Chapter 6

Subject: Maddy

The IFV ‘Black Mamba’ pulled out of the station with Team 2 nestled into it’s protective shell. The Mamba was a special beast. Heavily armored in the same angled style Maddy had seen on fleet warships, with a low profile turret sporting a mighty auto cannon, a coaxial machine gun, rocket pods that fired guided anti-tank rockets, and a number of small countermeasure pods facing every direction that were originally intended to fire smoke bombs to conceal the Mamba for a hasty retreat. Gremlin and Felix were especially excited to point out that they’d modified the countermeasure ordinance to instead fire bomblets full of tear gas and napalm. “The special sauce,” Gremlin had called it. 

Eight people could fit inside. The driver, gunner, and six passengers. Theoretically, more could ride on top of the turret, but the top edge of the Mamba was covered in spools of razor wire. A hard stop and whatever sorry bastard decided to ride up top would be thrown directly into the wire. Maddy rode in the back, sitting next to Blitz, who’d taken Two-Feet’s spot on Maddy’s inaugural trip beyond the barrier. 

“I’ll show you how we’ve been doing it, but ultimately how you run your team is up to you,” Blitz was saying, his voice being transmitted directly into Maddy’s ears by the comms system built into their medium-weight expedition armor. He was seated next to her in the IFV. “We’ve figured out a pretty good way to do things and haven’t lost anyone yet. There’s some pretty nasty fauna out there, but don’t discount the flora. There’s at least one type of carnivorous plant that where we are going today that you need to be on the lookout for.”

“Aye sergeant, I’ve been reading up on the combat logs but please point things out as we see them,” Maddy replied. Reading about something and actually seeing them were two entirely different things. A thought suddenly occurred to her- “hey Blitz, we have helmet and gun cams, why isn’t the footage attached to the reports?”

Blitz sighed, “we have the footage. It’s linked to the reports, but Chief is using the server where the video is stored for something else. You wont be able to access it or watch the videos until he’s done.” Maddy couldn’t see his face, but his tone implied resignation. Like he’d waged this battle before. 

The IFV hit a bump and shuddered. A skinny, young woman with short red hair shifted uncomfortably, seeming to shy away from looking at any of the security team members directly. She was with the science team, and Maddy hadn’t seen her until today. 

“Hey,” Maddy said while intentionally gazing directly at her. The comms system detected the intended target and funneled the audio to the headset, “what’s your name?”

“Liselle,” she said. She looked at Maddy critically, paused, and then looked down at her feet.

“Liselle? I’m Maddy. I’m the new sergeant for the second security team. I’ll be heading up your security detail for a while.” Saying it out loud made Maddy realize how weird it was that she’d just now met the science team. The whole point of her coming here was to support them, she should have met them on the first day. This whole operation was weird, and the inconsistency and lack of actual real guidance was concerning. Why were there thirteen security staff to support six scientists? Why are the teams so siloed? What the fuck was wrong with Chief?

“It’s good to meet you Maddy,” Liselle said awkwardly, like she had to consciously try to say each specific word in order. 

“So, what kind of science are you doing? I spent a lot of time prepping for this post but no one ever really talked about the actual science of the science mission,” Maddy hoped the small talk would make the science team open up to her a little more. If she was going to be liaison between them and Chief, she should probably get started on making friends. 

“Oh!” Liselle’s eyes lit up, “well, what do you know about the planet’s ecology?” The awkwardness was gone, she seemed genuinely excited now that the topic was hers. 

“Practically nothing, aside from the microbes here make everyone sick and there’s freaky xenofauna outside of the town’s barrier.” The life-altering medical nanite controller implant that she’d so desperately needed, and traded 10 years of her life to get, was a requirement to even step foot on Oasis III because of how virulent the microbes were here. She knew that much, but hadn’t had the mental wherewithal or desire to learn much more. But, it made Liselle happy to talk about it, she could tell. 

“Weellll,” Liselle drug out the word, like she was trying to decide where to start, “the life here is unlike anything we’ve encountered anywhere else. The whole ecology of this place is extremely aggressive and evolves extremely quickly. You can see it first hand when you look at the plants and the animals,” she hesitated and looked at Maddy nervously after saying the word ‘animals’. “Uh, flora and fauna I mean.” 

She continued, “anyway the mechanisms of how they evolve so rapidly are of great interest for research back in the central systems. You can see it most clearly with the micro organisms. Almost every generation has incremental changes, and because they reproduce so rapidly you can watch in almost real time as they adapt to changes in their environment. Even something as small as the weather on a particular day can influence the entire micro ecology. It’s incredible.” Liselle was gushing. Whatever price she’d pay for the medical nanites was probably worth it to her just to be able to do science in this place.

“Is that why medicine does’t work? Because they evolve around it?” Maddy didn’t have to fake interest anymore, Liselle’s enthusiasm was contagious. 

“Yes and no,” Liselle explained, “they don’t actually infect us like bacteria do. Our biology is entirely incompatible. But, they do seem to be able to rapidly adapt to using us as a resource. The initial illness, the one that caused the first quarantine-“ Liselle paused, looking at Maddy in an effort to make sure she was following along with the line of reasoning. Maddy made eye contact, then realized her helmet’s visor partially concealed her face. She nodded and grunted to signal Liselle to continue. “Well, the first wave of illness that we can attribute to native life here was an archae-analogue that adapted to steal iron out of our blood and wound up causing extreme anemia across the colony. Hundreds died and you couldn’t kill it with antibiotics or medicine because it wasn’t even close to similar to Terran life.”

“But nanites work?” Maddy already knew the answer, but wanted to encourage Liselle and didn’t know enough about what she was saying to have any real insight. Liselle’s passion was, well. Extremely attractive, Maddy admitted to herself.

“Yes they do. They’re the only thing that works across the board. The control system that we all have can tell when something is out of line, and the nanites fix it. Nanite injections can work too, but they aren’t nearly as effective as the whole package.” Liselle’s interest was waning, apparently she wasn’t as into the medical side of things. 

Maddy tried politics, “and the cost of the controllers drove ISD to stop the colony efforts?”

Dad chimed in, “that and no one trusts any of the exports from the planet. All of a sudden all the lithium from the mines and all the food grown on the surface were less than worthless. The whole fucking place became a liability for ISD. They were gonna leave everyone to fucking die before the feds stepped in forced ISD to honor their employment contracts.”

“You’ve been listening this whole time?” Maddy asked, and double checked her comms. She was on TAC-1, the unit’s general chatter channel. Whoops.

“Course I have sarge, you’re on TAC1,” Dad’s gruff voice sounded amused, a vein of humor threatening to show itself. “But this is something that I care a lot about and so I want to make sure you see the whole picture. ISD outfitted everyone on the fucking planet with those nanite controllers to make the Colonial Affairs people happy, but ISD don’t give a fuck about this colony or any of the people on it. They’ll provide whatever bare minimum the people need to survive to make it to the end of their contracts, but not a single contract has been allowed to be terminated early. The colony is dead, and there’s no future, and no plan, and everyone here is trapped until their contracts run out.”

Dad paused, giving space for someone to interrupt him. No one did. “Do you know what the average contract length is for an ISD settler? The first wave guys like what live here in NC?” NC was short for New Carthage, Maddy had heard it before but hadn’t quite realized what it meant until she heard Dad say it. 

“I dunno,” Maddy said. She truly didn’t know. 

“Twenty years. Subjective. Half the colonists woke up out of stasis to find the project already shut down and NC abandoned, and their contracts had just started,” Dad’s passion was on display now, but it was far less fun than when Liselle had been explaining microbes or whatever. “Stasis sleep doesn’t count. You aren’t awake, so ISD says you haven’t earned that time.” 

Silence permeated the vehicle. The sustained collective silence prompted the noise isolation on Maddy’s comms system to turn off, and for a breathless minute all she could hear was the whining of the IFV’s turbos. Her mind was spinning; why wasn’t this more common knowledge? The non-stop media circus that she was used to seeing back when she was connected to the rest of the universe would have ran this story around the clock for at least a few cycles. But yet again, Iapetus Systems Development, or ISD, was one of the oldest and richest corporations out there. They’d invented FTL travel as far as humanity was concerned. They could probably silence the media narrative with a stern look.

“Anyway, sorry sarge. I just want to make sure you’re aware of the big picture when it comes time to meet the locals. There’s a lot of desperation out here. This place ain’t normal, and there’s a lot I think you don’t know about it yet.” And that was it, Dad was done talking. He’d said more words in that burst than Maddy had heard in the days she’d known him. The big picture clearly meant something to him, Maddy would remember that. 

They rode in silence for the next ten minutes, with only occasional interruptions for Peanut and Felix to harass each other. The IFV paused at a checkpoint leading out of the city’s barrier; a network of sonic devices that humans couldn’t hear, but kept away the big fauna. 

“Okay Turner this op is gonna be pretty easy,” Blitz said as they neared their first stop. “We’ve got two monitoring stations to hit. Each one takes about five minutes and we’re gonna less than a kilometer from the barrier. I treat this one like all of the others. Keep the Mamba hot, and send out two teams of two, one overwatch and one with the scientists.”

“Copy. Two heavies with the science crew?” Maddy asked. Dad and Peanut were seated closest to the door. They wore powered armor and carried high-caliber weapons.

“That’s usually how I do it, it’s easier for overwatch if you have folks with lighter armor take the job. They can climb over stuff easier. Plus, the scientists like to load their equipment onto the back of the heavies.”

“You know how contract work is,” Peanut sighed. “Client is always trying to get you to do shit outside of your scope.” Maddy knew exactly what he was talking about, but they weren’t a contract team. Opposite actually. Technically, they were all federal law enforcement. Jesus Christ, Maddy realized, Two-feet and Chief are federal police. Despite the Dominion conscripting everyone into federal service at some point in their lives, it seemed odd that they would have such low performing people doing a job like this.

“And when we air drop in?” Maddy said, moving on. She realized this was probably the last time she’d get real OJT from a peer, unless you counted Felix. 

“Same thing, only you have more guys on the ground since you don’t have the Mamba.” Blitz paused for a second, thinking. “Yeah those further away spots where we have to fly in tend to get pretty weird, it’s actually a lot better having the bigger teams. You actually need it once you start pushing out past the barrier.” 

The Mamba came to a stop and Gremlin, started shouting over the internal PA system from her spot at the gunners seat, despite everyone being within earshot and having a military grade communications system that made shouting entirely unnecessary. “First stop! Dick rock! Everyone get out and remember to kill anything that isn’t human! Remember, the more we kill, the better we feel!”

The back door to the IFV burst open and the two heavies, Peanut and Dad, filtered out. The IFV’s auto cannon let out a three round burst, each shot thumping in Maddy’s chest like she’d been punched in the chest by professional boxer. Liselle put her hand over her heart and closed her eyes, and the other science guy, who Maddy had completely forgotten about, winced and shook his head. 

Blitz sighed. “Okay, get out, you’re with me. We’ve done this one hundred times, everyone knows where to go.” Maddy stood and duck walked out of the IFV onto the alien savannah, followed closely by Blitz and the scientists. 

The alien world was breathtaking. The savannah was just that, a hilly area with pockets of dense vegetation shading a deep, lush dark red ground covering. The landscape was a tapestry of reds, purples, and blues. Maddy saw a plant that looked like a fern with spikes that was so dark purple it was almost black. It seemed like everywhere she looked there was a swarm of thousands of bug-like things being chased by a hundred birds. Everything was teeming with life. It was so beautiful, that Maddy was momentarily distracted from the heat, and the smell. 

“Come on,” Blitz said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “it’s only pretty until you get to know it.” 

Maddy hefted her rifle and followed him around the front of the IFV. The science team made their way down a worn footpath while Peanut and Dad scanned the edges of the thick brush for movement. “There’s a good vantage point up on that hill.” 

Maddy rounded the bend, rifle at low ready, scanning the brush. She could hear Gremlin singing softly over the TAC1 channel, “dick rock, phallicite, scrotem totem.” Sure enough, straight ahead was a large, skinny rock that seemed to stick straight up out of ground. Gremlin’s nickname was accurate to say the least. She kept singing, looping back and humming, “dick rock, phallicite… hmm mmhm.”

A scaly, bright pink creature about the size of a dog darted out from behind the rock and scurried towards a pocket of brush about 20 meters away. The coaxial machine gun on the IFV opened up on it, unleashing a hail of fire that tore the poor thing in half and ripped tufts of red grass out of the ground. Before the pieces managed to fall back to the ground Gremlin hit it with a three round burst from the auto cannon, sending a spray of lizard-dog parts, alien plants, and dirt into the air. “COCK ROCK, FUCK-A-CITE,” Gremlin shouted.

“Enough!” Maddy belted into the comms, giving her first real order to the team. “Keep TAC1 clear. Y’all want to sing your weirdass songs and fuck with each other that’s fine, but do it privately.”

Blitz chuckled. 

Together, Maddy and Blitz climbed a nearby short hill and looked down onto the team as they worked. The turret of the IFV whirring back and forth, Dad and Peanut hefting guns so big they needed powered armor to pick them up, and the science team dutifully pulling what looked like air filters out of a red-and-purple-camouflaged patterned box sitting next to a weather station, complete with spinning anemometer.

“Its important to be on the lookout for any fauna that’s bigger than the smallest person on the crew. That red headed science girl you were flirting with is the smallest today since Gremlin is in the Mamba.” Maddy blushed and was about to argue to save face, but noticed the words ‘Private Comms Channel’ on her combat display. Blitz continued, “anything bigger than her is gonna want to try to eat her. That’s just a fact. There’s a big predator out here we call a skullfucker. It’s sort of like a pig, I guess. There’s a science name for it but if you ask the science team to show you pictures of a skullfucker they’ll know what you mean.”

Maddy nodded, “copy, look out for pigs.”

“Yeah, skullfuckers. There’s a flying one too that looks like a big caterpillar with six legs. The legs have hooks on each leg and they are powerful. They CAN and WILL fly off with anything they can carry. We call them flyers. Well, we call everything that flies and might be a threat a flyer.” Blitz turned and looked at her, “honestly Turner there’s no rules out here. We usually shoot the first few things we see in any new area and it scares everything else off. It seems ridiculous but it works. I’d prefer it if Gremlin didn’t waste so much 30mm in the process but this is your team now and it’s your call.”

“Copy Blitz,” Maddy said, trying to sound sincere. “I appreciate you taking the time to walk through everything with me.” Maddy eyed the scene. Aside from the five-thousand not-quite-birds flying around, it was peaceful. Serene even. A sort of pulsing chittering birdsong filled the void in the conversation. Maddy had spent most of her life on space stations. Were all habitat planets this… busy? Alive? She had nothing to compare it to. Dirt-side marine training posts were usually on lifeless frontier worlds. 

“Look I need to talk to you. One on one,” Blitz’s voice cracked with nervous energy. “You’ve probably wondered why there’s twice as many security team members as science staff out here. Well, listen. About a year and a half ago,” he paused, then clarified, “standard, of course. We don’t use local time. Anyway, we had a break in while we were out on a science op. Animals. Back then we only had the seven, Gremlin, Dad, Two-Feet, Chief, Myself, and a few of the guys from Team 1 that I don’t think you’ve met. Anyway, Two-Feet stayed back with with a member of the science team, a doctor, who was doing some science thing that required her to be there non-stop.” 

Blitz took a deep breath, then continued, “When we got back we saw the place was broken into. Window shattered and front door wide open. We stacked up and cleared the building like pros but everyone was gone, until we found Two-Feet crying and trying to work a tourniquet on a very dead doctor. Apparently, Two-Feet was taking a fucking nap when the break in happened and didn’t hear anything until the doc start screaming. He ran in, saw what was happening, started shooting, missed every shot, and let the animals get away. Chief went ballistic. Rumor has it, he’d been sleeping with the doc, so.” 

“Goddamn,” Maddy said. 

“Yeah it was a mess. Nothing’s been the same since. Two-Feet got his new nickname and was completely shunned by Chief and everyone else. Can’t quite kick him out since he’s on contract. We wound up moving to the fire station because it’s more secure than our old building. The science team totally avoids us now. Chief lost his mind. He’s taken on this whole new persona since then. We used to call him ‘Rose’, can you imagine that?”

“Rose? Like short for Roseburg?” Maddy inquired.

“Yeah, like short for Roseburg. But he moved into the fire chief’s office in the fire station and I guess decided that the name on the door was his now. We don’t even have a fucking chief! His job was supposed to be to manage the team’s relationship with the locals and the science folks, but instead he’s been working up this scheme to get back at the animals. I know they were probably after the lab equipment to sell to the zoo chemists, but Chief thinks it’s personal and he’s got most of my guys foaming at the mouth looking for revenge and he’s damn near completely alienated us from the local cops.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Maddy asked, again feeling that the more she got dragged into this nonsense, the more she was somehow personally responsible. 

“Because it’s important context if you’re going to do your job well. You need to be the one to get us back in the good graces of the science team and the locals. Plus Chief’s been neglecting a lot of his job lately and we need to get back on track. Don’t worry about Chief, I’m managing him. I’ve got it handled..” 

Maddy stared at him. Anger boiled in her stomach. Why the fuck does he think it’s my job to show up here and fix everything? What the fuck has he been doing this whole time?

“GET BACK,” an electronically amplified voice commanded. Maddy jumped into high ready, pointing her rifle down at the team and scanning for targets. 

“AHAHAHHAHA!” The voice laughed, before the autocannon on the IFV loosed a barrage of fire into a stand of ropy brush. The shockwave from the rounds sent a cloud of dust into the air. “Okay team, we got em all. Cock rock is drained. Let’s R.T.B!” 

Maddy sighed, she’d been ready to fight off some kind of goddamn forest monster, but instead it was Gremlin doing her best malicious-compliance with the order to stay off the comms channel. Guess the IFV had a PA system and that didn’t technically count. The anger at Blitz was gone for now, he’d just been trying to help in his own way after all. This was too much drama for Maddy’s liking, and she wasn’t excited to lug around a bunch of other people’s personal burdens. 

Chapter 7

Subject: Admiral Nilson

“Percheron and Mustang are destroyed, no survivors. Rahvan suffered a direct hit with the beam weapon and lost eighty-four crew confirmed dead, one hundred plus injured. A further thirty-one are missing. Decks one though five are open to vacuum from frames one to twenty eight. The bridge is destroyed and most of the command staff is dead or missing. The ship’s Chief Engineer, a Mister Pruitt, has assumed command and is coordinating damage control out of auxiliary steering. Chief Pruitt reports that the ship is combat ineffective.”

Nilson was in disbelief as the comms officer rattled off the damage report form the battle. They’d come out ahead, incredibly, but he’d lost all of his patrol cruisers, and there were still two of the bastard Adversary ships left. He watched them move about the battle display as they accelerated to insane speeds, way faster than his ace-in-the-hole destroyers could move. They were heading straight for Oasis III, a planet that he’d left defended by three of the worst ships he had at his disposal. They’d be fodder for these things. 

“Comms, get me a direct link to Mister Pruitt please,” Nilson asked as an aide handed him a fresh cup of coffee. Davis had wandered off after the battle, probably to shit himself, Nilson figured. 

After a brief moment, the video display came to life and a balding man in a set of utility coveralls flashed before him. His face was covered in grease and blood and it looked like he’d been crying. He looked like a sad old man, not a ship’s commanding officer. 

“Chief Pruitt I hear you are doing one hell of a job coordinating the disaster on your ship.” Pruitt winced, Nilson continued, “I’m so sorry for the loss of your crew, truly. I’ve lost damn near half of my command this week, and we’ve still got two of those fuckers in our system. We need to catch them.”

A tear ran down Pruitt’s cheek. He wiped it away and stood tall. His voice cracked as he spoke, “aye admiral.”

“Time is critical, but we aren’t going to leave you in the lurch. I need to know, Chief Engineer. Can your crew hold out on that ship? And how can we help in the immediate term?” Nilson prayed Pruitt didn’t ask to abandon ship. Not that he needed half a patrol cruiser, but there was nowhere to put the crew on his ship. His life support couldn’t accommodate several hundred more people breathing in the Bastion’s compartments. And dragging the entire remaining formation back for an evacuation would cost valuable time.

“Admiral, our sickbay is overwhelmed. If we could transfer some of the folks who might make it if we had the room over to you, that’d be a huge load off.” Pruitt plead. 

“Done, I’ll dispatch our shuttle and prep our sickbay,” Nilson made eye contact with the operations officer while he talked. The young officer was paying close attention and immediately fell into their work. This would be a great job for an XO, if he had one.

“Use the port docking bay. The others are gone.” Pruitt’s face was grim. Nilson nodded. “Chief Engineer Pruitt out,” and just like that, he was gone. Nilson prayed that crew would still be alive by the time he got back to help them. If he got back to help them.

“Okay Estevez, you and I need to talk. Follow me to my office.” Nilson looked around, seeing if Davis had shown himself yet. He hadn’t. Nilson turned to the next most competent person who wasn’t Estevez, his tactical officer. “Lieutenant Sahr, you have command until I get back. Get the wounded aboard our ship and start a burn down the well in tow with our destroyers.” 

“Aye Admiral!” Sahr barked. 

Nilson led the way into his office, closing the hatch behind Estevez and pressing the button on his smart link to render the room secure. Not that he was worried about secrets getting out, but Estevez had a tendency to be overly cautious at times, and he wanted her to be comfortable and open right now. He looked at her and waited for her to start the conversation. 

“Yeah that was bad,” She said. 

“Yeah it was,” Nilson replied. They stood in silence for a moment before Nilson broke it. “Okay, just lay it out there. I know what you’re thinking but I want to hear it from you. Tell me what you’re thinking. Unfiltered.”

“Well,” she started, "they are clearly very advanced and they learn very quickly, but they aren’t invincible, and they aren’t infallible. We proved that when we killed that last one. It had to make a decision when it chose it’s target, and it chose the wrong one.”

“It did, but it killed two cruisers in seconds. We got lucky, I almost had us stay course longer trying to get out of it’s kill zone. If we had been, I don’t know, a minute later on the maneuver to turn it could have killed both cruisers and turned to kill us. We have two more in the system and we can’t risk another engagement like that one.”

“I know, Admiral.” Estevez had her hand on her chin and was clearly lost in thought, probably running simulation after simulation in her mind trying to figure out the perfect piece to the puzzle that left them alive and the enemy dead. “We have at least two engagements left to plan for. Defense of Oasis III with our frigate squadron, and then contact between whatever is left from that and the Bastion with it’s destroyer escort.”

“I should have left the destroyers closer to the planet.” Nilson regretted his words as soon as he said them. A ship’s CO, and he was an admiral no less, shouldn’t openly doubt their own decisions in front of their subordinates. But, Estevez was as close to a confidant as he had. 

“No, you shouldn’t have. I can’t see any engagement with this enemy where we win by having our ships sit still. We need to hit them fast and be willing to move before they can get close enough to use their beam weapon. By the way, Admiral, they missed a shot, did you see it?” Estevez’s smile reassured him. 

“Yeah, right at the end before we killed the last ship. We shot it and it knocked it off target. Why?” Nilson was sure he was missing something. 

“We got the beam on sensors losing coherence. We have a kill zone for the enemy now, and it’s shorter than our railguns.” Estevez smiled wryly.

“Okay, that’s fantastic. We out range them. Between us and the destroyers we’ve got four railguns.” Nilson beamed, “what else?”

“Well, they’re going to get to Oasis III well before we can catch them, and our frigates there are hardly combat capable, but we still need to do something. Who knows what they’ll do to the planet if they’re left unopposed for the time delta.” 

Nilson kept Estevez in his office and ran through the options until the conversation lost steam and started circling. He was exhausted, and so was she. Nilson dismissed Estevez and walked back onto the bridge. It wasn’t totally necessary to have that brainstorming session in private, but he preferred for the crew to see him make a decisive decision rather than waffle around in uncertainty. 

“Ops, lets bring down the tempo a bit. Shift back to standard hours and lets get everyone rested. Engineering, recharge all of the capacitors please, run the reactors to full power if you need to. Tactical, thank you for standing watch. Please service the guns and double check our munitions count. I’m especially interested to see how many missiles we have left. Comms, make sure the stand down general quarters message gets out to everyone.” Nilson turned to look at the battle display. A chorus of ayes sounding off behind him. 

Nilson manipulated the display and brought up the orbit of Oasis III and it’s four moons. The two Adversary ships were racing there at twice the maximum speed of his own ship. There’d be a full day and a half where the only opposition in the system would be a handful of junkyard frigates and the station..

“Wait!” Nilson thought, suddenly realizing a key detail he hadn’t considered. He looked around, everyone was staring at him. Apparently, he’d thought aloud. “Sorry, disregard me,” he said, and turned to his display.

The station in orbit of Oasis III was designed to be a transit hub, cargo transfer station, and light repair space-dock. The ISD colony ships that first settled the Oasis system had been disassembled and incorporated in to the body of the station. He had three junker ships docked to the station, each one out of service for various reasons, but they were still warships.

“Comms, whats the light delay between us and Oasis III’s station?” Nilson asked while playing with the battle display. 

“Just over four hours, sir,” comms responded. 

“With the current course, what will light delay be when the ships in orbit around Oasis III make contact with the adversary?” Nilson asked again.

“One moment, sir,” the comms officer replied before typing something into his terminal. “Should be one hour and fifteen minutes.” Damn, way too far to give real time commands. Nilson was going to have to lay a trap and cross his fingers that it worked out. By the time the light from the battle reached him, the action would be over. He wouldn’t be able to intervene.

“Alright, thank you comm.” Nilson re-examined the situation and sipped his coffee. Three frigates, each has one coilgun battery. One station. Three broken ships; a patrol cruiser, an e-war light cruiser, and a corvette with an iffy reactor that made everyone nervous to even think about. The system has four moons. We are in an entrenched position with a day to prepare. The enemy will see everything we do. I can’t give orders in time to influence tactical action. Victory is killing the enemy, delaying them until the big ships arrive, or scaring them away from Oasis III. 

“Hey Estevez, come here and look at this with me.” Estevez paced over, curious. Nilson continued, “this e-war ship, the Kydoimos, it’s out of service because the engines are shot, but as far as I know, the rest of the systems are fine. Am I remembering that right? This ship has been here longer than me.”

“That’s right,” Estevez said, “the ship is actually relatively modern, but the main drive was damaged during a survey in another system. The crew’s mostly gone and it’s been sitting there with little more than a fire watch on board. What are you thinking?”

“If we fired up the sensors and jammers, could you control those systems from here? With light delay, obviously it wont be very good, but we can program in the projected flight path for the Adversary and buy some cover for the other ships.” Estevez pondered for a second before responding. 

“Yes, I think so. But it would be running off station power and the dock power couplings aren’t rated for running starship systems beyond life support, and even that is shared with the station. We’d really be pushing our luck.”

“Okay great,” Nilson didn’t care about power couplings or luck right now. Everything was going to be a long shot. “Coordinate with the station and get that thing powered up. I want you to blast the Adversary with whatever jamming and white noise you can. Light them up. Use whatever personnel you need to help maintain it.”

To Nilson’s surprise, Estevez smiled a cat’s smile. “Aye, admiral.” And she got to work. No push back. 

So we have concealment, somewhat. Maybe. Enough to hide the movement of his little ships as they prepped the battlespace. “Logs, how long would it take to run a report on munitions and parts stockpiles back on the station?” Nilson turned to look at the logistics officer. It wasn’t often that he got to test his staff under fire like this, and he doubted his XO kept up with details like ‘spare weapons’ in a system that hadn’t seen more than minor smuggling interdictions in a decade.

“Admiral I have all of that ready to go. Should I send it to your terminal?” The logistician seemed surprised to be called out, and relieved that he was prepared. Nilson was actually proud of the young man for being so prepared. Aside from Estevez, Nilson wasn’t sure how the ship or the fleet would perform in a fight. Now here they were, trading ship-for-ship blows with an unknown enemy, and truly rising to the occasion. Nilson thought of Chief Engineer Pruitt, hands red with the blood of his crew and crying as he tried to save what was left of his ship. Nilson shuddered and drank a long pull from his cup. The familiar warmth and smell grounded him. 

“Sir, are you…?” The logistics officer began.

“Sorry, I lost myself for a second there,” Nilson chided himself. Focus, one task at a time. “Give me the total count of spare missiles; ship-to-ship, PD, husks, whatever.”

“Aye sir. Most of the stockpile is munitions that have timed out and been removed for inspection, but we haven’t had a qualified missile scrutineer to work with the munitions loaders…” the logistician said, apologetically. 

“It’s fine, a few duds aren’t likely to be a dealbreaker. Give me the whole list, expired or not.” 

“Okay sir. Fifty one ship to ship, a hundred and fifteen point defense, and three hundred boosters and shells without payloads. We have an extra assortment of payloads, but they’re listed by pallet load and not individuals. Looks like decoy flares, grapeshot, EM payloads, some HE penetrators, I’ll send the list over.” 

Nilson manipulated the display, simulating the movement of ships around the planet, moving his pieces one at a time to see where they’d end up when the Adversary came near. Nilson called out to his staff to contribute, and each person did. Estevez especially. Slowly, a trap started to come together. Each piece useless in a fight against the Adversary, but as a whole, a weapon began to emerge. Within two hours, an actionable plan was drafted and sent to the squadron of outclassed warships.

They’re gonna shit themselves when they see this. 

Chapter 8

Subject: Maddy

When Chief told Maddy he’d be ‘forwarding her some emails’, what he’d apparently meant was ‘disable my email account and just have everything automatically roll over to you’. A sudden flood of notifications had alerted her to this brave new administrative world she was in charge of. She’d been keyed in on every message for at least the last six months and could see not only if the message had been opened by Chief, but if he’d replied, what he’d said, any drafts he’d prepared to send but didn’t, and if he forwarded the message to anyone else. It was the sort of access a tin-pot dictatorial manager of an authorization corporation would use to spy on their underlings. 

Maddy sifted through the messages, most of them junk mail from the division server, auto-replies for reports, reminders to send in time cards, updates to policy, et cetera. An unopened message caught her eye. 

From: ISD GENERAL ALERTS

To: DIST-GEN

Subject: ISD PUBLIC ALERT SYSTEM - COMMUNICATIONS DISRUPTIONS

Message: Due to fleet security actions, the Oasis System Rift Gate has been placed under temporary lockdown. As a result, access to faster-than-light communications systems has been restricted to fleet only use until further notice. Local systems remain operational. Thank you for your cooperation. 

Huh, Maddy thought, we’ve been out of contact with the central systems for almost a week now. Something like this was kind of a big deal, and Chief hadn’t even opened the message. Maddy flipped through the inbox, sifting through message after message from the science team making requests or more frequently, lodging complaints. There were several messages from the local ISD security team- the local law enforcement, asking for assistance. Apparently, under some mutual aid contract that she was totally unaware of. 

It seemed that Chief had gone through a period about four months ago where he stopped replying to messages, instead typing lengthy, rambling, obscenity strewn rants in reply to messages that had nothing to do with the actual contents of the message and not sending them, thereby creating a permanent fossil record of his mental decline in the drafts folder of his email account. The most recent message was in response to a request from the science team’s manager, who’d asked in a roundabout way if we could ‘please stop shooting the big cannon at the wildlife on every data collection run’, to which Chief had typed ‘listen you helpless rat fuck’, before apparently closing the email client and never opening it again. 

This operation was way out of line and Maddy knew the burden of pulling it together was going to fall squarely on her, whether she liked it or not. She had an obligation to it. Her military service contract had just under seventeen years left. She knew that her tine spent on loan to the SAS could conveniently NOT count towards that service time if she made her higher-ups look stupid. Not intervening and preventing a disaster when you had the means was just as bad as causing the disaster. ‘If you have the means, you have the responsibility’ so goes the saying. And so Maddy started pulling together a mental checklist of things to un-fuck. 

First, she needed to pay a visit to the science team. Maddy decided that they would be first because they were in the same building as her, and NOT because Liselle was on the science team. Liselle was irrelevant, Maddy reminded herself. 

As she stood in front of what appeared to be an armored airlock door on the second floor of the station, it dawned on her what an incredible oversight it is that she’d never been formally oriented to the building. A good security team should be intimately familiar with whatever space they operated in, even if that space was temporary. 

Everyone had gotten way too comfortable pretending they were professional big game hunters and drug-addict stomping jackboots and had apparently forgotten their core mission. In the Fleet Marine Corps, slipping up like that was a one way ticket to being smoked until you either died or found the will to become the best at whatever it was you were doing. 

Maddy hit the comm button on the wall, and after a moment Liselle’s voice answered.

“Oh, Sergeant Maddy is that you? Is everything alright?” She sounded concerned. Apparently seeing security up here was irregular. Maddy straightened her uniform as she spoke.

“Yes, everything is fine. I wanted to tour the science lab and meet the team. I, uh. I’ve also been assigned as the security team’s liaison to the science group,” Maddy was painfully aware that in the right light, Chief assigning an underling to deal with the science folks when that was his whole job had the potential to be insulting. Like Chief had pawned off such an unimportant task. She felt awkward saying it, but truth was, anything was better than what they had right now. 

“Okay that’s great!” Liselle sounded surprisingly happy. Maddy could picture the way her eyes lit up when something caught her attention. “Most of the team is busy right now in the cleanroom, but Doctor Carney is free- she’s the one you’ll want to talk to anyway. Come on through and I’ll grab her.”

The door slid open automatically and revealed itself to be an airlock or pressure equalization chamber or something. Maddy stepped in and saw the words CONTAMINATION REDUCTION ZONE printed in bold block letters on the wall next to pictograms of a T-posing stick figure. Maddy was trying to decipher what the room wanted her to do when the lights dimmed and an electronic pulsing sound reverberated through the room. A dim blue light shone from the floors and the walls for a few seconds, making her feel like she was at the world’s worst rave. Or, in the case of the world she was one, maybe it’s best rave. Who knows. 

It ended suddenly and the door slid open to reveal Liselle, standing at attention with her arms crossed over her pelvis, her hands grasping each other. She was wearing a long white lab coat, like Maddy had interrupted her mid-science. Liselle smiled and gestured with a ‘come on’ wave of her hand. Maddy obliged. 

They walked through what appeared to be a supply room, well stocked and immaculately clean and orderly. A stack of hundreds of what looked like air filters laid out with handwritten numbers and letters on them.

“What’s with the air filters?” Maddy asked, genuinely curious. “There’s like a thousand of them.”

“Those are a type of sample filter than we use for data collection,” Liselle explained. “Yesterday when we went into he field, we were changing filters out on the monitoring stations. You see, our team studies the airborne microbiome around the settlement. We have pretty complex monitoring stations attached to systems that take air samples periodically so we can get a snapshot in time of the life and how it’s changing. All of the data from the station is sent to us over the link, but we have to physically remove and change the filters on a schedule. It’s the basis for why we do field expeditions.”

Here was the whole reason why they went out into the field, the whole justification for the majority of their jobs, and Maddy had no idea until now. And she’d only learned about it because she’d happened to see something weird and was actively trying to make small talk. 

Maddy’s last post was on an intermodal relay, before the accident that filled her with cancer and forced her onto Oasis, and she’d been required to learn every detail about the comings and goings on the station, no matter how minute. Her team had orders to stop a certain number of people on every patrol and interrogate them. If their explanation didn’t make complete, absolute sense, she was required to detain them and call for a supervisor. Her CO reasoned that if every marine on station was an expert on the workings of the station, then it would be that much harder to smuggle contraband, or weapons, or do terrorist shit there. It was a pain in the ass, and extremely awkward, but the reasoning made sense and you got over feeling like an antisocial asshole pretty quickly. 

A tall, blond woman in a lab coat stopped them. She had a severe face, pinched in the center like she actively tried to make her lips look as stiff as possible. Her perfect posture screamed former military officer. She looked Maddy up and down, her face twisting into an expression that looked like she was sucking on a wasp; evidently appraising the security sergeant and finding her lacking.

“What do you want?” The woman asked. She spoke in a short, clipped tense and had a posh center systems accent. 

“I’m Security Sergeant Turner, ma’am. I’m new to Oasis III, on mutual aid from the Fleet Marine Corps. I’ve been assigned as liaison to the science team.” Maddy tried for a formal approach, hoping that would counteract the disapproval. 

“I’m Doctor Carney, research director for the Dominion’s Scientific Advancement Section and adjunct professor on exoplanet microbiology at the Tau Ceti Institute of Advanced Sciences, among other things. Tell me then, ‘security sergeant’,” she raised her hands and did an air quotes gesture when she said ‘security sergeant’, “why the fuck are the intersystem comms down? Even FLT comms IN system. They’ve been down for days now with no update. We can’t get our findings out.”

What a pompous dick, Maddy thought. “I’m sorry ma’am, but I don’t know any more about that than you do.” Carney scoffed at that. “I promise if I get any updates I’ll share with you what I can. I stopped by because we have an expedition operation tomorrow and I wanted to talk about how we’ve been doing these operations recently.”

“Oh is that so?” Carney pointed an accusing finger at Maddy, apparently channeling all the pent up frustrations with Chief at her, “OUR job here,” she gestured to herself and Liselle, “is to advance the human race. YOUR job is to prevent loss. You aren’t soldiers, you aren’t action heroes. Right now the ‘way we’ve been doing these operations’ is entirely unacceptable, and if you and your fellow knuckle draggers cant figure out why shooting a fucking bazooka at every one of our test sites is bad science, then I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not your mother, I shouldn’t have to explain how to have basic sense.”

Maddy had been yelled at a lot and had worked up a pretty tough skin against it. Sure, she was shy in social settings, but at work, she was playing a character. And that character was impervious to verbal insults. But, for some unknown reason, this woman’s tirade was actually getting under Maddy’s skin. 

“I’ll talk to the team tomorrow and see if we can make updates to the collection procedures.” Maddy replied flatly, and turned to walk out. She didn’t need to fight back against the woman, but she also didn’t need to take heat without cause. Her ears burned as she walked away and she wasn’t sure if it was from anger or shame. The woman had a right to be angry, sure, but she didn’t have to be the worst version of herself to prove her point. Maddy hoped that was the worst version of her, at least. 

Maddy had made it through the contamination reduction area and started down the side stairwell but stopped when she saw a figure standing at the bottom of the stairs. Chief. 

“Turner, Sergeant Turner, I see you are attempting to ingratiate yourself with our esteemed colleagues,” Chief’s fever dream vocals made Maddy’s descent down the stairs feel like the first confused moments of suddenly waking from a deep sleep. “I see you’ve even met the Queen herself, miss Carney of Tau-CETI,” Chief added extra emphasis to the ‘Ceti’ in Tau Ceti, “the professor of all-knowledge, the arcane and natural. Listen Turner, I need to show you something, come with me.” Chief turned and start walking briskly, duck walking as he went as though his knees were splinted in place. Maddy followed. 

Chief’s office door opened and a waft of smoke drifted out. It smelled of tobacco and cinnamon. “Are you smoking in here, sir?” Maddy asked, immediately regretting a second confrontation so quickly after the first. 

“It’s a fire station, Turner,” was all Chief said. 

His office had been transformed over the last several days. Monitors and screens of various sizes and models were arrayed across every flat surface available, with several mounted to the wall, and one lay on the floor with the screen smashed inward. Wires ran haphazardly in every direction. The monitors played camera feeds from inside and outside the station, with several outside, aimed at street corners down sidewalks. One of the screens showed the view inside the office, the screen showing a view of the screen she was looking at, giving the illusion of an infinite tunnel of screens and cameras. 

“I’ve been surveilling Turner. Reconnoitering. Observing the enemy as they linger outside our castle walls. My plan is almost ready to carry out, but I need something from you, Turner.”

“What’s that, sir?” Maddy asked. She noticed that the Black Mamba was present in at least half a dozen camera views. It must've had three-hundred-and-sixty degree coverage.

“I need you to fulfill your purpose. Achieve your destiny, Turner. I cannot be tied down by the unending bonds that try to keep me from reaching my goal. There’s an infinite number of paths that we can choose from here Turner, but we can only choose one. I’ve chosen mine, and I can’t be taken off course.” 

Blitz emerged from a side door with a file box in his hands. Chief smiled his snake smile, his skeletal features highlighted by the dim glow of the two dozen screens. “He’s talking about this, Sergeant. It’s the other half of your new job.” He handed the box to Maddy, and she saw that it was filled with papers, personnel files, reports, and checklists. Blitz mouthed ‘I’m sorry’. Chief lit a massive, hand rolled cigarette, puffed it, and grinned. Maddy took the box and sighed. 

Chapter 9

Subject: Admiral Nilson

The God of War smiled on Nilson. He’d set up the upcoming battle under the impression that he had three functional ships and one day to prepare the field, however a lucky break changed everything. Estevez had managed to coordinate with personnel left on the station to fire up the e-war systems aboard the Kydoimos. The massive array of jamming dishes turned like cannons on their turrets towards the path of the oncoming Adversary ships and loosed a barrage of energy. Electromagnetic radiation across every spectrum and wavelength the machines were capable of producing. A brute force assault of noise meant to confuse whatever sensors the alien ships used. 

And it worked. It better than worked. The Adversary ships decelerated and stopped in their tracks as soon as the waves of energy traveled through space and met the enemy. They stopped for so long that Nilson’s battered squadron of the Bastion and two ancient destroyers came within three hours of contact. Close enough that Nilson called general quarters and started making plans for an early engagement. A ranging laser fired by the Bastion spooked the Adversary into forging onward into the noise, but the delay bought the defenders around Oasis III an extra day and a half. 

Even better, it meant when the engagement happened, the light delay between Nilson and the defenders would be seconds instead of minutes. He could command the battle in near real time, and if the defenders could hold their ground long enough, Nilson’s ships could theoretically join the battle. The prospect of all of his forces joining battle at the same time would be a huge break. It was inspiring and gave him hope. 

Nilson watched the battle display from the bridge of the Bastion as the Adversary slid into range of Oasis III’s L2 Lagrange point, close enough to the planet’s largest moon that a traditional defending naval force would move to engage. Nilson’s force was anything but traditional. The Adversary was moving fast, and their heading put them on a collision course with the station above the planet, but Nilson knew from past engagements that they could change course and speed at will, apparently without any regard to physics. By happy accident, that course would force the two alien ships into a near encounter with two of Oasis III’s four moons. And, as far as Nilson knew, the ships were still blinded by jamming. 

“Comms, send the fire order to Battlegroup Boxer,” Nilson ordered. Boxer was the callsign he’d given the mishmash of broken ships and light frigates. 

“Aye admiral!” The comms officer declared. Estevez looked at Nilson and smiled reassuringly. At the range the ships were at, the firing was destined to be entirely ineffective, but the point wasn’t to hit the Adversary, it was to draw their attention and try to pull them in the direction Nilson wanted. 

“Admiral, do you have a minute?” A voice behind him asked quietly. Nilson turned to look, and to his astonishment it was Davis. At his post. Wearing a crisp, black officer’s uniform, perfectly decorated and straightened. 

Nilson looked at his display, there wasn’t anything he could do right now that would make a difference, and it would be some time before ships got close enough to need commanding. “Sure, XO Davis. Estevez, you have command until I get back, let me know if anything changes.” 

“Aye sir,” Estevez responded. Nilson and Davis walked off the bridge into a small briefing office meant for command staff to gather. The compartment had been unused for so long, the crew started to use it as a break area and a place to store broken equipment. 

“Admiral, I know our relationship has been horrible and I want to say a few things, so you understand. I want to say this before we go into battle in case something happens.” Davis started. His expression was of genuine humility and concern. Nilson had never seen this before. 

“Speak freely, XO,” Nilson responded, intensely curious as to what was on Davis’s mind.

“Do you know who I am, Admiral?” Davis asked. 

“I know you’re the cousin of a politician or some god damned thing like that,” Nilson regretted the annoyance, but nepotism was destroying fleet flag officer culture. It seemed like every graduation class had fewer warriors and more politicians. Eventually, it would be all politicians. 

“My dad actually, he’s on the Colonial Affairs board of directors as an advisor. He was a fleet officer, too.” That’s how it was, politicians weren’t considered qualified unless they had some patriotic hero story to campaign on. Warship captain, or fleet admiral, or even sector commandant was a guaranteed majority vote if your opponent didn’t have the same chops. Hell, he’d seen political jockeying that came down to arguments over rank and time-in-grade. Because of that, nearly every politician across Dominion space pulled strings and lined pockets to make sure their kids, or allies, got the best fleet positions that matched their budget. 

The problem had gotten so bad that second fleet’s admiral made it a point to make the fleet’s command track progression so grueling, that being called ‘captain’ was only achievable if you were willing to spend half your career mastering the inner workings of whatever ship you were assigned to from the ground up. You had to be signed off on every primary bridge station before you could be considered qualified to command the thing. And it worked. Every captain in that fleet could sit down behind any station and operate it like a pro. Nav, helm, tactical, e-war, whatever. Second fleet was proud, and it was earned. The shiny point on humanity’s spear. Terror of any bastard alien that wanted to make trouble. Nilson wished he had a force like that now.

“Listen Admiral, I’m not trying to make excuses I just want to explain,” Davis said. Nilson relaxed and nodded, gesturing Davis to go on. 

“I went to law school, and when I graduated, my father pulled me aside and explained that I was not going to the Navy JAG. He’d bought me an officer route and I’d be following in his footsteps. It didn’t matter what I said. I wrote ‘Judge Advocate’ on every piece of career selection paperwork I was given, but it didn’t matter. I went from basic, to OCS, to Fleet Academy. I even tried to fail out,” Davis’s eyes were pleading, like he’d never told anyone his story. Like he’d had no one to tell. “If I failed an assignment, even on purpose, I’d get smoked alongside everyone else but my record would always show ‘resolved through remediation’. Always. I could not fail. I was pushed through Fleet Academy and did one orientation tour on a supply barge that lasted three months. I followed around the operations officer for one supply run and was immediately promoted to executive officer of the Bastion.”

Nilson let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He had no idea it was this bad. 

“When Captain Morcos lost his mind, I was terrified I’d be put in command of the ship. I had no fucking idea what to do. So, I did what I could do lay low and avoid being fingered for promotion. It would be insane to put me in command. I filled the spot for a few weeks, sure. But I just had Estevez take us back to the Oasis system. I thought I was going to have an ulcer. It was an incredible relief when you decided to take over Bastion as your flagship.”

Something clicked in Nilson’s mind. The young man was trying to fail on purpose. He was out of his depth, and he knew it. 

“I really appreciate your leadership,” Davis was near tears. “Thank you for stepping up, I couldn’t do it. I can’t do it.”

Nilson was at a complete loss of what to say. He knew Davis was incapable, but he didn’t expect the man to start crying and admit to it. 

“After seeing what happened to the Rahvan, I’m worried that could happened to us. It’s been eating away at me and I know how to fix it. Make Estevez the XO. Assign me wherever, I don’t care. Just get me out of the command succession.”

As if summoned by Davis’s words, the ships PA bellowed, “Admiral to the bridge, Admiral to the bridge.” 

“Davis, you’re right and I’m sorry this is the state of things. I don’t think you’re a bad kid, you’ve just been fucked over in a way that hurts all of us. I’ll find a way to make the transfer seem like a good thing for you so it doesn’t ruin your chances of holding office and get me on the Colonial Affairs chopping block. Give me time, I’ve got to go kill aliens.” Nilson put a reassuring hand on Davis’s shoulder, “take some time but don’t wait too long, you’re not going to want to miss this.”

Nilson speed walked to the bridge. Partially out of anxiety about the upcoming battle, but mostly to get away from the crying man that had just confided in him. Estevez greeted him on the bridge. 

“Admiral, phase two is underway and it’s starting to heat up,” Estevez told him. 

Nilson took up his post in front of the battle display. Someone had left a fresh cup of coffee on the flat surface by his backup command terminal; that someone deserves a medal. 

On the display, the situation was unfolding just as Nilson and Estevez had planned. The coilgun slugs the three frigates were firing were loaded with flak munitions, similar to the grapeshot munitions in the point defense missiles, but packed with fewer, and much larger, impactors. The clouds of tungsten were hard for the Adversary to dodge while moving at full speed, and so they shifted course to put the big moon between the station and themselves, effectively using the moon as cover. The maneuver didn’t cost them speed, but it did delay them slightly. Nilson’s squadron was two hours out of kill zone on the Adversary’s current position and burning at full speed. Every delay brought them closer to contributing in the current fight. 

The Adversary ships split up on the back side of the moon, one moving spinward, and the other moving counterspinward. Their intent seemed to be to emerge simultaneously on the planet facing side in order to trip up the defenders. That was fine. The less their point defenses overlapped, the better. 

The thing about mines, in space, is that they only really work if the enemy doesn’t know they’re there. Space is so big that you can generally see what’s going to happen well before it actually happens. And point defenses being what they are, mines are generally a niche tool for niche application. Nilson believed this to be that application. He had directed the three frigates to drop bundles of missiles in orbit around all four moons and had accelerated several hundred individual missiles up to the speed of the station and left them at differing intervals between the moons and the planet. They were dropped randomly. He didn’t know they’d wind up having time to arm the three-hundred missile hulls with the excess munitions, so three hundred unarmed missiles existed in the battle space as decoys. Clusters of armed missile munitions without hulls were dropped as well. The battle space was absolutely littered with little surprises for the enemy. 

“Five minutes until the station is in the enemy kill zone,” Estevez announced just as the Adversary rounded the big moon, and dozens of missiles waiting on the other side started burning towards them. 

Nilson wondered what kind of thoughts went through the alien’s disgusting freak brains when they realized they’d flown into a mine field. He wondered if they even had brains, or if the ships were fully automated. One of the frigates targeted a cluster of munitions that had wandered a few hundred kilometers from one of the ships, and hit it with a coilgun strike. The exploding ordinance wouldn’t harm the alien ship, but it would send out a mess of shrapnel and light, hopefully enough to confuse and distract. An EM bomb was part of the cluster, and a wave of energy meant to disable alien energy shields raced outwards, engulfing the Adversary ship.

The Adversary that was hit with the EM blast took evasive action, trying to escape the unknown wave of energy while the other unleashed a mighty wave of seekers. Missiles, guided by the targeting lasers aboard the docked e-war cruiser came closer and closer as the seekers struggled to keep up with missiles activating and flying in from every angle. To Nilson’s delight, the seekers couldn’t tell an armed missile from the husks, and dozens of seekers chased down and sacrificed themselves in mass to stop unarmed missiles that were near completely harmless. The e-war cruiser dialed up its jamming, activating a battle-short mode that would overload any warship’s sensors completely- and burn out the e-war systems within hours if sustained. All three frigates alternated coilgun fire between the Adversary and strikes on packets of ordinance floating in the gap. The chaos was unbelievable. 

Both Adversary ships fired their beams wildly into the bedlam. The beams missed hitting human warships by thousands of kilometers, instead lancing into the planet behind them. The beams of hellish energy burned bright swirling auroras into the planet’s atmosphere as they plunged to the surface. 

“Now!” Nilson ordered, commanding the rag-tag fleet to deploy their secret weapon. From the far side of the second moon, a navy corvette emerged, burning at full emergency speed. The little kamikaze warship had barely been put into position in time. It’s fusion reactor was already a sketchy thing to behold, but now, here it was turned up to eleven. Engineers and maintenance technicians had worked around the clock welding, lashing, and bolting missiles to the hull as makeshift chemical rocket boosters. They fired in series, propelling the ship at G forces well beyond the survivable limit for any human crew. Estevez controlled the suicide bomber from the Bastion, using the e-war cruiser as a relay. Nilson gripped the railing on his command podium as he watched the battle display. 

The Adversary, blinded, fired on, harried by missiles, terrorized by a minefield, and now pursued by a post-apocalyptic warlord’s kamikaze wet dream, must have sensed their imminent demise. Both ships did something entirely new at exactly the same time. The cylinders between their outriggers opened and fired long, barbed spikes. All of the spikes, fourteen in total, were aimed at the planet and propelled themselves into a circular formation, with New Carthage in the center. 

And that’s when everything fell apart. 

“Tactical, Estevez, coordinate PD fire on those projectiles! Comms! Send a message to the planet admin warning they are under attack!” Admiral Nilson shouted. 

Both the fleet officers shouted back, “Aye!” Their voices gaining energy as Nilson ramped up. 

“Sirs! Power junction on the dock attaching the Kydoimos to the station has just overloaded and caught fire! Damage control teams have been dispatched!” The situation officer announced to the bridge. 

“Fuck!” Estevez shouted, turning red either out of anger, or shame for losing her composure in battle. “The Kydoimos lost power, e-war, missile targeting, and suicide ship control are offline.”

Nilson’s stomach flipped as he realized the magnitude of what just happened. 

Both Adversary ships, suddenly free from the oppressive jamming, dialed in on their targets; beam weapons suddenly found purchase. One of the defensing frigates was cut in half, as the other took a direct hit to the reactor and went critical, a blaze of nuclear fire expanded at light speed into a sphere of absolute destruction.  

“Optical sensors offline!” The sensor operator shouted.

“The Morana and Tana are destroyed!” The situation officer shouted.

The Bastion and her destroyers were just close enough to watch, but not close enough to help. Nilson’s knuckles turned white and his hands ached. His jaw clenched hard as he watched the battle turn without any control or means to intervene. 

The Adversary, apparently having fulfilled their mission of launching weapons at the human settlement, slowed and changed course, unintentionally allowing time for the little suicide ship to get closer towards its target. Despite having lost guidance when the e-war cruiser lost power, the ship dutifully carried out it’s last commands. Rockets fired, and the ships main engine burned well past any measure of safety. The Adversary, apparently either confusing the ship for a missile, or wanting to avoid repeating the reactor overload of their last kill, launched a barrage of seekers to intercept the corvette. Fatal choice. The beam is light speed, the seekers are slow in comparison. The Adversary wasn’t aware of it’s mistake. 

The suicide corvette got far closer to the nearest ship than Nilson had hoped. As if guided by the hand of the God of War, the ship rocketed closer and closer to the closest Adversary ship. The Adversary moved at a leisurely pace to avoid direct contact and loosed another wave of seekers. The seekers pelted the hull, desperately attempting to stop it’s relentless advance. The final remaining frigate, with it’s one coilgun, seized the initiative and sent a tungsten slug directly into the corvette’s reactor. It went critical, spilling a cone of nuclear light that twisted and burned into a roiling sphere. 

“Confirmed kill,” Estevez announced. 

The remaining Adversary, the last of it’s kind in this system, having accomplished whatever mission it set out for on its gauntlet run, turned and accelerated away from the battle and down towards the gravity well of the system.

Chapter 10

Subject: Maddy

The second expedition, Maddy’s first as squad leader, got off to a rough start. They’d taken a small convoy of vehicles to the spaceport to meet a contracted light shuttle that was meant to drop them off at a remote research site, loiter, and then pick them up a few hours later after their little adventure had wrapped up. This time, they took the buggies and the pickup truck, leaving Mamba back at the station at the insistence of Chief. The problem came when they took a backroad that ran them through a shanty town. 

“Zombieland,” Felix keyed in over the comms, “this isn’t really on the way to the spaceport.”

“No it isn’t,” Maddy replied. She’d taken the time to study a map of the surrounding town. It was laid out like a big square and gridded up into districts. The spaceport district was in the center of town. There was an admin district just north, and a hospital district adjacent to the spaceport to the east, and the police and judicial district to the west. The old lab where the security team had originally been posted was next to the hospital district. Their current headquarters, the fire station, was about three kilometers south of the spaceport at the furthest edge of the square settlement. All of the void space was taken up by temporary structures being used as housing, rudimentary shops, hydroponic gardens, workshops, and whatever else the locals could improvise. Small settlements pocked the space between New Carthage and the barrier. 

They should be going due north. The path they were going was north generally, but it was via a detour to the east, through an area that was originally a lithium mine that had been abandoned. It was now apparently animal central, ‘zombieland’, as Felix had called it. Others called it The Exhibit. Maddy figured she knew why, Team One, Blitz’s team, was driving the first two vehicles. 

The convoy slowed as they drove through a few dozen skinny, emaciated people wearing brown rags. They were bent over, laying, or kneeling in the road blocking traffic. One, a young man by the looks of it, was slowly walking on all fours, his body moving in a jerking motion and taking one step backwards for after every other step forward. He was moving like one for those bizarre lizards Maddy had seen in nature documentaries of old Earth. There must’ve been a hundred more people in various states of wacked-out semi-consciousness on the sidewalks, between buildings, or amongst rubble. Garbage was everywhere and reflective foil emergency shelters were strung up haphazardly between collapsed, temporary buildings. 

The lead vehicle, the pickup truck, was being driven by a Team One guy that went by the name Smoker. Smoker had chosen this route, and Smoker decided that blasting the truck’s siren was the appropriate move in this situation. Maddy hadn’t even known the truck had a siren. 

“Fucking animals,” Peanut sighed on the comm.

“We’d have no problem with them if we didn’t actively go fuck with them like this,” Dad muttered. 

The siren drew more in, animals they were called. Maddy didn’t like how derogatory it sounded, but she had to admit, they certainly didn’t act human. A crowd of them emerged from the buildings behind them and wandered into the roadway. Some had their hands out, two of them were crawling, and a third had his arms tucked in and was rolling along the ground like a little kid rolling down a hill. Maddy could hear Smoker yelling and she looked up to see him waving his service pistol out the window. 

Maddy sighed, they were boxed in. She activated her comm, TAC1, “Team Two dismount and clear the road. Team One, get the vehicles turned around and lets head back towards the main road.” Someone scoffed over the comm, probably Smoker, Maddy guessed. Dad and Felix were in the buggy with Maddy at the rear of the convoy. Their driver was a mousy kid from Team One that Maddy hadn’t formally met yet. She pointed at him and said, “you’re going to be lead when we turn around, don’t pull any of this bullshit. Back to the main road and north. Got it?” He nodded.

“Okay get back! Clear the road!” Maddy shouted at the crowd of animals. Felix hoisted his rifle and charged at them, pointing it wildly and cursing. “Whoa, take it down a notch Felix!” Maddy ordered. She was seeing the gun pointing as a pretty severe escalation on the use of force continuum. They’d barely given the animals time to move out of the way on their own. She looked over at Dad, and he had one by the arm and was dragging him onto the sidewalk, his captive babbling madly. Maddy looked at the other group, they were all taking slightly different approaches to clearing the road. Peanut was squared up like a boxer, shoving them back hard. The animals didn’t seem to understand what was happening. 

“Man, these ones are fucked up! Must be some good shit!” Felix said as he dragged one to the side of the road, mimicking Dad. One started walking back after he’d been put on the sidewalk and Felix shoved him to the ground. “They get pretty animated when they’ve gone a few days without the zoo. These ones’ve been dosing recently.” 

“Team Two on me,” Maddy announced on the comm, changing tactics. Her team gathered around the rear buggy. She keyed up the comm, “alright, Team One, lets reverse out of here and turn around. Team Two, do like Felix and Dad and lets make space for the vehicles.”

They worked together, grabbing the animals by the arms and walking them to the sidewalk, sitting them down with physical control tactics right out of the academy. The buggies rolled by and started turning around. Right as the truck got to the break in the crowd, Smoker pointed his pistol at one and fired. The boom caught Maddy by surprise and she drew her sidearm, unsure of where to aim before realizing that Smoker was trying to scare an animal that was staring at him by shooting a hole into the building behind him. 

“GOD FUCKING DAMMIT SMOKER!” Maddy roared, holstering her pistol and charging with a knife-hand instead. “YOUR DUMB ASS GOT US INTO THIS CLUSTER FUCK, AND NOW YOU’RE TRYING TO GET THE FUCKING COPS DOWN HERE TOO?”

“You’re soft, you needed to see what it is we’ve been dealing with,” Smoker responded, a half grin on his face. 

Soft, Maddy thought. She wanted to break his fucking nose. She could too. A dozen thoughts ran through her mind, all different ways to settle this right here and now. She wanted to spit in his face, pull him out of the truck, and kick him in the gut until he cried. But, that’s not how a commanding officer was supposed to act, and it wasn’t that bad yet. 

“Listen to me, you aren’t in my squad but that doesn’t mean I wont find a way to end your ass when I have the chance. We have a timetable to keep and I am not going to fuck it up by playing who-has-the-biggest-dick with you. Holster your gun, turn your truck around, and shut the fuck up or I will pull you out of that truck and restrain you for insubordination.” Maddy was fuming. Shy Maddy was gone now too, apparently she was feeling open enough with the group. That plus work Maddy had come out to play. Smoker, to his credit, could tell he was about to lose this. He gave a shitty salute and turned the truck around. 

“Mount up!” Maddy ordered, glaring at each member of the team in order. The science team in the middle buggy looked at them with a mix of shock, awe, and disgust. No wonder they hate us, look at this team, Maddy thought. 

The convoy roared up to the spaceport. At first, Maddy was concerned that her itinerary didn’t include a landing pad number for their ride, but there was only one shuttle out a the spaceport when they got there. It was industrial green with red and silver warning tape accenting anything that you could conceivably hurt yourself on. The doors opened on either side behind the cockpit. The science team was first to the shuttle, the four of them on this mission strapped their equipment down on to the deck in the shuttle while her team climbed into their seats. Dad slid a heavy impact case against the science equipment and strapped it down. Maddy climbed in as the pilot joined the comms channel. 

“All aboard?” The pilot asked. 

Maddy did a quick headcount. Herself, plus five security officers, four scientist. Ten total. “Affirmative, the teams all here.”

“Alrighty kids, put on your seatbelts, put your tray tables up, and keep hands, feet, and all other objects inside the aircraft while we are in motion.” The pilots jovial attitude relaxed Maddy a bit after the drama with Smoker, but she was still on edge. 

“Listen up team,” Maddy spoke over the comm. “I am not tolerating any more bullshit. I appreciate that you all have been here much longer than me, but I am not going to have my team act like a bunch of assholes. We are better than Team One, and we are gonna act like it. Practice radio discipline and stick with your buddy. And, we are not going to shoot everything as soon as we drop.” Everyone looked at her, wide eyed like she’d lost her mind, “the science team has developed countermeasures for the wildlife. ONLY shoot if I say so, or if something is an active threat. Yes, pre-attack indicators count as imminent threat. Something running away from you or hiding in a bush a hundred meters away does not count. Are we clear?”

Silence. 

“Felix check in that you understand these orders.” 

“Yes ma’am!” Felix replied, sounding, to Maddy’s surprise, enthused. 

“Dad?” 

“Good copy.”

“Peanut?”

“Sure, I get ya.”

“Gremlin?”

“We’re still gonna kill shit, right?” Gremlin asked. 

“We will kill anything that fucks with us Gremlin, use your judgement.” 

“Okay, I copy,” Gremlin replied, disappointed. 

“Two-Feet?” She’d almost forgotten about him entirely, he’d been so quiet.

“Yep, of course.”

The team flew in relative silence for the rest of the journey. Maddy had to consciously stop herself from looking at Liselle. It was creepy, she knew. She was also concerned that the last two times Liselle had seen her, she’d been in fights with people. Sure, Maddy’s job was in part to fight people, but she’d been fighting her coworkers. Maddy decided to look at her smartlink instead. 

There were about a dozen notifications she hadn’t seen earlier. She wasn’t used to having to check the damn thing, but now that she was doing Chief’s job, she’d have to be better about it. She opened the notifications and saw they were all from ‘ISD General Alerts’ talking about ground-to-space travel restrictions and imminent fleet action. What the fuck? 

“We’re here, first stop. Sergeant Turner give me a holler when you’re ready to bugger out and I’ll meet ya right back here. We got fuel for hours and I like flyin’ so no rush,” the pilot announced in his smooth, musical voice. Maddy pushed the alerts out of her mind, that was space, she was on the ground. Maybe the fleet it having it out with pirates or some damn thing. None of the alerts gave any detail beyond ‘stuff happening, be aware’. 

Maddy and her team hit the ground and fanned out in a circle around the light shuttle. The science team unstrapped their boxes and Dad’s big case and pulled them onto the ground, ducking low. The shuttle rose and split away, banking into the clouds and disappearing from view. Maddy scanned the brush, saw nothing and lowered her rifle. “Clear,” she said over comm. The rest of the team reported in clear. 

They had set down on a small, flat, bald hill surrounded by forests on all sides. The forest was extremely thick, with brush filling the space from the ground up to the canopy of the bizarre, red-to-black trees. Hundreds of birds squirted between brush in every direction. Dad and Peanut had donned the last pieces of their heavy powered armor pulled out of the big impact case, and the science team was busily strapping cases of air filters onto their backs. 

Maddy scanned the brush again, this time activating the thermal overlay on her visor. The forest came to life in her vision, and she could see dozens of tiny creatures darting about amongst the bushes, climbing trees, and dancing between branches. The smell was horrible, the heat was oppressive, but the planet was beautiful in it’s alien way. And filled with so much life. 

“On me,” Dad said, peanut taking position behind him. “I know the way.”

“Copy, Gremlin, Felix, take the flanks, Two-Feet, you’re with me at the rear,” Maddy ordered. Liselle walked by and smiled at her. She was wearing hiking clothes with a stab vest over the top. 

The team marched about 500 meters along the base of a ridge where the brush was thin. They emerged into a clearing where the first monitoring station was. 

“Skullfucker twelve o’clock,” Dad said.

“Right on the monitoring station,” Peanut added.

“Finally something to fucking shoot,” Gremlin had to share her weird line straight out of the sociopathic thought factory she called a brain. 

“Hold fire, let the science group take this one,” Maddy ordered, and signaled to a scientist who’s face was covered by a giant, full faced respirator. He pulled a device off his back and slid a mechanism on it down. Three legs popped out, turning it into a tripod with a square box on the top. The box had a green indicator light on each side. The scientist pushed a button and the lights turned red. Suddenly, the skullfucker and about twenty-five hundred birds screeched and ran or flew in every direction AWAY from the device. A squirrel like thing at her feet that she hadn’t even noticed until it started moving let out a whooping cry and rocketed into the bushes. She was amazing no one started shooting just as a response to the momentary chaos the thing had inflicted. 

“What the fuck is that?” Felix asked. 

The scientist looked as if he was going to explain, but Maddy raised her hand and cut him off. “Technological progress, killer. They’re scientists and they figured out a science way to scare shit off.” 

“Huh,” Felix mumbled. Gremlin looked at it disapprovingly. 

The scientist couldn’t contain himself, “its the same as the barrier device, but much smaller. It makes noise that we can’t hear, but drives the local creatures crazy.”

“I can hear it,” Two-Feet said. 

Maddy looked at him like he was crazy, but then realized she could hear something too. An alarm. She looked around and then realized, her smartlink was going off. She had the damn thing on mute, did the barrier device break it? She pulled it out of her pocket and realized the rest of her team was doing the same with their own smartlinks. An emergency alert displayed on the screen.

EMERGENCY: SEVERE ORBITAL HAZARD(s). SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. 

Everyone looked at each other, dumbstruck. A moment later, a beam of hellish light speared through the sky, appearing across the entire horizon at once. A burning, swirling green-then-red-then-blue-then-green aurora spread across the sky like a shockwave. Lighting arced from the beam and spread in all directions like the roots of a tree the size of the planet. Another flash of impossibly bright light and a second spear burned its path of ionizing destruction through the atmosphere, destroying the very air it touched. A sonic boom detonated, then a second one. The sound cascading from an incredible, earth shattering explosion to an electrical sizzling. Her team dropped to the ground, her active hearing protection glitched out trying to counteract the impossible sound. She could feel it in her chest like her heart had exploded. She wanted to yell ‘get down’ to her team. Hell, she might’ve, but it was pointless. Pure animal instinct glued them to the ground where they once stood. 

The impacts kept coming, two, then four. Maddy lost count. Each one was like hearing the voice of a wrathful god. She was crying and didn’t quite understand why. The tears were those you shed at the end of the world, not out of fear, but out of awe. Someone was screaming, but she couldn’t tell who. 

After a time, probably about minutes but it felt like an hour; like the orbital strikes had somehow opened a time dimension into a Department of Orbital Vehicles waiting room’s timestream, where each second felt like an eternity, the strikes stopped. Maddy rolled onto her back and looked at the sky. The aurora spread from horizon to horizon and she could still make out the zig-zag pattern of the beams of light across the sky, although they’d faded from their initial surface-of-a-star level of brightness down to the much more reasonable vaguely visible. A dozen or more smaller streaks were visible in the distance, ringing the sky in all directions. Each one terminating into a spray of fire and ember high in the atmosphere, raining down a hailstorm of broken, burning debris. 

Maddy was left feeling shellshocked; she was terrified, overwhelmed, and strangely, excited. Maddy left to her feet, “UP! UP! UP!” She yelled at her team, everyone still taking cover on the ground with the scientists “Dad, get comms with our air support and get evac on the way! Felix, Gremlin, get on that rock and get me a sit report!” Maddy aimed a knife-hand at a large rock, the highest point in eyesight. “Peanut, Two-Feet, get the science team ready to move.” The usual grumbling and shit-talking was gone. Everyone responded with a prompt ‘yes ma’am’ and got to work. 

Maddy picked her smartlink up off the ground where she’d apparently dropped it. Whoops. She scrolled through the contacts to Chief, thought briefly, and then called Blitz. He answered immediately.

“Sergeant Turner you need to get the science team back to base,” Blitz stated without preamble. Maddy could hear Chief yelling profanity in the background. 

“My thoughts exactly; I’m getting the team together now. Is everything okay back at the station?” Maddy asked. Clearly they hadn’t taken a hit from whatever the fuck just blew holes in the atmosphere, but Blitz sounded worried.

“The station is fine, everyone is okay. NC wasn’t hit by anything, but its pandemonium out there. We are going into lockdown. Have the shuttle drop you on the station’s roof.” 

“Copy that,” Maddy responded before turning to the team on the rock. “You two, what’s the status of our exfil?”

Gremlin chimed in over the comms, “looks like the lasers or whatever hit something to the east, there’s a big fire starting over there. NC and the west looks clear. The way out looks the same as it did coming in. Lots of xeno’s running around though! Weapons free on the way out?”

Maddy sighed and switched comms to the whole team, “Listen up! This op is cancelled and we are going home. Two by two road column, Dad and Peanut take the front, Gremlin, Felix take center, Two-Feet and I will take rear. Science team fall in between us and try to stay tight. The way back is clear but kill anything that isn’t human and looks at us funny. Dad, what’s the status of exfil?”

“Shuttle is 10 minutes out, ma’am,” Dad replied. 

“The stars have aligned then. Move it!”