Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Read online

  Not that the back was much better.

  The good thing about Fergunakil technology was that a lot of it had biological components, and biotech was easy to rip out. The unfortunate thing about it, aside from the fact that there was no inoffensive way to secure it about your person, was that it was squishy, and slimy, and it stank.

  On top of the physical unpleasantness, Fergunak often slipped lethal – and very hard to trace – security measures into their data, so it was a delicate process getting anything out of them. Drago knew this better than most, but it was a fact drummed relentlessly into AstroCorps officers throughout the course of their training.

  It would take some work to get information off the processing tube, especially since they didn’t have access to a synthetic intelligence, and there was a certain amount of risk … but it would still be easier than trying to pry out whatever information the Black Honey Wings computer had managed to take from the clipper. And any information Dool’s crew had taken from the clipper was probably already contaminated, if they really were as clueless as they seemed.

  Anyway.

  Next step for Drago was getting back to his cosy little modular.

  Nobody had come into the main hold while he was rooting around in the Fergie ship, even with the fight he’d taken part in just outside. The A-Mod 400 was clearly doing a decent job keeping everybody distracted. The question was how he was going to get back on board the modular before she did critical damage to whatever part of the Black Honey Wings he happened to be in. The main hold, its big cargo airlock the only thing separating him from vacuum, was probably the worst of many bad alternatives. It wasn’t necessarily a critical weakness in the starship, so it wasn’t necessarily a priority target, but it could be used as a fighter launch bay by the defenders, and it was a tempting spot for attackers to fire through and attempt to hit systems deeper inside the ship. So it was a target.

  The question he had to answer to his own satisfaction – preferably very, very quickly – was whether his crew would have reunited with the A-Mod 400 yet, in which case they’d be considering extraction options for the information they’d come aboard to retrieve. The information, and the hapless Chief Tactical Officer who had the information stuffed in his belt. Alternatively, W’Tan might still be operating on her own over on the modular, in which case she’d know he was headed to the main hold but not that he had achieved his goal and was looking for a way out. He could only transmit so much to the bridge with his little pulser, especially once the dogfight began in earnest. Protocol required that she conclude the conflict with the compromised yet superior enemy starship without undue consideration for single crewmembers in harm’s way. And Choya Alapitarius W’Tan would stick to protocol.

  Molren, he thought with a wry grimace. I told Skell it was a stupid idea to put any in the command group.

  Still, if he had to bet his life on one thing other than Molren being sticklers for procedure, he’d bet it on Çrom Skelliglyph making it out of the Nope, Leftovers and back onto the bridge of the A-Mod 400. But he couldn’t make the assumption that they would risk everything on a crash-dock for him, and he knew they’d know he wouldn’t.

  Indeed, they’d trust him to do the only thing he could do in this situation. Which, much as he hated to admit it, was essentially what combat protocol suggested anyway, because the protocols were ultimately designed by a sane – albeit disturbingly aggressive yet cold-blooded – person. Primary goal achieved, he had to get into the Black Honey Wings’s systems and do what he could from within to help the A-Mod 400 to win her fight.

  He jogged away towards the access doors, the Fergie processing tube flapping obscenely against his lower back.

  X (Meanwhile)

  W’Tan sat back in the Captain’s chair. Most of the other officers avoided sitting at the main command console when they were filling the role of Acting Captain. It was as if they thought some vengeful God of Rank would smite them for daring to have ambitions above their station. Their superstition was pointless symbolism at best. At worst, it was defeating the design purpose of the bridge. They put that seat, those controls and overrides, in that location for a reason. Sitting somewhere else, at some auxiliary console, was functionally handicapping yourself.

  Drago Barducci’s pulse whisper, in the absence of any real comms, was a perfect example. Of course the enemy ship had nullified their communications. Even if the crew of the A-Mod 400 had been stupid enough to attempt to communicate on common channels during an armed conflict, the enemy would want to prevent it. Preventing it was less problematic than tapping into it. But Barducci’s little tag was one of those things that could really only be efficiently used from main command.

  “Is that all, Commander?” Glorious Providence (Sarcasm) asked from the comms station. Providence was a relatively competent Blaran of some neutral political creed or other, her entire body striped horizontally black and white. W’Tan knew it was her entire body, because Providence was in the habit of dancing naked at crew gatherings.

  Apparently performing a carnal act with her had been dubbed ‘ticklin’ the ivories’ by some wit down in the maintenance pool. Probably that cretin Varies-Wildly-By-Day. He loved a good bit of rumour mongering, and the shipboard gossip was that Providence was not averse to a bit of fun with the weaker species. Nothing wrong with that, of course. You just had to be careful, with humans. They fell in love and died very easily.

  Sometimes simultaneously.

  “Yes,” W’Tan replied.

  “Your orders?” Zoran Krader, Acting Chief Tactical Officer, asked crisply. Krader was human, probably put in his role by that reprobate Barducci … but he was passable at the job.

  “Stand by,” W’Tan said.

  “Commander–”

  “It is ‘Acting Captain’ under these circumstances,” W’Tan said. “And ‘stand by’ means you await orders. Unless you would rather go to the rec dome and run around pretending to be an aeroplane? It may be a better use of your time than standing here pretending to be Chief Tactical Officer.”

  Krader subsided huffily. Another ten, then twenty seconds dragged by.

  The ship was silent, no sign of trouble. No sign of attack, no evidence of the Black Honey Wings preparing her weapons to fire upon their modular.

  But that message from Barducci …

  “Check on the medical arc airlocks,” she said.

  “The … copy that, Acting Captain,” Krader said, displaying the surprising ability to learn. He was passable, she had to concede. “Locking and decompression agents,” he confirmed after another ten-second pause, sounding disgruntled. “I should have expected that.”

  “Yes,” W’Tan said, “but perhaps next time you will. Our goal at this point is to ensure you get that chance,” she keyed in a closed shipboard comm to select units. “It seems our hosts would like us to remain docked,” she said, “until such time as they can incorporate our ship into their own. While this will bring some greatly-needed symmetry to their vessel, I consider it a small consolation. Not only because we have our own mission to continue, but because in the event of a takeover the competent crewmembers will be coerced into indentured servitude and the incompetent ones will be executed. Therefore, to save the lives of almost everyone on board this ship, we will need to break dock immediately.”

  “The Captain and his team are still in there,” Krader protested.

  “Perhaps you missed the part where I said we were doing this to save your life,” W’Tan said.

  “We can’t leave them in there,” Krader insisted.

  “I know you didn’t miss the part where I am Acting Captain, Mister Krader,” W’Tan said, “because you just called me ‘Acting Captain’,” she sat back and tapped the control panel near her lower left arm. “We’re leaving. Now.”

  XI (Meanwhile)

  “We’re getting a stand-down message from the Black Honey Wings,” Glorious Providence (Sarcasm) reported, her striped hands flashing over her console. “It has high-level clear
ance, diplomatic tags, the works. Apparently there are still delicate discussions taking place and both parties require us to hold position and make no overt moves in the interim to exacerbate matters. No command confirmation of that from our people, though,” she added, unnecessarily.

  Naturally, W’Tan thought. She tapped on her console and double-checked that their exit sequence was approved and ready. She straightened again. One problem with the command console on this modular was that Skelliglyph absolutely refused to install Six Species compliant furniture – at least on his own stations. The seat and consoles were therefore annoyingly … stumpy.

  “As I believe our Chief Tactical Officer would say, things have gone south,” she announced.

  “What does that mean?” Providence asked.

  “It is a phrase humans use when they’ve created an untenable communication environment,” Stana Pae Segunda replied from the far end of the comms console. “I’m not sure what it has to do with antiquated planetary cartography.”

  “Mister Genevieve, take us out,” W’Tan said. “Mister Krader, exit sequence.”

  This was a fancy way of saying that they were going to engage their subluminal drive, slice their way free of the main docking connector using a combination of maintenance cutters and exchange shear, disable the enemy’s mechanical and atmospheric infiltration at the other airlocks by use of catching arms and small weapons-fire, then just fly off as recklessly as possible and do as much bodily harm to the already-damaged enemy starship as possible in the process.

  W’Tan would have preferred to have Ghee at the helm, since he’d been the pilot for their initial launch from Pestoria Geo Chrys and had done the job magnificently, and they needed much the same sort of manoeuvre now. Still, Arlin San Genevieve was just as capable of wanton destruction in the medium of AstroCorps modular mishandling. He was a human, after all.

  The floor shuddered, although that was probably less to do with collision or weapons than it was to do with the gravity exchange hiccoughing as they ground it up against the Black Honey Wings’s system. A moment later they were free, the hull of the misshapen starship turning slowly in their main viewscreens.

  “Incoming,” Krader announced tensely.

  The Black Honey Wings opened fire.

  XII (Meanwhile)

  The larger starship had sustained some damage and was becalmed, but she still had superior firepower and armour.

  She was also, fortunately, suffering from the hammering they had delivered earlier and a certain amount of confusion among her crew – which, with any luck, the Captain and Chief Tactical Officer would be exacerbating the Hell out of at that moment. The A-Mod 400 was rocked by some light weapons-fire as she tore and crashed away from the death-clutch of the docking spar, but the big guns shot wide.

  Another advantage of the break-away manoeuvre, W’Tan reflected, was that it made them a moving target very close to – sometimes even in among – some of their enemy’s most important systems. This tended to make the enemy hesitant to fire too recklessly, for fear of hitting themselves.

  The A-Mod 400, meanwhile, was constrained only by considerations of blowback damage as she merrily blasted away at the modular segment of the ship – the so-called Nope, Leftovers – and launched a spread of guided torpedoes against the main vessel. Not so much to do any damage, as to help exhaust the Black Honey Wings’s countermeasures and see what sort of defence sequences her crew used.

  There were some qualified crewmembers aboard the enemy ship, however, because not only did the twisted behemoth lurch into some pretty creative and hard-to-counteract evasive progressions, one of her still-mostly-functional Godfire guns hammered a hole in the A-Mod 400’s hull near the rec dome farm ring, uncomfortably close to the relative torus. It damaged one of the oxygen arcs but they could survive without full functionality there for a while. Sitting in deep space without a relative drive, however, was a bigger problem. As the crew of the Black Honey Wings were no doubt painfully aware at this point.

  They were also launching some sort of concussive mines to clutter up the general area and help bounce as much damage as possible back on the aggressive little modular.

  “Bring our main guns to bear on that Chrys hull connecting the main ship to the docking spar,” she instructed, as another mine-blast detonated far closer to their hull than she would have liked. “We want to separate the Leftovers from the main ship and give our team a chance, but also knock out their mini-whorl capability if we can.”

  “Pater and Mater primed and ready,” Krader reported. “Firing.”

  W’Tan watched as the eye-jarring grey bolts hammered into the spar, shattering it and sending the two sections of starship drifting ponderously in opposite directions.

  “Recalibrate to new firing position,” she said, sweeping the set across to Tactical, “and take us to relative speed,” she ran the navigational calculations on the fly, keyed the commands to her console with her lower right hand and swept them to the helm with her lower left, “this volume, on my mark.”

  XIII (Meanwhile)

  There was a bit of a formula, for making leaps through soft-space. The very simple version was, don’t do it unless you’re a few thousand miles from anything bigger than a lander.

  The very complicated version, naturally enough, didn’t even bear writing down and was utterly incomprehensible to anyone but a relative field engineer, and even most of them would only nod and pretend they understood because seriously, who was going to call them on it?

  Anyway, rule of thumb (Part One) was: Go to relative speed close to something like a star, or a planet, or even a moon or large asteroid, and you could tear your ship’s relative drive out by the roots – if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, your entire engine core could shake itself to pieces at ten thousand times the speed of light, and scatter the rest of your ship across an area the size of a solar system. The only good news there would be that the pieces would be exotic-scale small, so they’d basically sleet off into the universe without hurting anybody else.

  Rule of thumb (Part Two) was: Go to relative speed close to a large body like a medium-sized asteroid, or a Mandelbrot or a Worldship, and the effects could be similarly destructive, as well as doing a certain amount of recalibration-necessitating damage to the other ship’s engines.

  Rule of thumb (Part Three) was basically: Go to relative speed close to another starship, and ehh. You were just kind of a jerk. Fergunak, for example, did it all the time.

  The Black Honey Wings wasn’t large enough to warrant the sort of concern that might come under rule of thumb Parts One and Two, although of course there was still a risk. The larger starship’s relative drive was already more than a little mangled, and the A-Mod 400’s launch into soft-space in her vicinity certainly didn’t help. Of course, the most important thing was that nobody on board the A-Mod 400 gave a damn about the Black Honey Wings’s relative drive calibration. In all likelihood, and indeed if all went well, the poor schlub in charge of calibrating the engines was going to be killed in the next hour anyway.

  It was a quick crash-jump, into soft-space and then back out and then back in again, to emerge on the other side of the ship they were harrying. It was a precision manoeuvre, and not one you could reasonably expect to pull off in every combat, but this was a special case. They were in the middle of deep space, the enemy ship was just the right size and just the right sort of crippled, and they’d already rammed her a couple of times so it was beginning not to matter if they did it again.

  Crash-jumping from essentially null subluminal velocity was another matter entirely, but it was more a matter of comfort and spacefaring tradition than anything else.

  Commander W’Tan, demonstrably, cared about neither.

  XIV (Meanwhile)

  The crash-jump, to W’Tan’s surprise and grudging admiration, did not come as a complete surprise to whoever was in charge over on the Black Honey Wings. Who that was, exactly, remained unclear from the bridge of the A-Mod 400 but it did
n’t ultimately affect the outcome. Either the Noro Metak had survived and regained control, or he had survived and taken some sort of remote command of the ship, or he was dead and had a rather gifted lieutenant on the bridge. W’Tan didn’t fall into the trap of expecting a hostile crew to be hopeless without their Captain, although it was awfully convenient when the enemy made the same assumption about you.

  As they emerged from soft-space on the far side of the Black Honey Wings, they found the misshapen starship already opening fire on them with a nasty array of refraction beams designed for general-purpose metaflux corruption. Nothing critical was hit, but in the first three seconds after return to normal space they suffered some widespread hull damage. Had they been moving at a higher cruising velocity, their shields would have been amped up and the damage lessened. Just the price you paid for not wanting to plough into a starship at high speed.

  Fortunately, the A-Mod 400 was also firing as soon as she left the grey, and she was firing her two mini-whorl canons. A tight swing as they tumbled in towards the Black Honey Wings brought the row of ugly little snouts firing the refractors into Godfire range, and then they were sweeping along and hammering at the hull and other weapons emplacements. The larger ship, or at least the half they were currently fighting, was attempting to manoeuvre and evade on her subluminals – without much success, because of the fact that she was now two half-ships, but the subluminals would have to be the next thing to go.

  The subluminal drive engines, however, were much more volatile than the relative drive. Accelerating a mass through space utilised a whole different set of energy-transference and conversion laws than flipping the whole lot over into soft-space did. The subluminal drive was linked into power relays, heat exchanges, the hull shielding … and taking it out could have disastrous consequences inside the ship. That was one of the reasons the core was so well-protected.