Was bored tonight and wrote this.A Tendency to Start Fires
A ship drops out of warp at just over forty kilometers distance from an isolated deep space repair depot consisting of a complex of zero-g habs, life support structures, and a smattering of fabrication and maintenance machinery arranged in a web of scaffolding like insects caught in their predator’s net. At the center of this trap lays a dry-docked industrial ship, a Sigil-class, the over-sized spider in our inaccurate analogy. For if there is a hunter here, it is the one that has just fallen through space at a quite improbable speed and now lingers at the edge of the repair depot’s visual range, contemplating uncivilized things.
At his console in the watch tower anchored in space only a short distance from the depot, a sentry looks up from the number pattern game on his personal datapad and does a double take. His terminal tells him two things. First, that a warp signature has been detected and a contact registered on the overview. And second, that according to the schedule from traffic control, no vessels are due for arrival for more than six hours. Something in the readouts stands out to him, a thought occurs, and he takes his eyes off the console for a moment to fill in an answer in his game. When he looks back up, the ship has fired its sub-light engines and is accelerating toward the complex.
“Uh…” the intercom in the depot commander’s quarters cracks to life just as she is pulling off her second boot and rubbing fourteen hours worth of aches and pains out of her feet. She glances toward the speaker near her bunk and instinctively feels a chill down her spine. Nobody pipes directly into her quarters except her XO, who would have the sense to page first, unless it’s an emergency. “Unident’fied vessel, ma’am,” the sentry drawls through the speaker. Her boots were already half on again.
He pushes upward as if against a heavy weight laid on his shoulders and feels his legs stretch to a comfortable limit. A tingling flows up from his toes, across the tops of his feet, through the calves, and along the iliotibial bands. The crisp solar wind fills his lungs as he draws in a deep breath, and pushes up one final measure onto the very tips of his toes. Ah, maximum velocity.
An event report automatically generated by his console’s AI receives the sentry officer’s approval with a tap of the fingers, and the corporate headquarters is notified of the situation. On the exterior of his one-man lookout hab an anachronistic visual spectrum beacon ignites and begins to rotate. Inside, unable to see it, the sentry mutes the annoying auditory klaxon that has also perked up and leans back in his chair to focus on his datapad. He quickly spots another answer in the pattern and fills in a few more numbers. Six stars? He is pleased at his seemingly effortless progress on such a challenging puzzle.
Shouts echo in the control room as the commander bursts in on a scene of chaos. Suddenly everything stops and all eyes are on her, many of them pleading, a few stone cold but not uniformed. She grips the railing in front of her and leans forward. “Visual,” she orders. The large display at the center of the room resolves an image according to her command. Everyone can see the front-on view of a ship, a frigate by scale, with two distinctly tapered forward sections, a central command hab, and six foreboding protrusions that look like rings mounted on raised metal fists. The computer highlights these and identifies them by caliber. They are cannon, aimed directly at the depot. One of the crew asks, “General quarters, ma’am?” Simultaneously the ship’s IFF code is finally resolved from a secondary database and the computer displays its registration. The commander’s heart climbs into in her throat. She chokes out part of an order, “All hands.” She squeezes the railing tightly to keep hers from shaking and finds her voice, “Abandon the depot!”
Turning his neck, he feels his spine crack and relief spread through his body. He dives into a pirouette and takes in the sight of the depot. The bottom looks quite soft. With a sniff, he cracks the knuckles of each hand methodically. This shouldn’t take long.
“Torch Six here, we are responding to a contact report,” a voice plays over the console in the watch tower. The sentry keys his headset by touching the interface device on his index finger. Without looking up from his game he replies, “Heya, Torch, we got a unsched U-I a few min’s ago. Computer sent the mess’ge.” Several seconds pass without another call from the corporate quick reaction force and the sentry looks up at his console as much out of a lazy sense of curiosity than duty. Several cruisers of the QRF are converging on the depot, which is itself being pummeled by projectile fire from the intruder. Tiny stars flare up in the space between the friendly cruisers and the small frigate orbiting the depot as the larger ships launch missiles. “
Ho-lee fuck,” the sentry slowly subvocalizes, dropping his datapad on the desk and magnifying the view on his console. The watch tower's AI suggests activating the depot’s defensive turrets as well, and after a moment of bewilderment the sentry gleefully consents.
Round after round of 120mm ammunition impacts on the thin armor protecting the hull of the depot’s inhabited structure. In a red-lit corridor filled with sirens and terror, the commander runs smack into the captain of the industrial ship parked in the maintenance array. She doesn’t recognize him in his casual attire, the loose robes of Amarrian ecclesiasts. He is wild-eyed, and seems to overcome a great inhibition in the heat of the moment to grab her by the shoulders and plead what he can do. The depot commander places her hands on his outstretched arms and calmly answers, “Run.”
Their missiles fragment several dozen meters from his shield and strike it with the kinetic force of countless submunitions. The depot will only take a few more good blows, but this rain of spite from its little defense fleet was beginning to make his eyes water. It's like standing in a dust storm and facing the wind with your eyelids wide open, and it pisses him the hell off. He faces away from the depot and pushes off, flinging himself into a trajectory aimed right at the nearest cruiser. With aggravation he wipes his eyes and the hair stands up on the back of his neck as he bathes his aura in fresh energy drawn forth with every beat of his heart. Just a few flies to swat.
In a calm voice the console AI inside the watch tower reports, “Torch Three, combat ineffective.” The sentry snaps his fingers in disappointment. “Thought this was gon' be a fight,” he says, getting up from his seat and moving across the small ops room to retrieve a black duffel bag bearing his name. He tosses the bag on his seat and begins to pack his personal effects in it as the AI notifies him, “Torch Five, combat ineffective.”
“Ma’am, 185 are away, 144 are loading, and 3 remain on station.” The depot commander snaps back to the present, her mind momentarily numbed by the circumstances. She knew she could never hack it in a real military assignment. Was this proof of that fear? “Ma’am?” her XO asks, waving a datapad in front of her face. They stand alone in a corridor. The sirens have been shut off, but other far more ominous noises echo through the superstructure, betraying the heavy toll it has already sustained. She nods and pushes the XO toward the direction of the life boats that are still loading, but stops mid-stride. “Wait,” she says, “Three?” Her second-in-command simply smirks and points up. The watch tower. The commander repeats her previous nonverbal confirmation and the two take off at a sprint.
The last cruiser takes a hard punch through its drive core containment barriers and rips itself apart in an orgasm of destruction, spilling blue light and debris into space. He plows through this field of metal and bodies and radiation, twisting his body sharply. He bends his knees and launches himself back toward the depot with all the force his legs can muster. He zips past a curious little structure with a rotating light on top of it as he falls toward his target. It is unarmed and poorly protected, but he carefully dodges it nevertheless. It can be quite jarring, if not very dangerous, to collide with large objects like that. Briefly he glances toward a theoretical point off in the distance and makes a mental note of it while, realizing he is within falloff range, absentmindedly rolls his shoulders back, cracks his neck, and unleashes his fury on the depot.
A hoot of excitement escapes the sentry’s lips as the intruder buzzes the watch tower on its way toward the depot. The console’s overview indicates six wrecks on slow trajectories away from the depot’s local space and that the automated turrets are continuing to attack. They apparently have no noticeably affect. He throws his duffel bag over a shoulder and grabs his datapad from the desk. Walking across the room to a small hatch, he turns his head back toward the console and says, “Well, g’luck to ya,” meaning the AI. It does not reply. The sentry hits a control pad on the wall with the edge of his datapad and the hatch opens onto a tiny one-man life boat. He shrugs the duffel off his shoulder once inside and takes a seat.
Flying away from the depot at several hundred meters per second, the commander takes a long look at the assignment that moved her out of planetside middle management and into an entirely new phase of her life. Dozens of shells impact on the depot, its exterior already heavily pitted and scarred by earlier volleys. Every other round seems to explode in a tiny burst of brilliant white light in the millisecond before hitting its mark, and ripples of lightning briefly flash outward from each point of impact. The only visible effect of the other half of the attacker’s fire is a violent implosive distortion of the depot’s metal and polymer structure. Finding herself unable to watch in the final seconds, the commander of the repair depot looks away from the viewport and waits for the inevitable flash of light that will briefly illuminate everything inside the life boat, most noticeably, her failure. She knows all too well the debt this dishonor will charge.
A buzzing in his ear and a flash at the periphery of his vision tells him he has satisfied his contractual obligations. He aligns on that distant point, banks, and falls forward through space faster even than the light escaping from the collapsing power core at the heart of the exploding depot.
The sentry’s life boat is shortly filled with luminescent white, followed almost instantly by the coy snickering of its lone occupant. He fills in the final row of numbers on his datapad. The game notifies him that he’s set a new personal record. Glancing out the window he takes stock of his situation and puts down the datapad. “S’pose I’ll have t’ update my resume,” he says to himself. After a few moments of silence with his fingers crossed on his lap and the stars spinning outside the window, the (former) sentry reaches into his duffel bag and takes out a book. “Now,” he wonders out loud, “what’s the word fer ‘it wa’n’t my fault’?” He turns the book over and opens it up, searching through the pages idly. The sun passes in front of the window and casts a beam of light into the life boat, briefly shining on the book’s cover and revealing the words: “Napanii for Gallenteans”
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Topic: A Tendency to Start Fires (Read 1021 times)