Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework

by Randolph Lalonde

  “Search: XO-99,” she said to her command and control unit. Her eyes focused on the tactical read of the area around her. There were thermal readings that pointed to thousands of trapped non-combatants who were hiding in their ships. The drop pods had stopped, but readings told her there were hundreds of frameworks in her area. Most of them were still recovering, but they had survived the event just like she did, only she regenerated faster. “I think I’m shorter,” she said as she moved behind cover. “Yup, shorter, more compact. I wonder why? Maybe I lost something? Wait, no, my mass is almost the same.”

  Her tactical computer highlighted the location of her XO-99 rifle and she smiled. It wasn’t too far away, less than a hundred metres. “You’re probably all broken up, but I bet if I get you home someone can help me rebuild you.”

  Alice checked her ammunition; the D9 rifle was loaded with explosive pellets that could hold a charge, and had nine hundred thirty rounds left. She checked the bag hurriedly and found three more clips. “Now this is a party.” Realizing that she stood out like a sore thumb, she activated the colour matcher in her vacsuit and touched a rusty patch of dirt. Her armour changed colour to match. “Yup, I’m definitely shorter. My run speed is gonna drop.”

  She turned towards the Triton settlement, seven kilometres away, and started running between two piles of debris. There were no people out in the open, only frameworks, and she took two down the moment she broke out into the open, strafing as she passed.

  Alice dropped and slid under a fallen girder, rolled onto her feet and lurched towards the yellow marker designating the spot where her prized rifle was last spotted. “Target zero, in my quadrant!” shouted a framework as she passed a thick hull plate. The tactical computer only detected him once he was right beside her - he was using the plating as shelter and she had to wonder whether he knew it would stop her system from detecting him.

  She jumped to her left, taking a hit on her hip. Alice’s thick armoured vacsuit registered the strike and advised her that the suit would only take another two hits in the same place before offering no protection. Her tactical system warned her that there were several more frameworks coming out of the wreck behind her. Her foot caught on some rubble and sent her sprawling, holding onto her rifle for dear life.

  Flipping onto her back, she took aim at the one who called her ‘Target Zero’ and fired. He ducked behind a heavy strut jutting out of the ground as though he saw her retaliation coming well in advance. Three more targets drew her fire. She missed the second but shot the other two who were taking positions behind a leaning landing pylon.

  She rolled onto her feet and sprinted towards a large, warped sensor dish as shots pecked at her surroundings. Her cover made creaking and pinging sounds as several super-heated bolts of energy struck it. She could feel her outer vacsuit repairing itself, and in that moment she could see her comm system’s tactical map in her mind. The next moment it was gone. Alice ran up a broad cargo ramp into the main hold of an old cargo ship. “Wait, what was that special thinky-seeing thing?”

  There was a hatch open on the other side of the cargo hold; she could see the light of day coming in. With a grace that was as natural as walking, she leapt up and caught a support beam then used her momentum to swing over the rough pile of crates between her and the hatch opposite her. A hop and a roll got her over the rest of the debris and she came out the other side.

  “Alice, you have a neural node made to communicate mentally,” Ayan said over her comm. The sound of a fire fight was in the background of her message. “I’ve looked you up and gotten more details. I don’t know how you’re with us, but you might still have a device like that, and if you’re seeing status from your equipment, then that’s going to be helpful. Concentrate and you’ll get it.”

  “Might be helpful? Yeah, just a bit,” Alice said as she dropped from a scaffold that, inexplicably, was still intact along the side of the old cargo ship. The two frameworks she dropped behind only had time to half-turn before she riddled them with rounds. Her tactical screen populated with more information, including paths that would lead her directly to the Triton settlement. There were hundreds of frameworks moving and firing towards their location, and a few trying to close in on her. “You expect me to concentrate with all this going on? Oh, and thanks for the uplink.”

  “You’re welcome, we’re getting a good amount of information from you too, but it’s time for you to come in. Our shields are down so you’ll have an unobstructed run straight in if you can get past the frameworks,” Ayan said, the end of her statement was punctuated by her rifle cycling up and firing.

  “That simple, just come on over,” Alice said.

  “You just covered a kilometre, leapt twice your height and dropped seven metres without injuring yourself. You can make it, and we want you here,” Ayan said.

  “Of course you do, now that you’re under siege,” Alice said, running up the side of a ruined shuttle and leaping onto a segment of broken hull. Several soldiers tried to fire at her while she was in mid-air, but missed, and she increased her pace as she found good cover and a flat surface.

  “Alice,” Oz said. She immediately liked the sound of his voice, as though there was some subconscious memory of him that indicated that he was trustworthy. “We’re suspicious because we saw you die, but we want you here. We want you to be who you say you are. Ayan and I never got a chance to really meet you, and I’d like to.”

  She leapt off the edge of the broken hull into the open air, peeking down. Vertigo gripped her as she looked nineteen metres down at a collection of sharp, wrecked bits of metal and junk. At the last instant she looked back up to her target and missed her footing. Alice fell forward, dropping her rifle onto the hull in front of her and sliding off until she turned the tackiness of her vacsuit up and it stuck to the bare hull, leaving her legs dangling over the edge. Scrambling up she said, “That woulda hurt.” Picking up her rifle, Alice ran on into a labyrinth of abandoned crew cabins and corridors that would eventually lead her to a curve in the ship and a hatchway closer to the ground. The overturned bunks, stripped consoles, and dark hallways were eerie. “Ships are for living in, best way to make them look alive,” she muttered to herself. “Dead ships are spooky.”

  “What was that?” Oz asked. “It came through so fast it barely sounded like words.”

  Alice realized then that she didn’t say it verbally, but mentally. “I think I connected to something,” she said. “One sec.” She ducked behind a twisted bulkhead and checked her tactical screen. There were frameworks trying to follow her, and there could be more waiting at her exit point. There was no way of knowing, not even the Triton Settlement’s sensors could see that side of the ship.

  Alice made an effort to ignore everything around her. “I just need a moment, a moment of peace,” she said.

  A memory invaded her senses. She was leaning on a railing, watching a group of children walking below. One of them looked up at her and waved hesitantly. Alice gave her a big smile and waved back. The little one was immediately all atwitter, anxiously telling a little blonde friend at her side about the stranger above as they were walked down into the mass transit tunnel.

  “I wish I had a childhood,” she recalled telling Lewis using her neural link. It was so easy, treating the device just like it was a finger or a hand. No one thought about how a hand did what it did when it grasped an object, they just did it. The neural connection in her memories was the same, and when she tried to apply that information to herself she could see all the electronic objects she could touch, the workings of her comm unit, and she understood exactly how it worked with the systems she used to hack the Freeground ship. “They’re all part of the same sense,” she said aloud. “I think I got it, Oz.”

  She couldn’t get past the mental image of the little girl waving at her though, and in a flash she realized why. “Oh, no way,” she said to herself, commanding her vacsuit headgear to retract and bringing up a holographic mirror image of her face. “Ro
under face, baby-fat, not so much as a little laugh line around the eyes,” she paused a moment and checked her physiological scan. “Oh no, I’m a teenager! And I’m short!”

  Alice’s tactical system warned her that there were frameworks entering the ship lower down, and she sealed her suit back up, then moved on, rushing towards them. “Guess I wanted to have a childhood so bad that this framework rig compromised. That might explain why I can’t remember a whole ton of stuff. Love having a tactical system feeding my head though,” she said. Alice simply knew how much ammunition her weapon had, what the sensors on it, her vacsuit, and every other system she had were saying, and seeing her enemies in her mind’s eye. She was at one with her equipment, and it only made her faster, more confident. The inventory system made her aware of what she had in every pocket, where those things were, and what their status was.

  She pulled a shield puck from one of her pockets and configured it to her purpose with a thought. There were three frameworks waiting for her through the next hatch, standing between her and the exit. She held the shield emitter out in front of her and dropped through the hatch, firing at one framework while blocking the other two, one of which said, “We have eyes on Target Zero, engaging!”

  The first framework soldier was blasted to pieces. The other two couldn’t fire past her shield, so she rushed them with it between her and their deadly fire. Knocking the first over, she continued to collide into the other while firing at the first as she passed it. The third screamed as the energy barrier burned its face. Her suit connected to the shield emitter, keeping it charged with reserve power. She spun and held the barrel of her rifle up to the last framework’s head for a moment before pulling the trigger.

  Her sensors told her there were eighteen framework soldiers waiting behind cover for her to emerge from the ship.

  “Wait for air support,” Oz said. “We’re seeing resistance but we should be able to get a couple of fighters out there soon.”

  Alice slung her rifle, watching the first framework she killed upon entering the cabin slowly begin to regenerate. She affixed the shield emitter to her left forearm and pulled ten thin grenades from her hip pocket. She had two left there and a cartridge of thirty-five in her pack. “I’ve got this, keep your fighters for defence.”

  Crouching low behind the energy barrier, she ran as fast as she could towards the hatch. The barrier ran along the ground in front of her, humming and crackling as it adjusted to her gait. The first shots struck the shield the moment she made it to the hatch, but she’d caught many of them by surprise, and most missed while she rushed the first trio, who were taking cover behind an overturned antigravity truck.

  She leapt onto the truck’s cab then dropped down on top of one of them, leaving a grenade behind as she sprinted to the next group. Her suit registered a thirty six hundred degree spike behind her as the grenade exploded. She increased the timing on the rest of the grenades, relieved that she was just far enough from the first explosion for her heavy vacsuit to deflect the shrapnel.

  Alice flung a pair of grenades towards a group of three to her far right and mentally sent a detonation signal using her mind’s data connection as she rushed another group. The group of five were smarter than the rest. The other frameworks were finding better cover as she moved, while the five she charged directly broke cover and intensified their fire. Alice tossed the two grenades in their direction as her energy shield ran out of power, and she jumped for the nearest cover.

  Her suit absorbed several shots before the grenades went off, incinerating the five of them. She discarded the burnt-out shield emitter, unslung her rifle, and ran from the scene, limping as her right leg regenerated a deep burn. A second later she was running down a fresh path of loose gravel between two wrecks as she watched the frameworks try to catch up. She emerged into a large crater and stopped, jumping behind cover. “Oz, you’re going to want to send people down here, right now. There are real soldiers in a pit I just found, and a big ship. They took my XO-99.”

  “Your XO-99?” Oz asked.

  “My gun, they took my favourite gun. I was tracking it so I could get it back before I headed to your camp,” Alice said. Her heart skipped a beat and she was filled with rage as she saw Grabriel Meunez and Lister Hampon emerge from the large main hatch in the side of the top of the ship. She verified with her suit’s sensors and nodded. “How are they down here?”

  “There’s a major segment missing from the Leviathan, the Order of Eden command ship. They must have come down right after the Carthan carrier crashed.”

  Alice looked at the rows of soldiers gathering around the outside of the ship. They lined up black boxes she recognized from the drop pods and worked on setting up equipment. She peeked out from behind the wreckage and zoomed in on Gabriel Meunez. His hair was longer, and he was dressed in ornate robes. There was no one in the galaxy she hated more. She couldn’t help but remember him, and how he pursued her for years. “I see you, bastard.”

  He looked directly at her over the one hundred fifty-six metre distance. “I can see you too,” he said through her neural communicator. “There’s something new, something wonderful and fresh about you.”

  “Get out of my mind, sicko,” she replied through her mental node.

  “That was such an emotional response, I only heard static,” Meunez replied. “You must have missed me. If I knew you were alive, I would have never stopped searching for you. I love you, Alice. I ache when I can’t feel you connected to me.”

  His message was so loud in her head, his voice was so clear, she retched involuntarily then hurriedly retrieved the clip of grenades from her pack and slapped it into her rifle, setting all its systems to maximum. She calmed her mind and suppressed her disgust. “What can you give me if I join you?” Alice asked.

  “Control,” Meunez replied, his response slightly garbled by emotional static.

  Her tactical systems told her two squads of soldiers were moving around the sides of the crater, carefully creeping towards her. She could also feel exactly where Meunez was. Hampon was a mystery, invisible to her.

  “What kind of control?” Alice managed with some clarity.

  “Control over your destiny. You can live your life however you like, wherever you want.”

  “You’d have control over me,” Alice said. “How can you call that freedom?”

  “I love you, Alice,” he replied. “I’m overjoyed that you’re still alive.”

  It was all the data she needed, her connection was so revoltingly strong with him that she could feel where his mind was on her tactical systems with no margin for error. She moved out from behind cover, kneeling firmly. Alice held her rifle steady. She took an extra second to make sure her aim was true.

  “You can’t destroy me, Alice,” Gabriel Meunez said.

  “I can try,” Alice replied, pulling her trigger. Energy rounds burst from Alice’s rifle in a steady stream, ripping his shoulders and head to flaming pieces. She switched firing modes to her grenade launcher and let loose with a rapid-fire arc of incineration grenades hot enough to melt his framework systems.

  Her first grenades were going off as a soldier’s rounds caught her in the shoulder. The rest of his squad opened fire, and they were joined by others. Her vacsuit was finished in seconds, torn apart by hundreds of rounds. When the first round that struck her in the face burned through to her cheek, she thought it was the end. And then it was.

  Chapter 52

  Connections

  “We’re down to three mines, packing our last six right now,” Frost reported from his tactical station.

  Jake looked at the hull status of the Warlord and nodded, satisfied. The emergencies were handled well enough. Not as quickly as he would have liked, but their three decompressions only resulted in four fatalities. More than there would have been if the ship was completed on the inside, but fewer than he could have expected. As for the hull, there were dozens of spots where the ergranian metal had warped and recovered. They only ha
d two breaches that had to be sealed.

  “I just lost a thruster,” Ronin reported. “Joyboy and I just finished scrapping with a squad, I don’t think we’ve got another one in us, even with your support, Warlord.”

  The three functioning turret guns on the top of the Warlord and the pair of torpedo launchers they had left were running full-time. They were down to their last five torpedoes and Jake signalled the launch room to reload and hold at the ready. The pair of turrets on the bottom of the ship were abandoned after they took a direct beam hit from the Leviathan and then seized into place thanks to an overheated section of hull. Life support systems were in even worse shape; the crew worked in sealed vacsuits.

  “Sunspire, we need to either head down or get in closer to a big carrier for cover,” Captain Valent asked through his comm. “We’ve been lucky so far, but that won’t last.”

  “The fighter screen over our sector is finally thinning out, if you’re going to make a break for it, now’s the time,” replied Specialist Lehrin. “Good hunting, Warlord.”

  “You heard him, Ash, take us down. It’s time to go somewhere we’re not outclassed,” Captain Valance said. They turned away from the Sunspire as another beam of light was refracted away from its hull, and the outer hull was pockmarked by a stream of heated particles. The Warlord spun and thrust towards the blue, brown, and green surface of Tamber. A corvette and three fighters threatened to block them off, firing energy rounds and a torrent of small energized slug rounds. It was one of the United Confederation Worlds ships, a new enemy he’d learned to hate in the last half hour.

  “Head straight for ‘em and drop everything we’ve got on that ship,” Captain Valent said, programming and launching their missile mines personally. He hoped they would be the last they’d spend outside of the atmosphere.