Unsanctioned Reprisal

by Eddie R. Hicks

  Keep the vortex open long enough for them to pass through, and then force it closed. That was the plan Foster had in mind as she stormed into engineering, making a dash to the vortex key with her hand stretched out ready to make contact with it.

  Hopes were high that the Draconians didn’t follow, like their last encounter.

  Her omnipotent mind held the shrinking vortex open, allowing the Johannes Kepler to slip through. Phase one of their escape was complete, now on to phase two.

  Like a doorman at a busy night club, she forced the vortex to seal shut. The blackness of space and its stars were the only thing that surrounded the Kepler on its FTL voyage back to Taxah. Her mind waited for Saressea or Kostelecky to pull her away from the vortex key, the threat was halted. Whatever it was the Draconians were doing in the maelstrom, it didn’t involve the known universe.

  Or so she thought.

  The vortex flashed open, and the clouds and lightning bolts of the maelstrom expanded outward. In the center of it, was an armada of bio-ships traveling at FTL speeds with Charybdis ships nearby, having reopened the gateway.

  Foster saw engineering once again, and the mist lifting away from the vortex key.

  She stood motionlessly with a horrified expression on her face.

  “Captain, are you okay?” Saressea asked her.

  “The Draconians weren’t gathering to attack the station,” Foster said grimly. “I think they were following me.”

  The Hashmedai controlled Uelcovis system stood on the brink of an invasion twice the size of the one that attacked Earth.

  45 Peiun

  Space Bridge interior

  Derelict Space Bridge, Morutrin system

  October 16, 2118, 22:48 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  Magnetic rifles blazed, so did the one Chloe brought with her as she conjured a circular shimmering shield to deflect the barrage. The flabbergasted looks that appeared on the operatives’ faces were the same as the one Sarah had when she realized Chloe was a psionic.

  Peiun retreated to the airlock with Alesyna. There wasn’t much he could do to assist Chloe while armed with a plasma sword in a zero-g environment. It was a reminder of how Radiance won a great many battles in the past against the Empire, should rangers board a crippled Imperial capital ship. Psionics were the one thing that gave the Hashmedai a fighting chance in those situations, and more often than not, were left behind to delay or weaken enemy forces for the benefit of those wielding melee weapons and after rifle-wielding Hashmedai had been sacrificed. Peiun didn’t like that part of his people’s military history, nor how he was forced to do the same when he boarded the transport with Alesyna, but not with Chloe.

  He also didn’t like the HNI notification that flashed over his eyes. The Terran loyal UNE fleet opened fire upon the Rezeki’s Rage. Thankfully, due to its close proximity to the space bridge and other ships, only a few of the ships were able to fire. Though, that situation was going to change, a number of ships had moved to reposition and come about. Alesyna needed her powers back to give them a fighting chance.

  “Alesyna, are you unharmed?” he asked her.

  “I’ll feel much better when I can get this slave collar off.”

  Their bodies had weight once again when they stepped into the transport’s rear cabin. Penelope touched the collar wrapped around Alesyna’s neck, giving it a stern look.

  “What an arsehole,” Penelope commented. “He hands her over and doesn’t provide the deactivation codes?” Penelope grabbed one of her holo screens, bringing it in front of Alesyna. “Just give me a minute or two, I’ll get this off.”

  “My ship is coming under fire without its psionic, they won’t last long!”

  “Your ship will have its psionic,” Penelope said, as the slave collar deactivated and pulled away from Alesyna’s neck. “Now. Rather, in the time it will take for her to teleport back.”

  “Get back to the Rezeki’s Rage at once and take command,” Peiun said. “Don’t worry about us.”

  “As you wish,” Alesyna said, and used her powers to smother her body with bright blue light. She vanished from sight when the light diminished.

  Alesyna teleporting herself was the fastest way to get her back onto the bridge and get the overshields active. It should buy them another few minutes from the barrage of particle cannons, rail guns, and plasma missiles. Ultimately, the Rezeki’s Rage would need to pull out, sooner rather than later and hope the fleet didn’t chase. And before they could do that, Chloe needed to be recovered from the assault the operatives were delivering to her psionic barrier.

  “That was a quick minute or two,” Pierce commented at the speed of Penelope’s hack of the slave collar.

  “Not really, we still have another minute left,” Penelope said. It drew confused glares from both Pierce and Peiun. “Oh, you two must have misunderstood. That ‘minute or two’ was for my plan; the slave collar removal was easy.”

  Right, that plan.

  “Chloe!” Penelope shouted from the airlock doors. “Might be best if you joined us, before you-know-what happens!”

  “I’ll be fine, you guys get to safety!” Chloe shouted back.

  Penelope retreated back into the transport. Peiun shut and locked the airlock doors, ensuring nothing got through.

  “This better work,” he said to Penelope.

  Penelope shifted through her holo screens, finding the one that displayed what Durendal’s eyes did.

  “Oh, it will, trust me.”

  Durendal and Moriston entered the primary command center of the space bridge, where the human psionic crew gathered to combine their powers together, merging it with the station’s operating system to power the space bridge. There were five human psionics wired into their pods, resting comfortably within the weightless environment to perform their tasks.

  Durendal drifted to the edge of the command center, close to a wide window that displayed the growing battle outside against the Rezeki’s Rage. Moriston drifted beside him sharing the view of the dazzling battle.

  “They’re still in the Uelcovis system, but I don’t know for how much longer,” Moriston said. “We’re going to jump once we deal with the loose ends here.”

  Durendal smirked facing him. “Got any last words?”

  “What?”

  “Guess not,” Durendal said. “That’s okay; you never gave me the chance to say mine.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Durendal?”

  Warning alarms beeped within Durendal’s protect suit. Said alarms spread to his plasma grenades and rifle, they were all set to overload. Well, not the grenades, they were straight-up set to explode without being primed to do so.

  Moriston backed away from Durendal the best he could, given the weightlessness.

  “I have a message for you, Moriston,” Durendal said drily. “Maraschino says hello.”

  Durendal’s body exploded with a blast strong enough to turn his body into vapor, and shatter the thick window, exposing the entire space bridge to the cold hard vacuum of space. Those that weren’t expecting the blast found their bodies pulled out and set adrift in space with an icy layer of frost enveloping their bodies.

  After the decompression, Penelope, Pierce, and Peiun returned to the space bridge with Imperial EVA suits on. They examined the damage done, confirming that those who didn’t get vented into space were killed, with the exception of Chloe. Her protect suit, psionic barrier, and foreknowledge of the plan kept her alive.

  And what a plan that was.

  Penelope had convinced Chloe to surrender Devorei’s memory data crystal to her. She then used it to copy Devorei’s consciousness into Durendal’s body, overwriting his in the process. The Durendal that was exchanged for Alesyna was, in reality, Devorei in control of his body, who in turn disabled a number of security protocols for Durendal’s equipment, allowing Penelope to access them remotely and set them to overload.

  Devorei was brought back to life, only to die again. Thankfully, Peiun had the chance
to sit with him and learn everything he discovered during his mission to board the mercenary base, confirming that members of the Fortune Runner were indeed the personnel that used the Morutrin space bridge to travel to Sirius, only to vanish when the Carl Sagan did. There were a number of other important details; all of them recorded with his HNI for future reference. Once the conflict with the Terrans was dealt with, Peiun planned to study the newfound intel and continue the mission given to him by the empress.

  “Holy fuck,” Chloe yelled as the group arrived at the space bridge’s command center, staring at the massive gap in the shattered window.

  “Don’t forget what Devorei told you,” Penelope said. “I think it’s going to be a while before we find another body for him to upload into.”

  Peiun checked the status of the Rezeki’s Rage, it was still intact, and its shields holding. In fact, their shields and overshields weren’t dropping at all. They were slowly recovering. He drifted over to the shattered window and found out why.

  “The fleet is gone,” he said grimly.

  Chloe joined him in looking out into the star-filled void beyond. “How the hell?”

  Turning around, they saw the Terran psionic crew still wired and strapped into their pods. The decompression didn’t take them all into space.

  “Shit, they must have mustered what strength they had left to stay alive, then make the fleet jump away,” Chloe said.

  “Then died of exposure when their powers were drained,” Pierce commented. “Talk about committed to the cause.”

  The space bridge took the fleet away. It didn’t make sense, as they had no command ship that would allow them to teleport away in one attempt.

  “They jumped the entire fleet . . . that’s impossible,” Peiun said.

  “No, maybe not,” Chloe said, looking at the pods. “They’re human; our psionic evolution took a different path from Hashmedai and Radiance.”

  “Right, Lyonria experiments,” Peiun said.

  “More than that,” Chloe said. “The first generation of human psionics were created with the oversight of EISS, and then taken to work as black op agents like myself. Nobody knew what became of most of them, guess we know why. These five must have been training for this operation for years and figured out humans operating a space bridge could move a fleet without a command ship. It’d also explain how they pulled it off with a team of five psionics.”

  “How many psionics does a space bridge need?” Pierce asked.

  “Fifteen to twenty,” Peiun said. “It depends on the skill and level of cybernetic augmentation the psionic team has.”

  “Any idea where they went?”

  Peiun floated over to an active computer, it too showed its age as it used a computer screen rather than a holographic one. The data reports that outputted weren’t promising. “They wiped the logs, I have no idea.”

  Penelope confirmed his findings with a quick hack using her illegal HNI mods. Not only were the recent logs wiped out, also its navigational data. Wherever the Terran loyal fleet went, they didn’t want anyone to follow.

  “Peiun,” Penelope said. “What’s in the Uelcovis system?”

  “Taxah, as I recall.”

  “Unless you guys have any other ideas, I think that’s where they went,” she said. “Moriston mentioned the name of that system just before we blew Durendal up.”

  A disturbing image popped into Peiun’s head, one that depicted Taxah being ravaged by a fleet operated by rogue humans that hated Hashmedai, and all other nonhuman life. He ordered Alesyna to send out a telepathic broadcast to every Imperial psionic mind she could reach with a warning about what was coming to the system.

  The Uelcovis system, however, was one of many remote colonies of the Empire scattered across the galaxy. The only way in quickly was a space bridge jump, and that required MRF-equipped ships or command ships to be available, and a space bridge primed and ready to send said fleet into the system to assist. Finding a fleet, let alone a single ship, and space bridge that met that criteria could take hours at best, days at worst. From there, it would take another hour or so to materialize into the system. The reinforcements wouldn’t be arriving to stop the Terran fleet. They’d be arriving to bury the dead.

  The Rezeki’s Rage was officially the only ship that was near a space bridge, equipped with an MRF and aware of what was going on. They had to leave, and it needed to be now.

  “Alesyna,” he said, using his HNI to establish a communication link with her. “Please join us back on the space bridge . . . we’re going to need your assistance.”

  46 Foster

  XSV Johannes Kepler

  Far edge of the Uelcovis system

  October 16, 2118, 23:43 SST (Sol Standard Time)

  The Johannes Kepler whooshed past fleets of Hashmedai warships. The Kepler was fleeing from the behemoth-sized vortex slipping an armada of bio-ships into the system. The Hashmedai fleets were en route to quell the new threat. The two forces meet one point five AUs away from Taxah. Tolukei’s ESP sweep of the battle sent disturbing tactical data that appeared on the bridge’s view screen as a hologram.

  Yellow dots on the hologram showed the location of the Imperial forces. They were vanishing at a rate of two ships per twenty minutes. The Draconians’ armada saw no decrease in the number of their ships, only an increase as the remainder of their armada continued to leave the vortex.

  New ESP data refreshed the screen as the Johannes Kepler neared Taxah. All Imperial ships in the system changed their course, abandoning the worlds they orbited, entering sub light speeds to assist the shrinking Imperial fleets from getting steamrollered by the Draconians. The Hashmedai were putting up an all-or-nothing fight, and it left worlds like Taxah defenseless.

  A blob of clustered blue dots popped onto the far corner of the tactical screen. It made Foster’s eyes squint, and her fingers scratch her head in confusion as to why the Johannes Kepler wasn’t the only blue dot on the map. Red dots were enemies, yellow were neutral or allies, and blue dots? Those were ships transmitting UNE IFF codes.

  “What the hell is the UNE navy doing out here?” Williams said, having observed the same data from his station.

  Foster addressed the one member of the UNE military that might have an answer. “Miles, what’s up?”

  The Marine shrugged, stepping closer to the view screen. “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”

  “Captain,” EVE said. “I recognize the name and configuration of the UNE vessels. They are the same ones that assisted us in the Kapteyn’s Star system.”

  “Th’ fuck?” Miles said.

  “The missing fleet . . .” Williams said.

  “Ain’t so missing now, Dom” Foster said.

  “I’d still like to know how they got here, and why?”

  “Who cares, this is the backup we need,” Foster said. “Their timing couldn’t be more perfect.”

  It was perfect timing indeed, almost too perfect, like it was supposed to happen. It was either a gift from God, a gift from the three Radiance Gods, or a gift from Tiamat.

  Foster was ready to find out.

  “Get us back to Taxah,” Foster said. “We’s still got people there, and they might need help with evacuation now the Imperial ships done gone left ‘em behind.”

  “Us helping Hashmedai evacuate?” Odelea said. “Gods, forgive us.”

  “If this goes against your religion, Odelea and Tolukei, I understand.”

  Though with Tolukei being a Muodiry, she had doubts he was fully invested in Radiance religion. She wouldn’t be surprised if he believed in their three Gods out of convenience and fear of being exiled rather than true faith.

  “The Hashmedai, as vile, lust-driven, and demonic as they are, helped protect Sirius from an attack,” Tolukei said. “It would be dishonorable not to return the favor.”

  There were no further objections from the crew. Foster made her decision. “Then, let’s do this.”

  Foster’s face did a double take, when she saw hor
des of wyverns in the skies of Taxah, unleashing their plasma-fueled breath attacks on fleeing civilians in the city of Muro below. Both sensor and ESP scans revealed the Draconians were being delayed by Imperial forces. There were no Draconian ships in orbit of the Earth-like planet.

  “How the hell did they get here before us?” Foster said, pointing at the viewer as they made their landing on the snow- and ice-covered landing platform.

  “It is a pretty big fleet, Captain,” Williams said. “They must be spreading fast despite the efforts of the Hashmedai.”

  “Yeah, and we’s faster than them, and had a head start,” Foster said.

  “I didn’t sense any dragons on our way here,” Tolukei said.

  “Nor did I pick up any on scanners,” Chang added. “Besides, I thought it was their ships and weapons that were FTL capable, not their dragons?”

  “That’s right; their ships deliver the dragons to the fight,” Foster said.

  “Incoming transmission, Captain,” EVE said. “It is from Master Gunnery Sergeant Chevallier.”

  “Master Gunnery Sergeant,” Foster snickered. “Man, that’s gonna be such a mouthful to say, we need to shorten it.”

  “I nominate Master Guns,” Chang said. “No wait that’s too common in the military. How about, Grand Masta Clapa? It goes well with her MC nickname, kinda. Or . . . better yet—”

  “Chang!”

  “Gunclapa? That’s pretty short!”

  Excessive humor; Chang was doing his thing to hide the fear and stress that was probably going through his body. Fear and stress that was likely going through everyone’s body, not to mention the need for sleep, they’d been at this all day. As usual, Foster let him be, he had every reason to be worried, losing the system didn’t just mean the end of the lives of the people that lived in it, it also meant the Johannes Kepler was going to be stranded if the Draconians took out the space bridge. Without additional testing, the maelstrom wasn’t a reliable option. The Draconians currently flying into the system were proof of that.