Friday, September 30, 2011

War Angel: part thirty-one


A bead of sweat dripped down Richard’s nose. “10 seconds….” He wiped his hand across his face. “5 seconds… 3… 2… 1… scoop shutdown!”

The ship lurched and shuddered as the scoop released the tachyon and re-entered normal space. “Success…” Richard whispered to himself.

Jack jumped out of his seat and moved forward to the sensor station. “Status?”

Kate’s hands were a blur as they moved back and forth across keyboards and panels. “Hold on.”

“It’s kind of important…” he replied.

Her head snapped around. “Then I’d better not fuck it up. So HOLD ON,” she said with a glare.

Jack backed away and turned his attention to Gina. “Helm?”

She turned toward him, wearing a look of astonishment. “As hard as it is for me to believe, our course is exactly what we programmed.” She pointed at Richard. “His crazy thing didn’t tear off or send us spiraling.”

Richard held his hands high over his head in a mocking sign of victory.

“I hate to interrupt your moment of triumph, Clover,” Kate interjected, “but we’re in deep shit.”

“What? Why?” Jack asked.

Kate jabbed a thumb in Richard’s direction. “His little toy didn’t come with proper brakes.”

“Braking thrusters are on,” Gina calmly replied.

Stinson shook her head. “Not enough for the speed we’re carrying. In about ninety seconds, we’re going to round Saturn, come right up behind that ship for about half a minute, then whip right past them and keep going. By the time we make a second pass, they’ll have launched and be ready for us.”

A sickening silence crossed the bridge. Finally Jack spoke up.

“How do we slow down right now?” he asked.

Gina stood up from her chair, her eyes closed tight. Suddenly her hands began tapping against her body in rhythmic fashion, and she began talking to herself, lips moving but making no sound. Baffled, the rest of the crew watched until her eyes flew open and she dropped back down into her seat. “We dive,” she said. “We dive.”

“Use the atmosphere…” Richard said. “It’ll have to be done right or we’ll fry…”

Sarah began making calculations on the shields screen as Gina began plotting a course to skim them along the atmosphere. As she typed, Sarah became more and more distressed. Her brow furrowed as she re-did her math. But nothing changed.

“Captain, the ship’s shields and armor were designed to handle the energy of laser cannons and the impacts of small asteroids. But the heat and energy from an atmospheric burn? No. We do this and at bare minimum we’ll lose the shields almost completely on whatever side of the ship we skate on.”

Jack looked at Gina. “Helm?”

“I’m out of other ideas.”

Kate’s voice was flat as she spoke. “We don’t do this and we lose the element of surprise. We’ll be facing a lot more than one single ship.”

Jack swiveled around to look at Sarah. He hoped she would offer another idea, give him a way to not damage the ship and yet maintain the shock needed to complete this mission. Instead she gave him a look of cold pity, a look that said “you wanted to be captain and play hero, so now you’re stuck with it.”

“Make your dive, helm,” Jack said, never taking his eyes away from Sarah.

“We’ll protect our crispy side as best we can once we attack.”

Thursday, September 22, 2011

War Angel: part thirty


Jack had called them to the dining table to lay out his plan.

“As you can see on screen, there is a single B-class battle cruiser in orbit around Saturn. Compliment of 1000 Omegans, 200 individual fighters. That’s the bad news,” he told them.

Kate, freshly showered and shoveling down a plate of food, asked the question that they each on their mind. “There’s good news?”

The new captain of the War Angel smiled. “Oh, yeah. One, the Omegans are a lot like us. They need water to survive. It isn’t perfect for them, but they can breathe Earth atmosphere. The atmosphere in their ships is pretty close, and their systems recycle the air the way ours does. They are omnivores, but their ships travel mostly with packed rations and freshly grown- what we could consider- vegetables. Most of it is consumable by the human digestive tract.”

Richard was incredulous. “So what? How do you propose to get our hands on it? Ask nicely? Perhaps you’re overlooking the 1000-to-5 ratio of us versus them? Not to mention what will happen when they launch those fighters?”

Jack walked around the table until he was standing over Richard. He placed his hands on Richard’s shoulders and gave him a pat, then continued circling the table. “Not at all. But they’re never going to have a chance to launch those fighters. Gina?”

Gina coughed and then pulled up a schematic of the Omegan ship on screen. “Okay, I went over this as best as I could, and the way I see it, our first objective has to be to take out the launch and landing bay.” She pointed to a large area along the bottom of the ship, the rear part attached to the engine housing, the launch window facing the front of the ship. “We have to prevent their warriors from being able to get to us.”

“I can’t imagine that’s not ridiculously fortified,” Sarah jumped in. “Do we have the firepower…?”

Jack shook his head no. “It’s probably the most shielded part of the ship.”

“Then how the hell…”

Jack cut her off. “Wait for it. Trust me.” He nodded at Gina. “Please go on.”

She continued. “We won’t be able to blow up the launch bay. Not unless we were inside it, at least. But we can make it inaccessible. We can make the entire ship inaccessible, I think. We just need some good shooting.”

Sarah shrugged. “That’s my department. What do I need to hit?”

Gina pointed at a small spot on the top side of the ship. “Here first.” Her finger them slid along the picture until it came to rest on a spot near the craft’s nose. “Then here. It’ll have to be precise.”

“May I point out,” Sarah replied, “that neither of those spots will be easy to hit? And that, just from looking, I can tell you that they don’t control any aspect that ship’s weaponry, life support, or shielding? So what the hell am I shooting at?”

Jack snorted a laugh. “Something even more vital.”

Friday, September 16, 2011

War Angel: part twenty-nine


As Sarah peeled herself off the bulkhead behind her station, she took note of what she knew would be the first repair project she and Richard would need to undertake. “Inertial dampening system not up to fully dealing with FTL acceleration. Check.”

It took the better part of a minute before the system compensated and everyone was able to move freely again.

Still, the ship shook as it traversed space at speeds man had never achieved before. Jack spun around to Sarah, a worried look on his face. “Is she going to fly apart?”

Sarah checked the data screen. “I don’t think so. Shield system adapted to the speed way better than the inertial dampeners. The running shield is at maximum.” She looked out at the rest of them as she spoke. “Before you ask- the running shield also acts like a tourniquet. It keeps things out, but it also maintains structural integrity. We’re fine.” Her next words were spoken only inside her head. “For now.”



Richard eyed the tachyon system carefully, watching for any signs of damage to the physical pieces of the scoop or surrounding systems. That was the real test of what he had created.

“Look,” he had explained to Sarah early in the mission. “I don’t think there’s any real question that faster than light travel is possible. Certainly we have seen that ships can come exponentially close. The Omegans are proof of it. They beat our long range sensors and probes because they’re flying faster than our equipment can follow. We spotted anomalies each time, but never quickly enough to make a difference.”

“I sense there’s a ‘but’ coming on, Richard,” she said.

He smiled. “But the real issue is that the Omegans were, I believe, limiting themselves. They’re extremely long lived. Their ships went as fast as they cared to. In part, I think, because they use actual fuel cells to feed propulsion. The cells are energy based, but they still have to collect that energy. So every once in a while they have to stop or slow down and fuel up.”

Sarah looked skeptical. “In case you forgot, so do we.”

“Not as often,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe more frequently if we were trying to leave the solar system. But with the tachyon scoop, once we drop a particle into the field and absorb its momentum, it’s pretty much perpetual until we eject it. At that point we’ll drop back to regular space and be dependent on fuel. But as long as we ride the scoop in active mode, we’ll be zipping along nicely.”

“The risks?” she asked him, knowing he had to be hiding one last “but”.

“That the scoop tears off in flight. That the speed and energy are so powerful that even the running shield can’t hold it together. If it tears even partially, it could change our course and send us spiraling into a planet or a star.”

She felt a headache coming on that never quite went away.



Richard began to talk but found himself without a voice. He took a swig of water and tried again.

“51 seconds to scoop shutdown,” he rasped at Jack.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

War Angel: part twenty-eight


2142- In Orbit Around Pluto

The first time that Jack and Sarah set foot on the War Angel he couldn’t resist giving her a history lesson.

“They made eight of these, you know,” his voice raspy and filled with no small amount of awe.

Sarah was taken aback by that particular bit of information. “Seriously? That’s it? I’m trying to remember… wait. The First Period Omegans showed up with 15 B-class cruisers, right?”

“And the Rail Gun Carrier.”

“Right. So even with eight, we were way outgunned. Hard to believe we won, isn’t it?” Sarah ran her hand along the wall of the ship’s bridge. “Such primitive technology. Actual screens. Physical keyboards instead of holo-keyboards. Didn’t they use some projectile weaponry as well?”

Jack nodded. “These were equipped to fire missiles initially, as well as the energy cannons. They were still adapting Omegan weapons tech when the first couple of them launched.”

“Please tell me you aren’t hoping to restore missiles to this crate.”

He held up his hand in mock protest. “Absolutely not. I’d rather see the energy cannons brought up to modern standards and beyond, thanks.”

Sarah studied Jack’s face for a moment, looking for sincerity and finding… nothing. He shrugged at her and moved on to another part of the ship. And then, not for the last time, she wondered why she had allowed herself to be convinced that this was a good idea.

“You’ll notice that none of these ever wound up in a museum or monument, Jack,” she whispered. “Neither did their crews.”

A shiver ran down her spine.



“Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Richard’s scream wasn’t echoed by his shipmates, but it was something that they easily understood.



The mood on the bridge was tense as they finished preparations.

“Scoop extended, Captain,” Richard said, a small quiver in his voice. “Ready for tachyon release.” This was it, he realized. The fulfillment of all his dreams. Or the announcement of his greatest failure, a failure that would almost assuredly lead to their capture and/or deaths.

Jack sat forward in the Captain’s chair, his hands clasped tightly together. “Steady as she goes, Clover. Let’s fire it up now, see what she’s got, and then puke later.”

Richard coughed. “Puke later. Aye aye.”

The Captain’s chair swiveled toward the rear of the bridge. Multiple plasma screens had descended from the ceiling, surrounding Sarah on three sides. The screen to her left showed a tactical readout of the War Angel’s position in space relative to Pluto. The center screen provided a heads-up targeting display for all four energy cannons that extended from the Angel’s central hull. On her right was a screen of data readouts, each item announcing the status of some part of the shielding system. Her eyes darted from screen to screen, checking and double checking what she saw, the creeping terror of a mistake gnawing at the back of her mind.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

She blew out a gust of air, sending her hair dancing wildly across her forehead. A frown etched itself upon her face. “Nothing.”

Jack cocked an eyebrow. “It doesn’t look like ‘nothing’.”

“No, really. Everything on my readout is perfect.” She stared him in the eye. “Perfect. And you know how I feel about perfect.”

He did indeed. “Perfection never lasts,” she had told him the first night they had ever spent together. “It just means that something is waiting to go wrong.”

Jack spun away from her before she could say anything else. Facing forward again, he turned his attention to Kate at the sensor console. “How do things look, Kate?”

She didn’t bother to turn around and look at him. “Same as they have since we’ve been on this dump. Until we get where we’re going and turn on the active sensor array instead of the passive stuff, it ain’t gonna change.” Her voice snarled. “Captain.”

Sensing the tension, Gina spun around in her chair to face Jack. “Helm is ready. Computer has the course locked in and the timer on the scoop is set. As soon as we drop out of the jump, we’ll have to hit the brakes, but we’ll be on the flip side of the planet from them. That should give us enough time to slow it down and engage.”

Jack unclenched his hands and sat back in the chair, taking a long, deep breath. This was it.

This was it.

“Clover, we are go for tachyon jump,” he said softly.

“Tachyon jump in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…” Richard counted down, “Gahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Thursday, September 1, 2011

War Angel: part twenty-seven


From the Journal of Steven Keys- September 10, 2018

Weird vibe in the camp today. There are all sorts of rumors flying around about a massive offensive in the works.

Ed The Human Bummer- I’ve taken to calling him that as though it’s his full name and he gets a laugh out of it so why stop- seems to think it’s not a good idea. “Too little time to plan, too much emotion involved. Great way to get a lot of our own people killed.”

It would be nice, for once, if Ed was wrong. Oh. Here’s one of the Army guys. Hang on.

Didn’t think that would take so long. Four hours of briefing. Wow. This is going to be big. And dangerous. Really, really dangerous.

What baffles me, though, is that Ed volunteered for the mission. What’s wrong with that picture?

I asked him about it, and all he would say was that it was better to go along on this one than be left behind.

From the Journal of Steven Keys- September 11, 2018

I could spend years trying to describe what happened today and not ever do it justice. The short version: we blew up an alien battle cruiser. In orbit. Ed died saving my life.



From the Journal of Steven Keys- September 12, 2018

Okay, I’ve had a day to decompress and think about everything that happened yesterday. This is my best attempt at explaining it.

Two days ago, we were called in and informed of a plan for a massive retaliatory strike against the Omegans. The idea was reasonably simple: careful observation had discovered a pattern to their troop and supply movements, and there were a couple of ships that seemed vulnerable. We would sneak ourselves on board inside of cargo containers, and be taken to a B-class battle cruiser in orbit. There we would stealth our way around the ship until we located the engine room (the Army was pretty sure they knew where it was located) and we would hide explosives on a timer. After they were placed, we’d hurry back to the ship that brought us up, place ourselves in the cargo containers headed back down to Earth, the ship would leave on schedule, and five minutes later the battle cruiser would go sky high.

Sounds easy enough, right?

There were six of us that made our way onto the Omegan ship. Three pairs, the idea being that if a group got caught, there was still backup working to accomplish the mission. Good thing. It all started going to shit immediately.

First, one of the other guys turned out to be claustrophobic. Knowing that, I’m not sure why he volunteered- unless he wanted to make sure he died. So it was only a couple of minutes into the flight to the battle cruiser before he started hyperventilating and losing his shit. The Army guy in the crate with him had to cold-cock him to shut him up before he gave us away. Not a good omen.

We arrived, got unloaded, and then our streak of crap luck continued. The landing bay was depressurized to decontaminate the ship between flights, I’m guessing to clear out the crap it would have picked up from out still clogged atmopshere. We heard the hiss of air starting to leak out and bolted from our hiding places and headed for the door before it kicked in at maximum level. Five of us made it, including Claus (as I’ll remember him) being carried by Ed. One of the Army guys… well, I watched in horror as his body was flung into space, only a sliding door between me and him.

I’d have loved to take a moment to appreciate the fact that I was now in orbit around Earth. But at that point, I couldn’t. Right now I can a little bit. Good grief- I was in ORBIT on an ALIEN SPACESHIP. Granted, a hostile one, but still. For me, taking a plane trip where we cruised at 35,000 feet was miraculous enough. I was never an athlete. I was certainly never a candidate for NASA. I’m in decent shape for a guy my age. But I was never going to have a life where I touched the void.

Not until these alien bastards showed up and started murdering us.

We dumped Claus’ body out of sight and the four of us split up into pairs, each of us heading in the general direction of where the engine room was supposed to be. Ed and I paired off and began making our way through the ship. Now, I’m not an engineer, so my ability to talk about the Omegan tech and stuff like that is nonexistent. That was Ed’s department, and he said a LOT of shit that went way over my head as we ducked and crawled through that ship. More than once one of those big purple bastards was within arm’s reach of us and I was sure we were going to get caught.

Caught. Who am I kidding? You get caught, they were going to kill you, and probably in the most unpleasant way they could. But we had one advantage that I now realize- they had no reason to look for us. Earth hadn’t even sent a man to the moon in forty years. It took months of preparation to get a shuttle into orbit. They had to feel like there was nothing to fear up there.

They won’t make that mistake anymore.

Anyway, miracle of miracles, we managed to find our way towards what had to be the engine control room. There were a couple of Omegans inside, but also lots of places to hide. Ed and I slid into crevasses and began planting the C-4 explosives. It went quick and easy. So of course something was about to go wrong.

Just as we placed our last ones a loud noise erupted- some sort of internal alarm. From outside the room we heard what sounded like gunfire, the door opened, and two more Omegans came racing in. They had an animated conversation with the engineering crew and ran back outside. The engineers began working furiously at what I would call a keyboard, and Ed and I watched them with amazement. When they stopped there was almost a pregnant pause in the air, then a machine beeped and a screen popped up. Suddenly they turned around and were looking right at us!

“Fuck,” was all Ed could say. I couldn’t say anything at all.

We drew our guns as they drew theirs, but luckily we fired first. I emptied an entire clip into the one nearest me, and Ed did the same on his. We ran over to their bodies and grabbed their weapons and stopped for a moment- there was no sound. Whatever had happened with our counterparts was over, and as they had never arrived at the engine room, the outcome was obvious. Ed spotted a second exit on the far side of the room and we made our way to it. There was no way we were going to get out the way we came in.

Guns at the ready, we made our way out of that room and back into the hallways of the ship. We figured we didn’t have much time- someone was going to find those bodies and see the internal scan and it was likely to happen quick. Thus we needed to get off that ship as quickly as possible.

Ed the Human Bummer once again reared his ugly head. “No way we’ll be able to get on one of those cargo transports again. They’ll be scouring those things top to bottom.”

“You have a better idea?” I asked, feeling sick to my stomach.

He stared at the remote detonator. “Probably not. But if these guys are this evolved, they must have emergency exits.”

I couldn’t help but choke out a laugh. “Escape pods? Well there’s a classic sci-fi trope.”

Ed shrugged. “Best I’ve got. If there is something like that, I’d guess it’ll be near the crew quarters.”

“By the landing bay,” I said, finishing his thought. I shook my head. We were still going to have to head in the direction where everyone was going to be looking for us.

For a couple of minutes we had clear sailing and we made our way close to the Omegan “barracks”. Then all hell broke loose again. The alarm rang out and a voice began booming from some sort of internal radio. We could then hear the sound of heavy boots echoing on the floor and obviously drawing closer. Ed and I looked at each other, and in that moment, I think we both knew we were dead men. Then he smiled at me.

“I have a plan.”

His plan, frankly, was a bad one. He told me that he had dressed up as Han Solo for Halloween when he was a kid, and that he had always loved the scene where Han acted crazy and chased after a platoon of Stormtroopers, scaring them into running away from him. He took the Omegan gun that I was carrying, handed me his Glock and the detonator, and ran off toward the incoming threat, firing wildly with both laser pistols. As he did, I made my way away from the confrontation, listening carefully to what was happening in the distance, until I found the crew quarters. As the door opened I came face to face with an Omegan, and before he could react, I shot him in the face. Seeing that the room was empty excepting him, I did what I was sent there to do: I hit the remote and set off the explosives.

The sound was deafening, and the ship shuddered like it had been punched by a comet. The lights dimmed, the alarms sounded, and then new lights flicked on. They created a trail through a second room, and luck being on my side, that room was full of small doors. I stepped in front of one and it opened automatically. But before I walked in, I took out my gun, loaded a new clip, and then shot out what appeared to be the control panels for many of the rest of the doors. Seeing that the job was done as it could be, I climbed inside mine and the door shut. A screen came up showing a map of Earth and the explosions began growing louder and closer. So I tapped the map, and the “pod” released. Of course, I had meant to tap northern Arizona so I would be taken home by this little emergency evacuation system. But one last explosion jarred the pod as I hit the map, and that explains why I am where I am now.

What the hell. I’d always wanted to visit Japan anyway. Of course, I wanted to go to Tokyo and the other big cities. This island in the middle of the Pacific wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.