Scout Ship: Rise of the Empyrean Empire: Novel 01 Read online

  Of course, that left the reactor. What kind of reactor ran without reaction mass? Well, it wouldn’t be a reactor without reaction mass, some other form of energy generation? Maybe whatever it was, lasted for so long they didn’t need a feed. The reactor was huge after all, and could hold a lot of reaction mass within it. Maybe they just swapped out something every year, or ten years, or maybe it was something that humanity hadn’t even theorized yet.

  There was no writing in here either, just dead touch consoles all over the place, assuming they were touch consoles and not just displays. The control interface may have just been audio via A.I., or for all I knew mental connections, humanity had flirted with those types of interfaces in the past.

  “When it’s investigated everything in engineering that it can, without damaging anything, have it search and scan the rest of the ship room by room. That will take far longer than the time we have, but it will be ready with a lot of data for the scientists when they show up.”

  Carly nodded, “Yes sir,” and sent the commands.

  Then added, “Impulse sir? You think they have AG?”

  I shrugged, “Based on the shape of the ship, and other circumstantial evidence we’ve found to date, there are number of contextual clues that seems to support that theory.”

  Carly looked thoughtful for a moment, and then her eyes narrowed.

  “Columbus, postulate if it’s possible a localized gravity distortion and sheer could have caused the damage to the alien ship’s hull.”

  I raised an eyebrow and she shrugged, “If they’re using AG to move the ship, and within their ship for gravity and inertial dampening, why not as a weapon too?”

  That was alarming, and something I hadn’t thought about at all. Which I should be ashamed of, since I did rise up in the weapons and navigation track.

  Columbus replied, “The damage would be consistent with such an event, but I can’t be certain that was the actual cause.”

  It was still just speculation, but it all fit just a little to neatly, to the point where coincidence strained credulity. It was possible their bodies were just tougher than ours and gravity didn’t matter, but as the circumstantial evidence mounted it became much less likely.

  I wondered what else they could do with artificial gravity? Could they use it to communicate somehow? Is that why there were no radio waves? Gravity didn’t move at the speed of light either, it instantly propagated through space, so did they have FTL communications, and perhaps scans that could detect mass immediately instead of waiting for the passive light to catch up, or the active Radar, Lidar, and spectrograph scans to return?

  Now I was just building things up in my head, trying to think up worse case scenarios in case they were inimical and would attack us. Would we even have a chance? Still, they were so far ahead of us who knew if they couldn’t do all that and more that I hadn’t even conceived possible? Did they already know we were here?

  Chapter Six

  For the next two days, we watched the scans coming in. Nothing else revealing had been found for the alien technology. Although we did figure out a few things. The aliens, whatever they were, definitely weren’t humanoid. We’d found what was obviously crew quarters, because the rooms were identical to each other, and had a bathroom of sorts. I say of sorts, because the shower was wider than it was tall.

  The bedroom had no bed in it per say, but did have some kind of soft rectangle on the floor made of soft polymers where the aliens had likely slept. There were no pictures, artwork, physical books, or writing of any kind anywhere, which I speculated meant they weren’t big on individuality, but that was just a guess. For all I knew the ship that fought it had stripped the ship of everything before powering down the core.

  But if that was the case why didn’t they just claim the ship, if they were of the same species?

  I smirked, maybe this was a third species, and the aliens in 61-Virginis were completely different. Perhaps this highly advanced ship was the last uninvited guest to drop in on that system.

  That thought was terrifying, we wouldn’t have a chance in hell. Chances favored species infighting, but another player was definitely a possibility that I couldn’t just dismiss. If there was one alien species, why not two? A shiver went down my spine, and suddenly the stars didn’t feel empty to me anymore.

  It was the first hour of my shift, and I turned my head toward the bridge door when it opened, and Katy walked in with a pack over her shoulder.

  She said, “Can I talk to you sir?”

  Her voice was a little sloppy, and I wondered if she was buzzed, or maybe drunk. She really was sinfully attractive, so much so that it was an effort to keep my eyes above her neck.

  It’d been a very long year.

  I replied, “Captain’s ready room,” as I stood up and walked over there. The door opened and I stepped inside, and I rounded the desk to sit down. She came in and sat in the chair across from me.

  We’d had more than a few conversations over the last year, but we were on opposing twelve hour shifts, and hadn’t talked all that much because of that. Usually only when she needed help with Carly’s training, or some other ship concern.

  Usually her hair was up in a bun, but right now it flowed over her shoulders and down her back. Beautiful dark red hair that made her face softer somehow when it was down. She was without a doubt the most attractive woman on the ship, at least in my opinion, and her body while in shape was very curvy in all the right places.

  My thoughts were totally inappropriate, not that I thought she’d ever want anything like that, and I hoped my attraction didn’t show in my face as I looked steadily into her green eyes. She was definitely tipsy at the least. She pulled the backpack off her shoulder, and put it in her lap, and then pulled out two glasses and a bottle of scotch.

  She sighed, “Did Timothy tell you? We tried to be discrete, small ship and all that.”

  I immediately felt even more guilty about my inappropriate thoughts, when it finally hit me why she was here. She’d been in a relationship with my best friend. For how long I had no idea, and how hadn’t I known that? They were both Sr. Lieutenants, so that wasn’t an issue. Regardless, she’d come to share her grief with her lover’s best friend, me, and my thoughts had been… well never mind what I’d been thinking.

  “You know drinking on duty is not allowed?”

  She nodded, “Yes sir,” she said as she poured a couple of glasses, and then slid one toward me. She always did have a loose interpretation of regulations, but her work was exemplary otherwise.

  I sighed, “No, he didn’t tell me. How long?”

  She replied, “Three months, sir. It started out as just… a relief valve. It’s a long cruise. But it didn’t take us long to fall in love. You know how he is… was, he was a hell of a catch for me.”

  I waved that away, “Call me Michael, for this conversation anyway, and I’m sure he felt the same way about you. I’m sorry we lost him.”

  It seemed right, she’d come to share her grief over her lover’s death with her lover’s best friend, not with her superior officer.

  She smiled sadly, “Thank you Michael. We had a lot of plans, we were going to get married and apply for a service exception at the end of this mission. We were actually going to ask the captain to…” she trailed off.

  Service exceptions weren’t that rare, as long as married couples weren’t in the same chain of command the UEDF would not only allow them to serve at the same postings, but would make sure it happened. Of course, that went away as soon as one of them was promoted into a first officer or captain position, since then they’d be in the same chain of command.

  I don’t know what made me do it, maybe I thought it was time to talk about it. Regardless, it just felt right to share a story about him, and one about what a selfless hero he really was in the pursuit of his duties. The captain had said he gave his life to what we believed in and why we fought, which had been the truth. His death had been senseless, but his life had been
a gift to all of us.

  “Did he tell you he saved my life, on the Beta Hydri mission?”

  She shook her head, “He wouldn’t talk about it, either of the missions that he earned metals for.”

  “You ever been there?”

  She said, “No, before this I was at 82 Eridani, and Delta Pavonis.”

  Delta Pavonis had a world not very unlike Earth was, it was habitable with a human population in the billions. I’d love to see it someday, but I hadn’t gotten to see either of the fully settled words, the other one being Sigma Draconis.

  “Beta Hydri is a lot like Eridani, it’s basically a huge spinning space station habitat for millions, around a gas giant, along with a refinery and scoop shuttles to claim hydrogen. We were at the standard entry point for civilian shipping. Doing interdictions if their paperwork didn’t match up with their navigation logs or mass readings.”

  Standard entry points were just the areas scanned and commonly used by navigators on the ships. Any ship could get their own scans elsewhere, but in general it was much safer to come out of subspace outside of a solar system. All the mass in a solar system effected subspace, especially the sun, and could cause major issues, including a critical failure of some kind during transition. The closer to the sun, the worse the odds of a successful transition and even death.

  Fortunately, on the edge of a solar system the chances of transition failure with the latest Chavez-Teller drive was much less than one percent. At Jupiter, the failure rate would be about five percent, all the way in near earth it was a fifty-fifty chance the ship would have catastrophic failure and possibly even be destroyed, ripped apart by forces we barely understood. Most civilian ships would never risk it, they were there to make money, not to throw away lives, resources, and ships on a stupid gamble to save a little gas, and six days burning in system from a safe entry point.

  “A large freighter came through with obviously forged data, and the captain ordered them to heave to and prepare to be boarded. That’s when we found out it was a pirate Q-ship as well as a smuggler, several false pieces of hull were ejected, revealing missile launchers and phased plasma arrays. The ship was already in close range, too close, and opened fire on our ship. We didn’t find out until later, that they were smugglers, and only in the system to steal some reaction mass to get to their final destination. Some idiot had let them run too low, which is why their electronic paper work was so badly forged, they weren’t truly prepared for entry into Beta Hydri and had just thrown together the bad forgeries in desperation.”

  I shook my head, “I’d found out later from the debriefings, the captain had ordered to charge and fire our own weapons, but it was too late, the pirates fired as soon as their false plates were clear. The deflectors were charged, but at close range the plasma stream was at full strength. They cut into us easily, and they breached the ship from the edge all the way to the center of the ship. The bridge was gone, as was the captain and first officer, and half of engineering. The second officer had been in her quarters, which was destroyed by one of two missiles the idiots fired into us, when we were already dead in space.

  “The second missile hit the compartment next to me. Woke up to my ship suit buttoning up, as I flew toward a huge hole in the hull. I managed to grab a loose EPS cable sticking out of the shattered wall as I flew out, and wrapped it around my wrist twice before the slack ran out, and my arm was dislocated as I came to a very sudden stop.”

  Katy’s eyes were a little wide, and I laughed, “I might have been a bit frightened, and in need of a new suit.”

  Katy snorted, “I doubt that.”

  I was scared, terrified really. My heart had been racing, and I’d been sweating buckets in my suite.

  “You’re right, my sphincter was far too tight to allow anything out.”

  She snickered, “What happened then?”

  “The pirates left us to die, and their ship started a burn in system to the refinery. My arm was useless, but I used the other to pull on the cable and get back aboard. Over fifty percent of the ship was a vacuum according to Amy, and the main ship’s A.I. was melted scrap. It was a miracle they didn’t ignite our hydrogen tanks, if they’d aimed a little bit down they would have. Perhaps they missed on purpose, only burning the upper decks, afraid if we did go up that closely to them that we’d damage their ship.”

  The hydrogen and xenon tanks were mid-ship and on the bottom deck, spaced around the six large ion engines on the bottom of the ship.

  “I was able to get to an oxygen cabinet and hook it up to my suit one handed, and then I started to move through the ship toward the hangar deck, which thankfully the bastards missed. The first two emergency air locks I tried, had warped outer doors that lost their seal, so there’d be no way to open the other door because of the safeties. The ship was a twisted wreck, and without the A.I. I had no idea who was left alive.

  “The third inner emergency airlock was a loss as well, and that’s when I decided to hoof it outside, and I headed outside. Thing was, I was in bed sleeping, and didn’t have my magnetic boots on.”

  She shook her head, “Are you crazy sir?”

  “Michael, and yes, just a little bit. There are a lot of lips, sensor blisters, and other handy things on the hull of our ship to grab onto, so I very carefully moved along the hull of the ship, but not carefully enough. I was maybe twenty yards from the landing bay and outer air lock door which I could use to get back in the ship. I was in shock, one arm was numb with pain, and I was scared, as well as angry as I wondered just who had died when I’d managed to live. I also wasn’t positive at the time the landing bay was intact, and was scared I’d just lived long enough to die last. I mistimed a jump as a result, and my trajectory was off just enough that the blister I aimed for was out of reach, and I floated off into space. Let that be a lesson to you, always keep a cool head in tense situations. I should have been dead.”

  Katy snorted, “Obviously, you aren’t.”

  I nodded, “Timothy was in the hangar deck, prepping an assault shuttle by himself, when he saw me floating by. The large external door was already opened.”

  I paused for a moment, and looked in Katy’s green eyes, “He didn’t know who it was, or if they were even alive, but he didn’t hesitate for a second. As soon as I saw him, he was already running in that awkward way people do in magnetic boots. He grabbed a jet pack, the ones the crew uses for outside work, and then jumped out of the ship in my direction. He put the pack on as he floated toward me, and then used the jets to correct his vector, and caught me. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and shook his head, and then used the jets to return to the landing bay.”

  Katy nodded, “That’s exactly what he would have done. I think he was as crazy as you are Michael.”

  I laughed, “Very much so.”

  I stopped there, the point of the story had been to talk about how Timothy saved my life, this was our own little mini-wake, but Katy wasn’t satisfied with half a story.

  “So, then what happened? I understand you got a promotion of some kind out of it?”

  I sighed, “It was stupid, I almost destroyed Beta Hydri, but because it worked I got a promotion.”

  Katy narrowed her eyes, “Because what worked?”

  I waved a hand, “I took over getting the shuttle ready and armed, I was the navigation and weapons specialist out of the two of us, he was the pilot. While I did that, Timothy went back into the ship to search for more survivors. We both wanted revenge on the pirates, but at the same time we wouldn’t leave any live crew behind, even if there was a second shuttle for them to claim.

  “Timothy found seven others by the way, but in the meantime, I was on the flight deck waiting for him to get back, the shuttle fully loaded with eight missiles, and gassed up. Just needed Timothy to come back and fly it. That’s when the large rack of twenty missiles caught my eye. I got a crazy idea, and with Amy’s help, I programmed the missiles on the same heading the pirates were on, and set them to launch on a
ten-minute timer. Then I used a loader, to launch the rack out of the landing bay. I literally just tossed it out the door.”

  She stared at me with her mouth open.

  I grinned, it really was stupid, if the pirates had spoofed any of those missiles to miss, they would have kept going toward the gas giant, and perhaps reacquired a lock on the station or refinery platform. It was very stupid, but it worked, and some admiral decided that made me command material, making the hard decisions to stop the pirates from terrorizing the civilian outpost and space station on Beta Hydri. Truthfully, I don’t know if I’d do it again, I was very angry at the time about the crew deaths.

  “So, Timothy gets back and the nine of us stuff ourselves in a shuttle built for six, Timothy was the only qualified pilot left alive so we launched a messenger missile for Mars and the admiralty apprising them of the situation, and then launched from the ship and set our heading for the Beta Hydri space station. From where we were, it was a one gravity burn for just over an hour, and then flip for another hour burn to reach orbit of the gas giant.

  “We were about thirty minutes into the burn, when our sensors picked up the debris. Twenty missiles might have been overkill, there wasn’t much left of pirate ship at all. I used the one phased plasma array on the assault shuttle to burn any big pieces as we flew past, the rest of the pieces were destined to fall into the gas giant, but were still small enough for the stations deflectors to handle just in case they didn’t miss.”

  She shook her head and sighed, and picked up her glass, her piercing green eyes daring me not to drink with her.

  I did the only thing I could do, I picked up the snifter of scotch, and raised my glass.

  “To Timothy, may he be in a better place.”

  She replied, “To Timothy, we will miss you.”

  We both slammed back the alcohol, and put the glasses down.