Curiosity
*****
Operations Room
TFR Sydney
Karathi L1 Lagrange point
One day later
THE TFR SYDNEY APPEARED IN the jump point without incident, and Captain Matthew Knight withdrew his key from the jump system, returning it to his breast pocket. His XO, Commander Peter Baker, did the same.
“Jump complete,” came the call from navigation. “We are in position at the Karathi L1 Lagrange point.”
Knight moved from the jump console to navigation, observing on the large monitors what the ship’s myriad of sensors was telling them. An image of the red ball of Karathi floated below them, a barren desert wasteland with very little life, high heat, and no significant resources, geological features, or points of interest.
Nothing showed itself except the wreckage of the Giralan, once home to Ben, now a rusting wreck almost completely buried in sand.
“Launch surface teams,” he said, “and have them report in on the hour. Mister Baker, deploy strike craft in a standard seven-point CAP. Navigation, clear the jump point.”
The operations room lit up in a flurry of activity. Two Broadswords launched, tiny ships sailing out through the void, hurtling silently towards Karathi. A flight of Wasp fighters followed from the hangar bay but began a wide arc, a standard patrol, and the ship slowly sailed out of the well of extreme microgravity, gently drifting through space towards the giant red planet. It was a standard deployment for a jump and, so far, everything had been moving smoothly.
A flashing light, red and urgent, on the communication officer’s console stole his attention. Almost immediately, the crewman at that station called out, “Captain, incoming transmission. We’re receiving a signal from…” the slightest pause and then, “from a nearby asteroid belt, Captain.”
“What’s the nature of the transmission?”
“Unsure,” said the communications officer, a fresh-faced midshipman named Finnis. “It’s a repeating signal, no discernible message. Looks to be a beacon of some description.”
Knight made his way over to the man’s console. “Any record of any beacons in this area when the Beijing was here last?”
“No, Captain. This one’s new.”
Knight considered for a moment and turned to his XO. “Sound general quarters, Mister Baker, and launch the remaining strike craft and gunships. Recall the patrol and charge hull plating. Marines to their stations. Let’s head into that asteroid field and see what we can find. Mister Cruden, set a course for that beacon.”
Baker moved over to Knight. “Did you want me to recall the ground team, sir?”
He shook his head, and together the two of them moved back to the command console. “No. It’s going to take us hours to get there, and we need the intel from the ground. Keep the CAP centred on us, but let the ground team do their work. This could turn out to be nothing. Maybe Liao and her people just missed it or didn’t think to include it in their report.”
“Probably the latter, sir. You know how she is with paperwork.” Baker pulled up the long-range thermal camera output on the command console. “What the hell do you think is going on?”
Knight narrowed his eyes, looking at the radar output, which showed tens of thousands of the rocky asteroids floating in space, vast expanses of nothing between them, and then focusing on the optical camera pointed at the same region, a black blanket dotted with a faint sea of stars.
“I don’t know, but I have a feeling I’m not going to like it.”
TFR Sydney
Later
Knight finished the last of the incident log and set his pen down on the heavy oak desk.
He trusted Baker implicitly. The man had been his right hand throughout almost all his career, always giving him good advice and keeping him focused on his job. Baker was much more cautious than he, a quality that served him well as the ship’s XO.
Perhaps caution could be wisely applied here.
As Knight always did when he wanted to think, he reached out for a memento on his desk, a full-sized Australian Football League ball, a Sherrin, oval-shaped and elongated like an egg. He stood by the wall, bouncing it against the floor.
Bouncing an oval-shaped ball was a particular skill unique to Australians who had played the local brand of football, the AFL, as the ball had to be bounced much like in basketball. Typically performed while running, it could also be done while standing—not straight up and down like a basketball, but forward, using the oval shape to return it to one’s hand. A much more challenging task than the American basketball, but one that focused his mind and allowed him to think.
Knight had played on a team once as a reserve for the Geelong Cats during his teenage years before enlistment. No star of the track and field, he found his position brief and unmentionable, almost entirely spent warming a bench, but it was a stint he had always treasured. He’d played a grand total of eight minutes on the field, but those eight minutes were some of his fondest memories.
No longer a member of the club and those days far behind him, Knight had kept his jersey safely stored in his home on Earth, and he took the ball with him when he was away. It was a useful thing to remind him. Once a Cat, always a Cat, he liked to think.
Thump, thump, thump went the ball, and his mind turned over. What was the signal, and what was it doing there? What was transmitting it?
He didn’t like this. It was a simple beacon floating out in the middle of the asteroid belt, but for some reason, it nagged at him. He tried to explain it rationally: a warning against a navigation hazard, perhaps, or even a Forerunner probe that had malfunctioned or was transmitting some kind of alert.
But alerting what?
The door to his office creaked and opened, so Knight caught the ball and stepped back to his desk. Commander Peter Baker stepped inside, a folder in hand.
“Playing footy in your head again?”
Knight gave his old friend a smile, cracking open the fridge. A bottle of the famous scotch each of the Pillars of the Earth carried was resting on a shelf, an option briefly considered but ultimately passed up. They were, after all, still on duty. Instead, he withdrew a tray of ice cubes, a container of water, and a pair of chilled glasses. “You caught me.” Setting them out on his desk, Knight twisted the tray, dropping a heap of ice into each container.
“If the crew knew you did that, they’d think you’re mental.”
Knight poured water from the steel container, the ice clinking as the glasses filled. “Good thing nobody tells them then.” He picked up a glass, offering it to his XO with his left hand, the scar from a surfing accident years ago giving it a rough, calloused surface. His tone became more formal as he got down to business. “So Peter, I heard the report came in. What did our teams find on the Giralan?”
Commander Peter Baker took his glass. The two men clinked their drinks together, and both sipped the cool, icy water.
“Nothing,” Baker answered, “absolutely nothing. The coordinates the Beijing gave us were accurate, but when our marines arrived, there was just this great big hole in the ground. The whole ship appears to have been taken.”
“The whole ship?”
“Yes, sir. There was plenty of debris still around, buried in the sand, but the body of the ship appears to have just been taken away. That area gets quite bad dust storms, apparently, so don’t read too much into this, but we couldn’t find any evidence of salvage equipment or cutting tools or anything like that. To be honest, Captain, it’s like the ship just lifted straight out of the ground in one piece.”
“But Liao described that vessel as a derelict, almost rusted through. Apart from the information in its datacore, I can’t imagine there’d be anything of any value remaining.”
“Me neither. It’s a mystery for Fleet Command, I’m afraid.” Baker sipped his drink again. “What’s the word on the beacon?”
Knight put his glass down on the desk, inhaling. “Not a lot, to be honest. It just appears to be a repeating long-range signal sitting out there in the middle of nowhere.”
“You seem worried. I would probably have just left the thing alone.”
“Yeah, well, my mum always used to say I was a curious one.”
“You know what they say about curiosity and cats, sir.”
“I’ve heard that one before.” Knight tapped a finger on his desk. “I hate to say it, but I’ve felt very strongly that, ever since the attacks on Earth, we haven’t known enough about our enemies or our friends. We’re going into this blind, stumbling through the dark, and so far things have turned out pretty good for us more or less. The problem is that the floor is covered in razor-sharp glass, and just because we can’t see it, and just because we haven’t stepped on any, doesn’t mean it won’t cut us.”
“So you’re saying that we need to shed some light on this situation.”
“Correct. Even if it hurts our eyes, we have to see the universe as it really is. Otherwise, we’re just going to continue to stumble, and eventually we’re going to cut our feet up. We’re going to fall.” Knight deliberated for a moment. “For now, though, have our men continue to comb through the debris of the Giralan. Let’s see what else we can find.”
TFR Sydney
Later
“We’re entering the outer regions of the asteroid belt now, Captain.” Baker consulted his instruments. “Distance to the beacon, ten minutes.”
Knight studied the radar screen closely. “Very good. Start decelerating; we don’t want to overshoot.”
“Confirmed all engines reversed,” said Baker. “We should pull up right beside it.”
He could feel the shift in the gravity as inertia pulled him backward, the reactionless drives unable to fully correct for such a high amount of deceleration. He and Baker leaned forward slightly to compensate. “Good, make sure we get as close as possible. We’ll be doing an EVA to study it.”
“Did you want to bring it on board, Captain?” asked Baker.
“Depends on what we find,” Knight answered. “I’m definitely not ruling out that possibility though.”
“I’ll set up Engineering Bay One as quarantine then, along with a clean room path directly to it. As a precaution.”
“Agreed. Quarantining this thing, if we do bring it aboard, would make total sense.” Knight smiled thankfully. “That’s what I pay you the big bucks for, right?”
“You’d be lost without me, sir.”
“That I would.” Knight tapped at his command console. “How long until we can see this thing on radar?”
“Two minutes, Captain. We should be able to get a simple reading now, but the asteroids are interfering with our long-range radar.”
That was to be expected. “What about thermals?”
The tactical officer considered. “Something so small won’t appear very hot on our cameras, but it might help us figure out what kind of power source it’s using.”
Knight mulled this over. “Works for me. Let’s bring up a fisheye thermal view—see what we can see.”
His screen on the command console changed to a black-and-white image, a sea of white streaked with occasional darker spots. He switched it to white hott, frowning in confusion at a tiny white dot sitting to their port. It was warmer than the other asteroids and far too large to be a probe. He zoomed in on that spot, tapping at the touch-responsive screen several times. It wass hard to see from the artefacts and corruption, but all around the hotspot, billowing black clouds slowly expanded out. It looked, to him, like steam rising from a boiling pot of water or the cold gasses billowing out from a pot of liquid nitrogen.
“Mister Baker, what do you make of this?”
His XO moved beside him, looking over his shoulder. “No idea, sir. It could be friction from a recent impact between two asteroids.”
The density of an asteroid belt was significantly lower than most people thought it would be, their perceptions informed by Hollywood movies. Most asteroids were hundreds of thousands of kilometres apart, with the total mass of the belt being less than a fraction of most moons. The likelihood of witnessing a collision between two objects was extraordinarily low.
“I doubt it,” Knight said. “It’s too hot for that, and the heat dispersion is far too even.” He considered. “It would explain the gas, though. Mister Weeder, can you focus the long-range radar on it? See what we can determine about its composition?”
“Aye aye, Captain. One moment.”
He stared at the white dot, barely a few pixels wide, and the radar operator spoke again.
“It’s about fifty thousand kilometres from the signal’s origin point. It appears to be hollow, so it could be a fractured asteroid. It’s hard to determine size at this distance. Something is scattering our radar pulses, but it’s pretty large. It might be a chemical reaction within the exposed layers, perhaps some kind of massive geological anomaly.”
“Subterranean nitrogen pockets?” Knight scowled at his monitor, the dot looming larger and larger as they approached. “Yeah, I don’t think so. I don’t like this thing, whatever it is. Can we stop before we get there?”
“Sorry, Captain. We’re already decelerating at the maximum safe rate the reactionless engines can compensate for. We could try an emergency reversal and exceed that, but I wouldn’t recommend going higher than half a G. It will make a mess, but it’ll slow us down a lot faster.”
Machines could typically output far more stress than a body could handle.
Weeder spoke again. “Captain, the spectroscope’s returning data. Hang on one moment. Strange… very strange.” He paused. “The spectrometer suggests that the nearby gas appears to be nitrogen and is significantly cooler than the hotspot itself.”
“It’s not a geological anomaly,” Knight said. “It’s coolant. It’s a ship trying to mask its heat signature. We’re stepping into a trap.”
“Emergency break?” asked Baker.
“Do it,” Knight said, “on my mark.”
Baker grabbed the intercom headset. “All hands, emergency brace for impact. This is not a drill. I say again, brace, brace, brace.”
Knight gripped the console tightly, spreading his feet to steady himself. He gave the crew an extra few seconds and then looked to Cruden, the helmsman. “Three, two, one, mark.”
The ship lurched like a car swerving around a corner, the force of half the Earth’s gravity almost knocking him off his feet. The fittest, absolute best aircraft pilots could, with the aid of G-suits and other devices, sustain nine-G turns, but they were strapped firmly into their seats. A full one-G turn would be the equivalent of hanging straight off his console on Earth. As it was, a half G was like trying to ride a rollercoaster by simply hanging on.
Nobody said anything, being far too busy trying to keep their footing as the ship slowed and alarms rang out through the ship’s operations room. After a period of time that seemed to last forever but couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen seconds, the feeling eased, and the only sound he could hear aside from the alarms was the retching noise of one of the operations crew emptying his stomach’s contents onto the metal deck This was followed by the faint smell of vomit.
Knight could hardly blame him. “Report!”
“We’ve slowed, Captain. Full deceleration imminent.”
Baker grabbed him by the shoulder, ashen faced. Knight wondered for a moment if it had been he who had lost his breakfast. “Casualty reports coming in, Captain. Multiple injuries over all decks.”
Knight heard Finnis’s voice cut over the din. “Captain, priority alert. The Broadsword Paladin is reporting they’re under attack!”
“What!”
“A wing of Toralii strike fighters were hiding on the surface! Their escorts are down. They’re cut off!”
Knight stared wide-eyed at Baker, who returned the stare, then he looked back to Finnis. “Get them out of theree. Order the ship to make a run for the L2 jump point and escape. In the meantime—”
“Captain!” Weeder, the radar operator, said as he swivelled in his chair. “The contact, it’s moving!”
Knight felt sick to his stomach, the same feeling he had before a big game. “Dammit.” He grabbed the intercom. “All hands, general quarters. This is not a drill.” He tossed the device onto the console beside his keyboard. “Mister Baker, charge the hull plating and prepare the ship to escape. Head for the nearest jump point and execute an emergency jump. Have our strike craft execute a defensive screen.”
“Aye aye, Captain!”
Turning back to the thermal camera, Knight could see the silhouette of the contact becoming clear now, a familiar sight he’d seen before, on the exact same screen he was looking at now, in the exact same hostile, aggressive attack position.
The Seth’arak, pride of the Toralii Alliance.
“Fuck! They’re meant to be our allies!” He reached for the headset. “Mister Finnis, broadcast to that ship. All frequencies, no encryption.”
“Channel open, Captain!”
“Seth’arak, this is the TFR Sydney, of Task Force Resolution. We are authorised by your own words to be here. Cease fire on our Broadsword immediately. I say again: Cease. Fire.”
His answer came not in words but in the twinkle of weapons fire on the thermal camera. “Incoming!” called his tactical officer right as a shudder ran through the length of his ship, the energy weapons splashing against their hull. Like an angry hornet’s nest, tiny specks flew out of the Seth’arak’s belly as it disgorged wings of strike fighters.
The ship’s glow on the thermal camera spiked, signalling what was happening before his tactical officer even spoke.
“Captain, they’re charging their worldshatter device!”
“Evasive manoeuvres; get us out of here! Full power to the hull plating!”
No sooner had the words left his lips than a powerful impact tore through the Sydney, tearing the operations crew from their seats and flinging them violently across the room with the impossibly loud roar of tearing metal and snapping bulkheads. The intense blast caused the very rivets of the ship’s structure to pop, sending them screaming into computers, consoles, and flesh.
Baker and Knight, standing together by the command console, both crashed in a heap at the base of the radar operator’s console nearly ten metres away. Black smoke poured from the air vents, and the wailing of alarms increased in pitch and volume, coupled by another sound, far more ominous, summoning the instinctive fear of all who worked in space: the hiss of escaping air and the scream of the decompression alarm.
“GAS, GAS, GAS!” came a cry from across operations. “Decompression alert!”
Knight struggled to stand, but Baker’s heavy body was pinning him down. The damage to their ship must have been massive if it was causing a decompression alarm this far inside the armoured heart of the Triumph-class vessel. Baker wasn’t moving, but Knight managed to push him away, checking the man.
Baker’s neck was bent at a strange, impossible angle, and blood poured from his nose. His eyes had rolled back in his head. Knight could see immediately that he was dead. Pulling his bruised body up to his feet, he coughed out a lungful of acrid smoke and shouted out over the howl of air as it rushed out of the room.
“Report!”
Nobody answered immediately, save for the groaning of the wounded, but Finnis, the midshipman, pulled himself up and back onto his chair. “Direct hit to our starboard side! The superstructure’s cracked; we have a massive decompression along the length of the ship! Eighteen sections are holed, and there are fragmentary decompressions reported on numerous decks! The hull armour is sixty percent ineffective, with large gaps, and fires are reported throughout the ship.” He turned and looked squarely at Knight, and Knight could see the fear in his eyes. “They broke our back, Captain.”
“Signal the Toralii!” he gasped, a hacking cough interrupting him. “Tell them we surrender!”
“They’re not answering.”
Knight watched the short-range radar, the tiny dots of his strike craft winking out one by one as the vast tide of Toralii ships engulfed them. In the long-range communications headset, he could hear increasingly frantic Israeli voices, but one by one, they went silent until nothing but the faint hiss of static could be heard. The strike craft turned to the Sydney now, like a rain of arrows falling on a medieval battlefield, and the Seth’arak glowed warm in the thermal camera.
Another explosion, this one louder and more intense than the last, tossed the ship on its axis and threw the crew into the ceiling. Knight felt his ribs bruise at the impact and then again as he fell down and struck the deck. For a stunned moment, the only sounds on the bridge of the Sydney were the wails of klaxons, the dull roar of escaping air, and the groan of stressed, breaking metal.
Knight knew he was concussed. The pain of his injuries seemed distant, as though he were watching himself through another’s eyes. With unsteady hands, he pulled himself up to the command console, his right arm broken and hanging limply by his side. The red tinge of emergency lighting cast the console readings in a strange light. In a daze, he examined the output.
… breach on deck A. Hull breach on deck J. Hull b…
… ary coolant failure in reactor containment. Restore…
… on deck B. Fire on deck C. Reactor overload in se…
Knight could feel blood running down his forehead. He reached up and wiped it with the back of his left hand, the one with the scar, fresh blood staining the old wound. He opened his mouth to speak but inhaled a lungful of roiling smoke. Overcome by coughing, his lungs trying to breathe the thin, smoke-filled air, he doubled over again.
Seconds later, he almost tried again but just closed his mouth and rested, half standing and half kneeling, against the command console. Nobody was able to hear his orders or respond if they could. Instead, he simply watched the few remaining active consoles, staring at them with an odd calm.
The deck below him trembled, shaking slightly but with a growing force. A dull explosion, distant but coming from within the ship, caused a vibration to run through his whole body.
He’d lived for nearly two years on board the Sydney and had come to know it intimately, like a child. Just like any parent, he could tell when she cried, and somehow, instinctively rather than logically, he knew the source of her distress.
The reactor cores, lodged deep in the heart of the ship and the source of their power, contained nuclear fire, bottled and harnessed for electrical energy—eight of them in all, stored behind strong walls and multiple redundant systems, but any one of them held more than enough force to turn his ship to ashes. Now, with the ship bleeding and broken, that fire wanted to be free.
Another rumble confirmed the suspicions of his dazed mind. The ship’s containment was breached, and that nuclear fire would spill out and engulf them all in its heat as though they were unleashing a tiny piece of the heart of the sun. His ship was mortally wounded.
He didn’t need to make a general announcement, either. The crew knew what was happening. The collision avoidance radar showed the ship’s escape pods launching, little life rafts breaking free from the sinking ship, ferrying his crew away from the Sydney in tiny capsules with white-hot exhaust trails to mark their flight.
The arrowheads of the Toralii strike fighters turned like a pack of hounds after rabbits, closing with the speed of hungry predators, and in brief flashes of weapons fire annihilated the life rafts.
The pain in his body grew fainter, more distant, and Knight slumped forward on the deck, the concussion and blood loss taking their toll.
His mind drifted back, for some strange reason, to his days playing for the Geelong Football Club, to the roar of the crowd that one single time he’d stepped onto the playing field of the MCG as a midfielder, taking the place of a much more skilled player with a torn hamstring. He’d never even touched the ball, nor gotten close, and very few people knew of his one single glorious day, but he’d treasured it for all his life.
Once a Cat, always a Cat, he liked to think.
The Sydney’s reactors could no longer contain the pressure within and exploded, the thermal reaction consuming the ship in a vast, silent fireball. It blew scorched chunks of debris out in every direction, a slowly expanding ball of white-hot gas in the Karathi asteroid belt, a second sun for the system that slowly faded away to leave nothing but a spherical debris field. The wreckage, its course set by the atomic blast, was slowly pulled by gravity’s inexorable tug into the same elliptical path as the asteroid field, the pieces of wreckage floating forever amongst the stars.