Star Force: Flashpoint (SF8)

  1

  November 3, 2059

  Clint-274 ran down the long hallway, popping his head into each training alcove as he went, finding them either empty or with the wrong adept. He worked his way through more than thirty of the chambers before he finally found his superior, standing in the center of the small sparring room on his hands, with his feet pressed together and toes pointed at the ceiling. His face was flushed, indicating that he’d been holding the pose for some time, but aside from a subtle quiver he was holding his handstand in perfect form.

  “Paul, we have a situation,” Clint said, breaking their protocol regarding training sessions.

  “What?” the level 8 adept asked, his legs swaying a bit as the movement of his jaw off balanced him.

  “A ship transponder went dark,” Clint explained. “Twelve minutes later a distress beacon was activated. It lasted for 23 minutes then went dark too.”

  Paul’s knees bent and he flipped over onto his feet and stood up, turning around to face his naval assistant.

  “What ship?” he asked, eyes narrowing in suspicion. Star Force mandated that all ships carry transponders for navigational purposes, else the owner would incur a penalty on any future transactions. The danger of ship collision was low, but with the varying orbital speeds it would almost certainly prove fatal if it occurred, which is why Star Force was adamant that all ships be tagged.

  “Not ours…Taiwanese, but a Star Force purchase. Leo-class.”

  “Location?”

  “Making a return run from Luna, probably headed for the Exchange,” Clint said, referring to the Star Force Commodities Exchange mega station, an orbital facility half the size of Atlantis set in near middle orbit, 50,000 km in altitude and smack dab in the middle of the ever-growing band of station clusters inching their way out from the planet. The station served as a way station for supplies transitioning between the Earth and Moon, allowing for the sale and purchase of raw, refined, or fabricated materials, not all of which were Star Force in origin, as well as being the transit hub for most mining traffic coming to and from Luna.

  “Any comm?” Paul asked as the pair left the room at a quick walk. Whatever was going on it was sounding more and more dire.

  “Nothing. Taiwan has also lost contact with them.”

  “Any collision hazards?”

  “Nothing immediate, but if she’s drifting…”

  “How far away is the closest SR?”

  “A little under 12 hours unless you want them to push it. They’ve got a 3/4 fuel load and 115,000 km to climb. Opportune orbital launch window is in…,” Clint checked his watch, “11 minutes.”

  Hearing that Paul took off in a run down the hallway, with the third class Archon scrambling to match his speed as they hurried out of the training areas of the seafloor sanctum, which were massive, and up to the command and control center where Clint had been standing watch.

  Paul burst into the circular chamber that served as fleet headquarters to find Levi-145 hovering over a display table with the orbital maps glowing in neon blue set on a black screen, with thousands of dots marking the locations of stations and ships.

  “Show me,” he said quickly, with Levi pointing to a blank spot on the table-sized map.

  “SR?”

  “Number 4, here,” he said, moving his finger a sizeable distance.

  Paul confirmed Clint’s figures in a glance and nodded. “Give the intercept order,” he said, taking control of the map and bringing up the data records. He backtracked the sensor data until the ship reappeared, then he let the timeline roll forward, noting the placement of the distress signal and duration…as well as the type.

  “That’s a backup beacon, not a primary,” Paul said as Levi walked around the table to stand beside him. “It auto-activates if there’s significant system damage and the bridge doesn’t override the flag within a five minute window. Standard issue on all Star Force designed ships. They probably didn’t even realize it was there.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that for whatever reason they didn’t shut down their transponder voluntarily, because shortly after it went out something went wrong with the ship, and with so few minutes in between the two events we’re probably talking about a debris cloud hitting the comm array first, knocking it and the transponder out, then the ship taking more serious damage shortly thereafter.”

  “Has this happened before?” Clint asked after sending the departure orders for the Search and Rescue vessel.

  “Not on this scale. We’ve had some ships suffer minor damage, but never enough to trigger the backup distress beacon. And the fact that it went out means there’s probably not much of the ship left, given that it has its own transmitter and power supply. Problem is, that would take some large debris impacts, the kind of which shouldn’t be in the system. We’ve cleaned up most of the junk, and the odds of multiple asteroids passing through orbit undetected is low.”

  “What are you thinking?” Levi asked.

  “That we’ve got a bit of a mystery on our hands,” Paul said, searching around the map for the nearest tracking station. Star Force had 22 dedicated outposts for the sole purpose of being high powered radar arrays, each spread out at key positions within low and middle orbit to monitor traffic and detect any roaming debris passing through their zone. All other Star Force stations also had lesser powered arrays used to monitor the local regions, as did all of their starships and dropships…who simultaneously and constantly transmitted their data streams across the Star Force communications grid, letting any one user ‘see’ with the combined vision of the entire fleet.

  The map that Paul was looking at was a series of circles spread out around the Earth, with each of the circles being the effective radar range of the active arrays. Dots were visible in between the circles where active transponders were transmitting on frequencies that the radar could pick up, but most of the orbital tracks were dark to detection of anything small in size, given that radar range was determined by the size of the object and its reflectivity.

  The Taiwanese Leo had passed through one of the detection zones when departing from Luna, then continued across the map only by transponder detection. Paul searched the immediate area for additional ships or stations, both past and present, but no interactions appeared to have taken place.

  He took the calculations a step further and plotted the expected course from the point of disappearance assuming the ship, or what was left of it, was ballistic and tagged that area as hazardous, then sent the update into the system, which relayed the data to all Star Force ships using the navigational net, as well as all the corporate and national vessels that also were tied into the grid with ‘view only’ status.

  Next he contacted the nearest radar station to the projected course, a Star Force tourist resort, and requested that they begin beam scanning the area on a regular basis, thus increasing the range of their ‘search light’ in the hopes that they might pick up something in the next few hours, though the chances of that were minimal, given the distances involved. Still, Paul wanted to maximize their limited detection capability in that area, for even a brief contact would give the SR a position trace to help hunt down the ship before it veered off the projected course and/or ran into something else.

  On the map one of the dots split in two, indicating that SR4 was pulling away from its berth at the Star Force way station that served as both refueling depot and base of operations for the crew when they weren’t deployed, along with more than a thousand other travelers moving about the orbital infrastructure. The ‘truck stop’ was situated in one of the heaviest traffic zones, making it likely to be near any trouble that would arise.

  Six other SRs were similarly positio
ned around the planet, offering some belated assistance to ships in distress with the number of small hull breaches amongst non Star Force constructed ships rising by the month. Already four people had died when a Russian transport depressurized from micrometeorite impacts…too many to plug before they lost consciousness.

  After that, and with the help of Star Force acquisitions, most starships had equipped themselves with internal patch kits with detection leaks and auxiliary oxygen canisters…enough to hopefully keep the crew alive until an SR could get to them and either evacuate the crew or patch up their ships from the outside. This they did free of charge, but with only 7 ships deployed the response times were dismal and even knowing that the other ship manufacturers refused to cover their ships with sufficient armor, citing weight and fuel cost concerns.

  The Taiwanese, however, bought all of their ships from Star Force and had built up a sizeable orbital empire over the past decade, heeding every ounce of advice Star Force threw at them and making for one of their most loyal customers…which also meant that all of their ships should have been immune to small scale debris impacts.

  Paul spent the next hour in the control room, studying all the available sensor data, ship logs, and crew manifests. The ship in question, designated AX-34, had been carrying processed ores from Luna, with nothing even remotely explosive in her holds, and given Star Force’s overly redundant systems he doubted it was an internal malfunction responsible for the loss of signal and short-lived distress beacon.

  With nothing left to do but wait until the SR arrived in the search area Paul left the control room to return to his training, grabbing an earpiece on his way out. “Let me know the moment you have something.”

  “We’ll pass the message along,” Clint promised, referring to the next shift that would arrive for the usually boring watch while most of the other adepts were busy training or building something elsewhere in the sanctum.

  Paul nodded and headed back down through the mountain-sized underwater complex, wondering what the hell could have happened to that ship.

  Thirteen hours later the Captain of SR4 got a radar ping on his display screen at extreme range, and lost it again just as quickly.

  “What was that?” Borsk asked.

  “Intermittent contact,” the helmsman confirmed as it appeared and disappeared again. “5,000 km out…too small to be a ship.”

  “Can you tag the coordinates for Cyclops?”

  “Not yet. Permission to adjust course?”

  “Granted,” the Captain said, watching the blip reappear again as the ship rotated to the left then kicked in its four main engines for a thirty second burn, redirecting their trajectory closer to the radar signal.

  “Got it,” the helmsman said five minutes later.

  “Transmit to Cyclops 15,” the Captain ordered as a second, more distant intermittent blip appeared. “I want to know what’s out there.”

  “Sight request incoming,” a synthesized voice said aloud in the control room of the surveillance outpost as the text version was displayed on the primary monitor along with a myriad of other data statistics. Halfway across the small room the tech on duty glanced up from his game pad, halfway through today’s shift monitoring and maintaining the large, yet relatively empty space station’s high powered radar and communications equipment.

  Six other Star Force personnel were also assigned to the Cyclops station, two of which were on sleep cycle, another three on downtime, while he and Carrigan were on duty. She was off tracking down a faulty sensor, leaving him with babysitting duty in the normally boring control room.

  Norrington paused his game and walked across to the primary console, seeing that a search and rescue vessel was requesting use of their telescope in the search for a missing ship. Coordinates were attached, so he brought the dorsal node around on the barrel-shaped station and pointed it in the approximate direction, then began the lengthy sifting drill as he pulled the zoom in and out, looking for anything to allow him to more precisely aim the high powered aperture.

  Right off the bat he was having trouble, given that there was some kind of gaseous cloud obscuring the normally crystal clear view. With properly precise coordinates or a transponder tag to hone in on, the Cyclops station or any of its twins situated around the planet could monitor every vessel between the Earth and the Moon so long as they weren’t on a direct line between the station and the sun. Right now he could still see a starry backdrop, but the haze was constant until he pulled back far enough to outline a general perimeter to the cloud.

  It was diffuse, but easily identifiable by the variable output of the starlight behind…at least as far as the computer controls were concerned. Norrington could barely make out the haze with the naked eye, and after a quick examination he turned the scanning process over to computer control to see if it could pick any microscopic reflection out of the haze.

  It did so three minutes later, and the tech zoomed in on the object in question, adjusting the angle until he had a good framed image that he captured in both still and video, then sent it off to SR4 along with the offer of additional surveillance as they required.

  He locked the telescope tracking program on the object so that he wouldn’t have to reacquire it again and returned to his paused game with the rotating rib-like piece of ship debris spinning slowly about, winking in and out against the bright sunlight.

  2

  Several hours later Paul watched the sensor data being relayed from SR4 in the sanctum’s control room along with Roger and half a dozen other naval Archons as the ship closed in on the carcass of what used to be a Leo-class transport. Large pieces were scattered over hundreds of kilometers, but what was left of the main hull drifted lazily in the center of a fine debris cloud that had made radar detection erratic, but at a distance of 6 km the fine particles of dust couldn’t obscure the view of the beaten and broken ship.

  More than 500 meters long, the cargo ship was of the ‘pizza cutter’ variety with a large gravity disc up front trailed by four cargo pods along the ‘tail.’ As Paul watched the slowly growing ship on the screen he noted that the pods had each been breached, which would account for the dust cloud. The Taiwanese ship had been carrying crushed magnetite, and it appeared that nearly all of it had been expelled into space.

  Worse though was the disc which was missing several large chunks. More than a third of the structure had been cut out, leaving large jagged edges that belied its original, smooth aesthetic design…and made the likelihood of there being any survivors nil.

  “Find an airlock if one’s still intact,” Paul ordered over the comm. “If not go EVA. I want a computer interface if possible.”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Borsk acknowledged, then turned to the crewman on his left. “Get the team prepped.”

  “On it,” Markinson said, hopping up out of his seat and heading aft. When he walked outside the bridge he turned right and headed up the curved walkway that angled up into the ceiling, but he didn’t feel the climb as he was only traveling around the artificial gravity arc until he got to the main spine that ran the length of the gravity cylinder. Halfway down he came to the crew quarters and walked inside, banging his hand on the wall three times to get everyone’s attention.

  “Harry, Andy, Kara…get suited up. We’re going for a walk outside,” he said before ducking back out into the hall. He headed up a level into a lesser gravity section and into the prep room, letting the others catch up on their own time. He had his locker open and the bottom half of his vacuum armor pulled out when they got there.

  “How bad’s it look?” Kara asked, walking over to her own equipment locker and pulling out the chest piece of her armor.

  “Like half the ship is missing,” Markinson said direly. “I have no idea what could cause that much damage, but the Archons want a computer download so we get to go inside.”

  “Decompressed?” Andy asked.

  “Most likely. Chunks of the saucer section are visibly missing.”

  “Dam
n,” Kara whispered, pulling the chest piece over her head. “How far out are we?”

  “A few klicks, but there’s a lot of debris so the Captain’s taking her in slow. If we’re lucky we might find a useable airlock, otherwise we’re using the thruster packs and grapple lines.”

  “Lovely,” Harry commented, realizing that this wasn’t going to be the typical patch job. “Any other fun surprises?”

  “We’ll find out when we get there,” Markinson said, pulling on his chest piece and latching it in place. After that he attached the arms and helmet, then vacuum-locked the armor, hearing the reassuring crescendo of clicks as the separate pieces merged into one airtight unit. A reverse overpressure surge tested for leaks, and after thirty seconds of stability signaled the suit was ready for space via a small green dot on the left forearm panel.

  When the other three were similarly suited up the quartet walk/climbed up into the center of the gravity cylinder and headed forward into the hammerhead portion of the ship that bracketed the linear pair of cylinders opposite the engine bank. In the head of the ship was a large bay that contained several recovery craft, but they skipped past that and headed up above it to a series of airlock ports spread out across the hammer, capable of extending and docking with a variety of craft, as well as cutting an emergency entrance and installing a makeshift airlock if needed.

  Once at the third of five airlocks, situated just above the midline of the ship and the hammer, Markinson and the others waited for the 375m long ship to inch its way closer to the Leo. Once in position the Captain radioed that there wasn’t a viable airlock to connect with, but that they were as close as they dared get considering the list of the ship, which Markinson knew would make for a hazardous crossing.

  Using interior controls, the team extended an umbilical around the airlock then transitioned through two by two, leaving them standing in the cup-like cubical open to space held in place only by magnetic latches on their boots and a few small handholds. Kara moved to the front and aimed a large gun attached to the umbilical at the slowly moving ship stretching out before them. The Leo was so massive that it blocked out almost the entire starfield, but it gave them an up-close view of the damage to the saucer section.