Breach the Hull

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “There’s got to be another. Some new weapon, some new—.”

  “They’s workin’ on somethin’ on Phoenix Twelve. Gone.” Franco tapped his head with one finger. “Gotta new idea. Gonna work. Kill ’em all. Fleet brass gonna go for it. You know.”

  Jane Devries stared back at Franco. They will. We and the T’kel will use most of what we’ve got left to establish bases on each other’s reserve worlds, and then we’ll both rock each other’s worlds into lifeless rubble. Will anything else ever come here? Any other race exploring and finding star system after star system full of dead and destroyed planets, and wondering what kind of homicidally insane races did this to each other? She got up and stumbled out of Franco’s cabin, leaving the Captain mumbling to himself.

  The torn insulation on one bulkhead fluttered near her face as Devries leaned against the bulkhead for support. There’s almost nothing left. Soon there’ll be nothing left. We’ve spent almost a century destroying each other, smaller and smaller fleets of ships roaming endlessly to avoid the asteroids that smash anything with a predictable course through space. What would it be like to live on a planet? I never saw Earth. There’s nothing left.

  A hatch nearby drew her gaze. The Chesapeake’s sole remaining long-range shuttle. Nothing. Commander Devries threw herself against the hatch, punching in her authorization code. Access lights winked green and the hatch cycled open. Nothing. Systems powered up. Alerts would be displayed on the bridge now, warning the Chesapeake’s crew that the shuttle was preparing to launch. They’d be trying to find out what was going on. Who was in the shuttle. Nothing. Her boards green, Devries hit the emergency launch button and moments later blacked out from the force of the shuttle blasting away from the Chesapeake.

  It had once been the T’kel home system. Jane Devries had figured if there’d be any place likely to have a T’kel ship lurking about, it would be that system. And when the shuttle jumped into normal space, she saw one.

  She methodically shut off the shuttle’s offensive and defensive systems. One by one, her shields and her swords dropped off-line, until the shuttle was no longer a warship, but just a target, brightly visible to anyone tracking it.

  The T’kel ship had sat watching as Devries’ shuttle came deeper in-system. Fear-ing a trap, no doubt. Hours passed. No asteroid mines came after her. The T’kel ship remained silent and passive. Surely a trap. Surely some attempt by humans to lure them in.

  But, for all she hated them, Jan Devries knew the T’kel had the same curiosity as any other form of intelligence. They’d be wondering why she was here. They’d want to know the answer.

  More hours. Devries napped several times, starting awake to stare around in confusion each time, before she remembered where she was. The navigational system beeped. An inbound object, closing on her course. De-vries bit her cheek and tasted blood. Had the T’kel grown tired of waiting? “It’s one of their shuttles.” It took a moment for Jane Devries to realize she’d spoken out loud. The move made sense. The T’kel shuttle had its combat systems active. It had the T’kel warship backing it up from a safe distance. If this was a human trap, the T’kel were prepared for it.

  Slowing as it approached Jane’s own shuttle, the T’kel shuttle carefully nudged itself into contact, the emergency airlocks mating thanks to flexible seals designed to handle any possible hatch configuration. Humanity had been throwing together ships as fast as possible before the last shipyards were rocked. Standardization hadn’t been a concern at that point.

  Thumps and thuds sounded. Jane Devries stood up as her shuttle’s hatch began to cycle. A moment later, the hatch opened and a T’kel stepped inside. The T’kel resembled a cross between an alligator and a dolphin which had evolved into a four-limbed sentient life form. Its large eyes regarded Jane, but she could read nothing in their depths. Moving slowly, Jane reached down, unbuckled her holster, drew out her sidearm with one finger, and pushed it as far away as she could.

  The T’kel watched, not moving. Minutes passed.

  “Well?” She pointed to her sidearm. “I’m disarmed. Either kill me or talk to me, damn you.”

  A long pause, then the T’kel brought out its own sidearm, and shoved it toward Jane’s. “What?” it asked, the voice sounding like gravel washing together. She shook her head. “I don’t know what. I don’t know why. Haven’t enough died?” More silence, then the T’kel made an odd gesture. “Dark.”

  “Dark? The light shouldn’t be bothering you.” “Go to Dark.”

  “Who? Who goes to Dark?”

  “Worlds.” Jane still couldn’t guess at the expression on the T’kel. Colors rippled across its belly. “Light. Go to Dark. T’kel worlds.”

  “And human worlds.” Her voice came out as harsh as that of the T’kel. “Human worlds were Light and now they’re Dark.”

  “Light is T’kel.”

  “Why can’t we share the Light?” “Light is T’kel. Hu’ans go.”

  Jane Devries sagged down into her seat. “I don’t know how much the T’kel have left. Probably about as much as humanity does. How can we go? Every habitable world with range of our ships is dead. Dark.”

  “T’kel the Light.”

  “No. Don’t you get it? T’kel the Dark.” “Hu’an not the Light. Hu’an go.”

  Jane buried her face in her hands. What was I thinking? When we met the T’kel we tried talking to them. We never understood them. After Earth was destroyed we stopped trying. Why did I think I could somehow communicate meaningfully with creatures who’ve baffled all of humanity since first contact? “We’re dying. We’re about to do something . . . something suicidal. There’s no other word for it. Do you understand? Can you understand? Humanity is planning to force your hand. The war will end. We’ll both be destroyed. Both races dead. Is that what you want? How can you want that? The Light will be gone.”

  “T’kel the Light.”

  “T’kel the Dark!’ She screamed it, wondering how the T’kel would take that. “Your race will die.”

  The T’kel didn’t seem affected by Jane’s words or her actions. “T’kel the Light. T’kel the Dark.”

  “You stupid, insane race of . . . of . . . mass murderers! You want to die? You want us to die? Fine. You’ll get that. T’kel the Dark and humans the Dark!” The T’kel’s belly suddenly swirled orange. “T’kel the Dark!” “And humans the Dark!”

  “T’kel the Dark! Hu’ans go!”

  “We can’t go. We’ll stand and die because there’s no longer any alternative. And we’ll take you with us. T’kel the Dark and humans the Dark.”

  “No!” Jane stared, startled by the word. The T’kel’s belly had shaded into red. “No hu’an the Dark!”

  “Sorry, you son-of-a-bitch, we’re going down together.” Seeing the T’kel apparently get increasingly agitated, Jane Devries savored hurling the words at it again. “T’kel the Dark and human the Dark!”

  “No. T’kel the Dark.”

  “You can say it as many times as you want. It won’t change anything. Under-stand? Both our races have reached their limit and now we’re going beyond it. We’ll both die out. I hope you bastards are happy.” Jane looked away, the deadness be-ginning to fill her again. “Go ahead and kill me now. It’s just a matter of time any-way. Franco was right.” She jabbed one thumb at her chest. “Me! The Dark! Go ahead.”

  Jane Devries closed her eyes and waited. Nothing happened. Finally she looked back at the T’kel. Its belly had darkened until the red was almost black. The eyes swung wildly from side to side. Finally focusing back on her, the T’kel raised one arm. “T’kel the Dark!”

  “When you kill me, I’ll go to the Dark. Just like all those dead worlds. Go ahead.” “Hu’an the Dark?”

  Jane Devries stared at the T’kel. “Of course. What did you think? If we don’t . . . if humans and the T’kel don’t have the Light, we’ll have the Dark. Both our races.”

  The T’kel suddenly spun around and headed into the hatch. Jane watched it go, wondering
why she was still alive and what was bothering the creature.

  We never understood them. They never understood us. And now we never will. I guess it’s planning to blow my shuttle from its own ship. Fine. Get it over with.

  But the T’kel shuttle kept going, back to its ship. Jane watched for a long time, then shrugged. Her shuttle carried some rations. She chose a few and ate them, not tasting anything, wondering how long ago they’d been packed away, if some might even have come from Earth. She slept again. Woke and ate some more. At some point she finally noticed that the T’kel had left so hurriedly that its sidearm had been abandoned in her shuttle.

  After a long time, the T’kel shuttle came back. It may have been carrying the same T’kel. Jane couldn’t tell. The T’kel stood in her shuttle, its belly dark red, then slowly extended one arm carrying some sort of document. Jane reached out at the same careful speed, taking the papers from the T’kel’s hold, feeling a slight shudder inside at even that indirect contact.

  The papers contained T’kel writing on one side, standard English on the other. Jane looked at them, perplexed, then back at the T’kel. “What is this?” “Take? Hu’ans take?”

  “I don’t understand. Take what? These papers? Of course I’ll take. I mean, yes, I took them.”

  “Hu’ans take. Hu’ans the Light.”

  Jane’s eyes widened as she looked down at the papers. Words from the English text leapt out at her. ‘Coexistence.’ ‘Cease hostilities.’ ‘Joint worlds.’ “Is . . . is this a peace treaty?”

  “Hu’ans the Light.” Somehow, Jane thought the T’kel sounded resigned. “T’kel the Light. T’kel and hu’an not the Dark.”

  “Oh, God.” She sat down and cried, shaking, not able to move for a long time as the T’kel stood watching her.

  “What happened, Commander Devries?” Fleet Admiral Chang leaned toward her. “What happened when you met the T’kel?”

  She glared back at him. Approaching a human ship had been a long, drawn-out process, with the crew of the Arabia watching for any sign of a trick. She’d been iso-lated, quarantined, searched, tested, and probed. Only after assuring themselves that neither Jane nor her shuttle carried any traps or weapons of any kind did the Ara-bia bring her here, to the Flagship. The Terra. “You’ve seen my records. The shuttle recorded every moment of the meetings. Audio and video. Why are you asking me this?”

  Leader Owen raised a calming hand. The many factions of humanity had never been able to agree on a title for a single political leader, so Leader she became. “We’ve seen the recordings. We don’t understand them. What happened? Why, after all this time, have the T’kel agreed to share space with us?” She held up the documents the T’kel had given Jane. “Commander Devries, they’re actually saying they want our bases and their bases located close together on habitable worlds. Why?”

  “Oh, I’ve figured that out,” Admiral Chang noted. “That way, it’d be impossible to rock the planet without taking out your own people. It’s sort of like exchanging hostages.”

  “That would work. But it still doesn’t explain this.” Owen walked toward the large display on one bulkhead, where stars glittered against the blackness. “We’re so tired. Humanity is on its last legs. We’re facing extermination with no way out. And then you show up with a miracle. A peace treaty from the T’kel. How is this possible?”

  Jane Devries started laughing, then stopped before the laughter became uncontrollable. “Oh, it’s very simple. Really, it’s very simple. I stumbled across it purely by accident. Purely out of despair. The T’kel are agreeing to coexist with humanity for what to them is a very good reason.”

  “What possible reason could there be? The T’kel have never even agreed to separate areas of control, let alone sharing planets or orbital locations with us. They’ve pursued a genocidal war against us, just as we’ve waged one back against them. So why now? Why are they finally agreeing to some sort of co-existence? Why are they now willing to let humanity live?”

  Devries stared at the star display. “I discovered that they want to die in some kind of Armageddon. Maybe it’s religious or maybe it’s something else we can’t begin to understand. But they want us to kill all of them in a great war and they were going to keep killing us to keep us hitting back at them until we finished exterminating their race. What they hadn’t taken into account was that they might exterminate us as well.”

  “Why does that matter?” Owen demanded.

  “Because there’s one thing more important to them than whether or not they share the universe with us.”

  “And what is that?”

  “They don’t want to share hell with us.”

  Back to Contents

  BROADSIDE

  Bud Sparhawk

  CAPTAIN FARADADDIE CHECKED THE BRIDGE AS SOON AS HIS HEAD CLEARED FROM THE DIZZINESS OF blink transfer but before the headache started. Everybody looked all right for a change.

  “Ship approaching,” Navigation reported as the long-range detector pinged. “Three thousand klicks and closing at eight hundred.”

  “No SIFF, Sir,” Communications said. “Rebel for sure.”

  “Coming on screen,” Visuals reported and zoomed the cameras on the approach-ing ship.

  “Sir, we’ve got identification. It’s Invincible,” Intelligence said. “Heavy cargo hauler. Ten million tons. Armed and armored.”

  Faradaddie swore. He’d hoped they’d engage with one of the rebels’ ships, but not this one. She out-massed Pride, one of the Fleet’s warships, which meant she was a lot slower. Maybe there was a chance he could get her back. The more ships they captured, the sooner the colonial trade war would be over.

  The rebel forces had captured Invincible only a month and a half ago. How could they possibly have gotten one of Earth’s capitol ships ready for combat so quickly? Where had they found enough crew to learn how to operate her systems, let alone fully man it? For that matter, how in the name of everything holy had they managed to capture it?

  He examined the grainy, magnified image carefully. “No sign of external damage, Sir,” Intelligence confirmed his observations.

  “Unless it’s somewhere we can’t see,” he corrected. They could have gotten it by stealth, or a hundred other ways, but most likely was that they’d breached the hull to capture it. Nothing else made sense.

  “Weapons armed,” Guns reported. “Tracking.”

  “Still closing at eight hundred,” Navigation reported.

  “Battle stations,” the Chief blared over the general net. “Lock down sections.” Immediately the sounds of blast doors slamming into place echoed through the huge ship, sealing each section into an independent unit to minimize damage.

  “Let’s pass on her anterior side,” Faradaddie instructed the helm. If the breach was on the side he couldn’t see perhaps they could take advantage of it. “Get as close as you can. Guns, aim for the steering jets as we pass.”

  “Give us two hundred meters separation, minimum,” Navigation confirmed as Helm made the adjustment as Guns adjusted range on the cannon. “Spin the ship to ten rotations per minute,” Intelligence advised. “That will be enough to put the marines in place.”

  Faradaddie turned to the Chief. “Tell your marines to get ready.”

  The quantum probability drive gave mankind the stars. It allowed ships to travel multiples of light-years in an instant. At the same time, it did have a few drawbacks. For one, the maximum distance one could travel in a single blink was limited to two light years. Ships disappeared when they tried to go further and, some contended al-though no one could prove it, that they were destroyed. Others thought that they were simply unable to return. It meant the same thing, regardless. No ship’s captain in their right mind would dare go beyond two lights in a single blink.

  The QP drives were enormously expensive. Each ship represented a major investment of a world’s economy. As with other capitol projects such an investment was not to be wasted. A colony was rich if it could afford two ships,
fabulously wealthy if it had four, and only the resources of the entire Solar community could muster the resources for more than five.

  The second problem with the QP drive was that light-year blinks were not kind to the human body. Roughly ten percent of the crew became deathly sick on a long blink. One in a hundred died on a one light year blink. Regardless of distance, nearly everyone experienced headaches, dizziness, or threw up when the drive engaged. You could not stand two blinks in a row without being violently ill.

  “How are your men?” the Chief asked over the intecom, four seconds after coming out of blink.

  “Armed, ready for action, and mean as hell,” Sergeant Tsu replied immediately. It wasn’t strictly true, coming out of blink made him feel as bad as the morning after a really good liberty.

  Four of his marines were on the deck, puking their guts out and two were sitting down, shaking their heads in confusion. Some of the others looked pretty green around the gills, but what the hell, marines can survive anything. He just wished that he had their youthful constitutions.

  He’d been in this stupid war since the beginning, had four boardings under his belt and had fought hand-to-hand a half dozen times. He just hoped this attack wouldn’t be his last. He was getting too old for this, too old and maybe too lucky. He prayed his string of luck would last until the damned idiotic trade war was over. It was the only way of getting out with his ass intact.

  He felt the ship lurch. It must have been a pretty violent movement because noth-ing else could have overcome the ship’s artificial gravity. There was somebody shout-ing in the corridor. Tsu couldn’t make out what they were saying. He mentally kicked himself: Pay attention to what you are doing. Let the god-damned Fleet officers worry about the ship.

  Concentrate, he reminded himself as he walked among his troop, fifteen good men, even though three of them were women and one was, well, different. “Snap that faceplate,” he warned a young ’cruit who looked like she just stepped off the freaking farm. He tugged the straps on another’s pack, adjusted the air flow on one man who was hyperventilating, and nodded approvingly at the way the newbie caHenrath was holding her torch with one finger resting on the guard, not the damned trigger. Good thing, too, the way her hands were shaking. He’d seen some Firemen blow off their legs when they forgot basic safety. Rough way to learn a lesson.