My alarms were blaring now, and I tapped the pad on my hip to silence them. Ignoring both Sai and Vash's questions as to what they were. I didn't have time to talk, only to work as my power reserve had dropped down to one percent, and the suit was shutting down systems to preserve what little I had left.
I grabbed the relay assembly and looked for the primary trunk. It was easy to spot as it was the only non-powered fiber bundle. I clamped the assembly over it and tapped the control panel to activate the grafting program. Just a few seconds and Vash would have control. Red warnings were flashing in my heads-up display showing imminent systems failure of the suit. But nothing was happening.
My eyes widened in terror and anger over how unfair the universe was when I saw that the skirmish with the pinger had damaged one of the power couplers. I let fly with the most unladylike string of curses as I pulled the cover from the coupler to see that the contacts were spread apart.
That's when I heard hissing as the power in the suit failed, and my atmosphere started blowing out of the enlarging holes where the nano panels were losing their cohesion.
I calmed for some reason instead of panicking. I was already dead, I knew that, but I was ok with it if I could save the woman I loved. I looked at my tools and then the coupler and smiled. A person can last about fourteen seconds in a vacuum before they lose consciousness, and up to two minutes if they don't have air in their lungs.
I whispered into coms while I still had the atmosphere for sound to carry, “I love you Vash.” Then as the suit completely failed I tore the rebreather off of me as the oppressive radiated heat of room from the friction heating the city hit my skin as I exhaled violently to get the air out of my lungs. If she said anything back, I don't know as there was no atmosphere to carry the sound.
My feet left the floor, and I grasped the relay as I felt my tongue bubbling, the moisture boiling away in a vacuum. I grabbed my largest spanner and with a silent scream in my head as I felt I was being baked alive, I jammed it between the contacts in the coupler and then was flying back to slam against the far wall when the power arced and completed the circuit.
My vision was getting blurry as the moisture boiled from my eyes. Come on Fixit, you can't pass out now! With an internal growl, I pushed off of the wall with all my might, floating back toward the relay. My hand was outstretched toward my target as my vision blurred farther while I fought the urge to inhale.
My biggest fear was that my hand would miss the screen that was now lit up, ready for activation. I sort of felt my fingers contact something as the darkness wrapped around me.
The next thing I knew, I was on the floor and inhaling deeply as I heard the hiss of the room pressurizing, Vashon's voice getting louder and louder as the atmosphere thickened, “Vega? Vega! Vega talk to me!”
I coughed and gasped as my vision came back to me. I could feel heavy vibrations through the floor, and I noted the doors were now closed. Alarms were sounding all around me, but they were almost drowned out by the rumble of engines, which could move a small moon, straining.
I held a hand up and looked toward the nearest camera on the wall. My voice sounded hoarse as I wheezed out, “I'm ok. The city?”
It was Doctor Germaine who responded. “Our descent is slowing, two more minutes at full burn and it will be arrested, and we can start proper insertion into the gravitational wakes.”
I realized I had gravity as I stumbled to my feet and toward the door, asking my girl. “The rest of the lower levels?”
She was quick to respond, “Pressurizing, all airlocks sealed.”
I stumbled to the door, tears feeling like they were burning paths down my decidedly red skin. I heard myself almost sobbing out, “Glitch... he saved me. We have to...” I slapped the door release, and it cycled, and there was a whump when the higher pressure of the room equalized with the lower in the corridor which was still pressurizing.
I let out a squeaking sob when, just a few feet away, moving slowly toward me, sparking from damage all over his orb and mobility platform which had only one tread now, was Glitchy... his grappler dragging behind him. Pieces of destroyed sewer pingers were strewn about the corridor, some embedded in the walls.
He squealed out a two-toned question that sounded like, “Fixit?”
I dove on him hugging him as tight as I could to me as I was rasping out, “Vash, we need Anna down here now, Glitchy is injured!”
I passed out hugging my mechanical hero to me, just after Vash said, “Medics and engineers are on their way, Germaine will be there in a moment. You did it, Vega.”
As darkness took me, my final thought was that I just wanted to go home.
Epilogue
The next eight days were hectic, though the first two I spent with doctors before Vashon or Lady Peregrine would let me out of my bed. The rest of the time I split between the room my girl was suspended in a cocoon of fiber optic neural nets and the secret Covert Sciences level where Glitchy was being taken care of.
I had missed some tense moments after I had passed out. Vash had lashed out at the escaping Dreadnaught. It took Sai and Anna a moment to realize what had happened when the entire city had lost power for a moment, and then a debris field was detected where the ship had been.
All of the cities were built in other star systems as Tau Ceti Prime was being terraformed, and they had to fly the cities to the rifts and do a rift jump to get them in-system here. So for all intents and purposes, the cities were mammoth spaceships.
Vash knew that if the carrier had escaped, they would bring the rest of the Pacification Fleet possibly before we could get our own fleet here for defense while we rebuilt the system facilities. The city has no defenses except small armament against small craft trying to land, so what my girlfriend did, was to project the gravity well used to bump the city to sub-light speeds.
She had targeted the artificial microscopic black hole at the position of the dreadnought. It took only an instant to implode its power core. It was an old tactic used by the first of the rift jumpers when we had run across one of the two other intelligent alien races discovered in their exploration. Weapons were useless against the more violent of the two races, the Unwelcome Ones, or Scourge, who had some sort of holy mission to purge the galaxy of all other intelligent life.
Captain Aiden Barret of the Rift Jumper Skimmer, the North Star, Old Earth's greatest hero, found that gravity was the one weakness in the Scourge defenses and so had used this tactic on the enemy vessels while sending the others through the rift to warn Earth.
Somebody knows her history.
It was a little chilling knowing how efficiently she had taken the lives of the people on the carrier. Sai had shrugged and said matter of factly as she rubbed her chin on my shoulder and explained, “She was a bit upset that they had almost killed you and Glitch at the time.” Was it wrong that I wanted to scratch the assassin between her ears?
When they finally let me in on the debriefings and aftermath, I learned of the fate of the other cities. And I understood why my ranger seemed distracted whenever I spoke with her. They had fitted relays in all the data cores, and Vash was controlling the systems on all of them until they could replace the core processors with some of the cores Prime was manufacturing for our Dark Fleet. That was the only way to be sure there was no malicious circuitry built into them. It was going to be a few months before I got my girl back.
Vash was able to break the encryption of the malicious code built into the circuit pathways of the crystal and sent the return code for the thousands of ships heading out-system and we had rudimentary communications. Some ships were short duration vessels like tumbrils and didn't have the fuel, supplies, or rations enough, and they just kept on going on their never-ending journey into deep space as tombs of innocent victims of the political machinations of the politicians of the two star systems.
As for the other cities... everyone on Starlight except Mayor Janctz and a handful of government officials were dead. They had survive
d because of a few dozen of the thousands of stasis pods on board were able to be powered by the dielectric solar power generation of the building coatings. I understood their reasoning that it was the leaders who survived, but part of me thought them to be self-serving reasons.
Gamadine and Tireial were able to keep most of their populations alive, but between them, they had lost over seventy thousand. Tireial had set up their parks as refuges almost exactly like Gamadine had.
The other two cities New Sydney and Correnth had held daily lotteries as they kept moving people into areas of the city with whatever heat, rations, and oxygen supplies they could until people started getting sick from CO2 poisoning, then they would hold another lottery leaving half the people behind.
Their mayors, King and LaTorres, refused to be left out of the lottery, insisting they would have nobody do what they themselves wouldn't do. King was lost in the first lottery in New Sydney, and LaTorres in the fifth lottery of Correnth. Unfortunately, just hours before the Betweener fleet ferried repair crews to the city to restore their systems. They, to me, were true leaders. And their sacrifices had saved a combined two hundred thousand individuals.
New Terra had fared the best, not that losing a few thousand people to vacuum and Pinger attack is good. But because the ranger of my heart had been basically slaved into the control systems on New Terra, they never lost life support.
It was almost funny to listen to the snobbish elitists of the city calling in daily, complaining about not having their pinger slave labor to cater to their every whim, and demanded production of newer, safer models to begin. I had to smirk. Any new pingers would not be the mindless slaves they were used to as none would have the Asimov inhibitor chips in them. Life was going to be a lot different for everyone from this moment on.
I had to grin whenever I walked the corridors and saw the cameras all following me, knowing my sexy ranger was watching me. I put a little extra wiggle in my hips for her until I realized that Vashon flirting over the coms, things like, “Lookin' good Fixie, shake it,” was being broadcast open channel. That explained the surviving sky rangers I passed always clapping, saluting, or whistling at me. I wished I had died in the control room.
I had to laugh the first time I visited Glitch. Engineers and techs were trying to hook him up to diagnostic probes. He was lunging at them with his plasma cutting torch blazing as they were shouting orders like, “Pinger A3-791, command override. Power down.” or “Pinger A3-791, command override, institute Asimov protocols!” or “Ahhh! It's going to kill us!” Ok, maybe I didn't laugh at the last last one, but it was still funny as sin seeing the tech who said it positively pale as a ghost.
Anna Germaine, the woman I'm still not sure if I like or hate, had just been watching the whole thing with a smirk on her face as she took notes on an iso-pad. Everything was an experiment to her.
I had to calm everyone as I stepped between them and my friend who was shaking so hard I was afraid pieces were going to rattle out of him. “As Dr. Germaine knows, your diagnostic tools aren't going to do you any good. You won't be able to make sense of the data.”
One said, “Don't get too close, it's dangerous. It's the rogue code, the thing is a killer.”
I rolled my eyes and turned to my buddy, “Hi killer.”
He stopped shaking, and if he had a mouth I know, he'd be smiling as he whistled and squeed at me. I snorted at the binary insults he was slinging about the 'fleshies.' I winked at him as his torch cut out then folded into his scarred and damaged orb. It was amusing to hear him come up with that fitting slur for humans.
I looked back to the incredulous looking techs after I kissed his ocular port and turned around to demand, “Somebody get me a multi-tool, then get out of my way.” Then I looked at the amused looking Director of Covert Sciences and added, “Preferably the one Dr. Germaine stole from me?”
They looked between their superior and me, the woman just shrugged and asked, “Why are you looking at me? You heard the woman. This project is compartmentalized and coded level ultra violet. Get her whatever she needs.”
The one who thought he was going to die, responded to her with incredulity, “But... she's just a dirter.”
My respect-o-meter went up for the doctor as she quickly straightened and snapped out with venom in her tone, “This... dirter... is the only reason anyone is left alive in the Tau Ceti system. The next person who disparages her is out and blacklisted from any tech or engineering position. If you must know, her tech rating is a T7...” She paused to let that sink in since she was the only T7 on Prime, before adding, “Or higher.”
The outright shock on their faces was almost comical to me. Take that you bootwaffles. Then she gave me one of her crooked smirks and left the room as I went about dragging Glitch's grappler up to him and looked at the shredded connectors. “Let's see if we can't get your hand working again, shall we?”
That reminded me, and I yelled out the door to the Director of Sciences whom I didn't find intimidating anymore, “And I want Flower's grappler control crystal that you took out of Vashon, it has some of Flower's distributed consciousness in it.”
I saw her do an airy wave over her shoulder through the windows as she walked past security without looking back. Well, it was either a wave or the grinch had flipped me off.
It was odd... I'm just a pinger mechanic, but ever since the cities had been put on the correct descent trajectories to return them to their proper places in the skies of Prime, nobody stops me from going wherever I want. Even into the strategy meetings for what we all knew was going to be all out war with Old Terra.
I stood in the main control room after Vashon kicked everyone out, and I just held her hand as she projected the planetary system in the air around us. We just shared our closeness as we stared at one fixed point in space, where we knew the rift was, knowing someday soon, the people of Tau Ceti would make their first stand there.
I just wanted to finish repairing Glitch and to take my Sky Guard ranger and go home. But we all knew that any peace we could find dirtside would be only fleeting. There was a storm coming, and I'd meet it with my girl and my family, head on.
The End
Sedition
A Fixit Adventure
By Erik Schubach
Copyright © 2020 by Erik Schubach
Published by Erik Schubach
P.O. Box 523
Nine Mile Falls, WA 99026
Cover Photo © 2020 Kris Cole / Depositphotos.com license
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, blog, or broadcast.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Manufactured in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Chapter 1 – Agri-Grid A1
I heard Flower squealing outside of the maintenance bay of Agri-grid A1 here on Tau Ceti Prime. Her warbling alternating of high and low tones sounding suspicious like, “Fixit!”
I looked from the tender we were working on in a repair bay to the door and cursed silently to myself. I told the weapon's tech who was assigned to learn how to maintain the harvesters and tenders which helped to supply food to the floating cities above, “Stay here... and don't touch anything! I'll be right back.”
Things have been hectic here since the Galactic Federation of Old Earth attempted to secretly wipe out our colony here in the Tau Ceti system because they simply suspected us of sedition. The sick irony of it all is that... they weren't wrong. Tau Ceti has been b
uilding a fleet to rise up against the oppressive system the government of Terra has used to keep all the human colonies in line with their thinking.
My thoughts went to Ursula Prime. They had been talking about the totalitarian governance that the Galactic Federation had over the other star systems and were about to vote on independence when their entire star system had been taken out by a freak accident, a quantum fusion meltdown of their orbiting power generation station.
Whispers on the solar winds were that it had actually been the covert Obsidian Pacification Force which the Galactic Federation has hidden from the member systems for generations. I had thought it to be just one of the spooky stories mom told me as a kid, an urban myth.
I recently learned of Prime's Covert Sciences, which had this Dark Fleet of our own being built somewhere to defend against such draconian pacification here in the Tau Ceti system. Again, it was ironic that this fleet, though just a whisper on the wind, was what brought the Obsidian Pacification Force to our doorstep.
They had no proof, only rumors, but it was enough for them to engineer our fate as another Ursula Prime. Only... we didn't fall. Their plan had been virtually flawless since, unknown to all of the inhabited systems, the Galactic Federation, who supplies all the control crystals to the various star systems, had embedded code buried so deep in the command subroutines that it was virtually undetectable unless you knew exactly what to look for.
This code, when activated by the Obsidian Pacification Force, could take control over any system the crystals were integrated into. And worse, they embedded that same code into the Asimov inhibitor chips installed in every pinger and drone, effectively turning them into killing machines within their target's own star system. An army of assassins who were no longer limited by the three laws of robotics.
Fixit Adventures Anthology Page 21
