Assault on Ambrose Station: A Seth Donovan Novel (19 page)

29.

The rush of speed was exhilarating, but I had to curb it down a notch. Max was right about the debris. Even at a relatively sedate pace, I could hear multiple pings and bangs against the cockpit. In a regular spacecraft, the inertial stabiliser field that surrounded each ship would act to push the smaller stuff aside, and pilots could evade the larger stuff. Large, sluggish ships tended to sport stronger inertial fields, which acted to shunt bigger debris away.

Without the flight console, I had room to stretch out my legs a little and get comfortable. I was glad I wouldn’t be riding in the back, though, that was positively cramped. I brought up the short range sensors – all the sensors on this fighter were short range – and put the data onto a heads-up display on my overlay. I was to capture fifteen-minute exposures of sensor data and send it back to the Dreaming in data bursts along a tight beam transmission. I started my first recording, storing the data in a memory buffer on my interface overlay. I couldn’t store much, as my overlay was far from high grade, but I had enough free memory to store fifteen minutes of feed without too much trouble.

I remembered one of my squaddies from the Primarch Star Marine Corps, the one who had a top end overlay installed. He used to be able to store hundreds of movies and simulations on his overlay. While everyone else was catching shut-eye or playing cards during evening downtime, he would lay back, close his eyes and watch videos.

Thinking of him, I was hit with a sudden dose of nostalgia. Most of the tricks I knew with an interface overlay – including how to mask unofficial military apps – was due to his instruction. His death had hit me particularly hard, and I consider myself responsible for it. He was the last of my squad to die, horribly wounded in a hand-to-hand fight with some Ghantri. I tried to patch him together the best I could, but his injuries were too severe. He constantly screamed in pain, raving in delirium. It wasn’t until an hour after his injuries that we realised he had been poisoned by the Ghantri blades. Rather than face an agonising death, he begged me to kill him. It took me half an hour more to summon the courage to oblige him.

From that point onwards, I was alone.

Just as I was now.

For the first time, I realised that I was alone once more in the Gossamer System. Suddenly, the confines of the cockpit felt claustrophobic. The compression buffer seemed to slow my movements down, get into my pores and seemed to seep into my skin. I was stuck in here, with no way out until I returned to the Dreaming. I started to breathe in quick, rapid puffs. A small part of me realised I was hyperventilating – the surest sign of a panic attack. My heart began to race and a pressure started to build in my head. I felt like pulling the eject lever and getting out of here fast, or grabbing the yoke and turning around to go back to the Dreaming.

What if this ghost contact was real? What if it
was
the Ghantri, lying in wait for me? I was turning my head around in sharp motions, my mind telling me the Ghantri were near. I felt the presence of the Great Web of Ar’od Dar pressing down on me, as if the nebula was watching me, judging me, and finding me wanting. I wanted to curl up and hide.

A loud, dull
thunk
snapped me out of my panic. A piece of debris had collided with my canopy and startled me. It left a gouged scuff mark on the hyper-diamond shell.
Get it together, Seth!

With an effort of will, I focused on my breathing.
Breathe in, breathe out. Nice and slow,
I thought. It took me a few moments, but I felt my heart rate slow, my breathing under control. I realised I was shaking, peering at my hands. I gripped the yoke harder, in a double-handed grip. I had a job to do.

My first scan was finished and I packaged the data up into a single file then sent it to the ship’s AI for transmission.
Focus on the task at hand
, I told myself,
see each objective and visualise what is needed to complete it. Once done, choose the next objective and proceed.
It was a mantra that got me through my ordeal the last time I was here. I moved the fighter away from the Dreaming even further, despite my misgivings about leaving her behind. We would learn nothing by staying close to her.

I flew several thousand kilometres away, completed another scan and sent it back. So far, I could see nothing. Another fifteen minutes passed, another scan was sent. Space was empty, here. I could detect no contacts, nothing that indicated a ship was following us. The debris field was nothing but a tomb, interspersed with the broken pieces of starships and their doomed crew.

Oh, yes. There were bodies out here. They were hard to find, but if you looked closely enough, as I was, you could spot them after a while. They were perfectly preserved, near frozen in the cold grip of open space. I knew Protectorate sorties had been launched to try recover as many of the dead as they were able, but it was simply too dangerous, and there were too many to recover. And so, they were left, forever adrift in the icy graves of the abyss.

A profound sadness began to replace the unease I felt. So many lives had been lost here, and for what? Why had the Ghantri done what they did? Why attack a people, who for all intents and purposes were offering them the stars to wander as they pleased? What did they gain? The madness that infests this system is beyond comprehension. I suppose this is what makes them alien; their mind set so different from ours.

My fourth scan picked up the ghost contact, nearly forty thousand kilometres from the Dreaming. I was pulsing active sensors every few seconds, and an echo appeared on my trace, then it was gone. I watched carefully, and the contact appeared again for two sweeps and then once more vanished. I changed the profile of the scan, focusing on that area. The sweeps increased in frequency and intensity. There was still only a few hits for every dozen sweeps I performed, but I was starting to believe that there was indeed a contact out there.

I packaged up the data, and sent it back to the Dreaming, along with a request for instructions from Max
. Should I get closer? Should I try making contact? Should I start an attack run?

I waited several minutes for a reply.

Need another scan, different aspect. Try get close, but not too close,
came the reply.

I grunted to myself, sending back another question.
How close is too close?

Use your discretion, but don’t get killed.

I’ll get close enough to buzz them, be ready with the beamer if they come at me.

Not too close!

I sighed. Screw it, all this sneaking about was getting on my nerves. If there was a contact, we needed to draw it out. We couldn’t enter the empty zone without dealing with this first.

Okay,
I thought,
they’ll be running on passive sensors only. I’ve got an idea of where they are, if I do a fast flyby and do a visual scan I should be able to spot them.

I switched off my sensors, and shut down the comms line. I was essentially running dark, aside from my propulsion. As I approached the area, I shut down the engines and just coasted. Using dead reckoning, I got my overlay to put a box over my sight where the contact should be.

I heard a few thuds against the hull as I coasted, wincing each time.
Couldn’t be helped
, I shrugged. As I passed, the canopy angled to show me the entire vista. I craned my neck trying to see it.

Nothing. The space around the box was empty.

When I was a few thousand kilometres away, I slowed and turned around. This time I was coasting at a much slower speed, ready on the controls to initiate a thruster burn in case they saw me and opened fire.

The flyby took much longer. I waited for nearly half an hour before I reached the area, coasting to within a few dozen kilometres of the contact. I still couldn’t see anything.

Baffled, I slowed down again and approached the area under power. I cruised to within ten kilometres of the contact and stopped my engines. I stared for several long minutes. Was that something? Were my eyes playing tricks on me? I didn’t dare do a sensor sweep, I had only been using micro-jet manoeuvring bursts to move so I knew I was being cautious. To do a quick scan using active sensors would give my position away for sure. I couldn’t risk sending another data packet, either, even on tight beam. There were always
some
scatter from transmission and there was too much debris to send a communications laser.

I had to get closer. I nudged the ship forward, slowly, using the micro-jets. It took twenty minutes to get within a few hundred metres. I still wasn’t sure, but there was a kind of smudge in space, an unfocused section where the stars and debris weren’t quite the same. It was hard to make out. I’d never heard of the Ghantri using something quite like this before. I had to find out more. I had to get out of the Eclipse and see for myself.

I shut down the flight controls, once I’d stopped all motion of the fighter, and waited while the pilot paste drained away. An airtight compartment near the arm of the flight seat contained a set of towels that I used to clean my face and body as much as I could, and I struggled to get back into the light duties space suit. I wasn’t too proud to admit that I gagged a few times at my stench. This filth really was disgusting.

When I was ready, I let the fighter suck the atmosphere out and I popped the canopy. It was a short jump to the murky splotch, and it was most definitely something, I could see that now that I was free of the pilot paste. My mind was trying to comprehend what I was seeing, or rather not seeing. Every time I looked at it, my eyes kept trying to focus, as if looking through a fine mesh. I was getting a headache just trying to see the thing at all.

With a light metallic clunk, my feet finally touched the thing. I reached down with my hand and felt the hard surface. With a little effort, I sent my nanites into the surface and started the Scan Paradigm. In seconds, I had concrete data, and things started to make sense.

I was standing on standard, military grade armoured hull plating. The composition was normal for current Eridani-Votus manufacturing processes, so I knew right away that it was not likely to be a Ghantri vessel. Also, trillions of nanites coated the surface.

My best bet was they were producing some sort of soft-light hologram, mimicking the image on the other side of the ship. I let my own nanites map out the surface in all directions and, after a few minutes, they found a cavity and hatch system about fifty metres away. I put the data up on my screen as a wireframe overlay and navigated my way over to it.

I had my PX-2 Energy Pistol with me, I rarely left the ship without being armed, and had it out in my right hand. I reached forward with my left and focused my nanites on the airlock below me. When I had it mapped out, I activated my Spatial Translation Paradigm and shifted through dimensions to appear inside the airlock.

The wind was nearly knocked out of me as I landed heavily on my arse. I always forgot about local gravity when I did that. I got to my feet and examined my surroundings. Sure enough, this appeared to be an airlock like many others found on Protectorate ships across the galaxy. There were warning labels in galactic standard text, humanoid sized space suits and fixtures about the compartment. The inner airlock was pressurised, but a manual release opened it. I peered down the adjoining corridor. It was empty and led to the left and right.

I called up relative info on the Dreaming’s location on my overlay, reasoning that the ship would be pointing towards her if it was indeed following us. I removed my helmet, leaving it in the airlock, and took off to the right at a light jog. It wasn’t long before I reached a junction, both exits curling around out of sight. There was a hatch at the junction as well, a small porthole allowed me to peer inside. It was a berthing cabin. I hit a release and entered the cabin.

Furnished like most military berths, sparsely, there were no decorations or personal mementos on the bulkheads. Nothing that could tell me anything about the cabin’s owner. I tried a locker by the starboard bulkhead, but it was locked. I wasn’t about to start shooting locks just yet, so I turned to leave. I stepped out into the corridor.

“It’s rude to enter someone’s cabin without being invited.”

I almost dropped my pistol. There were people in the corridor!

30.

I briefly considered translating, but I swiftly realised I couldn’t trust my memory to judge how far away I needed to go, and I didn’t relish the thought of materialising inside a bulkhead. I looked from left to right, weighing my options, then my flight or fight instinct gave way to realisation. I recognised these men!

“Triptych? Geko?” I said, my mouth hanging open.

They lowered their weapons and grinned ear to ear.

“You’re a sneaky sonofabitch, I’ll give you that.” said Geko, the shorter of the two.

“Geko wanted to blast you as soon as you come through the hatch, you’re lucky I talked him out of it.”

Triptych was a Malforian, a race of near-humans from somewhere further towards the inner Networks. They were very similar to humans in appearance, but had only a single gender. I think I remember reading somewhere that they reproduced asexually, they just accumulated genetic modifications and mutations and after a while split into two entities. As a result, they all tended to look alike – the same hermaphroditic humanoid. As people, they were reliable and reasonably intelligent. The strangest thing about them, however, was a universal phobia of open spaces. This agoraphobia made them excellent space farers.

Geko? Well, Geko was a practical joker, a human and one of the youngest members of Naga Team.

I smiled at them and held my hands up in mock surrender. “Take me to your leader?”

They led me through several more corridors, tactfully refusing to answer any of my questions despite the levity I tried to play into the situation. I started to get the idea that I was not expected, and that my stumbling upon them wasn’t exactly welcome.
Had I misjudged them
, I thought.

Soon, they led me to an elevator and then through a hatch into the bridge. It was clearly that, not the cramped command module like the Dreaming had. I could see a wide vista before me, of the debris field I had recently traversed. The screens, for I knew that no starship would host actual glass ports on their bridge, were each as tall as a man and spanned a view of nearly a full one-eighty degrees. There were several console stations about the bridge, each one manned by an enlisted crewmember.

As I took all this in, I realised that most of the crew had stopped what they were doing and had turned to face me. I was even more amazed by the presence of a Votus, whispering in the ear of an elderly human male.

The Votus, despite being one of the more powerful races in the Network, were reclusive by nature. Their civilisation spans millennia, far outdating human exploration of the galaxy by an order of magnitudes. The Votus, as any spare-farer will tell you, had reached the epoch of their civilisation many thousands of years ago and had since grown weary of the burden. As a people, they rarely ventured away from their designated population centres, preferring the company of their own kind to that of the younger species. They are humanoid, stooped individuals resembling hairless anthropomorphic felines. Their long arms end in long, thin fingers – the perfect appendages for delicate work on intricate technologies. They are among the galaxies finest engineers and builders.

Their technology, closely guarded though it is, forms the basis of many of the technologies shared by the other species of the Votus-Eridani Network. The Corporations usually hold a monopoly on any insights the Votus choose to share, although it is not unheard of for a reversed engineered device showing up on the markets. Such achievements have been known to garner instant wealth to those with the knack for such things.

A station near the middle rotated to reveal Lieutenant Ormund, rising from a command chair - a little theatrical for my tastes. Another, more central station rotated and a tall, older man with silvering hair stepped off to greet me.

“Mr Donovan,” he said, his tone crisp and formal, “Welcome to the Astral Spider.”

“What’s going on here? Why are you following us?” I tried to sound serious, despite clearly being in awe of the technology about me. I mean, they had
three weapon stations!
After a moment of gaping, I had to ask - “What class of ship is this?”

“My name is Captain Roderick Garner. She’s a modified corvette, a fruit of the Votus - Protectorate alliance. So far, it doesn’t have a class name as it’s a prototype. The Protectorate call it Project Astral, hence the name. As to your other questions, I suppose you are due an explanation – despite the fact that you just committed an act of piracy breaking in here.”

“Bullshit, you know as well as I do that this is a war zone…”

“Exclusion zone.” he corrected me.

“…that doesn’t change anything. You were stalking our ship, we had to defend ourselves, we needed to find out what was following us.”

“How did you find us?” asked Ormund, speaking for the first time.

“Our AI isolated a ghost contact in the background scatter during that ambush a few weeks ago. We’ve been watching for it ever since.”

Captain Garner turned to the older man, who had ceased his conversation with the Votus, seated a few metres away at what looked like a systems console. He stood and approached us. I noticed he walked with a slight stoop, as if he had spent most of his youth bent over a workbench or computer console. His jump suit was unadorned, the usual military insignia absent. He held out a hand, which I shook.

“My name is Doctor Elias Montannis the Eleventh. I’m the civilian expert assigned to this vessel to monitor its performance.”

“Your colleague?” I said, indicating the silent Votus.

“I helped design this ship, Mr Donovan. Melafenaseance is our benefactor, and chief engineer. A lot of our technology is quite experimental. How did your AI see through the camouflage? What model is your AI?”

“I’m not sure how we spotted you originally. It was during combat and there were plenty of energy bursts in the area. Perhaps we caught an echo off one of those. Our AI is Vengnashi, originally. I’m not sure what model, but he did a lot of sensor work in a previous role. He’s good, though. Very good.”

“Mmm, perhaps I could avail myself of your AI, I should very much like to run several tests…”

“I don’t think my Captain would agree to that.” I cut him off, there was no way I would let this man take Tac apart just to sate his curiosity.

“Very well, then. Perhaps I should review the combat logs. Focus on the energy signatures.” Elias wandered back over to his console and immediately started tapping out commands. It was as if he simply forgot we were there.

“It was you who destroyed that missile?” I asked Garner, “Back during the ambush?”

He nodded. “We weren’t going to interfere, but it looked like you needed some help.”

“I guess I owe you one. So what now?”

“What now indeed.”

“My ship will want to know I’m all right.”

He seemed to be contemplating something. He didn’t make eye contact with me.

“Am I a prisoner?” I said.

He made a huffing sound, looking up into my face. “I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?”

“To be honest, we didn’t think you’d spot us.”

“You still haven’t told me why you’re following us. What’s your mission?”

Ormund answered, “We’re not at liberty to discuss that.”

Another familiar voice broke in, the chuffing a Garz’a makes when they’re unimpressed. “
Naga-zak
know. No point hiding from rest.”

“That’s not your call to make, Sergeant.” said Ormund as Kekkin stepped onto the bridge. His ever present sidekicks, Renthal and Harris not far behind him.

“Not yours either, LT,” said the burly Renthal, “Seth made it for you.”

Ormund gave the trio a filthy look, which they promptly ignored. Garner turned to face the vista behind him, rubbing his chin in thought. A full minute passed before he gestured to a young ensign by the port side of the bridge.

“Open a tight beam channel to the Dreaming of Atmosphere.” Said Garner

“Aye, sir!” the junior officer said, hands playing over his console, “Established line-of-sight comms, sir!”

Garner sat down at his chair and keyed a control.

“Dreaming of Atmosphere, this is the Protectorate Vessel Astral Spider. Come in.”

A few moments later, a crackly voice came over the bridge speakers.

“Er…hey. Have you got my boy?” I shook my head and chuckled. That’s Max, right to the point.

“We do indeed, Captain Cooper. He is safely with us.”

“Do I need to come over there and shoot up your ship?”

“No, Captain, we have no hostile intentions towards you or your crew.”

“Good, how about you let him get back to his fighter and we can call it a day?”

“I have a better idea. Why don’t we rendezvous and have a little chat?”

“Why don’t you flush yourself out of the nearest airlock?” I couldn’t contain another chuckle. I could hear Renthal choking back a laugh as well.

I thought it was high time I stepped in, before things got nasty. “Max?” I called over Garner’s shoulder, “I’m okay. Hear the man out. It’s Naga Team. I think they’re going to help us.”

The Lieutenant gave me an annoyed looked, but remained silent. Garner also seemed to catch on to how Max operated and said nothing. Smart man. You did not want to get into a pissing match with Maxine Cooper.

She was a few moments silent before replying, “All right, but if those thugs give you any guff, you have my permission to knock a few heads before escaping. Just don’t kill anyone.”

“I’ll try not to, I promise.”

“Love you. Maxine out.”

Ormund gave me another annoyed glance. “We didn’t give her our coordinates!”

“Won’t need to, she’s got a trace on you already. I told you, our AI is good. So is our systems operator. Well, looks like you have a couple of hours to explain to me what it is you’re doing out here, so I can help you sell it to Max. You don’t want a pissed off Maxine on your ship. Trust me.”

“I’d listen to him, sir,” said Renthal, “That woman has
fire.
”

“She once punched a Corporate in the guts,” I added, “at gun point.”

I could almost see the colour drain from Ormund’s face.

“She sounds like my kind of woman!” said Garner, laughing.