Alien Death Fleet [Star Frontiers 1]

by Robert E. Vardeman

  The Death Fleet. He screwed his eyes closed and tried to force the name from his brain. It was not possible because it was too descriptive.

  “They've finished bombarding the planet,” the pilot said, a hollowness rising inside. That meant nothing survived below—except the alien looters. He didn't have a family to speak of on-planet, and he had just broken up with his girlfriend, but they were all dead now. His boss and the few friends he had made and even the most casual acquaintances—all gone. Dead.

  Dead by alien hand. Neither the black ships nor the automated looting factories were anything he had ever seen before. To his way of thinking that meant aliens.

  His knuckles turned white as he clutched hard at the edge of the control panel. A strong hand on his shoulder brought him out of his emotional wasteland of loss and anger.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “We got to do something. We're not outfitted for a long trip, not with four of us aboard. There's nothing for any of us down there.” The maintenance man pointed toward the vidscreen showing the voracious black beetle machines creeping through the city, tiny robot feeders scurrying back and forth to keep a steady flow through the packager. Crates dropped behind the machine and were hurried to cleared areas where the ferries swooped down for them.

  “They've done this before,” he said, anger rising. “This isn't the first world they're destroyed and robbed. They're too efficient for this to be new to them.”

  “Space take ‘em,” the man said. “The world's gone. The whole damned colony has bought it. We've got to think about our own necks.”

  “We can't shift for another system. There's too much mass and not enough fuel for that.” The pilot laughed harshly. “There's not even enough oxygen, and we'd fry halfway there. It's harder to get rid of waste heat in shift space than it is in normal space.”

  “How many can this wreck shift safely?” the man asked in a low voice.

  “Two. Maybe three, but that's pushing back the bubble's edge. Why do you...?”

  The pilot watched with a growing sickness as the man swung around. A short punch with the tips of his fingers crushed one man's windpipe. Before the third maintenance man could respond, his met the same fate. Both had been killed with a minimum of fuss or mess.

  “We'd better waste the air and jettison them. I don't want to share the compartment with two dead men all the way to ... where?”

  The brightness in the killer's eyes made the pilot stammer. “Nearest planet. Lyman IV. Yes, Lyman IV.”

  * * * *

  The two bodies drifted just outside the scoutship. The pilot couldn't take his eyes off the near-view vidscreen showing hull conditions. The dead faces always seemed to swing around toward him, open and accusing eyes fixed on him.

  He began laying in a course through shift space—the only reason he still lived. The maintenance man could kill him any time, but he needed piloting expertise. One vidscreen filled with two dead bodies and another showing massive plundering, the pilot set the computer for the shift.

  He wondered how long he would live.

  He wondered how long any human would.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  Pier Norlin stretched and yawned. Picket ship duty was dreary. Being stuck in a long apogee orbit required a duty tour of more than three months with little to do. The automated equipment recorded a vast array of data for a half-dozen different scientific studies. Most of it Sublieutenant Norlin ignored, except to service if necessary—and it seldom was. The equipment had been well designed and required very little maintenance.

  Some of it he tended as if it meant the world to him, because it accumulated data for a PhD candidate, Neela Cosarrian. He had listened endlessly to her telling what the equipment did and what she expected to discover, relating to her degree in multi-dimensional membrane physics. He had only a vague idea what it all meant, but he could listen endlessly to the petite scientist describe her research. He had done well at Empire Service Academy on Sutton II before assignment in the Lyman IV system as a research adjunct, but his specialty field had been electronics and command, not physics and analysis.

  That did not bother Neela at all. Too many other academics looked askance at a lowly sublieutenant. Not her. She valued his skills as much as he did hers. Neela: physics. Pier: electronics. Together: great chemistry.

  The data poured through the multi-channel, multi-dimensional collectors and went directly into the computer banks. The cerampix would be studied later by scientists and the data on the block circuits run through the massive Lyman IV base computer. A dozen intricate theories on the abnormally high density of dark matter inside the Lyman system would be proven or discarded, and Norlin didn't care. It would give Neela her degree, and that pleased him. What did he care of the ‘branes altering the fine structure constant?

  He cared more for Neela's brain—and the rest of the package.

  He ran his fingers over the control console, not watching the inexorable progression of words across the vidscreen. Trying to study for the lieutenant's examination had proven more difficult in isolation than he'd believed when he accepted this assignment. His mind kept returning to Lyman IV—and Neela Cosarrian.

  Her long, blond tresses floating on the wind mesmerized him. He could watch for hours as the breeze pulled at her locks and outlined her finely boned face, that gorgeous face with bright sea-green eyes and straight nose and full lips that pressed so nicely against his.

  Norlin heaved a deep sigh and ordered the computer to back up over the last ten pages of vidtext. He had seen it all but understood none of it. How could he when he wished he were on-planet with Neela?

  “Status report,” he ordered.

  “Forty-seven analyzers are online and recording,” came the ship's soft voice. Norlin frowned. He had ordered the technicians to duplicate Neela's voice. There was a slight hint of huskiness to this computer-generated tone that Neela lacked. He had been on-station only a week and already something glitched?

  This oversight didn't bother him as much as the notion that they might have cut corners in preparing other equipment. He had asked for extensive modification in the bulky, bulging converted picket ship, and the spaceport techs had not received the news well after Neela, her adviser and three other physics profs had finished giving their specifications for equipment mounting.

  “How many experiments running?”

  “Eight. Do you wish an itemization?”

  “Is Neela Cosarrian's online?”

  “Yes. Doctoral Candidate Cosarrian is studying the interplay of dark matter with higher-dimensional membranes in an experiment to determine—”

  “Stop,” Norlin ordered. He knew the basic premise of her research. He had just wanted some contact, however slight, with her and her work. All he got was an increasingly generic computer voice.

  “There is an unusual signal being detected on a little-used frequency. It is almost drowned out by the ten-centimeter hydrogen emission.”

  “Natural?”

  “Artificial,” the ship said. The voice circuit altered again and turned deeper and more male. Norlin sat up and blanked his vidscreen. On a prior flight he had noticed the subtle change in tone. The ship had warned of a fuel cell malfunction. He had repaired the trouble before it developed into full-blown danger. Since then he had become more aware of the computer's inflection and timbre.

  Norlin expertly homed in on the signal, laser-bounced a request off an orbiting cometary detector forty light-seconds across the system to get a tri-angulation, then estimated the original frequency and corrected for the Doppler blue shift to get approach speed. A plethora of other information could have been deduced from the faint signal, but Norlin allowed the computer to follow an expert systems program rather than do it himself.

  The content of the message worried him.

  Through the snap and hiss of hydrogen emission, he heard the faint, worried voice warning, “Dangerous bastards. Can't
use normal communications channels. They'll hear. They listen. They're clever. Destroyed my planet.”

  Norlin worked to computer-filter the signal further and amplify it. He made no attempt to transmit; that ran counter to his standing orders. Other research ships orbited through the Lyman system gathering data. An unexpected broadcast transmission might wreck hundreds of hours of minute signal collection. Even with sophisticated filtering, primary data might be lost by errant radio signals.

  Norlin's eyes worked along the readouts on his board and saw that everything progressed well. He concentrated on enhancing the signal from the distant source. Not only did the contents tantalize him, it broke the monotony of the flight. Studying had quickly palled, and the few amusements the Empire Service allowed aboard a picket ship held his interest less than a day into the mission. He was a mere week into a three-month orbit.

  Three months without Neela.

  “...huge fleet. Can't guess how many. At least ten thousand, maybe more.”

  At this, Norlin frowned. He might be picking up an entertainment transmission from another system, though the strength of the signal belied that. The idea of ships descending to destroy a planet had been discredited by Empire strategists long years ago. The finest genetically enhanced mentalities in Emperor Arian's court had considered the problem for a decade before deciding that planetary defenses could fend off any mobile invasion. Even though such gedanken battles were suspect, Norlin had seen the computer results and agreed.

  That didn't stop the trivid dramas from showing fourteen different worlds blowing up every week as a result of rebel invasion, alien invasion, natural causes and even unexplained phenomena. Norlin snorted. That wasn't entertainment. He preferred the real dramas from Earth's Golden Period. Nothing pleased him more than a good Sherlock Holmes drama or a well-acted Travis McGee piece, unless it was a latter-day Golden Period vid from the 2060s.

  “Just my luck,” he said, switching off the receiver and going back to his textbook. “Had to get some worthless trivid.”

  He tried to concentrate on the text on his vidscreen and found he couldn't. Something nagged at the back of his mind. He finally switched to full computer access and asked, “Is band splitting possible on any entertainment broadcast?”

  “No,” came the immediate answer. “All enter-tainment bands are laser-closed and not broadcast. What cannot be done by satellite bounce is transmitted through foptic cable. This is done for financial considerations.”

  He nodded. There was little leakage from a satellite bounce or a comsat origination program, insuring viewers had to pay for what they received. Through a fiberoptic cable there would be no detectible leakage.

  He again worked the frequency carrying the disquieting message, wondering at its origin. While it might have been an Earther broadcast from an earlier century, the signal strength was too great for it to have come more than a hundred light years.

  “Help me. Can't go on much longer. Dropped out of shift space too soon. Couldn't get back in. Too close to Lyman IV system primary for a second shift. No power, anyway. Oxygen's almost gone. Am switching to loop broadcast with everything I discovered. Don't let them destroy another world. The Death Fleet. The alien Death Fleet!”

  Norlin jumped back from the console when a loud screech tore at his ears. He checked the auto-volume control and found it properly adjusted. The unknown ship had switched to a high frequency and micro-bursted several hundred terabytes of information. Norlin made sure he had intercepted it and began reforming it into usable data.

  He fluctuated from complete disbelief to grudging acceptance of what he saw. The scoutship pilot had not given full documentation, but the pix of the huge black beetle-like looting factories moving along the streets and stripping away everything of value sent shivers up Norlin's spine. It might be a fake. The entertainment industry had true geniuses at duplicating reality, making their fictions seem more than real.

  A graininess to the pix bothered him. He believed these photos had been taken from orbit using a scout's surveillance equipment. He was expert in sensors of all kinds. He made a guess about the model of cerampix camera used to record the destruction. Even worse, he couldn't tear his eyes from the vidscreen.

  The panorama of death and devastation sickened him even as it held him captive.

  “This must be a hoax. One of the others is sending me this as a joke.” He tried to locate the other research ships gathering data. He found Josi Prenn's. She wouldn't fabricate such an elaborate joke; hers tended toward sharp jabs lacking subtlety. Two other picket ships showed up on his sensors. Both were too distant and out of position to originate the signal.

  “It's broadcast,” he mused. “That's hardly ever used. Signal gets too weak too fast. Better to use a lock-in lasercom.” He fell silent. Lasercoms were useful when you had an exact position on both receiver and transmitter. If he believed the unknown scoutship's pilot, the man had no idea where he was or whom he reached.

  Norlin ran through a complete global scan. Only the faint off-band com signal from the mysterious scout-ship broke the bubble of tenuous locator radiation he sent out. He followed it back, checking through triangulation using other detector units. The same position came out of the computer.

  The distressed scoutship lay just inside the Lyman system oort cloud. This presented too much danger for a practical joke. The area a thousand AUs from the primary was littered with small comets and particles of dust and gas trying to become comets. Norlin had heard of at least two manned probes into the area in the past year that had been severely damaged.

  “Not a joke,” he decided. He continued to watch what the unnamed scout pilot had recorded, the frightening view of a world being systematically ravaged. The readouts showed how the radiation cannon had scoured the planet of life before the automated wrecking crews landed.

  Pier Norlin watched and thought and grew more restive. He glanced at the sensors he had locked on the probable position of the small scout craft. The instant a tiny waver came in a gravitometer reading, he jumped into action.

  “Request permission to alter course,” he said, flipping on his base lasercom. He started to explain then fell silent. It would be two hours before base received the request and another two for their response.

  Norlin fumed at the necessary delay. He spent the next four hours on edge, waiting for the reply. When it came, he still jumped at the sharp, clear response.

  “What's got into you, Norlin? You just started your sweep. There's no way I can let you off. Finish your assigned course. We can talk about durations when you get back.”

  He had expected it and had prepared his reasons—and tried to brace himself for more light-speed delay.

  “Sorry, this is a class-three emergency. Possibly a class-two.” He had run through the scout's data during the hours waiting for authorization, sending selected segments to bolster his case. The light-lag delay in approval for rescue put the scoutship in increasing jeopardy, but he had his orders. To break off the research orbit required high-level approval. Or absolute certainty on his part that he did not have. This could be a prank, although a sick one.

  “Class-two? There aren't any ships in distress. Don't try to feed me vacuum. Finish your mission and quit wasting my time. I go off-duty in four hours, and you've tried my patience all day long.”

  “Scoutship, registry most likely the Penum system.” Norlin double-checked the computer's figures backtracking the scoutship. Penum seemed to carry a ninety-five-percent level of confidence as the ship's port of origin.

  That meant Penum IV's colony was dead, and the entire planet raped. If this was not an overly elaborate joke at his expense.

  “Here come details. I'll give it to you in a classified burst.” Norlin worked for several minutes, as if his supervisor might violate the laws of physics and order him to stop immediately. “Here comes everything I got from the ship. It's going to be a macroburst. Get ready for it.”

  Norlin almost went crazy waiting for confirm
ation of receipt of the transmitted data. Four hours stretched like four centuries.

  “We're getting some proton storm interference,” came the unexpected reply. “Retransmit to be sure we get your data. Can't hold a beam longer than a few minutes. Stay on your predetermined course so we can maintain lasercom.”

  “Understood.” Norlin said immediately, then cursed himself for the response that wouldn't be heard for two hours. He punched in the transmit code again. The data relayed by the scoutship in addition to his own observations blasted toward Lyman IV on a lasercom beam. Even as the computer churned out the transmission, Norlin reprogrammed his orbit to intercept the incoming scoutship. Violating orders might mean saving a pilot in extreme distress.

  “Inconsistent with mission,” came the computer's immediate response. “There is insufficient fuel to jet directly to intercept and finish our mission. A Hohmann orbit requires fourteen days. In either instance, the ordered data collection must be terminated.”

  “Rule One,” Norlin said.

  “Danger to the crew of a spaceship noted.”

  “Well?” he demanded. “Give me the mission override, and let's blast straight on an intercept and damn the fuel!”

  “All pertinent data have been analyzed. There are no living crew members aboard the scoutship.”

  He slumped. He had hoped the pilot had survived.

  “Oxygen?” he asked.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Intercept in optimal time,” he ordered. “I assume full responsibility. Even if the crew is dead, the ship contains important data.”

  Cold waves swept up and down his back as he stared at the vidscreen and the slow parade of black metal machines chewing their way across Penum IV's surface. The pilot had died bringing this warning to Lyman IV. What other information had he put in the scoutship?

  “I require base confirmation.”