Eternal Frontier (The Eternal Frontier Book 1) Read online

CHAPTER SIX

  Anger burned through Tag like a T-drive revving into hyperspace, and sweat coated his palms as he tightened his hands into fists. The pirates had done this. It seemed exceptionally cruel to send the Argo straight into the hellish bowels of the raging star. But as Kaufman’s cardiac support system continued its rhythmic beeping, he realized the action was hardly contrary to the barbaric way they’d treated the ship and its crew so far. He calmed himself, fighting through the initial panic. His first thought was to determine how much time he and Kaufman had left.

  Without the ship AI’s help, he would have to make a rough estimate on his own. It wasn’t too difficult to estimate their distance from Eta. Given their steady acceleration and current speed, he calculated they’d reach Eta within the day. Of course it would be less than that before they’d be fried by the star’s radiation and intense heat.

  There was no time to delay.

  “Can’t wait in here all day, can I?” Tag asked Kaufman. He looked at her still form and wished he had found just one more crew member alive to help with this predicament. He wished she was alive and able to help. But wishes couldn’t save lives. Only fast thinking and real action could do that.

  The remnants of yellow fog still swirled in the med bay, far thinner than before, but still, to Tag, no less dangerous. A quick review on the terminal showed the haze had dissipated somewhat from the outer passages, too. There was no telling how long it would be before it was completely scrubbed. Tag had a feeling he couldn’t afford to wait and find out.

  “Kaufman, if I don’t get us out of here alive, I apologize.” He pressed a hand to the acrylic partition separating the lab and the med bay. “But I’m going to do the best I damn well can. I promise you that much.”

  He snatched an emergency oxygen mask and placed it over his mouth. Smashing down the airlock button, he stepped into the decontamination chamber, let the gases hiss over his body, and took another deep breath as the airlock released him into the med bay.

  Waves of the dissipating fog seemed to surround him and reach out like a living creature as he pushed through the light haze. Every bit of exposed skin stung. His flesh turned red. The pain wasn’t as bad as the first time he’d touched the fog when it was at its full strength, but it was steadily intensifying. Sweat trickled across his forehead, and his senses slowly distorted. He gasped another breath of oxygen through the mask, but he could feel his throat starting to constrict. Maybe the poisonous fog was leeching through him, tunneling into his bloodstream. His mind became muddled by the invisible fire crawling over his skin and through his nerves. There would be no way he could make it to the bridge and reroute the Argo under this kind of duress.

  He stumbled and fell. Fatigue crept into his muscles as he tried to push himself up. He found he couldn’t do it. His breathing was growing shallower, weaker.

  Come on, Tag. Kaufman needs you. The Argo needs you.

  He crawled forward to a cabinet along the bulkhead. Leaning against it, he slowly lifted himself to his feet and opened it, his vision growing even more dizzied and blurred. He reached, swinging his hand through the air, until he grasped crinkling plastic. His fingers wrapped around a swatch of plastic fabric, and he pulled a biosafety suit from its place in the closet, then toppled backward, the suit flopping over him. Darkness crept into his vision, and he could only see a narrow tunnel before him. Palms and knees flat on the deck, he dragged himself back to the airlock.

  Hold on to the suit. Hold on to the suit. He had to repeat the mantra over and over. Or was he saying it aloud? He wasn’t sure.

  His vision went completely black, and the threads of an unforgiving void wrapped around his mind, threatening him with unconsciousness, but he persevered past those enveloping coils and continued crawling.

  Kaufman needs you. The Argo needs you. Hold on to the suit. The suit. Suit. The words echoed against the inside of his skull and slurred over his swollen tongue.

  His head knocked into the bulkhead. Had he reached the lab side of the med bay? Again, forcing energy into his exhausted muscles, he pulled himself upright. His hands played across the bulkhead, searching for the airlock’s manual release, numbness spreading through his fingers and hampering his movements.

  But he thought he felt it. The lever. He pulled down.

  Somewhere, in the shadows of his mind, he recognized the whoosh of air and hiss of an opening hatch. He tumbled inside, clutching the biosafety suit to his chest, and then slammed his hand randomly against the interior of the airlock over and over, searching for the button. Finally he heard the satisfying punch of a depressed button, and the hatch hissed shut. Decontaminating gases poured over him, and the air in the chamber was sucked out, replaced by fresh bursts of clean oxygen washing over him.

  But the yellow gas had already done its damage. He could no longer keep the encroaching darkness from his mind. It swallowed him whole.

  As the inner hatch to the airlock opened, he crumpled, sprawling across the deck of the lab. He reached out, his numb fingers trembling in the air, a final thought whispering through his mind: I’m sorry, Kaufman. I’m so sorry.

  He fell into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Pod ejected.” The robotic voice echoed in the lab.

  A pang of piercing agony shot through Tag’s head. His eyelids opened slowly. Light filtered in, stabbing into his retinas like scorching daggers and exacerbating his pounding headache. It was worse than the most debilitating hangover he’d ever endured.

  “Pod ejected,” the robotic voice repeated.

  Faint recognition burned through the cloud of Tag’s headache. The voice. Was the ship’s AI running again? Optimism cut through his muddled thoughts like Earth’s sun parting through storm clouds. But with his returning consciousness came brutal reality. Standard announcements, like “unauthorized boarders” and “pod ejected,” were not the reaction of any AI system. They were simple statements, programmed to go off in response to various events—whether it was the captain sending the ship into full alert or, in the case of the “pod ejected,” one of the ship’s escape pods being flung from the ship.

  But if escape pods were being ejected, that meant—

  Tag sprang to his feet. Someone else was still alive on the ship. Or at least, they had been on the ship.

  Were there others hiding from the pirates, waiting to escape at the last moment? He scrolled through the lab’s terminal to view the map of Eta and the surrounding planets. Sure enough, two little blips pinged on the projection near the Argo. They appeared to be careening toward the planet, Eta-Five, where Lieutenant Sofia Vasquez was supposed to be. On the comms menu, Tag selected a command to open a channel with the pods.

  “Pod One, this is Lieutenant Commander Tag Brewer, chief medical officer of the Argo. Do you read?”

  No response. No static. Nothing.

  He tried the second pod. “Pod Two, this is Lieutenant Commander Tag Brewer, chief medical officer aboard the Argo. Do you read?”

  Again, no response. He checked the comm log and saw both messages had failed to even make it off the ship. Whatever the pirates had done to the ship’s comms was still in effect. Through the holoscreen, Tag watched the pods rocketing away. Kaufman and he needed to be on one. He started to put on the biosafety suit he’d almost lost his life dragging in here. There was one more pod left. He could grab a suit for Kaufman and take her to the pod. They might be able to catch up with the other two, or at least land near enough for a rendezvous.

  He finished slipping on the white biosafety suit, and the self-cinching seams closed over his back. Then the ship shuddered. A blue beam traced across the map of the Eta solar system, signifying an energy weapon. It had seemingly come out of nowhere.

  But then Tag realized what was happening.

  The pirates were still near the Argo. Damn it. Tag remembered that they’d evaded the Argo’s radar and lidar in the first place. They were virtually invisible to the ship’s sensors, and their stealth ship wouldn�
�t show up on the solar system map.

  The energy beam connected with Pod Two, and the blinking dot disappeared. Tag’s heart sank. More death, more destruction. He waited for another beam to fire from the stealth ship and catch Pod One, but instead, the Argo rumbled a deep, throaty growl. It had fired its own weapons. A chain of concentrated pulse rounds flew across the holoprojection from the Argo’s single energy cannon. The rounds lanced into the small blip representing Pod One, and it too disappeared.

  Had the pirates reprogrammed the ship to fire on its own escape pods? Or worse, were they still on board the Argo?

  “No,” Tag said. “No, no, no, no.”

  He ran his fingers through his sweat-matted hair. Now, he feared, if he and Kaufman boarded the remaining pod, they would be shot out of space like Pods One and Two. And even if they somehow evaded the fire of their commandeered ship and that of the pirates, they would crash-land on Eta-Five alone and with no way of getting off the damned globe. He glanced at the map of the Eta system once more. They were mere hours from reaching the overpowering grasp of the star. The ship’s radiation shields could only endure so much before he and Kaufman became shipboard stir-fry.

  There was only one surefire way to save them. He had to pilot the Argo. It had been decades since he’d been at the helm of a ship, and technology had advanced since his ill-fated days of flight officer training school, but he had no choice.

  He put the biosafety suit’s helmet and mask over his head and, before leaving the lab, considered what he was up against.

  For some reason, the pirates hadn’t simply obliterated the Argo with their cannons or a well-placed torpedo that would have turned the ship into a cloud of debris floating through space. To Tag, that could only mean one thing. They wanted no evidence that this ship had ever existed—not a single shard of discarded alloy. He wondered if this was what had become of the UNS Hope so many years ago. It too had vanished without a trace and, so far, no sign of the ship had been recovered. Whoever these pirates were, they seemed to want to turn this part of the universe into a figurative black hole.

  But maybe there was hope of somehow evading the pirates. After all, at least the Hanno had made it through the Eta system unscathed to drop off Lieutenant Vasquez.

  He shuddered. The pirates possessed better firepower. Their ship was stealthier and more advanced. And they were still coasting alongside the Argo. Even if he did gain control of it, what then? How would he escape the cannon fire that had decimated Pod Two?

  He needed to compartmentalize this. One thing at a time. First things first: he needed to get to the bridge and ensure he could control the ship. The blasts from the Argo’s energy cannon worried him. It meant the pirates were somehow in command, which might explain why the AI didn’t seem to work. Maybe the pirates had gained remote control. Tag sighed in frustration. He was no hacker or computer specialist and wasn’t sure how he’d break their stranglehold if that was the case.

  He performed a final cam survey over the ship’s passages and bridge then drew away in shock. At least now he knew the ship wasn’t being controlled remotely.

  A trio of pirates was in the bridge. One sat in the captain’s crash couch while another worked weapons, and a third sat at the pilot’s terminal. Each wore sleek black mechanized suits. Glowing orange visors obscured their faces, and tubes snaked from their helmets into ports along their backs. Gun barrels were mounted on their forearms, and additional sidearms were holstered at their hips. Tag had no idea how he would get past this obstacle blocking his path toward escape, saving Kaufman, and warning the SRE fleet of these bastards.

  Tag punched the button for the airlock and let the decontamination process repeat itself for the third time that day. He left the safety of the lab, and the biosafety suit’s air filtration system kicked in. Air whooshed in and out, reminding Tag of what it sounded like to breathe underwater when diving. His suit rustled as he strode across the med bay’s deck and picked up Kaufman’s pulse rifle. The weapon felt heavy in his hands despite the polymeric shell. The small fusion core in the device was weighty enough, and the weapon was usually handled while the user wore power armor. There was no way he could fit into Kaufman’s idle armor still lying on the deck. Even though she was broader and more muscular than him, built like all the other marines, she was also half a head shorter.

  Ah, well, he thought morosely. The armor hadn’t saved her or any of the others from the pirates’ rounds. It won’t save me.

  He puffed out his chest, primed the rifle, letting it hum to life, and punched the manual release for the med bay’s hatch. This time, to his surprise, it hissed open, and he crept into the passage, cautiously stepping over Morgan’s outstretched limbs and avoiding his fallen crewmates. Winding through the slightly hazy corridor, he snuck toward the bridge. Every step he took, he was plagued by a single, relentless thought: If these pirates had made it past the marines, how was he, a medical officer, supposed to bring down three of them?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tag shouldered the rifle and peered down its optic sights. He peeked around the corner and aimed at the hatch leading to the bridge. There were no pirates in sight. Slowly, he crept to the hatch. Every nerve in his body tingled, and a nagging voice in the back of his mind kept telling him this was suicide. He wanted to ignore it and end this battle against the pirates in a swift, surprise spray of pulse rounds.

  But it was those impulsive, impetuous urges that had once sabotaged his career trajectory as a flight officer and landed him in the ship’s med bay instead of the captain’s seat. He paused and let that nagging voice speak a bit louder. The pirates’ armor had appeared unscathed when he’d observed them over the ship’s cameras. And he hadn’t seen a single dead pirate amid the corpses of the Argo’s crew. There was something about the pirates he’d missed. Something the marines had missed. There was a reason the pirates hadn’t taken a single casualty.

  Then Tag realized he held that reason in his hands. The marines had, of course, been using their standard-issue pulse rifles. But not a single round seemed to have connected with the pirates. It almost seemed too obvious to him now when he considered how much more advanced these pirates seemed to be. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the shields shimmering around the pirates’ armor again. Their armor was somehow able to generate enormous power to dissipate incoming energy rounds through suit-bound shields.

  Energy rounds—pulse, laser, whatever—wouldn’t pierce them. Once again, his mind raced to the ship’s armaments. The Argo was equipped with a pair of Gauss cannons capable of launching depleted-uranium rounds. When an enemy ship’s energy shields prevented pulsefire, good old-fashioned kinetics-based weapons often did the trick. Tag retreated slowly from the bridge and crept to the armory. His suit rustled with each movement, no matter how quiet he tried to be. He was almost there when footsteps clanged down the corridor.

  The armory was at the opposite end of the passageway, and the footsteps sounded too close. Whoever they belonged to would be on him at any moment. He ducked into the nearest hatch: Engineering. As carefully as possible, he closed it. The sound of footsteps rounded the corner just as the hatch shut. Tag backed into the rear of the bay. Dull amber lights glowed over the space and illuminated the bodies of three more fallen crewmates, no doubt suffocated by the yellow haze. Large pipes and wires spiderwebbed across the room, connecting ducts and equipment Tag only vaguely recognized.

  With the hatch closed, he couldn’t hear where the footsteps had led, and if he went back to the passageway, he might run into a pirate. Even though he hadn’t made it to the armory, engineering wasn’t a bad second option. A glance around the space revealed all manner of tools scattered on the workbenches—chem-catalyst welders and cutters, sensor arrays, idle repair bots. He set the pulse rifle down and looked for something to replace it.

  There was nothing Tag found that would prove an adequate kinetic projectile weapon. The closest thing he uncovered with any long-range utility was a chem-catalyst welder. But if
pulse rounds were absorbed by the pirates’ shields, he wasn’t sure how well the welders would fare. He only had one chance at finding a working weapon, and any modicum of doubt was enough to pass by a possible candidate. With all the available tools, he figured he could put together some kind of weapon.

  But while tools were something he had in spades, time was not. Instead, he examined the spare disc-shaped repair bots with their tentacle arms. The small bots and their limited AI were used for repairing things like hull damage or malfunctioning sensor arrays. Their reinforced plating, meant to withstand space debris, might help prevent damage to Tag. He picked up a drone. It was light enough to lift with one hand. With his other hand, he hoisted a heavy wrench. He felt hopelessly prehistoric wielding the improvised weapon and shield, but if luck would have it, he wouldn’t meet a pirate on his way to the armory anyway.

  Inhaling deeply, he positioned himself by the hatch. He tapped on a terminal and brought a bulkhead-mounted holoscreen to life. The limited intraship cam views allowed him to see partway down the corridor. There was no sign of the pirate he’d heard before, but he might be lingering in the cam’s blind spot.

  But Tag couldn’t wait any longer to find out. He inched the hatch open and winced as it groaned. Peeking out, he surveyed the passageway. Except for the bodies of his former crewmates and the slowly diminishing haze, it was clear. So far. He gently closed the hatch and sprinted through the corridor. The armory hatch appeared before him on his left. The door hung open, letting the soft glow of lights filter from the small gap between hatch and bulkhead, and Tag crept toward it.

  He held the wrench back, ready to strike, listening for any sounds of a pirate within. With his shoulder pressed to the hatch, he pushed the hatch open and stepped inside. Bright white lights washed over him. Weapons and pulse mags littered the deck, as did discarded pieces of armor. Marine locker doors lay open to reveal holopics ranging from landscapes of unfamiliar planets to seductive pinups to smiling families and loved ones. Tag tore his eyes from the sad sight and snuck between the lockers to the gun storage. He heard the clink of metal against metal. Holding his breath, he leaned around a locker.