Conflict: The Expansion Series Book 3

by Devon C. Ford

“No,” Torres said, “and we can’t exactly tell them now, can we?”

  ~

  “Rogers, report?” Brandt barked as she held Paterson down into a vacant seat using the power of her armor against the physical forces in play. He strapped himself in and nodded up to her in thanks, seeing only his own face reflected in her visor.

  “The Ichi has jumped away. Two enemy fighters are floating scrap and two others are forming a close escort on the pair towing… whatever that thing is they’re towing.”

  “Are we clear?” the commander asked the pilot, prompting a second’s pause as he double-checked his readouts.

  “We’re clear. Shields are holding steady and Shroud is showing in the green.”

  Thank God for Paterson, Brandt thought, looking at the man himself and seeing only annoyed concern on his features. “Sound off,” she barked into the open channel, looking down at Paterson before reaching out and thrusting a headset at him

  “Zero.”

  “Horne.”

  “Specter.” The robotic twang like a unique accent.

  “Rogers.”

  “Payne,” a female voice said.

  “McMarrow,” the large figure beside Specter, clasping a squad support gun to his chest like it was loot.

  “Perez,” another male voice.

  “Turner, medic,” the last armored man said as he glanced up at the commander.

  “Paterson,” the confused scientist added after a pause. Brandt nodded to him, placing a gauntleted hand on his shoulder to try and reassure him.

  “Rogers,” she said as she turned and walked towards the cockpit, where she pulled herself into the co-pilot’s seat and hit the buttons to give her virtual control of the quad cannon atop the small shuttle, “take us away at one-third speed.” The pilot complied and deftly manipulated the controls to move them away from the conflict area in the hope that they wouldn’t be noticed. Brandt, detached from the real world inside the ship, watched the outside space through her HUD as her eyes controlled the direction of the gun turret.

  “Nothing,” Rogers muttered, earning a shush from Brandt.

  “They’re moving away,” she said, seeing the two vessels towing the ungainly lump between them grow smaller.

  “Yeah,” Rogers said after checking the passive sensor data, “moving slow – slow for them at least – and the last pair of fighters are shrouding again to follow.”

  “They haven’t seen us,” Brandt said on the crew channel, “they must think the Ichi was all we had here, and they know it’s gone now. We follow them; see what’s what.”

  “Aye aye,” Rogers said as he moved the small, shrouded ship off after their slow-moving quarry.

  “Everyone else okay?” Brandt asked, expecting to hear positive affirmations and receiving them. Up until the line reached Paterson in the chair furthest away and nearest the ramp.

  “Paterson,” she snapped efficiently, “you good?”

  “Aw maaan…” Paterson moaned, “My wife’s gonna kill me!”

  “Your wife?” Brandt let out involuntarily.

  “Yeah, she made me promise not to do anything dangerous or stupid again. I was supposed to stay with the fleet or on the space station. Figured she’d never know if I stayed with the ship…”

  “Yeah, well,” Brandt said as she clutched at straws for positive comment when she didn’t even know her friend was married, “she ain’t gonna find out from your obituary that I dragged you onboard to save having your ass vented into space at least. Get a grip, dude,” she added, connecting him to their shared past like a live electricity wire being touched to a circuit. At her words, Specter gave a small start, glancing around as though something had woken him from a power nap behind his mirrored visor. Paterson watched as Horne tapped at the device inside his left forearm and glanced at the cyborg as he relaxed.

  The hell did you just do, asshole? he thought to himself as his eyes narrowed involuntarily. He knew he shared an acidic dislike of the man with Brandt, guessing that she wanted any excuse to jettison the PMC into space, but what he thought he had just witnessed troubled him.

  Some kind of sedative? An increase in dopamine levels? He had no time to dwell on that, as the mission and his survival came first. Paterson dug deep inside himself, thinking back to the four years he had spent as a trained recon trooper, a good one at that with two confirmed terrorist kills adorning his official service record, and he tried to summon that mindset from before he had earned his degree. After that, he had forgotten the military life and gone straight into prototype systems development research on behalf of the shady underbelly of the United Nations, the UN Intelligence Directorate. He searched himself to find an echo of the capable soldier he had once been.

  “Aye aye, Commander,” he said with sudden gravity in his voice that was somehow stronger than the artificial gravity of their ship.

  “Targets heading towards the exoplanet,” Rogers cut in, “matching speed and course at a five-thousand click distance.”

  “Keep on the sensors to make sure they don’t make us,” Brandt said.

  “On it,” the pilot snapped back, suddenly all game and no jokes, “taking us in on a new heading to avoid outlining us against the smaller sun,” he informed them.

  Impressive, Brandt noted privately.

  The next hour went slowly, tensely, as they all expected to be detected at any point. Their protocol was to stay dark on comms unless contacted by the fleet, so the silence on the sub-space comm array was expected. After an hour, Brandt called for Zero to take over gun control via the software patch in his suit, which he did unquestioningly. An hour spent looking down the sights with your metaphorical finger on the trigger was an insane amount of mental pressure to bear; worse when combined with the added burden of command. When relieved, Brandt unstrapped from the cockpit chair and walked back into the cramped cargo area where her tiny crew were squashed into the small seats. The rest of the cargo area was taken up with the compressed forms of the two battle mechs she had luckily ordered loaded into the Tanto well ahead of time. Strong and worrying memories – the kind of memories that kept a commander awake all night in worry – stung her from the last time she had set foot on the surface of an alien planet and had her ass gift-wrapped and handed back to her complete with a bow on top.

  Only the working wireless link to the Tanto’s cannons she had just relinquished control of had saved the entire team from being ripped apart by just a single pair of Va’alen, or ‘roaches as the crew had all started calling them, and she was adamant that the next time she met one of them, she would be the one standing victorious over the body of her enemy. At least their weapons were more powerful than the last time they had tangled.

  Jesus, she thought, when did you get so morbid?

  “Change of heading,” Rogers called out, snapping her of her reverie.

  “Direction?” she asked.

  “Small moon orbiting the planet,” he said, indicating with a pointed finger on the holo-display. The probe data on the system had been downloaded and the archive image showed a satellite not unlike their own moon, only densely forested and with obvious surface water; almost like the hilly wooded areas of the Canadian lakes where the mountain ranges jutted out into the dark water like fungal fingers capped with white snow.

  “Nicer than ours,” she quipped, earning a scoff and a chuckle from Rogers, who agreed wholeheartedly. Theirs was just a gray lump of dust that kept their oceans from going haywire, whereas this one seemed like a habitable planet.

  “Anything on sensors?” she asked.

  “Escorts are breaking away,” he told her, “direct heading towards the last known location of their ring device thingamajig…”

  “The gateway device,” Brandt educated him unnecessarily. Rogers gave a shrug and made a noise which she took as a ‘meh’.

  “Stay with the cargo… thingamajig,” she told him. They did, and when they got closer to the moon, the sensors picked up massive electrical activity in the upper reaches o
f the atmosphere.

  “What the hell is that?” Rogers asked her.

  “What the hell is what?” Paterson asked from way in the back.

  “We’re reading major electrical storms in the atmosphere of the moon,” Brandt told him, “sensors can’t penetrate it.”

  “Is it natural or manmade?” Paterson asked, earning a moment of silence as nobody knew how to answer. “Well, not manmade obviously…”

  “Can’t tell,” Brandt said, “going to burst a sitrep back to fleet before we go further.” She tapped at the ship’s console to send the brief text report via sub-space before hitting send. Almost instantly, the sensors lit up as the two escort ships they were following stopped and powered up their shields and weapons, the process lighting up the board with threat warnings.

  Rogers yelled something which she didn’t hear because the oppressive vibration of their shields being pounded shook her brain inside her armor.

  “Get us out of here!” she yelled, ignoring the shouts of protest and alarm coming from a few of them in the passenger compartment.

  Rogers did. He rammed the manual controls hard and tore through space at a speed which told everyone he no longer cared if they could detect their ship. He didn’t know how they already had, but he had a suspicion based on the coincidental timing of Brandt sending the subspace message.

  “One ship in pursuit,” Brandt said as she dropped back into the weapon control sub-menu, “Zero?” Brandt called out, dragging out the marksman’s name. “I have the guns.”

  “Handing back control,” he answered simply, his voice radiating calmness under extreme pressure as the hull vibrated with Brandt’s barrage of fire when she began lighting up the black expanse with bright orange bolts of directed energy. The enemy ship zigged and zagged as it varied its forward momentum randomly, making it impossible for her to send accurate fire to where it would be by the time her shots arrived through the empty space between them, so she settled on filling the void with a barrage of full auto in the hope that something would land a hit.

  In contrast, their initial flight away from the contact gave the pursuing Va’alen a line on their speed and heading which Rogers had timed only fractionally wrong as he pulled out of the dive too late and suffered five more direct hits to their shields.

  “One, no two more contacts inbound,” he shouted. Brandt took her eyes off the targeting reticule for just long enough to see how the new signal converged on their beleaguered ship. She made the only sensible call available to them.

  “Jump us out of here,” she ordered. Rogers didn’t acknowledge her, simply hit icons on the display as he hauled on the manual controls, then reached out a triumphant finger to activate the Fold Drive.

  Just as another series of impacts rattled them hard.

  “Fold Drive’s offline,” their pilot yelled in panic, getting both hands back on the controls and hauling for all he was worth to try and keep them out of harm’s way. “So are the forward and port shields!”

  “Shit,” Brandt cursed in a hiss as she worked the gun turret as hard as she could. She knew they couldn’t mix it with four enemy ships, even if the new sensor readings were in fact single vessels and not pods of two and four like they had seen before. She was stuck between guaranteed destruction, which would result in mission failure, along with the death of some of her favorite people, or the uncertainty of the moon’s surface.

  “Get us down there,” she said in a low voice through gritted teeth.

  “Where?” Rogers asked, his own voice higher than usual.

  “The surface. Put us on the deck. Do it now!”

  Chapter Four – Proxima Centauri b Orbit

  “I asked for a private conversation,” Dassiova complained, “and he jumps back from his recon mission instead?”

  “Sir, the Ichi is reporting enemy contact,” the comm officer said sternly, “Captain Torres is requesting face to face comm.” The admiral stood and walked towards his office without another word, knowing that the communications officer would connect the call to his terminal in a few seconds. He sat, put on his unimpressed face, which came to him so naturally, and activated the link.

  “Okay, Son,” Dassiova said, “from the beginning.”

  “Admiral, enemy contact near the twin suns,” he answered with a wild look in his eyes, “they appear to be able to detect us when shrouded, Sir, it happened when we used the subspace comm.”

  “That’s what I wanted you for,” Dassiova said in annoyance, “someone used the array on your ship without authorization. They got around our security protocols a little too easily and sent the transmission a few minutes ago.”

  “No, Sir,” Torres insisted with a resolute shake of his head, “the Va’alen detected the subspace comm you sent. They pinpointed the ship and fired on us.”

  “…Oh…” Dassiova began, unsure of what to say for a brief moment before Torres continued.

  “We managed to deploy the Tanto with a recon team onboard before we jumped,” he said, “transmitting the data to you now on what we were following before they detected us.”

  “Hold up, Captain,” Dassiova interrupted, “just to be clear: you’re telling me that the enemy can detect us when we’re shrouded if we use subspace communications?”

  “Yes, Sir.” He left off the unnecessary fact that even if the Indomitable was equipped with a shroud device to mask their signature, their sheer size and output would be visible anyway.

  “And you were covertly trailing the enemy before I hailed you?” the admiral asked carefully.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Goddammit,” Dassiova cursed, slamming a flat palm into the desk. “So the unauthorized transmission back home can’t have originated from the Ichi.”

  “Unless it was pre-programmed and already transmitted back to the Indomitable before we jumped ahead,” Torres answered, disbelieving his own logic as his trust in his crew was absolute.

  The admiral paused. “Hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted, “I’ll look into it. Now, tell me what you found before you had to evac from the sector.”

  ~

  Their entry to the atmosphere of the moon was nothing short of a gut-churning, terrifying death ride. It was worse than any theme park ride or Earth re-entry or combat dropship deployment any of them had ever suffered.

  “It’s not my fault,” Rogers complained over the ship channel, “it’s the ion storms in the upper atmosphere; we’re hitting pockets of electrically charged air everywhere.”

  Nobody answered. Nobody could do much except hold their breath and try to keep the contents of their stomachs inside their bodies as the pilot slammed them bouncing through the fierce electrical storm like a ball thrown down a tight stairwell.

  The ship groaned and lurched, complaining at the treatment it sustained until it seemed as though they could endure no more. Brandt, gauntlets gripping the arms of the co-pilot’s chair so tightly she left grooves in the smooth polymer from the force of her servo-powered fingers, closed her eyes as the only way to cope with the flashing imagery that threatened to overload her brain. She hadn’t had time to disconnect the remote targeting program from her suit, so whatever the exposed quad cannons saw was projected straight into her HUD, giving her the unfortunate virtual reality experience of riding the storm from atop the Tanto like she was surfing it. It was too much to bear, too much for any mere human to endure beamed directly into her brain, and she squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to block out the swirling vortex of bright slices of sky corresponding with the lurching movements of their vessel as they were pounded by the charged particles.

  “Shields at thirty percent!” Rogers yelled unnecessarily loud into the channel, “And I can’t see an end to this shit any time soon.” His warning was vague, but it was a warning, nonetheless.

  “Take us straight down,” Brandt ordered through her grinding teeth.

  “You want me to nosedive?” Rogers responded in a near shriek.

  “Do whatever the hell you have to do
,” she growled, eyes still screwed tightly shut, “just get us on the deck.”

  “Oh, that’ll happen, don’t you worry. You know… gravity?” Rogers quipped breathlessly as he fought the controls. “Don’t think you’ll like the state we’re in when we get there, though…” he added, not quite under his breath.

  Brandt had no answer. She couldn’t manage another word, especially not as the sound of choking and vomiting sounded over the channel from someone in the rear. She tried to open her eyes, to blink on the squad icons and check the health status of the other people onboard, but the disorientating light show filling her field of view threatened to make her throw up too.

  “Can you…” she gasped, “can you shut off the turret link to my suit?” A pause filled the ship with only the choking sounds of labored breathing and vomiting dominating the channel.

  “Got it,” Rogers snapped, making her open her eyes and blink rapidly to try and clear the confusion that had assaulted her brain. She checked the team, seeing elevated heartrates everywhere except on Specter’s readout, but even that showed a spike in neural activity, indicating at least some form of human response to the life-threatening peril they were in.

  “Perez,” she shouted, seeing his vital signs peaking dangerously high, “open your visor.”

  No response.

  “Turner,” she tried, calling their medic in the hope that he would be able to assist. The chances of her making it back there in one piece if she unstrapped were slim. “Turner,” she tried again with more urgency, “can you reach Perez? I think he’s choking.”

  “Can’t… reach him… Commander…” Turner responded. In desperation, she looked at the squad readouts on her HUD again. Paterson, the only one not in a protective suit, had passed out, from what she could see of his vitals. Perez was spiking dangerously, and the others weren’t far behind on pulse and blood pressure readings. Any one of them, herself included, was at risk of losing consciousness at any point. If Rogers succumbed, they were all guaranteed a sudden but savagely brutal death when the Tanto inevitably found the surface at a speed fast enough to atomize them all and leave a crater the size of a large building.