In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Read online

  “Jase, we’re in,” I said. “Get going.”

  “Aye aye, Skipper. I’ll back with the cavalry in no time.”

  The Silver Lining turned on her length, then her engines glowed to life, pushing her into the Mavia’s shield. An aura of static electricity sparkled around her as her shield interacted with the Mavia’s, then as soon she was clear, she streaked away toward Lena’s last known position.

  Izin sealed the outer hatch, then when the inner door irised open, my battle suit was suddenly struck by multiple high velocity impacts, knocking me against the outer door. My headscreen’s tactical overlay lit up with hostile contact markers, all crammed together in the blacked out corridor beyond the inner door. Points of blue light twinkled in the darkness, marking the electromagnetic muzzle flashes of the assault guns raking my suit. I rolled sideways, trying to regain my balance as a headscreen indicator began ticking down, warning that my suit armor was being shredded. In the cramped airlock, all I could do was turn my side armor to the incoming torrent of fire, spreading the damage, then a malfunction indicator flashed, warning that the suit’s thruster pack had been destroyed.

  Izin stood to the side of the inner hatch out of the line of fire. He raised his left arm, sent three fragmentation grenades on low trajectories into the corridor and immediately resealed the hatch. Three muffled explosions sounded a moment later, then he opened the inner door to smoke and silence and a corridor littered with shattered bodies.

  “We appear to have lost the advantage of surprise,” Izin observed dryly as he raised his suppressor and stepped into the corridor. His tamph instincts would have preferred to ambush our adversaries rather than go head to head.

  “I guess you’ll have to fight like a human this time,” I said, following him into the corridor as my suit warned almost half its frontal armor had been ablated.

  “I may not like frontal assaults, Captain, but you will not find me lacking,” he replied, raising both weapon arms as he moved to the left.

  I took the right side, stepping over bodies shredded by Izin’s grenades, aiming my weapons down the corridor. Both suits were equipped with rapid fire, magnetically accelerated suppressors, each capable of delivering ten thousand rounds of hurt with computerized precision. Our secondary weapons were different. Izin had a thirty round grenade launcher, I had a laser cannon that drained my suit’s power cell at a frightening rate. Being sensor linked, we each saw everything both suits detected, and while these armor coated widow makers could drop from orbit and deliver death and destruction wherever they landed, I was beginning to realize they were too large for fighting in confined spaces.

  At the end of the corridor was a locked pressure door. My target finder quickly located its locking points, which my laser cannon sliced through like tin foil. Izin kicked the door, sending it flying into a large darkened compartment, then fired a salvo of grenades, evenly spaced, left to right. He waited for them to detonate, then stepped through and moved left, immediately coming under fire. I followed close on his metallic heels, going right, drawing ranged fire that sparkled like blue fire flies in the darkness.

  The Orie mercs concentrated on our torsos, trying to ablate our chest armor for a kill shot. Our suits’ thermal sensors detected their body heat while our optics tracked the flash of their weapons. Twenty six threat prioritized targets appeared in front of my eyes, half allocated to me, half to Izin. They wore heavier body armor than the troops that had greeted us at the airlock and had some cover, making Izin’s grenades less effective. Our suits calculated who were more accurate and bumped the expert gunners to the top of the priority list. Izin ignored his suit’s helpful advice, choosing instead to sweep the left side of the room with his suppressor, laying waste to everything in his path. I took the other route, firing short bursts at targets prioritized by the suit’s combat system, conserving my ammo. I held back on the laser cannon, saving the juice in case we ran into something the suppressors couldn’t handle.

  Ten seconds after we entered, the only ones left standing were us. The room was now lit by burning equipment and strewn with bodies. The compartment had once been a machine shop for fabricating replacement parts for Earth Navy ships. Now it was a support facility for the Mavia in its new guise as a wormhole generator ship. A single vehicle door dominated the opposite bulkhead, showing signs it had been augmented with slab armor. Capital ships were built with armored citadels at their heart to protect critical sections, but I’d never heard of a repair ship being fitted with one. A small hand torch lay on the deck in front of the door, beneath thin black scars where someone had tried cutting through.

  Izin fired a grenade at the armored door, which exploded on contact, doing no damage.

  “I’ve got this,” I said, clanking toward the armored door and switching my laser cannon from pulse to beam. I fired a pencil thin stream of white energy at the top of the door and began carving a horizontal line across it. Black smoke billowed into the air as molten metal flowed onto the deck and my suit’s power level began dropping steadily.

  Leaving me to my work, Izin marched to various open hatches and scanned for threats. When he’d finished his sweep, he said, “There’s no one close, Captain, but I can hear movement.”

  “Maybe the crew’s abandoning ship before we blow it up,” I suggested.

  Izin took up position beside me, aiming his weapons at the pressure door as I began cutting back up to my starting point. When I finished, with half my suit’s power supply gone, he pushed the rectangular slab through to the other side. It crashed onto the deck with a horrendous clang, telling everyone where we were, but rather than inviting another hail of gunfire, we were met by an empty corridor, pitch black except for a distant flickering light.

  Izin stepped through, weapons raised, then declared, “It’s deserted, Captain.”

  I followed him through into a vehicle passageway immersed in darkness. It led to a blacked out intersection, then onto a large compartment at the center of the ship, the source of the flickering light. Izin moved quickly, almost recklessly, along the wide passageway, forcing me to hurry to keep up. The little tamph might not like frontal assaults, but when he had to, he preferred speed over caution. He paused at the intersection only long enough to scan both directions, then started across with me a few paces behind.

  My headscreen suddenly flashed, then the visual feed broke into static and the tactical overlay began blinking erratically with meaningless symbols. No diagnostics popped up advising me whether it was a malfunction or jamming, but the suit’s combat system was clearly scrambled. The only indicator that made any sense was the suit’s power level and it was falling fast, threatening to trap me inside a metal coffin.

  I slammed my chin onto the emergency release as my suit power flat lined, just in time for it to half open before freezing. The headscreen blacked out as unpowered pressure fields collapsed around my body, turning my suit into tonnes of scrap metal which toppled face first onto the deck with a thunderous crash. The unpowered suit was too heavy for me to open by hand, so I twisted my shoulders until I could squeeze my left arm across my chest to a small lever at my right shoulder. I started rocking the lever furiously, slowly cranking the clamshell torso open. When it was wide enough for me to squeeze through, I flopped out onto the deck, relieved to have escaped.

  A glowing silver disk floated a meter above me, humming and spinning as it bathed the suit in a narrow cone of light. I rolled away into the darkness, keeping the suit between me and the end of the corridor, determined to get my gun away from the disk before it too was drained of power.

  DEVICE UNKNOWN, my threading informed me as I drew my P-50.

  Izin’s battle suit was still standing, a metallic statue beneath another disk the twin of the one that had knocked out my suit without firing a shot. Beyond the junction, my threading picked up a small thermal signature retreating toward the distant compartment. The red ghost was far too small for a Mataron or even a man. For a moment, I thought it was a child, then I
caught a glimpse of its silhouette against the light coming from the compartment.

  It was a tamph!

  I shouldn’t have been surprised the Consortium were recruiting tamphs. They were smarter than us and with the right training would make the best possible engineers for the Consortium’s stolen alien-tech, once their Mataron instructor was gone. I could have tried for a shot, but I remembered how deadly Izin’s aim was and ducked behind my fighting suit’s torso as a streak of light flashed through the space my head had occupied a moment before. My threading then flashed another alert into my mind’s eye:

  WARNING! HIGH ENERGY PLASMA DISCHARGE, TECHNOLOGY UNKNOWN.

  Another blast hit the suit as I made myself into as small a target as possible. I resisted the urge to return fire, certain the tamph was baiting me just as Izin would have done. More blasts hit the suit’s legs, then the firing stopped. I brought my P-50 up, preparing to shoot in case the tamph was closing in for the kill, then I noticed its power level was down a third. Even in the dark, the disk was draining it. Before my eyes, its charge dropped another tick, then I blasted the disk, shattering it with a single shot.

  Now only the light from the disk above Izin’s suit illuminated the junction, enough for an eagle eyed tamph to drill me the moment I left cover. Tamphs were infinitely patient, and this one had more time to spare than me. I raised my P-50 as if to fire blind, knowing if the tamph was waiting to ambush me, I’d lose my gun and probably my hand, but no shot came. Relieved to discover my hand was still attached to my arm, I stole a look up the corridor. There was no flash of a weapon, no silhouette, no ghostly infra red blur from my threading’s optics. The tamph had retreated, perhaps summoned by his Mataron master.

  I blasted the second disk, then darted across to Izin’s suit, using it for cover. A hairline crack ran down its side, showing it had no more than unlocked before dying.

  “Izin, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Captain. I can’t open the suit.”

  “There’s a lever beside your right shoulder. Twist and grab it with your left arm.”

  Soon I heard a rapid creaking sound, then the torso slowly opened. I could do nothing to help as the suit was too heavy and without power, the clamshell machinery was locked tight. When it was two thirds open, Izin climbed out and dropped to the deck beside me.

  “Left the eject a little late, did we?” I asked.

  “I was trying to block the power drain,” Izin replied defensively.

  “You were over thinking the problem.”

  “You, of course, ejected at the first sign of trouble.”

  “Let’s just chalk that one up to superior human survival instincts over excessive tamph tinkering.”

  “I do not tinker, Captain, and I’ll let you know, my survival instincts are in no way inferior to yours.”

  “Then how come you were trapped like a sardine and I wasn’t?” I asked with a grin. Before he could answer, I added, “Speaking of tamphs, there’s one on this ship. He knocked out our suits.”

  Izin glanced at the two wrecked disks on the deck. “That’s not Earth-tech.”

  “Neither’s the gun he’s using.” I nodded to the shallow craters pockmarking my suit where the tamph’s plasma weapon had vaporized the Union Army’s finest ablation armor. “The Consortium are turning stealing alien-tech into an art form.”

  “It appears the Tau Cetins had more cause to interrogate me than we believed,” Izin said soberly, ever able to focus on the truth, no matter how painful.

  “Let’s give them cause to trust you,” I said, determined that the tamph traitor was not getting off the Mavia alive.

  We started forward, creeping through the shadows toward the electrostatic hum coming from the enormous compartment at the end of the passage. It had once been the industrial center of the depot ship, a veritable mobile space dock that could be carried to the furthest reaches of Mapped Space. Now stripped of its human equipment, the circular base of the Hrane tower occupied the center of the cavernous chamber. Its trunk reached up through the Mavia’s hull all the way to the wormhole mouth nine kilometers above.

  Surrounding the quantum tunneler were four structures. Three were dark energy siphons surrounded by glowing white fields, each emitting a brilliant white energy beam into a receptor in the deck below, twins of the machine on Gern Vrate’s ship. The hemispherical siphons floated off the deck, held in place by pressure fields, while a few meters from each siphon were rectangular cryochambers similar to the one I’d seen aboard the Merak Star on Novo Pantanal. Each held a Kesarn in hydrothermic suspension, alive enough to allow the Tau Cetin siphons to drain limitless energies from the universe. They stood at three corners of a square, with the fourth corner empty. The empty corner was where Gern Vrate’s siphon had been meant to go, but clearly three were enough to operate the tunneler.

  Standing in front of the tower and its three dark energy siphons was a bank of transparent chambers filled with exotic matter. The first chamber was two thirds full. Its glowing contents were being fed up through the center of the tower into the wormhole mouth, where it stabilized the hyperspace tunnel’s fragile throat against the tremendous crushing forces pushing against it. Display screens lined the bulkheads on either side, filled with images of curved space, wormhole mouths, gravitational tides and a storm of chaotic forces fighting to collapse a perversion of celestial geometry that refused to buckle. One screen showed the micro-singularity itself, whose mere presence threatened the survival of all life on Earth.

  Below the screens were consoles and human sized seats, all empty. Inok a’Rtor, the Mataron scientist from the Merak Star, stood in front of one console, busily making adjustments. He wore a Mataron energy weapon strapped to his chest and a loose fitting pressure suit, but showed no sign of a skin shield. The tamph traitor would have told him we were here, but with victory so close and with Earth about to be flung to a freezing death, he couldn’t abandon his post – not yet.

  Not far from the consoles, three human technicians lay side by side, face down on the deck amid a converging pool of blood. They’d each been shot in the back of the head, execution style, gruesome proof the Matarons had double-crossed the Consortium. Once the human scientists had realized the wormhole exit mouth was in the wrong place and the singularity was not dissipating, the Mataron had eliminated them.

  I realized the armored door I’d cut through hadn’t been sealed against Izin and me, but to lock out the Mavia’s human crew. It left the Mataron scientist and his tamph lackey free to do as they pleased, securely encased inside the ship’s armored citadel. With all power coming from the dark energy siphons, they could control the Mavia from here. It was why the old depot ship’s passageways had been immersed in darkness and why her crew had desperately tried cutting through the door with a feeble hand torch.

  I pulled back into the shadows and whispered to Izin. “One Mataron. Three dead humans. No sign of the tamph.”

  “The tamph has moved.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s what I’d do.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. “How long have we got?”

  “He’ll strike when he’s ready, when he can win, not before.”

  “OK, we kill the Mataron, blow the ship and get out of here. We’ll deal with the tamph when he shows himself.”

  “How do we get off the ship, Captain? The suits are dead.”

  “They must have lifeboats.”

  “This is a big ship and there are still crew aboard. Even if we find the lifeboats in time, the crew may not want to share.”

  “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m listening.”

  Izin hesitated. “Considering our homeworld is about to be destroyed, your plan will suffice.”

  Our homeworld! He really was a Terran, a Terran Amphibian. “Told you human survival instincts were superior to tamph’s.”

  “If that were true, Captain, we wouldn’t be in this situation. The Matarons would not have deceived my people the way they de
ceived yours.”

  It was probably true, but the Intruders had millions of years on Homo sapiens. “At least we’re not at war with half the galaxy,” I said, stealing another look into the siphon room, finding the Mataron was no longer visible. I pulled back quickly as a flash from his blast pistol almost took off my face.

  “Earth’s destruction’s now on autopilot,” I said. “He’s just got to hold us off.”

  “Keep his attention, Captain. I’ll find another way around,” he said, vanishing into the darkness.

  I fired blindly into the compartment, just to let the snakehead know I was still here, pulling back as another blast flashed past. After a few seconds, I dropped to one knee and let off another unaimed shot from close to the deck. It took the Mataron a moment to adjust before a blast scorched the deck plate in front of me. Black Sauria or not, this Mataron egghead could shoot.

  Hoping to track the snakehead by sound, I cranked my listener’s gain to full, but all I heard was the static hiss of the siphons – which gave me an idea. I fired once at the nearest siphon from waist height, but the stasis field surrounding it caught my slug harmlessly, then as I pulled back, a shot from the Mataron struck the bulkhead beside me.

  “Worth a try,” I muttered to myself, now certain a P-50 slug was no match for the universe’s near-infinite supply of dark energy.

  I considered running into the compartment, wondering if my ultra-reflexed speed would be enough to get me to cover before the Mataron shot me. There was a lot of open deck to cross, but fortunately, Izin’s voice sounded in my earpiece, saving me from testing the reptilian’s aim.

  “Fire one shot, Captain,”

  I let off a blind snap shot, narrowly avoiding a return blast, then I heard a single distant shot – Izin’s shredder – followed by a guttural groan.

  “Izin?”

  “I have him, Captain.”