by Marc Stevens
I awoke to the sound of soft footsteps on the deck. Tria was asleep in my arms and we were lying on the deck just behind the pilot’s chairs in the cockpit. I saw the Principal Investigator looking at me shaking her head. She had a small smile on her face that vanished when she noticed my eyes were open. My implants told me I had slept for more than five hours.
I whispered to Sael in hopes of not waking Tria. “Is there a problem?” Tria’s eyes popped open and she sat up.
“Yes,” Sael said. “The prototype mine detonated about fifteen minutes ago. Coonts and Klutch are armored up and want to go investigate. I told them it be would wise to speak with you first before taking any action. They are waiting by the hatch.”
Tria and I got up and fastened our suit liners. We went to the boarding hatch and sure enough, Coonts and Klutch were there picking at each other.
“Stand down you two. Let’s give Klutch’s diversionary tactics a chance to see if they work out.”
Klutch retracted his helmet. “That’s what I was trying to tell Coonts, Commander, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Coonts retracted his helmet and I could practically see the steam rising off of his head. He opened his mouth to start in on Klutch for what I was sure was a less than an accurate description of the situation.
I held up my hands. “Can that scat. I don’t want to hear anymore bickering!”
Coonts crossed his arms and fumed at Klutch, but both held their tongues. Tria took my hand and led me to the small galley area behind the flight deck. Everyone else had already eaten while Tria and I slept. We ate a fast meal of high-energy proteins that tasted similar to oatmeal and drank two containers of water to wash it down. My thoughts wandered to why the Prule did not continue the search for us any sooner. It was something I would never know unless of course one of them were to take a timeout from trying to kill us and spill the beans. Feeling almost well-rested and with something in my stomach, I decided we should take a look to see if Klutch’s diversion worked.
Tria and I, with Sael in tow, went down to the cargo bay to armor up. Sitting on the deck between our armor suits was a fresh crate of Chaalt grenades.
“Sael, was there anything else we can make use of?”
“Unfortunately, Commander, the AI on this shuttle cannot reprogram the IFF so you are able to use Chaalt weapons. If we live through this, you might consider getting a permanent Chaalt ID chip. Among other things, it will allow you to use the full range of our weapons.”
It was the part where Sael said among other things that bothered me. If I had the procedure done, the Chaalt would be able to identify me just about anywhere I went. That was something that I did not want. I stepped up into my battered armor and sealed it up. The suit seals were still in the green but I had a lot of yellow warning lights my suit AI methodically canceled. Justice’s subsystem knew better than I, there was nothing we could do about the degraded conditions of our armor. It would take a trip back to Alpha base to restore or possibly even replace them. As much as I wished we could make that journey, I knew it was just a pipedream.
“Everyone ready?” I asked.
“Ready!” My strike team replied in unison.
Sael pointed to the rear of the cargo bay. “We can exit this way. The shuttle will close the hatch in sixty seconds unless the hold command is given.”
I rapped Klutch on the shoulder. “Lead us out to the hangar hatch Troop Master.”
Sael gave the command for the cargo doors to open and they quietly parted. We boosted out and Klutch took us up above the shuttle to do a fast scan that came back negative for contacts. He set us down at the big hangar entryway. He looked over his shoulder at me waiting for my orders.
“Troop Master, I want you to make a hole and lean out far enough to get a scan and then close the portal so we can analyze your findings.”
Klutch gave me a thumb’s up and activated the device. He leaned out the portal and quickly pulled back. I was standing very close to him and my no light sensors could easily show me his facial features. His big lizard-like eyes were the size of half-dollars and his expression sent a chill up my spine. His suit AI transferred the scan to our HUDS. No one said a word. There were eleven Hunters and fourteen Maintainers in the corridor just outside of the armory entrance. I was wondering if they caught a scan of the Troop Master and the portal. A loud metallic clang on the hangar bay hatch confirmed they caught a sniff of something.
I pointed to the overhead. “Sael, what’s up above us?”
She hesitated for almost a minute. I was going to ask her again when a loud thump reverberated through the big door in front of us. We had indeed drawn attention to our location.
“Sael?”
“Come!” She said and then pointed to a spot in the overhead. “There is a service tunnel for the atmospheric machinery at that location.”
Not wanting to be trapped in tight spaces, I voiced my opinion. “I don’t want to be in another shootout stuck in a crawlspace.”
“We can access the deck above us from there without going outside of the hull.” Sael blurted. I knew being swept away into hyperspace was a very bad thing, but so was being ripped apart by Prule Hunters.
“Let’s go Klutch!”
The Troop Master did not need to be told twice. He boosted to the overhead and activated the portal device. I thought he was going to boost on through but stopped and turned to me.
“Commander, hold on firmly to my lower torso. If the Principal Investigator is wrong about the location of the service tunnel, you will need to pull me back before I am sucked out into hyperspace.”
I gave him a solemn nod and latched on to both of his legs. Tria, Sael, and Coonts must have decided if one of us is sucked out, we would all go out together. They grabbed both of my legs and Coonts grabbed onto theirs. The Troop Master leaned through and was instantly pulled violently forward. I was pulled with him and as my head cleared the portal, I saw the shimmering gray of hyperspace and Klutch flailing his arms like he was caught in a tornado. Tria, Sael, and Coonts groaned out loud as they pulled with all their might to drag us back inside. We all went crashing back to the deck more than a hundred feet below us. Our suit AIs reacted to the fall and hit our gravity drives just before impact. The sudden stop on the deck was still a jarring experience. It would just add more bruises to our already battered bodies.
Klutch rolled over and stuck his face mask against Sael’s. “Any more brilliant ideas?”
Sael shoved him away and pointed to a spot several feet back from her original guestimation. Two more resounding thumps from the hangar door reminded her we needed to hurry.
“Try there, I can’t be that far off!” She yelled.
The Troop Master boosted to the overhead and triggered the device again. We again grabbed onto each other. Klutch decided he wouldn’t take Sael’s word for it this time around and elected to just stick his arm through. He used the targeting reticle for his beam weapon and his AI transferred the data to our HUDS. There was a dark tunnel just big enough for our armored bodies to fit. It went forward toward the bridge. I slapped Klutch on his armored ass and he slid up into the passage. I glanced back down over my shoulder and saw an orange spot glowing on the heavily fortified hangar door.
“The Prule know we are here. We may need that shuttle before this is over with!” I called to Sael.
She nodded and called out a verbal code over our comms. A faintly visible bubble appeared around the shuttle. “If something happens to me you will have to use that code to regain access.”
The portal started flashing. I gave my gravity drives a short burp and boosted into the crawlway. My strike team wasted no time following. The passage was a lot tighter for Klutch because of his unusual girth. He was slowing us down but there was little I could do about it.
I decided to have a conversation on a private channel about the merits of his diversionary tactic. “It seems that your elaborate little ruse was a waste of time.”
“On the contrary Com
mander, it destroyed another Hunter, and what’s not favorable about knowing where your enemies are?” Klutch replied.
I purposely rammed my helmet into his butt. To me, it was the same as banging my head against a brick wall, which at the moment I felt I needed to do. It elicited a chuckle from the Troop Master.
3
Sael hailed us on our group comms. “We are far enough forward we can access the deck above us.”
Klutch twisted around onto his back and made a portal at the top of the service tunnel. He wasted no time pushing himself upward through the hole. I followed and we found ourselves in a machine room. Lucky for us it was unoccupied. Tria, Sael, and Coonts popped out of the portal and Klutch closed it.
Sael took a moment to get her bearings. “We are in the waste recycling compartment. If we go up two more levels, we will be very near the passage that will take us to the bridge.”
I pointed upward. “What’s up there?”
“A sanitation station and some of the crew quarters,” Sael replied.
I called to the Troop Master. “Let’s get moving Klutch.”
He leaned back and projected a portal on the ceiling. Pulling out his pistols, he boosted up through the hole. We rapidly followed, ready for a fight. We again found ourselves alone. This was becoming too easy, and the feeling we were going to pay for it was weighing heavy on my mind. Klutch did a fast scan of the corridor outside the latrine. He had no contacts to report.
“The remaining Prule might all be below decks trying to locate us,” Coonts suggested.
I knew that was wishful thinking. The Prule would have to be morons to leave the bridge unguarded during an ongoing hostile action. I have seen aliens do stranger things but still doubted if that would be the case. We cautiously moved out into the passage and went about fifty yards when Sael stepped around me and tapped Klutch on the shoulder.
She pointed to a spot on the overhead that was void of any machinery or piping. There was a six-foot-by-six-foot hatch with a red ring encircling it. The Chaalt word for rescue was emblazoned in various places around it.
“If we go up through that hatch, we will have access to the bridge lift tube.”
Klutch looked back at me and I gave him a quick nod. Standing in the middle of an open corridor made me feel like we had big flashing bullseyes painted on our backs. He projected a portal on the hatch, then boosted up into it. We followed and stacked in a tunnel that was the equal of the hatch. We were at a junction with tunnels going in different directions. There were large chevrons printed on the walls and pointing down each passage. Underneath each was a label indicating where they led to. Sael pointed to the one that said bridge lift tubes. Klutch took the lead and we headed in that direction. The tunnel was void of any obstructions so we moved down it silently on our gravity boosters.
I commed the Principal Investigator. “Sael, is there any way we can port into your quarters?”
“Not without going outside the hull.” She replied.
I was somewhat familiar with the Fury’s design but when the Chaalt took it to their homeworlds they made several changes that I had no knowledge of. I knew the bridge was on the forward end of the ship and it took up most of that location. Sael’s cabin would have to be against the outer hull. I was hoping for the best but now had to prepare myself for the worst. A shootout in the confined spaces of the bridge will most assuredly do catastrophic damage to the ship's control systems. I was hoping to avoid that situation. The Fury may well prove to be our salvation if we end up at a Prule base.
The escape tunnel promptly ended at another hatch that had bridge lift tubes stenciled in bold Chaalt letters around it. We were making good progress. Not wanting that to change, I ordered Klutch to make a hole. We stacked behind him and again made ourselves ready. He activated the device and got a good portal. He looked back at me and I was going to give the command to go when a Prule Hunter’s power whip suddenly came through and bounced off Klutch’s chest. The Troop Master shoved me against the sidewall of the tunnel and the rest of my team did the same. We had our weapons pointed at the shimmering portal waiting to see if the Hunter would step through. We had this happen once before and Klutch knew what to do if the Hunter decided to pay us a visit. As far as we knew, you could not shoot through a portal with an energy weapon. The energy was somehow siphoned off into interdimensional space. A projectile weapon was an exception to the rule. Tria and Sael were pointing their anti-ship rifles at the portal. We had no choice except to wait and see what the Hunter would do. Going through to find out could prove to be fatal. After more than a minute, the time I was sure the Bio-machine spent blazing away at the portal with its energy weapon, it stuck its capsule-shaped torso through the opening. The Prule didn’t have a face to register the shock, or anus to expel the surprise of seeing us with our weapons pointing into its visual sensors. It didn’t matter anyway, because Klutch closed the portal severing the machine’s torso before it could advance or retreat.
Thinking the Prule would not make the same mistake twice, I gave Klutch the order to go. He made another portal and we boosted through. As I passed to the other side, I found Klutch doing what he does best, blowing the crap out of everything in his path. A Prule maintainer was reeling from the point-blank shots Klutch put through its machine guts and another was attempting to grapple with him. I shot it in the biomass container as the Troop Master spun it around. I had assumed that was his intention but was proven wrong when a jolting blast knocked me backward into Tria and Sael. Klutch was attempting to use the Maintainer as a shield from a Hunter’s energy cannon. It only partially stopped the shot. It blew through the Maintainer’s torso, striking the Troop Master in the side. He was sent flailing down the passage out of the protection of the lift tube we were stacked in. Tria, Sael and I, fell several feet down the inoperable lift tube before righting ourselves. Coonts took that as an opportunity to send a little payback back at the Hunter on the behalf of Klutch. He stuck his beam weapon out of the tube entrance and gave the Hunter charging down the passage a double down payment. The resulting back blast sent large chunks of the Bio-machine flying violently in all directions.
“Coonts! Check your fire. We need the bridge intact.” Sael yelled over our comms.
“And what Principal Investigator, politely ask the Prule not to kill us!” He yelled back at her as he boosted out into the corridor in search of Klutch.
I could see the Troop Master’s life signs in my HUD. He was alive and like the rest of us, not in good shape. He now had a small breach through his outer Containium armor plate just under his left arm. His empty nanite reservoir soaked up the remainder of the blast, but he definitely felt it. He verified my suspicions with an unusually long sentence of his favorite Tibor profanities. Tria, Sael, and I boosted out of the tube and went prone on the deck with our weapons pointing toward the bridge. Other than the glowing remains of the Hunter, the passage was vacant of any movement. To Sael’s relief, the massive blast doors that protect the bridge were closed and still uncompromised. A quick inspection of the main corridor revealed the evidence of a battle we were not part of. Weapons turrets were hanging down from the overhead. They were charred and melted as was most of the once immaculate corridor. The remains of several Prule filled the passage just outside of the blast doors. What caught our attention was the decomposed Chaalt bodies. There were at least a dozen and all were missing arms, legs, and heads. The missing body parts were scattered about the passage.
Tria had once suffered the same treatment, resulting in the loss of two of her arms. She made it a point to comm her thoughts to the Principal Investigator. “There are questions that still need to be answered, but from what I can see, the Fury was not turned over without a fight.”
Coonts and Klutch came running up the corridor, breaking the spell the morbid scene cast over us. The Troop Master was gritting his teeth. He was in pain but would never admit it.
“We put several grenades in the aft drop tubes at varying levels Commander,�
�� Coonts reported.
“It won’t stop the Hunters, but it should give us a warning when they are coming,” Klutch added.
I was going to do the same to the tube behind me but saw that Tria and Sael were already following Coonts and Klutch’s example. They were tossing grenades up and down the tube. We regrouped and moved to the bridge blast doors. Evidence of Coonts's second beam shot marked a corner of the heavily fortified hatch. The burn-through of the shot that destroyed the Hunter partially melted the door to the bulkhead. It was still radiating considerable heat. Grenade blasts from two of the three lift tubes that accessed the bridge level, let us know we would be getting company very soon.
I didn’t need to tell the Troop Master his business. He was waiting for us to stack at his back so he could make a hole. He looked back at us. “When we go through, go low, and hit the deck, they have to know we are coming.”
