Among Enemies, page 18
part #9 of On Silver Wings Series
Agreed.
With the decision made, the conclave turned their focus back to the other matter immediately at hand.
The Alliance vessel was nearing the jump point.
It would not be long now.
*****
Parithalian Cruiser Upwind
As they watched the last preparations for the jump were being made. The cruiser would enter the jump point soon, and this mission would be over.
Sienele sighed softly.
It was well past time, in his opinion. They had learned much, and much of it was disturbing to say the very minimum. That there were conspiracies within the Alliance was nothing new, of course. The breadth of this one, that made it unique.
"Envoy, we are exiting the system well," a Parithalian aide said from behind him. "The Master of Ships will be engaging the jump drive shortly."
"Very good, thank him for keeping me up to date." Sienele said casually.
"Yes, Envoy."
*****
"Charging Drives."
Master of Ships Jar Nelim nodded his acknowledgement as he reviewed the transport equations for any errors before signing off on them and sending them back to the Navigation console with his approval.
"Secure all hands, all decks," He ordered. "Prepare to transit to jump space."
"Yes, Master of Ships. All hands, all decks, secure for Jump!"
Nelim did what was about the only thing he could do after that order was given - he watched the numbers count down as they closed ever closer on the position of universal null-gravitational effect that was a local stellar jump point.
The Upwind was reporting back, deck by deck, that it was ready for the jump and shortly they would be exiting the production system and en-route for the nearest Administrative one.
All very routine and normal.
"Master of Ships..."
"What is it?" Nelim asked, looking over to the speaker, a young officer manning the gravitation scanning console.
"There are... anomalies in the scan."
I apparently thought about the routine a little too soon.
Nelim sighed, getting to his feet, and crossing the deck. Anomalies were not all that uncommon, most systems had unmapped planets if you bothered to look for them, generally orbiting far out in the outer sphere of the primary's influence. So far out that they reflected no light and generally took extreme periods to make a single revolution.
That meant that jump points could shift from time to time, even going from extremely stable for centuries only to suddenly dance around like mad when the planet in question finally came around for a visit.
It was a navigational hazard, but one that could be dealt with easily enough by an experienced hand.
"Show me," He said as he got to the console, leaning over.
"Right here," Finel, the young officer said, pointing. "It just appeared a moment ago, watch."
Finel ran the numbers back, showing what the instruments had scanned. Everything was running appropriate to the predictions until, from one moment to the next, the anomaly appeared.
Nelim blinked, leaning in closer.
That's not... what is that?
Unmapped masses didn't just appear from one moment to the next like that. Gravity didn't work that way. It should have shown gradually, likely over years if anyone watching, but perhaps only being noticed when a ship passed through to scan it.
It shouldn't have appeared like someone flipped a...
Nelim froze.
"Signal combat alert," He ordered. "All decks, rig for war!"
"Combat alert!" He second repeated the order. "Rig for war!"
*****
Sienele twisted as the alert sounded, eyes flicking over to lock with Kriss who was also moving to the observation deck to get a closer look.
"What is going on?" Sienele demanded of the aide.
"I do not know. The Master of Ships is not able to respond!"
Damn it. Of course, he isn't, if he's signaling a combat alert, something far more important is taking up his time.
Sienele hated not knowing what was going on, but he couldn't be more than frustrated at the fact that the Master of Ship's was unavailable. After all, there was nothing that he could do about the situation.
It was all the Master of Ship's play... for now.
He settled in beside Kriss... and watched.
*****
Chapter Seventeen
Portal Ship
Sorilla grimaced as she hit the deck, barely evading the warp pulses from the enemy security forces, returning fire with her own captured weapon as she skidded along the deck before coming to a stop and scrambling to the side where she could get cover behind a corner.
The enemy had pushed hard, racing up to catch up with her even as she moved as quickly as she could through the layout of the ship, and they'd managed to catch her in a pincer crossfire just a few meters from her target.
She cast around, finding the doorway to the target room just up ahead and quickly clambered back to her feet before sprinting for it as fast as she could.
It seemed that her burst of speed tool the Goblins by surprise. She didn't feel their weapons pulse until she'd crossed almost half the distance, but then it there was a sudden mass of twisting spacetime behind her, racing right for her.
Sorilla jumped, diving for the controls as she was struck in the back and slammed hard against the wall. Again, the graphene armor she wore was strong enough to take the hit, but she could feel the results pulping her insides even through that.
Leaning against the wall, Sorilla roughly punched open the interface and put a pulse blast through it, shorting the system again and opening the door.
With more pulses following her, she rolled into the room and hit the floor painfully before rolling again to get clear of the door and incoming fire.
Her lungs were on fire now, every breath painful, and while none of her implants were registering the sorts of severe damage they'd been designed to look for, they were showing a massive increase in white blood cells across huge swaths of her body. She didn't think that was a good sign, and was pretty sure that the damage was worse than her systems indicated.
They'd been designed to sense discrete sources of damage, like bullets. Those weren't exactly subtle, and were pretty known to SOLCOM medical tech. The Ross weapons were turning out to be somewhat worse than she'd thought.
Sorilla rolled herself to one side, pushing the pulse weapon out from under her, and returned fire through the door, driving the lead element back with losses as she forced herself up to a seated position and used her free hand to helped push herself back to gain some shelter behind the closest computer system.
That could have gone better.
She heaved herself up to lean on the console, bracing the pulse weapon against it as she fired another set of warps into the door single handed and brought up the interface.
*****
What is she accessing?
The conclave allowed the security forces to back off their pressure, just enough to see what intelligence was of interest to the human. The projection came up quickly, flipping through different sections more quickly than even they could read and absorb the data, before it settled.
Current Temporal Scanning Data. Interesting. She's found the tracking section.
She is looking for active operations in the region. There is only one, now.
She's found the Alliance ship.
The conclave focused their interest on the action, all of them intently curious as to what the one known as Entropy would attempt to do.
*****
Sorilla snarled under her helmet, glaring at the projection. The Ross were targeting the Upwind if she were reading it right.
She didn't have any loyalties to the Alliance ship, though she had to expect that they'd probably taken her own stolen ship back on board, so if they were destroyed, she'd lose her little bush plane too.
I was just getting the hang of flying that thing. Damn.
All of that aside, she wasn't happy about seeing Kriss die, if no one else. The grumpy Lucian was... well, not a friend exactly, but this wasn't how he'd have wanted to go out.
More importantly, however, if the ship was destroyed, so too went the intelligence they were carrying and everyone currently part of the investigation, aside from her. Which, of course, was the most likely point of such an attack.
Sorilla let her fingers twist in the warp interface, directing commands out.
If I can get to the communications array, I might just be able to... wait...
She swore under her breath, realizing what had happened when all of the commands met dead ends.
They sandboxed me. I can't send anything out, they just wanted to see what I would do.
The projection chose that moment to go completely dead.
"Fuck!"
Sorilla grabbed up the weapon, twisting to the door. They'd be coming for her, en mass, of that she was quite certain.
*****
A not unrespectable attempt.
The conclave agreed to varying degrees. The communications attempt likely would have warned the Alliance vessel, had it gone through. Whether that would have been sufficient to save it, well that was another matter, but it was possible.
Kill her access. We've seen what we wanted.
Agreed. Security is now authorized and ordered to press in fully.
Of course.
The conclave refused on the Alliance ship, their actions toward Entropy having been made and now outside their immediate control. It was time to finish what they had begun.
Formulate a solution for the Alliance vessel.
Solution is complete, awaiting confirmation.
Confirmed.
Firing.
*****
Parithalian Cruiser Upwind
"Urgency Maneuvering, all thrust!"
"Yes, Master of Ships! All thrust, Urgency Evasion now being conducted!"
The Upwind fired its thrusters, powerful engines rumbling through the ship as the reserves of chemical fuels were expended with alacrity. Despite the advanced capacity of the Alliance's space warp drives, for emergency high thrust burns, all Parithalian ships still maintained a supply of high impulse chemical fuels to blow through their thrusters.
Slamming the ship aside like the hammer of the gods, the thrusters managed to slightly overpower the vessel's inertial management system, making every person on board hang on as they reached nearly one gravity subjective acceleration to the side.
Nelim clutched as his command console, just barely hanging on as the ship felt like it had suddenly been upended and planted firmly on its side panels.
"Warning Report, Ship's systems just detected a major gravetic anomaly along our previous course!"
Nelim swore, leaning forward, "All hands secure for high stress maneuvers!"
A new alarm sounded as his order was confirmed.
Someone was trying very hard to kill them, and he had a very dark suspicion of just who it was, and it was not good.
*****
"It's them."
Sienele snorted, "Of course it's them. Who else would be this brazen? They're going to try to kill us before we can report to an Administrative system."
Kriss bared his teeth, "We should have seen it coming."
"Not all species are so confrontational as the Lucians, my friend. The Ross... this is not in their normal character," Sienele disagreed. "Normally they are far more subtle, if considerably more alien, than this."
"We cornered the vermin," Kriss countered. "They are reacting as any such pests might."
"These vermin, as you call them, are equipped with weapons capable of annihilating planets, cornering them might not have been our best idea," Sienele sighed.
Kriss just snorted.
"It doesn't matter now," Sienele went on. "It's no longer in our hands. Our fate lies with the Pari and their ship."
"That," Kriss said, "Is what I despise most about this situation. Cowards could not be bothered to do the job properly. They had to kill us like the worthless vermin they are."
"Dead is dead." Sienele had no patience for the Lucian's absurd warrior ethos just then.
He had to put his trust in the Parithalians and their ships. For most incidents of space battle, he would be happy to do so. Against the Ross, however?
Not the way I wanted to end this day.
*****
Portal Ship
Sorilla grunted, the pain of the deep bruising starting to fade as her armor, implants, and biological instincts all worked in collusion to amp up the production and distribution of natural painkillers and fight or flight hormones, augmented by a little chemical engineering along the way.
She slammed into the wall beside the door, pulse weapon dipping down as she drew her pistol with her right hand and brought it up just as one of the Goblins came through.
The sidearm roared once, dropping the little Mechanoid in its tracks with a round that perforated its chest and took out the central control mechanism that resided there. The mechanoid dropped as she pivoted out, stepping over the body, bringing up the pulse weapon and firing from the hip as she unloaded the sidearm simultaneously.
Combined fire tore through the ranks at close range, where she would have to work harder to miss than to hit her targets, opening gaping holes in the perimeter. Sorilla holstered her pistol empty, whipping the alien weapon in a hard toss that decked a Goblin that got a little too brave for its own good as she sprinted forward.
The Ross security mechanoids were... good, after a fashion. Whatever flaws they had were made up for by the fact that they didn't have any real senses of self preservation and, she assumed, were probably relatively cheap to manufacture.
The downsides to them were pretty much the same downsides as Sorilla had found in all automated systems. Generally, a significant lack of creativity. It was a necessary result of anything that had a coded behavior. The responses tended to be predictable.
In this case, the Goblins were clearly coded to avoid shooting one another. That meant that they were programmed to avoid flagging each other with their weapons. Not a bad thing to program in, Sorilla figured. She'd have probably coded them the same way, in all honesty.
However, it did leave an exploit that could be turned to the benefit of someone who was willing to get in close and dirty.
An arm bar shattered the limb of the closest Goblin, relieving it of its weapon as Sorilla twisted and sent it flying across the hall into its fellows. She didn't bother changing the settings on the weapon as she continued her spin while bringing it to bear and opened fire at close range without aiming.
The warp pulses shattered the composition of the Goblin's construction with ease, sending parts and fragments flying as the security mechanoids automatically began to redeploy to open lines of fire in their formation so they could engage without destroying one another.
Sorilla wasn't going to allow that to happen, however, dropping low in a spin to sweep the legs of a couple that were shuffling in response to her previous actions, then flopping to her back to deliver powerful elbow blows that crunched the armor of the small lightweight drones.
With each target she took out, unintuitively the danger to her grew significantly worse however, because she was clearing lines of fire for the enemy herself. So Sorilla plotted her motions so that each attack and strike and dodge brought her closer to her actual goal.
Before the Goblins could recover from the attack, Sorilla abruptly broke contact and lunged for an open path, vanishing around a corner, leaving chaos in her wake.
*****
Why did they not simply eliminate her?
The security forces are encoded to avoid damaging the ship or each other. We overrode the ship damage protocols, with limits, so that they could fire when Entropy was hiding behind computer systems, however we did not consider the second set.
The conclave slumped, more metaphorically than physically since they were interconnected on the level of thoughts, but the presentation was much the same.
Remove those restrictions.
Agreed.
The conclave sent out the orders with alacrity.
She does provide us with valuable data, if nothing else.
Few in the conclave appreciated that observation in the moment, which only seemed to amuse the speaker all the more so as shards of irate emotions were flung his way.
The chaos she leaves in passing is utterly unacceptable. She destroyed the order of the universe by her very existence.
Oh, calm yourself. The universe is no more ordered than you are intelligent. Entropy is the natural state of things. She is merely that universal force incarnate.
Both of you are giving her too much credit. She is of a lower species, not some supernatural beast of chaos.
How would you tell the difference between her and such a thing?
The exchange grew more and more heated until a shattering voice entered the fray.
Be silent.
The converse fell quiet, all focus shifting.
Track her. The voice ordered, calmer then. Determine her goal, and plan to accomplish such. Cease the foolishness, stop wasting resources for no gain. Have none of you noticed that the Alliance ship evaded our initial strike?
The assembled abruptly shifted their focus to that, seeing that the Alliance vessel was on a heavy evasion burn.
Not good.
No, it is not. If they are not destroyed within the jump point, there may be evidence of their fate. That is unacceptable.
*****
Parithalian Cruiser Upwind
Nilem's flicked side to side as he scanned the scrolling feed from the scanners. The gravity anomaly had vanished, but that wasn't how gravity worked, naturally. The only way that could have happened was if an unnatural source had appeared in the system, a ship in other words.
No such vessels should be there, and the sudden second anomaly right along their previous course made it clear what that ship's intent had been.
Attempting to hide will do nothing. They are already tracking, and we don't even know their location. Running is... an option, but not a good one. They were clearly awaiting us at the jump point itself. That destruction would have been...
