Conflict: The Expansion Series Book 3

by Devon C. Ford

  “Stand by,” he told her as he stared directly ahead intensely, “Nothing on thermal imaging. Optical intensifiers show some sign of animal tracks… but they appear to be old. I think.”

  She heard his voice, his accent, which had only been marred by the addition of the metallic, robotic edge to it where she had been told that they had repaired his scorched vocal chords. She could still imagine the younger face saying those words, the face of Jake Santana before the glowing green eyes that showed no emotion and the scars were added. She shook the thoughts away and got a grip of the mission.

  “Move out,” she told him.

  Chapter Seven – Deep Space near Alpha Centauri

  “Nothing?” captain Halstead demanded of her own bridge officer manning the tactical station.

  “No, Ma’am,” the nervous Lieutenant responded as his eyes darted over the screens before him, “haven’t detected a single trace since we jumped in.” Halstead chewed her lip and rested her hands on her hips, which only made the young officer more nervous, as though he felt that the lack of enemy activity would somehow be construed as his doing.

  “Comm, give me a ship-to-ship subspace with the Hammer,” the captain instructed. The acknowledgement came only slightly before the activation of the viewscreen showing the similar bridge layout of their sister ship. Halstead allowed herself a smirk that hers was newer and better, then lost it as she recalled the pain of sacrificing her old ship.

  “Anything your end, Captain Hayes?” she asked.

  “Negative,” Hayes answered sullenly from where he sat still in his command chair, “recommend we move to planetoids and drop into orbit for closer looks in case they went down anywhere.”

  “Agreed,” Halstead said.

  They jumped again in tandem, this time only for a few seconds to save themselves half a day of steaming and scanning as they advanced towards the last known coordinates of the Ichi before they escaped the unexpected enemy barrage. Neither of the frigates, even if caught on their own, would be forced to turn and flee under those circumstances, but then both were heavily-armed and reinforced space tanks after their last ill-fated foray outside their own solar system. It would take a few dozen Va’alen fighters to cause them concern now as they appeared in a new sector of the Centauri system within weapons range of each other and ready to lay down supporting fire if things got hot.

  “I’ve got… something…” the tactical officer said uncertainly as his voice drifted away.

  “Do tell, Lieutenant,” Halstead enquired with a hint of sarcasm lacing her tone.

  “It’s er, it’s debris, Ma’am.”

  “Incoming hail from the Hammer,” said the comm officer.

  “On screen,” Halstead told her, looking up to see the concerned face of Hayes staring back at her.

  “You seeing what we’re seeing?” he asked her with a frown of concern.

  “Not sure yet,” she told him, “just assessing now but from what I can tell, there appears to have been a scuffle out here.”

  A scuffle was an understatement. At least one ship of a decent size had been destroyed, given the amount of electrically-charged metal spinning around their immediate proximity. The only things in that sector, other than the scraps of evidence of a fight, was a large planet that resembled Earth with a little less water on the surface, and a forested moon. There was little chance of finding anything useful near either of the twin suns, as they would burn up if they got close.

  The two captains retired to their private offices and conferred, deciding to bring in the admiral to their discussions. The subspace link was activated and after a long wait the third portion of their screens blinked into existence with the harassed visage of Dassiova staring back at them.

  Halstead filled him in on their findings with Hayes interjecting with facts and opinions at times. This clearly annoyed Halstead but she kept her lips pursed tightly together when the interruptions broke her flow.

  “Conduct a search in grid pattern,” Dassiova told them, “start with the planet; that’s where I’d ditch if I had to, because we know the atmosphere is good down there. No beacons detected at all? You’re sure?”

  “Sir, the Tanto isn’t pinging on any frequency. If she’s out there, she’s gone dark.”

  “Understood,” Dassiova growled. He didn’t say that he was upset and concerned at the loss, the potential loss, of a rather valuable ship and a few irreplaceable members of the fleet. If it came to a fight on the surface of any planet, he would need those people to go in first and reduce the risks to his fleet and the other ground-pounders so that they weren’t cannon fodder. He didn’t tell them his concerns that not one, but two encoded messages had been transmitted back to Earth and he had no way of knowing what those messages contained.

  Understood, was all they got and all they would get. The pressures and decisions of command were his to bear, and the captains of his frigates, of his war hogs, had their own concerns without his burdens falling on them too.

  ~

  On the surface of the exoplanet orbiting the larger Earth-like orb, two low-ranking pairs of Va’alen warriors received an incoming message via the hardlines wired to their reinforced outpost. Their small bunker, uncomfortably short for their height, which forced them to spend much of their time sitting down, was linked to the purpose of the outpost’s existence high on a mountain peak over a thousand feet above them. That mountain top, leveled and flattened by pulse cannon fire and an engineering team dropped off by ships, housed a single surface-to-space rail cannon which was actuated and fired by the commands of the bunker built far below. That same cannon had sent a single shot at a falling object which the garbled message they had received told them might be human, and having scored a direct hit, they reported their success. Then they went back to playing their repetitive game where they used datachips containing simple statistical values for fictional characters, and bet those stats against the unknown card of the other. The winner kept the cards, and their game had gone on so long that both knew the deck inside and out.

  When the comm link, another hardline from their main base fifteen kilometers away, buzzed unexpectedly they dropped their chips and rushed to respond.

  “Rail gun bunker,” the smaller one of them said as he answered.

  “I know it’s the rail gun bunker, you cracked-shelled fool,” snarled the more senior Va’alen on the other end of the line, “calling the bunker you are in was literally the last thing I did in my wasted life. Did you think it might be a wrong number?”

  “I apologize, Aq D’marath,” the Va’alen said respectfully.

  “Stick your apologies in your…” the officer commanding the surface base growled and forced himself to give orders and not take out his frustrations on idiots. “There are two new enemy signatures in the sector,” he told them, “keep the rail cannon charged to ninety percent ready to fire if they come into range.”

  “But, Aq, if we keep the cannon at ni…”

  “I know!” D’marath snapped, “Don’t let the capacitors overload and I won’t have to inform your clan that you were killed for incompetence.”

  The line went dead, and the two rail cannon operators shrugged at one another. One leaned over and dialed up the charge to maintain a steady fifty percent until the coils would threaten to overheat; only then would they turn them down enough to remove the heat buildup. Until then, they went back to their game.

  ~

  “It’s clear,” Brandt said over the team channel, “Zero, Payne, stay on station. Turner, bring your group in.” The round of acknowledgements rang out as she maintained a scanning watch on the lower ground all around them. Specter did the same, but his head moved faster, and his artificial eyes saw more details at further range than even her HUD could compute.

  The advancing people came into view as the taller mech driven by Horne took point with the body of McMarrow mag-locked to the chassis. Behind him came the medic, who was half carrying Perez with one armored arm over his shoulder. Beside t
hem came Paterson, now conscious but still evidently unsteady, helped along by Rogers. It took them an agonizingly long time to negotiate the terrain with their burdens and Brandt could almost feel Horne’s annoyance at not being able to unleash the power and speed of the battle mech. She focused on the mercenary and activated the HUD outline of his mech with her eyes to bring up the stats. Already the battery power had fallen lower and the figures she saw made her grit her teeth. If the mech was going to be needed in a fight, then they would need to conserve the remaining power it had or find some way of recharging it. Her absent-minded thoughts killed the time it took for them to make their final approach up the incline towards their position. That reverie was burst by the warning Zero called out.

  “Movement, in the air,” he said sharply.

  “Where?” Brandt shot back as her head spun to find the source of the potential danger.

  “Your six, high and far,” the marksman said, “it’s an animal. Flying.”

  “Everyone down,” Brandt ordered, “find cover. Zero, you keep whatever it is in your sights.”

  “Understood, Commander,” Zero drawled back at her, every word exuding competent confidence and deadly efficiency. She watched as Turner and Rogers deposited their buddies behind rocks and sank to cover them, with weapons raised. Specter stood tall and her mind conjured the faint sound of his eyes whirring as he zoomed in on it. Horne’s mech powered up as the canopy locked down and the arm cannons whined in readiness to fire the heavy bolts of directed pulse energy.

  “Everybody hold your fire,” Brandt warned, “conserve ammo and don’t attract attention unless we have to.” She didn’t wait for an acknowledgement but turned to address Specter alone by muting the team channel. “What do you see?” she asked him quietly.

  “It’s big,” he said, “like, the size of our mech big. Wide wingspan. It’s just gliding this way, watching the ground like it’s scanning.”

  “Predator?” Brandt asked again in utter betrayal of her fears. Va’alen warriors were one thing, but alien creepy crawlies and wolves scared her more than she wanted to admit.

  “Large eyes, elongated beak, possible talons… I think yes.” The robotic twang to his words didn’t soften the blow of the information one little bit. She reactivated her mic to the team channel.

  “Zero?”

  “Here.”

  “This thing looks predatory,” she warned, “if it makes a move on us, I want you to take the shot.”

  “Understood,” he said, again without emotion. It was a task. A mission. He was merely in the universe to be the matchmaker; to introduce bullet to target.

  Seconds ticked by as slowly as if they were swimming through soup. Every breath, every heartbeat made the distant shadow grow ever so slightly larger until it formed a shape without magnification. Without warning, the direct approach vector switched to a lazy, looping arc as it lost altitude effortlessly.

  “Hold your fire,” Brandt reminded them, as much to calm her own nerves as theirs. With a piercing cry the flying creature loomed into view overhead and flapped wide, leathery wings with percussive cracks to slow itself before the elongated talons of its hind legs gripped an outcrop of rock and scraped with a sound like a knife dragging over armor. It settled with more flaps of its wide wings and slowly turned a long head to face them. It craned its head slightly and looked directly at Brandt, through her, and she fought down the urge to open up on it just because the look of it terrified her for a moment.

  “Hold your fire,” Specter said slowly, somehow reading her mind and taking over as she was temporarily paralyzed by the sight of it perched twenty meters from their position. It looked at them intently, cocking its head to focus a bloodshot, yellow eyeball at them. It issued a chirping sound as it bobbed its head at them, somewhere between a questioning noise and a challenge, and stepped down from the rock to walk towards them awkwardly on all four legs. It raised the extended tips of its wings straight above its head and moved strangely in the curious way that all graceful flying creatures had when on the ground. The chattering noise came again, followed by the snapping of the large beak which exposed rows of sharp-looking teeth like neatly arranged drill bits.

  “It probably hasn’t seen humanoids before,” Specter said over the channel, “it might not have a reason to be scared of us yet.” As if in answer to his words the creature made a series of darting movements in their direction as it chirped and snapped, as if trying to scare them into running away.

  Brandt swallowed and got a grip of herself. “Hold your f…”

  The creature exploded in a flash of bright orange light and dark red mist. The atomized cloud of blood and matter exploded outwards, cannoning a handful of smeared spots onto the front of her visor. Her mouth opened to yell at Zero, to curse him for taking the shot when he didn’t have to, but before she could start to speak, the facts replayed in her mind and she saw the slow-motion replay of the shot connecting. It wasn’t a charged bullet from the high-powered rifle, not unless it struck something inside the creature that detonated, but instead must have come from the mech with its new alien-technology cannons on each arm.

  “Goddammit, Horne,” she roared in unprofessional rage, “Stand down. Now!”

  “Negative,” he snarled back in fear, “there’s more of the things incoming.” The words stopped her next curse in her mouth as she scanned the skies. Horne was right; a dozen more readings flashed up on her HUD from the same direction the first one had come from. She made an instant decision.

  “Everyone inside the cave, move!”

  They moved. Brandt and Specter held their ground together as though some unspoken order had been given, as both turned to face the visible wave of incoming beasts. The thin, dark line of their approach grew darker and thicker and seemed to correlate directly with Brandt’s own heartrate and blood pressure. As the team commander, she could access the details of every one of them, but she worried about her own icon on their HUD’s flashing red to warn of medical problems. That kind of leadership crisis could be catastrophic for them all.

  She glanced back, seeing the injured and impaired with their escorts moving as fast as was possible. Rogers and Turner had sacrificed the dignity of their burdens and thrown them over their shoulders to speed up their flight as behind them Zero and Payne, weighed down slightly by the addition of McMarrow’ big support gun, ran hard to make up the distance. She glanced back again, seeing that the dark line was now made up of individually distinct shapes which, to her imagination at least, were larger than the one that was still partly smeared down the front of her armor.

  “Come on, Zero,” she said breathlessly, “pick up your feet.” Zero didn’t answer. She hoped he didn’t answer because all of his energy and concentration was going into running.

  Shrieks filled the air, sounding like the calls of birds mixed with the yowling of an angry cat. The cries echoed all around them in the barren, rocky wasteland. Brandt turned her head back again and nearly let out a sigh of relief to see the others almost on top of them.

  “Go, go, go!” she told them as they filed past. Horne’s mech stopped just ahead of her and he stepped aside to ready his weapons towards the approaching animals, but Specter ordered him onwards before Brandt could speak.

  “Horne, push ahead and clear the cave,” he ordered with a bladed gauntlet signal ahead into the darkness. To her surprise, the PMC turned and did as he was told without argument. She looked back to see Zero and Payne had closed the gap and were bounding up the slope in long strides that wouldn’t have been humanly possible without their armor. She glanced back at the flying threat to see that the line had split into three, with both flanks soaring in wide loops to surround them. She held her tongue, knowing that saying anything to hurry them up would only serve to fry their nerves instead. She dialed up the power on her modified weapon and settled it back into her shoulder, ready to fight if she had to.

  “Why aren’t they attacking?” Payne – it had to be Payne as the only other female voi
ce on the team – asked in between gulps of air. It was Specter who answered again.

  “They seem to be wary,” he said.

  “You wonder why?” Brandt shot back. “They probably saw what happened to the last one.”

  They spoke too soon. The cries reached a crescendo until they seemed to fill the air with a continuous wailing noise that sounded ominous to all of them. Visors met as they imagined locking eyes with one another, and the sound spurred them on to run for the gaping, dark entrance to the world below the one with the flying beasts.

  Chapter Eight – Proxima b Orbit

  The construction of the space station was something of a slow-burner. When Dassiova had first watched the graphic simulation of how it would go together, his boredom had dictated that he watched it on fast-forward. Having that quick imagery in his mind didn’t help his mood as the sections unfolding from the retrofitted Venture out of the porthole he stared through moved so slowly that he had to fight the urge to find someone to yell at.

  He called it encouragement. It was everyone else who thought he was yelling.

  The painfully slow progress was something that was unavoidable, but that wasn’t to say that he couldn’t make any other parts of their mission move a bit faster. The small station, rapidly prefabricated as much as it could have been in Mars orbit, required a well-coordinated team of a few hundred technicians and engineers, all trained for EVA – spacewalking for the uninitiated – and involved connecting everything together both inside and out. The central hub of the station, which was effectively a vertical and a horizontal ring around a nucleus containing the power supply, was the starting point and after half a day they had succeeded in constructing the main support arms for three of the rings to be towed out in sections the equivalent size of a couple of dropships, before being inched into place and locked in. Lost in thought as he watched out the window, he almost jumped in fright when someone spoke to him.