The reflection of yellow warning lights flickered off the dark surfaces of the strike team’s armored spacesuits. Thomas completed his quick inspection of their gear. As usual his troopers were suited without error, and he nodded his approval to his second-in-command, Sergeant Bunyasiriphant, before turning to watch one of the Hawks rotating into position. The sergeant turned her attention to the line of eight troopers and began barking the standard pre-mission spiel.
A Terran destroyer had been discovered nearby, dead in space. Thomas and his strike team were going to board and investigate. A second set of warning lights flashed to life at the port-side airlock, and the doors began to slide open as another Hawk returned from the scene.
Bowen’s XO, Lieutenant Perry, approached Thomas across the hangar deck, moving awkwardly in his full spacesuit. The emergency suits worn during battle stations only had a few hours of life support in them, but they were thin enough not to impede regular movement in the close confines of a warship. The full suits were designed for extended excursions into open space, and while much better at keeping their occupants alive for long periods, they were bulky.
The strike team’s armored suits had servo assists to reduce their weight, if not their bulk, but Thomas was so used to wearing his now, he barely even noticed the soft whirrs as he stepped forward to greet the XO.
“It’s Toronto,” Perry said without preamble. “No power emissions, no life signs—but no obvious battle damage, either.” The destroyer Toronto had been reported missing in action some months ago, Thomas recalled, a suspected victim of a lucky stealth attack. Since gravi-torpedoes usually left nothing but a thin cloud of plasma, no one had ever expected to find any wreckage. A fully intact ship, seemingly abandoned, made no sense.
“Did the lifeboats jettison?” Thomas asked.
“No.” The XO, a man three years younger than Thomas, suddenly looked much older as the strain showed on his features. “This isn’t going to be pretty.”
Fleet personnel didn’t see death up close and personal very often. Thomas felt his first glimmer of sympathy for the man who stood before him. Any XO had to act like a tough bastard in order to enforce discipline, and showing weakness was anathema to line officers in general. But the pressure was wearing on Perry.
“I’ll give you a heads-up before you arrive,” Thomas offered.
“We’ll be on station within ten minutes of your boarding—don’t search beyond what you need to in order to assess the threat.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sergeant Bunyasiriphant appeared at his side. She was tall, and her wiry frame was surprisingly strong. Small eyes against dark-brown skin revealed little, and after nearly a year of serving with her, Thomas knew almost nothing about her personally. But she was competent and loyal.
“Sir, our ride’s ready.”
The just-returned Hawk had rotated on the deck and was now pointed back toward the airlock, doors open for the troopers to climb in. He nodded farewell to the XO and followed his sergeant to the small craft.
He paused at the doors to let Wi Chen climb down. The youngster’s face was flushed with excitement.
“Quite a famil ride, Chen?”
“I’m heading straight to the bridge to see how the rest of this goes!”
“Glad to be part of the entertainment.”
Chen laughed as he stepped clear. Thomas climbed through the Hawk’s airlock and squeezed past his troopers, who were in the process of snapping down the passenger benches on either side of the craft’s main cabin. He stepped forward into the cockpit and patted Jack Mallory on his suited shoulder.
“Hey, Wings. What have you got me into this time?”
Jack glanced up, raising an eyebrow.
“Hey, Guns. I got you a dead friendly. Maybe we can salvage it and take command.” It was a joke, Thomas knew, but it stung. Thomas took his seat behind Jack’s right shoulder.
“Just get me there in one piece, Jack.”
“Troopers ready,” Buns called from back aft.
Thomas listened as Jack spoke quietly with flight control, and the Hawk rolled forward into the airlock. Just as they passed through the doors he glanced to starboard and saw that Spinner-Two had completed pre-flight checks and the second boarding party was loading up. The XO’s job would be to thoroughly assess the cause of Toronto’s demise, but no one that valuable was setting foot on the destroyer until Thomas and his jarheads had made certain it was safe.
The Hawk was through the airlock quickly and flying free. Bowen had taken station off Toronto’s stern, ensuring that her own weapons arcs were maximized and the destroyer’s were minimized, just in case there was a nasty surprise waiting. Reading Jack’s 3D display Thomas could see Spinner-Four still patrolling at close range.
“We’re going in as if hot,” he said over his strike team circuit. “Sensors report no activity from Toronto, but the rebels have used local stealth fields before to hide defenses. Stay sharp.”
“Where do you want to board?” Jack asked.
Thomas surveyed the charcoal metal of the destroyer’s hull, searching for any signs of blast damage or weapons fire. As far as he could tell, the ship looked perfectly intact.
“The airlock at top-part midships,” he said. With no hints, they might as well start at the middle and work outward. Jack maneuvered his craft smoothly into position, sliding to port to mate his airlock with Toronto’s hull. Thomas heard the usual series of clicks and hisses as the airlocks connected.
“Watch for gravity shift,” he called out as his troopers started to push off their benches. “We’re entering down into top-part.”
Once the airlock was secure and atmosphere confirmed within the destroyer, the hatch was opened. Even in the cockpit Thomas felt his ears pop as pressure shifted rapidly, and he instinctively dropped his faceplate to switch to suit support. Jack did likewise, followed a moment later by the Hawk’s tactical crewman.
“This is Bravo-One,” Buns reported over the strike circuit. “Through the door. Zero-g. Atmo pressure low but breathable; oxygen content normal.” So the ship had lost air, but in equal parts. That suggested a hull breach somewhere, rather than a fire or a chemical attack.
“This is Alpha-One, roger. Proceed on suit support,” Thomas ordered. Any faceplates that hadn’t already been lowered snapped down. The eight troopers followed their sergeant through the airlock, and Thomas brought up the rear.
The interior of Toronto offered no gravity, and they pulled themselves along the short tubing “down” into one of the main corridors of the ship. Helmet lights danced across the black interior bulkheads as they spread out fore and aft along the passageway. Thomas checked his forearm display to ensure comms with Bowen were still clear, and spoke on the command frequency.
“Mother, this is Alpha-One. Touchdown, ops green. Environment at entry point is zero-g, atmo at seven-zero percent, temperature at”—he double-checked his display—“two degrees Celsius.”
“This is Mother, roger. No changes in power levels detected, assess your entry has triggered no responses.”
Thomas glanced at his sergeant. She nodded her agreement.
“Alpha-One confirms, commencing standard search pattern.” He switched to strike frequency. “All units, Alpha-One. Standard search procedure: Alpha Team to bridge, Bravo Team to engine room. Record and report on sight any signs of battle, of survivors, or casualties. Bravo-One, over.”
“Bravo-One,” Buns replied. She immediately pushed her way aft as her team of four troopers formed up around her.
Thomas watched as his own lead trooper, Alpha-Two, took point and started moving carefully along the passageway, weapon pointed forward with one hand while the other grabbed at the regular handholds. Alpha-Three followed, and Thomas obediently stayed behind his designated bodyguard. Alphas Four and Five brought up the rear.
The helmet lights cast an uncertain, yellowish field of view ahead, but there was no doubt that they were moving along the familiar lines of a Fleet warship. Thomas felt unsettled as he watched so many recognizable landmarks appear out of the utter darkness. This didn’t feel dangerous, he realized. It felt uncomfortable, almost as if something had been violated.
The bridge of a city-class destroyer was two decks down from their entry point and two frames forward. Alpha Team moved efficiently through the darkened spaces without incident or opposition. A single report from Buns indicated a similar ease of movement for Bravo Team toward engineering.
Thomas pulled himself through the airlock door of the second frame when he heard his leading trooper speak.
“This is Alpha-Two. I can see damage to equipment here… but it looks weird.”
He could see the light cone of the trooper up ahead, no longer moving forward but scanning slowly along the bulkheads. Alpha-Three paused, but Thomas edged past him. The big trooper moved to stay at his side.
“Be more specific, Alpha-Two,” Thomas said.
“Things are broken, but it doesn’t look like battle damage. I don’t see any blast marks.”
Thomas floated up alongside Alpha-Two and shone his own helmet lights along the metal frames of the passageway. He also saw no sign of impacts, but firefighting equipment was floating half-loose from its brackets, and one corner of a bulkhead panel had ripped open. There was no damage behind the rip, just another layer of interior bulkhead.
He swept his lights around the passageway. Starting from about where he floated, and becoming more obvious as he continued forward, Thomas saw weakened fixtures, equipment missing from mounts and, eventually, the absence of handrails. Casting his light forward, he saw the end of the corridor where he knew the airlock to the bridge should be. In its place was a ragged outline of the frame opening, and darkness beyond.
“All units, Alpha-One,” he reported on both circuits. “Mild structural damage sighted aft of the bridge, contained within a single frame and worsening as we move forward. From my position I assess the bridge will be significantly damaged. I am advancing on thrusters to investigate, over.”
“Mother, roger.”
“Bravo-One, roger.”
With the handholds gone there was no way to move forward now without using his suit’s thrusters, but they had limited fuel and didn’t offer much speed. Thomas unreeled the safety line from his belt and handed it back to Alpha-Three. He pointed at the nearest handhold.
“Is that handle secure?”
Alpha-Three pushed over to grab it. With his powerful tug the handle snapped free of its base. The trooper’s eyes were wide as he held up the broken metal.
“Try the next one back,” Thomas said.
Three handholds aft, the troopers finally found secure anchors they could use to affix the safety lines for Thomas and Alpha-Two. Thomas motioned Alpha-Two to lead the way forward. Under thruster power, they approached the blasted opening to the bridge.
All Fleet bridges were contained within an armored sphere, designed to protect the ship’s command center even from attacks which penetrated the outer hull. He’d spent years working in spaces like this one, but as he approached now, both his lights and those of Alpha-Two were swallowed up by darkness.
Alpha-Two entered the bridge first. Thomas watched as the trooper floated through the opening and swung the light mounted on his assault rifle. It moved in a swift, steady arc. Then the arc faltered.
An armored hand grabbed desperately for the frame.
It was out of reach, and Alpha-Two scrambled in mid-air, legs flailing and weapon arm tucking in close as he grabbed for his safety line.
Thomas locked his own line and heaved on Alpha-Two’s taut safety wire. The trooper sailed back, thudding against the bulkhead as he grabbed hold of something solid.
Alpha-Two was close against the bulkhead, but to his credit he responded immediately, quick breaths punctuating his words.
“Sorry, sir. I lost my bearings. The whole thing’s gone!”
Thomas unlocked his line and thrust forward carefully, surveying upward into the bridge from just inside the frame. What he saw made him reach down and lock his line again.
There was no bridge.
There was no central deck, no outer sphere of armor.
There was nothing but a vast, completely empty space bordered by the ragged edges of bulkheads and decks. Twisted remains of fixed equipment gave some spaces a nightmarish image, but most of the openings in the vaguely circular space were completely empty. Thomas spotted what looked like half the communications control room to port, and a pair of forward storage bays on the far side from his position.
Leaning to his right he realized he was looking into the very after end of what had been the captain’s cabin. The dining table was still there, bent and twisted, but all the chairs were missing.
The bridge was gone, and he realized suddenly that everything near it had been pulled violently inward. No outer damage to the hull. No survivors. And this.
“Mother, Alpha-One,” he said. “Recommend anti-stealth warfare condition red: attack imminent.”
* * *
Any sense of boredom which might have settled upon Bowen’s crew was gone.
Thomas returned to the cruiser as the fourth and final Hawk was being prepped for launch, a full load of torpedoes and detection gear aboard. More people moved with purpose through the flats, floating instead of striding now that the AG was doused. All training manuals in Club Sub had been abandoned, replaced by tactical reports from the various theaters of war. The junior officers pored over them to look for records of similar incidents.
Thomas knew he should sleep, but his mind spun with scenarios on how the attack on Toronto could have played out. His subbies should sleep, as well, since they all had bridge watches to stand, but the excitement was fevered. All lights were on as they read reports and discussed what they found. He was hooked down into his usual corner of the big couch, watching as Chen floated freely, looking as if he wished he could pace. Alex scrolled through yet another list of reports, and Hayley absently munched away at a free-floating bag of fries.
He’d trained them well. There was a time to sleep and a time to focus, and these kids all seemed to know the distinction.
“I don’t get how anyone could control a singularity,” Alex commented. “Aren’t they by definition beyond known physics?”
“No, they’re totally possible,” Chen countered. “We studied them all the time at the college. They just don’t tell you artsies, so you don’t go trying to order one from your engineering department.”
“Did you make them in class?”
“No, but we weren’t conducting stealth warfare, either—and from what I’ve seen so far, those ASW guys are mad geniuses. Like totally insane.”
“You’re fucking insane,” Hayley growled, “just to have majored in physics in the first place.” She was short and cute with bright-blue eyes, but she easily had the foulest mouth and worst temper of anyone Thomas had ever met. He liked that.
“What’s so insane about ASW?” Thomas asked.
“Just the ability to think in four spatial dimensions,” Chen said, excitement growing on his face as he started to maneuver his hands like ships. “Like with Wings, he dropped a line of barbells here, and with nothing more to go on than a curvature eddy any sane person would have dismissed as space dust, he cuts across here, drops another line—boom-boom-boom—and cuts over again to do the big dip. And voilà, we were sitting practically right on the target. Close enough that I could see it!”
“That’s his job,” Alex said.
“But I asked Master Rating Singh afterward what procedure Wings was using and Singh just threw up her hands. She said she’s learned to go with her pilot’s instinct, because it’s never wrong.”
“Jack does have a crazy ability to see the entire picture as a whole,” Thomas acknowledged. “Some of the ideas I’ve seen him come up with—”
The comm panel chirped. Hayley reached for the headset.
“Club Sub—Sublieutenant Oaks.” She listened for a moment, then glanced at Thomas. “Yes, sir.” Another moment of listening, and she hung up. Blue eyes assessed him. “Somebody’s in shit.”
“Why?” he asked.
“You just got summoned to the CO’s cabin. By the Old Man himself.”
“What, right now?”
“Yeah, fucking jarhead, right now.”
Thomas unhooked and pushed past Hayley and Alex.
“Get that out of my face,” she said, smacking his butt.
“At least I didn’t drop a line of barbells as I went past…”
He appreciated the laughter as he exited his little corner of subbie security and re-entered the real world. The captain wanted to see him. In a year on board, Commander Hu had never wanted to see him.
* * *
The CO’s cabin door was closed and the do-not-disturb light was shining. Thomas buzzed for entry. The door opened immediately, and he spotted the CO hooked down at the head of a briefing table in the center of the large space. Every seat was occupied by members of the second boarding party. The XO and Chief Ranson flanked the captain, both looking up indignantly at the interruption.
“Mr. Kane,” Commander Hu greeted, gesturing him forward, “please join us. Chief, continue.”
Thomas pushed himself over and hovered discreetly, listening as Ranson carried on with a discussion concerning the engineering systems in Toronto. To Thomas’s surprise, the destroyer was salvageable, although without a functioning bridge it would likely have to be towed home. The captain surveyed his table of guests grimly.
“Good work, everyone. That’ll be all.”
Hu was a man of few words. Perhaps ten years Thomas’s senior, he’d already been long in his command of Bowen when war broke out. During the initial panic of the rebel attacks, it had been Hu’s order which had seen the newly demoted Sublieutenant Kane assigned as a crisis replacement to Bowen’s strike team. Over the past year, though, he rarely addressed his strike officer directly, and never had he invited Thomas to his cabin.
Yet as the assembled team unhooked themselves and pushed away from the table, Thomas saw Hu place a hand on the XO’s arm, the other hand rising to motion Thomas to take a seat. Hu gave him a bland expression that somehow carried frightening authority.
Thomas hooked into the chair Ranson had just vacated, and listened as the door shut behind the last of the departing group.
“We’re breaking off to continue our patrol,” Hu said quietly, “but we’ll leave a secure beacon here, in case anyone decides to return. XO, how much time do you need to set that up?”
“No more than thirty minutes, sir,” Perry replied.
“Make it so.” He turned deep-set eyes to Thomas. “What’s your take on the damage to Toronto, Mr. Kane?”
“It looks like a gravi-torpedo, sir, but I’ve never seen one that small or precise.”
“Because there aren’t any,” Perry snapped. The captain ignored his XO’s comment, and after a moment of silence, it seemed as if Thomas was being invited to continue.
“The damage pattern clearly shows a violent force directed inward toward the center of the bridge,” he added, “and the complete lack of debris suggests a singularity which destroyed everything within a certain radius.”
“You’ve seen this before?”
“No, sir, but I’ve been in a ship which had a near miss with a gravi-torpedo. The way it pulled us, I’d expect to see this sort of damage.”
“That’s right,” Perry muttered. “There isn’t anything Sublieutenant Kane hasn’t seen.”
Thomas dropped his gaze, pushing down anger. He was just a strike subbie now, he reminded himself firmly. Arguing with a cruiser’s XO wasn’t what strike subbies did.
“Sir,” Perry continued, “our scans indicated no unusual gravimetric readings.”
“It could have faded by now,” Hu replied.
“Even this many months later, there would still be some evidence of a singularity.”
“How do you know?” Thomas blurted out. “We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Because my last staff job was at the ASW school on Astral Base Four, Mr. Kane,” the XO replied, “and before that I was an ASW director. I don’t recall seeing any ASW experience in your files. Or did I miss something?”
Thomas pursed his lips together, biting down his reply.
“Stay focused, gentlemen,” Hu said.
“It might have been a regular torpedo which failed to activate properly,” Perry offered.
“I don’t think so, sir,” Thomas said. “For one, the target is too precise—that singularity was placed directly in the center of Toronto’s bridge. For two, if a regular torpedo had misfired, we’d have found some evidence of the rest of the crew. Either they would have taken to the lifeboats, or they would have been killed in the attack. Each of those scenarios would have provided us clear evidence which just isn’t there.”
“The same thing goes for your mini-torpedo, Kane,” Perry snapped. “Where are the survivors? Or did your magic weapon suck up all the crew and leave the rest of the ship intact?”
That was a good point, Thomas conceded silently with a nod.
“Perhaps, then,” Perry suggested, “it was some kind of singularity bomb planted before the ship left port.”
Hu turned at that, expression newly thoughtful.
“Why not just blow the entire Astral Base, then, XO?”
“Perhaps they wanted to test it small scale, away from any large gravity wells.”
“The Centauris are nothing if not patient,” Hu mused. None of the other rebellious colonies really mattered in this war. Centauria was the leader—both technologically and politically— and it was their culture which Terrans needed to understand best.
“XO, sweep our ship for any gravimetric anomalies,” Hu ordered suddenly.
“Yes, sir.”
“Any other recommendations?”
“Maintain our augmented ASW status,” Perry replied immediately. “While I may not agree with Mr. Kane’s assessment of the attack, there may be a higher stealth threat in this sector than Intelligence suggests.”
“Mr. Kane, your recommendation?”
Thomas started. He was being asked to give a command recommendation. Perry’s face darkened, he noticed, but the XO remained silent.
“Inform Astral Command of the incident, sir, and recommend that all future patrols consist of at least two ships. Toronto may have been vulnerable because she was alone. Others might be, as well.”