, burying itself in our side. It digs in. Metal mandibles sink into our shoulder. We are being pulled apart.

  “Babaji!”

  That’s what they call us. We’re their god. Their protector. My wife. My daughter. My crew. All of them.

  “Babaji!”

  Vishnu. That’s who that title belongs to. Not the man inside him. Am I still one?

  Are you sure you want to do this, asks our heart. This will result in critical damage.

  We don’t want to destroy our heart. But yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

  The ocean threatens to swallow us now. It creeps over my waist as the light before my eyes dims. It drags us away, machine and monsters locked in terrible combat, towards its dark depths.

  Are you sure you want to do this?

  Damn right we do. We are a god, and you will listen.

  Command accepted. Nuclear core critical. System will destruct in 3…2…1.

  And then the world explodes. Wiping out the monsters, wiping out the machine, wiping out the man. A new sun is born on the Indian Ocean.

  And finally, there is peace.

  Author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

  Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is an author, programmer, researcher and former journalist on the Big Data team of LIRNEasia, a think tank specializing in hard research. He's run news operations, designed games, and fallen off cliffs, but he's known in his native Sri Lanka for sparking political commentary under the Icaruswept moniker. His debut novel, Numbercaste, came out to critical acclaim, predicting a complex future built off social media trends in the world today. Follow his work on Amazon, and connect with @yudhanjaya on Twitter for more.

  Author R.R Virdi

  R.R. Virdi is a two-time Dragon Award-nominated author for best fantasy (paranormal). He is a former mechanic, custom PC builder, and odd-jobber. He now spends his days in Northern Virginia writing full time while getting into arguments with his dog over what company makes the best socks. You can follow his work on Amazon, his website www.rrvirdi.com, or on Twitter @rrvirdi.

  Duty

  by Bill Patterson

  The greatest problem with doing one’s duty sometimes it deciding exactly where one’s duty lies.

  Lieutenant James Benison leaned back in his command chair, surveying the crew of his small corvette. It wasn't his first command, but a runabout just doesn't count. Not when your corvette mounts enough weaponry to equal all the bombs released from both sides of World War II. Sometimes, James marveled that the Grand Fleet of Earth would allow someone of his age to command a vessel capable of such destruction, but the constant war losses had the Fleet really dipping into its reserves recently.

  "Lieutenant, we have a contact at three twenty-one, range ninety-two AU. Emission lines match known Slorg engine patterns."

  "Give me a plot, tactical." The monitor screen at the front of the control room showed a glowing red dot in a moving three-dimensional space.

  "Do you want it in the Tank, sir?" asked the navigator, hands poised over the controls.

  "Do it." The red spot blossomed in the holographic space occupied by various glowing dots representing known objects within one hundred astronomical units of their position in the outer Solar System. Earth was a small, blue dot near the bottom of the tank, while Lieutenant Benison was more worried about things within ten AUs of his position.

  "Show me the vector," he commanded. The dot grew a red line, the direction of the line as well as its length was a function of its heading and speed. James rotated the display of the Tank until he was satisfied. "Damn bugs are heading straight for us," he said.

  "Actually, sir, they're going to miss us by about three tenths of an AU," said the navigator.

  Lieutenant Benison directed a withering look his way. "A fifty million kilometer miss is spitting distance, Ensign," said James. "Battle Stations!"

  Horns hooted throughout the ship, and subtle changes in air pressure told of automatic hatches locking shut.

  He turned to the back wall, where his spacesuit, helmet, and gloves hung. "Full gear, Sparks. Announce it."

  Sparks, the communications tech, groaned inwardly. Full gear meant full spacesuits. "Aye-aye, sir." Turning to his gear, he announced, "Attention. Full spacesuits, helmets, and gloves. Unknown hostile inbound on near collision course. Full gear."

  "No need to tell them why, Sparks," said Lieutenant Benison. "They should jump into suits on command."

  "Just trying to keep the men informed," said Sparks.

  "I know. Still, let's do it my way, shall we?" Benison left his helmet visor up. "Visors up until they are within five AUs. Range?"

  "We have forty minutes, assuming they don't maneuver, sir," said the navigator.

  "They always maneuver. Assume they'll be in range in twenty. Now, how to get them before they get us…"

  He snapped his fingers. "Navigator, here's what I want you to do…"

  ***

  The Slorg captain was puzzled, absently grooming his vestigial wings with his middle legs. "Their captain is an idiot." His tactical computer showed Benison's corvette trying to get away from the much larger Slorg ship, but travelling in an odd corkscrew sort of pattern. "Why isn't he just straight racing away? Why the spin?"

  "He might have blown a jet," offered the first officer. "The spiral is remarkably constant. It's not like it's an evasive pattern."

  "I don't really care," said the captain. "I want that ship taken in one piece. Our ladies need live hosts for their eggs, and humans are the best there are."

  "Aye-aye, sir," said the first officer. "We could try to blast their engines, or hole their fuel tanks. Do you have a preference, sir?"

  "Hit their tanks as we pass them. And make sure you put the suppressors on them! Don't forget the lesson of the Host Mesher."

  The first officer shuddered. "That's one of ours that stopped a human ship, and found it full of corpses."

  "Correct, First," said the Captain. "No shots fired, either. But he left the humans conscious, and they suicided rather than host our eggs. So their crew were forced to take their places."

  The first officer blanched. "Locking in suppressors for the pass. Navigator! Make sure we can get back to them quickly, before they wake up from the blast."

  "Aye-aye," said the
navigator, rubbing his abdominal shell absently as he punched information into his computer. The Captain watched his crew work the problem as he pondered the actions of Lieutenant Benison. On the screen, the corvette continued its spiral, and the Captain thought once more about the fate of the Host Mesher's crew.

  Hosting eggs meant being tied down, alive, conscious, but paralyzed, while six Slorg eggs hatched inside your third segment and began feeding on your digestive system. Adult Slorg dimly remembered the fight to the death against their siblings to become the one Slorg larva to emerge from the newly emptied host and spin their maturation cocoon.

  Once the Slorg began colonizing space, they encountered other species that could fulfill the role of host. Nowadays, only the worst crimes in the Slorg penal code carried the sentence of 'hosting'. Other species filled the role.

  Humans, it turned out, were perfect hosts for Slorg eggs. After the female Slorg was led into a human's cage, the Slorg stung her victim until it was completely paralyzed, then laid six eggs in the abdomen. The victim would remain alive and alert while the Slorg eggs hatched and the hungry larvae devoured him from the inside out. Along the way, the six larvae would try to kill its siblings so that it could have more of the victim as a food supply. In the end, it was always one Slorg larva who would emerge from the emptied host, victorious.

  As perfect as they were, humans were quite difficult to catch. The Captain looked up.

  "Ready?" he asked his crew.

  "Completely. We have their ship's movements locked in. The attack run will take approximately thirty seconds. The computer figures they will be unable to respond for approximately twenty of those seconds, as we will be in radar shadow relative to them. The suppressors come on at the ten second mark, lasers at zero. If all works out, they will be unconscious for almost thirty minutes, and it will only take ten for us to return and open them up."

  The Captain looked at his crew, one at a time. Each nodded, eager to get their hands on some fresh hosts for their mates. He stood up, rubbed his forearms over his eyes to clear them, and slashed the left one downward. "Execute!"

  ***

  The annunciator panel lit up like a Christmas tree, alarms howling from a number of sensors unknown to the Slorg. The crew silenced the alarms. The Slorg were making their move.

  "About time," grumped Lieutenant Benison. "I thought they had given up on us. Brace yourself, folks, this is going to be rough."

  The Slorg ship bored on its attack run, tens of kilometers per second relative to the madly cavorting corvette. The Slorg were confident in their ship, its systems, and their tactics. They just had no experience with an enemy that thought differently.

  The first indication of trouble was when a finger of flame reached out from the front wall of the command deck and touched the navigator on the shoulder. An explosion of flesh and hemolymph sprayed out of an enormous exit wound in the other shoulder. The commander stared for a moment, which saved him from the ultraviolet flash of several more flame fingers penetrating the front wall. A high-pitched whistling filled the deck as the command deck atmosphere raced for the holes to space.

  The commander slapped down the visor of his helmet, furiously punching command links to get damage reports. A shuddering along the ship spoke of more damage, but from what?

  "Ice, sir," said his engineer. "They must have dumped water into their exhaust. "

  "That pinwheeling!"

  The engineer's reply sounded strained. "Yeah. Filled space with debris, and we're plowing through it. Damn, just lost the starboard laser pod."

  "Can we still fire?"

  "At the moment."

  "Blast them!"

  The engineer tried his best. He only had about seven seconds before the weakened forward hull blew out, carrying everyone out into space, but his one blast did get through."

  The Captain watched mournfully as he flew past the Earth ship in his spacesuit. "All those hosts," he murmured, before a ball of ice, no larger than a pencil eraser, impacted near the top of his air tanks, blowing their valves apart.

  ***

  There was no cheering aboard the corvette. The Slorg engineer aimed his single chance well, targeting the life support system and destroying the air renewal machinery, as well as the five crew who knew all there was to know about it.

  "You're kidding me. There's nobody else aboard who knows how to run the air supply?"

  The single remaining engineer rating held himself on the deck by pulling down on a nearby handle. "Yes, sir. I took the propulsion track during my Advanced Training. There were three environmental techs, one per shift, and the other two who were killed were picking it up as a kind of hobby."

  "How bad have we been hurt?"

  "Sir, we lost about ten percent of our air when we got holed. Our tanks hold two complete changes of oxygen for the whole ship. Other than that, I don't know much at all."

  "How long do we have?"

  "I have no idea, sir. I don't even know the current oxygen consumption rate."

  Lieutenant Benison stared at the rating.

  "Hey, sir, don't look at me like that. I don't know everything. Hell, sir, I'm only six months out of propulsion school as it is." The man's feet had left the floor and he was starting to curl into the spaceman's crouch, a sure sign of defensiveness.

  "All right, that's enough. Your name?"

  "James Watt McDougal. Yes, I know, a damned Scot engineer."

  "I said no such thing, McDougal. I am breveting you to Cornet, which is the lowest commissioned rank possible. I do this because I need an engineer who knows what he is doing before I send others to help you. In the meantime, I want you to take readings of the oxygen level at the main airco intake manifold. I've got to know what our consumption rate is."

  "Do I crack the tanks when we drop too low?"

  "Not until you report to me and I give you the word. I suspect the CO2 level is going to get us first."

  Cornet McDougal scratched his head. "Sir? Not sure I know what you're talking about."

  "Ancient history. Back in the first days of spaceflight, a ship had an accident and almost didn't make it home. One finding was the CO2 build up was more of a danger than the falling oxygen level in the air. That might have to happen to us. So, you monitor this stuff," he said, fanning his hand in front of his face, "And I'll go look up some things. We might make it yet. How are the engines?"

  "No problem with them. I've been optimizing them so we can get home before we all turn blue."

  "Keep it up. Dismissed."

  ***

  Lieutenant Benison's command was in serious trouble. Far from the nearest base, or even other ships, the destruction of the life support system was the only reason he turned for home.

  Blasting away on thrusters, the ship came ever closer to the nearest tramline--those mysterious linkages of exotic matter that allowed ships to sidestep Einstein and flash across the light-years in an instant.

  Even after this tramline, he had two more to traverse, with at least a month in between each one, before he would be close to repair facilities. There was no way to make it on just the air in the ship.

  A short period of cheering broke out when the navigator detected a ship near the tramline entrance and identified as an Earth dreadnought. The ships exchanged recognition signals and the corvette hove to near the huge bulk of the Fearless. Lieutenant Benison received a polite but firm request to meet with the Captain of the dreadnought.

  He clapped his executive officer on the shoulder. "I'll get them to send down some techs as soon as I can. Do try to keep the lights on, will you?"

  "Bring me back an apple," the XO replied, as Benison waved from inside the airlock.

  ***

  An older Lieutenant came aboard three hours later, with a swarm of engineering techs. He hunted up the executive officer.

  "I understand you asked for this," he said, lobbing an apple at the surprised man. "I am Senior Lieutenant Hodges, your new commander. Lieutenant Benison will be remaining with
the Fearless. Arrange to ship his effects to the Fearless within the hour. In the meantime, give me the logs of your last mission. I want to see how Benison could screw up so badly that they took his ship away from him."

  ***

  Ten years later, Commander Benison could see clearly his errors. The final report of inquiry, which they were gracious enough to send him, summed up the knowledge of the Powers That Be.

  "Lieutenant Benison departed from Fleet doctrine to perform an unorthodox maneuver in the face of the enemy. Although that maneuver did result in the substantial destruction of the enemy vessel, he placed his command in extreme danger, and indeed caused the death of five crewmen. Without the fortuitous appearance of the Fearless near a tramline entrance, it is highly likely that vessel damage would eventually have doomed all personnel before they would have reached safety. Such daredevil tactics have no place in Fleet Operations.

  "It is recommended that Lieutenant Benison be removed from the list of command officers, and reassigned to duties that do not involve contact with the enemy."

  Fleet was too strapped for personnel to let anyone leave the service. Unless they were hardened felons, and even those could be used somewhere.

  The knowledge that he remained of some value was cold comfort to James Benison, particularly when some of his old shipmates popped up in Fleet news.

  "Moron," he muttered, as he read of the death of his former executive officer. The ship he was commanding somehow managed to get caught in a flanking maneuver near Epsilon Eridani. Survivors said the sensors were overwhelmed by a close approach to the star, and did not detect the Slorg refueling at one of the outer gas giants of the system.

  "That's because the solar wind on Eppy is about thirty times that of the Sun. Of course the sensors were overwhelmed. Any fool knows that. But no, I lost five men, and thus I cannot be trusted! My XO, on the other hand, loses most of his ship and a hundred crew, and it was only through pure luck another Earth force was around to pick up the lifeboats before the Slorg made them into incubators."