by Ramy Vance
“Mining, most likely,” Virgil said.
“Iridium?” Jaeger asked. Her crew had needed to mine some of the asteroids for the rare alloy from time to time, as well.
“Possibly, but it’s hard to say. The Osprey’s sweeps haven’t detected significant amounts of any particular mineral in this section of the asteroid belt.”
Jaeger frowned. “I wonder if they design their ships after their body templates. Those crab shapes look very similar to the pictures Art showed me. They’re much, much larger though. The ones Art drew couldn’t have been more than two or three meters long. These look to be closer to twenty.”
“Or they use the same template for all their ships and robots,” Virgil suggested. “Even the mother ship ghosts we’ve glimpsed on long-range scans share a similar shape to the main carapace structure, only without the legs.”
“Are you…suggesting they sent smaller droids down to Locaur to eat the Locari?”
“Or perhaps capture them for some other purpose.”
“You have a nasty imagination for an AI.”
“Are you prepared to deploy the tracker, Captain?”
Jaeger glanced at her inventory screen. She’d left the Osprey with three of the spy tracker cameras loaded into the fighter’s missile silo. One was currently planted on the asteroid shielding her from view, sending her a visual feed of the strange alien ships, or droids, or whatever they were.
She had two more in the tank, locked and loaded. Once she fired it at one of the targets, however, she’d likely blow her cover and need to skedaddle.
“Yep,” she said. “But this is the first good look I’ve gotten at them. I want to watch a bit longer. Holy smokes. They’re really eating through that thing.”
On her screen, the squad of Creepers chewed tunnels through the asteroid, like a time-lapse video of ants disassembling a wedge of cheese.
“They must be targeting specific mineral veins in the asteroid,” Virgil mused. “The mining operation seems quite targeted. I suspect they’re displacing enough of the asteroid’s mass to destabilize its orbit.”
Jaeger chewed her lip. “That might explain some of the change of asteroid patterns we’ve noticed in the last few months.”
“Precisely.”
“We’ll have to mark this location and come back to analyze the mineral contents more closely. If we can figure out what they’re mining, we might be able to figure out what they’re doing.”
“Location marked and broadcasted back to the Osprey, Captain.”
“Thank you.”
Jaeger’s relationship with Osprey’s AI had more or less settled into professional tolerance in the last few months. The AI still managed to get pretty screwy in the head in a pinch when pressures and tempers were running hot, but for the most part, they remained civil, if occasionally frosty. It wasn’t ideal when Jaeger’s social circle was composed of a whopping five life forms—and one of them couldn’t speak at all—but it was kilometers better than the ornery, spiteful AI she’d had to deal with back when they’d first entered this quadrant.
“One thing I don’t understand,” Jaeger mused aloud, “is why—”
She saw the explosion before she felt it. The video feed coming in from her spy cam cut to static. Directly in front of her, the asteroid she was hiding behind rocked—and suddenly hurled in her direction.
“Shit!” Jaeger barked, her hands snapping to the thruster controls. No time to think, and certainly no time to re-connect her cerebral adapter. Not when a mountain of floating rock was about to crash into her.
She jammed full power to reverse thrusters as the shadow of the asteroid fell over her, but it wasn’t enough. Cursing her luck, she banked, flew the fighter in a tight arc out of the path of the oncoming mountain and directly into a cloud of smoke and debris that hadn’t been there seconds ago.
Massive chunks of boulder hurled past, and she fell into a wild, reactionary flight pattern as she dodged this way and that. The asteroid the Creepers had been mining had exploded and now only existed as a cloud of dust and rubble. The explosion had destroyed her spy camera.
“Crap. Crap, crap, crap.” The fighter jerked as an errant boulder glanced off its aft wing. “What the hell happened?”
“I’m not sure.” Virgil could bring itself to sound only mildly puzzled by the chaos surrounding Jaeger as she desperately tried to keep her fighter from getting pulverized. “Seven, eight, nine—ah, yes. There they are.”
“Information, Virgil,” Jaeger said tightly. Her sensors were useless in this dust cloud, and she had barely more than a kilometer of visibility as boulders hurtled toward her at nearly the speed of sound.
“You’re nearly out of the debris cloud, I think,” Virgil said, sounding somewhat distracted. “But the Creeper vessels are—”
Ahead of Jaeger, the smoke faded into a sweeping star scape dotted with distant, drifting asteroids. She punched the breaking thrusters with a sigh of relief.
“—Directly ahead of you.”
Jaeger found herself drifting in the space between the debris field and a scattered swarm of the strange, crab-like ships. Their bellies had distended with mined ore, dwarfing their legs and giving them the look of bloated ticks.
Jaeger stared at them.
They stared at her.
Several of them began to glow with engine discharge. On her instrument panel, her radar screen re-activated, showing six of them converging on her location.
Great.
Jaeger punched a comms button, sending out a pre-recorded, generic “I come in peace” message. “I don’t suppose they’re willing to talk?” she asked hopefully.
“They seem to be powering up mining lasers once again,” Virgil noted.
Jaeger didn’t see many options. They had her surrounded, with her back to a dangerous debris cloud, and they weren’t responding to her peaceful hails.
She could only hope that, with their mass increased so much by their full cargo bellies, they didn’t have a very good turning radius.
She selected a gap between two of the approaching ships and punched the engine controls.
The Alpha-Seeker fighter had more tricks and toys than just the optional cerebral interfaces. It boasted a blindingly fast acceleration engine.
Jaeger suspected Seeker was genetically modified to withstand extreme g-forces. She, unfortunately, was not. Her vision grew fuzzy for a few heartbeats as the extreme acceleration shoved her blood to the back of her skull and crushed her into the pilot’s seat. Still, she remembered his advice and took it now. She breathed out. Hard. Everything came back into focus.
Thank you, Seeker.
Virgil’s voice piped in. The AI was reciting radar updates into her ear.
“Most have peeled away and are retreating, but you have four of them in hot pursuit. Mining lasers discharging. Captain? Do you copy? Have you lost consciousness again?”
“I’m here,” she gasped, surging upright as the inertia forces stabilized. Jerking the thruster controls, she threw the fighter into an erratic flight pattern—and not a moment too soon. A mining laser blasted over her fore wing, leaving a long dark scar across the hull.
Jaeger cried out in triumph and terror as a second blast rocked her opposite wing. “Shit!”
“You are rapidly approaching another densely populated section of the belt,” Virgil said. “The odds of safely navigating an asteroid field—”
“Never tell me the odds!” Jaeger glanced down at her g-force gauge and did some quick mental calculation. “Also, play anything from Star Wars.”
Trumpets blared, drowning out Virgil’s sigh as Jaeger flung the fighter hither and yon, trying to shake the pursuers. The mental math checked out. She could take her chances trying to navigate a dense asteroid field at top speeds, or she could try something almost as stupid.
It was going to be tight.
Never mind a puny human’s pathetic ability to withstand g-forces. The maneuver she was about to attempt would rip apart any stan
dard fighter.
Good thing the Alpha-Seeker was no standard fighter.
Jaeger waited until the approaching asteroid field was a series of looming monuments filling her entire screen. “Get ready to shout me awake, Virgil,” she called.
Then, in the same breath, she cut forward thrusters and punched reverse thrusters up to full power.
She did black out that time as the fighter screeched to a halt. Numb darkness swelled up from the corners of her vision and swallowed her whole.
A very nasty electric shock, originating from the diode on the base of her skull, brought her back to consciousness. “I’m awake. I’m awake!”
“Are you sure?” Virgil asked. Another painful shock zapped down her spine.
Jaeger reached up and ripped the diode—and several fine hairs—off of the base of her skull. “You’re a sadistic bastard,” she breathed.
She’d been out barely a second. As she’d hoped, the pursuing Creepers, with their full cargo sacs, couldn’t come close to matching her reaction time.
They overshot the fighter and vanished into the deep shadows of the looming asteroid.
An orange explosion blossomed from the darkness. On her radar screen, one of the pursuers vanished as the remaining three split, barely banking in time to avoid becoming fiery flowers, as well.
She needed to get that tracker planted, and she needed to do it now. She brought up the missile targeting system and cursed at the red “system locked” emblem that appeared. Of all the things to fail—
“Captain,” Virgil said. “You have the advantage while they’re distracted. You need to retreat.”
A trickle of blood ran from Jaeger’s nose. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and reached for missile controls. “Patch me through to Seeker again,” she barked.
She and Seeker might have their differences, but at least the man knew how to keep his priorities straight when a situation got hot. The remaining pursuers were beginning a wide arc to bring them back around to head her off, their mandibles glowing as they powered up lasers once more.
No good sitting still and waiting to get blasted. As Virgil connected them, she activated thrusters and took the fighter into an abrupt nosedive toward a different asteroid.
Seeker’s voice came through the speakers once more. “What?”
“Hi!” Jaeger’s voice was tight, giddy, as she dodged another stream of laser fire. “I took enemy fire, and my targeting systems are non-responsive. I need a quick reboot, and I need it now.”
There was half a heartbeat of silence as Seeker processed the request. Then he grunted. “There are three manual switches above the targeting screen. See them?”
The fighter shuddered as another blast of mining laser sank deep into the body hull. Something blinked red on her ship status screen. “Yes,” Jaeger gasped.
“Press all at once and hold for one-point-five seconds. That will reboot the system.”
Jaeger jammed her bloody palm into the switches. The targeting screen went black then whirled to life.
“Thank you, Seeker!” she cried as she wove a wild path between stray asteroids, banking and spinning away from her pursuers. On her radar screen, another blinked out of existence as it tried to dodge an asteroid and failed.
Then the screen flared to life, blinking green. All systems go.
Jaeger whooped as she banked the fighter away from the asteroids and toward another open patch of space. No good planting the tracer if her target went and crashed itself.
“What the hell is that noise in the background?” Seeker wondered. “Are those the shields oscillating?”
“Those are violins.” Jaeger locked the rear targeting system onto the farther of the two pursuers, aimed her fighter down a long, empty stretch of space, and fired.
The only indication she had that anything had happened at all was the new blip that appeared on her radar screen. It was small, moving fast.
Jaeger held her breath. They had carefully crafted these little tracer-missile packages to be minimally harmful, but there were never any guarantees in a fight.
On the screen, the tiny, fast-moving dot merged with one of the two pursuers and vanished.
The pursuer continued its chase.
“Thank God.” Jaeger let out a breath as she banked the fighter a final time and ordered the navigation computer to calculate a path back to the Osprey.
Mission accomplished.
“Now, let’s shake these bugs and go home.”
Chapter Three
Jaeger opened the cockpit and unstrapped her harness. She kicked, sending herself drifting up and out of the fighter as soon as Osprey’s cargo doors had sealed and the bay was fully re-pressurized. There was no gravity, artificial or otherwise, in the wings of the Osprey’s superstructure. In the past several months, Jaeger and her crew had become experts at moving through large zero-G chambers using only the push and pulls of the electromagnetic soles of their boots, though currently, she had hers turned off.
The Alpha-Seeker fighter hissed and began a cooldown sequence, billowing steam beneath Jaeger as she turned lazy, stretching somersaults, suspended in the middle of the docking bay. Twelve hours was too long to be stuck in a cockpit.
Something squat and bulky moved through the docking cradle steam. Jaeger barely had time to react before a monster the size of a Volkswagen bus hurled in her direction, emitting a rumbling purr that shook the air around her.
“Hey!” Jaeger laughed and spread her arms wide. Baby, Jaeger’s hyper-enlarged pet tardigrade, bellowed from her toothy face-hole and plowed into Jaeger. The force would have crushed Jaeger to a paste in standard gravity, but here in the bay, the two of them only tumbled and wrestled through the air as Jaeger laughed and Baby purred. Jaeger hooked her fingers through Baby’s loose collar and pulled herself up to straddle the water bear’s back as Baby soared through the open space.
“Have you been hiding out in the docking bay again?” Jaeger glanced at the corridor and saw that the hatches into the ship remained sealed. Baby must have been hanging out in the bay as the cargo doors opened to allow the fighter in, exposing her to all the raw radiation and cold vacuum of deep space.
Baby shook herself happily, no worse for wear.
The corridor hatches unsealed, and Occy and Toner floated into the docking bay. Occy whooped and leapt from the catwalk, sending himself hurtling into the open space, where he became a tumbling ball of powerful tentacles curled protectively around a fragile human child.
Baby changed her trajectory and barreled straight toward the boy like a bowling ball coming in for the strike.
That was Jaeger’s cue to get off the boat. Baby and Occy could get rough when they wrestled.
Not that she minded. Seeing those two at play reminded her why she was doing this. Besides, there were few things funnier than watching a tentacled kid and an oversized water bear playing.
Jaeger chuckled as she pushed herself off Baby’s back as water bear and tentacle monster collided with howls of laughter, activated her mag soles, and drifted lazily down to join Toner on the catwalk.
She gave the man a double thumbs up. “It finally worked.”
Toner eyed the fighter in its docking cradle as two repair droids activated and began a hull sweep. They hummed and reproachfully clicked as they sprayed temporary patching foam over the mining laser scars across its wings.
“Great,” he said. “Mission accomplished. Great job. Hey, can I fly the superjet now?”
Jaeger chuckled. “Like I would trust you with that thing.”
“I’m trustworthy,” he said, mocking hurt.
“Sure you are. OK, later.”
He rolled his eyes. “Later, later. Toner’s fun always has to wait until later.”
Toner had the bloodless look of an anemic and shoulder-length bleach-blond hair often on the greasy side. The only bit of color on the man at all was in his icy blue eyes. He was tall and wiry, his physique done no favors by his baggy white jumpsuit. She’d s
een him beat a dinosaur to death with his bare hands. She half-suspected his meth-addicted-overnight-janitor-for-the-mental-hospital style was supposed to lure potential victims into a false sense of security.
So he could eat them.
She leaned against the rail beside him and allowed herself a moment of quiet rest as the droids worked, and Baby and Occy wrestled. “A boy and his dog never get tired,” she observed.
Toner grunted and frowned as Baby soared past. He wrinkled his nose.
Jaeger insisted Baby’s method of self-propulsion in zero-G was odorless, a statement which Toner disagreed with profusely and at length.
“Hey.” He nudged her and pointed at some of the nastier scars across the Alpha-Seeker’s hull. “Looks like you’re cutting it kind of close there, Tiny.”
“It looks worse than it is. Even in a dogfight, hull integrity never dipped below ninety percent.” She paused. “And don’t call me Tiny.”
Toner grimaced. “A mere ninety percent? That’s fine then. We can totally make do with ninety percent of a captain the next time you get into a dogfight.”
“I don’t plan on getting into any more dogfights. I got the tracer planted. No need to go out again for a while, I hope.”
“Yeah, speaking of which—” Toner cut off abruptly as Occy and Baby settled onto the catwalk a few meters away from them—Occy stuck to the metal via his activated mag soles, and Baby delicately clutched the lattice in her long claws.
“It’s movie night.” Occy’s head tilted to one side.
“Is it Tuesday again already?” Jaeger smiled.
“Monsters,” Occy said pointedly.
Toner groaned. “You picked the movie last time.”
“Monsters, please.” Occy insisted.
Jaeger nodded. Movie nights were the best thing about being on the ship with this crew. Even if Occy always picked the movie. “Why Monsters?” She knew the answer.
“It has my favorite character in it. Thaddeus Bile. He has arms like mine.” Then his little-boy grin faded into a contemplative frown as he studied Jaeger. “How did the mission go, Captain?”
