The Corrupted Star

by Martin HC

  There was no reply, the girl didn't seem to be angry and the man turned back to Damon, who in turn looked back to Tiralyn, and could have sworn that something changed in her eyes and face. A flicker of a smile played across her lips, almost as if she was toying with the man, although it disappeared again as fast as it had shown itself.

  Damon could feel some kind of odd relationship existing between them, there was no badness in the back and forth, it was just a simple argument with the outcome being in the girl's favour.

  It also threw Damon off guard for a second, he was starting to question what was going on between the two.

  “So do you have a captain on this ship? Or someone in charge I can talk to?”

  “Yeah that's me,” the man replied. “Well, sometimes it's her,” he said pointing to the girl. “But it's mostly me... kind off.”

  “So the Captain may be you... but may also be her?” he questioned again, hoping to clarify the man's answerless answer.

  “Depends at the time on who's around.”

  Figuring he was getting no better answer, Damon pressed on. “And your name is?”

  “Oh yeah, it's Haydn,” he said, stepping forward and offering the man his hand, which Damon did not shake. “You're making this handshake really awkward.”

  Damon remained motionless and only stared at him in response, leaving him to pull his hand away and step back again, “OK, cold and awkward it is then,” he muttered.

  “Who is the other she that you mentioned?”

  Haydn seemed to concentrate for a second before answering much more slowly this time.

  “She's, not here right now, well she kind of is, but isn't.”

  This answer done nothing to help Damon figure out what was going on, he was really starting to question the mental faculties of Haydn and Tiralyn, so tried to direct his next question back onto the subject of his ship and crew.

  “Right, so Jill is fine and on the Ophelia with Serena and Brenn, who is sleeping off a hangover, that leaves Arlan and the kid?” he questioned.

  “The kid, so you did know you had an eleven year old child crawling around your ship's plasma reactor?”

  “Yes, she helps out Arlan in engineering,” Damon replied carefully.

  “Right, well I just wasn't sure if you knew or not so I thought I'd ask, I mean it's not really where you'd expect to find a child.”

  Damon couldn't tell if this was a statement of fact or an accusation of some kind, so he simply didn't reply, and instead looked to Tiralyn.

  “The child and Arlan had sustained greater injuries than yourself and are currently stable, but undergoing surgery. Arlan will be awake and back on his feet in a few hours, but the child will need much longer,” she told him.

  “How bad were their injuries? What happened?” Damon asked.

  “After the missiles detonated, your ship sustained an incredible amount of damage, she appears to be armoured past the normal which kept you all alive initially, but the proximity of the detonating warheads caused a delayed breach in your core, filling half your vessel with lethal amounts of radiation,” she paused here, allowing him a few seconds before continuing. “Although we picked up the breach fast enough to evacuate before you were killed, we couldn't contain the resulting explosion as the core tore itself apart, destroying your engineering department, secondary control, secondary power control and the star drive.”

  That last part was like a hammer blow, up until then it hadn't occurred to Damon at all that his ship the Ophelia, his home, could fall like that, it had been his castle throughout his entire life. Externally, they could have repaired the sensors and turrets as they were nothing, then limped it back to a shipyard, but with so much damage sustained internally there was nothing to be done, it would have been like having your lungs and heart both pulled out at the same time.

  He sat in sickened silence for a few long seconds before realising the other two in the room were both still there, and looking at him.

  “You alright friend?” Haydn asked him slowly, “you're looking a little sick.”

  “The Ophelia is dead then?” he questioned, as another thought struck his head, “if secondary power was destroyed then Serena would not have survived, she needs the core computers for her main processing, you told me she was with Jill, did you send Jill and Brenn back to a dead ship?” he was getting angry and suspicious, things weren't adding up. “How could you have evacuated us before the core breached? A breach would have destroyed the Ophelia completely, not just the engineering,” Damon stated as he stood and faced them.

  “The Ophelia is not dead,” Tiralyn told him. “As I said before we managed to contain the core explosion and so the rest of your vessel was saved.”

  “Saved?” he asked disbelievingly. “Even if you have done what you said, it would be nothing more than a powerless floating cargo container now.”

  “OK, I think we need to calm and slow things down here friend, if you want to see you're ship you can, we're not lying to you,” Haydn told Damon cautiously. “We projected shielding around the core to contain the blast while getting you out, Tiralyn is supplementing your systems with power to keep Serena alive, we know her memory is tied into the Ophelia's secondary power, we're also as we speak repairing your ship and building a new core for it.”

  This stopped Damon completely, he didn't know what to think. If this was a trick then he couldn't see the end game.

  “I want to see Arlan and the kid,” Damon demanded. “You said they're still here, I want to see them.”

  “You can see them if you like, you can't go in the rooms just yet but we can show you a window into each,” Tiralyn answered him.

  “Show me.”

  “Very well, if you look to this wall.”

  And Damon did, the entire wall disappeared completely, revealing an image so clear he wasn't sure if it was an image at all, or if the wall simply ceased to be, allowing them to see into the next room. Another revelation struck him, there was no door to the room he was in, just the four walls, or three now.

  He filed this observation away for later, but for now he looked into the next room. It was darkened, and in the middle was a bed much like his own but with more going on. In the bed lay Arlan, his right arm below the elbow was missing along with most of his right leg.

  Above him suspended in the air was what Damon guessed a holo display, showing the nervous system and skeletal structure of the engineer. Damon turned to Haydn

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was severely injured, the child was in a worse condition and I will recommend that you wait till we've finished regrowing and repairing their bodies before looking further, the process is not comforting,” Tiralyn replied.

  “It's really not something you want to see friend, it'll mess with your dreams, I promise,” Haydn told him. “Don't worry though, when they wake up they'll look as good as new, new arms, legs, the whole works I promise,” not giving Damon a chance to answer he pushed on. “Besides you'll want to be getting over to your ship to check on the repairs, and find something to wear I reckon.”

  Damon thought for a few seconds, if Arlan and the kid were really as bad as this, waiting here for them would be pointless, he wanted to get back home and check up on Serena and Jill, he wanted someone he could trust beside him again.

  “How do I know Arlan and the kid will be safe if I leave?” Damon threw out the question.

  “They're no more safer with you being here than they are without you, if we had bad intentions, none of you would have woken up,” the answer Haydn gave was not what Damon wanted to hear and made him visibly flinch, but the man was right.

  “OK, we can go take a look at my ship, I want to see Jill.”

  Damon watched as behind Tiralyn, a space on the wall seemed flawlessly to form a closed door. She stepped aside as the door opened into a corridor just as plain as the room.

  “Please,” she said, “this way.”

  Damon stepped through the open doorway, but
not into the corridor he could see.

  The Search Begins

  Colonel Brice watched on with pride as they approached the seventh fleet's flagship, she looked a beautiful crimson red with the light from the local red dwarf beating down on her long hull, the name 'Maelstrom' visible along the prow. The thirty six hundred metre long battleship was built to take punishment, and despite having most of her offensive capability replaced with a more enhanced command and defensive suite, she still retained her brutal quad plasma lance.

  After the shuttle reached within three hundred metres of the Maelstrom's airlock, the flagship's automated guidance systems encouraged the pilot to rescind control of the landing. She rejected this option, opting to control the ship herself instead of allowing the computers to manoeuvre them neatly to their destination.

  The shuttle flew past a cavernous landing deck and into a transit tube. The ship's massive scale was only reinforced by how long it took to reach the flag deck landing area, which was much smaller than the general transit deck.

  Despite the pilot rejecting the automated guidance request, the touchdown was flawless.

  “Colonel Brice, welcome aboard the Maelstrom, flagship command vessel of the seventh fleet's Starfye battlegroups,” Fleet Admiral Y'Riell greeted him as he left his shuttle.

  “Thank you Fleet Admiral, she is a truly beautiful ship, and I would also like to thank you for being on deck to greet me personally,” his tone was polite but professional.

  “Well when I received orders telling that my entire fleet was to be pulled from patrol and commandeered by intelligence, I just couldn't wait to see the face behind the name Brice,” there was no hint of politeness in either her tone or face. “Would you please follow me to my office,” this was not a question, evident by how she turned and walked off.

  “I trust there were no issues on your journey to reach us?” she asked while leading him, he noticed this time it was a question.

  “The journey took some time but overall nothing entertaining happened, I was surprised however to see your shuttle pilot bypass her automated landing systems. You must train your pilots well as the landing was very well executed,” he knew he'd nailed it, her lips crept at the edges and her eyes lit up as she answered.

  “Yes we train our pilots to work without networking their craft, in my opinion the networking systems in any military vessel should be torn out, with exception to our ECM cruisers of course,” she answered.

  He didn't disagree, a compromised network on a military ship would kill the crew faster than any missile or plasma weapon, so by design very little on a military ship was networked, this was to prevent sabotage and to contain any compromised systems from spreading their viruses.

  During the early stages of the great Desian expansion, the information required to hack the empire's warships had been obtained and used to great effect, killing the crews of hundreds of ships without a fight. The computer systems were infected via a local fleetwide comms network, from there access was gained to the environmental controls, namely gravity control.

  Entire crews were crushed to death under their own body weight, leaving the fully functional warships intact to be commandeered by the enemy.

  Many had learned this the hard way, not just the Desians, and the story was used today as a teaching example in military schooling.

  “I trust the good Admiral Ortza has explained to you the necessity for this mission despite its cost,” the colonel said to the fleet admiral as they walked through her office door.

  “Yes Colonel, but the information given was vague at best and by recording, I was informed that you would assist in controlling objective identification and guidance while I would remain in full military command. There has been no in-depth briefing in the matter, and I was rather hoping you would fill the blanks.”

  “Certainly, I would like to brief you and your battlegroup commanders on the situation, I understand that fleet intelligence is infamous for withholding information, however in this case, I do not believe this will help us to achieve our current mission objectives.”

  His honesty made her suspicious, to remove an entire fleet from patrol to go on a hunt with fleet intelligence was not unheard off, however when intelligence officers were honest, bad things tended to follow.

  “Thank you for your honesty Colonel, when would you like to set up the meeting for?”

  “I can brief you on route to the system's edge before we leave.”

  “Very well Colonel, we will require some time to prepare the fleet for our departure, as you have not rested since boarding or even seen your quarters, please feel free in the meantime to find some time to relax and prepare your brief.”

  “Thank you, I think I will do that.”

  The Fleet Admiral to her credit had the fleet underway much sooner than Brice expected, by the time he got the notification of the fleets departure he'd eaten and washed, but there was no rest.

  The briefing room was impressive, each seated individual boasted their own smaller holo display which could be manipulated by the operator to view any of the material presented, as opposed to everyone having to view what was put in front of them on a larger more centralised display, although it did have one of those too for flexibility. The seating could be prearranged in any manner to suit the needs of the occasion, and in this instance it was arranged in a large semi circle, with all seats facing in to a point a few metres back from the centre, much like a university lecture room.

  Brice detailed his brief, unknown man, unknown ship, unknown tech and objectives, all he could tell them was what their target looked like, and his ability to get into and out of high security areas, while at the same time disabling the security systems around him.

  The briefing ended, and the ship captains disappeared as their holo projectors switched off one by one, leaving just the Fleet Admiral and Brice remaining in the room.

  “This is going to be a very interesting hunt, Mr Brice,” she stated

  “Ma'am?” he questioned.

  “Well, we're now having to hunt a ship which can evade any tracking system we have, I believe it's highly unlikely we'll ever see it again though, in allowing himself to be arrested he confirmed he knew about us knowing about him. So the break in, I would say, was the fastest means by which to get the information they needed, now that they were above the radar... so to speak.”

  “I'm not sure I agree, I would suggest that they are getting desperate for information on the Darkspace region, the infiltration was an attempt to find that information.”

  “Yet we don't know if they found what they were looking for, most of what we know on the Darkspace after all is freely available, why would they need to hack our servers for this information?”

  “Perhaps they're looking for something specific, which we know little of, or have missed completely.”

  “It's possible, but most records anyone have are diluted and misrepresented of the true facts, data loss and corruption in the initial stages of the Fall were bad enough despite the thousand years of wars, lawlessness and disorder that followed, it left us only knowing the basic details of what happened, if they can be believed,” Y'Riell told him, then thought aloud. “It's also entirely possible that the questions they're asking about the Darkspace is to throw us off their true intentions, the idea of anyone going back there and drawing out the beasts that ended the Desians is terrifying.”

  “True, but if not the Darkspace, then what?” he asked.

  “The Sciesin are always trying their luck, and the Ferrens have been after the secret to our antimatter tech since its creation, they fear it since we proved antimatter can be weaponised. It's the only reason we've been at a stalemate with them this long, if only they knew the truth.”

  The truth being it couldn't really, not effectively, too much was required just to contain the power source, not to mention manpower requirements for continuous maintenance and monitoring. The only effective way to weaponise the stuff was to eject the cores, but even that
would take the ship with it, the imbalance created in the newly uncontrolled environment would cause the containments to fail, long before the ship could clear any useful distance.

  The Ferren's currently rivalled the Mergence in terms of ships and technology, the difference being, the Mergence had made major breakthroughs in the field of antimatter control and manipulation.

  While the Ferren's could throw more ships and manpower into a fight, effectively overwhelming their enemy, the fear of having weaponised anti matter thrown back at them kept them to their borders.

  “The Sciesin doesn't have the technology base to pull this off, but the idea that the Ferren's are behind this worries me,” Brice answered her. “If they have this technology at their disposal though, wouldn't they have launched their attacks by now?”

  “Not unless they are waiting for something, Colonel,” she replied before ending the speculation. “But getting back to our hunt, where are we going first?”