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One of my creative writing endeavours:
“Star liner Tupalayev, Star liner Tupalayev, by order of the Confederation Customs Office, you are instructed to shut down your engines, disengage your Taylor Field, and prepare to be boarded.”
Legionnaire Beta Gregory Clarke listened in on the outgoing signal. The vital sign monitor in the corner of his armor’s HUD indicated that his pulse and blood pressure were both elevated, which he thought was perfectly normal since he was suppose to carry out the boarding action the com officer had just announced. Unfortunately, no one on the CTS St. George believed for a moment that whoever had taken over the Tupalayev had any intention of shutting down engines or disengaging their mass canceling Taylor Field, and that was why he was wrapped in the four-hundred twenty kilos of armor and weapons that make up Legionnaire Boarding Armor.
It did not help his trepidation to be locked in place in breech of the armor assault launch system, affectionately dubbed the man-cannon. He glanced left and right, and saw the two armored suits of the reserve team, but Epsilon Greiss had decided that L.B. Clarke would make the initial crossing alone, to minimize the risk of detection for the boarding party.
“Don’t worry, Clarke,” he had said, “if you need back up, they won’t be coming in stealthed, they should get there before they need to hose you off the deck.” It was not very reassuring. He did not want to go alone.
“What the hell do you mean, he is going alone?!” Captain Strickland was shouting at the towering figure of Epsilon Greiss, who responded simply by cocking his head slightly to the side.
When Greiss heard the captain sucking in air to continue his tirade, he interjected, “Captain, it is a tactically sound move. If we can get the Beta on the target ship undetected we can possibly secure the ship with a minimum of damage. Sending a full team is an unacceptable risk in this case.”
“Coming up on T-3, Captain,” announced one of the junior officers in tactical.
“Thank you!” Strickland realized he had let some of his frustration with Epsilon Greiss leak into his tone, “thank you,” he repeated more calmly.
“What is T-3?” The question came from Mr. Stewart, the civilian representative of the company who owned the Tupalayev, as well as all four of the other ships that had been hijacked in this sector in the last few months.
“T-3 is,” Commander Apicello intercepted the civilian; correctly assuming the Captain had no desire to explain military maneuvers to the driveling insurance monger, “the next step in the standard Customs Engagement Procedure. As you know, the St. George is using its ECM suite to mimic a standard customs cutter, and their next action would be to launch boarding shuttles. So at the correct time, we will launch a flight of interceptors, who will use their ECM to mimic assault shuttles.”
Apicello was not sure that Stewart knew any of what that meant, but knew the type well enough to be convinced that Stewart was not going to decline any intelligence being attributed to him. Ego stuffed wool suit he thought to himself.
The comm officer, Lieutenant Moore started counting down, “3… 2… 1… T-3 –“ he reopened the channel “ – Star Liner Tupalayev, Star Liner Tupalayev, you have not complied with the orders of the Confederation Customs Office, we are launching assault shuttles now. Make no effort to repel the boarders. You may still encounter leniency if you shut down your engines and disengage your Taylor field.”
As soon as the signal indicator light went out, “This is Captain Strickland to flight-ops, launch interceptors.”
The speakers carried the Lieutenant Coy’s soprano order confirmation to the bridge, but it was lost on the sudden din.
“Captain! Track indicates they have gone to red zone on their Taylor Field, ninety-eight percent mass cancellation. They have also found another ten to twelve percent engine power. At this rate, they should be exceeding the maximum acceleration of a customs vessel.”
“Damn!” Strickland was not happy with that news, either their ruse was over, or he had to let whoever had hijacked the ship push further away. “Find out where they got that power! Suggestions?” He looked around at his senior officers questioningly.”
“Launch initial boarding now,” Greiss responded immediately, and with such authority the gunnery officer almost did so before checking with the captain.
“Ok, then what?”
“Launch in 10 seconds.” The synthetic voice of Clarke’s armor cut in to his attempt to calm himself. Checking the chronometer he confirmed that he was launching early. The shock undid any relaxation he had achieved, and he was barely into proper launch position when the man cannon fired.
A long time ago, someone had figured out that the human body could handle a rather large number of g-s for a very short duration. Some time after that, someone had decided that Legionnaires should receive advanced genetic modifications to make their bones and other organs less susceptible to damage. And after that, someone else had thought up the idea of building a pulse weapon large enough to fit an armored legionnaire inside. At the end of that string of events was lonely Beta Clarke, who experienced ninety-two g-s of uncompensated acceleration for point-zero-three seconds. The actual acceleration was even higher, but the integrated inertial compensator and pressure system of the boarding armor cut it down to levels that would only break bones in an un-enhanced human.
It made Clarke’s teeth hurt.
“Captain, if I may?” Commander Apicello offered, deliberately overly calm and polite.
“Go ahead, XO.”
“Whoever is in charge over there only has a few options. If we assume they have not identified us as a warship, they may be dumb enough to think they can out run assault shuttles, otherwise they have to be running towards something. The only useful options would be combat ready friends, or another ship holding a jump ring just below the threshold. Either way, we will know about it long before it happens, so lets let them have some rope. On the other hand, if they have identified us as a warship, they have to realize they are already deep within our engagement envelope and can’t simply run out of it, so they are hoping we will et them go rather than risking the whole ship.”
At the last remark, Mr. Stewart’s face visibly paled.
“There is another possibility.” It was Greiss, speaking in his space cold combat voice now, “we know they have a boarding craft, and we haven’t spotted it yet, which means decent stealth. They could be hoping to get us to pile on enough vector in the wrong direction before launching and zipping off in a new direction. If they have something equivalent to an assault shuttle of their own, they could out accelerate everything but our interceptors, which we don’t believe they know about. In addition with the civilians on that ship, they could easily engineer a situation that mandates us following the Tupalayev, such as shutting down life support.”
If Mr. Stewart was pale before, the thought of the families of two thousand passengers and crew litigating was enough to blanch him to colorless.
It was an oddly terrifying and wonderful sensation to be hurtling through space in nothing but boarding armor. He was fortunate that this had been a direct launch and not an oblique launch; at least he could keep sight of the target the whole way across. His eyes flickered across the various displays on the HUD, current velocity, and current distance to target, time to intercept, and current Taylor Field intensity.
He had sat through the same hyperspatial courses that every Legionnaire did, not as intense as Fleet’s courses, but still intense. He had come out know only a little more than he had going in. The Taylor Field is a spherical shell of negative pulse mass, which would counteract the mass of anything contained within the field for physics effects. It came down to changing the mass in force equals mass times acceleration. Currently he was riding one of the benefits of the system. Pulse mass is a capacitive effect, so it bleeds off slowly, meanwhile with no additional power being put into the system, momentum, that is mass times velocity remains constant. So as the field slowly collapsed his mass increased, which results in a loss of velocity.
Despite being aware of the underlying physics, it was always unsettling to him to imagine yourself hurtling through space with literally nothing to slow you down. Admittedly the nothing did a good job of slowing the armor down, but it was still nothing. Human sensibility called out for a lifeline, a hand hold, anything so that at least there was a chance of saving oneself when all the technology failed. So there, alone in the dark, he closed his eyes and --.
A tone called his attention to the fact he was within two kilometers of the target, and he chastised himself for letting his mind wander. He rolled into approach position, and started looking for an airlock to access the ship. He needed one of the big ones that would allow enough room to get his armor through.
He located one, near the aft of the target vessel, just ahead of the engines. He angled himself towards it, and released the smallest burst from his maneuvering thrusters to change his angle.
Another tone indicated he was coming up on the inertial barrier. When a mass crosses over a Taylor Field it is like throwing a rock at a jello mold. Too little velocity and you get bounced off, or twisted of course; just enough and you go straight through. Luckily for Clarke, the computer calculated the approach velocity, and this time he was through after being rattled around by the faux collision. Some quick thrusts, and he was within grapnel range of the airlock.
Before anchoring himself to the ship, he raised his right hand and used his boarding laser in communication mode. First he targeted the small panel above the door and accessed the command override. Fortunately, Confederation Law required all airlocks to be accessible using an encrypted signal for just this reason, and even pirate scum was unlikely to remove the functionality for fear of eliminating any possibility of rescue.
When the door began to cycle open, he turned back towards the St. George and signaled that he had secured an access point.
“Captain,” Lieutenant Moore reported, “We have access confirmation signal from boarding the party.”
“Thank you, comms.”
“So you have a man over there, do we have a recovery plan yet?” The captain did his best to project the sense of command confidence that was his job, but this operation was coming apart at the seams, and he didn’t want to be responsible for two thousand civilian deaths, two thousand and one if Mr. Stewart fell to a fit of apoplexy which seemed more and more likely.
“No Captain, not yet.”
Beta Clarke stepped through the inner door of the airlock and found him in a maintenance storage facility. Mostly spare heavy equipment filled the space; he recognized several massive stove systems nearly identical to the military models. As soon as the inner door closed, he reached into the storage compartment on the right side of the armors lower back, and unlimbered one of his Spikes. Unfortunately for them, Spikes had a military acronym that was not conveniently verbalized, so they got a nickname based on their look. Clarke assumed there was at least a quartermaster or two somewhere in the military who knew what they were actually called.
He rotated the Spike, and checked the ID blister on the top and confirmed A, for Albert. He dropped the leading end of the spike into a nearby data terminal and was instantly rewarded with the flash of a micro-explosion welding it into place. A normal Spike downloaded viral software into the computer systems of a target vessel, and gave a boarding team limited access to the ships control systems.
None of Clarke’s spikes could be called normal. He had spent years while growing up playing with a variety of high-end programming, including limited AI development. It had been hard to pack an entire AI matrix into the limited data structure of the Spike, which is why the original creators had not bothered. Clarke took it as a challenge, and came up with an innovative solution. He put only a portion of the AI matrix onto the Spikes, along with the other software they needed. As long as he used them in the proper order, they would download themselves into common space on the target ship’s computer. The result was that the first spike was not all that intelligent of an AI, but adding a second resulted in two separate AIs, each more than twice as smart as the original, and he had five.
Still in touch with his old hobbies, his fingers began flicking up and down within his suits gloves. Most Legionnaires used the voice interface with the armor’s on-board computer exclusively. The tactile interface was faster, but not as intuitive, unless you had sat at a terminal for years as a programmer.
He brought up the suits internal sensors in passive mode, switched his boarding laser to combat mode, and was in the process of completely shutting down his suit’s pulse mass system and switching on his disruption field generator when the room lights flashed once.
“Good job, Albert,” he said to himself inside the helmet. The chrono said it had taken twelve point five seconds to secure basic environmental systems access, which a normal spike could do in eight, but a normal spike would not know to signal without using radio. Clarke was happy not to have a radio signal announcing his presence until he knew for certain that he had been detected.
“Captain, this is the CIC, there is data coming in from Trojan Horse flight that you should see.”
“Thank you CIC, route it to the briefing room.” Captain Strickland responded, and then glancing around the room, “Apicello, Greiss, join me in the briefing room. Computer, inform Lieutenant Coy to join us by holo.”
The three men climbed the eight steps to the armored door of the briefing room. As it slid open, they were greeted by the holographic projection of Lieutenant Coy. Unfortunately Lieutenant Coy was rather short in person, and despite having the capability to scale the image to an appropriate size, it always scaled them down about twenty percent. The tech crews claimed that this was so it was impossible to forget who was really there, and who was a projection, but everyone else in the navy figured it was a long-standing practical joke. Whatever the reason, the one meter tall image of Lieutenant Coy appeared to be standing on the chair like a child.
“Thanks for coming, shrimpy,” Apicello joked.
“Keep it up, Jumbo, and I’ll –“
“Valerie, why don’t you just show us what your interceptors have found, and not be insubordinate to a superior officer,” Strickland interrupted with a grin on his face.
“I’ll give you insubordinate, but superior? Oh well, here,” The hologram mimicked her motions, but without the actual control panels, it looked silly. After a moment, a second holographic projection appeared, this time of the Tupalayev hovering over the table. “T.H. three spotted this from their vantage point off the pursuit axis.” The Tupalayev was a pretty typical civilian craft, ninety-two meters at the peak diameter; the octagonal cylinder was four hundred ten meters long. Along the length of the ship there were four equally spaced rings, where the passenger airlocks and other service points were located. As the Lieutenant worked the controls, the image rotated and zoomed in on the second docking ring.
At first they did not see anything, and then they realized what they did not see. All of the docking ports on the ship still had their light systems working, except this one. And on closer inspection the shadows did not look quite right.
“How the hell did they get a Remora with a working shroud?” Apicello asked, aghast at the implications.
“I don’t work for the Office,” Greiss replied, “but I am sure they will blame the Admiral-Emperor’s garage sales, and I’d give ‘em fair odds of being right. Here and now though, what do we do about it. If we try to shoot it off the hull, and they haven’t buttoned up the airlock, then we space anyone nearby, which may include an unknown number of the civilians we are trying to rescue. And if we try, then we are throwing our cards on the table. No way a customs boat would have had a chance to see that, might as well drop the ruse, and come in guns blazing. Worse yet, if they get inside and just disconnect, there is no guarantee we’ll be notice when they do it, and with a working shroud we won’t have any idea where they go.”
“Have you ever had an optimistic thought Greiss?” Lieutenant Coy asked. “Now that we have a track on it, I have set T.H. three and four on to tracking the anomaly, with any luck, we won’t miss it.”
“Can we send over the rest of the boarding party?” Strickland cocked an eyebrow towards Greiss as he asked.
“Not without giving something up, we fell behind when they went to redline acceleration. If we catch up they will know we aren’t the customs ship we’re pretending to be, and if we try to launch them from here, their launch signatures will be above the non-detection threshold.”
“Great. Thanks for the report Lieutenant, get back to work, I want everything on the deck ready to launch, no idea where this mess is going.”
The holographic caricature saluted, then faded away with a nod.
“Now, gentleman, we really need a plan.”
“I really need a plan,” Clarke said to himself inside his helmet. So far he had managed to avoid coming into direct conflict with any of the pirates. He also found time to slot Beatrice and Charlie, so his Spike AIs were almost fully formed. As a result, they were happy to inform him that the command interlocks had been removed, and the Tupalayev could only be controlled from main engineering. They even provided him with a map, which showed he only had to go about fifty meters to get there. On the downside, he also knew there were a total of twenty-eight hostiles on board, and only eight were in engineering. If he tried anything, the others would know he was coming, which was fine for him, but the two thousand civilians on board are probably hoping for rescue, not cross fire.
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part 2:
“Move a little further out to starboard T.H. four,” Lieutenant Coy’s orders flowed over the tactical comm net. Fortunately for her and her flight crews, assault shuttles were expected to maintain radio contact with their mother ship, so unlike the poor Legionnaire out there alone, she could still coordinate her flights. Right now she was trying to move them in position to detect an advanced stealth boarding craft, the finest the Confederation had managed to develop. Of course doing so meant coming up with something the senior brains had missed in development, because they had used Confederation sensors as the benchmark for indefectibility.
“Roger, Sparta,” Hanson answered over his helmet comm., and gently touched the controls to steer to the new vector.
“Boss, how are we supposed to follow this thing? I still don’t see it, and I know where it is.”
The voice belonged to Avory Nash, the most junior member of the interceptors four person crew, and as usual it was filled with petulance and whine as though signing on to Fleet was suppose to be a vacation not a job.
Before Hanson could answer, the silky voice of Flight Lieutenant Angela Cross cut in, “can it Nash, ours is not to reason why, ours is to do then go get smashed after.” Then, as though that sentence had resolved the issues, she went back to monitoring the various components of the advanced weapon systems she controlled.
Hanson flicked his head around to see if the issue was put to rest, which again brought his eyes over the skin tight flight suit of Cross, which was entirely too torturous. He silently wished, for the millionth time by his count, that she had been assigned to any other Flight Group on the St. George so fraternizing would not get him a jail term. He shook himself, and turned back to the controls.
It had been an easy machine when they launched, technically a milk run, but as more details poured in, it was getting harder and harder. So he focused on his own tasks, which were flying and commanding. Flying was easy, he’d been doing it since he was eight, although trying to pretend that an eight metric ton interceptor capable of sustained accelerations of fifteen-hundred gravities is an eighty and change ton assault shuttle, barely capable of three-hundred gravities made it more interesting.
Commanding however was a challenge, between Nash’s whining, Cross’ beauty and Bardall’s overly technical conversations—
And then, as though a stray thought was a sufficient reason to start one, from the very back of the crew cabin Flight Engineer Bardall began, “See Nash, the Remora’s shroud works on a very simple principle. The hull of the ship is split into four hundred and eleven facets, all but seven of which have dedicated EM sensors, emitters, and signal processors. What ever signals hit the shroud are instantly registered, and phase conjugate signals sent out, while at a micro second delay the original signal is sent out by the opposite facet. In effect, the shroud removes its own reflection from the entire EM spectrum.”
Hanson closed his eyes for a second; Bardall was going to be going on like this for a while.
“This is not a good plan,” Clarke muttered. He had found a data access point in a systems closet, and managed to slot both Diadre and Eric, which brought is AI team up to full strength. He was going to try to avoid putting into his report that every screen in the closet, all forty-two of them, had been tuned into one of the security cameras, with a strange preponderance of those cameras being focused on the swimming pools or ladies’ rooms of the ships. The tipped over wastebasket filled with tissues was almost certainly an indicator of an operator with severe allergies.
The gestalt AI had managed to secure sufficient access to none critical systems that he could actually begin to have some effect on the ship. Specifically, on his signal the inertial dampening effect created by the grav-coils was going to be extended into one of the ships eight engines. The imbalance should be enough to make the hostiles pull the engines back from redline, and give the St. George a chance to catch up.
That was the good part of the plan.
The bad part was standing at the secondary storage access point to main engineering. There were still eight hostiles on the other side of the door, and if any one of them managed to send a signal to the others, hostages were almost certainly going to die.
So he stood there, looking over the lines of codes scrolling up inside his helmet. He had programmed the shoulder mounted grenade launcher to use non-lethal Sizzeler rounds, and one for each target. Fortunately he knew where each of them was, any who did not go down from the pain effect were going to catch a boarding laser in the head. He kept reminding himself that they used lasers because they did heavy organic damage, but wouldn’t do much damage to ship board systems, but knowing that he was planning on firing weapons in the ship’s equivalent of a brain stem left him sick to his stomach.
“Nerves never helped anyone succeed.”
“Three, two, one, begin sequence.”
“Captain! Tupalayev has reduced engine power to eighty percent nominal, scans showed engine power deficiency in engine six before they cycled back.”
“Excellent! Was that your man Greiss?”
“Can’t say, no way for him to report if it was or wasn’t. They were running the engines hard, they might have burned something out, or he might of helped it along.”
The door slid open without a sound. The rubberized soles of his armor’s boots made nary a peep as the strong magnets battled with the hydraulic muscles to gently take each stride. The ventilation system of the superconducting energy cell had even been shut down to avoid the tell tale whirring of fans.
All of which was idiotically unnecessary because before the door had fully opened the grenade launcher had begun its automatic firing sequence. It fired using a magnetic mass driver system; the final few rings were fluted so they could launch a grenade almost perpendicular to the barrel. The computer controlled targeting, since no human could, and in the span one point two seconds eight grenades had fired.
The Sizzelers consisted of a micro cell capacitor and a magnetically charged casing. When their outer shell was destabilized by hitting something it is vaporized by the capacitors discharge. The resulting radiation is the same well-understood micrometer wavelength energy that produced the ancient ‘Pain-Ray’ effect.
Eight hostiles dropped like sacks of potatoes screaming in pain and agony.
Clarke wandered through the room, putting nanobot carrying subjugator tabs on each hostile, and in seconds each in turn fell into an artificially induced medical coma.
“Main Engineering secure,” he told the empty room.
“So if we can manage to track one of the unprotected facets, or track signature emissions, then we should be able to track the Remora.”
Hanson applauded, celebrating the end of Bardall’s technical brief, though he was certain Bardall was taking it as a compliment to his technical knowledge.
Just over his shoulder, Cross was chuckling at the melodramatic humor, and Hanson had to lock down his neck so he didn’t reflexively crank it around to see the glorious jiggle that went with the girlish giggle. ‘I need a new assignment,’ he thought to himself.
Lieutenant Coy’s voice came across the main channel, instantly ending all mirth, “Target vessel has cut engine power to eighty percent nominal, continue to advance on vessel.”
“New time to ‘boarding’ intercept fourteen minutes,” Bardall reported from the aft panel. He, as always, had done the math in his head faster than Hanson got it punched into the computer, and his result was no more than five seconds off.
“Confirmed,” Hanson said, then checked the positions of the other interceptors in his group.
“Emergency Condition in Main Engineering! Emergency Condition in Main Engineering!” The electronically synthesized voice of the Tupalayev’s emergency announcement system was not as pleasant as its other voices. Perhaps that was deliberate, or maybe it was just perceived by everyone on board when every reinforced internal hatch slammed shut as the magnet fields holding them opened were suddenly discharged. Suddenly the ship was cut into dozens of adjacent bank vaults, as no main corridor remained open for more than a few dozen feet.
“Crap,” Clarke cursed, “that was not what I wanted to happen.” He had tried to crank into the fusion core protocols, to simulate a failure, and shut down the engines, apparently he triggered the wrong protocol, and locked himself completely out of the system.
Then the more complicated problem set in, Main Engineering was a room eight meters by ten, and the main access doors were sealed with significantly more spring force then his armor’s muscles could generate. He could dig out the springs, and open the door, but it would take ten minutes or so, per door.
He brought up the interior map of the ship, and counted.
Seventeen doors between him and the nearest hostile, another four before he got to an area where they were keeping hostages.
While he was trying to come up with a plan for dealing with that issue he heard a voice in the room. Spinning around, he found the source, an open comm link on the bench.
“Seven, this is One, Report! What the hell happened?”
“Well, if they don’t know yet, they will soon, so no point hiding.” His fingers flicked in the subtle gestures which disengaged his radio lockout out, and issued the orders to the viral AI working its way through the computer to go fully active, rather than trying to hide.
Data began streaming down the visor inside his helmet, as well as out through the radio link back to the St. George.
He thought about answering the call, but thought better of it.
“Data stream from boarding action, Captain,” the report was crisp, clean, and formal, as it was suppose to be, which was a vast improvement over the half screamed,
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For the two of you reading this, sorry I messed up the cut & paste on friday...
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“Data stream from boarding action, Captain,” the report was crisp, clean, and formal, as it was suppose to be, which was a vast improvement over the half screamed, “what the hell,” of a moment before when the Tupalayev went into emergency lockdown.
“Report indicates that he has secured Main Engineering, and removed eight of twenty eight hostiles. Securing the –“
“Captain,” it was Apicello yelling, “explosion in the Tupalayev’s Main Engineering chamber.”
Clarke had been surprised by the explosion. Apparently the response to a missed check in from the hostile group in Main Engineering was the detonation of rather a large supply of explosive.
As a consequence, he had spent the last six minutes using the hydraulically powered muscles of his armor to dig himself out of the heap of wreckage. The expansive room of Main Engineering was a disaster, only separated from catastrophe by the reinforced doors protecting the fusion reactors.
A glance at his helmets internal displays indicated aside from increased tension, and the physiological indicators of being rather pissed off Clarke was uninjured. Armor had a few minor damage indicators, the worst of which was a spoiled laser-focusing array. He ejected the cylinder that carried the focusing lenses and solid-state media of the array and replaced it with one of the spares.
A tone in his helmet indicated his outbound signal was being jammed, and the St. George was no longer receiving telemetry.
“I have had enough!” Captain Strickland shouted at the main screen in response to the report of signal jamming. “All stations, this is the Captain, secure from Trojan Horse operations, disengage ECM disguise, and transmit the following:”
“Hostile raiders aboard the Tupalayev, this is Captain Strickland of the CTS St. George, you are in violation of Confederation laws, and will be brought to justice. There is a Legionnaire boarding party on board the Tupalayev already, and the assault shuttles you were monitoring on approach should be revealing themselves to be Rapier class interceptors as I speak. You will disengage your Taylor field and shut down your engines immediately, or we will use force against you.”
The captain’s demeanor was dripping ice water as the signal leapt the miniscule distance across the gulf of space to the Tupalayev. There was no response.
“Apicello, I want firing solutions on all eight engines, you will have one shot, and we need to stop that ship cold.”
“Computer, Lieutenant Coy,” a fraction of a second later a comm. hologram appeared, “Coy, I want all the Interceptors tasked with making sure that Remora does not get away, and prep launches of rescue craft and anything else you may need, your discretion.”
“Navigation,” the Captain continued, turning away from the holographic image of the Flight Control Officer without waiting for acknowledgement, “shake a leg boys, we aren’t pretending to be a lame duck anymore, I want a best time intercept on the Tupalyev.”
“Greiss, you have two more men in tubes already, launch at your discretion, Clarke could use some help I believe.”
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yet more...
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Clarke took one last look around engineering, and without lament brought the fractal edge of his legios down against the outer wall of the ship. The sword’s blade was ridiculously heavy compared to the ancient weapons it was based on, but then the people using those blades had not received genetic modifications to increase muscle power, nor did they have access to any of the other training facilities and techniques of the modern Legionnaire. Every Legionnaire was a master of the use of the legios, similar to the samurai and their katana, and could wield the eighteen-kilogram weapon with amazing skill and quickness. Inside of boarding armor, with the augmented exoskeletal musculature the legios seemed as light as a bamboo-training weapon.
It took four blows to cut a whole in the inner hull large enough for his armor, and another four to hack through the outer shell of the ship. He was already outside the skip, walking down the hull using magnetic boots, when the spectral hands of the out rushing air grabbed a hold of the dead hostiles and flung them into the void.
The gestalt AI of his spikes prevented the ship from noticing the explosive decompression of the main engineering section, so no alarms sounded. As an added benefit, he smiled as damage indicators lit up indicating someone was cutting through the isolation door systems, as though he was heading forward that way.
“Three, two, one, launch.”
“Reserve boarding party away,” reported the officer in charge of the ‘man-cannon’
“Captain! Vector change in Tupalyev, they have rotated twenty-seven degrees left, fourteen degrees down, and are accelerating at two-hundred-twenty gravities, new plot on your screen.”
“Dutchman! Dutchman! Prepare to launch recovery team,” Lieutenant Coy was rather busy on the flight deck, but the two Legionnaires hurtling through space would certainly want picked up, so the recover shuttle just got bumped up in priority. At the rate they were launched, and the new vector of the battle, if she waited, they may be out there alone for hours.
“Where the hell did they get two-twenty gravities?”
Mr. Stewart answered, “it isn’t possible, the Tupalayev is a Harrington class cruise vessel. The red line should be one-eighty gravities, no way they could pull another twenty five percent out.”
Strickland tried not to roll his eyes, Stewart was spewing statistics that he had memorized without realizing so had everyone else on the bridge.
“Mr. Stewart, I am grateful for your help, and I understand your concerns in this matter, but at this point we are in an active combat situation. Regulations require me to have you taken to your quarters, for your own protection. Dansen.”
Dansen, the most junior bridge officer, rose immediately, not thrilled to be assigned the task of escorting the civilian to quarters, he knew the duty was coming.
“Poor guys,” Cross said from the weapons station as she watched the two Legionnaires pass through her sensor envelope. They would certainly miss the party.
“ECM systems shut down, reactor and engines secured from silent running, Taylor field at full combat intensity in eighty-one seconds,” Bardall reported every step of the checklist from the engineering area, despite the redundant readout on Hanson’s terminal.
Hanson did not mind, since he was now trying to secure the best firing line he could on an invisible ship docked on a star liner that was now accelerating at one hundred twenty two percent of the theoretical maximum.
Clarke lurched on his feet, the magnets almost failing as the ship’s acceleration climbed to unprecedented levels. He scanned the reports that his gestalt AI ally was feeding out through the ships radio system.
‘The water,’ he said to himself reading the reports. The Tupalayev’s engines used a peroxide compound as part of the fuel for the ion engines. It was mass intensive, and expensive, but cheaper in the long run by the heavier and much more expensive systems used by military vessels. However, the energy available, and the plasma fragmentation point of water is almost the same as the peroxide.
Somehow, whoever these hostiles were, they had managed to rig the plumbing of the Tupalayev’s swimming pool to dump the water into the engines. It was effectively an afterburner for the ion drives, terribly inefficient, but they would be able to hold this acceleration for as long as they had water, and that would be a while.
Clarke continued reading the data that his ally had provided, but the end was sudden, and accompanied by the warbling tone inside his helmet that informed him of radio signal jamming.
“Damn it,” he said, reflexively turning to raise his left wrist, and his boarding laser towards the St. George, but the range was to great for him to line up optically, and without even passive signals working through the jamming, his armor could not line up the shot either.
“Damn it!”
Nope, now you have two. Great story!
I like the story!
I am intrigued, but my two year old won't let me finish so I'll bookmark it and drop in later.
Maybe a little more character description. Everything else is explained in a way that makes perfect sense, but then, I'm a Trek fan, and their explanations seem to work for me :)
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“Now what?” Apicello was not happy when his tactical screen went to the yellow background indicating jamming and conjectural data.
The flight decks had been rapidly emptying, and at the moment, in addition to the original four interceptors, there were four fighter, two actual assault shuttles and the rescue shuttle heading after the two legionnaires. The two heavy combat legionnaire drop armor systems were on hot stand by, ready to launch as soon as they figured out where the Tupalayev was headed.
Worse, from his point of view, he had just managed to rebuild his tracks on the target’s engines and was three seconds from being ready to fire. He was already shifting to use LIDAR as the primary tracking mechanism, but the change would cost more seconds.
Worse yet, though he would not find out for some time, was that the jamming cut off the tell tale signals that would have told him where the Tupalayev was getting its insane power from.
“New priority, computer, prepare Lighthouse level 3, and launch immediately!” Coy was responding without orders, but she had too many of her people in the vacuum to care.
“Lighthouse 3 ready,” the computer responded less than a second later, “launch in 3, 2, 1.”
Lighthouse drones consisted of sensors and communication equipment packed into a tiny, stealth-shrouded package. Without having to designate any mass for none critical purposes, they could out accelerate even an interceptor, and their equipment could burn through the jamming and even use the tangled electronic signal to find the source.
“Lieutenant Coy,” It was the captain on the comm., “I want you to launch Lighthouse—“
“Already done, Cap,” she said, trying hard not to be dismissive. That had been in her annual review, ‘dismissive attitude towards commanding officers,’ and she did so want the rank of Commander this year, so she could officially be Commander of the Aerospace Assets Group.
“Good work, Lieutenant,” and the captain’s connection was gone.
“Targeting solution acquired, prepare to fire.”
“Holy mother! Captain, we have been acquired, active RADAR and LIDAR detected!” Apicello was using his junior version of command charisma. Without raising his voice at all, every duty station on the bridge had fallen silent for his report. It was so quiet that between words you could hear his fingers flashing across the controls.
“Lighthouse shows obscured source to aft, advanced stealth profile, activating Burn Out.” The burnout feature of the Lighthouse drones consumed their internal batteries in seconds, but they would generate sufficient signal strength to burn through any signal jamming or deception, and the internal reactors would have them back online in a few minutes.
“Fire!”
Somewhere behind the St. George, a mass accelerator vomited a one-point-two kilogram mass of specially processed metal alloy. The initial kick-start came from a pulse mass device similar to the man-cannon, but with no concern for the upper acceleration limit. A fraction of a second later, rapidly coupling and decoupling magnetic fields added more and more speed to the weapon, so that the round hurtled into the vacuum at nearly thirty-nine hundred meters per second. The tiniest delay later and the coaxial particle beam launched a single molecule of the antimatter equivalent of the metal alloy. Two thirds of the way from the weapon to the target the two came into contact, resulting in the massive release of thermal energy, and instantly flashing the alloy beyond its own plasma point, breaking it down into a hyper velocity cluster of ionizing gas.
The Plasma Cannon variant of the mass driver was the single most powerful weapon ever devised by Confederation scientists, and its fury had been unleashed on the unprepared aft segment of the St. George.
Clarke’s screens flashed for a second, and he recognized the pulse of Burn Out signals flooding the space around him. He sincerely wished he knew what was going on, but it was not to be. Once again, he used the bypass signal to cycle through another airlock, and found himself inside the second receiving ring, a large promenade where passengers would be boarded and guided to their rooms and the resort areas. It was the closes he could get to the bridge without having to cut his way in.
He noticed movement out the corner of his eye, and reflexively snapped his boarding laser up and fired.
The focused beam instantly boiled the fluids at the point of impact, causing a messy explosion of blood. The unused heavy pulse rifle clattered to the floor.
“Only place they could be controlling the ship from now is the bridge,” he said to himself.
Unexpectedly, the lights flashed a single time in response.
“Condition Black! Unknown hostile force in the aft combat area, all weapons hot,” like the rest of the well-trained team, Hanson was issuing the correct orders to his crew before receiving them from higher.
Every fiber of his being wanted to react by streaking off to identify the hostile; however, doing so would result in losing the lock on the remora, and if it detached they may never find it again.
High cyclic pulse cannons were firing fragmentation rounds on automatic at the incoming bolt of plasma. They were unable to really destroy it, but scattering the plasma or slowing it down would result in that much more energy being bled off into the epic chill of space and that much less that the St. George’s armor would have to absorb.
Meanwhile, the ship went through a roll that was impossible to fully compensate for. People and equipment were dumped from beds, chairs, and tables throughout the ship.
The computerized alarm signal sounded, followed by, “General Quarters! General Quarters!”
Broken down by the defensive fire, and twisted by the inertial barrier, the remnants of the plasma bolt raked a mere meter away from the apex of the ship. Fortunately, only a few minor secondary systems were whisked away.
The follow up shots faired even worse. Fired within milliseconds of the first, they reached the rapidly veering target progressively less accurately.
“Ahh, hell,” Lieutenant Coy shouted, “Captain,” she waited while the signal was connected, she was not first in line to report to the captain, finally her turn arrived “Captain, there is a small blunder. All fighters are currently deployed, none of them with the heavy ordnance package. I’m sorry.”
Even through the holographic system, she was reluctant to make eye contact while making the report of such a blatant mistake.
The captain growled for a second, then he started, more calmly than Coy expected, “not your fault lieutenant, you didn’t expect this any more than we did up here. We dropped the ball, now lets figure out how to get it back.”
“Cap, the only thing I have left on the deck is the Drop Armor,” as she spoke she glanced through the armored crystalline window at the two black shapes on the flight deck. “They can’t carry torp’ launchers—“ she trailed off in thought.
The captain finished for her, “--but they can carry torpedoes, get to work Coy.”
Finally, a fix, thank you!
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Gods, has it been two weeks... work has been hell... here you go...
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Clarke let out a grim smile as he flicked his wrist to clear the blood from his blade. It was not surprising to find a guard standing on the far side of the door, not at all since he had restored contact with his gestalt AI. Of course the guard had been surprised when three feet of three feet of fractal edged Menjennan blade pushed through the door like it was paper, and through his bowels with even less resistance.
The body slumped to the ground, falling into the doorway when it opened. Clarke simply stepped over since hiding the body would be meaningless given the hole in the door and the rapidly spreading blood. For a moment he watched the spinning drops of blood as the rained out of the air when they reached the limits of his disruption field and reencountered the ships artificial gravity.
“Unknown Hostile Vessel, this is the Confederation Starship Saint George. We are in lawful pursuit of a civilian vessel currently under control of unknown hijackers. If you do not disengage we will be forced to fire upon you,” the comm. tech’s voice was filled with an icy chill, a cocktail of fear, anger, and discipline, as she spoke.
“Captain,” Apicello began as soon as the channel was closed, “hostile vessel identified as Hull Number 51807, CTS Night Stalker, Black Knight class cruiser. Lighthouse Burnout confirms ID with ninety-eight point seven percent certainty.”
Captain Strickland reviewed the technical data, though he already knew most of it. The Black Knight cruisers were variants of the Star Knight class cruisers like the St. George. All of the surface mounted secondary systems were redesigned for low emission, and given a high absorbency coating. Fortunately, the Night Stalker had not bee upgraded as a Black Knight II, which included similar active stealth systems to the remora they had already found.
The Night Stalker’s service history was more revealing. A cascade failure in the transi-core reactors had been reported, resulting in the Captain ordering the crew to abandon ship. During the evacuation, nine escape pods reported launch failures. A few moments later the debarked crew had front row seats as they watched their former captain, most of the senior staff, and several dozen other crewmembers commit an act of treason. It had been impossible to track the ship due to its stealth capabilities, but there was only one place they could go, into the open arms of Admiral-Emperor Potokar’s Imperial Republic.
The Captain stood up, “All hands, all flights,” he paused as the computer attempted to make the connections, knowing that with the jamming not every craft was going to hear him. When the tone warbled indicating connection he began, “Ladies and Gentleman of the St. George, today is a most grievous day. For those of you in sections where the current situation has not reached you, we are in pursuit of the Star Liner Tupalayev, which has been hijacked. We have suspicion that the hijackers are in collusion with the traitor admiral’s forces. We know for a fact that we are being pursued by one of the ships that has crossed the line, and they have fired on us without provocation. They refuse to respond to our hails, and we can only assume they intend to bring us to battle.”
“Never in the history of the confederation has one warship fired upon another in anger, and this is not a historical footnote I wanted to make. I ask all of you to tend to your duties, and prepare to defend your self, your ship, and your ideals. Though I know it will be hard, put aside your doubts and concerns. We will carry the day. Courage and honor!”
“Close channel.”
“Helm, new vector zero-zero-five by two-nine-zero, one-eight-zero gravities, one hundred twenty seconds; commence in five seconds.”
The helmsman read back the command, and executed as ordered.
“Tactical, aft armaments commence sustained fire, suppression pattern.”
“Communications, discontinue attempt to contact hostile, tight beam transmissions only from this point out.”
“Engineering, charge secondary reactors, full emergency power condition. Recommendation on viability of Reynir field generation, report in sixty.”
“Sensors, lock into the Lighthouse platforms, alert me whenever Burnout becomes available, and try to have them keep up.”
“Helm, next turn, at previous mark, three-five-five by one-eight-zero.”
“Tactical, forward weapons commence fire as target bears, conserve missiles to fire after next Burnout sequence.”
The orders continued for some time.
Coy took another moment to admire the Legionnaire Drop Armor units. They were a child’s dream come true, an engineering nightmare, a weapon on incalculable potential, and indescribably expensive.
They were twice as large as a standard fighter-bomber, and covered in the same heavy Menjennan alloy as warship hulls. Somehow, the engineers had squeezed in not one but two perma-core reactors, and advanced secondary systems unlike anything else available to fleet or surface forces. They were capable of two hundred plus sustained gravities in space, trans atmospheric, and seemingly impossible, capable of transforming from thirty-five meter space ship to thirty-two meter tall battle robot.
Coy was hard at work, trying to pull the reserve ammo drums out of the holsters on the legs. The holsters were designed to hold a hundred thousand round drum of heavy pulser darts, but would also just fit a torpedo.
A team of senior techs was pulling the engines from two torpedoes, and replacing them with magnetic grapple units, and hopefully in less than five minutes, the two suits of drop armor would be launching with two anti-matter limpet mines.
The work was being watched by two of the ships Legionnaires who were wearing full suits of boarding armor, a requirement for Drop Armor pilots. She wished she had something for them to do, she was embarrassed enough already, she did not need to be watched.
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The first bolts of coherent energy lanced from the St. George towards its assailant. Four of the eight aft lasers could bring the target under their sites, and each pumped nearly four hundred megawatts of multi spectral electromagnetic radiation towards the target over two hundred times a second. Microscopic variations in the focusing medium and the EM lenses turned the pulses into cones of suppressive fire.
Immediately the pursuing ship had to adjust its course in order to avoid entering the worst of the maelstrom, and only superficial damage was reported on the forward sections.
A few meters away, the dedicated gun handlers of the four aft mass drivers wondered why they had not been ordered to fire. Without the plasma inducer modification, the mass drivers had a much lower potential for damage, but the cyclic rate was high, and they still did more damage per hit than the lasers would. Instead, the gun crews listened to the stead thrumming pulse as the laser capacitors charged and discharged somewhere in the bulkhead between the two kinds of weapon mounts.
“Captain, Engineer reports Reynir field modification impossible at this time without first shutting down the Taylor field,” Apicello abridged the Engineer’s report, removing the long winded justifications, and the description of the chunky remains of people that would be all that was left if they lost inertial compensation for even one fraction of a second.
“Understood,” Captain Strickland replied. The Reynir field idea had been a gambit, but only newer ships were really built to handle that much distortion in the Taylor field.
“Captain, new course in three, two, one.”
The ship began accelerating along a new course tracing the long parabolic curve of continuous acceleration. Inside, nobody felt even the slightest sensation of movement as the engines pushed the ship along.
Strickland glanced down at the monitor, trying to determine the vector the target ship would choose. It had already turned away from a direct pursuit because of the laser fire.
“Hold course for fifteen more seconds, then go to maximum available acceleration on the same course.”
“Signal change in target, sir,” Nash reported from the interceptor’s engineering console, “they are transmitting. Signal is encoded, computer is grinding on it.”
“Thank you, Avory, they may have finally made a mistake,” Hanson smiled with a predatory grin.
“Come out, come out where ever you are,” Clarke muttered to no one in particular. Someone had blasted several of the internal sensor modules in this area, so he figured it contained one of the smarter targets.
As if in response, a figure popped out of a doorway further down the corridor and let fly with a heavy bore pulse cannon.
“What the hell,” Clarke screamed, and instinctively wheeled to take the shot full in the chest.
Using a weapon like that was seven kinds of stupid. When it fired it launched a four-gram projectile at nearly one thousand meters per second. The projectile was specially shaped to serve as a resonator for a fifty-four kilogram pulse mass field. If the pulse mass field did not fall off so quickly it would deliver two pint seven million Joules of energy to the target, instead at this range it should have delivered an even million or so.
The transfer of energy out of a pulse round into a real object is terribly inefficient, so only a fraction of the delivered energy was really going to do damage, but still enough that if the bulkhead of the ship was hit, it would open the whole compartment to space.
Instead, the resonator crossed the boundary of Clarke’s disruption field, and the pulse mass was simply snuffed out. There was no time for energy coupling, or momentum transfer, so the tiny particles hit the Menjennan alloy armor of his chest plate and delivered a pittance of energy.
Clarke responded by twitching the two middle fingers of his right hand, and immediately a fragmentation grenade fired down the hall, command detonating at the exact doorway.
Without the internal sensors, he had to confirm the kill for himself, and it took counting the boots to determine there had been two people waiting in ambush for him.
Coy watched as the two armored Legionnaires boarded their drop armor units. The torpedoes had been set up to be used as limpets, and they would do massive damage if they were placed correctly, but drop armor was not designed for this type of fight.
“Captain, Flight Deck Reporting, drop armor ready to launch.”
“Acknowledged, launch after next maneuver.”
“Navigation, turning, immediate, zero four five mark three four zero.”
“Tactical, forward guns prepare to fire as the target bears.”
The maneuver cut the ship around hard in space. For just a few seconds the hostile ship was wholly in front of the St. George, giving the forward gunners a chance to fire every weapon on the tapered octagon.
Eight lasers fired high-energy lances across the void. Sixteen barrels of pulse cannon mass drivers fired. Another four barrels of plasma cannon fire was added to the mix.
Only the forward missile launchers did not fire, the range far to short for proximity weapons.
The target shipped slewed in response to the incoming fire. The lasers hitting the armor before inertia could be overcome, forcing the molecularly perfect silicon based diamond analogue of the Menjennan armor to dissipate the thermal energy. Tiny fountains of molecule-sized suns blossomed here and there where the armor failed.
Then the ship seemed to leap, slewing high, and away from the St. George, bring its own much smaller aft array to bear on the Confederation ship.
The maneuver spared them the worst of the incoming deluge of plasma and pulse mass, and the inertial barrier of their Taylor field shrugged off yet more of the attack.
I single eye rending explosion decorated the tail of the target as it spun through its own battle dance maneuver, and now its won aft battery attempted to lay into the St. George.
“Target hit, solid damage reported in transfer interlocks. Damn it, reported one of the ratings in tactical assigned to target assessment. The transfer interlocks were the large cargo passages for loading and unloading of equipment, probably the least vital target on any ship. Then again, the target was now facing their main sensor array away from the St. George, as two heavily stealthed units of drop armor slipped unseen into the depths of the battle.
“Target Separation,” shouted Nash and Cross almost simultaneously. A second later the computer confirmed their assessment, the Remora had detached from the Tupalayev. There was no way to be certain if there were hostages on board, but they had been ordered to make sure the stealth vehicle did not escape.
Cross thumbed a trigger stud and a pair of unguided kinetic kill missiles separated from the interceptor.
A fraction of a second later twin explosions blossomed confirming the death of the nearly invisible Remora.
Sound does not propagate through the vacuum of space, but when one object explodes near another the millions of tiny particles carried on the blast wave can create a similar effect.
Clarke had been ten meters from the companionway leading to the Remora’s docking position. A moment before he had been listening to the crewmen on board, as they got ready to launch.
Now, he was seeing the flashing indicator that told him outside noise was being filtered while listening to the thunder like roar of the molecular remains of the escape vessel pummeled the outside of the Tupalayev.
He continued moving forward, looking for the leader of the hostile boarding party. It was quite convenient that the now dead men had made it clear they were leaving him behind.