Authors: Evan Currie
Then everything went black and he passed out.
*****
More torpedoes tore from the forward bays, sending shudders through the decks as the Los Angeles and other ships of the Squadron continued to empty their munitions stores at appalling rates as they tore and twisted in space on evasive patterns, hoping to throw off the aim of the approaching ships.
“Holy Christ!”
Kay’s head snapped up, jerking over to the source of the yell, “What now!?”
“The Majesty, Ma’am. She’s making for the jump point, at forty gravities and climbing!”
Kay’s head dropped to the plot, eyes seeking out the icon that represented the Majesty, then she just shook her head.
I hope you know what you’re doing, Alex.
“So wish them luck and keep firing!” She said aloud, just as the Sierra suddenly shook from a sphere of flame that erupted from her rear port stabilizers. “And get me a track on our torpedoes!”
“First impact in thirty seconds! We’ve lost telemetry on half of them though... I think they’re engaging with point defense!”
The Admiral’s voice echoed over Kay’s implants just a moment later, “Gather every bit of data you can on their systems, Captain. I’m transmitting everything to the Majesty.”
Kay swallowed, but nodded though the Admiral couldn’t see her. “Close on the bandit! Engage with lasers!”
“Impact!”
The nuclear fused torpedo erupted as it slammed into the enemy ship, slamming through the outer armor at a speed difference of almost sixty percent the speed of light. It penetrated through eight decks before the explosives detonated, and even on the Los Angeles they could see the reaction spread through the enemy ship as it spewed nuclear fire through the hull breach.
“Hit! We have a hit!”
“Bandit one has lost acceleration!”
“How much!?” Kay snarled, leaning forward.
Surely it would stop accelerating altogether.
“Down to ninety gravities... holding at ninety!”
Kay stared, unbelieving. Ninety. How could it hold at ninety after a nuclear weapon detonated inside its hull!?
“Lasers discharging!”
The lasers lanced out as the ships closed, sending thermal blooms off the hull of the bandit ship, but without noticeably affecting it in any other way.
“Point defense is too strong! We’re running out of torpedoes!”
Three ships, all firing four of the things every three point two seconds, and they’d only managed to get one solid hit through the enemy point defense. Kay supposed that could be considered too strong, but what else could they do?
“This is Admiral Sweet to all ships,” The Admirals voice called out calmly through the insanity. “Continue firing.”
The answer was, they couldn’t do anything, of course. Not a single god damned thing.
“You heard the man!” Kay growled, “Empty the magazines!”
Twelve more torpedoes surged into space from the three ships, angling up and away from their launching points, and straight into the Bandit ship as it came within only a couple lightseconds. It’s closing speed was such that it would blow right past them in less than a minute, but in that time the three salvoes had maneuvered into its path.
This time they registered shifts in the course of both the torpedoes and the squadron’s ships themselves as the bandit opened fire on the torpedoes, but it had less time than before and more of the missiles survived.
Three of them slammed into the thick forward armor this time, and like the bunker busting brethren their design was based on they slammed through the armor like ice picks through cardboard. In the instant it took to tell the onboard warheads to detonate, all three had slammed through five decks of the enemy ship, and when they went up this time, they gutted the ship with nuclear fire.
“Her accel just died!”
The victory cry went up as the still remarkably intact ship lashed past them, now on a ballistic course with no power to her drives. All Kay would think was that the damn ship was still in one piece, and it didn’t seem possible.
“Bandits Two and Three are accelerating again!”
“Weapons status!”
“We’re down to two salvoes!”
Two salvoes. Kay shook her head, knowing that it just wasn’t enough.
“Captain,” The Admiral’s voice sounded again, “I want you to launch all our ground support supplies.”
Kay blinked, confused, and stared at the screens in front of her. “What?”
“The colonists will need them more than we will,” He said quietly.
She swallowed, nodding. Of course.
“Liz!”
“Ma’am?” Her CO looked over.
“Fire all our ground pounder gear, try to land them around the colony site.” She ordered quietly.
Liz looked confused, but nodded, “Alright... I mean, Aye Ma’am.”
It would probably be a lucky break if they got them on the planet at all, but Kay didn’t care just then. The fast approaching ships were consuming her attention, she knew that they’d let one go one ahead just to test her ships’ capabilities. It was wasteful, perhaps, but then she was launching billions of dollars’ worth of gear into space on the odds that some of it would get where it needed to go.
She’d already lost one ship, and another was probably a Dutchman... She pushed the Majesty out of her mind, focusing again on the enemy. Who were they to waste lives like that? Her lives, their lives?
She seethed, knowing that it was all over except for the shooting.
“Lock them up!”
And soon the shooting would be over as well.
*****
The two alien ships charged in against their human counterparts, apparently taking the barrage of fire without answering in kind. However the torpedoes launched by the Los Angeles class destroyers would just detonate halfway to their targets, destroying others in fratricide, one after the other until space was wiped clean.
And, as they closed, first one then another of the human ships buckled and crushed under an unimaginable force, until they finally erupted in a sphere of perfect white light.
The Los Angeles, namesake of the entire class and flagship of the Squadron closed on the two, her lasers and mazers blazing with unearthly energy at her enemies, but they just shrugged off the assault and turned their weapons on her.
Nothing crossed the gap between them as the Los Angeles died, she just suddenly ceased to be as a ball of white light erupted where the proud ship had once flown. The remaining alien cruisers continued on, accelerating hard toward the sole remaining ship, only for it to vanish moments before they could get its range, vanishing out of existence in a brilliant blue flash of Casimir radiation.
*****
Fourteen lightyears from the Hayden system, the crew of the Survey vessel USV Socrates was shaken when her computers began screaming alarms. They roused themselves from the dreary routine of their mission, shaking off the rust that had accumulated on their rarely used skills.
“What the hell is going on!?” Captain Alexi Petronov growled, swinging down from the observation bubble to the Bridge as the alarms continued to wail.
“Emergency transponder! USF signature, Sir!”
“Here??” Alexi growled, unbelieving.
There was nothing out there for the Fleet to be looking into, let alone get into trouble over. There wasn’t a colony for fourteen lightyears, and nothing ever happened at Hayden anyway. Alexi pulled himself hand over hand to the center of the bridge as the sensor data kept flowing in.
“Yes Sir... Reads out as the Majesty. She’s a...”
“Los Angeles Class. Yes, I know.” Alexi growled, pulling his straps tight as he settled in. “Locate her, and prepare the ship for acceleration.”
“Yes Sir.”
Finding the Majesty was easy, she was screaming for help on every frequency in use. Catching up to her was a little more difficult, Alexi noted. She must have been running at one unholy speed when she jumped, he decided. She’d bled some of the momentum into jump space, but most of it was still hanging with her, and she was flipping end for end through space at almost forty percent of light speed.
They spent the better part of three days just catching up to the vessel, screwing their survey mission all to hell in the process, but they finally managed it and roped the navy ship to flatten out her spin. Only when that was done could they send in borders.
The ship was dead, literally, bodies still strapped into their crash couches with limbs floating freely in the zero gravity. Alexi led the team himself, moving through the ghost ship with a sick feeling forming in the pit of his stomach.
On the bridge things were the same, dead officers were slumped over their equipment, some of them with obvious injuries like broken limbs and necks, but most simply still.
“Gott.” One of the crewman whispered, “What happened?”
“Acceleration,” Alexi said softly, floating over the Captain’s console, gently moving the uniformed figure out of the way. “They redlined their drive.”
“Why the hell would they do that??”
Alexi read the displays on the screen, barely able to understand most of them, but he saw enough to make him pale in his suit. “Kelly...”
“Yeah, Cap?”
“Radio back to the Soc, tell them to start priming the drives for a jump.”
“Captain??”
Alexi pulled a portable memory drive from his suit pocket and slid it into the Captain’s console. “We’re going home, Kelly. Mission’s scrubbed.”
There was no answer to that, only a faint sound that sounded like a sigh. One of relief, perhaps, Alexi thought as he downloaded the data from the computer onto his portable drive. If it was what he thought it was, the men and women around him had given their lives to get it this far.
He’d just have to carry it the rest of the way for them.
Sorilla raised her hand, sinking down into the fields as a stray movement caught her eye. Behind her, the colony’s Pathfinders froze as well, ducking down and out of sight. They were approaching the outskirts of the colonized and quasi-terraformed section of Hayden, and the fields of cultivated crops marked the border between the local fauna and the imports like a ruled line.
Her corneal implants refocused on the movement automatically as she flicked her gaze across the fields, following it, then she ducked to the side and vanished into the leafy blue vegetation. Behind her, Reed slipped slowly up to the position she had vacated and knelt quietly with his rifle in hand. For the past week they’d been working to locate other remnants of the main colony site, but it was long slow work.
Hayden had jungle aplenty, and the concentration of living things packed so close played havoc with even the best gear available to Sergeant Aida. It had quickly come down to quartering over a ten thousand square kilometers of jungle, then picking out priority search locations based on the opinions of the pathfinders themselves. No one knew the jungle like they did, barring of course the people who were likely guiding the other survivors to hiding places.
It had become a game of who could outguess who, and only the fact that one side didn’t know precisely what it was playing made the game winnable.
Jerry swept the field once again with the scope of his rifle, the only sighting tool he had that didn’t have an active component that might give away his position, then sank back to the ground and shook his head as he glanced back.
Behind him, Bethany Connors shrugged slightly but didn’t speak or otherwise move.
Bethany was an exo-biologist, one of the transients in Hayden culture. Unlike Reed, she had only arrived on-world a year and half earlier, coming in on a university work visa to study the Chiroptis and other microscopic species that populated Hayden. She knew her stuff, though, and like most frontier academics she more than knew her way around a rifle, so he was glad to have her.
Not that rifle fire had proven to be much value against the Golems they’d begun to meet in the jungle and along the outskirts of Hayden Capital. At best, the most powerful rifles the colony had only served to distract the lumbering brutes while Sorilla nailed them with her assault rifle.
Not precisely a fulfilling activity, in Jerry’s opinion, but someone had to do it.
*****
To those born of Hayden chemistry, the fields were flowing seas of death. Eating the Earth born crops would kill any of the local fauna, just as the plants poisoned the ground where they grew, introducing elements to the soil that would strangle the local plants. To the transplanted colonists, however, they were now the only hope for life that remained.
Dean Simmons had grown up tending them, being a third generation Hayden man. Most of his young life, the fields had been a chore, a duty that took from his time in town and with his friends. Food was plentiful, supplied from the orbiting counterweight, and the crops seemed useless. Medical crops that grew far better on Hayden than anywhere else in the known worlds, cash crops that grew so well here that even with the transport costs to Earth they turned a profit.
Now they were the only foods that could be eaten.
As long as the ghosts didn’t get him while he tended them.
Since that long night, the shadows danced around Dean when he moved, following him wherever he went and making him look over his shoulder and even under his bed for the monsters in the dark. There was something wrong in the fields today, wrong beyond his paranoia. The local versions of animals were quiet, but it didn’t feel like the sudden oppressive silence that had landed on their head during the attacks.
Dean stayed low, making his way through the fields, intent on getting back to his bolt hole and clearing the area. He didn’t care about the differences, there was something wrong in the air and he wanted out of the fields. He’d come back later for the food.
Less than fifty feet from the bolt hole a chill ran down his spine, and Dean suddenly couldn’t resist the urge to make a break for it. He didn’t know where the feeling came from, it just surged over him and he broke into a sprint. Just a few instants too late, as it turned out.