The expansion box set, p.31
The Expansion Box Set, page 31
part #1 of The Expansion Series
That’s gonna leave a mark, she complained to herself pointlessly.
Rogers righted the small ship, levelling it out and punching it so hard that they all felt the shove backward and instinctively fought against it.
As soon they had adjusted to the inertia of hard acceleration, they had to stop themselves from pitching forward toward the cockpit when Rogers switched to a hard stop. Anyone not strapped in risked flying out into space via the bulkhead in front of the pilot.
Momentary weightlessness, courtesy of their grav emitter that could barely keep up, followed as Rogers pitched them into another steep dive.
“Commander,” the pilot yelled in a tone somewhere between unimaginable panic and professional concentration, “I could really use your trick with the guns again.”
Brandt’s eyes settled on the pieces of her armor skating around the deck of the passenger bay. She wouldn’t be able to replicate that particular show any time soon. Her eyes caught Zero’s; he shook his visored head to say that he didn’t have the software patch to use them.
“I’ll do it manually,” she said, fighting her way forward to the cockpit and the vacant co-pilot’s seat.
“Not at these velocities you won’t,” Rogers told her. “At this range they’re moving just too damned fast for us to get a shot off and—Dammit!” He cursed as a series of bright orange streaks flashed ahead of them. Their pursuer had fired a burst. “Commander, I have no idea what will happen outside of atmosphere if these assholes hit us with their god-damned ray guns.”
Just as Brandt opened her mouth to respond, a huge impact rocked them and blackened the interior of the ship in a terrifying instant. The artificial gravity failed, as did their engines, shields and life support. They tumbled through the blackness. Only the soldiers still encased in working armor retained much in the way of their wits, since the HUDs provided them some information. Rogers and Brandt, arguably the two most important people onboard the small ship, were spun around in total darkness with no concept of which way was up; Brandt, because her useless armor had been discarded on the deck and now floating free, and Rogers because he was not used to having armor, and hadn’t activated the helmet.
“We need to reset the systems manually,” Specter shouted over the sounds of the contents of their ship crashing around. “The electronics have tripped, so we’re not quite dead in the water yet.”
“Access panel,” Rogers yelled through gritted teeth. He tried to keep the contents of his stomach inside. “Deck under the jump seat. Manual override for maintenance.”
Specter said nothing. He clamped his impossibly strong robotic hand onto the grab rail and leaned back to pull open the maintenance hatch underneath the seat nearest the hangar door.
“Pump it… three times to… prime it first,” Rogers cried, the G-forces exerted on his brain threatening to black him out at any second.
“Hurry, Jake,” Brandt added, just as her own mind went fuzzy.
37
Proxima b
“Open fire!” Torres shouted.
The stress and over-excitement of the move made his voice sound far louder than a captain should use to give his orders. The four gun bubbles of the Ichi rattled and chirped as their triangular barrels, like the gun system on the Tanto, burst into life and poured fire into the oncoming path of the ship that had just shot down his team. They had concentrated their fire to cover the whole area the alien ship was heading for, and their saturation of that tiny part of space with charged projectiles paid in full.
There was no explosion, no boiling fireball to mark the destruction of their enemy, only the sparking of the dying power as wires and metal were torn apart when the ship broke up into pieces, The bits continued to plough their sparking way onward through space without slowing. Further parts of the bulbous craft disintegrated as the damage caused the parts of it still pressurized to come apart. Soon none of the debris left was large enough to contain anything still living.
“Target destroyed,” reported the tactical officer. The other officers watched the destruction in full screen on the bridge’s main display.
“Sir, incoming comm from the Tanto. Audio only,” called out the comm officer.
“On speaker,” Torres ordered. He retook his seat with more dignity than when he had leapt out of it like a sports fan with money riding on the outcome of a single play.
“Bōken sha Ichi, this is Specter, how copy?” came the crackling voice.
Torres recognized the voice, recognized the callsign of their ghostly secret crewmember. The weak signal was due to the transmission coming from a suit and not automatically rebroadcast through the ship systems as it normally would have been.
“Specter, Ichi Actual, you’re coming in two-by-three,” Torres told him.
“Captain,” came the muffled but familiar voice back at him. He spoke slowly and clearly like he was giving instructions to an unruly child. “We have been hit, bandit is still out there, I have restored basic power, but I cannot, I repeat, I cannot get the ship back to you. Copy?”
“Copy that, Specter. Be advised your bandit is no more. Stand by.” Torres clicked on a separate communication channel and got Doctor Paterson in the main lab.
“Paterson, have you or Harris got any tricks up your sleeves for retrieving our little bird which is currently dead in the water?” he asked hopefully. “No secret tractor beam project you’ve been working on that I didn’t know about?”
“No,” Paterson said immediately—maybe even a little too immediately for Torres’s liking. “Is she able to receive data?”
Torres looked up at the tactical officer who flashed a hurried thumbs-up gesture. He was being given the green light.
“Affirmative,” he told Paterson.
“Good, we can remote pilot it back. Hold on a second…”
The intercom clicked off and within moments the blip on the display for the Tanto began to fly straight and true before swinging about and heading for their docking bay at a smooth pace. Torres waited in agonizing silence until the tactical officer reported that their shuttle was docked safely.
“Bring us about,” he called confidently. “Return to our position in the starboard shadow of the Venture and prepare to target hostile ships.”
The Ichi turned and surged away, back toward the gigantic colony ship. From this angle, it was backlit by the dull, red haze coming from the red dwarf that gave life to part of the planet.
Below them, rushing from the docking bay with all of their gear, medical personnel buzzed like highly organized flies around the repulser-powered gurneys that carried the injured or dead members of the returning team. Zero and Specter were unhurt. Miraculously Brandt and Rogers were merely shaken up after the G-forces had robbed their brains of blood flow for a few seconds too long. Marksman and cyborg were still encased in their suits which went a long way to explaining how they were unhurt, but Marcus and Chopra were banged up badly after their clash with the eight-foot-tall bugs on the surface and again in space. Byrne was also on a gurney. However, he didn’t have medical personnel attending to him; his suit readouts were silent.
“Get me to the bridge,” Brandt said. She stood tall, only to lose her footing almost immediately and felt her fall arrested by the painful clamp of a robotic hand around her upper body. She involuntarily hissed in pain, making Specter release his grip and use his other hand to help her back to her feet.
“Sorry,” he said. “I still forget how powerful they are sometimes.”
“Show off,” Brandt said with a smile. “Get me to the bridge so I can report to the wheel how bad I screwed up again.”
Her knees gave out a second time and she surrendered without a shred of grace to unconsciousness. Specter allowed her to fall as he changed his position, scooping her up in both arms like a child before turning and depositing her on a free gurney.
“Possible concussion through secondary blunt force trauma,” he said efficiently, pressing a finger into Brandt’s blue-tinged lips. “Query cyanosis and hypoxia. Loss of consciousness due to extreme G-forces experienced without protection.”
The medic nodded, scanning the commander with a ruggedized datapad. She took charge of the ship’s ground commander. Specter watched her go and turned to Zero and Rogers.
“Anyone volunteering to pass on that information to the captain?” he asked them.
Neither did.
Specter climbed the ladders and jogged along the decks to reach the bridge, still wearing his armor and bearing two weapons mag-locked to his thigh and back. He scanned his identity and was rewarded with the hissing sound of the bridge doors opening. He strode up to Torres’s left shoulder, waiting to get his attention, but found his glowing eyes drawn to the display screen dominating the entirety of the wall ahead of them.
The screen showed the glowing blue rounds rippling out from the hull of the massive ship ahead like high-pressure water from a sprinkler system back on Earth. It seemed to Specter that every half-dozen or so gun positions concentrated their fire on an individual target that his advanced ocular implant could just about make out. Every so often a small blossom of golden sparks would explode to signify a score for their team, but he watched in horror as each sparkle of dying electricity was answered with a huge explosion and a bright pulse of blue as another ship slammed into the shields.
“Ready,” Torres called, looking down at the display beside him. “And… weapons free!”
The hull vibrated as all of their guns opened up at once along with every warhead they had left. Specter realized that the battle he was looking at ahead of him was actually occurring behind him. They had just opened up on the leading ships not destroyed as they overshot their target and tried to loop in close to the massive hull. Warheads detonated ahead of the insectoid ships, sucking them into the collapsing space to implode them with all the might that physics had up its inescapable sleeve. Their guns thundered charged bolt after charged bolt of heavy metal. They slammed the projectiles mercilessly into the shields and hulls of the enemy and transfered their kinetic energy into devastating damage.
In an instant, through the combined might of the Venture’s guns and the trickery of the Ichi, almost two-thirds of the enemy ships had been destroyed from the first wave.
“My thanks, Captain,” said a voice over the comm. Specter recognized it from a lifetime ago. “Leave the rest to us and get yourself clear. Deal with your wounded and don’t stray too far.”
Torres cut that comm link without responding, as he did, he spotted Specter for the first time. Specter stood slightly taller.
“Sir, Commander Brandt is in medical. Minor injuries only. We have one KIA, two badly injured and two who’ll be just fine. We also still have our people on the surface—”
“I’m aware of that,” Torres said irritably, pausing before he sent the man away. “Prepare all the ready troops to conduct casualty evacuations. I don’t know if we’re expecting boarders, but it wouldn’t hurt to anticipate that.”
Specter glanced at the display, too far away for any normal human to make out any detail but it may as well have been in front of him on a holo-display.
“On which ship?” he asked.
This fight was clearly far from over.
“On my go, fire everything we have and do not stop until I say so or we run out of ammunition,” Captain Hayes growled at his bridge crew. He seemed to enjoy the prospect of a no-holds-barred firefight when they were already half-dead in the water. As long as he had breath in his body, the Hammer would still be fighting.
“What do we do then, Captain?” asked his helmswoman loudly. She had a smile on her face as she nursed the battered frigate into a blockading position. Their ship would protect the huge target of the Venture from the twelve remaining inbound alien ships.
“Then, Ensign Canham, we use bad language and small arms,” he replied.
“Targets marked, weapons range in one-hundred-ten seconds…” Hayes’s tactical officer reported.
The captain sat down and gave his final string of orders. He expected this to be the final battle of his command. He had ordered them to come about. Some of his starboard gun positions had been damaged in their first clash. All of the ready ammunition from those damaged and useless positions was then shipped to the far side of the frigate so that the guns on that side could fire almost constantly. He planned to unload everything he had and go down shooting so that the Venture stood every chance of surviving the fight.
“Tactical officers: you may fire when you have a targeting solution. All gun teams: consider yourselves weapons-free when targets are in range. Concentrate fire—three guns to one target and prioritize. If you hit one, every gun will fire at its partner vessel before the asshole kamikazes our shields. Good huntin’. Hayes out.”
“Sir, shields are down to twenty-nine percent,” reported a worried voice from somewhere to his right.
“Boost all auxiliary power to shields; I want the port side running higher than everywhere else to begin with. Where are we with evacuation of the damaged decks?”
“Decks three through five all evacuated, sir,” called out an officer. “Decks seven and nine still being evacuated.”
“Divert all power from decks three, four and five to auxiliary banks,” Hayes ordered. “Cut life support and gravity. Lock it down cold.”
“Warheads away!” yelled the weapons tactical officer, nervous tension forcing the words to sound almost hysterically excited.
Hayes didn’t need the words shouted to know exactly what had happened. The rippling vibrations heading from bow to stern told him that almost every warhead they had possessed was now streaking through the dark on a course to detonate, hopefully, in the path of the incoming alien ships.
They weren’t the only ones to have adapted following their first clash. Before the warheads could cover the distance, the alien vessels lined up shoulder to shoulder and fired a massive salvo of shots that advanced like an orange wave of destruction. Immediately afterward, they broke away to attack from different directions in pairs.
Hayes, whichever way he looked at it, was screwed. He could move his vessel out of the way of the incoming fire. But the readout beside him confirmed that if he moved those shots would all connect with the Venture. The amount of fire was visible on the big display. His ship wouldn’t survive it if they took even half of the weight, but neither did he have enough time to order his crew to abandon ship. He had twenty seconds to do or at least say something meaningful before they were all blinked out in an instant. His only remaining option for survival was to perform another risky short jump with the Fold Drive, but that abandonment of the Venture was sure to spell their eventual destruction. The Hammer was badly damaged and needed the help of the big colony ship to have any hope of making it out of the system in one piece.
Just as Hayes reached out for the intercom to tell his crew that they were the laziest bunch of assholes he had ever had the pleasure to fight and die alongside, another excited cry tore the still air on the bridge.
“Contact! Port side.”
“The Norton,” he said. He recognized it in a heartbeat. He couldn’t believe that their sister ship had jumped in to give them a chance at life after all.
Moving slowly, the Norton had adjusted course after jumping in. They had seen the threat facing the beaten-up Hammer. Pushing every bit of power available to their port shields, the frigate’s engines surged into life to slide them into position and soak up the incoming shots fired by the enemy.
Captain Hayes watched on in horror as the blinking lights of the Norton faltered. He stared as she began to tumble end over end as her heavy stern vertically undertook her bow. He was slammed back against his chair as a dozen shots hit their weakened shields, draining all of the reserve power he had reclaimed from the abandoned and evacuated decks in an instant. The Norton had saved them, but that reprieve might just have been a stay of execution.
Then he saw the attacking enemy ships on the display. They converged to finish off their weakened and injured prey that they believed were near destruction. But as Hayes continued to watch the display, those lights began to blink out in swirling, rippling vortexes.
Before she had been disabled, before she had taken the hits and been left paralyzed, the Norton had fired everything she had at the enemy, who were now being crushed into nothingness by the collapsing singularities devouring their would-be conquering squadron.
38
Deep Space near Proxima Centauri
Nine Hours Later
“Keep her steady,” Torres warned the young man at the helm of the Ichi
The pilot was already being as careful as he could possibly be. The man was no Rogers, who despite being ordered to remain in medical, had tried to resume his post at the helm of the big sister of the vessel. His refusal to lie down and be examined led to him being sedated and kept in medical forcibly, which was where he remained.
“I’m trying, sir,” the stand-in pilot said nervously, but he wasn’t up to the task.
They had matched their speed and rate of spin to that of the tumbling frigate, the Norton, that still rolled end over end towards deep space. It seemed likely to do so indefinitely unless someone managed to stop them. Their power was out irretrievably. The gaping hole in their port side showed a gap right through the ship. This hole was exactly where their main power source had been before it broke free of its fixings and was sucked out into space. Now they needed a ship to dock with them externally to jumpstart them.
This meant they needed a ship large enough to stabilize the big frigate’s need for power, but also one that was small enough to dock with them like a transport vessel would. The Ichi was the obvious choice, but without Rogers at the helm, they couldn’t find a pilot with the ability to perform the stunt.
