9 Tales Told in the Dark 19 Read online

  “From the point of view of some hypothetical ‘at rest observer’ in normal space, you’ve been gone only—uh, I think it’s three nanoseconds—or is it milliseconds? Some ridiculously tiny number, anyway! Not knowing when the Narakan ships entered hyperspace, our ships had no way of knowing when they’d return to regular space in front of the colony. Turned out to be about six hours after our warning drone, so the colony’s defenders were full-on ready. But nobody could know that ahead of time.”

  Svonavec shook his head. “Even so, why come charging through here with hardly any room to maneuver?”

  Ansell shrugged. “Surprise the Narks?”

  “Yeah, sure—very surprising. Also suicidal. Three ships against twenty?”

  “Maybe they had something to prove.”

  “To who? The fucking Narks?”

  “Or our ever-doubting allies,” Ansell responded tartly. “They gotta respect our courage more now!”

  “Fuck, they already think we’re crazy—this just proves it.”

  “Fact is, they did it and it worked. The ships, the people we lost—sure, that’s horrible. But on balance, it was worth it!”

  Across the way, Dante Karpinski cringed.

  “Enough!” CPO Zhang finally stepped in, fire in his eyes. “You clods shut your mouths and get busy. We have a shitload of prep work to do. I expect this Recovery Team and its equipment 100% ready for action, the instant the Skipper issues the order—and anyone who shits on my expectations will regret it!”

  “Okay you clods, listen up.” Zhang’s voice was calm, controlled and above all controlling over their suit radios: “As usual, we’ll push off manually. I expect everyone to conserve propellant this time! We’ll need it for maneuvering through that debris field. Right now, it’s primarily a scouting mission—once we locate the high-value items and guide them out of that jumbled mess, we go back for the tow-sled and bring it all in at once. Everybody got that?”

  Dante and the other three responded affirmatively as the wide airlock doors began to open.

  “Recovering the hyperspace generator and mass-reader are, as always, our top priority. But watch out for unexploded ordinance or anything else of a threatening nature. Oh, and this one used to be a Nark heavy cruiser—so keep an eye out for anything of possible intelligence value! Okay, clods—here we go.”

  For the third time in two days, Dante and the others followed their team leader from the ship. The previous jobs had been almost routine—bringing in spent drones. You went out, latched onto a drone and jetted back to strip it of reusable components then stowed the valuables away in Andersen’s hold.

  Dealing with the wreckage of a full-sized, mostly exploded warship was several orders of magnitude more difficult—and more dangerous.

  The five of them floated to within a hundred meters of the debris field then pulled up in a decently even side-by-side line using micro-bursts from their e-suits’ maneuvering jets to cancel their momentum. They continued using the suits’ built-in sensors to study what they faced.

  “As expected, all manner of shit,” Zhang muttered “Everything from microscopic particles up to chunks the size of my daddy’s heavy-lift air-truck. Spotty higher-radiation areas, of course. But that shouldn’t be a problem—long as we limit exposure times. We’ll each have to pick our own way through to the middle section—which seems mostly intact. Just everybody take your time and stay alert! These suits cost the folks back home a damned lot. Some few might even be sorry if one of you fucking clods didn’t make it back—God only knows why . . . . ”

  “Okay, Boss,” Logan answered for the rest. “Let’s do this.”

  In they went.

  Like the others, Dante moved cautiously. Ten minutes into the debris field, a flash of reflected light drew his attention. A dish-shaped, partially broken piece of electronics almost the size of his head cartwheeled slowly past. He studied it closely. “Nark targeting sensor,” he murmured to himself, remembering a day in training when they’d showed off assorted recovered enemy artifacts. “Most of one, anyway.”

  “That you, Karpinski?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “Something to report?”

  “Negative, Chief. Something recognizable, but pretty ordinary.”

  “Okay, just stay alert and—”

  “Hey, Chief—I got something very un-ordinary over here.”

  “Ansell?”

  “Yes, Chief.”

  “You clods identify yourselves on comm, damn it!”

  “Sorry, Chief. But I was just passing this jagged, three-meter chunk of a magnetic cannon assembly when I got a weird reading—a strange concentration of the hydrogen-sulfate mix the Narakans breathe?”

  “That’s hydrogen-sulfide, Ansell.”

  “Oh, right. But anyhow, I move a little closer and there it is, impaled on a twisted piece, a—oh, fuck!”

  “Ansell? Crewman Ansell, report!”

  “Got distracted. Damn! Nark e-suit. Empty. Punctured and leaking air—or what passes for air with the long-noses. Oh shit—something came in at a weird angle, smacked me good.”

  “Is your suit punctured? Are you losing air?”

  “Checking. Micro-stress-fractures, only. Suit nanobots sealed them already. Diagnostics confirm only minimal air-loss. It was a fist-sized hunk of something, not sharp but moving faster than most of this junk. It feels—yeah, medical nanos say two broken ribs.”

  “Start for the ship. Stay alert and don’t rush! Logan, you should be closest—make sure he gets back okay.”

  “Logan here. Will do, Boss.”

  “Rest of us will continue—acknowledge?”

  “Svonavec, acknowledged.”

  “How ‘bout you, Karpinski?”

  “Uh, yeah—Karpinski, acknowledging.” He watched a ragged piece of once-organic matter flow across his line of sight. It had been the upper third of a Narakan, though part of the alien’s prehensile trunk had been sheared off, probably by the same explosion that seared what was left. The look of the mangled partial-corpse assured Dante that the Nark had been dead before its exposure to the icy, zero-pressure near-vacuum of space.

  In the days before the Third Solar War left them extinct on their homeworld, elephants and rhinos had been brought to Zilharko’s Planet. They were almost the only Earth animals that could adapt to Big Z’s high gravity without extensive genetic engineering. So Dante had seen a few of each in his birthworld’s zoo habitats.

  Of course, the meter-tall, obsessively militaristic aliens were in no way related to those massive creatures.

  Dante couldn’t shrug inside the close-fitting environmental-suit. So he pulsed his maneuvering jets and continued on his way.

  The airlock’s inner doors parted and the balance of Recovery Team 2 returned to the service bay. Seated, Crewman Ansell greeted them and the moderately-loaded tow-sled they climbed off of with bemusement.

  “Well,” Ansell remarked as the others shed their e-suits, “see you scored a little more this time.”

  “Three pieces of what looks like alien computer components,” Logan confirmed upon removing her helmet. “What might be the ship’s log, too. All of it pitted and burned, but maybe Fleet Intelligence will be able to get something out of them.”

  “What about the more—uh, immediately useful—prizes?”

  “A hyper-field generator—one of the big Mark-V ones, capable of pushing a big ship like that was through hyperspace at .350 subjective with no trouble and the mass-reader to go with it. They were still hooked up to each other, still in what was left of the central compartment. Had to use our suits-lasers to cut ‘em loose.”

  “So—they’re both in good working order?”

  Logan blinked. “Not a scratch on either unit—predictably.”

  By now the others had gathered around their injured crewmate.

  “Steve,” Svonavec growled, “for someone who claims to know a lot about shit like hyperspace physics, you ask some pretty dumb-ass questions. We might not underst
and how the generators do what they do, or even why they work—”

  “Or,” Logan added, “why the mass-readers work in the hyper-void when no other navigational equipment does.”

  “Yeah, right.” Svonavec nodded. “We haven’t got a clue—and neither do our friends or enemies, or anybody but the freakish creatures that sell us the damned things. But we know they work, they make interstellar travel practical—so we use them. And there’s one other thing we know, from several hundred years’ experience.”

  Svonavec took a breath, leaned closer to the seated man.

  “Hyperdrive units and mass-readers are absolutely, fucking indestructible!”

  “We don’t quite know that,” Logan corrected. “I mean, if you tossed one into a black hole, maybe . . . .”

  “Enough,” Zhang said wearily. “How you doing, Ansell?”

  “Better. The Autodoc doused me with happy-juice. Then it programmed and pumped in a full regiment of reinforcements. Together with med-bots already inside me, they should have my ribs mended in a couple days. At which time I can return to full duty, it says.”

  “Good. We’ll probably still be grabbing stuff up by then and I have no intention of allowing the other teams to outdo us, even if we’re shorthanded. So you clods get all this material stowed, while I report to Pappas. On the double, people!”

  Dante and Svonavec separated courtesy quarter-second bursts from their suits’ tiny maneuvering jets. They were headed for a pair of drones that had burned-out one another’s hyperdrives.

  Of course that was technically inaccurate: The hyper-field generators and mass-readers were in perfect working order. It was the connecting circuits—in these cases built by human and Narakan hands—that shorted-out when two hyper-fields touched. Those circuits could and would be replaced, and the Lintonian devices reused by whoever possessed them again and again.

  Regaining that equipment was doubly important now. The Lintonians—mysterious and strange, almost magically powerful, silicon-based aliens—hadn’t been seen in their part of the galaxy since the beginning of the war. They’d pledged not to deal with the Aggressor States—meaning the Narakan Empire and Republic, and any who willingly supported them—for the duration of the war. But they also hadn’t said when one of their gigantic motherships would return to sell more of their vital devices to the Allies—or how much they’d charge.

  Just over five years later, the true value of what they sold was now clear to everyone.

  As for the drones, there really wasn’t much else to them. A light composite framework held the hyperspace generator and mass-reader, a micro-computer (to tell the drone where to go and what to do), that vulnerable connective circuitry and maybe (if it was primarily intended to carry information, rather than attack enemy ships) a simple comm-laser.

  The drones used the smallest class of the several generator sizes, but the entire affair had such little mass that the drones were much faster than the ships that carried them. Once launched—by a low-energy ‘budding-off’ from the mother-vessel’s hyper-field, an attack drone dialed up its own field to maximum and speeded toward its programmed target. When field met field, both objects fell back into normal space, their faster-then-light drives at least temporarily disabled.

  If drones knocked hostile ships back into normal space in reasonably similar timeframes, the battle would then continue with such conventional weapons as torpedoes, shells from various types of magnetic cannon and particle-beam emitters.

  “Zhang here,” Dante heard now. “We’ve got the sled loaded with everything from the Nark destroyer. Logan’s driving it back to the ship. I’ll meet you halfway, help you manhandle the drones in.”

  “Dante here. Thanks, Chief.”

  “Yeah, Svonavec here. We can manage, you know—”

  “I do, but we’re all tired—long day, but a productive one. Oh, Karpinski? Warrant Officer Valin just buzzed me—Team Three’s just finished work on Zafir. Figured you’d like to know?”

  “Thanks, Chief.” The question of exactly how Carina died still nagged at Dante. But he was relieved that he hadn’t been assigned to pick over the mangled remains of her ship. “See you in fifteen minutes or so. Karpinski out.”

  A couple minutes later: “Chief? Svonavec here. About to get hold of my drone, but something odd about it.”

  “Specify.”

  “My suit-sensors say there’s more to it than usual.”

  “More to it?”

  “Significantly higher mass—and I’m not talking about a comm-laser, more—”

  “Reverse thrust, Will! Back off that fucker now!”

  Dante had never heard real alarm in Zhang’s voice before. He decided to invest just enough propellant to reorient and see Svonavec.

  He saw William Svonavec’s suit-jets flare to life, obeying Zhang’s order without question. But it was too late.

  Dante watched in horror as the explosion erupted silently from the drone. The blast wave hit, swung Svonavec around. A split second later, shrapnel tore multiple holes in his suit—far more than the suit’s microscopic repair bots could handle. Pieces of varying sizes reached, punctured the stout crewman’s flesh. Blood and other bodily fluids exploded from him into cold space; a single scream cut short—either by failure of the e-suit’s transmitter or a sudden, violent death.

  “Karpinski!” Zhang shouted, but Dante had already realized his danger. He jetted away, outran the spreading, deadly shrapnel.

  “What the Hell?” Dante said from a safe location, well beyond the second drone. “Chief?”

  “Yeah. Booby-trapped—some kind of explosive and a proximity fuse. Wondered when somebody would think to try that. Bet Command orders our ships to start doing the same from now on”

  “Chief—Svonavec?”

  “Yes, Karpinski. We’ll recover the body—right after we retrieve what he died for.”

  “That’s the last of it,” Ansell said and Dante locked down the hold. “Wonder who thought it a great idea to give all our light cruisers in effect the same name?”

  “No idea.”

  “Your sister’s ship—Zafir? That comes from—?”

  “Arabic. Carina told me, after she looked it up.”

  “That was one of bigger Old Earth languages, right? I bet when Earthgov decided to cobble together Pan-Human, to promote species-wide unity, they used a bunch of Arabic words.”

  “Wouldn’t know.” Dante adjusted his uniform collar. “Ancient history isn’t my strong suit.”

  “Then you wouldn’t know where the word we actually use comes from?”

  “Victorious—no, you?”

  “Nope,” Ansell admitted, almost shamefaced. “But it was probably one of the other big ones—French or English. Or Russian—sounds kind of Russian to me.”

  Dante shrugged. “Zhang’s former ship—Teppo?”

  “He told me that’s from Finnish—most certainly not one of the famous ones.”

  “Well, Janos, like I said, I’m no expert—”

  “Attention, all hands!” The voice of Lieutenant-Commander Pappas, Andersen’s CO, filled the corridor. “Polygen ship Treni 332 just spotted an emergency escape pod from one of our ships, just a couple hundred AU closer the K-Class star. Call letters on it ID’s it as from the Zafir. Uninhabitable, due to catastrophic damage—but sensors indicate our sort of organic matter within. As always, we like to recover remains of our people—give families something to hold a funeral for, even if it’s just a few strands of DNA. We’re proceeding over there, but our escorts are anxious to get home—so am I frankly. And I know our recovery teams are all exhausted, but if anybody cares to—”

  Dante slapped the nearest intercom unit. “Karpinski here, Skipper. I volunteer!”

  His eyes met Steven Ansell’s, who nodded and stepped up. “Crewman Ansell, Ms. Pappas—I’ll go, too.”

  “Very good. Get suited up. We’ll be within range inside of five minutes.”

  True to its Commanding Officer’s word, the salvage ship
pulled alongside the comparatively tiny pod in minutes. Pressed for time, the two men left the airlock using their jets—at their gruff team leader’s expressed permission.

  One side of the escape pod was buckled inward, warped and holed by massive explosive force. On the opposite side, the hatch was jammed—half-open. Turned sideways, Dante and his friend barely squeezed through.

  “Oh, shit,” Ansell muttered, staring at the single body—the helmet of the e-suit open, the face ruined by explosive decompression. Then he realized his friend’s eerie silence and looked at the name stitched into the dead woman’s e-suit. “Oh, shit,” he said again, already calculating how they could get Carina Karpinski’s body back to their ship.

  CPO Zhang and Lieutenant-Commander Pappas entered the cramped ready room.

  “Stay seated, Crewman,” Pappas said when Dante Karpinski started to jerk himself to Attention. “Relax—if that’s possible.” She smiled, thinly.

  “Thanks, Skipper, for—letting me listen privately to the message she recorded. She was already in the suit, supervising repairs on a hull breach when Captain Durango gave the ‘abandon ship’ order.”

  “I know,” Pappas said softly.

  “Oh, yes—of course you do. It must’ve been too late.”

  “That’s right. The pod’s recorder confirms the ship blew up, even as your sister tried to assist a wounded crewmate inside. Just like she logged, the wounded man was blown out of the jammed hatch and the pod’s air reserve was lost. She only had a few hours of suit-air and with all the pod’s systems out she couldn’t even extend that by recharging the suit’s recycler.”

  Dante nodded. His sister had no way to signal the surviving cruiser as it turned, a third of a lightyear away—and jumped back into hyperspace, bound for their orbital base next to Colony 9.

  “She knew there would be no rescue,” Dante muttered. “Decided to make it quick.”

  “At least,” Zhang finally said, “you’ll be able to bring her home.”

  Dante Karpinski started to nod and the nod became a shudder of horrified despair.

  THE END