Captain Bullock scrolled down a list of damage reports on his retinal implants as he ignored the lieutenant junior grade barraging him with the Union Earth Naval regulations concerning accommodations for rescued sailors. In truth he registered as little of one as the other, and sought only a distraction from the fact he’d just witnessed a fellow captain and crew snuffed out with little effort by a xeno ship that shrugged off everything he put down the barrel.
They were too far from home, escorts that couldn’t even defend themselves, let alone the freighter carrying silk and coffee, of all things, to Pedres. Like they were some fourteenth-century caravel. His ship was ill-equipped to confront any of the countless xenos, despite being thrice the tonnage of a Privateer. If that Maeyar fleet hadn’t shown up when they did, he’d be as dust as the Clarke. Most of her personnel managed to make it off, but Captain Hill had gone down with the ship and his entire command team. Bullock looked at his own, packed into the CIC at half a dozen stations. He wasn’t fool enough to stick around this system. They’d jumped into a war, and damned if he wasn’t going to jump right back out again regardless of the freighter’s full holds, and hightail it to the system’s core.
Two fighters kept pace with his ship, a dozen kilometers off his starboard, according to his thermal sensors and active Lidar. The two little wasps probably matched his firepower, if not his armor. And their presence wasn’t exactly reassuring.
"Open a channel to the lead fighter," he said.
The main screen clicked, a portion being taken by the low resolution camera on board the fighter.
"Wing Officer Sothcide. Go ahead, Human Hudson."
Bullock didn’t bother to correct him. "Wing Officer, we’re adjusting course to make best time for the core. It’s a little too unfriendly in this neighborhood for us."
The communication feed was muted for a few moments before the wing officer replied. "Negative, Human Hudson. All traffic out of the system is suspended on the grounds of informational security. Proceed to Pedres approach as planned and wait for further instructions."
"Wing officer, we’re staring down the barrel of a thousand-ship gun here. I can’t keep my people in a system under active attack."
"I understand your reservations, Human Hudson, but my orders are clear. There is to be no traffic out of Pedres until further notice."
Bullock watched on his sensors repeater as one of the fighters crept ahead of the other and climbed in the azimuthal plane. It was a subtle movement, but the two craft were improving their ranging solution on the Hudson River. Not for the first time, he felt the cold dampness of his uniform collar against the back of his neck. The maneuver wasn’t a threat, per se, but it was certainly less than a friendly gesture. At their current acceleration the formation was six hours from Pedres, or nine from the closest calculated jump point. But he also had the freighter to worry about. The freighter had no Alcubierre drive. It was too big. Though size didn’t seem to be a problem for the xenos, humans were still limited by mass when it came to executing a horizon jump. Bullock terminated the communication, weighing his options.
"Skipper, we’re picking up active targeting radiation."
The words cut through his thoughts as his head snapped to the tactical officer’s station. "Whose?"
The young officer looked at him, her eyes wide. "It’s a Privateer profile, sir."
"Missile fire, missile fire! Port side, zero bearing rate!"
Captain Bullock got to his feet. "Battle stations!" he roared, "Point defense, target those missiles, get me a solution on the source!"
"Point defenses inactive, Captain. IFF paints missiles as friendly, I don’t have time to override. Projected time to impact, eight seconds! Seven, six,"
"Evasive program," yelled Bullock, knowing that inertia would never let him move the bulky destroyer fast enough to evade the missiles. Had Victoria fired on him?
"Two, one!"
No explosion came. A half dozen missiles streaked past his ship, lancing out after the escort fighters.
"Incoming communication, textual only, human IFF code."
As the fighters reacted to the volley of missiles, words scrolled across the main viewscreen. HUDSON RIVER – MAEYAR AMBUSH IMMINENT - MAKE BEST TIME TO JUMP - TIME NOW
"Don’t have to tell me twice," said Bullock. Helm, make the course adjustments to the nearest jump."
The viewscreen showed the icy contrails of the missiles as they streaked toward the fighters, and the warnings as the fighters fired back. A shriek of tearing hull pierced his ears as the lasers carved a channel through his starboard ablative armor. Not strong enough to penetrate at their max range without a cohesive saturation on a single spot, they still wiped out a half-dozen sensor modules, leaving a gap in his visual feed. He swore.
"Skipper, the secondary hit the Yakima. She’s venting atmosphere."
The majority of the freighter was kept in vacuum during transit, outside the pressure hull of the inner compartments. If they struck atmo then the crew was almost certainly dead and the cargo boat dead in the water.
"What about those missiles?"
The tactical officer regarded her screen. "Impact on the secondary, no engine profile, no active radiation. The primary . . . Jesus, he just took out all three missiles. He’s full burn sir, headed back to the picket fleet."
"Can we take him out?"
"Negative sir, our missiles can’t catch up with a Maeyar fighter at full acceleration and a head start."
Bullock swiped the viewscreen displaying the Yakima to his primary repeater. At max magnification he could see the plumes of frozen atmosphere petering off as pressure in the inner hull equalized with the vacuum of space. The freighter had no hardening against directed energy weapons, the fighter had cut her apart like swiss cheese. There was no one left to escort. He’d failed his mission.
"Prep the Alcubierre, let’s get out of here before the Wing Officer tells his friends what just happened." Victoria, what did you do?
The Condor’s circuit carried it away from the boarded Gavisari vessel and into the upper atmosphere where Victoria ordered her pilot to break orbit. Several hours of slow flight carried the Vultures far enough from the sensors of the Gavisari to risk acceleration, and from there Victoria watched her ship eat up the kilometers of space on the way to the rendezvous point, watching Juna shrink in the rear viewscreen. Long range passive sensors gave away the presence of a multitude of ships in the theater, the majority of the fleet in Pedres had moved to the staging point inside the last planet’s orbit. By the time Victoria reached a distance she felt comfortable risking communications, the sensor team already identified upwards of fifty contacts at a destroyer profile or larger.
"Go ahead and growl up the Wing Commander," said Victoria, "Fleet Ops is going to want to act on what we saw. Guarantee they’ll want to make a move when they find out half of those ships are without power."
"Even so, they can’t field enough ships here without leaving Maeyar exposed. They’re terribly outnumbered, Vick," said Huian.
"So are we." Victoria held up a hand to halt Huian’s response as the communication channel connected. "Wing Commander Jalith, Captain Marin identifying, activating IFF transponder now."
Almost as soon as the transponder revealed their position, sensors warnings lit her command repeater with active radiation signatures as the Maeyar active sensor suites bathed the Condor with ranging and targeting radar.
"Christ, what a welcome," Victoria muttered, hopefully too low for the transmitter to pick up.
"Condor, do not deviate from present course. Reverse acceleration and stand down all active weapon systems. Prepare to dock. The Twin Sister will receive a delegation consisting of your captain and two additional personnel."
Victoria’s retinal implants flashed with a message from the sensor shack. Twin Sister scrambling fighters. The Maeyar were pinning them in. Heat began to rise in her blood, and she fought back the urge to turn tail and disappear into the dark of space. The velocity game was not on their side, the fighters would overtake them before ever they reversed their momentum away from the battlegroup.
"Message received, Twin Sister, understand all. Reversing acceleration."
The channel closed from the other end and Victoria let her breath out. If they wanted her to dock then the Maeyar weren’t on the verge of blowing her ship out of the stars. That cleared her for the next few minutes at least, but not much beyond that. She thumbed the general circuit.
"Attention all hands, this is the captain. Rig for docking. The XO has the ship."
Aesop Cohen opened his eyes, and almost immediately regretted the decision. The flashing glare of a nearby tungsten welding kit felt like needles jamming the front of his brain, but try as he might to fight it, the unfortunate reality of his surroundings continued to become more and more clear. Front and center was a pallid xeno face. As soon as the lizard part of his brain caught up with his vision center, panic seized him, and had him straining against a lanyard secured to the bulkhead before his rationality kicked in and told him the xeno was dead.
"Bout time you came round, Cohen."
A vacuum suit floated behind the lifeless alien, pushing it along the corridor. The voice in his helmet belonged to Singh. "Sorry about him. We moved most of them to the forecastle, but more keep floating out of hiding," she said as she unhooked his lanyard. His retinal implants received an alert that the woman was checking his vitals through the suit computer, and he instinctively looked to check on Maggie Chambers.
"Mags," he said, stomach dropping as his computer returned no vitals from her suit.
"She’s fine, aside from a broken arm and some electrical burns. That tether fried all her radio gear, but your little stunt probably saved her life."
"Not that she’d ever admit it," said Aesop, looking around for the first time. The Gavisari still loomed, assumedly disfigured from the exposure to vacuum. An array of little horns ringed its round face like a sunflower, though the similarities to any Earth flora or fauna ended there. For one, the face seemed to be in the middle of its chest, with three fluted legs splayed out evenly around its core. Standing up on all three it probably could have stretched to ten or more feet high, explaining the ample leg room in the ship. Not much was known about the Gavisari, other than that they were oxygen tolerant, fiercely territorial, and non-expansionist, which meant the Union Earth had little cause to come in contact with them.
"Not that you’d ever ask her to," said Singh, following his gaze with her own opaque faceplate. Her oxygen cultures got cooked too, we’ve been bleeding our excess to her. And yours. But you’ll need more now you’re awake. We’re going to be getting air-thin before—before too long."
Before the Condor came back. If it came back. "How many data bursts have we missed?"
"Three," said Singh. Their mission had been to ransack the onboard computers, then patch into the communication hub and report on activity at Juna. Every time the derelict came into line-of-sight with the Condor the marines would send an encrypted databurst, a highly directional packet of radio waves containing all gathered intel compressed into a half-second transmission. It was their only means of reminding the Condor that someone was still alive out here. "We’ve got the dish in place, but no one wants to be the one to try and integrate it with the ship’s power."
Aesop nodded. Marines were excellent at slinging lead down range, but not so much at xenotechnology. "Smart. Last thing we need is Vega frying the transmitter. Do we at least know where their power bus is?"
Singh led the way through the inner compartments of the ship to the tether connection, where a soft hum began to translate through his gloves and boots where he contacted the textured tunnel walls. Before long they emerged into a low-ceilinged chamber snaked with various color cables and paneling. Vega was prying the lid off some sort of junction box when he noticed Cohen floating behind.
"‘Oy, Cohen. You made it, looks like I owe Singh a beer."
"You bet against me?"
Vega shrugged. "I like beer. Help me out here, I think I found the artificial gravity."
"You think you found the artificial gravity in a sealed compartment marked secondary sublight alignment calibrator?"
Vega looked back at the panel, seemingly seeing the Kossovoldt standard scripting for the first time. Admittedly it was subtle, either faded or just a hair off the background color of the bulkhead and upside-down to his perspective. Maybe it was meant to be read by touch, or in a different spectrum of light. He just didn’t know enough about the Gavisari. As he looked, Aesop could see similar markings on a variety of equipment crowding the small ship’s engine room.
Instead of joining Vega, Aesop looked around until he spotted a small monitor embedded in the bulkhead. By some miracle it was receiving power from the magnetic tether, and before long Aesop had gained access. Xeno computers were so painfully primitive. A diagnostics page showing almost total failure of all ship’s systems greeted him, and an automatic events log that detailed the jump into Pedres and the last moments of what he learned was called the Blossom. Not a warship at all, but a diplomatic envoy. Why bring a ship for missions of peace along on an invasion?
"Come on Cohen, can you get the gravity back on? We’ve been floating for hours, it’s making me want to hurl."
"I don’t think there is any gravity, at least not the way we’re used to. I think they just have an acceleration dampening field, but they keep the ship in microgravity. Look how everything is designed to be in arm’s reach for them. I bet they don’t even have an up or down. But I do see a bus that the tether power is being routed to. We can hook the dish up to that."
Singh floated nearby, looking over his shoulder. "Does it say what did all this damage? We checked over the ship and there’s at least a dozen compartments open to space."
Cohen shook his head. "This is just an engineering logger. We’re not going to find any intel until we crack into whatever fleet broadcast codec they’re running to coordinate the ships in orbit. It looks like they didn’t have the voltage to power the array and the life support at the same time."
"What must that have been like?" asked Singh, "To choose between living a few more desperate minutes or to say goodbye to everyone you ever knew?"
"Who cares?" asked Vega, shrugging. "Neither helped them in the end. The pressure hull failed and those three-legged bastards don’t do any better in vacuum than we do."
Despite Vega’s callous remarks, Aesop stopped for a moment to reflect on it. He’d had the misfortune of losing two ships already, one to hostile xenos and one abandoned due to onboard fire. What he would have traded for a few minutes to say goodbye was not a short list.
"Let’s get the power hooked up. I don’t want to miss the next transmission window."