Callsign J-KR

[wAsh67]

The collision happened at a little over thirty meters per second – almost one hundred kph. I was slammed against the harness, the breath exploding out of my body, and the controls were torn out of my hands. “Shields offline.” The COVAS reported in a matter of fact manner as if this were an everyday occurrence - maybe it was adapting to my flying - but they had done their job and saved my ship, my life and put a nice new dent in the reinforced rear wall of the space station that complemented several others that I could see from this close up. I took a moment to gather my senses, recovered control of the shieldless Cobra with trembling hands and slowly, carefully headed toward the station entrance where my assigned landing bay waited for me.

The Mamba that I had overtaken just outside the toast rack glided past me, the pilot flashing his forward navigation lights at me repeatedly to grab my attention. I raised a hand in apology as we passed, and I could see through his canopy that he was making a rather lewd hand gesture at me – pumping a closed fist up and down, his face distorted into an angry snarl. I nodded acceptance of his low opinion of me and returned my hand to the controls to spin the Cobra about and concentrated on settling gently down on the landing pad, making a show of precision handling to nail the centre mark right in the middle despite the tremors still running through my fingers after the close calls.

I systematically shut the ship’s systems down as the magnetic clamps engaged and the landing pad descended into the hangar space below and I logged into the legal services web page of the station to pay the fine incurred by my reckless approach. My fuel situation was also looking pretty dire after the roundabout route that I had taken during the course of this day’s misadventures, so I ordered up a full refuel to take place while I was stationside. I also requested a septic tank drain as the combat and the long time in space had forced me into using the Cobra’s sanitary cupboard more than once while I’d been out in the black. After the last five minutes I felt an irresistible urge to visit it again. Restoring hull integrity after the beating it took from the Fer de Lance would cost an eye watering two thousand credits, so I booked the Cobra into a mechanic to get that sorted too.

A quick scan of the mission board revealed nothing available that suited my rating, and I was pretty sure that it would be a hell of a long time before I got any haulage contracts from here due to the mess that I had made of that approach. The vid of that landing would be on the station’s Galnet page in hours, along with my Pilots federation mug shot, no doubt. My reputation was probably through the floor after such a dismal display of ship handling, but that was of little import to me. After all, I had no intention of basing myself here where living costs were almost as high as they had been at Poincare Gateway.

When I got through the security office to the back rooms where Alliance Intel kept their offices, Max was already waiting for me at the interrogation room, which he referred to as conference room one. “Nice landing.” He smiled as he shook my hand again and sat down across the table from me.

“Already?” I asked, my eyes widening in surprise.

“Nothing escapes Alliance Intel,” Max laughed. “Have you made the delivery yet?”

That was the problem with the distances involved in space travel. You could create esoteric devices that twisted the laws of physics in all manner of directions to enable faster than light travel, but in 3305 sending data through local space could only be done as fast as focused tachyon streams would allow, which was several orders of magnitude slower than a frame shift drive could accomplish. This was one of the reasons why data delivery jobs were plentiful – it was not only secure, but also much faster to deliver time sensitive data by hand than to transmit it down an encrypted tight beam tachyon stream. “Yes,” I replied. “but that’s not why I’m here.”

“Oh?” He asked, raising an eyebrow.

“The ten grande for providing you with Si’s datapad still hasn’t been transferred. You said it’d be a couple of hours. It’s been half a day already.” I pointed out.

“Unfortunately, Amy has already left the office.” He said, holding his hands out in front of himself in a placating manner. “Admin staff tend to work to traditional office hours, even out here.”

“That’s convenient.” I said, rolling my eyes.

“It is what it is.” He said, frowning. “Tell you what, how about another job to pass the time?”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “You must be joking. I won’t be doing any more work for you until the money is in my pocket.” I told him, leaning across the table as threateningly as I could make myself look. He didn’t back off an inch. “Biowaste? Pull the other one. I was lucky to escape with my life.”

“Oh?” Max said, cocking an eyebrow. “What happened? Did you crash your ship into the outpost as well?” He said, grinning.

I explained what had happened, from the interdiction through the brief combat, the high wake and hiding just outside the corona of the star, all the way to plotting a route so that I came back into this system from the opposite side to when I’d escaped. Max didn’t look surprised at anything I said, merely broke into a sneaky smile. “Actually, luck didn’t come into it. You handled yourself admirably, from what I could see.” I glared at him harder. All it did was make my eyebrow muscles ache.

“Let me explain myself,” he began. “When you left I accessed Simon’s datapad. It gave me full file access, so I had a look at what he’d said to you in his, er, epilogue, shall we say. I noted the advice to you to ‘git gud’ at combat so I decided to test your abilities.”

“You were the FDL pilot?” I asked, incredulous.

“Of course.” Max beamed. “It’s not my ship, I must admit. It’s an old beaten up crate that got handed down to us as a courtesy craft rather than simply scrap it. We use it as a general runabout for all sorts of odd jobs. I was going to run the cargo myself to close my shift but getting you to do it killed two birds with one stone. Of course, Amy isn't at all happy that I just wasted fifty grande on a delivery that I could have done myself for free in company time, so I imagine I’m in the doghouse right now. That’s more than likely why she hasn’t released your ten k – to teach me a lesson. Not that I care.” He laughed.

“So you were going to get me to dump the cargo so you could pick it up and take the fifty grande for yourself, then pocket the other ten as a mission fail penalty?”

“Well, no. I wouldn’t have gotten anything.” Max explained. “The logs would show that the bio-waste was delivered by an Alliance Defence Force ship, so any payment due would have been cancelled. The ten thousand would have – still will when she gets around to it – gone to your bank account and that makes it untouchable for anybody but you. You’d have gotten the fine, sure, but you could have fled the system and not paid it like most everybody else does.

“I can see you aren’t happy about this, but I promise you that you weren’t in any danger. Once I’d stripped your shields and got your attention I’d have offered you a second chance to submit, but you high waked out of the system and the ship’s wake scanner hasn’t worked properly for months. I hung around for an hour to see if you returned when your shields recharged, then headed back to the barn. My intent was just to see what sort of a pilot you were and how far you would go to protect your cargo. Si seemed to think you had potential, and I can see why. You got the job done, which is what life out here is all about. Simon’s death has left a hole in our capabilities that needs to be filled, and maybe we can call on you from time to time for the odd mission while you get your skills up?”

“So that was all just a job interview? You caused more than two grande’s worth of damage to my ship!”

“Sorry about that. Get it fixed, email me the receipt and I’ll put it through expenses if you fly for me again.” Max offered. “So, how do you feel about becoming associated with us? We can get you fast tracked through the ADF’s military ranks to give you access to Alliance ships and advanced weaponry that other pilots can’t get, and we’ll give you first refusal on ADF related jobs before they go up on the mission boards. They won’t be high paying, but they will give you the experience you need to move up and advance your rank in the pilot’s federation.”

“There’s thousands of pilots out there that are way higher rated than I am. Why not just approach them?”

“Oh, lots of reasons, not the least being that freelance pilots can earn far more by themselves than they can with us. You can’t. Not for a long while, at any rate – especially if that landing is anything to go by.” He smiled. “AX combat doesn’t pay much - I think it’s in the order of ten grande per kill for a scout caught in the wild, although if you can find one in an incursion system an AEGIS flight operations carrier will pay more, especially if the pressure is on. Then there’s the trust factor.” Max added, looking me in the eye as he spoke. “There’s not a lot of that out in the black, especially when you get close to the edge of the bubble.

“Mostly what makes me lean in your direction is that Simon told us of your desire to go up against the Thargoids. The majority of pilots – even many Elite – will run rather than stand when faced with a Medusa so to find somebody willing to wade into anti-Xeno combat without being forced to at gunpoint is rare and an opportunity that all the major powers need to capitalise upon. kcuF, even most of the regular ADF ships run and hide when confronted by a Thargoid presence in a system and that attitude gets instilled in the pilot officers, which is no bloody good to us. Anti-Xeno is a niche role and we think we can help you fit into it, if that is indeed what you want and Simon wasn’t misleading us?”

“No, Simon was straight with you.”

“So are you in?” He asked, offering me his hand again. “We can help you along the path to becoming an AX specialist while you assist us from time to time. And being associated with the Alliance rather than freelancing against the ‘Goids will improve your chances of survival beyond measure, I promise you.”

I hesitated for a second or two, totally forgetting what Simon had said about it being almost impossible to escape from the clutches of the ADF once they got their hooks in you. Our hands shook firmly, and my future was taken out of my control.




tbc

 

[wAsh67]

7

Spoilin’ For a Fight

​

​

The starfield stabilised as the ship dropped out of supercruise and into a floating debris field in orbit around the eighth planet of an unpopulated star system. The dinky little Sidewinder that I was flying braked sharply using nose thrusters until it had come to a complete halt, the scanner lighting up with a flurry of contacts. The screen was cluttered with the scattered returns of wreckage and drifting VTS cargo canisters, literally dozens of them, the top half of the scanner displaying a mass of densely packed square white dots and vertical white Z-lines.

It was difficult to see all the objects through the canopy as the light from the star was quite weak this far out, so I toggled the switch for night vision and the canopy HUD immediately filled up with specks of green light dead ahead, drawn in rudimentary vector graphics on the HUD like some twentieth century video game by David Braben or Atari. Some of the debris was large enough that even from this far away I could make out the ship type from the shapes of the hunks of wreckage. One of the Gutayama ships, I reckoned. A starship that had once had sleek lines, graceful curves and an aesthetic aerodynamic form more appropriate for atmospheric flight than charging through the cosmos where shape meant nothing and a house brick was just as efficient at cutting through the void as an arrow. You can say what you like about the Empire’s starships, but they do build the things damned pretty. What was once the spacefaring analogue of an antique Ming vase was now little more than a metaphorical pile of shattered china. The starship had been smashed into hundreds of pieces - burned, pockmarked and battle-scarred fragments that trailed wiring, ducting, pipework and torn metalwork like glittering entrails.

​

I advanced the throttles gently, easing the speed up to a lazy ten metres per second and carefully closed in on the debris field while the scanner electronically sifted through the wreckage, compiling the identifiable pieces into a list on the navigation and targeting computer. My finger scrolled up and down the touch screen, briefly highlighting items as disparate as shield generator wreckage that on its own was worthless but could be salvaged for future synthesis, and perfectly intact canisters of highly valuable superconductors. I targeted what I was looking for and steered the ship toward the selected contact, trundling along at a pedestrian speed. As I entered the fringes of the debris field I flipped on the ship’s headlights and deactivated the night vision, confident that there were no major fragments of wreckage between myself and my goal. I double checked the power distribution settings – four pips to shields and two to engines, with the weapons system already fully pre-charged - just in case of an emergency - with enough energy to give me a couple of shots before the capacitor was drained.

The cargo scoop deployed with a thud that I felt through the ship’s frame as it locked into place. A pop-up screen on the target computer’s holographic projector helped me fine tune my vector, the cross hairs urging me to nudge the ship to the right and up a fraction. Ahead the ‘black box’ that I was flying toward fell into the glow of the headlights. Why they call them black boxes is a mystery whose explanation is lost in the mists of times past as the damn things are painted reflective silver with bright orange stripes to help them stand out from the darkness of space. This one was tumbling slowly as my ship approached it, displaying scorches and dents on each of its faces as it spun. I took my eyes off the mesmerising view and concentrated on the cross hairs, flying the responsive little Sidewinder deftly until the cargo scoop hoovered up the item and placed it into storage on board my ship.

​

​

Bringing the Sidewinder to a halt almost smack in the middle of the debris field, I scrolled through the list of shattered components and cargo, looking for something that might prove useful. The cargo itself was pretty much off limits unless I wanted to risk my reputation by handling stolen goods. Cargo scavenged from deep space was not recognised as legal salvage in order to deter unscrupulous pilots from blowing ships up, taking the cargo and selling it on. That was piracy, and laws making cargo scavenging illegal were rigorously enforced to cut down on such felonious behaviour. All these laws did in reality was to drive the sale of illegally salvaged goods onto the black markets that thrive in the down-belows of many starports, especially those outside the high security systems. Officially recognised salvage missions could allow pilots to recover cargo canisters from wrecks, but those had to be chartered by the owners of the canisters. For the rest of us they were strictly forbidden contraband unless you were willing to risk getting caught and heavily fined ferrying them to a black market.

There was some tempting contraband floating around out there just waiting to be rescued. Aside from the superconductors there were canisters of agricultural fertiliser, basic medicines, coffee, titanium, hazmat suits and bio-reducing lichen, a veritable cornucopia of cargo all of which as a law-abiding citizen I had to leave in place and going to waste. Whoever said the law is an ssa knew what they were talking about. None of this ship's wreckage was particularly high in value, either. Specialist material traders often dealt in the stuff in order to cannibalise parts and obtain rare, classified or trademarked components that they could then sell on to engineers who could in turn reuse the items for their own mysterious purposes. Most modern ships could also recycle select items of wreckage via synthesis into usable consumables like chaff, heatsink reloads and even ammunition.

I scooped up some shield emitters that I might find a use for one day and then buttoned up the ship ready for a hyperspace jump back to Polecteri, accelerating out of the debris field so that I was clear to manoeuvre. That’s when things started to go wrong.

“New contact detected.” Verity announced. I glanced down at the scanner, trying to identify the latest contact from the dozens of existing ones without success. I switched from the navigation screen to try and find it in the contact list. That was my first mistake. Now that I had the black box safely on board I should have stayed in the nav screen, selected the closest system and jumped the hell out of the place.

When I found the new contact in the target list I made another mistake. I locked it up as the primary target, pointed my nose at it and initiated a scan. Ship type - Vulture. Pilot status - Wanted. Pilot rating - Master.

The Vulture promptly deployed its hard-points and headed directly toward me, the scanner legend changing from hollow square to hollow triangle as its gun ports opened and the weapons elevated into place. Where the hell had that come from? I wondered as I flipped open the safety cover over the hard-point deploy switch and un-safed my own weapons. As the Vulture’s twin pulse laser fire lit up my shields on impact I hit the boost button, punched out a canister of chaff and prepared to fight. That was yet another mistake.

His shots kept hitting on my shields as I wrenched the Sidewinder through punishing high-G twists and turns. The chaff had been wasted. This pilot was good enough that he didn’t need gimballed lasers with signature tracking that followed the target and automatically adjusted the guns with servo motors to keep their fire on target even when the ship’s nose was pointed elsewhere. He was getting hits on me with fixed weapons using good old-fashioned Mk 1 eyeball bore-sighting alone. This guy knew his stuff. I hit boost again, further depleting the capacitor for the engines, and adjusted the power distributor equally between shields and propulsion to give me a little more speed and a faster recharge between boosts, violently twisting and turning all the while in vain attempts to throw off the pilot’s aim. I had two chances at beating the Vulture – speed and manoeuvrability. If I could get behind him I could stay there using the superior handling of the Sidewinder to land my shots on it while it writhed frantically under my gunsights until it was just another ball of wreckage floating through space. That, dear reader, is what is known as ‘wishful thinking.’

My shields were down to one dim ring when I finally managed to break away from his firing line. We corkscrewed through space in a deadly ballet, diving, banking, snaking, spiralling, rolling and boosting. Soon my manoeuvrability began to tell, and it was my turn to chase as he desperately tried to prevent me getting onto his six. He banked left and boosted but I anticipated the move and finally I got him in my gunsights.

I hit the fire trigger and two beams of focused coherent laser light beams shot out of my guns and played against his shields, which were still weak after his period spent in stealth mode, turning them a bright blue where they impacted. I kept my finger on the trigger and my gimballed weapons obediently stayed locked onto the Vulture. I could see his shields dropping in strength – the final ring in the indicator was almost invisible. Then my beam lasers stopped firing. Even though my finger was still on the trigger.






tbc

 

[wAsh67]

A moment’s confusion was all it took, and the Vulture reversed his bank and corkscrewed downward with a kick of boost and I had to go through the chase all over again. I pulled the trigger before I was fully on his tail, hoping that my gimballed weapons had enough extra travel to slave to the target but still nothing happened. Soon I had him dead centre, his shields by this time back up to one third strength – presumably he was running bi-weaves - but my guns remained defiantly silent.

When I looked up from my desperate fault finding I found that the Vulture was flying straight and level, and I could see it rotating in space right in front of me as I closed in, but still travelling away from me. He’d disabled flight assist so that he could fly in one direction while pointing in another. In moments his weapons would come to bear on me while I was still frantically trying to figure out why mine had stopped working.

PIPS!

Of course! I reset the power distributor to even levels across the board, cursing my own stupidity and yanked the controls back and to the right as his nose lit up with laser fire that pummelled the belly and flanks of the Sidewinder, reducing my partially recharged shields back down to barely one ring remaining, two thirds of their strength now lost. I hit boost to separate and put some distance between us. It was time to run. With low shields and the weapons capacitor flat-lined all I could do was try to high wake it out of the system.

I desperately called up the nav screen and jabbed my thumb down the list of systems that were in jump range one at a time, but as luck would have it the compass indicated that they were all behind me and I’d have to turn back towards my attacker to jump to them. That was out of the question. Unbelievably the heavy, armour plated Vulture was gaining ground on me and soon my shields were completely gone. The Sidewinder’s hull began screaming, groaning and banging with the impact of the pulse lasers.

Finally, I found a star system that was within jump range and ahead of me, turned toward it and rammed the jump handle forward almost hard enough to snap it off. Then the ship came apart around me. I felt a pulse of heat warm my back, the inside of the flight deck lit up brightly by the rest of the ship behind me exploding into plasma and watched the canopy shatter into a thousand fragments of inch thick glass as the frame distorted and buckled. The lights went out.

“Well, that was a right royal clusterkcuf from start to finish, wasn’t it. “Max laughed as the lighting came back on and I slumped back in my seat, releasing the joystick and throttle. “What do you think your biggest mistake was, amongst the great deal of kcuf-ups that you made in the last five minutes?”

“The power distribution pips.” I sighed, throwing my head back and rubbing my eyes in exasperation while the simulator reset itself and parked me back in a starport, kicking myself for forgetting one of the most fundamental combat rules. From the fusion reactor at the heart of the ship, all the power generated gets routed through a power distribution module that charges enormous capacitor banks. A capacitor is a device that can be charged to massive power levels slowly over time, but crucially it can release all of that energy in one rapid burst if required. If you use the analogy of a water faucet pouring water slowly into a bucket, the faucet is the fusion reactor, the water the raw power itself and the bucket is the storage capacitor. Now you can choose to leave the bucket full, slowly empty the bucket over time, take a litre or two out when you need it fast, or dump it all on somebody’s head in one go to really ssip them off. That’s what having a capacitive system allows you to do, rather than just restricting yourself to the limited power of the stream that comes out of the faucet.

There isn’t, however, enough power available to keep engines, shields and weapons capacitors fully charged at all times in a high stress situation such as combat, and as more load is placed on the power distributor the charge levels in the capacitors can drop faster than they can be recharged. By opting to have the power distributor concentrating most of its power to shields and the rest to propulsion, I had allowed the weapons capacitor to completely discharge so that after just a couple of shots the weapons bank had totally drained and without the distributor routing more power to recharge it, the lasers no longer functioned. The default setting for the distributor was to evenly split it between all three subsystems, but on entering the debris field I’d specifically set it for shields and engines only to better manoeuvre the ship around the wreckage, and if I did accidentally hit something large then the shields would have plenty of charge to absorb the impact and deflect the object rather than risk a penetrating hull breach. Having avoided fighting for most of my career that was where I habitually set my power distribution pips while scavenging for recyclables and this practice had tripped me up the moment I’d gone into combat. “I should have split the bias more towards weapons and shields and less to engines.” I admitted.

“Yes, you should have.“ Max nodded. “You should have evenly split it between shields and weapons – three pips each - because you don’t drain the engines capacitor at all in normal flight unless you boost away, but your first mistake was way before that.”

I turned around in the swivel chair to face him. “Enlighten me, Obi Wan.” I sighed.

“Your first mistake was wasting time picking up that wreckage. You must consider the mission requirements above all else. Always complete the kcufing mission. You could have come back to pick the bones of the wreckage any time you liked after dropping the black box back at the starport.” Max explained. “What you should have done is grabbed the black box and high waked to the next system straight away – which you also should have punched into the nav computer well in advance of penetrating the debris field, ideally the second you dropped out of supercruise.“ He pointed out.

“What you do in your own time is your own business, but you have to remember that above all else when you fly for Alliance Intel the mission takes absolute priority over all other considerations! Knowledge is gained from completed missions. Plans and strategies are derived from the outcomes of completed missions. The big picture is arrived at by highly paid analysts who look at all the individual little puzzle pieces that the snippets of information from our missions provide. Each and every mission that we run – however trivial and inconsequential they may seem to us – has been assigned to us for a specific reason and the product of those missions will have an impact on the lives of other people, from providing the ADF’s carriers with tasking orders, to safeguarding the farmers herding sheep on terraformed planets whose lives it is our responsibility to protect.”

“I didn’t come here to run,” I shot back. “I came here to learn how to fight.”

“The most important thing you have to know when you get yourself into a fight is understanding when to run. It should have been obvious the moment that Vulture first showed itself that your Sidewinder was outclassed in just about every respect except perhaps in boost speed. Vultures exist to pound the tihs out of small ships – it’s their job. They are kcuf all use for anything else. They don’t go off exploring uncharted worlds, they don’t run cargo or do passenger runs, they just get into scraps.” Max said, pounding the fist of his right hand into his palm to reinforce the point. “Have you ever seen a bunny rabbit turn and take on a wolf? Well that’s what I just witnessed.” Max laughed. “You should have run even before you turned to scan it and discovered that the pilot was rated Master. Even setting aside the mission comes first rule, your own survival instinct should have kicked in and made you get the hell out of Dodge.”

“At the end of the day, this is just a sim.” I argued. “If this was out in the black I would have run…”

“From what I saw it would have already been too late.” Max interrupted. “You didn’t even detect the Vulture running silent in the debris field.”

“It was matt black.” I protested. “Showing no lights, no heat signature and there were no shield emissions.”

“When you switched on night vision for your approach, even I could see it as a green shape hiding behind what was left of the iCourier’s fuselage and at my age my eyesight leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. You were so focused on searching for the black box on the target screen that you failed to use your own eyes to give yourself situational awareness.” He said, raising his voice and stabbing a finger at me.

“So what was I supposed to have done?” I asked, leaning back in the simulator’s seat and folding my arms across my chest defensively.

“You ever been in a skimmer planetside?” Max asked.

“Sure. My dad worked as foreman of a large agricultural complex back home for a while. I often went out with him during half-terms – even flew the things a few times when we went out mending fences or rounding up strays.”

“Well in that case your mistake was even more unforgiveable.” Max said, shaking his head. “When you come in to land in a skimmer, what’s the first thing that you do?”

“Deploy the landing….” I began, but then it clicked, and I stopped myself completing the sentence. I nodded, closing my eyes at the realisation. My father had pulled me up on exactly the same thing more than a decade ago. “I guess I should have orbited the debris field first instead of driving straight into it.”

“Bingo.” Max grinned. “A skimmer pilot will always circle a landing zone looking for ambushes, terrain hazards, life forms, wind gusts, trees, overhead electricity cables and anything else that might be a risk to his skimmer before settling on a final approach vector that takes him into the wind. Likewise, when getting into a fight nothing should be done without a complete understanding of your surroundings.” He expounded. “You don’t just pile in gung-ho without first surveying the combat zone. That’s the fastest way to get yourself bushwhacked. Any combat pilot approaching a debris field should be constantly mouthing the word ‘trap’ to himself as he flies. It’s not easy finding a ship configured for stealth in a debris field, but night vision will quite often reveal the outline of a predator unless he’s running silent in a really small ship and actually riding on the debris in order to blend in.

“The Vulture pilot knew there was a strong likelihood that any ship investigating the debris field would be coming in from the general direction of the star and positioned himself accordingly – he put the largest chunk of the iCourier’s wrecked fuselage between himself and the star so that you would not see him on a direct approach.” Max explained, using his hands to demonstrate the positioning of the various objects. “As soon as you emerged out of supercruise he went to silent running, so your scanner wouldn’t pick him up unless you happened to be right on top of him. It’s a classic pirate trap scenario and two minutes spent flying around the debris field with night vision active would more than likely have revealed the Vulture to you. Then ,when you could see that it was a trap you should have bailed out and escalated the mission to more experienced operatives in better ships because the risk to yourself was just too great. A dead pilot is no use to us at all. Running isn’t cowardice – it’s a strategy that allows you to fight another day when the odds might not be stacked so highly against you.”

“Was there any way I could have won this engagement?” I asked.

“You? Hell no. Perhaps an Elite rated pilot using flight assist off could have beaten the Vulture in a Sidewinder given enough time, but the Vulture had enough armour and shields to high wake out of there if it got too tough, so all that the Sidewinder pilot would have earned would be a hefty repair bill for the damage to his own ship. With absolutely no bounty or even any gain to reputation with the pilot’s federation as the kill would never have been made, engaging was an act of futility. That scenario has been in the sims for a long time and has earned itself the label ‘Kobayashi Maru.’ You know what that means?”

I nodded. You’d have to have lived in a cave your entire life to not know that a Kobayashi Maru means it’s a test of character, not of competence.

“This exercise was to test your risk assessment skills, not your flying – which was not too shabby, by the way.” Max offered in an attempt to assuage my damaged ego. “You managed to get on the Vulture’s tail and would have probably stayed there if it hadn’t gone FA off so flying without the computerised flight assist is another thing you’ll have to practice extensively on the sims while you’re here, along with power distributor management. Knowing when to run and when to fight is a vital skill for spaceship pilots. An old Earth ace combat pilot by the name of Kenny Rogers lived by the mantra ‘You gotta know when to hold, and when to fold,’ and you flunked this particular test.”

“I flunked because this is just a sim and there was never any real risk at all.” I pointed out. “In reality I would never have taken a Sidewinder up against a Vulture. I have been flying for a long time and I know what kinds of ships get selected for particular roles. I’m not fresh off the farm and still scraping horse tihs out of my boots.”

“Fair enough. If that’s your attitude, then let’s make this interesting and go hard-core.” Max said, staring directly into my eyes. “Next time you flunk a simulation you’re cut from the program and you can go back to hauling trash and bottled water for a living. No second chances. This isn’t a game that you can play in your bedroom where you can press the restart button if you kcuf up. You die at any time while you’re in this simulator – which is costing the Alliance 150 credits an hour by the way – and I wash my hands of you. Is that enough risk for ya?”

“Not nearly. How about you shoot me in the kcufing chest with that kcufing cannon you carry if I screw up again?” I shot back.

“I like your style, kid.” He smiled, pulling his gun out of his shoulder holster and chambering a round. I peered at him intently as he slid the safety off with his thumb. “You’re on. Let’s start by replaying that scenario.” He tapped the master control panel screen a few times and I turned back to the simulated ship’s controls, surprised to find myself already breaking into a sweat while I was supercruising to the imaginary debris field. Jesus, me and my big kcufing mouth…..

The heat was on.







tbc

 

[wAsh67]

Interlude 2

Deep In The Hole​

A laser light show was taking place about a klick magnetic north of where the squad that we’d been assigned to had chosen to pause and regroup, lick its wounds and count its dead. Short pulses of blue light from plasma cannons criss-crossed with red Thargoid energy beams as the focal point of the battle moved inexorably toward the mine complex where the numerous shafts disappeared into the depths of the planet and where the majority of the ADF’s defences had retreated to. Occasionally fireballs tumbled out of the sky like a New Years’ pyrotechnic display played backwards, whether our fighters or theirs impossible to tell from this distance.

“We’re taking heavy fire here,” A voice screamed over the comms system. Of course they were. That mine complex was, after all, the aliens’ objective. It had to be taken so that they could gain access to a vast meta-alloy forest that had been found buried under millions of tons of dirt at the foot of a mountain range. There must have been a landslide after an earthquake or an asteroid impact long ago, sometime between when the Thargoids had seeded the planet with barnacles and when man had begun terraforming and mining this world in 3302 for the rare metals that it was discovered to contain. The meta-alloys had been stumbled on by accident while the miners were excavating a rich seam of mixed heavy metals. While they had been hoping to come across minerals that glowed in the dark, they hadn’t quite been expecting to be literally blinded by the largest forest of meta-alloys ever found.

The Alliance had swiftly responded to this discovery on one of their aligned worlds on the very coreward edge of the Pleiades nebula by taking over mining operations from the mining companies. They hastily militarised the base against possible moves against it by the Empire and the Federation whose access to meta-alloys had completely dried up now that the finds in the Witch Head, California and Horsehead nebulae had become exhausted due to the high demand for the stuff.

While political wrangling over shared access to the discovery raged in parliament, the ADF moved almost all its mobile quick response forces to the region as a deterrent to an invasion by the two stronger powers. Thermonuclear devices had been concealed within the excavations in a scorched earth policy – if the Alliance couldn’t have them, then neither the Empire nor the Federation would be permitted to take them by force.

However, word soon spread about the extent of the find given the rarity and value of meta-alloys. Once the trade in meta-alloys was seen to have resumed, the transports found themselves getting regularly hyperdicted by Thargoids and the trade routes were eventually traced back by the aliens to the point of origin. When the Thargoids learned of the scorched earth policy an invasion by their forces became inevitable, so the ADF had reinforced both planetside and orbital installations in preparation for the expected onslaught.

That the find had been buried for so long explained the Thargoids failure to harvest it earlier in their intermittent occupation of the Pleiades – the forest had been undetectable from orbit, even with the latest composition scanners, but had been able to survive under the tons of dirt and rock that had covered it. In fact, it had done more than merely survive, actually seeming to thrive while buried with no Thargoid extraction ship visiting to harvest its fruits periodically. The dirt that covered it may have brought thousands more tons of fresh minerals within its reach for conversion to meta-alloys, and without the infrequent ‘pruning’ of an alien resource extraction ship, it had spread underground like a weed, reaching further than any barnacle site previously discovered. Being buried also protected the barnacles from the new atmosphere that the terraforming was creating, as Thargoid barnacles die when exposed to air. It was, quite literally, the mother lode and in order to take back their forest, the ‘Goids would have to fight us on the ground, and that was something nobody had ever experienced before.

The Thargoids began their assault with an attempt to blockade the planet with Scouts, Cyclopes, Medusae, Basilisks and Hydrae but were beaten back time and again. Each time they attacked they did so in greater numbers, and each repulse resulted in the steady whittling down of Alliance Defence Force ships and pilot’s federation mercenaries. In desperation, concessions were made to both the Empire and the Federation, allowing them a share of the meta-alloys in exchange for assistance in defending the planet against the incessant onslaught of the aliens, which seemed to have culminated with the arrival of a ‘Hive Ship’ in orbit that disgorged dozens of dropships carrying ‘Goid warriors. Our job on the ground was to hold the mines until the Federation’s Farraguts and the Empire’s Majestic class warships could arrive to relieve the decimated, exhausted ADF and sweep the aliens from the skies.

There was a loud banging on the SRV’s door. “It’s for you,” My wife called down from the gun turret. “If it’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, tell them we’re Catholics.”

Rolling my eyes, I unsnapped my harness, put my helmet back on and leaned across to throw the door open. The cabin depressurised with a brief hiss as I touched the handle and the door swung open fully with a loud squeal at a hard shove – the rubble that had buried us at the factory must have damaged one of the hinges. A combat suited support tech reached up, his hands offering two sealed mugs of coffee.

“Gawd blass ya, lad.” I said over comms as I took them from his hands.

“Compliments of the sarge,” the squaddie replied. A nasty crack spreading across the left side of his helmet’s visor indicated how close he’d come to being another casualty. All it would take was a sharp whack of a hand and that visor would rupture completely, exposing the squaddie to the partially terraformed atmosphere whose oxygen content was still too low to support human life without breathing apparatus. If he held his breath he’d last about five minutes, tops. Another year or two and the processors would have transformed this planet’s atmosphere into breathable air for the miners and settlers, but now the atmosphere processing reactors in the ice caps at both poles were nothing more than steaming craters thanks to the ‘Goids and the air was so thin at ground level that it was the equivalent of being at thirty thousand feet of altitude on an ELW with a breathable atmosphere. “Any news on when we’re moving out?”

“The God of war himself will tell us when it’s time to rock and roll.” I replied, raising my head skyward to where our generals sat in their Drake class carriers deciding when to sacrifice us in their desperate plans for victory. “Won’t be long, I imagine. As soon as a large enough concentration of the bugs get bogged down at the mine entrance they’ll unleash us lowly cannon fodder and we’ll squash the kcufers from all sides.”

“Amen to that,” the squaddie laughed. It’s amazing how quickly you get religion when you’re facing death in the middle of a combat zone.

I reached under my seat and pulled out my spare helmet, inspecting it briefly before tossing it to the soldier. They were all interchangeable. “You’ll need a tech-head to reprogram it for your squad and battalion net.”

The soldier inspected it himself before handing it back. “I appreciate the gesture, but I think I’ll hang on to this one a while.” He said, tapping the side of his helmet with a finger and laughing. “That bright orange bullet magnet look doesn’t quite go with the rest of my camo gear and sarge is gonna try and scrounge me up a replacement. I reckon there’ll be a few of those out there.” The squaddie finished grimly.

I took my spare helmet back and threw the kid a sloppy salute, wished him luck and buttoned up the SRV, popping the seals on the coffees. “Break time, slinky!” I called up to my wife.

“For kcuf sake I ordered a Mojito!” She complained when she climbed down from the turret and took the coffee from me. “The kcufing service around here sucks. This is the last time we holiday in this tihshole.” She fumed. “Next year I want two weeks at a nice warm beach on Turner’s World, mister, or you can find some other sap to blow you on Tuesdays.”

The comms unit chirped and I called up the message on the left MFD. “All units execute plan alpha, variant six.”

The god of war had rolled his dice.




tbc

 

[wAsh67]

8

She’s Got Balls​

Needless to say, I survived my period of simulation based training without getting my stit pierced with hot lead by Max, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. That’s the trouble when one writes in a first-person perspective – it takes some of the uncertainty away from the telling of the tale.

Sim based training isn’t all that different to the computer games that we all played growing up, but instead of a bedroom, the venue is a fully configured virtual reality suite with ultra-realistic cockpit controls and visuals. I kcufed up occasionally – actually, I kcufed up a lot - but my successes far outweighed my failures by the end of the week and I had learned quite a lot from ‘playing’ at being a combat pilot, which was the entire point of the exercise. It turned out being time well spent and an activity that I should have invested in earlier in my career at the numerous starports that offered simulation suites. Based on how busy those sim suites are, I imagine that’s how many pilots prepare themselves for fighting, using them to stay sharp in the down time between missions.

The most important thing I discovered during the training was that it didn’t matter how skilled you were at throwing a spacecraft around an asteroid field, nor did it particularly matter what ship you fought with. What mattered most of all these days was how competently you engineered the ship for the role that you needed it to undertake. It’s not unheard of for an extensively modified small ship like a Cobra to take down a behemoth like an Anaconda or a Corvette - in the right hands, of course.

As a trader I was familiar with outfitting my own Cobra for the needs of the contracts that I was awarded, whether haulage or ferrying passengers, so I knew all about the various grades of modules that could be fitted to a ship to improve any aspect of its performance. I already knew what the difference was between an A rated shield module and a D rated one and when a D spec was actually a better fit than the A rated one, but what Max and his training programme had given me was an understanding of how to balance a ship in order to tip the scales of combat capability in my favour, specifically how to select and configure a ship for a particular role. For example, an interceptor set up to tackle human combat zones wouldn’t last two minutes in a Thargoid incursion and vice versa.

It wasn’t just about picking the right ship, arming it with the right weapons, toughening it up with the right shields and the right hull plating and then fitting the appropriate accessories to round off the build, although that is precisely where many combat-oriented pilots stop. What Max gave me was an insight into what third party engineering could accomplish to enhance just about everything fitted to a ship to take it to the next level and place it a cut above an outwardly identical hull.

Engineers for some reason operate on the fringes of interstellar society. For the most part they tended to be loners living in far flung locations, conducting their businesses out of hard to find outposts like cave dwelling hermits. But what they can do to the modules that they specialise in can transform a run of the mill runabout into a veritable murder machine. Finding an engineer, however, isn’t quite as simple as just logging onto the local net and doing a Stargle search and even if you did find one there was usually a hefty price to pay just to sit down and talk to them. Many of them will only make themselves available to you once you’ve gone through other engineers and reached the limits of what they can do for you, and your reputation with introductory engineers is a significant factor in convincing the more capable engineers to accept you as a client further down the line. There are exceptions, though, particularly at the entry levels of engineering, and one of those exceptions is an engineer called Felicity Farseer.

Most pilots know about Farseer Incorporated on Deciat 6-A. Originally the mining company founded by her family, Farseer Inc. is now merely a front for the modifications that she makes to the modules that she and her apprentices specialise in. Her name and reputation are well known. If you want something done to your FSD then that’s who you go to. Want to jump further? Farseer Inc can sort that out. Want the FSD to charge quicker? Go see Farseer. I wasn’t in urgent need of FSD improvements, but what I did have was a pressing need for main thruster improvements to get me more combat manoeuvrability and, as a bonus, access to the higher tier engineers that dealt in offensive and defensive modifications. To get that access, Max advised me that it would be prudent to earn enough trust with Farseer by using her to engineer my drives and then find out from her how I might later get in contact with these mysterious tech gurus higher up the modifications chain.

The ‘brotherhood of nerds’ as Max calls them is a particularly tight club and the entry level engineers act as a sort of security screening team. These are the ones that you have to go through first in order to gain access to the club. Once you’re past them and ‘in the club’, so to speak, there is a ring of ‘front of house’ technicians that you then must be acknowledged by to gain access to the ‘back-room boys’ that really know their stuff. Once you’ve gone through everything that the back-room boys can do for you, then you might one day get invited by them to meet the ‘management’, who are the bright sparks at the very top of their game – the visionary experimenters and pioneering innovators like Ishmael Palin and Bill Turner.

You can’t circumvent the hierarchy of engineers. If you try, you’ll only get shut out. If somebody managed to learn the location of a second-tier engineer’s workshop by Stargling or by torturing a pilot who already had access and went directly there without that second-tier engineer having heard about them through lower level engineers like Farseer, then they wouldn’t even be given the time of day.

So that’s how I found myself on my way to Deciat to discuss my requirements with her. I knew where she was because when I had reached the pilot’s federation exploration rank of ‘scout’ my promotion notification email had been closely followed by a message stating that her particulars had been automatically added to my navigation computer. As a trader making smaller, fuel efficient jumps I’d ignored the invitation as Deciat was a lengthy trek away from my regular trade routes and the need for the improvements that she could make to my Cobra wasn’t high up on my to-do list. Now, after testing the differences out in the simulator, I wanted what was known as ‘dirty drives’ and perhaps a faster boot sequence for the FSD which might have saved my ass in the salvage simulation that I recounted to you earlier. One thing I had learned from my simulated experiences was that it was really easy to get into trouble in space, but getting out of trouble was a little bit trickier.

Max and I materialised in the Deciat system in my trusty Cobra 3 after the long trek from Polecteri to find the emergence point at the star unusually busy with around half a dozen medium sized ships and one Imperial Cutter just hanging around near the navigation beacon. “Scan detected” pinged on my comms console a couple of times as the predators inspected my ship for cargo, some of them making overtly aggressive passes as they sniffed my electronic signature. Soon enough, satisfied that I was carrying nothing that piqued their interest, they all slunk back off to await the next new arrival to the system. While unusual, it was not unheard of to find packs of hunters waiting at stars for prey, like sharks sniffing the water for blood, particularly in low security and anarchic systems where law and order had yet to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with.

“You’ll get used to this when you visit engineers, especially the entry level nerds.” Max told me as he sucked some more coffee through a foil straw. I had no idea what extras he’d added to the coffee after it had come out of the dispenser – the syringe he’d used to squirt a clear liquid past the straw’s one-way valve had been unmarked - but it sure made him wince when he drank it down. He jammed the cup into a foam holder to save it floating away in the Cobra’s flight deck and peered wistfully out at the receding spacecraft. “Man, that Cutter sure is a beaut.” He commented.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“You tell me. Could be anything. Usually they are just lazy pilots looking for wanted novices with bounties against them on their first visits to entry level engineers as they are expected to be relatively easy kills and a lot of traffic in this system is for pilots with either no engineering or lightly engineered ships. Or maybe there’s a passenger with a bounty on his head expected to be travelling through the system. Perhaps we’ve strayed into the middle of a faction war. Who knows?” Max shrugged. “Deciat is out of my sphere of interest so I have no idea why there’s a mini blockade in force here. Target and scan a couple of them,” he suggested. “See if they have a common allegiance.”

“Really? You want me to lock them up?” I asked incredulously. Whatever he’d put in his drink must have been a pretty potent juice. Some pilots saw being targeted and scanned as an invitation to a hostile engagement and if they happened to be wanted by the authorities themselves and have a bounty on their heads then a scan from an unknown pilot might invite something altogether deadlier in response.

“Of course not. Let sleeping dogs lie, that’s what I say. Especially when there’s so many of the kcufers it looks like we’ve wandered into the local stray pound.” Max laughed.

“Was that another test?” I smiled, pleased to have passed it.

“Joe, life out in the black is one continuous never-ending test. Let your guard down for a single second and you’ll end up as atomised particles.” He told me, lifting his cup and sucking up another mouthful of whatever was keeping his nerves steady. Like all pilots, he utterly detested being a passenger.

As this was my first ever visit to the Deciat system I switched from combat to analysis mode and powered up the full spectrum scanner, honking the system – honking is a slang term for using the ship’s scanner sensors to gather the raw optical data - and then calling up the navigation screen to view the results and run surface scans of the system’s planets once all the raw data had been collated. I knew where I was going because the information embedded in the nav computer with Farseer’s original invitation was sufficient to plot a course directly to her front door, but what I didn’t know was the gravity, as that would influence how I conducted my approach to her base. If it was a high gravity planet then a standard approach would see my Cobra plummeting towards the landing pad so fast that thrusters wouldn’t be able to stop me from crashing into it. Once the scan was complete I called up the data and studied the information that the FSS had gathered on body Deciat 6a.

The planet turned out to be a moon orbiting a gas giant and was classified as a small rocky body, measuring approximately 1578km in diameter. As such it had a very low gravity of less than a tenth of Earth standard and no atmosphere. It was also very cold, orbiting more than 2000 light seconds from the system’s main star with surface temperatures in the region of 129 degrees Kelvin, or 150 below freezing in planetside parlance. Essentially it was a rock half the size of Earth’s moon orbiting a planet the size of Jupiter – a tiny, almost invisible dot in the black.

“Course laid in for Farseer Inc.” I announced, banked the Cobra around the star toward the distant moon where Felicity Farseer waited and throttled up to full power, leaving the star and the small flotilla of interstellar marauders far behind us.

We were interdicted twice on the two thousand light second journey from the star to Deciat 6 and on both occasions I submitted without a fight, once to another Cobra III sporting reflective armour and the second time to a Krait Phantom. Like a good boy I didn’t bother locking onto either of them in order to scan them and see what sort of pilot I was up against. It wasn’t worth the trouble. I was clean, carried no cargo and couriered no data on this trip so there could be no possible reward for visiting any violence upon me other than the pilot adding another arbitrary kill to his rap sheet, and as I was rated ‘harmless’ even that kill would be just about worthless. Max sat nervously in the co-pilot’s seat, no doubt having second thoughts about accompanying me on this excursion now that the journey was proving to be akin to wandering like a lost tourist through the no-go zones of a starport's down-below where lawlessness reigned. “Busy system,” he murmured as the Krait scanned us with both a kill warrant scanner and a manifest scanner before departing without a single word of apology for waylaying us out of supercruise.

We jumped back into supercruise for the final few seconds of flight to Deciat 6a. As luck would have it Farseer Inc was on the far side of the moon, the normally solid circle of the targeting indicator now dashed to indicate that the destination was occluded by the body of the moon. I banked away from the moon in a wide orbit to keep my speed up, all the time watching the broken circle. The moment it switched from dashed to solid I turned back toward it as this meant that the base was now directly within line of sight and near the edge of the moon from my perspective, so that I was approaching at a relatively shallow angle. I slowed down for a planetary approach – hit the gravity well of a solid body too fast and you’ll get thrown out of supercruise with a hefty bang which can damage both hull integrity and internal modules - and once I was close enough to the surface of the moon the FSD automatically geared down out of main supercruise and into a low power glide mode that would take us the rest of the way at high sub-orbital speeds without the gravity well kicking the FSD completely offline.





tbc

 

[wAsh67]

At about twelve kilometres from Farseer Inc. the FSD finally powered itself down, unable to maintain a supercruise bubble this deep into a gravity well, and I flew us in on final approach under normal engine power. The settlement was dominated by a tower stretching almost three kilometres above the surface. For a moment I mistook it for a space elevator before realising that it was an early design of rail gun for launching mined ore into orbit for collection by bulk freighters too large to land at the place.

An obviously synthesised voice greeted us to Farseer Inc. “DeLacy Juliet Kilo Romeo. Access granted. Commencing automated flight control routine. Please observe docking protocols and proceed to docking pad zero-one.“

The landing pad assigned to us was a fair distance away from the main cluster of buildings that were perched on the rugged rim of a shallow crater dug out of the moon’s surface by the impact of an ancient meteorite, exposing a rich vein of some highly sought-after element. A long, rickety looking jetty stretched out into the crater and at the end of it was the landing pad. I imagine at some stage in the complexes busy past a conveyor belt had carried the mined minerals out to ranks of cargo ships queued at the landing pads, dumping the ores directly into open holds for a fast turnaround. Today the conveyor belts stood idle, a monument to history now that this region of the crater was totally depleted of anything worth extracting from the soil. I took a wide, sweeping approach to the designated pad, leaving plenty of space for a Lakon Type-7 bulk carrier that sat with engines idling on an adjacent landing pad, no doubt waiting for me to set the Cobra down so that it could then depart without risk of a collision.

Subtle nudges to the controls brought me directly above the centre of the landing pad and I let the moon’s microgravity drop me gently down the last few metres, the 0.6 m/s acceleration not requiring me to give the belly mounted thrusters a brief pulse at the last moment to cushion the landing. The skids thudded onto the pad and the weight of the unladen ship settled softly on the hydraulic shock absorbers.

“Ok landing.” Max judged, “but a docking computer could have done it in half the time.”

“Or killed us.” I pointed out. “If something goes wrong, you can’t beat having your hands on the controls to do a go-around.”

“DC’s are pretty good these days, the software is much improved over what it used to be. I guarantee you that far more pilots kcuf up landings than docking computers do. Just look at the last one you made at Hudson as an example.” Max grinned, unfastening his harness and struggling out of the co-pilot’s bucket seat, huffing and cursing the moon’s miniscule gravity rather than his own overhanging stomach for the effort he had expended squeezing his bulk out of it.

“I’m not wasting a hardware slot on a docking computer.” I asserted, rolling my eyes. “One day that DC will fail and a pilot who can’t land is going to look pretty kcufing useless floating around a starport starving to death while waiting for a tug. Docking computers are a waste of money, space and power.”

“If you say so.” Max shrugged. “Though personally I’d feel a hell of a lot safer if you used one.” He added with a grin.

I gave the finger to his receding bulk as he left the flight deck to add some more bio-waste to the Cobra’s septic tank now that the ship was stationary and hooked up to the outpost’s service umbilicals. I requested a video conference with one of Farseer’s representatives. After a few minutes the white-haired woman herself appeared on the comms screen. She looked positively ancient, her face not much more than a layer of pockmarked skin stretched over her skull, but I didn’t think pointing that out to her was a particularly good idea on a first date.

“What do you have for me, stranger?” She asked in a voice that seemed to defy her looks. Perhaps being out in the black exploring for so long aged people prematurely – too much exposure to background radiation, black hole x-rays and neutron star emissions. Maybe her apparent frailty had been exacerbated by the zero-gravity environment and the necessity to ration food and water for long treks in small ships.

“I’m looking for some drive upgrades. Thrusters and frame shift.” I replied.

She did some tippetty tapping on a datapad and frowned at the results. “You don’t seem to be on my records. Is this your first visit, commander?”

“Yes ma’am.” I acknowledged.

“Any existing or prior modifications to your ship by other engineers?” She asked.

“No, ma’am. My drives are completely OEM as far as I am aware. You are the first engineer I’ve ever visited in any ship.”

“Ah, a virgin.” She smiled, suddenly looking predatorial. I suppressed a shudder. “Things have changed from what you may have heard about me on Galnet, commander, so I apologise if you’ve come all this way unprepared. My latest research has taken me in a direction that I hadn’t anticipated so I’m afraid it’s no longer payment in credits and exploration data that I’m looking for. Right now, I need something that I’m finding increasingly difficult to come by.”

“What might that be?” I asked. Please don’t say sex – please, please please not that, my brain screamed at me.

“Meta-alloys.” Farseer replied, steepling her fingers on the desk she sat behind.

“Meta-alloys?” Max exclaimed over my shoulder, having completed whatever business he’d needed to attend to in the ship’s toilet. He smelled faintly of the industrial strength air freshener that I had left magnetised to the vacuum cistern there to fumigate the cubicle after Vader had once contaminated it to dangerous levels after a curry night. “No wonder there’s so many sharks circling in this system.”

“And you are?” Farseer asked, folding her bone thin arms across her shrivelled chest.

“An interested non-entity, ma’am.” Max replied. “Meta-alloys, to the best of my limited knowledge, are used in Thargoid ships and technology. Are you modding for the bugs now?”

”Hardly,” Farseer laughed. “You tell me what your interest in my business is and if I’m sufficiently impressed I might tell you what my business actually is.”

“I’m attached to Alliance Intelligence, my specialism is military affairs.” Max said, still leaning over my shoulder so he was in the cam shot. “As things are unusually peaceful between the regular antagonists in the bubble right now, we are finding ourselves more and more concerned with preparing our defence forces for handling Thargoid incursions into our space, especially down in our new holdings in the Witch Head sector, so the Alliance has an interest in all things bug related.”

“Ah, you must be one of the Maxes.” Farseer nodded thoughtfully. “This system is aligned to the Federation. Why should I reveal anything to you that Federal administrators might one day use against me?”

“I thought you were an independent?”

“I am, and this business is, of course, out of necessity.“ Farseer agreed. “The Deciat system, however, is far from independent and I have to live here and conduct my business affairs from here. I don’t need things being made any more difficult for me than they already are as a political neutral.”

“It’s not my intent here to make things in any way difficult for you.” Max told her. “In my capacity with Alliance Intel I can offer an exchange of our research...”

“I don’t need your research.” Farseer interrupted with a smug, superior snort. “I’m one of the most respected technical experts in the galaxy for pioneering enhancements to exploration technology…”

“I am aware of that,” Max interrupted back. “And, of course, fully respectful of your richly deserved standing in the ranks of your esteemed peers, but as far as materials technology goes, our own researchers may have already uncovered information about meta-alloys and how the Thargoids use them that you probably haven’t yet managed to figure out by yourself. We have state of the art laboratories full of experts on several worlds analysing meta-alloys. The Alliance uses a ‘two heads are better than one’ philosophy rather than your ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ one because, as you know, we operate in a spirit of openness and cooperation that the other superpowers seem reluctant to embrace. Our ships have engaged in combat with Thargoids and we are in possession of salvaged wreckage fragments from their propulsion and hyperdrive systems in various states of functionality that could shed further light on whatever it is that you are researching here. Add to that the fact that I am capable of tasking some of the Alliance’s considerable spacefaring assets to obtaining additional meta-alloys – or whatever else you might need - on my own authority should you require.

“Of course, if you’d rather Palin beat you to the finish line with his own research into meta-alloys….” Max left the sentence unfinished.

Farseer leaned back thoughtfully, still frowning although that might just have been the way her facial muscles naturally relaxed at that age. I thought she’d see through the typical Alliance propaganda that Max had just spouted – The Empire serves one man, the Federation serves one world, the independents serve only themselves, Alliance members serve each other. She wasn’t convinced – that was clear from the scowl she wore – but it was also clear that she was mulling it over.

“Look,” Max continued. “One day soon the Federation, Alliance, Empire and the independents will all have to put aside their petty differences and bigotries and pool their combined resources anyway or the damn ‘Goids will destroy us in detail one system at a time. If we can help you discover something that in return helps humanity fight back against the imminent invasion, then that can only be a good thing for you from not just a business perspective but also a moral sense too. I’m not overly happy discussing this on an open comms channel, so how about a face to face meeting while my errand boy here goes and fetches you however much meta-alloy you need? If you doubt my bona fides, then I’ll be happy to share what we have recently learned from Gail about ThunderChild.”

Her eyes widened at his Max’s last sentence, thought about it for maybe two or three seconds and then nodded. “I guess I can spare the time. Things are quiet around here, so I’ll listen to what you have to say. One of my interns will drive out to your ship in a buggy to fetch you shortly, so you’ll need to suit up. In the meantime if your pilot can secure for me a couple of units of meta alloys, then that’ll go some way toward cementing any agreement that we might reach. The intern will also drop off a catalogue outlining what further materials are required for any engineering work I might undertake for you.“ The comms screen went dark.

“Thunderchild?” I asked.

“Sorry squirt, that’s ‘need to know.’ I could tell you but then I’d have to throw you out the airlock in your underwear. You have a working space suit in this tihsbox?” Max asked.

“Not one your size.” I laughed. “Check the cabinets in the central hub. If you’re lucky there might be one you can squeeze into, but you’d best give it a high pressure integrity test before you go outside as it won’t have ever been worn in all the time I’ve had this ship and the rubber seals might have perished. Oh, and put the embedded heaters through a self-test before you leave – it’s kcufing cold out there. What the hell are meta-alloys and where do I get them from, anyway? I’ve never heard of them.”

“Briefings that I’ve sat in on taught me that the Thargoids create a large amount of their spacefaring machinery from meta-alloys, which is why I imagine Farseer is so interested in them. They might help her to recreate a witch space wormhole generator, which is what we understand the Thargoids use for long distance jumps and one of the technologies that we in the Alliance are working on ourselves.” Max replied. “I’m no expert on this stuff and all I’ve got to go on is bits and pieces that I’ve picked up from other sources, but in layman’s terms meta-alloys are a metallic structure with large internal voids, much like the honeycombs found in bee hives, and they are lighter, stronger and more versatile kilo for kilo than foamed aluminium which makes them ideal for ship and module construction. And they are supposedly capable of repairing themselves when damaged. Our metallurgists believe that they are going to be the future of materials technology once they are fully understood. They can be machined, but they can’t yet be manufactured and melting them for casting purposes destroys most of their useful properties – one of which is to counter the corrosive effects of contact with some Thargoid materials. Do you remember the UA bomber incidents?”

“Of course.” I replied. That had been a scary time. Starports across the bubble had gone into virtual lockdown status when sufficient quantities of Thargoid sensors – at that time known as Unknown Artifacts, hence the UA acronym – had been collected at a starport, usually via the black market. The emissions from the sensors disrupted human technology causing all sorts of malfunctions that left starports unable to operate. The AEGIS organisation came up with a method of protecting stations that then allowed Thargoid materials to be traded openly without damage to a starport. I had always assumed that it was Guardian tech that had been exploited to counter the UAs, but Max went on to explain that that was not the case.

“Aegis figured out that the UA effects are nullified by modified meta-alloys, so there was a rush on them a year or two back, and as a result they are now a lot more difficult to get hold of. Many of the resource sites that once held them are now completely depleted of them and they aren’t something that can normally be obtained at a commodities market, which is why Farseer is struggling to get the stuff. If I play this right we can exploit that demand for our own purposes.” Max explained. “The usual sources are barnacle sites on high metal content planets where you can surface prospect for them, but many of those, I would imagine, are either mined out or permit locked by Aegis. I know there’s usually a small supply of meta-alloys kept at Darnielle’s Prospect in the Maia system for Palin’s research, but probably no more than one or two tons of the stuff. They daren’t keep any more as that system is buried so deep in the Pleiades that stocking any more than that will invite a Thargoid incursion to take them back. Also, that stuff ain’t cheap to buy because it is so difficult to obtain, so I imagine your best bet would be surface prospecting for it. Have you ever done that?”

“Nope.”

Max nodded. “Figured as much. Most people don’t need to until they start dealing with engineers or synthesizing specialist ammunition – which is something you’ll also need to get used to, by the way. You can familiarise yourself with surface prospecting by running the subroutines contained in most ship’s training simulation software, assuming you still have that installed. Then get yourself up to Garay’s orbital station and see if you can equip your ship with an SRV hangar and fill it with a Scarab, if they have any. And get a fuel scoop too, because from here to Darnielle’s is a bit of a slog. The last intel report I read revealed that the barnacles the meta-alloys grow from had been completely farmed out right across the Pleiades, but that is yet to be confirmed – there may still be some there, though I do know for a fact that a Farragut class battlecruiser that was keeping unauthorised farmers away from confirmed deposits in the Merope system has now been withdrawn, so it’s probably safe to say Merope has been mined out and exhausted. That report is only a week or two old so may not yet be public knowledge, but check the Alliance Intel database, like I showed you during your training, for other sightings of the stuff.”

“The Canonn one?”

“That’s one of them. Or EDDB. You can find current information on most stuff on the various databases in the public domain, or classified Alliance specific data on our proprietary database. We try to keep them up to date so that we can improve the efficiency of all our operatives and associates – less time spent researching means more time actually doing something useful.”

“I have them all downloaded onto my datapad and subscribed to.” I assured him. “This sounds like it might take some time. Not to mention money that I don’t have a great deal of, as you know.” I pointed out.

“I can sub you enough for a buggy bay and an SRV.” Max said, handing me an old-fashioned plastic card with Alliance Intel’s logo on it. “Scan that at the outfitters and they’ll put it on the company account. When you get back we’ll try and sell the buggy and any surplus meta-alloys to recover the cost. Don’t worry about time. I can get a taxi if you get yourself killed, and you never know, I might even get lucky with old Flossy. Looks like she hasn’t gotten any manly action in quite a while.” He winked.

I almost gagged as he went back to the suit lockers laughing his head off but just managed to fire off a quick quip before the cockpit door closed. “There’s heavy duty lube in the landing gear wells. By the look of her I think you’re gonna need it.”





tbc

 

[wAsh67]

9

Highway To Hell

​

Garay Terminal’s outfitters took the best part of half a day to rip out a cargo rack and fit an SRV bay in its place. Due to the modular nature of the components, those installations are supposed to take minutes rather than hours, especially in low gravity conditions where a couple of mechanics are able to remove the hull plating to access the module, then simply unbolt it from the standard sized frame, unplug the high voltage power and low voltage signal cables, disconnect the fluidics and pneumatics umbilicals and all the heat exhaust ducting and then pull the entire unit out on a forklift truck. Fitting the replacement unit is simply a reversal of these steps.

The service manager claimed that the difficulty was due to some twist in the Cobra’s frame from years of abusive handling that made it unusually difficult to remove the cargo rack. Once they got it out they found that the replacement wouldn’t slot in cleanly until they rectified the distortion. I wasn’t overly concerned as Alliance Intel were footing the bill for this retrofit and if there had been some frame damage – admittedly more than likely as a consequence of me recently crashing the Cobra into Hudson Ring’s rear bulkhead on top of a lifetime of rough landings – then that got straightened out at no cost to myself. I signed the invoice with a rather large grin on my face, having also had a fuel scoop installed at the same time at Alliance Intel’s expense.

I briefly considered heading back to Farseer Inc. to pick up Max after the lengthy layover at Garay’s, but instead discarded that option. Sooner or later I’d have to start figuring things out for myself again, so I left him behind to face the scary wiles of Felicity on his own and headed out of the bubble rimward into the sparsely populated expanse of the Inner Orion Belt that stood between where I was and the Perseus Transit. While waiting for the SRV hangar to be installed I’d set the navigation computer to map out a course to Maia, one of the ‘Seven Divine Sisters’ of the Pleiades nebula, otherwise known as Messier 45. The other ‘sisters’ were Merope, Sterope, Electra, Taygeta, Celaeno, and Alcyone. The name Pleiades originates from Greek mythology and effectively means ‘The daughters of Pleione’, Pleione being a sea-nymph and the wife of Atlas, one of the Greek Titans.

The most direct route on this near 400 light year excursion to the Seven Sisters would take me through a suppression zone – a region of what explorers call brown dwarf ‘badlands’ where scoopable main sequence stars are rare and there are no convenient starports or even outposts that could be visited for refuelling. A fuel scoop, heatsinks and a decent sized fuel tank are essential items, along with a frame shift drive with a jump range of at least 11 light years – anything less and it wouldn’t be possible for a ship to even reach Maia.

For the early stage of the voyage I jumped as far as the Cobra’s FSD would allow me to shorten the journey time, pausing frequently to refuel at suitable stars. Fuel scooping involves flying your fragile little metal skinned ship through the blazing outer reaches of a star and opening an intake port in the fuselage that sucks in free floating hydrogen atoms that have escaped from the fusion process. It is a procedure fraught with peril as you need to fly fast in order to ram sufficient quantities of hydrogen in through the scoop’s compressor, which means you have to do it in supercruise. Get too close to the gravity well of the star and you’ll be dumped out into normal space right on the edge of the corona in what pilots call a ‘Hydrogen Headbutt’ and at supercruise speeds it’s very easy to get the flight profile wrong. The closer you get to the star, the faster the scoop will fill your fuel tanks, but spend too long too deep in the corona waiting for the scoop to pull in enough hydrogen to fill your tank and the temperatures will rapidly go through the roof, risking damage to hull and internal modules at best.

To make navigation even worse, not all star classes allow enough hydrogen to escape the furnace to make fuel scooping feasible, and if you happen to wander into a suppression zone that contains exclusively pre main sequence brown dwarf or T-Tauri stellar objects (latterly nicknamed sub-stars) that are not heavy enough for the fusion of hydrogen to helium to take place in their cores – the Badlands I mentioned earlier - then you’d best either find an outpost offering refuelling services, switch to economy routing or turn tail and head back the way you came before your fuel tank drops to half full.

The seven star types that a pilot with a fuel scoop can refuel from are those designated A,B,F,G K,M and O and together these are called ‘main sequence stars’. Some pilots find that creating a memory aid out of those initials helps them to recall the usable star types. “Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me” is a common if quaintly old fashioned one that many pilots will quote when asked as this mnemonic lists the star types from hottest to coldest, but for me it’s one that Alain taught me early on in my travels before he was killed - “A Beautiful Kedonen Girl Once F***ed Me.” It’s the first line of a ‘space shanty’ that goes like this.

A beautiful Kedonen girl once f***** me,
Moaning while bouncing around,
F** me for many an hour,
Grabbing my head as she ground.
A beautiful Kedonen girl once f***** me,
Oh how her lithe body clung.
Kissing each inch of my body,
Because I am so wonderfully hung!

When charging the FSD to execute a hyperspace jump the navigation computer automatically flashes up a message on the HUD notifying you of the destination star type. If the arrival star was anything outside of a main sequence star, then I simply aborted the jump and called up the navigation screen to see if there were any main sequence stars on the route and within range of my remaining fuel stocks. If there were some suitable candidates then I ignored the star type and jumped regardless, comfortable in the knowledge that I would be able to refuel at a main sequence star somewhere downstream before the tank ran dry. When I got to the Badlands region I switched out of fastest route mode to economy mode and that way I was able to make my way through the minefield of useless sub-stars without having to worry about fuel scooping at all, albeit a lot more slowly and laboriously than would have been ideal.

At one system where I honked to check for potential barnacle presence I noticed that there was a distress call being broadcast, and it was only a few dozen light seconds from the brown dwarf. This was the first sign of life that I had seen in more than thirty parsecs. I say ‘sign of life’ but a distress call can just as easily mean that whatever signs of life had been there when the distress beacon was activated might no longer exist.

Closer inspection of the data that the FSS had collated when honking the system revealed something that at that time I found quite out of the ordinary. Normally the presence of a body in the system that couldn’t be classified as of cosmic origin like a star, moon, planet or asteroid belt gets labelled as a USS, which is short for unidentified signal source. Normally these are emissions from ships, outposts, starports and the like - anything with a technological trace rather than one from an object created by natural forces. Distress calls, weapons fire and funeral beacon signals all come under the catch-all USS designation. However, close to the distress call I noticed an unusual contact designation in the list. NHSS, it said. Non-human signal source. And close by it was another signal – weapons fire.

From this I could extrapolate that a human and an alien ship had taken pot shots at each other and if I was reading it right the human had been on the receiving end of an ssa kicking as the ‘Goids didn’t transmit any distress signals that our electronics could detect when their ships went kaboom.

A distress call in space is something that no pilot ever ignores, because one day it might be you out there in trouble and desperate for some other traveller to save your bacon. Somewhere out in the deadly black is somebody just like you in a whole tihsload of trouble, trapped in a metal box with a dwindling supply of air and fuel to keep him or herself alive in the vastness of space while facing one of the myriad ways to die. It could be that the pilot had simply miscalculated their route planning and ran out of fuel, or suffered a critical system failure, or had their drives destroyed in a pirate attack and been left stranded, unable to move. Or it could be a trap.

Out here a hundred light years from a population centre in an uninhabited system, nowhere near a shipping lane, these signals constituting a potential pirate trap was extremely unlikely as it could be days or weeks before a ship carrying cargo passed through. However, this distress signal was closely tied to an NHSS and I had no idea if using traps like this was how Thargoids ensnared their prey. I could barrel in at full throttle and find myself crashing out of supercruise and into the clutches of a Thargoid Interceptor looking for fresh meat to abduct. At this point I regretted not collecting Max from Farseer’s mine as no doubt he’d be able to advise me what to do. Maybe he’d have an explanation as to why the NHSS had a threat level marker of three attached to it, as I had no idea what that signified, and my simulator training hadn’t covered Thargoid combat – that had been deferred to a later date. Did it mean that there were three Thargoid ships detected there? Or was the three a grade from zero to ten with three meaning ‘be careful’ rather than ‘run the kcuf away?’

“What would Max do,” I asked myself out loud as I switched the display out of the full spectrum scanner and studied the co-ordinates it had uploaded to the navigation computer. Forty-six light seconds to the NHSS signal. I selected it on the touch screen and turned toward the vector. Forty-six light seconds gave me about two minutes to think this through and chicken out.

Max would tell me that the mission always comes first, I reminded myself, but it could be days before I had gathered enough Meta-Alloys, flown back to Farseer’s, then come back here to investigate. Whoever was out there would most certainly have run out of air by then.

But that could be somebody you know stuck out there in the tihs. I told myself next. Hadn’t Sara been reassigned down this way? Might that ship in distress be her taxi?

That distress signal could very well be you, if you investigate this any further, my subconscious warned me. My unengineered Cobra was in no condition to go to war with even the lowliest Thargoid scout ship and neither was I.

Go take a look, high wake out if it looks dodgy maybe? Okay, that sounds like a plan I admitted to myself. If you have to grow a pair someday, might as well make it today. Earnest resolve spread across my grim face as I tightened my harness straps to 1.2g.

I exited supercruise a couple of thousand meters away from the NHSS, put the Cobra into silent running mode, darkened the flight deck lighting and slowed down into the blue range of throttle settings for maximum manoeuvrability. Four pips to engines, two to weapons. There was no point sending any energy to shields as silent running automatically disabled the shield emitters. Directly ahead were a smattering of scanner contacts, mostly cargo and ship fragments, but I was still too far away to identify the type of ship that had been blown to pieces. I set the nav computer’s course to the next system on the route to Maia in case I needed to make a fast getaway and began a lazy orbit of the incident, keeping the contacts off my left side and studying them through the side of the canopy as I circled around them, careful to keep as much distance as I could, but close enough to actually see what was going on.

Starlight flashed off cargo canisters and wreckage around a lone Thargoid scout ship, one of the small, multi-faceted flying saucer like variants so familiar from comics and vids. The Scout just seemed to be hovering there, surveying the wreckage, not busying itself by claiming the cargo or kidnapping survivors as the news vids told us they did. One of the floating objects flickered bright red and for a moment I thought that it might just be the starlight reflecting every second or so off a tumbling piece of debris, then I saw the object for what it actually was






tbc

 

[wAsh67]

It was a man, or maybe a woman, waving his or her arms and encased in a remlok survival suit with its location beacon flashing regularly. The Thargoid scout was just sitting there, ostensibly watching that person slowly expire in the airless expanse of space. A remlok suit doesn’t have much – a small air supply, a tiny battery pack to heat or cool the suit for a short while and to power a locator beacon for a week or two for location and recovery of the body – it was just enough to keep a human being alive for maybe twenty four hours in a temperate zone where the environmental unit wasn’t working at full capacity but no more than that, and much less out here so close to the heat of the system’s star, even though it was just a brown dwarf.

Thin, almost invisible beams of red light shot out from the survivor every so often as his uncontrolled body tumbled in the midst of the wreckage field and it took me a second to register that the crazy kcufer was firing a sidearm defiantly at the scout. That was about as effective as shooting peas at an elephant – I doubt the scout even noticed. I checked the heat build-up in the Cobra from the time I had spent orbiting the scene while silent running, noting that I barely had a minute before it reached critical and I’d have to bug out anyway.

There was nothing I could do. It looked like the scout was content to just sit there laughing at the struggling human like a cat toying with a crippled mouse. Something inside me snapped at the senseless cruelty and I banked left and pitched downward to place my ship behind and above the scout in a position that I hoped would further conceal my signature as I approached, switching my distributor to full shields and half engines in a 4/2 split in readiness to run. I throttled up, my finger hovering over the button to deploy hard-points and unmask weapons as I closed in on what I hoped was the blind zone of the oblivious scout – it’s hard to know where the cockpit is on a saucer shaped ship. I prayed it would concentrate on playing with the survivor for just a little while longer. Warning lights began flashing in the cockpit, alerting me that the core temperature had finally gone critical and I had to do something fast or risk internal damage to ship.

The scout grew larger in the canopy – it’s surprising how big those things actually are – and I modified my approach to take me in about 500 meters over the top of it, travelling at one hundred meters per second. I dipped the nose and boresight targeted the remlok suited survivor and prayed to a God that I didn’t believe in for forgiveness before returning to level flight, passing directly over the top of the Scout, still at a distance of about half a kilometre.

I stabbed my finger down on the deploy hard-points button and selected the multi-cannon fire group. Then I deployed the cargo scoop, twisted violently through ninety degrees directly at my target and slowed to thirty meters per second as I crossed the convergence point of the scout’s weapons. Coming out of silent running I punched out a heatsink directly in the Thargoid’s face in the hope of blinding it’s sensors and then blanked the alien from my mind entirely as I rebooted the shields and aimed the cross hairs on the survivor, minutely adjusting my angle of approach to get the spinning figure dead centre. At the last moment I slowed to just under ten meters per second.

“Unidentified cargo acquired.” Verity informed me, and I buttoned up the ship, throttled up to full and rammed the FSD charge handle to the stops.

All I had to do now was survive fifteen seconds of combat – without shields - with a surprised and more than likely ssiped off Thargoid who’d just had its dinner snatched away from right under its nose. I wrenched the Cobra back through ninety degrees and flew beneath the Scout, putting myself back in it’s rear in the hope that those things took as long to reverse direction as some human ships did and apologising to the survivor for the wild ride that he was about to be subjected to, one that might even end up killing him just as dead as the Thargoid would have.

I heard the screech of hull plates getting buckled by whatever exotic weapons the Scout employed as its pursuit began, and I punched boost and pulled back hard on the stick to throw off its aim, silently mouthing another apology to the survivor, this time for throwing him around the cargo bay. I hoped he was holding onto something and not bouncing around the room unconscious like a rag doll or I’d be scraping blood off the walls for weeks. The ten meters per second that I slowed to as I cargo scooped the survivor is just over 30 kilometres per hour. The Remlok protected pilot should have been able to survive that with minor injuries, rather than the instant death that would have probably occurred from crashing into him at three times that speed. Although a cargo scoop and VTS canisters can just about cope with a 30 metre per second impact with an object, I doubted a human being could.

Another twisting, corkscrewing bank to the left rewarded me with the sight of a volley of glowing red plasma balls shooting off into the vastness of space as the Thargoid’s next salvo missed me entirely. The compass showed my jump vector now lay almost directly behind me, so I pitched hard up and held it there as the seconds counted down. Boost became available halfway through the loop and I punched the button again which not only increased the speed back to max but also provided the welcome bonus of drastically improving my turn rate and further throwing the alien’s aim off. The engine capacitor was now down to one bar – not enough to allow me another boost – but it was recharging as I tried to evade the Scout.

With the jump vector almost centred in the HUD I checked the scanner and saw the Thargoid sweeping down onto my six from above and behind. The engine capacitor showed I could boost once again – I had four pips to engines and two to shields - so I mashed my finger on the button and felt the ship kick me in the back as the engines flared brightly and my speed maxed out, leaving the scout behind. Crackling, banging noises echoed through the shuddering ship as the Thargoid’s next salvo hammered into the tail of the Cobra and I slammed the stick hard right and let the ship barrel roll as fast as it could while still pointing at the jump vector as the final seconds ticked down and the launch to hyperspace initiated at last.

I exhaled sharply what must have been the first breath that I’d taken since I’d cut across the Scout’s bow to scoop up the survivor.

A quick damage check while cruising through hyperspace showed that my hull integrity had fallen to dangerous levels as a result of the beating that it had taken but I couldn’t afford to worry about that at that moment. I had to put a few star systems between myself and the Thargoid in case they had the xeno equivalent of a wake analyser fitted. Three jumps later I banked away from a T-Tauri star and flew at max speed in normal supercruise toward the next vector, ready to jump if the Thargoid caught up with me or one of its brethren joined in pursuit.

“Voice command enable.” I told Verity and unbuckled myself from the pilot’s seat, pushing myself up with my feet then pulling myself across the ceiling using the handholds fitted in various places throughout the flight deck to get to the exit. Just aft of the cockpit was a small room known as the ‘hub’ and from that were service doorways and hatches that led to the various module bays and the main exit airlock. I lifted up a panel in the floor to reveal a recessed hatch that I quickly und0gged, then allowed myself to drop down and into a narrow service access corridor that ran the length of the ship from stem to stern along the main structural spar that formed the Cobra’s keel.

Propelling myself from hand hold to hand hold above dozens of electrical cables, hydraulic and pneumatic pipes, junction boxes, distribution panels, heat conduction wiring and conduits for all sorts of other stuff, I followed the laser etched signs to the cargo bay maintenance access hatch.

A red light flashed above the hatch, warning me that it had been depressurised in flight. I pressed my finger against a green button below a pressure gauge and waited for the red light to stop blinking. The hiss of compressed air passing through pipes filled the silence, but the pressure gauge remained pegged at zero and the light refused to extinguish. The cargo bay would not accept an atmosphere for some reason. If I hit the override and opened the door manually the ship would most probably vent its atmosphere out into space. And me with it.

“Kcuf.” I grunted, running back along the passage the way that I had come and climbing a ladder back up to the hub. The hub space also housed the lockers where I kept my personal gear, civilian clothing and spare flight and space suits. I pulled a bright orange space suit out of one of the lockers, stepped into the boot sealed legs and hurriedly pulled it up over my head, fumbling with the helmet catches until it locked into place. A switch on the front of the suit pressurised it with compressed air from a replaceable cartridge and a green light lit up on a wrist mounted status panel to inform me that it was at the correct pressure and there were no leaks detected. I waited a few moments for a self-test to complete and the comms link synchronised with the COVAS, checking the pockets for spare air cartridges and batteries and was eventually rewarded with a second green light.

I dropped down into the service corridor again, this time d0gging the hatch tightly closed behind me, sealing the corridor off from the rest of the ship, then shuffled sideways along the narrow corridor back to the cargo bay service hatch as the corridor was not wide enough to traverse normally while suited up.

I tethered myself to a hand hold with a clasp attached to the suit and carefully turned the d0gging wheel for the cargo bay access hatch. Eventually the door opened far enough to crack the rubber pressure seal and the air was sucked out of the corridor past me and into the cargo bay with a hiss not dissimilar to opening a bottle of soda pop that had been shaken up. A red light began flashing on the suit’s wrist panel, warning me that it was now unsafe to remove the helmet. Once the hissing had faded to silence I quickly undogged the hatch the rest of the way and shouldered my way into the cargo bay, the lights automatically switching on when the door opened.

The remlok suited survivor had jammed himself into one of the racks that normally held cargo canisters, bracing himself in position with hands and feet in anticipation of the next wild move that his new prison performed. I waved him to the hatch and he relaxed, letting go of the lattice like framework and pulling himself out of the racking. There was no sign of his sidearm, so either that was floating around unseen in the cargo bay or it had been thrown out of reach of the cargo scoop when I’d run him over. I’d have to check when we docked somewhere, not only for the air leak but also to prevent the loose weapon from fouling up the automated cargo handling systems.

I caught him as he flew in zero gravity toward me and helped him through the door, d0gging it shut tightly behind me. The lighting in the corridor flashed red to indicate that it had lost its pressure, so I flipped down the cover over the environmental control panel and recycled the air system, waiting for the illumination to return to normal when the air pressure equalised with the rest of the ship. It took two minutes for the red light on my wrist to stop flashing and I could undog my helmet, giving my passenger a thumbs-up signal for him to deactivate his Remlok. The thin plastic sheath flopped limply to the floor and he unhooked the dispenser from the utility belt of his flight suit while I led him up the ladder to the hub where I clambered out of my space suit, leaving it in a crumpled heap floating just above the floor. Tidying up could wait. Right now, I wanted to put as much distance as possible between myself and any pursuing Thargoids.







tbc

 

[wAsh67]

“I never had to use a remlok before.” The survivor said, jamming the used device into a trash bin, his voice sounding dry and sandpapery, more a rasp than anything else. “I’ll have to drop the manufacturer a thank you message. Kyle.” He said, ripping off a glove and holding out a bony, thin fingered right hand.

“Joe.” I replied, shaking his hand. “Are you okay?”

“I think your cargo scoop might have busted my left leg,” he admitted, rubbing his hands over his ghostly white, sweat soaked bearded face and using it to slick back his unruly black hair. He looked late twenties, early thirties maybe and skinny as a rake. He was lucky the impact with the scoop’s bucket hadn’t smashed every bone in his body as there was scant padding over his frame to protect it. I guessed the Remlok and the flight suit must have cushioned most of the impact as the thin skin of flesh stretched taut over his bones wouldn’t have helped much at all.

“kcuF, sorry man.”

“Sorry?” He laughed, grabbing me by the shoulders and hugging me like a brother. “If you hadn’t swooped in like a great white shark gobbling up a screaming surfer I’d be getting my orifices probed by one goddamned alien after another right now. I’ll take a broken leg and six weeks of catching up on box sets while it mends over getting worked over by a bunch of ‘Goid ssa bandits. I owe you big time, buddy.”

“Forget it man, anybody would have done the same.” I told him.

“Are you tihsting me?” Kyle exclaimed, now shaking as he refused to release me from his man hug. “Even if I had the balls to wade in to somebody else’s tihs and do something like what you just did there’s no way I could have pulled it off. I’d have either missed you completely or splattered you all over the canopy.” He laughed nervously, probably from the adrenaline that was slowly ebbing out of his system after the incident. “It was awesome, man. Where’s the head? I really, really need to take a ssip something desperate right now.”

I pointed over his shoulder, hoping Max had left the room in a usable condition, and made my own way back to the flight deck, strapping in and checking through the systems for damage. It wasn’t good, but it could have been a lot worse. Both of the cannons were mangled beyond repair, but the pulse lasers were still operational. The cargo bay hatch had been breached, which explained my inability to pressurise the module, but most disappointing was that the SRV bay had taken a lot of damage and was unusable. Max would have a field day when he found out about this. If I was lucky he’d hold short of drawing his gun and plugging me in the forehead for kcufing the mission up from start to finish. Repairs were going to be expensive, perhaps too expensive for me to be able to afford to buy the Meta-alloys at Maia. It looked like I’d have to get the stuff the dangerous way, if I could get the SRV repaired, that is. If I couldn’t then the whole trip was a complete bust.

Kyle grappled himself back into the cockpit, his flight suit unbuttoned to the waist and the arms tied loosely in a knot above his crotch to stop the suit from falling down further. He wore a t-shirt that proclaimed “Hutton Truckers” in bright red lettering above a stylised silhouette of a mug. “Buckle up,” I told him as I checked the route for main sequence stars. “What happened out there?”

“I got stupid.” Kyle replied as he flipped down the jump seat and strapped himself in. “I was heading back to the bubble with a hold full of ancient relics and other stuff to sell when I realised that I’d miscalculated my fuel usage. I’d programmed the route while the hold was empty because I knew where I wanted to go, then loaded the cargo piecemeal as I bought the stuff without recalculating for the additional mass. As soon as I got into the field of brown dwarves I double checked my route as a precaution and realised I didn’t have enough fuel to make it through. I let the computer recalculate the route, but it couldn’t get me through on what I had left and would barely get me back the way I had come to a fuel star, either. I was backtracking my route when I got ambushed by a pair of patrolling Scouts the moment I dropped out of hyperspace.

“It was those relics that did me in. They warned me about carrying them through the Pleiades but the money was just too damn good. Now I’ve gotta find the cash for a rebuy.” He moaned. “I won’t even get the ten grand for taking the lead Scout down without the gun camera for proof.”

A rebuy is the insurance excess for the ship that he flew – the bigger and more capable the ship, the larger the rebuy cost and in some cases that was measured in tens of millions of credits for an A-rated and engineered large ship like an Anaconda or a T-10. If you couldn’t afford the rebuy cost, then you’d have to settle for whatever ship you could afford, or start again from nothing in a hired Sidewinder. “Why was the ‘Goid just sat there watching you?” I asked him. “I thought for a second you might have managed to disable it before losing your own ship.”

“I don’t think so.” Kyle admitted. “I’d already taken one of the dratsabs out with AX multis, but I only got a couple of shots off at his wing man before he’d taken what was left of my shields down, then a lucky shot took my thrusters offline and the ship was crippled before I could even get the kcufer in my sights. Maybe his hold was already full of what he’d tractor beamed from the other Scout’s wreck and he was waiting for backup to arrive to pick me and the rest of the relics up. I’d already ejected the cargo, hoping that would allow me to escape but the kcufer just kept on shooting at me until the ship blew up. I hit the eject button just before she disintegrated, but the escape pod was damaged in the fight, overheating and leaking oxygen so I had to manually bale out of the kcufing thing before it baked me alive.

“I’d been floating there in the remlok for a couple of minutes before you arrived, taking pot shots at the dratsab with my sidearm, hoping he’d get annoyed and zap me with his ray guns and bless me with a quick death rather than asphyxiation, heat stroke or an ssa probing killing me slowly.” Kyle continued, holding out his hands and inspecting them for shot nerve shake. “I didn’t even see your ship jump out of supercruise - I must have been facing the wrong way when you arrived. The first I knew that another human was in the area was when I rotated to face the bug after my gun was drained and saw this big, shiny, glowing mouth of doom coming straight for me. Then I was bounced into your cargo hold and hanging on to the racking for dear life. That was scarier than facing down the kcufing Thargoid with a pistol, man. Wild ride! I’m lucky I didn’t puke up in the remlok mask the way you were throwing your ship around. Those things can’t cope with a rainbow yawn. kcuF, this leg hurts like hell. You got any weed on board, man? Any blow? Something to take the edge off?” Kyle asked, checking the pockets of his flight suit just in case there was some long forgotten joint lodged in a seam.

“There’s some pain killers in the first aid kit under the circuit breaker panel to your left.” I’d bought a few packs at Hudson Ring when the wound in my buttock began to give me grief once the slow release capsule they had injected me with at the hospital had finally dissolved. Being sat in the simulator for hours on end was a pain in the ssa in more ways than one. He rummaged around for a minute as the FSD spooled up for the next jump and swallowed the capsules dry.

“They’ll have to do,” he muttered, not even bothering to mask the disappointment with my hospitality. “Where are we heading to now?”

“Maia.”

“kcuFsakes, I only just left there.” Kyle sighed. “ssAhole of the galaxy, that place is. Can’t get any decent tihs there, not even on the black market at Maia Point or the down below on Moni’s Hub. My whole stash just got spaced by that kcufin’ ‘Goid.” He moaned. “I couldn’t wait to get out of that boring tihshole and the backward, in-breeding, straight laced rednecks and get my ssa back to civilisation and now you tell me I’m going straight kcufing back there? Man, what a crappy, crappy day!”

“Look on the bright side.” I said. “At least you aren’t strapped face down on an operating table with your pants around your heels getting gang probed right now.”

“I ‘spose.” Kyle sighed. The relief of not getting himself killed seemed to have worn off and now melancholy was setting in as his thoughts turned to everything that he had lost. In the space of a few minutes he had gone from being master of his own destiny, flying a ship with a full cargo hold wherever the work took him, to being homeless, hobbling on a smashed leg and reduced to hitch hiking back to where a few hours ago he had been a man of means. Who knows what the future now held for him if he had wiped out most of his capital on expensive relics and artifacts in the hope of trading them for a big profit back in the bubble. Maybe he didn’t have enough liquidity for even a Sidewinder. There is only a tenuous link to financial security doing this job and it was highly likely he’d end up doing manual work for pennies when I dropped him off at Darnielle’s, or, I mused, selling his skinny ssa down below for probing by fat, greasy homos in a hand to mouth existence that made me shudder at the thought. Although there are a million ways to die in space, there are also worse things than dying. It might transpire that I hadn’t done the guy much of a favour by saving his life at all.

I busied myself by jumping from system to system as we ran to the Sisters, checking the route planner regularly to ensure that a fuel star was still available before the tanks ran dry. I was cutting it close, but the computer assured me it was doable. Pressure in the self-sealing fuel tank was stable according to the gauges so there didn’t seem to be any leaks that would make this journey even more eventful than it already had been. There were always the fuel rats to turn to if things did go disastrously wrong, and I imagined that if fuel rats were needed anywhere then it would be in Badlands regions so there would probably be agents of theirs close by. I’d never had to call them out for an emergency refuel before but there’s always a first time.

Fuel rats are regular traders, explorers and combat pilots who while away the boredom that often goes hand in hand with space travel by zipping off to rescue pilots who by misfortune or their own stupidity have run out of fuel and stranded themselves and face a slow death as the environmental systems lose power and cease functioning. This happens a lot. There are many stories on Galnet telling tales of how intrepid explorers have gone one step too far in their search for the riches of being first to discover and map an Earth Like World in an uncharted system and been forced to place distress calls to the fuel rats to come and rescue them. The most renowned was when one maniac daredevil decided it would be cool to become famous as the person who had flown the furthest away from Sol and out into the absolute nothingness between our own Milky Way galaxy and Andromeda, then once he got within touching distance of the record realised that he could not get back.

In a well reported rescue mission, dozens of fuel rats raced to the edge of the galaxy and set up a relay system where they refuelled each other from the closest suitable star until one of them made it all the way out there. Then he was able to transfer fuel to the stranded pilot who then promptly limped back home, leaving the fuel rat to steal the fame as the person to fly furthest out of the galaxy after the cheeky kcufer decided that while he was out there and had the fuel, he could take the record for himself and also bring even more kudos to the fuel rat organisation itself. After all, it would have been immensely ungrateful for the pilot who’d just had his life saved by them to complain about them stealing his thunder to the media. The record wasn’t recognised by the Guinness organisation as it was a team effort rather than a solo endeavour, but the media made sure that everybody knew just who had made it the furthest that day, which earned the fuel rat an asterisked footnote alongside the rescued pilot in the record books.

Kyle remained downbeat and sombre as I worked my way through the jumps toward Maia, his head hanging limp and staring with blank eyes down at his hands in his lap as he contemplated his uncertain future. I felt sorry for him. I’d never lost a ship before and didn’t know how that felt, and I’d always had the support of Si, Alain and Vader when I’d gotten into more trouble than I could get out of by myself. I wondered how I’d feel it something like that happened to me. Never fly without rebuy, is the pilot’s mantra, which meant that you had to ensure you always covered your insurance excess cost or you could end up with absolutely nothing. I had skated on the edge myself a few times, and the rebuy for this mostly A-rated Cobra wasn’t that large.

“Can you absorb the rebuy?” I asked, breaking an extended silence.

“Not a chance.” Kyle sighed, fidgeting with his fingers, not even bothering to look up.

“What were you flying?”

“Viper 4.”

“Stock or upgraded?”

“Upgraded and partially engineered, actually. She was a work in progress. I’d got the beam lasers engineered to grade 3 and ran out of materials and cash before I could move on to shields and thrusters.” Kyle admitted. “The profit from this relic run was going to bring me up halfway back up to a rebuy. I blew the last of my savings on buying all that alien tihs from Maia.”

“That sucks, man. What are you going to do now?”

“kcuF knows.” He muttered. “Get my leg fixed and take out a loan for a new ship for starters, if the bank will let me take out another loan – I should check my Experian rating more often. Failing that it’s back to work in the mail room at Sirius Corp, which is what I did before this. Not sure I want to carry on space trucking now that the ‘Goids are interfering in business. It’s all getting a bit dangerous out here.”

“I hear that,” I agreed. The Cobra jumped out of warp at a class G white star and I slowly flew into the upper reaches of the corona. The fuel scoop automatically deployed once it had detected a sufficient flow of free hydrogen atoms and the compressors began to whine as it sucked the stuff into the fuel tank. I steered the ship around the star in a slow, lazy orbit and by the time the tank was brimming I was lined up on the jump vector to the next system. I accelerated away from the star to bring the heat levels back down to normal and double checked the route, switching from economy mode to max jump mode. The computer quickly calculated that the fifteen economy jumps that were already programmed in to get me to Maia could be completed in four regular jumps and there would still be fuel to spare. I cancelled the current jump sequence and selected the new vector that was right at the maximum range of my A rated FSD at twenty-two light years.

“What about you?” Kyle asked. “What brings you all the way out here to this tihshole?”

“Meta-alloys.” I replied.

“For Farseer?”

I twisted around in my seat and nodded as the FSD spooled up.

“You’ll be lucky, mate.” Kyle laughed. “I bought the last one at Darnielle’s before setting off back to the bubble as Farseer was next on my list. I reckon it was still floating around somewhere amongst the wreckage of my Viper when you turned up. I think you scooped up the wrong thing, my friend.” He laughed.







tbc

 

[wAsh67]

Interlude 3
Dog Eat Dog​

“Alpha Mike at eleven o’clock low.” Karen called over the intercom. Alpha Mike was her phonetic designation for what the Thargoids were generally known as across human space – alien mothertruckers. Most of the rest of us just knew them as Tangoes or, when under stress, Foxtrot Tangoes.

“Got a count?” I asked, bringing the SRV to a crawl so that she could survey them better without being bounced around over the rough terrain of the field of medium sized rocks that we were travelling across on our way to reinforce the beleaguered troops fighting at the mouth of the tunnel entrance that led to the subterranean barnacle forest.

“I got nine dots on the X-scan,” she clarified. “One of them a medium sized echo, probably a technical rather than a gunship or dropship, the rest look like regular bugs.”

“Intentions?”

“kcuF knows. They just seem to be sitting there. Maybe they’re having a picnic.” She mused. “Wake ‘em up with an airstrike?”

“Sounds like a plan.” I admitted, transmitting the co-ordinates and the feed from the Xeno scanner to HQ with a request for an airstrike or artillery barrage. The reply took an age in coming and when it did it was not the news that we wanted to hear. The generals or admirals or whatever God of War was in command today was refusing to release gunships for an airstrike as the CZ was deemed too hot for the regular ADF pilots and the big hitters were being tasked to more important targets. They wanted us to deal with these aliens who seemed to be lurking in the hope of ambushing something. I wasn’t too sure we could take them. Mech on mech we might be in with a chance, especially if we took them by surprise, but the eight smaller dots were undoubtedly Thargoid warriors, and as we had learned earlier in the battle, those Alpha Mikes were toting portable fire and forget AT missiles that packed a hell of a punch.

“No joy on the airstrike.” I told her. “What’s our loadout?”

I waited a moment while she scanned the inventory screens. “Plasma repeater fully charged, four pips PD set, two to shields. Dumbfires total sixteen, even split of frag and HE. Armour piercing AT guided missiles… we have just six of those left.”

“Salvo two HE at the mech, followed by two AT, then four frag to airburst over the warriors, then we’ll reassess.” I told her. “Wait for my command.”

“Roger, technical locked on optical targeting only.” She advised me, utilising passive measures to prevent counter-detection. If we could take them by surprise, then that was half the battle already won. I quickly messaged the platoon sergeant our intentions and advised him to get clear of our SRV in case it all went to tihs and we had to boogie on the double – I didn’t want to run over any of our own guys when we ran away screaming, or be responsible for the red hot shrapnel of our potential demise taking out any of his squad. Once we took the enemy tank down our troops could mop up any enemy warriors that the frag dumbfires hadn’t killed.

“Hit it, honey.”

“On the waaaay!” She shouted, and I heard the double whoosh of the high explosive dumbfires rocketing away from the SRV as she squeezed the firing trigger twice. The whir-click-clunk of the launch tubes being auto-reloaded with the anti-tank missiles was followed almost instantly by a second double whoosh as these were fired at the Thargoid tank. The HE dumbfires would hopefully drain the tank’s shields enough for the following armour piercing missiles to punch through its armour and kill the Alpha Mike. I couldn’t see the action from my position down near the ground, but Karen kept me up to speed with a running commentary.

“Two hits with the HE….Wow, that’s a good hit on the technical with the AT. Hard kill with the second AT. It’s burning nicely.”

Whoosh-whoosh. “Frags are on the way.”

Whir-click-clunk. Whoosh-whoosh. “Clear datum south two hundred. Getting secondary explosions on the technical.” She added, telling me that the fuel and ammunition in the Thargoid tank was cooking off and blowing it into even tinier pieces. Excellent.

“Roger that.” I replied, pressing my right foot to the floor, wrenching the wheel hard right and accelerating down a slight depression in the terrain that would hopefully conceal us from any retaliatory RPG fire. Behind us the infantry platoon opened up on the surviving Thargoid warriors that the frag rockets hadn’t peppered, bolts of blue plasma fire and red tracer rounds flashing over the landscape into a boulder strewn depression lit bright green by the flames of the burning enemy tank. A Thargoid missile gone wild screamed overhead, corkscrewing in its attempts to reacquire its target, then banked around hard for a second pass having locked onto our SRV too late for it to tip-over and go terminal first time around. Behind and above me I heard the turret whine as Karen switched it into point defence mode and let the systems take control.

The twin plasma repeater cannons fired off a salvo of four rounds, then the turret’s servo-motors whined for a second, traversing and elevating the guns by minute amounts as the scanners and computers tracked the outgoing fire with the flight path of the banking missile and ruminated over the results. Four more rounds shot away as the computers reached an agreement and attempted to merge the outgoing fire with the incoming missile, then it went to full auto as it sought to saturate the sky where it calculated the missile to be, taking into account jitter from the cannons and known evasion routines observed on past engagements with Tango missiles. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, then a bright flash lit up the sky a couple of hundred meters ahead of us as the plasma fire shredded the projectile and detonated its warhead. Shrapnel pinged off the SRV in blue flashes as the shields absorbed the bulk of their kinetic energy, reducing the impacts to of no more consequence than that of a handful of pebbles thrown at a passing ground car. I might need to dig out the T-Cut in the morning to touch up the paintwork, I told myself.

“Golf-niner, Sierra four sitrep?” I asked the platoon sergeant for an update on their status.

“Sierra four, we’re taking heavy fire from the hornet’s nest you stirred up, you crazy son of a biatch. Any chance of an airburst frag salvo?”

“There’s only four frags left in the mags.” Karen warned over the intercom.

“Paint the spot, sarge.”

“Got it.” My wife advised a moment later as the target area was superimposed over her displays. “Back us up a hundred metres – I can’t get eyes on the objective.” I did so and the instant I drew the SRV to a halt she fired off one of our few remaining anti-personnel rockets. “Frag away.”

The flight of the dumbfire missile took less than two seconds, then it detonated in the air above the prone Tangoes while spinning, its computer timing the firing sequence of the frag cylinders to create a cone of destruction that showered the ground around them with lethal shards of white hot, razor sharp armour piercing flechettes designed to turn the bugs into pin cushions. Without wasting a single second Karen took back control of the guns and laid down a mass of plasma bolts in the target area, her intent to burn those Alpha Mike voodoo dolls to cinders. After five seconds of continuous fire she released the triggers and switched the turret back to point defence mode just in case anything that survived that curtain of death lofted another seeker back at us.

“Nice pattern, Sierra four. Moving in to mop up if you can provide cover?” The platoon sergeant asked.

“Roger that Golf niner, Sierra four standing overwatch.” I replied.

“We should clear datum, just in case those bugs got off a contact report.” Karen leaned down and told me. “I can see a decent spot a hundred and fifty metres north that should still allow us to cover the troops.”

She was right, of course. We couldn’t just sit here. If the bugs had managed to report our position then there could be an enemy gunship on its way, or even a kinetic slug heading down from one of their ships in orbit to obliterate our position. I engaged the drive motors and steered to her directions, closing in on the burning tank that she had just destroyed. Surely they wouldn’t target a slug so close to their own position for fear of hitting survivors?

Suddenly the ground heaved beneath us, the landscape all around the SRV lighting up with bright explosions as a Thargoid scout screeched overhead, guns blazing. The SRV tipped over onto its left side wheels and I struggled to right the vehicle while my wife screamed, exposed in the cupola to the worst of the incoming fire that we were receiving and the most violent rocking of the vehicle. I managed to get the SRV standing back on all its wheels as the gunship banked around for a second strafing pass.

Point defence wouldn’t help us now. The plasma repeaters would have minimal effect against a scout. Nevertheless, Karen opened up with both barrels, merely serving to pinpoint our position to the Thargoid with our outgoing fire. It climbed rapidly to evade from her shots, rising beyond the elevation limit of our weapons, then began to arc over into a steep dive.

“Get us outta here!” She screamed.

I slammed my foot to the floor, giving the wheels full power, and as the speed built I pulled back on the yoke, which pointed the wheel mounted thrusters directly down. Normally angled slightly upward and backward to provide both thrust and downforce on low gravity planets and moons, by pulling back on the controls I had swivelled the thrusters down to the ground and effectively turned the SRV into a jump jet. A sluggish, hard to control jump jet, but now the Thargoid had to score direct hits on us instead of being able to disable us by tipping us over by earth-quaking the ground around us.

The distance between us closed rapidly, the low flying scout descending with a dive bomber’s angry wail as the SRV climbed in a snaking ascent until the charge capacitor drained and gravity began to pull us down again. Red plasma bolts bathed the world around us, most of it missing us, but enough impacting with the buggy to completely drain the shields in under two seconds, then the piercing squeal of tortured alloys twisting and buckling from heat transfer filled the SRV. The canopy cracked before me, zig zags of broken glass spiderwebbing across the curved survival cell, the laminated layers of reinforcing materials the only thing keeping it in one piece. Amidst the red beams of light playing over the surface of the SRV I could see a barrage of outgoing bright blue plasma bolts, but they looked like they were spraying wildly all over the place with scant chance of hitting the nimble scout ship.

Then the power abruptly went out in a fizzle of sparks and my displays went dark, the distorted view of the ground below us rising higher and higher in the shattered canopy as, uncontrolled, we tipped over. The silence was strangely absolute – no engine noise, no cannon fire, not even the shriek of incoming plasma bolts as the enemy scout turned away in search of new targets, his kill confirmed with our power loss. I raised my eyes as the ground rushed up towards us, trying to see where we would land, and the last thing I saw as the SRV ploughed into the ground nose first was a field strewn with boulders that were each at least as big as a human and must have weighed several tons apiece. Irresistible force was about to meet multiple immovable objects and I had no doubt which would come off worst. Time began to slow, or perhaps it was the low gravity making the crash stretch out into an eternity. Before I could open my mouth to tell my wife to brace there was a loud bang and I heard no more.






tbc

 

[wAsh67]

10
Wheels

​

After paying for the repairs to the Cobra and the SRV – which took two days to sort out - it turned out that I actually did have enough money to buy one single unit of meta-alloys which would have set me back an eye watering 125,000Cr. Unfortunately, as Kyle had informed me, there were none to be had at Darnielle’s, or indeed anywhere else in the Seven Sisters. Searches on Galnet using Stargle found not even dark web suppliers that I could source one from, and it was the same story with EDDB, INARA, Roguey and the Alliance’s classified databases. Questioning the market manager for his best guess as to when they might get some more meta-alloy in yielded nothing more than “a week, two maybe, who knows?” I spent my time while waiting for the completion of the repairs researching the harvesting of meta-alloys while lounging in an executive suite at a hotel on the Ocellus starport of Obsidian Orbital.

Accommodation was dirt cheap throughout the Maia system as just about everybody with an ounce of sense and a pocket full of credits was running away from the place as fast as they could. Fear of Thargoids held the system in a vice like grip and those that were able to afford transport back to the bubble a hundred parsecs away were packing their families and their belongings into Belugas and Orcas and sailing off to relative safety. Ninety-nine credits a night bought me a hotel suite twice the size of my apartment on Bloch with all the amenities and an outstanding room service menu that saved me from having to venture out into the gritty chaos that the exodus of the affluent had left behind. The Federation were losing their grip on the region and it wouldn’t be long before you could add the Seven Sisters to the list of regions that had descended into anarchy. Or fallen to the Thargoids. The shipyard had already closed at Obsidian – sold out of ships, I guessed - and as a consequence the outfitting services had also shut up shop. Ishmael Palin – an engineer several grades above Farseer - had even bailed out back to the safety of the bubble after the Thargoids had vented their ire in a rather violent way on his private research base on Maia A-3-a, probably irked at his continued focus on defence technologies specifically intended to combat their warships. The whole place reeked of abandonment, of an outpost at the edge of the inhabited universe that nobody wanted to invest in and wasn’t deemed worthy of saving.

Si’s girlfriend Sara had been reassigned here, I remembered her telling me, to Moni’s Hub which was around 1100 light seconds further out. I contemplated sending her a message over Galnet’s directional peer to peer app, but replies would take almost three quarters of an hour to come back and were by no means secure. With the threat of a million-credit bounty still hanging over my head if I broke the D-notice, I figured it best for both of us that I kept what I knew of Simon’s death to myself and didn’t burden her with the knowledge. She mightn’t even have made it here from Ethgreze yet. I had no idea how often scheduled flights made it down this far or if she’d had to slum it by hitching a ride on a military transport that was delivering MREs from outpost to outpost.

So instead I began to research barnacle harvesting, in particular where to find the things and how to farm them. Locating candidate systems was merely a case of searching the various databases until a list of reported sightings popped up, however the databases revealed to me that most of the barnacles that had been mapped had also been farmed out and the forests were now more or less depleted. The few that were confirmed as still populated with barnacles were guarded by an assortment of automated defence turrets, skimmers or orbiting capital ships due to their increasing rarity and value. This was beginning to feel like a mission impossible unless I was happy to hang around for a couple of weeks until Maia got restocked with meta-alloys, then zip back to Deciat with one single unit only to have to return and go through it all over again for the second meta-alloy. Ferrying these to Farseer in this manner could turn out to be a full-time job in itself.

A Canonn Research report on barnacles disclosed that they could be found in the canyons, valleys or craters of low gravity planets with a metal content of greater than 9% in regions close to not only the Pleiades, but also the Witch Head and the California nebulae. Eventually I found a star system in the databases located relatively nearby in the Pleiades Nebula called rather imaginatively ZF-N B7-0 where large barnacles had been reported but no further information was available – there was no indication of local defences or of patrolling Federation capital ships to keep scavengers away from this potentially lucrative find, so it was more than likely to have already been farmed out.

Once my Cobra was back up to full health I bade farewell to Maia and, armed with this information, blasted off toward ZF-N B7-0, which was 139 light years away. The Thargoid presence throughout the Pleiades was immediately evident in the sheer number of systems that contained one or more NHSS flags. Hazard ratings varied from 3 to 9 and having already lost at least two days because of my failure to ‘put the mission first’ I didn’t waste any time investigating them and deliberately blinkered myself against weapons fire or distress call signatures. Making a bee-line to the candidate system, I was there inside an hour.

I honked the system using the discovery scanner and accelerated to a few dozen light seconds away from the system’s main star to make sure that it wasn’t obscuring the hits when I manually resolved them by focusing the Cobra’s full spectrum scan sensors on them to determine what they were. There turned out to be nine planets in total, perhaps a dozen moons and rocky/icy bodies that didn’t qualify as bona fide moons themselves. Of the nine planets, four had a metal content in excess of eight percent, two of them had geological features, but only one of those had a signature that was classified as Thargoid in origin.

Barnacles are classed as Thargoid signals because scientists believe that they may have been originally seeded on these planets by aliens at any time up to a millennium ago. Initially they were thought to have been left behind as scarecrows, a warning to humanity to stay well away from their territory, but now we understand them to be a crop of some sort and vital to Thargoid technology.

There is an increasingly widely held belief that the escalating conflict between mankind and the aliens is rooted in the encroachment on Thargoid space by humanity’s explosive expansion over the last century. The creation of the frame shift drive and the corresponding accelerated expansion of mankind’s borders was forcing the Thargoids to come out from wherever they were happily chilling to combat what they perceived as an invasion of their territory. The Mycoid biological weapon deployed by INRA in the first Thargoid war had kept the aliens at arm’s length for more than a hundred years, but now they were laying siege to star systems that they had been forced to surrender following their withdrawal. After such a lengthy abence it was expected that they would have created their own antidote to the Mycoid bacterium and its mutations.

The enigmatic behaviour of the Thargoids is confusing. They refuse to communicate, and they allow human spacecraft to go about their business unmolested so long as they kept their distance and weren’t carrying anything that was Thargoid in origin, but their seemingly unprovoked attacks on space stations had left thousands of dead civilians in their wake, and thousands more trapped in burning starports right across the fringes of the bubble. One moment they ignored us, the next they were massacring us for no apparent reason.

Unless the barnacles were their pet plants for want of a better term. Perhaps the Thargoids had been seeding them on suitable planets as part of preparations for populating the fringes of their territory. Maybe barnacles were the first signs of growth in an early stage of a xenoforming process that mankind was unwittingly interfering with. The barnacles were understood to be drawing metallic compounds from beneath the surface of the seeded planets - much like a tree absorbs water and minerals from soil - and transforming those metals into meta-alloys that emerged above ground, much like a tree blossoms with apples.

The barnacles themselves are a non-sentient life form consisting of a large central formation that resembles a terrestrial marine barnacle, hence the name. The central barnacle is surrounded by several spikes growing upwards from the ground which typically hold one meta-alloy in the form of a tulip like outgrowth near the tip of the spike. If that doesn’t sound like an alien analogue of the branches of a fruit bearing tree, then I don’t know what does.

The meta-alloys that the barnacles produced are used extensively by the Thargoids, so there was a chance that the barnacle plantations that had been discovered were precisely that – forests planted to provide resources for the aliens for a time when they might need them, only for man to wade in and ‘innocently’ chop the trees down for their own purposes, as indeed I was intending to do. Was I about to give the aliens further reason to exact revenge on my species? If a stranger turned up on your doorstep and started stealing your apples, would you not be driven to do something about it? Is harvesting barnacles for meta-alloys further provocation and my attempt to fulfil Farseer’s demands simply inviting doom on another starport in revenge?

Perhaps the Thargoids saw mankind as an invasive species that had to be eradicated from what they considered their property, much like a rat infestation. Would humanity have done the same if the roles were reversed? I didn’t believe we would. Humanity would have first attempted a dialogue before despatching warships, a step in confrontation resolution that the Thargoids didn’t seem at all interested in. Humanity may not have been blameless in the war that was breaking out – we might even have inadvertently initiated it - but when a mistake borne of ignorance is met with deadly violence, even the perpetrators have a right to defend themselves.

I flew to the planet with the greatest number of Thargoid locations detected by the scanners and settled my ship in a high orbit, firing off a sequence of probes that would map the surface for their locations, setting their geosynchronous orbits in a Y shape along the circumference of the planet for maximum surface coverage and despatching one final probe to the centre of the dark side to complete the picture.

I selected a zone to harvest and flew the Cobra down to the surface, orbiting the target region at a height of about 300 metres before looking for somewhere flat to land, one eye on the terrain scanner waiting for the ship’s red silhouette to turn blue which indicated that a potential safe landing site had been found and the other eye looking for navigation hazards out the canopy. I hovered over a suitable spot, deployed the landing gear and allowed the low gravity to pull the ship down to a dusty impact with the surface, clouds of dirt billowing out to temporarily occlude my view from the flight deck.

In my space suit I clambered down the ladder from the hub to the keel passageway and made my way to the SRV hangar module, checking the status indicators to ensure the bay was fully pressurised before undogging the airtight hatch and entering the bay. Ceiling lights flickered to life as the door opened, illuminating a large eight wheeled all-terrain vehicle with giant puncture-proof tyres.

The Vodel Scarab surface reconnaissance vehicle is an ungainly looking beast. Four wheels on the front axles and two sets of rear wheels mounted on elongated, articulated suspension arms allow it to traverse all kinds of landscapes, and the suspension arms fold up tight underneath the main body to allow it to fit inside a hangar for storage. It is a seriously capable piece of kit, measuring almost 5 metres long, two and a half metres tall and weighing in at a hefty 4 tons but still able to achieve speeds of around 38 metres per second (85mph) on flat ground. It is fitted with wheel hub mounted thrusters that provide downforce to enable it to function effectively on very low gravity planets and extra boost thrusters mounted on arms which deploy from the turret that act as ‘jump jets’ for clearing obstacles that the large tyres can’t scramble over. Additional pitch and roll functions mapped to the hub mounted thrusters even allow some control over the Scarab while it is airborne, endowing it with a rudimentary short distance flight capability. The SRV is shielded to a certain degree and armed with a turret fitted with twin plasma repeater cannons. It can hold its own against planetary skimmers, but against even a basic Sidewinder it would be toast in no time at all.

I clambered aboard the folded-up Scarab, harnessed myself in snugly and pressurised the vehicle so I could operate it without having to wear the helmet of the space suit, which I then stowed in a net bag slung underneath the seat in case of emergencies. Many a Scarab driver has had to walk back to his ship after crashing their SRV or getting it wedged in a position that the 4-metre-wide vehicle could not get back out of so not taking a suit along for the ride was tantamount to suicide. Once the canopy had pressurised and the control systems had passed their self-test, I depressurised the hangar and opened the bay doors, the hangar lights flashing red in warning all around me. The Scarab stretched its legs and dropped gently to the planet’s surface between the Cobra’s landing struts and I carefully drove the vehicle out from under the ship and headed off towards the barnacles that I had spotted from above during my aerial reconnaissance of the landing zone.

The wave scanner swept a wide arc in front of the SRV as I motored across the rock-strewn landscape, highlighting detected features on a spectrum analyser that, all this being new to me, I couldn’t make head nor tail of – I just headed towards regions where the radar gave the most dense returns and hoped they weren’t just boulders. Fortunately, structures of interest were automatically tagged and superimposed on the SRVs radar display which simplified the location of harvestable materials and the Mk 1 eyeball did the rest. In no time at all I was parked at the base of a towering barnacle surrounded by dozens of ‘spikes’ poking up from the ground, many of them no bigger than the Scarab but one or two towering up over even the height of the central barnacle itself.

The barnacle was indeed remarkably similar to the marine barnacles that attached themselves to the hulls of oceangoing ships on Earth-like and water worlds, but on a much larger scale. It loomed over the SRV like a miniature conical mountain, perhaps fifteen metres tall – taller than many trees grow on ELWs. I drove around it in a wide circle, studying the spiky outcroppings that supposedly yielded meta-alloys, but all I could find were slowly healing scars where the materials had once been. This one had been picked clean at some stage and not even Canonn’s researchers knew how long it would take for the meta-alloys to regrow. If the barnacle’s roots had already sucked up the minerals within their reach, then it might just die and rot away to nothing. As they were only found in nebulae because the dust clouds recharged the surfaces of airless planets with fresh minerals over the eons, maybe this ravaged plantation might one day bear fruit again.

All the other barnacle spikes near the landing zone were similarly barren, I found as I surveyed them one by one, just shattered cones that looked like somebody had been hacking at them with an axe. Tyre tracks from other SRVs were everywhere – I needn’t have bothered with the scanner, I could just follow the multitude of trails to the next smashed cone. Clearly it was man and not the aliens that had stripped this barnacle forest of its meta-alloys and the Thargoid investment in seeding this planet with barnacles for their own purposes had been totally wasted. It was like a farmer had planted crops in a field only to find that a plague of locusts had descended upon it and totally devoured his harvest.

For the first time in my life I started to feel a little sympathetic to the Thargoid plight, if indeed their aggression was based on having their crops stolen by an ignorant mankind. But if this systematic crop theft was in fact the underlying reason behind their attacks on starports then why couldn’t they have just asked us to stop taking them? Surely - if I was correct in this theory - our authorities must have figured this out for themselves, or at least suspected so? So why then, I asked myself, had the various navies chosen to blockade and guard barnacle seeded planets with orbiting battlecruisers instead of withdrawing them and placing permit locks on the infected systems to keep human scavengers at bay? Were our superpowers actively denying the Thargoids their crops? I knew meta-alloys were expensive, but surely not worth the lives that they were costing?

I retired empty handed to the Cobra and blasted off back into space with not a single scrap of meta-alloy on board. I docked at Darnielle’s in Maia to find the place remained devoid of the stuff and the market manager still had no indication as to when their next shipment might arrive. I was also warned that despite his absence professor Palin had placed a priority pre-order for two units for urgent research when they did eventually come in, and as he was a preferred client it could end up being a long, long time before I would be permitted to purchase any. Returning to Felicity Farseer empty handed was out of the question as that would seriously hamper my chances of engineering the ship to combat capability, so somehow I had to find meta-alloys all by myself and that meant exploring.

I shot an email off to Max via Galnet explaining my dilemma, opting not to tell him of my dramatic rescue of Kyle. I just told him that there were no meta-alloys to be purchased at Darnielles, that none were expected in for a while, that the Pleiades barnacle sites in his databases were now barren and that I was heading off in search of fresh forests myself and I’d be back in contact if and when I located some. Without waiting for a reply as it could take days for a message to propagate back to the bubble from all the way out here, I stocked the Cobra up with provisions and headed back out into the black, steering a course toward the next nearest nebula – IC2118 in the constellation Eridanus, a reflection nebula from an ancient supernova remnant consisting of dust that reflected blue light from the blue supergiant star Rigel. Rigel, also known as Beta Orionis, lies in the nearby constellation of Orion and has a luminosity of more than 100,000 times that of Sol. The nebula itself is commonly known as Witch Head due to its resemblance to the side on profile of a classical fairy-tale crone when viewed from the direction of the bubble.

It was by no means a long journey, as anybody who has been out to Colonia, Sagittarius A* or Beagle Point will attest, but travelling there would be a drag. The trek from Deciat to Maia had been around 300 light years. To get to the closest edge of Witch Head from Maia was a further 600 light years, or around 30 jumps in my Cobra. In other words, a mind numbingly boring day’s travel with no starports to relieve the monotony or to refuel at along the way. I settled in for the journey and high waked out of Maia.






tbc

 

[wAsh67]

Two days later I was at the edge of the Witch Head nebula, having successfully managed to avoid contact with either humans or Thargoids. The journey was not without its problems, as there was a large area of permit locked stars between Maia and the nebula known as the Col 70 region which meant that I had to travel in a wide arc around the region in order to bypass the stars that the frame shift drive refused to lock onto, manually plotting a route because the nav computer seemed to want to go in a straight line. Eventually I got to Synuefe DH-T D4-10 and made a 21.64 light year jump into Witch Head Sector HR-W D1-12 using Vanadium and Germanium to synthesise Jumponium to make the jump. If the Cobra hadn’t the range to make that jump then I’d have had to go thousands of light years out of my way and attempt to find a passage from the other side, through Col 69, Trapezium, NGC1999 and Flame sectors and that, my friend would have been one hell of a star trek.

note: this pic is not of my making - it was found online. Appreciation goes to its creator, whoever you are. If you would like it removed, please let me know.

This was the sort of stuff that explorers did. Normally they had nothing to do but poke about and see what was floating around as they had nobody getting on their case demanding they deliver their stuff pronto for peanuts or assassinate a scumbag before breakfast, so they could just chill out and relax with their feet up on the dashboard, soaking up the sights, taking a few scenery snaps for the scrapbook and looking for unusual systems and stellar anomalies. They could even turn down the polarisation on the canopy glass, strip stark b0ll0ck naked and sunbathe safe in the knowledge that the chances of anybody flying past and seeing them in all their glory were in excess of a million to one. There is no better way for a normally pasty-faced space traveller to get an all over body tan that would make him or her the envy of even a well-toned supermodel. Skin cancers notwithstanding.

Pathfinding a route into a seemingly inaccessible area took time, patience and sometimes a little luck, but it was a challenge that any explorer worthy of the name lived for, if only to get their name associated with the passage for all eternity.

I’d done some basic exploration in the past, which is why I had a ‘Ranger’ grade in that particular hierarchy, but nothing serious like visiting Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy or Salome’s Reach in OEVASY SG-Y D0 – the furthest system in this galaxy that you could reach from Sol. All I did was pop into the odd system that was off the main traffic highways and catalogue what was there. That data then got uploaded at a branch of Stellar Cartographic when I finally visited a starport and if I was lucky I got a few pennies for my efforts and a miniscule increase in my reputation as an explorer.

It was an easy life. There were no worries about getting interdicted for cargo as there were no trade routes and thus no pirates lying in wait, and if you were intercepted then it was a case of merely submitting for inspection and the pirate would have no choice but to skulk off back into the shadows empty handed. The rest was simply jump scoop honk all day long - an activity now known as ‘jonking’ and at night you could retire back to a plush luxury cabin instead of strapping yourself into a cardboard thin camp bed that folded down out of a flight deck bulkhead. An exploration build doesn’t have a need to carry cargo so there’s plenty of room for a top of the range passenger cabin to be fitted instead of cargo racks.

The most dangerous part of an explorer’s day was accidentally drifting too close to a star while scooping. Emergencies were rare – simply a case of avoiding neutron stars or a main star with a closely orbiting secondary star that you could get trapped and fried between. The main hazard is space madness, where being stuck in a tin can all by yourself for months on end with no human contact causes you to basically lose your marbles. Many intrepid explorers who venture toward the outer reaches of the galaxy are never heard from again.

Like mountain men on the surfaces of planets, or people who choose to live ‘off the grid’, a so-called ‘explorer’ could survive in deep space for extended periods of time earning just enough by trading in exploration data to keep themselves comfortably provisioned. What made exploration attractive was not only the romance of being able to call yourself an explorer (swoon) and having only yourself to answer to, but also the fact that anybody could go off exploring the cosmos in any ship at all – even a basic Sidewinder - with no prior experience whatsoever. However, few explorers struck gold by making first discoveries of habitable planets and got rich as a consequence – especially these days.

Exploring was, in my opinion, something to do when there was nothing more interesting going on for people who weren’t equipped for bounty hunting, haulage or mining. Hardened professional explorers venture far and wide looking for undiscovered planets they can stamp their names on and get significant pay-outs for, but it was too late in the game for me to try and do the same. Most accessible regions had already been comprehensively mapped and tagged, so scanning systems that had already been visited earned just token amounts for fine tuning Stellar Cartographics’ orbital calculations and planet compositions based on up to date observations. Nowadays exploring only just covers the cost of merely existing out in the deep dark black and until a way is discovered that enables us to travel across the vast expanse of intergalactic space to neighbouring galaxies I don’t see things changing. Pilots will always bum around the fringes of the Milky Way calling themselves explorers, but few of them will ever be able to retire from the proceeds.

People like Farseer had made themselves rich and famous from exploring in the pioneering days of the Frame Shift Drive, disappearing off into the black void for months on end before returning to the bubble with discoveries of Earth-like worlds and water worlds that could immediately be settled on by mankind, terraformable worlds that could one day be made habitable, ammonia worlds where primitive alien life could sometimes be found and high metal content worlds that could be exploited for their wealth of mineral resources. Selling the data had earned these early explorers literally millions of credits, but nowadays all latter-day explorers were doing was confirming the finds of those that had boldly gone before them.

There were something like 400 billion star systems in the Milky Way and an estimated 100 billion planets, of which roughly two percent had been mapped and tagged, so you would think that finding one of the majority of unexplored systems would be easy, but in actual fact you had to go a long, long way off the beaten track, heading away from anything interesting like a nebula or a black hole that might have attracted previous visitors in order to make a discovery that could earn you decent money, venturing far above or below the galactic plane where the stars thinned out and were thus only likely to have been visited by intrepid hardcore explorers whose ships had abnormally high jump ranges and could synthesise exotic fuel mixes.

In my case, what I was doing was not exploring for exploration’s sake, but more like looking for needles in haystacks. I knew the environments in which barnacles were supposed to thrive from the research that I had done during my brief layup at Obsidian Orbital while the Cobra was being serviced, but finding one that had not only been seeded by the Thargoids, but had also ripened and not been already harvested by human or alien was not going to be easy. If I started my search at the fringes of the nebula closest to the bubble then there was a fair chance that any barnacles I found would have already been discovered and stripped. Nebulae, being sort of pretty and photogenic, are invariably extensively explored and mapped, especially ones relatively close to civilisation that are easy to get to and while Witch Head was around a thousand light years from the bubble itself, that is a distance which is considered nothing to dedicated exploration vessels capable of hyperspace jumps in excess of 70 light years – more so if they are equipped to synthesise jumponium which can double a ship’s rated jump range, or are able to supercharge their FSD from a neutron star which further increases a ship’s range and can thus enable them to jump large numbers of light years at once, albeit at the cost of damaging the frame shift drive each time such a jump is attempted. Or killing themselves – neutron star jumps are fraught with danger. A recent development in jump drive technology is the Guardian FSD booster module, which utilises reverse engineered G-tech to provide up to a four parsec increase in jump range without requiring either synthesis elements or braving neutron stars – I had one on my shopping list. The current single jump record for neutron jumps stood at just under 275 light years in an Anaconda fitted with a size 6A FSD engineered, if I remember correctly, to grade 5 increased range with a stripped down experimental effect to reduce mass.

But, stuck at 22 light years max jump range as I was, it took two days of jumping and scooping just to get to the outer reaches of the Witch Head dust cloud. I had no plan of mapping the nebula as such, I just started scanning systems as I travelled deeper into the expanse, figuring that if the theories were correct on why the barnacles were seeded in nebulae in the first place, then the most productive plantations would more than likely be where the dust cloud was at its most dense, so I headed toward the centre, changing course when necessary toward regions where the blue hue of the nebula seemed to thicken.

I had entered nebulae before when I was new to trading, easily bored and keen to get out and see amazing stuff instead of battered VTS cargo canisters and the equally battered insides of star ports. In a fit of what I now look back on as absolute madness, I had decided that it would be a good idea to visit a nebula close to the bubble called C99. C99 is more commonly known as Coalsack, which is a pretty good description of what it was – a black cloud obscuring the view of the stars that lay beyond it. It really couldn’t have been less awe inspiring as the deeper I had delved into Coalsack, the more the stars around me had dimmed until many of them simply disappeared, occluded by the density of the black dust that constituted the nebula. I had joked with my uncle afterward that Coalsack must be where God slept at night, because the light from the more distant stars was more or less extinguished as if the curtains had been drawn. The pinpricks of light became nothing more prominent than miniscule grey specks upon a pitch-black canvas, like dandruff on a black cat.

Witch Head was different. The dust reflected the light from Rigel into a faint, diffuse blue glow all around me as I jumped, honked and scooped toward the densest patches in my search for meta-alloys. The proximity to the red rimmed fringes of Barnard’s Loop painted parts of the vista a misty shade of pink. Everything took on a vaporous red or a pale cyan tint, depending on which way I was facing. Even the galactic core and its billions of stars that hung in the distance behind me like a great tear in the fabric of the cosmos took on a blue hint rather than the drab tan colour that I was used to seeing.

My search for barnacles yielded nothing initially, the mindless repetition testing the patience of a saint. Arrive at a system. Refuel from the star if possible. Honk using the discovery scanner and wait while the data was collected. Fly a short distance away from the star. Use the full spectrum system scanner to focus the ship’s sensor arrays onto each signal in the planetary bodies range in turn, one after the other, even in systems where there were sixty or more detected astronomical bodies. Check the top right corner of the screen for planetary features detected. Sigh. Jump to the next system. Yawn. Repeat ad nauseum. I even spent an evening at the Witch Head Science Centre asteroid base on HIP 23759 that was listed on one of Max’s databases, looking for clues on where I might be able to find a barnacle site, but not even a fifty-buck tip to the bartender yielded so much as a nod in the right direction. If Kyle had though Maia was the ssa end of the galaxy then he’d clearly never been to the WHSC.

Then, after five days of working my way toward the centre of the nebula, the discovery scanner reported that it had detected multiple signals on A4, a high metal content planet that flashed up as Thargoid in origin. The system was Witch Head Sector LC-V C2-10, now renamed to Wellington. I headed to A4 at full speed and slowed to just above a supercruise halt in a high orbit around the small dwarf planet, firing off a pattern of three detailed surface scanner probes that settled into geosynchronous orbits around it, searching the surface for the signals that the discovery scanner had detected. Once the scan had completed and the data had been transmitted back to the DSS analysis screen, the probes automatically self-destructed, and I logged out of the DSS mode and back into the nav screen, scanned down the list of navigation contacts until I found one that said “Thargoid site” and selected it on the touch screen.

The HUD superimposed the target region on the surface of the planet as I approached, flying the Cobra down toward the surface, deploying the landing gear and banking around the barnacle site, one eye on the scenery and the other on the altimeter. After my failure in the Pleiades to find meta-alloys I now knew what to look for and unfortunately this looked just as desolate a site - one solitary barnacle surrounded by the remains of a multitude of spikes, every single one of them hacked open and barren like the aftermath of a boiled egg breakfast. I didn’t bother investigating further, instead I raised the landing gear and supercruised up the escape vector and back into orbit. I selected another possible Thargoid site from the eight such candidates that the DSS probes had highlighted and rolled the Cobra back over towards the new HUD vector.

Again I descended planetside, this time getting thrown out of orbital cruise early due to the angle of my descent being in excess of 45 degrees, and flew the Cobra down in a shallow powered dive toward the cratered, rock strewn surface with sixty five kilometres to go, shifting the power distributor pips to full engines and half shields and repeatedly tapping the boost button in my impatience to get there and get this sideshow over with. Running at half shields was a risk this close to the surface, but with gravity so low and no significant mountainous terrain between myself and the barnacle growth the risk was less a concern than my rapidly diminishing patience. I figured I’d be fine unless I had an epileptic fit and nose-dived into the dirt on afterburner.





tbc

 

[wAsh67]

After three minutes of this sub orbital flight I was banking around the barnacle growth with a smile broadening across my handsome visage. This time it looked like I might just have hit the jackpot. There were two large barnacles surrounded by dozens of small spikes and five large spikes, all of them radiating a pale green glow that had been absent at the previous locations that I had visited. And there were no tyre tracks. I had finally found a ripe barnacle site that had not been harvested. All that effort had not been in vain.

The landing gear deployed with a high-pitched whine and a dull thud as it locked into place and I descended lower, the terrain mapping feature of the scanner coming to life to display a silhouetted likeness of my ship with a red circle beneath it superimposed upon the terrain and a line connecting the two icons to indicate altitude. I headed away from the barnacles and flew slowly toward a nearby mountain with the barnacles held at my six o’clock position. Eventually I came across a patch of ground that didn’t seem to be covered in boulders or pockmarked with craters and slowed to a near crawl as I waited for the red circle to turn blue and highlight a suitable landing site. As soon as it did I cut forward speed altogether and allowed the micro gravity of 0.13g to draw me down, tapping the belly thrusters just before impact to help cushion the landing and save the skids from digging too deeply into the soft soil which might reduce the clearance between the SRV and the underbelly of the Cobra to the point where the Scarab might get stuck while heading out.

I suited up, made my way down to the SRV hangar and clambered aboard the folded-up Scarab. Once the power up self-tests, seal integrity and system checks had passed and the departure board was fully green I depressurised the hangar and the SRV dropped down onto the surface of the moon. As I had landed with the target site directly behind me I simply drove out from under the Cobra and motored straight toward the large barnacles, leaving a rooster tail of reddish brown dust in my wake.

The meta-alloys grew out of the large spikes like glowing melon shaped balloons, one per spike, way out of reach even if I stood on top of the Scarab. I’d need an axe on a ten-foot long pole to get anywhere near them. I wasn’t entirely sure an axe would even be able to sever something that is notionally a metal from the rock-like spike. I would probably end up simply blunting the axe against the stem. So instead I chose the tried and tested surface prospector’s method of extracting materials from inaccessible places and blasted them off the spike with the SRV’s turret mounted dual repeater plasma cannons.

As I understood it, the Thargoids themselves used some form of matter transference technology to ‘beam up’ the materials from the spikes, through the barnacles, to a ‘mining ship’ that hovered above the barnacle while a brilliant beam of luminous green light pulsed between them to convey the meta-alloys upwards. This fuelled another one of my theories behind the aggression the Thargoids were showing mankind – their mining methods preserved the mature barnacle spikes so in theory they could be harvested again and again while our more basic approach left them as shattered rotting ruins.

The meta-alloy split off from the spike in a shower of sparks and slowly floated in one piece down to the ground. Then to my alarm it began to roll downhill toward a half mile wide crevasse that I had surveyed while orbiting the plantation where it would end up lost forever if I couldn’t get to it in time. In a panic I released the handbrake and floored the throttle, spitting dust out of the tyre treads as the SRV fishtailed under the harsh acceleration before the treads bit and the Scarab literally bounded across the terrain. The cargo scoop lowered into position as I thundered through the plantation, swerving around the smaller spikes that seemed to crop up everywhere, uncannily getting in my way, the scoop scraping along the uneven ground with disconcerting grating, grinding noises, small stones and rocks sent flying with sharp bangs as I sped closer to the cliff edge, steering directly at the melon as it gathered momentum with the steepening of the slope.

There was a crunch as the SRV rolled over the meta-alloy and the “Cargo acquired” announcement was drowned out by a juddering, tearing noise as I stamped my foot down on the brakes, wrenching the steering wheel hard left and putting the Scarab into a sideways skid that ended with the right side wheels resting about a metre from the edge of the crevasse. When the dust that my headlong pursuit had kicked up eventually settled and my heart rate had returned to somewhere near normal I gingerly leaned over to the right to see how far down the crack in the moon’s surface went. I couldn’t see the bottom of it.

The next meta-alloy was harvested without quite so much drama as this time I had parked the SRV downhill from the giant spike, sniped the meta-alloy off with the cannons and allowed the glowing melon to roll toward the waiting cargo scoop. With the SRV’s cargo hold now filled with a pair of meta-alloys I returned to the Cobra to transfer it across to the ship’s cargo bay. Three trips and half an hour later I had completely exhausted this barnacle plantation’s supply. Once I had finished I blasted the tops off a couple of the smaller spikes out of curiosity to be rewarded with what I took to be the waste products of the meta-alloy forming process – mostly small, virtually worthless nuggets of iron, nickel and other common metals that I collected anyway and stored in the material racks for future trading or synthesis into something useful.

I parked up the SRV in its hangar and checked the inventory screen to ensure the five melons were safely secured for the thousand light year journey back to Farseer Inc on Deciat. Hopefully that would satisfy Felicity’s demands for a while and get me started on the road to engineered upgrades. I wondered if she’d be happy with just three meta-alloys as that would leave me two to sell on the commodities market, which would hopefully net me at least a quarter of a million credits. Before locking in a course for home I surveyed the six remaining Thargoid sites with low, high speed passes at about a hundred metres altitude. Of the eight candidate sites registered by the DSS on this dwarf planet only two contained ripe barnacles and one of those I had just stripped bare. I bookmarked the planet in the nav computer and recorded the co-ordinates of the remaining ripe site on my datapad as that one looked like it might have at least four more large meta-alloy bearing spikes with not a single tyre track to be seen. Perhaps at some time in the future I’d need more of the stuff – I’m sure Farseer wasn’t the only person in the galaxy in need of them. Palin was obviously a candidate and Max had, I recalled, mentioned that the Alliance were doing their own research on meta-alloys when we had visited Farseer’s base. I considered uploading the co-ordinates onto the ADF database, but decided instead to keep the information to myself.

From Witch Head it was the same boring old routine of jumping and fuel scooping back toward the Seven Sisters, with a brief moment of trepidation at the jumponium leap back across the void between Witch Head and Synuefe, once again due to the permit locked region of Col 70. I considered stopping for rest and a decent meal at Merope or Maia, but my worries over my cargo attracting Thargoid attention throughout the Pleiades where they were known to maraud instead made me decide to stick to the road as I travelled back toward Deciat as fast as the Cobra could go, kept awake by nothing more potent than black coffee and the occasional tickling of the roof of my mouth with my tongue when my eyelids began to droop. Kyle had, I reminded myself, been caught carrying items of interest to the Thargoids and I had no desire to be left floating in space amidst the wreckage of my ship awaiting a rescue that might never come or an alien ssa probing that might never end.

I thumbed through the brochure that I had downloaded from Farseer as I journeyed back toward the bubble, noting the types and quantities of materials that she required to perform her wonders and checking the inventory screen for my stocks of the necessary items. My most desired starting upgrade was a Grade 3 Dirty Drive further augmented with experimental Drag Drives to improve my top speed and turning rate, which entailed a lengthy step by step modification process at her base that would use up significant quantities of both materials and firmware that I would have to source before even beginning. Courier, haulage and assassination contracts sometimes provided the hard to find materials like firmware instead of payment in credits, while the more common elements could be found with basic surface prospecting in a similar manner to the way in which I had obtained the meta-alloys. Other items of tech, like proto-alloys and shield emitters, are frequently obtained from the wrecks of spacecraft that can often be found floating around in systems where unscrupulous pilots can and do quite literally get away with murder.

It was the rare items that concerned me - those hard to find, often classified or top-secret data packages or technological components that were only found in experimental or military hardware. Such unusual objects could on occasion be sourced by accepting combat missions like exterminating pirate gangs or taking down drug lords for legitimate authorities that didn’t have the time to be bothered with going through the usual legal niceties, or local factions that just wanted their rivals taken out of the picture with extreme prejudice. If somebody had a problem in their system and could generate exceptional wake data or abnormal shield firmware to satisfy a requirement that they knew an engineer insisted upon for an upgrade, then they could attach that item to a dangerous mission as part payment safe in the knowledge that somebody, somewhere who wanted that upgrade would eventually take it on. If the taker was unfortunate enough to get killed attempting to earn that firmware, then that was no loss at all to the authority or faction that had commissioned the hit. There would always be somebody else willing to take a crack at it for the goodies.

But that was a problem for the future. Right now, my main concern was with making it home in one piece. The Pleiades was crawling with Thargoids. Every system where I emerged from hyperspace seemed to have multiple NHSS and degraded emissions signals – lots of aliens and lots of wreckage. I emerged at one system alongside the star to find a wing of four Thargoid scouts prowling the region seemingly looking for trouble. I didn’t hang about. I banked away from them as they turned to pursue and high waked to the next system the moment the FSD had cooled, not giving them a chance to interdict and pull me out of supercruise. One moment I was there, the next I was gone in a puff of drive smoke. Admittedly I was taking a chance flying through the Pleiades instead of going around it. The more prudent thing would have been to steer for the California nebula after getting past the permit locked region and then head back to the bubble from there, but that added hundreds of light years to the journey.

Ironically, it wasn’t even the Thargoids that I needed to be worried about. Twice while crossing the Pleiades I was interdicted by pirates looking to relieve me of my cargo. On the first occasion I managed to successfully evade the interdiction and high wake out of the system, but the second interdiction caught me napping while I was fuel scooping at zero throttle as close to the star as possible in order to obtain maximum hydrogen flow. Before I got a chance to accelerate in pursuit of the escape vector I found myself unceremoniously dumped out into normal space, the flight assist computer mistakenly assuming that my throttle being set at zero while refuelling was a signal to my assailant that I was submitting for inspection.







tbc

 

[wAsh67]

While waiting for the FSD cooldown to complete I targeted a nearby main sequence star that I had just enough fuel to get to and aimed the Cobra at it, intending to make a hyperspace jump as soon as I could while the pilot of whatever ship had ripped me out of supercruise tried to figure out my intentions, but the ship in question wasn’t actually visible on my scanner. I looked out the windows just as a burst of light flared brilliantly against the surface of the star, bright enough to show up against even the near blinding red/yellow glare of the O type star that I’d been scooping from. Recognising it as a heatsink being ejected from an overheating ship, I began to laugh. My guess is that the pilot interdicting me had come out of supercruise too close to the star and had fallen into the corona where his ship was now burning up.

When my FSD finally came back online I banked toward the stricken ship and locked it up on the targeting computer when it eventually showed up on the scanner, deploying my hard-points to bring my pulse lasers and multi-cannons to bear on what turned out to be a Krait MkII. The pilot’s status showed as ‘expert’ and ‘clean’. If I attacked then that would have made me a wanted man for murder, not that I could even get into position to fire on him. My targeting computer showed the Krait as ‘out of range’and I noticed that my own heat was climbing rapidly and began to back off, pumping out a heatsink of my own when my temperature went over 120%.

Before I could open a comms channel and ask him what the hell he was playing at the Krait began to break up, internal modules exploding from extreme temperatures that not even ejecting heatsinks could counter, blowing the bulkheads and outer hull apart like a dandelion shedding its seeds in a gust of wind. Before it fireballed, I saw the pilot eject from the Krait’s cockpit in a column of blue rocket smoke and shoot off into space for all of five seconds before his escape capsule melted from the heat of the star and he disappeared in a sheet of oxygen fuelled flame. Thirty seconds later the remains of his ship tumbled toward the star like a fiery comet, drawn in by the star’s massive gravity.

Now I felt kinda sick at myself for laughing. I’d just witnessed the cremation while alive of a fellow pilot and that was a harrowing experience even though I knew it was likely that he’d have gone on to become a wanted pirate given his attempted interdiction of me, unless he was one of the sick in the head ‘Thargoid sympathisers’ that intercepted traders and relieved them of anything xeno related that they were carrying. That would have explained his ‘clean’ status, I suppose. Still, as ways to die in space goes, that ranked pretty high on the bizarre scale.

Regardless, the pilot was now gone, incinerated, become ‘starstuff’ as the old timers call your remains after death and I was partly to blame for it. I couldn’t think of a worse way to die. Other than being eaten alive by small rodents. The pain of burning to death must be excruciating, sucking the burning oxygen into your lungs to scream as the rest of your bodies nerve endings were being seared by fire. I shuddered involuntarily. I hoped he went fast.

I logged the incident solemnly on the cockpit voice recorder and finished fuel scooping, all the while watching the tumbling pieces of wreckage descend to the roiling surface of the star, burning up into nothing bigger than fist sized fireballs as they fell before disappearing, literally atomised. In moments it was as if neither of them had ever existed, both man and vessel literally returned to the stars from which they came.

The rest of my escape from the Pleiades was relatively uneventful, the action resuming only when I got to within a hundred light years of the bubble. Traffic was on the increase and at almost every star I paused to refuel at there were several other ships also scooping. Federal Corvettes, Imperial Cutters, Chieftains and Anacondas, Mamba’s and Kraits, T-10s (I did ask the owner why, but was told ‘don’t ask’) and Fer-de-Lances, the zone around the star replete with dissipating high wake disturbances from large and medium ships that pointed toward the Pleiades. Xeno hunters mostly, and all heading towards where the Thargoid action was. I responded to several friendly hails, the pilots enquiring where I had come from. When I told them that I had passed through the Pleiades while returning from Witch Head the questions came thick and fast.

How many Thargoids were there? Where were the bugs massing? What were they doing? What types of ships did they have? Which starports had they attacked? Were there any Federation or Imperial battlecruisers down there yet? When I told them that there were dozens of non-human signal sources in almost every system close to the Seven Sisters they wanted to know what hazard levels they were and when I explained that I had seen everything from three to nine, some of the pilots seemed to grow a little pale. When I regaled to them my tale of being chased out of a system by four Thargoid scouts as soon as I emerged there from hyperspace several of them expressed alarm at the elevated level of aggression that the aliens were now exhibiting. “When you get to the bubble, don’t stop and keep going until you get to Colonia, mate.” One of them advised me. To the best of my knowledge none of them turned back after talking to me.

When I asked them why they were heading down that way I was told that while I had been busying myself stealing meta-alloys from the Witch Head nebula, some of the starports in Maia and Merope had been set on fire after Thargoid attacks throughout the Seven Sisters and that Ishmael Palin’s research centre in Maia had been totally destroyed. My thoughts immediately turned to Sara on Moni’s Hub and I hoped that she was ok. Most of the pilots said they were going down there to fight off the Thargoids while a minority were heading down primarily to help rescue refugees from the burning stations and installations and return them to the relative safety of the bubble. One of them was a Sagittarius Eye news crew in a bright white logo strewn Adder that requested a video interview with me that I politely declined. I knew less than the AX pilots that were passing me going the other way. I felt bad running in the opposite direction but what could I do? I wasn’t outfitted for either anti-Xeno combat or civilian rescue duties, so I would just be getting in their way.

I plodded on toward Deciat, each jump further away from the Pleiades making me feel more guilt at the helpless civilians that I was leaving behind. The sight of the Krait pilot engulfed in flames returned to me, but magnified ten thousand fold at the thought of a whole starport’s population suffering similar fates. My own ineptitude began to gnaw at me.

Two more interdiction evasions when I got to Deciat rounded off the journey and I delivered the meta-alloys without further incident to Farseer. She seemed over the moon to receive three of the overgrown melons, even though they no longer had that bright green glow and had turned a dull mouldy leaden colour, but she promised me priority access to her facilities when I had collected the materials required for the upgrades that I wanted. I lifted off from her moon and docked at Garay’s Terminal, checking into a hotel room for the night while the outfitters went to work on my Cobra with a large chunk of the half a million credit profit that the two spare meta-alloys had given me. Those things were increasing in value every day with their source in the Pleiades now under siege by the bugs.

The next day I was back at Farseer Inc. for my first upgrades, having studied the cartographic data for the planets and moons in the Deciat system before I crashed for the night in my room. I had spent the morning farming materials on the surface of Deciat 1 in the SRV and then traded in the excess that I had accrued at a Materials Trader for items that couldn’t be found in the Deciat system. By the end of the day Farseer’s intern technicians had completed upgrading my Cobra to A rated grade 3 dirty drive thrusters and A rated grade 4 frame shift drive. Farseer couldn’t engineer my thrusters any further – I’d have to tap up another engineer for that, and I downloaded the blueprint for the grade 5 FSD upgrade to my ship (called pinning) so that when I eventually obtained the exotic materials required I could get a technician at a regular starport to complete the work outlined step by step in those blueprints. For the experimental effect – the icing on the cake as it were – I’d have to return to Farseer and get her to do that herself as the plans for those effects were top secret and held close to her saggy, shrivelled chest.




tbc

 

[wAsh67]

11
Hard Times​

A half a day and another twenty jumps later, thanks to my extended jump range, I was back in the Maia system. I found that Farseer’s engineering had given me enough range that I didn’t have to worry about shifting down to economy mode and navigating manually through the Badlands. Now that I had a jump range of around 28 light years, the route plotter was able to give me a clear run all the way down using main sequence stars alone. The upgrades had more than halved the journey time. The dirty drives had made the handling a little twitchy and overly responsive to control inputs, but over time I managed to adapt to the alterations, enjoying the additional manoeuvrability and the significant increase in top speed.

When I got to my destination I found myself queued up with about two dozen other ships waiting for access to dock at Obsidian Orbital starport. Traffic control had organised us into queues stretching out about three klicks from the slot – small, medium and large ships in separate stacks as they waited for landing pads to become available. It looked like a traffic jam on a three lane planetside highway. In the distance I could see fires raging on the surface of the space station, flames reaching out into space as internal bulkheads depressurised, then flickering to nothing as combustion was smothered by the lack of oxygen. I watched hundreds of globules of molten steel being sucked out into the void from a great tear in the side of the starport, where they slowly faded away and eventually disappeared, becoming nothing more than invisible celestial buckshot sprayed in a broad arc as the structure rotated. A faint, smoky haze hung around the starport, made of the nearly massless particles of debris trapped in the natural gravity created by the starport’s mass.

<note, pics will be added when there are actually burning starports to visit>

A warning text flashed up on my comms screen advising me that the station’s automated docking facilities had gone offline and almost immediately two ships boosted up and out of the small ship traffic stack that I waited in, moving me up the order to third in line.

I glared at the two spacecraft as they vectored out of mass lock and high waked out of the system – a Cobra 3 similar to mine and a Viper 4 – and cursed the pilots for their laziness and ineptitude. As far as I was concerned, if you couldn’t dock at a starport without the assistance of a docking computer then you had no business flying a bl00dy starship in the first place. I had no problem with pilots using docking computers as a convenience, but when lazy pilots used them as an excuse to never have to learn how to dock manually in the first place then they really had no right calling themselves pilots.

When my turn finally came to dock I powered in through the buckled, twisted remains of the toast rack toward the slot, ignoring both the rotating amber danger lights and the local speed limit and slipping in to the left of a Beluga liner that was coming out, finding myself in what can best be described as a space themed version of Dante’s Inferno. All around me I could see flames licking across the docking bay surface fed by oxygen and hydrogen leaks, painting the inside of the starport a flickering orange. The inside of the docking bay was jammed with ships either arriving or leaving, slowly weaving about each other as they navigated the busy interior, the atmosphere roiling with turbulence and shimmering with a heat haze that made picking out my landing pad number difficult, even more so because the number was flickering on and off haphazardly due to some malfunction with the holographic emitters. Instinctively I pipped the shields to full power.

My Cobra was suddenly buffeted roughly by the shock wave of an explosion directly ahead of me as a damaged crane gantry - whose frame had been weakened at its base by some caustic substance that glowed the same bright green as a freshly harvested meta-alloy - collapsed into a rack of gas storage containers, a steel girder puncturing one of the pressurised cylindrical towers. A jet of high pressure violet coloured gas shot out in a tight cone that moments later turned into a roaring column of flame as a spark ignited it, then the ruptured container ripped itself apart as if it were made of paper in a thundering fireball as the flames travelled up the vapour cone and consumed it. I fought the controls as the Cobra bucked and dipped, narrowly avoiding colliding with a battered Keelback that had been thrown sideways just as it was lifting off from its landing pad. The Keelback’s shields lit up in bright blue as it tilted onto its left side and scraped sideways across the jet blast deflectors before demolishing a floodlighting tower in a firework like explosion of brilliant white electrical sparks before the pilot finally got the ship back under control and limped up and away from the decks, accelerating toward the main rotational axis of the station. I backed away, getting a thumbs-up wave from the grinning Keelback pilot as he passed up and over me.

On my way to my designated landing pad I flew directly over the smoking wreckage of a Lakon Type-6 transporter that had not been so fortunate, red suited rescue personnel crawling all over it as they dragged refugees who minutes before had thought themselves saved out of the burning hulk and back into the chaos of the disintegrating station and the back of queues that they had probably just spent hours or even days getting to the front of. Those that couldn’t find proper space suits wouldn’t stand a chance of surviving the exposure to the temperatures and the diminishing oxygen in the docking bay – the ‘baby Remloks’ that stations carried would only last minutes in that environment. While it was a legal requirement that all ships had to carry one large and one medium sized pressurised survival suit for each passenger, the refugees would have been packed in wherever there was standing space so perhaps not even one in ten would have won the fight for a decent suit when the Type-6 went down.

Red lights began to flash on my master caution board, bringing my attention to the heat building up on my own ship, but a glance at the gauge told me that it had not reached critical yet. I still had a little time before I needed to punch off a heat sink and add the blaze of that to the furnace like heat of the docking bay. I sped up sharply, dodging an Orca that was struggling to land at its own pad and gracelessly slammed the Cobra down on pad number 5 in a screech of metal skids against metal decking that threw a shower of bright yellow sparks all over the floor. The magnetic clamps engaged with a thud and the elevator dropped me into the hangar with a squeal and a judder that signified it was not far away from seizing to the guide rails. A close look at the rack and pinion system that formed the lift mechanism of the landing pad revealed more of that glowing green corrosive substance eating away at the teeth of the hardened steel rack, the contaminated steel dripping away like melting plastic. I doubted it would last much longer, but it only needed last long enough to get me back out again as far as I was concerned.

“Cobra pilot on 5, stay aboard your ship with the engines idling and prepare for immediate clearance to depart.” The docking controller commanded me over comms, her voice harsh and raspy with a combination of fatigue, stress and dehydration. “Please enable your airlock for external access.”

I did so on the touch screen and almost immediately the running board flashed amber as the airlock was vented to the station by the ground crew and I watched over the CCTV as a rush of men, women and children wearing the ‘baby Remlok’ emergency survival suits boarded, filling up the passenger bays that had replaced the cargo racks when I’d overnighted at Garay’s and spilling out into the narrow corridors that branched off the keel to the sealed modules. I kept the door to the flight deck locked even though I could have got at least five more refugees aboard – I didn’t need a crush of bodies flooding in or any other distractions up here as I waited for permission to leave. The temperature eventually reached critical and Verity warned sharply that I was taking module damage, but I hesitated before firing off a heatsink in the hangar. That would char-grill anybody that happened to be near it when it popped off.

“Control, this is the Cobra on pad five, callsign Juliet Kilo Romeo. I need to lift off urgently.” I told the controller. “My drives are taking heat damage.”

“Roger that. Stand by,” came the terse reply. After a few seconds the running board changed to full green as the airlock was slammed shut and sealed.

“Wait one Juliet Kilo Romeo, ground crew are still clearing the elevator platform of civilians.”

“Roger, wilco.” I responded. At this point my heat was at 160% of rated maximum and a glance at my ship status screen showed me that my module integrity was being affected. I couldn’t hold here much longer.

“Go, JKR. Departure cleared.” The controller finally told me. “Please proceed to Cavalieri in Electra to disembark passengers. God speed, good luck and thank you.”

“And you, control. I’ll be back.” I promised her as the elevator rotated and raised into launch position amidst more juddering and grinding.

The Cobra was sluggish lifting off, but no more so than with a hold full of heavy cargo, and I accelerated hard toward the slot, retracting the gear for extra power as soon as I was clear of the pad. Weaving through the incoming traffic I saw a pilot punch out a faintly glowing heatsink into the inferno of the docking bay, which I belatedly realised would allow him more time on the deck to receive passengers before overheating when he landed, but I had to hold off on ejecting mine in case it caused even more damage to the station. Now at 180% of rated heat, mine would blaze like a miniature sun and would probably melt straight through anything that it touched. I feared it was only moments until it would melt its own mountings and start to burn through the hull of my Cobra like a nuclear China syndrome.

The second I cleared the slot I banked the Cobra hard away from the three lanes of queueing ships and toggled the switch that punched the saturated heatsink out into space, exhaling a sigh of relief that I hadn’t realised I’d been holding in. The red lights finally ceased their insistent flashing and I scrolled my way down the right-hand status screen, checking the modules for damage and noting that it wouldn’t be long before the Cobra would need serious and expensive repairs at a starport. She wouldn’t take much more of that kind of thermal abuse.

Once my passengers had disembarked at Cavalieri and I had reloaded with new heatsinks I returned to Obsidian, making another three refugee runs before arriving for a fourth run only to be told that the starport was now closed to all traffic and being manned by essential maintenance personnel, and that only ships bringing in materials for the repairs would be given docking permission. With all non-essential personnel evacuated and thus having nothing left to do around Maia I high waked back to Polecteri to check in with Max.








tbc

 

[wAsh67]

12
Problem Child

​

“Where the hell have you been this last fortnight?” Max asked, holding the door open for me as I slipped past him into the Alliance Intel office at the back of station security. It seems that in my absence I had been promoted up beyond the interview room. The office was a bit of a disappointment, truth be told. Expecting giant video displays, whiteboards, nameplates, flipcharts and girls in uniform with their hair tied back pushing models of spaceships around table top maps of the Milky Way, I instead found a handful of desks strewn with empty drinks cartons, fast food wrappers and crumpled up tissue paper in varying shades of colours, though I’m sure all had begun life white before meeting snotty noses, inkjet cartridge spills and paper cuts. There wasn’t even a notice board hanging on the wall. It looked more like the back office of a ship breakers yard than the local intelligence headquarters of one of the three main galactic superpowers. The only thing missing was a calendar of topless models. Unfortunately.

Aside from Max and I there was just one other person in the office, but he had his head down and was tapping slowly but purposefully away at the datapad he was squinting at and Max didn’t bother to introduce me to him. “So?” Max pressed, settling down into his seat, leaning back and folding his arms behind his head.

“Darnielle’s didn’t have any meta-alloy in stock so I had to go looking for them.” I explained, dragging a chair across from a nearby desk and parking myself in front of him.

“In my shiny new SRV?”

I nodded, hoping he wouldn’t ask me to sell it back to the outfitters. I’d enjoyed driving it around and looked forward to entering myself into a Buckyball Racing event when one suitable for beginners cropped up.

“Any luck?”

“Everywhere I went in the Pleiades the barnacles were dead, just smashed empty spikes sticking up out of the dirt.” I told him. “I gave up trying to find any there after a couple of days wasting my time and headed down toward the Witch Head nebula. I found a way in across the Col70 permit locked region after exploring a few dead ends and managed to locate a moon that hadn’t been stripped bare already, so I took all three meta-alloys that were at the site and delivered them to Farseer the day before yesterday.” I didn’t mention the other two that had earned me just under 400,000Cr when I had sold them at Garay’s to fund the installation of the passenger compartments for the rescue runs that had kept me busy since. “How did your meeting with Flossy go?”

Max tapped the side of his nose and winked at me. “Need to know, sunshine.” He smiled. “I should have taken you up on that offer of the heavy-duty lube, mind. Been itching like mad down there ever since. One thing I learned from her is that tight and dry is not a great combo when you’re as well hung as I am.”

“Ahhh, TMI.” I grimaced. It was a shame that information hadn’t been ‘need to know’, as well.

“You asked, sunshine.” Max grinned broadly. “Any problems?”

“Nothing worth reporting. Couple of interdiction attempts on the way back, that’s about it.”

“Uh-huh.” Max said, now leaning forward in his chair. “Still no kills, then?”

I shook my head, though I did talk him through the Krait that got itself destroyed by interdicting me too close to a fuel star.

“So why exactly are you here?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.

“Just checking in.” I shrugged.

“You don’t need to do that. We’ll be in touch when we need you. But while you’re here I’ll take back the credit card that I gave you. Did you think to get receipts?”

“Err, no.”

“My fault. I should have told you about that. I’ll get Amy to balance the accounts and wipe the money trail – can’t have enemy spies finding out you’ve been spending Alliance Intel’s hard earned cash or they’ll put two and two together, which is another one of the reasons why you shouldn’t be visiting the office unless it is absolutely unavoidable - if nobody sees you visiting here, then you won’t register on their radar as a person of interest.”

I nodded understanding. “So that’s it?” I asked, fumbling in a breast pocket for the company credit card.

“Pretty much. You’re now officially on the books as an associate and thirty grand a month from an untraceable benefactor will be paid to your Bank of Zaonce account as a retention fee. We’ll be in touch when we have a job for you. In the meantime, just do whatever you need to do, get some engineering done on the combat essentials and try not to get yourself killed.”

“Have there been any developments on the investigation into the bombing at Rosie’s?” I enquired.

“Didn’t I just tell you to try not to get yourself killed?” Max sighed, shaking his head. “Leave the Xendes Mafia to me. Now ssip off and get your skills up and buff that ship of yours up a bit. Or better still, get something more combat capable because the way things have been deteriorating in the Pleiades recently you’re going to need something with a thicker skin and much sharper teeth than a Cobra. The Alliance has a working arrangement with Lakon, so if you see something in their catalogue that you take a shine to then I might be able to get you one at a decent discount. Go. It’s getting late and beers beckon.”

We shook hands one last time and he escorted me to the front office of the police station. As I got there a fat man in a business suit struggled up from a row of plastic seats and moved to block my way out with surprising speed for his bulk. “Joseph Kerr?” he asked, checking my face against a mug shot no doubt displayed on the phone that he held in his left hand.

“Yes?”

He thrust the blank Manila envelope that he had been clutching with his right hand at me. “Consider yourself served. Good day, Mr Kerr.” Then he left, leaving me with the envelope.

“Happy birthday to you?” asked Max, still hovering behind me. “If I’d known I’d have baked a cake.”

Bemused, I opened the envelope to find a legal summons demanding my presence at The Court of Pleione in Merope six days hence. Failure to appear would result in me earning a ‘wanted’ status throughout the Seven Sisters region and a bounty of ten thousand credits. There was no indication as to what the complaint was, just a Galnet hyperlink that I could type in to a browser to monitor the status of the case.

“What the hell?” I muttered, at a loss as to why I was being taken to court. Something to do with the rescue missions at Obsidian Orbital maybe? No, that couldn’t be it – the date of issue on the summons was more than a week before the attacks began in the Pleiades.

“No problems, eh?” Max asked, reading over my shoulder. “You’d best come back in the office, son and explain to me just what the kcuf you did down there. Jeez, why do I always end up with the kcufin’ troublemakers…..”

* * *​

That kcufing Kyle! The ungrateful mothertrucker. He had found some ambulance chasing shyster to do his dirty work for him and was suing me for injury and emotional trauma caused as a consequence of me allegedly kidnapping him by forcing him into my ship against his will via a cargo scoop that was never intended for human ship to ship transfer, as a result breaking his leg in three places and then imprisoning him in and throwing him about the cargo bay of my spacecraft with “unnecessary violent manoeuvring”, causing additional bruises and contusions to thirty percent of his body. Then I was accused of stranding him at an orbital facility – namely Obsidian Orbital starport - in an extremely hazardous region of the galaxy where he was unable to complete an insurance rebuy of his ship, or to obtain a substitute as the shipyard there had been mothballed. Then the Thargoids attacked and he had to be medevacked out.

Next, the list of charges claimed that I had destroyed his future prospects by preventing him from allying with the Thargoids. He was, according to this load of rubbish, a registered, fully-fledged member of the Far God religious order and had been in the process of transferring his consciousness to a Thargoid Scout ship when I had interfered with that process and “kidnapped him forcibly and against his will.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” a laughing Max said as he read through the online document. “Holy tihs, the muppet is asking for three million in compensation. I hope your insurance covers legal culpability, Joe.”

“This is all bulltihs.” I protested. “He told me he’d destroyed one Scout before the other one disabled his Viper.”

“Of course it is.” Max agreed, shaking his head in disbelief. “Stupid kcufer flew without a rebuy, so now he’s trying to dig himself out of the hole he‘s gotten himself in without giving a tihs about where the dirt goes. What an ssahole. It happens.” Max shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Just get down there, state your case and it’ll be dismissed. No judge is going to find against a rescuer just in case one day that judge needs rescuing himself. If he did find you guilty he’d be establishing a legal precedent for legitimately leaving ships in distress unaided, which flies in the face of the Pilots Federation code, not to mention basic morality.”

“You think it’ll be that easy?”

“kcuF knows. Frontier law can sometimes throw a few unexpected curveballs, so nothing would surprise me. It’s more a case of who you know than what you can prove in one of those systems, and if the lawyer happens to know how the sitting judge leans on particular subjects, then he can tailor cases to his advantage. Take this Far God thing, for example. How do we know for certain that the judge isn’t secretly supporting that bunch of barmy idiots, or that a member or two of the jury – if they even bother with one - aren’t sympathetic to the mumbo jumbo that gets spread about the Thargoids? Maybe that’s why the litigating lawyer has gone for such a kcoc and bull story.”

I knew a little bit about the Far God cult. It’s members believe that Thargoid vessels are in fact disciples sent to prepare us for coming of the supreme deity known as the ‘Far God’, which although phonetically similar to Thargoid, also signifies it’s distance from humanity measured in both light years, as the Thargoid homeworld is thought to be far away from the Inner Orion Spur, and in this Far God’s evident remote, uncaring attitude toward mankind. He did seem pretty much a ‘hands off’ sort of God, unless those hands happened to be somewhere near a human throat.

The followers of this cult maintain that on the day humanity is destroyed, the Far God’s angels will save the cult’s followers and merge with them in some unspecified manner. There is actually video evidence of escape pods being scooped up by the alien ships, their occupants disappearing forever. Some people believe the bugs eat us as delicacies, like the bogeyman of childrens nightmares, but the members of this cult theorise that somehow ‘worthy’ humans can be ‘absorbed’ by the Thargoids who then help them to reach a higher plane of existence. Personally, I think the Far God cult have been brainwashed by Borg related episodes of the old ‘Star Trek’ sci-fi series where species get ‘absorbed’ into a ‘collective’ to advance the Borg toward ‘perfection’. The cult demands that followers forget their past lives and live only to serve fellow believers in a commune, adopting the hive mentality believed to be followed by the Thargoids, even so far as to give up their names. Seven of Nine, anyone?

The only aspect of this religion I can understand is their daily prayers to the Far God. If things go the way many fear, then getting down on our knees and praying to the dratsabs stands just as much a chance of saving us as going to war against them will.

“What if I don’t show up for this kangaroo court.” I asked.

“At a guess you’ll be given a bounty rather than a fine until the case is decided to encourage you to get down there and get it sorted - probably around 15k or so for a no show. That’ll make you fair game for anybody with a KWS, and less than worthless running ops for me with a target on your back. I imagine a ‘Mostly Harmless’ fugitive would be quite an attractive mark, especially for a young gun looking to up his rating. Even an old hand would probably be tempted to dust you as its easy money for barely a minute’s work.”

“Thanks.” I muttered.

“Hey, no offense. If you don’t like to hear it then Git Gud as they say. Talk me through what happened in this rescue, step by step.”

I did so, pointing out that when I found Kyle Kenzie, or whatever his name was, he was shooting at the Thargoid Scout with a sidearm and if I’d stopped and opened the main airlock for him, I’d have had to EVA out to him under the Thargoid’s guns because he was free floating in an unmanoeuvrable remlok survival suit between the wreckage of his ship and the ‘Goid. I also pointed out that Kenzie had thanked me profusely for saving his life and told me that he was firing a blaster at the Thargoid to get them to put him out of his misery by vaporising him, which he felt would be less harrowing than suffocating to death or, as he put it, a lifetime of being ssa probed by bugs. I added that the Thargoid was far from benign as it set off after me with all guns blazing, which is why I had to throw the ship around while waiting for the jump drive to charge up.

“What sort of in flight data recorder is your Cobra equipped with?”

“Full suite. Data and cockpit audio and video.” I told him.

“Externals?”

“There are six wide-angle hull cameras plus a gun camera on each of the hard-points.”

“Nice. Does that come as standard or is that an option?”

“I had it all fitted to comply with the terms of my insurance package. They won’t let you fly rated ‘harmless’ without it.” I explained.

“Hmmm.”



tbc

 

[wAsh67]

Interlude 4
Shake A Leg​

When I came around the world was a blur. Ahead of me I could see a pair of legs that some part of my rebooting consciousness recognised as belonging to me. Beyond that were the flickering flames of a fire that seemed to be receding away from me very, very slowly. My butt hurt – not from the old wound that I had taken there in the bombing of Rosie’s Bar on Bloch – but from new hurts that kept recurring every couple of seconds as if somebody was repeatedly kicking me in the ssa.

Before me the fire suddenly blossomed into a ball of vivid yellow/orange brilliance as whatever it was that had been burning exploded, the heat sudden and intense against my face for a brief handful of seconds before the fireball fell away from view and I got a glimpse of a mushroom cloud sliding rapidly down my field of vision, then a smattering of bright stars before the back of my head slammed against the ground, giving me a snapshot of even more stars, although these ones were actually inside my head and not above it. Whoever had been dragging me away from my wrecked SRV had just been knocked over by the blast wave of its detonation and dropped me, I realised. Karen. Karen was still in there…….

“No….” I croaked as my body’s motor functions returned and I tried to struggle upright into a sitting position before falling back again when my stomach muscles couldn’t cope with the effort of righting myself.

“Relax, scrooge.” came a voice over my headset. “I’ll buy you a new one for Christmas.” My wife reassured me, then her helmeted face appeared over me upside down. “Can you walk, or do I have to drag you some more like the Amazonian Goddess that I am?”

I gingerly rolled over onto my belly and pushed myself up onto my knees, cursing at a dozen stabbing pains that assailed me as I struggled upright. ”I’ll manage.” I told her through gritted teeth, manly avoiding whimpering from the numerous injuries that I now carried.

“Good,” she nodded. “You need to go on a diet, by the way. Even in this gravity I almost gave myself a hernia dragging you out of the cab. I’ve warned you about that beer gut more than once.”

“What happened?” I asked, still not fully aware of where I was and what was going on.

“Oh man, you really totalled the Timberwolf. Your cab took the brunt of it while the turret airbags kept me from any serious injuries. I might have broken a thumb while bracing myself against the hand holds, though.” Karen told me, showing me her hand and wincing as she wiggled her fingers. “I had to cut through your seat harness with a knife and managed to drag you out through the turret hatch like a hard ssa cigar chomping heroine before the fire in the shield generator bay took hold and spread to the fuel tank and magazine, and now here we are – on foot in a kcufing full on battle zone with one combat knife and two dinky blasters between us. We are kcufed, useless husband of mine. kcuFed.”

“What about the squad we were assigned to?”

“kcuF knows. I can’t raise anybody at squad, platoon or battalion level. We’re on our own. I’ve popped both our distress beacons but disabled the flashers just in case it attracts the Alpha Mikes.”

“Golf-niner this is Sierra-four, comm check over.” I called.

“Reading you five by five Sierra-four. Sitrep? Over.”

“Our tank is toast, we’re stuck by the side of the road with our thumbs out waiting for the recce mechs. Beacons are on. Over.”

Karen bashed the side of her helmet with her hand a couple of times, then shook her head and shrugged. It seemed that her helmet was working over close range Bluetooth as she could hear what I was saying to the sarge through the link that my helmet had established with hers, but her broadwave radio system was out.

“Roger that, wait one. Over.”

“Your long-range aerial must be bust or something.” I told Karen. “Best you stay close to me until we can get you a replacement bone dome. If I get killed take mine so you can get through to somebody for rescue.”

For that I got a scowl. “Fingers crossed you get shot in the balls and not the head, then.” She smiled, poking her tongue out at me.

“Yeah, it’s not like those get used much these days….”

“Sierra-four, we have you on scanner. Disable your beacons and sit tight. You’re more or less on the way to our assigned objective. I’ve designated your current location as a waypoint and we’ll collect you en-route, approximately five minutes, repeat zero-five minutes, over.”

“Wilco golf-niner, sierra-four out.”

“Well?”

“The sarge said to stay where we are. They’re coming for us. Won’t be long but it looks like we’ll be walking to the mine.” I said, flicking up the protective cover on my suit’s wrist mounted control panel and switching off the distress beacon, telling Karen to do the same. “How’s your hand?”

“It only aches when I think about it, so thanks for reminding me.” She deadpanned, then her head whipped round, and I could see her lean forward slightly, as if she were peering into the distance. “Someone’s coming.” She hissed over the headset.

“Can’t be the squad.” I whispered back. “Too soon.” I motioned for her to get out of the flickering firelight of what was left of our SRV and deeper into the shadows, though that wouldn’t help if whoever was approaching had bio scanners or EM detectors sensitive enough to pick up our supposedly undetectable short range Bluetooth signal. Together we backed away from the crash site, finding a shallow trench that had been carved into the ground by one of the Thargoid Scout’s attacks to throw ourselves into in order to get ourselves out of the line of sight. We rolled into the ploughed furrow with a disconcerting crackling sound, the heat from the Scout’s plasma guns having turned a thin layer of the sandy surface of the planet into a skin of glassy residue called fulgurites. I drew my sidearm out of its holster, checking it for charge. Karen did the same.

A strip of yellow rather than red or green showed on mine, indicating that the blaster was half charged at best. Karen’s, I could see, issued a full green glow from the handgrip’s bar graph. A full charge from one of those would give maybe six seconds of continuous fire, or as many quick pulls of the trigger as would make up six seconds of continuous firing. For context, it’s worth explaining here that a quick jerk of the trigger giving a quarter of a second of firing would probably burn a hole through nothing more substantial than cardboard, whereas two seconds of continuous firing would punch a glowing hole through five millimetres of unshielded aluminium, so long as you kept the beam on the same spot. After two seconds the blaster would automatically shut off for ten seconds to prevent the barrel melting and distorting. They were cheap blasters, and as such weren’t great weapons. You couldn’t even use them for suicide when faced with a Thargoid butt probing as putting the gun to your head and pulling the trigger would merely set your hair on fire before your survival reflex made you drop the damn thing. They were, however, all we had so we stayed in hiding in the slit trench.

“Ours or theirs?” Karen asked.

I shrugged my ignorance. “Might be a different unit to golf-niner.” I offered. “Or it could be a platoon of Tangoes sent by the scout ship to check things over. Might even be civvies trying to get out of the combat zone.” I raised my head a little, peeking over the lip of the trench, more of the fulgurites crackling as they fractured beneath my shifting weight.

I had no idea how many of them were out there, but from the shape of the one silhouetted against the still burning fire that used to be my SRV they sure as hell weren’t human. I scrambled back into the trench. “Stay as low as you can get. Play dead.” I hissed over Bluetooth, avoiding calling on the sarge just in case they could detect the transmissions from this close. “It’s kcufing Thargoids.”

“tihS. Are you sure?”

“What I saw wasn’t human.” I whispered. “I saw one silhouette that looked like a wolf wearing an armoured exoskeleton. Might have been one warrior on his own or might be the point man for a full platoon of the dratsabs.”

“tihS.” She breathed.

“Best prepare yourself for an ssa probing, babe.” I winked at her.

“Aww, sweet of you to offer, honey,” she replied, carefully rolling over onto her back and keeping her blaster ready so that she could shoot anything that appeared over the rim of the trench right in the face. ”But I’m just not in the mood right now.”







tbc

 

[wAsh67]

13
Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap
​

The Cobra’s engines powered down with a diminishing whine that soon faded to a regular ticking noise, the components and support structure contracting as they cooled. Overhead the noise of large transport ships arriving full and departing empty rumbled across the station, parts and materials being delivered every minute of the day as repairs following the Thargoid attacks were undertaken by Reed's Rest station personnel and contractors. Although Merope had not been as hard hit as Maia where Palin had been based, the damage was still substantial even if it had been done while the Thargoids were retreating out of the Pleiades, beaten off by the Dangerous, Deadly and Elite of my peers.

Almost as soon as I shut the engines off, the door to the hangar opened to let in a repair gang. As I climbed out of the Cobra still in my flight suit I noticed that one of the haggard, drawn looking technicians seemed to stare at me for a second or two, then turned and nudged one of his workmates. I strode toward them on my way to the hangar door, smiled and nodded just before passing. The one who had stared at me reached out with a gloved hand to shake mine. Taken aback a little, I paused and shook the proffered hand. “Great job, commander.” The man said enthusiastically, grinning from ear to ear as he pumped his hand up and down vigorously, threatening to tear my own off at the shoulder.

“Anybody would have done the same,” I replied, guessing that he was thanking me for my part in the evacuation of Obsidian Orbital. The other three members of the repair crew crowded around me to shake my hand too as I squeezed by them on my way out. That was a first. Ground crew and maintenance personnel tended to keep themselves to themselves, but I imagine their friendliness in this instance most likely stemmed from the understanding that if they ever needed to be evacuated from a burning station, it was pilots like me that would be carrying them to safety, and they had all had just such a close call.

With a self-satisfied smile on my face I made my way up to the arrivals lounge, which was pretty much deserted when I got there aside from some returning evacuees waiting at the baggage claim carousels, collecting essentials that they had brought back with them. My phone chirped with an incoming message and I pulled it out of my pocket, scanning through a station generated email that contained a list of all the destroyed residences and directed their occupants to seek alternative accommodation via the personnel and residents offices. Fortunately, a list of hotels that had been staffed and reopened following the evacuation was attached to that email, so I began walking down to the commercial section. The rapid transit maglevs, monorails, elevators and escalators were all out of action, off limits to the public and locked to staff access only while the mechanics and engineers concentrated on restoring the station’s core functions. At 0.25 G and slowly increasing as I left the docking bay behind me the walk wasn’t a great deal of effort and welcome exercise after being sat in the Cobra for 400 light years.

For the most part the station seemed absent of life aside from a few souls moving purposefully around with diagnostic scanners in their hands and backpacks full of the tools that their particular specialisms required. I stayed respectfully out of their way while they concentrated on their own duties. However, if you closed your eyes and just listened you would hear a cacophony of noises, echoes of men and women hammering away in strenuous attempts at straightening buckled deck plates, the buzz of laser welding gear stitching sundered steel back together, the whine of drills, the squeal of power saws, the ear-splitting racket of grinding wheels, the snapping of arc welders, the popping of rivet guns and the clang of dropped tools swiftly followed by curses and expletives. Barked orders and reprimands occasionally punctuated the sound of repair work, foremen and women directing and often berating the technicians for their workmanship or lack thereof.

When I got there the commerce district was just as bereft of activity. The market stalls, while still intact this deep into the station, were absent the usual hawkers and their wares. Not a single bar was open for business, nor were any restaurants, bistros or cafeterias. There wasn’t even anywhere to buy civilian clothing so that I could at least look presentable at the court hearing. Some of the hotels sported signs advertising room vacancies but many more were simply locked up with their doors chained and padlocked. Soon the evacuees would come flooding back to their homes and their livelihoods and things would return to normal, but the trickle of migration back to the bubble and, in some cases, on to distant Colonia would continue so long as the Thargoids kept going to war over the barnacles in the Pleiades and Witch Head nebulae. It no longer made sense for mankind to expand in this direction, which could only be good news for the Alliance, whose main body of aligned systems lay closer to the galactic core than any of the other major powers. More people meant more labour, more labour meant more taxpayers and more taxpayers meant more money for the members of the Alliance.

Settling on a hotel just down the avenue from the Hall of Justice, I entered the tiled lobby and hovered expectantly at the reception desk waiting for somebody to attend to me. I glanced at my phone, noting that local time here was around two in the afternoon. After about five minutes idly drumming my fingers on the polished surface of the reception desk, dinging the bell every minute or two while passing the time admiring the expensive décor and the imitation woodwork, a flustered blonde haired woman appeared and swished her too thin frame behind the desk, apologising for the delay, explaining that the hotel was short staffed following the evacuation and that not all their facilities were ready for use. They could offer me a room but the bar, restaurant, gymnasium, conference room, swimming pool and spa were all closed until further notice, she said with a frown.

“No problem, I’ll be here just the one night.” I told the girl, whose name tag claimed she was called Kirstine. “I’ll take a suite at the basic room rate, seeing as none of the services that come with the full rate are available.”

“Sorry, all the suites and most of the double rooms have already been taken over by the contractors and essential station staff who lost their residences in the attack.” She told me tiredly, not even bothering to look up from the booking in screen.

“Ah, now I feel like a total tihs.” I grimaced, embarrassed.

“You weren’t to know.” She raised her head and smiled back, though I noted that the smile didn’t extend so far as her limpid brown eyes. “I can offer you one of the few doubles we still have at the single room rate for both nights?”

“I’ll take that, thank you.”

“If you could just put your finger on the pad?” She smiled, indicating where to place my RFID and fingerprint on the datapad for payment.

“Thank you, mister….Kerr?” She looked up at me again as I held my thumb on the pad, waiting for the local branch of the Bank of Zaonce to confirm the transaction. Eventually the device beeped, and the girl disappeared around the corner, leaving me alone in the lobby leaning on the desk and looking out the revolving doors where nothing at all seemed to be happening. When Kirstine returned she had the manager in tow, who introduced himself as Adrian by reaching over the desk and shaking my hand. Had payment been declined? tihS like that can happen at disrupted systems, particularly if the bank’s courier ships hadn’t been in-system to upload balance and security updates to the local branches for a while. Would he have bothered to shake my hand if payment had indeed been declined, I wondered doubtfully?

“Welcome to the Grand Hotel.” He beamed. “If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable given our restricted facilities at the moment, then please don’t hesitate to ask. I’m upgrading you to the Shareholder’s Suite at no extra cost to make up for the inconvenience.”

My eyebrows lifted at that. Kirstine looked embarrassed. “I thought the suites were taken by the repair crews?”

“Trust me, mister Kerr. I wouldn’t let a tech-head anywhere near the Shareholder’s Suite. They play stupid pranks with the conveniences. We’ve had displays taken off the walls and remounted upside down, remote control battery contacts covered over with insulating tape, shower heads filled with inkjet printer refills and ice dispensers topped up with urine. Awful people, engineers. Just because something can be done they believe it has to be done with no regard for the consequences. This galaxy won’t be sucked into the black hole in Sagittarius at the end of time, it’ll be blown up by some maniac with a wrench and a multimeter long before then, I promise you.” The man grinned. “All I ask is that when you check out you leave it in the condition you receive it.”

“Can’t make any guarantees about the mini-bar if all the local watering holes are still closed.” I joked.

“I’ll write it off as bottles damaged during the attack.” Adrian smiled.

“Wow,” I said, taken even further aback. “Am I missing something here?”

“Not at all. The galaxy appreciates pilots like you and I’m just expressing the hotel’s thanks and admiration for what you did.

Ah, the refugee runs again. “I just did what loads of other pilots did. I’m nothing special.”

“Not from what I’ve seen.” Adrian smiled, making a few taps on the datapad before assuring me that the door lock of the Shareholders Suite had been programmed to recognise my RFID signature. “Top floor, 0.8G. Room 242”

“Thank you. I know it’s an odd question, but could you recommend a lawyer to me?”

“You’ll be lucky. The lawyer that the hotel retains for guest issues was one of the first to evacuate – go figure - and lawyers will be the last people we need cluttering up the place while the rebuild is in progress. Although people are starting to trickle back now that the danger has diminished, I’d hazard a guess that a lawyer will be right down at the bottom on the transport priority lists, if they aren’t already relocating bubbleward instead. But I will ask around for you.”

I nodded my thanks and headed for the elevators, pleased to find them in working order. Two minutes later I was fast asleep on a king-sized bed in a comfortable suite the size of a Type 9’s cargo hold and I hadn’t needed a single bottle from the mini-bar to help get me there.





tbc

 

[wAsh67]

Six hours passed in, quite literally, the blink of an eye and I woke up hungry and bored so I ventured out of the hotel in search of something to eat. If all else failed I could always go back to the Cobra and microwave something out of the refrigerator or – as a last resort - synthesise something from a food cartridge, but as luck would have it a KFC had reopened just around the corner from the hotel while I had been kipping. I placed my order for a bargain bucket on their app and took a table while waiting for my number to be called. Fast food wasn’t a particular favourite of mine but it was the best to be had on this station at that time, and anything beats synthesised meals.

The establishment soon got busy as word spread that it had reopened, maintenance workers coming off shift or going on breaks piling in and forcing the skeleton staff to run around like headless versions of the wares that they were selling to meet the sudden rush of orders. The app pinged for me to collect my meal but by the time the counter staff had sorted it out and handed it across to me, a gang of four heavy set construction workers in hi-vis jackets had moved in and commandeered my table. Now they pored over their phones, making their own selections from the shop’s menu. One of them glanced up at me with a sneer on his dirt streaked face as if to challenge me in a ‘wotcha gonna do aboud it?’ manner. I locked eyes with him, frowned and gave my head a barely perceptible dilligaf shake and squeezed past, only for him to reach up and tug on my arm, gripping the sleeve of my flight suit with greasy fingers that I knew he wouldn’t bother to wash before eating.

“There’s room here if you want to sit, we can all scoot over a bit.” The man growled, his deep and naturally menacing, gravelly voice belying the apparent affability of the invitation.

“Nah, I’ll take this tihs back to the hotel and blitz the mini bar.” I told him warily, hoping that he wasn’t going to press the issue. I couldn’t take this guy on my own in a million years, never mind the three other bruisers that were seated with him.

“OK. Take care, commander.” The guy shrugged and turned back to his crew. I had to pause by the table and wait as a gang of security guards came in looking for someplace to sit and squeezed past me.

“You know that guy?” I heard one of the four that had taken my table ask the man with the dirt smeared face.

“You not seen the news?” came the reply. I glanced back over my shoulder, getting nothing more than a thumbs-up from the gruff worker, then the path to the sliding doors cleared and I made my way back out into the street.

Stuff like this never happens. I live in an age where eye contact is seen as a ‘to-the-death’ challenge, where nobody even nods to you anymore when you pass them in the corridors, where the words ‘have a nice day’ are only ever uttered out of sarcasm and strangers get ignored as a matter of course, treated as if they were invisible. An age where meeting somebodies gaze for more than a second is most commonly responded to with a “The kcuf you looking at?”

Hereabouts it seemed people were unusually friendly and while it was refreshing to see, it was also disconcerting as nobody these days is overtly friendly without a hidden agenda or a concealed weapon, unless they are Welsh of course but I detected no such accent down in Maia. Alarm bells were ringing in my head as I escaped the KFC, another glance over my shoulder assuring me that I wasn’t being followed by a gang of tough roustabouts looking to forcibly relieve me of my bargain bucket. And what the hell was that comment about watching the news?

Puzzled, I returned to my suite and demolished the bargain bucket, bones and everything (all foodstuffs synthesised from nutri-cartridges are edible, even if the bogus bones tasted more like bamboo than chicken), washing the stuff down with a couple of bottled beers from the mini bar. I was about to settle into the sofa and do some Galtube searches on the wall sized television when my phone chirped with an incoming message from the hotel, notifying me that the bar had reopened, and the restaurant would resume serving breakfasts from 6.30 in the morning.

Figuring that the gorgeous, lithe, scantily clad lesbian actresses would be there forever, but the bar would most probably be drunk dry before the hotel received a fresh delivery of booze, I rode the empty elevator down to the lobby, where I found the bar deserted with the exception of Adrian, the short-staffed hotel’s manager who was standing in as tonight’s bartender. He smiled and nodded to me as I strode up to the bar, set myself down on a bar stool and ordered a pint of Guinness.

“The last time I was in a bar the kcufing place blew up,” I commented idly as he poured the black liquid into a pint glass from an old style hand pump.

“Good to know.” Adrian laughed. “Does trouble follow you or do you chase it down?” he asked as he slid the glass across the counter top to me. I was mildly disappointed that he hadn’t drawn a shamrock shape in the froth as some show-off bartenders do. I pressed my thumb against the tab pad to pay and was about to ask if he’d learned about any lawyers arriving when a group of three men came in and he scurried down the bar to cater to their needs. I raised the glass to my lips and sipped the cold, dark, delicious liquid, then left the bar in search of a quiet corner, just me, my phone and my worries over the looming legal squabble that faced me the next day.

I had never been inside a court hearing room in my life, instead preferring to remotely pay the fines issued to me by the various authorities whose laws I had flouted rather than contesting them in a court of law. In just about every case the evidence of my admittedly minor piloting misdemeanours had been incontrovertible, so I felt it better to pay up than mouth off and risk having to pay more in court costs and legal bills. This was different. Three million credits for rescuing a pilot from a Thargoid as opposed to a hundred credit reckless flying fine different. And it all hinged on being able to defend myself against a professional lawyer. Without legal representation of my own it would be like sending a lamb to slaughter.

With the station under this level of repair, would the case even go ahead, I wondered. What if the judge wasn’t back aboard? What if the prosecuting lawyer wasn’t aboard? What if the Hall of Justice hadn’t even reopened? Could I get the case deferred due to lack of legal representation? I logged into the court service web site and keyed in my case number, double checking the date and time had not been changed due to the station’s state of disrepair, disappointedly finding that there had been no updates and that proceedings seemed to be going ahead as scheduled. If the justice service had been suspended due to the attacks, then surely their net page would have said so? On the flip side of that coin, in moments of chaos when there was the potential for widespread looting the justice service would be even more crucial to restoring order, I figured after a moment’s reflection.

I frowned, taking another sip of the Guinness in my dimly lit alcove in the darkest corner of the bar. Alain would have been pleased with my choice of table. Displays in the corners of the room flickered to life, showing the highlights of a soccer game that had probably been played a thousand light years away three weeks ago. I squinted at the score line. Liverpool 2, Manchester United 1. Good, I smiled inwardly. I hated Man U. Their supporters were invariably smug glory hunters obsessed with being associated with success, or losers who simply didn’t want to be further associated with losing so they attached themselves to a team that habitually won everything. Come on Liverpool, finish the dratsabs.

Returning my attention to the phone, I began scrolling through the local register of businesses in search of a lawyer. Each one that I attempted to connect to I found offline, even the ones with 24-hour emergency callout options, and after checking I found that the legal firm that was pursuing this suit on behalf of Kenzie were also offline. I realised that the only option I had was to turn up and hope that the judge would postpone the case until I was able to secure proper legal representation or move for a dismissal if Kyle’s lawyers proved unable to turn up themselves.

I put the phone away and half drained the glass of Guinness. As I set the glass down on the table I saw that the bar was getting a bit busier. If it were the only one open in the commercial section of the station then the place would probably get quite lively in a very short period of time as word spread, just as the KFC had done. I estimated I could get another two or three pints before I ended up losing my table, so I polished off the remains of the one I already had and went back to the bar, glass in hand, for a refill.

When I made to make payment, Adrian held up a hand to stop me and pointed to a table at the opposite end of the bar. “Courtesy of those four gentlemen.” He told me. “They each chipped in a couple of credits for your next drink after I showed them your vid.”

“My what?” I enquired, frowning in confusion.

“Your vid. The one that was on the local news feed yesterday?” Adrian answered, as if that made it any clearer.

“What the hell you are talking about?” I asked him, setting the fresh pint down on the counter and staring at him inquisitively.

“The rescue vid?” He said, leaning forward and raising an eyebrow.

“Wait a sec. Somebody made a video of me flying refugees out of Obsidian Orbital?” There were dozens of us pulling rescue missions that day, most of them with much larger passenger capacities than my humble Cobra. Maybe I had been singled out because now that the crisis was over, the pilots of the other ships were on their way back to the bubble or hauling materials to the station for the repairs while I was hanging about hogging the limelight and stealing their glory. I turned to the group that had bought me the pint and raised it in salute to them, receiving the same gesture back in return from each of them.

“No,” Adrian replied. “The one with the Thargoid.”

I spun around, almost losing the froth off my pint. “The what?”







tbc

 

[wAsh67]

Adrian rolled his eyes, using a remote control to direct the Galnet browser on the bar’s main television to replay the news clip. It’s not often you see remote controls these days, what with voice command coming standard on all electronic devices, but in a public place they were essential as you couldn’t have ssipheads yelling at the television to change channels and causing chaos. On screen a cute brunette presenter wearing a low-cut amber blouse and sat at a desk in front of a wraparound video screen in a news room read from an autocue as an animated representation of a Thargoid scout wobbled slowly on the wraparound like a UFO from an ancient Daffy Duck cartoon.

“There have been many tales of sacrifice and heroism in the most recent Thargoid raids on the Seven Sisters region of the Pleiades sector, but few with as much impact as the encounter that you are about to see.” She began. “A pilot known only by his call sign J-KR recently executed a breath-taking rescue in deep space right under the nose of a Thargoid warship.” The presenter disappeared, replaced by a full screen view of a Thargoid scout floating in space about 3km distant, the footage shot from what I assumed to be the gun camera of an approaching ship. The view cut away to a camera looking down upon somebody who looked just like me and wearing one of my faded flight suits in the command seat of a Cobra 3 going through the motions of setting his ship up for what looked to me like silent running. Never having seen anything like this before it slowly dawned on me that it was the cockpit video and audio feed from a black box flight recorder, and it was definitely mine. The face, hair and big ears were undeniably mine, the patches on the faded flight suit were mine, the red trim at the collar sullied with sweat was mine and there was even a chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle stain on the seat harness that I should have gotten around to cleaning off. Damn you High Definition television. That was definitely, unmistakeably me in my Cobra III.

Max had done this, I realised. One of the things Max had shown me before sending me off to face the music down here was how to extract the data from the Cobra’s flight data recorder without breaking the seals using some fancy Alliance Intel device that plugged into the manufacturer’s diagnostic port, the one that was usually reserved for software upgrades. It looked like he’d downloaded the data and used a video editing package to make a short clip of the encounter that he then obviously got couriered down here and leaked to the press.

The video continued to play as the presenter talked over it in a running commentary to make up for the lack of sound, the footage clipping to a view from another one of the gun cameras as the Cobra neared the dull green, almost grey Scout, the alien vessel growing larger and larger on screen before disappearing under the nose of my ship.

“The pilot was responding to a deep space distress call only to find that the ship in trouble had already been destroyed, the pilot not in an escape pod, but instead in a remlok suit floating freely in space and firing a laser weapon at the Thargoid scout. With no regard for his own safety, the unknown pilot flew his unshielded and unarmed Cobra directly between the Thargoid and the wrecked human ship, opened his cargo hold and scooped up the helpless pilot.” Now the video switched from footage of the Cobra rolling inverted and arcing over toward the stranded figure to footage recorded by the cargo bay’s monitoring camera as Kyle was bundled like a rag doll into the empty storage racks. Next the clip switched to a rearward view of the Scout firing bright red plasma bolts at us as I attempted to evade, the impacts momentarily turning the screen to static as the plasma balls impacted against the unshielded hull, then the sparks began flying as the hull plating failed and the internals started taking hits. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I watched the dramatic pursuit open mouthed until the FSD cut in, the Scout disappearing as the Cobra jumped into hyperspace. It was just as well I never got to see scenes like that as a pilot or I’d never get behind the controls of a ship again.

“As dangerous as space is, it’s reassuring for all of us to know that there are fearless pilots out there willing to put their lives on the line for complete strangers. Right on, commander.” The presenter said, throwing a lazy salute at the camera as the clip ended, fading back to the main anchor-person as Kyle embraced me in the Cobra’s hub section.

“Well, kcuf me.” I smiled, figuring that this would aid my cause no end in the court the next morning.

“If your d-1ck is as big as your balls, maybe I will.” A husky female voice over my shoulder laughed. I turned to find Kirstine the receptionist and a smattering of onlookers had been stood behind me silently watching the clip. A couple of them laughed at Kirstine’s joke before one by one clapping a ripple of applause that went on for a couple of seconds and spread throughout the bar. I felt myself redden in embarrassment as almost every last one of the onlookers then proceeded to pump my hand vigorously or slap me on the back until my wrist burned and my shoulders were a mass of bruises. “Later, commander,” Kirstine smiled then headed back out, returning to her duties at the reception desk. The attention I’d been receiving since arriving at Merope finally made sense.

“I’m not having much luck finding you a lawyer.” Adrian told me when things quietened down, “What do you need one for anyway, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“That,” I told him sourly, gesturing at the screen behind him, which had now gone back to the Liverpool vs Man Utd match, the scoreline now 3-1 to the home team. “I’m being sued for breaking the ungrateful dratsab's leg in the rescue and for preventing him from joining the Thargoids in their fight against mankind.”

“You’re kidding, right?” He asked disbelievingly.

“I tihs you not, my friend.” I assured him. “He claims he’s a member of the ‘Far God’ religion, whatever the hell that is. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.” I quoted Max as I drank my way halfway through another glass of Guinness. That had become my favourite cliché.

“That sucks, man.”

“I guess I’m going to have to represent myself tomorrow morning when the case is due.”

“What time?”

“Eleven.”

“Leave it with me. I’ll make some more calls.” Adrian told me as he stacked the glasses he’d polished back in their racks.

“What can you do?”

“Never underestimate the power of a hotel manager,” Adrian winked at me. “Your next pint is on the house, by the way.”

“Cheers,” I thanked him, raising my glass and giving him my thumb. “Now get yourself a drink on me.”

Adrian swiped the tab pad across my thumb and poured himself a Lavan brandy. I almost considered telling him he was taking the ssip by helping himself to something so expensive, but if he came through for me in the morning then it would be credits well spent. And he’d already let me have free reign over the mini-bar. I returned to my table and spent the rest of the evening in the bar chatting with well-wishers who were being made aware of both my presence and my predicament by Adrian.







tbc