Darklight Pirates

Cletus Tomlins tumbled through the command deck, his fire control helmet protecting his head from too much damage as he smashed into stationary chairs and instrumentation modules. Shaken, he reacted instinctively by throwing out arms and legs to slow his rotation. He winced as his arm crashed into a drifting officer, obviously dead, but the reaction slowed him even more, giving him a chance to grab for a stanchion.

“Report!” He barked out the order, although his father commanded the Shillelagh now that Sorrel had been removed.

The voice reports came from all over the bridge. He tried to sort through them and concentrate on the ones most vital and those most requiring his immediate attention. Through the din, made shrill by the decreased atmosphere caused by the hole in the hull partially plugged with another corpse, came Leanne’s plea for help. Cletus swung about and stared through the debris floating weightlessly. The explosion had taken out their artificial gravity generator, leaving them to flounder about in zero-g. He blinked a few times into his HUD and brought the remaining low-power laser batteries to bear on the Highlander. Steady, accurate fire removed the cruiser’s offensive capabilities quickly.

Only when he began to gloat over such an easy victory did he realize the cruiser vectored away from them, lacking power. Something had destroyed their drive capability. Realizing the energy weapons trained against him were without power, Cletus turned his attention completely to Leanne. She motioned to him from the captain’s chair where his father floated unconscious.

With a scissors-kick Cletus arrowed across the bridge, grabbed the captain’s chair arm and came to an abrupt stop.

“Is there any damage likely if I remove his helmet?” Leanne touched the command helmet. Some electrodes had gouged out shallow, bloody pits in his scalp. The device hung askew.

Cletus had no experience in this, but seeing the way the control helmet sat on his father’s head decided him to take the risk. Removing it when a solid connection between brain and neural network existed could prove dangerous. From the way the electrodes looked, some hardwired contacts had been broken by the explosion. Cletus ran his fingers under the wireframe device and lifted gently.

At first it stuck. He caught his breath, worrying it was held by electromagnetic bonding to his father’s brain. Then he saw how the blood oozing from the wounds had begun to dry. With a quick yank, he pulled off the helmet. It took all his willpower not to fling it across the bridge. This device might have fried his father’s brain beyond any hope of rebooting.

Donal Tomlins moaned and reached for his forehead where a gash bled profusely. He winced as he touched it. His eyes flickered open.

“Did you blow the son of a bitch out of space?”

“The cruiser’s power plant must have been damaged. The ship is drifting.”

“Don’t let it get too far.”

“I can destroy it.” Cletus closed his eyes, then broke off giving the mental orders when his father grabbed him and shook hard.

“No, don’t. We need the survivors for questioning. That was the Highlander? Not another ship running under false identity?”

Using his helmet, Cletus found a targeting station, powered up the CCD telescope attached to the laser cannon, read the ID number on the distant cruiser and then made out the name mostly seared off by his laser barrage. He nodded.

“Captain Lochlan commanded the Highlander. He might have turned traitor like Sorrel or a mutiny removed him. Or he somehow might have believed Sorrel’s mutiny on the Shillelagh had succeeded. I need to know.”

“If Lochlan is also a conspirator, the rot runs very deep in your military and probably in your on-planet command structure,” Leanne said.

“Exactly.” Donal pushed himself back into the chair, gripping the arms to prevent himself from floating freely. “Get me the auxiliary command helmet. The primary is ruined.” He rubbed the bloody spots on his head and smiled wryly. He pressed down into the still flowing head wound until he stanched the flow. “It’s a good thing I have a hard head.”

“Here,” Leanne said, passing over a duplicate of the command helmet.

“Are you sure you’re up for this? I can--” Cletus cut off his protest when his father shot him a cold look.

“I set the RRUs to work before the explosion aft. The explosion ...” Donal said, his voice trailing off. He snapped back to full attention. “We are still spaceworthy. Barely. The cruiser took the brunt of the explosion from the warhead that drilled through our hull. We have Captain Sorrel to thank for that.” He looked over his shoulder and took a deep breath. “RRUs have the life support back to nominal. No more external breaches, but it’s a good idea to have hull integrity checked out in a dry dock.”

“Only if the dry dock is safely under our control,” Cletus said. “The Highlander was docked at the station before it came for us.”

“The station crew might not have known what the cruiser intended,” Leanne pointed out. “But your concern is well taken. Your orbiting station has weaponry capable of blowing even a fully armed and functional dreadnought from the sky.”

Cletus saw that she spoke with complete conviction--and complete knowledge of the station’s weaponry. Supreme Leader had designs on Ballymore that stretched far beyond mere trade if his military intelligence included details of the station. Talking about this with his father was important, but getting the Shillelagh back into fighting condition took precedence.

“We’ll be back at 80 percent nominal overall within the hour,” Donal said. “Muster the marines and send a squad to the Highlander to bring back prisoners and any recorded communication.”

“Sir, the armory at midship caused the explosion that damaged this vessel. It is doubtful any of your marine detachment survived.”

“Leanne is right. I’m not getting any response when I ping the major.”

“It is better if Cletus and I go to the disabled ship.”

Cletus looked at her, then smiled slowly.

“She’s right, Father. We can use the exos. There’s enough oxygen in them for an hour trip.”

“I don’t like you risking your lives like that,” Donal said. He closed his eyes to concentrate on the flood of data reaching him, then looked increasingly grim as he evaluated everything. He finally said, “Go on. As you thought, the entire marine detachment is dead. I’ve restored full power and atmosphere to those compartments. The RRUs report enough dead bodies, or parts of bodies, to make any sortie unlikely.”

“I would recommend not attempting communication with either the station or your controller on-planet,” Leanne said. “If I might make such a comment.”

“I agree. You and Cletus get the information, forget bringing back prisoners except for Captain Lochlan, then return within the margin of safety for those suits. They are more than a match for a dozen marines, but you have no idea what you’ll find on the Highlander."

“Any sensor readings?”

“Radiation from the failed fusion engine blocks my probes.”

“That’s unusual. Radiation? When a fusion core goes down, it just ... shuts down.”

“The liquid sodium spewed out. The compartment safeties were destroyed by a laser shot. Good shooting, Son. That’s also turned the ship into a trap for the unwary.”

“We’ll be back before you know it.”

Donal snorted. They knew he would monitor every centimeter of their incursion until the cruiser’s hull itself blocked his sensors. Cletus turned over his fire control helmet to a second officer, started to give her orders, then knew that was a waste of time. Anything he told her, she already knew. And if circumstances required it, his father would provide better guidance than orders he gave now, before the ship was examined and boarded.

Cletus trailed Leanne to the cargo hold. The robot repair units had fixed several punctures and restored pressure so they could wander about and find where the cargomaster had stowed the crates with the exoskeletons. He found the crates before Leanne and heaved, dropping one to the deck.

“Programmer General Tomlins under compensated gravity,” Leanne said. “I feel half as heavy as normal.”

Cletus saw how the dropped crate had broken open. He hadn’t noticed the lesser gravity until Leanne mentioned it. There had been too many other problems to deal with. The sight of so much destruction between the bridge and cargo hold had left him desolate. Leanne dragging out segments of the exoskeleton perked him up. Wearing the exo and becoming powerful again thrilled him. He fell to helping her sort the parts.

“We’ll counter that when we get into the exos.” He kicked away the crate, found the smaller unit that assembled the exo and activated it. Jumping back, he let the device piece together the arms, legs and torso, then begin the checklist to be certain the exo functioned up to standards. As the robotic assembler worked, he sat with the heavy helmet in his lap, working on the adjustments so it would fit his head. A blink, a head twist, a movement of his chin, all the calibrations energized different functions.

“Here,” Leanne said, dragging a box from the stack. “Power packs for your energy weapons and a dozen small ballistic devices for your arms and shoulders. The high explosives are limited.”

“I wouldn’t want to blow up everything. Just anyone pointing a laserifle at us.”

Cletus had working knowledge of this model rocket Leanne handed him and worked slowly but effectively to load them into the launchers on the exo’s hard points. Leanne watched him closely, then finally turned to her own exo when she accepted he was competent with this bit of armament. Calibrating the lasers required both of them to coordinate, but within fifteen minutes the individual exos were ready.

“Let’s saddle up,” Leanne said. She stepped backward into the opened shell of the exo, pressed her heels down and cycled the front to close. The seals meshed perfectly. A hiss signalled full pressurization.

Cletus saw her inside the polarized helmet, twisting about to make the final adjustments so she could control the armor with the smallest of twitches. He took a deep breath, positioned himself in front of his opened suit and stepped down. As the suit closed quickly, he almost cried out in panic. One instant he stared at the stowed crates in the cargo hold and then he was cocooned and blind.

“Set your polarized faceplate on automatic,” came Leanne’s soft voice in his ear. He blinked a few times and light poured in. “That’s right. Do you want to practice?”

“We only have an hour of oxygen. You can brief me on the way to the cruiser.” He realized how dangerous that might be, arriving at a potential trap without knowing everything possible about the exoskeleton. The smallest muscular twitch magnified a dozen times. If he ramped up the power, he possessed the strength of fifty men.

Fifty men with firepower potent enough to level any moderately sized city in Burran.

He felt humbled and like a god at the same time.

“Turn on the duplex so you can get my readouts the way I see yours.”

A tiny flashing red light alerted him to the complete linkage. Before he moved toward the airlock to join the woman, he glanced at all four layers of the heads up display to be certain everything had come online. It didn’t matter to him that Leanne already would have checked his exo. When he was sure that he was online, he used the link to run down the same checklist for Leanne. Everything matched his readouts. The suits were in synch.

He waited for her to chide him for such redundancy, but when she didn’t he felt a small glow of success. He had never trained in an exoskeleton, and now he was launching himself across thousands of kilometers of airless space to board a ship where every survivor might be intent on killing him, and if everyone was dead, the flood of radioactive liquid sodium would sear through even the tough exo armor. Worse yet, the Highlander had been so severely damaged, it might blow up at any second. The readouts for the armory aboard the Shillelagh and how the weaponry there had killed off the entire marine detachment gave him something more to worry about aboard the cruiser.

Leanne reached out and pressed her elbow to his. The slight magnetic click that shivered through his exo warned him of what came next. The airlock opened and Leanne kicked in her rocket. The exo expended its fuel quickly.

“You’re depending on me to get us back?”

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t waste any propellant maneuvering.”

Cletus took a reading on the cruiser and saw she had lined them up perfectly. A Doppler radar readout gave their closing speed.

“Matching vectors is going to take some fuel,” he said, beginning to worry about how much jockeying was needed to board the ship.

“We can conserve fuel with direct entry.”

“Not if we have to fight our way through the entire crew.”

“We retreat immediately if that occurs.”

“You’re no fun.” His faint joke fell on deaf ears and made him uneasy. Looking foolish to her bothered him more than having to fight his way through all the legions of hell.

“Match now,” she said.

Cletus found his suit automatically applying the proper thrust to bring them to a hard landing on the hull. A quick check confirmed what he had wondered. Their combined bulk had thrown off the initial transit calculations. He disengaged from Leanne and powered up his lasers. Before he blasted open the airlock, she cautioned him.

“No need. It is still operational.” She stepped on the recessed pressure plate, and the airlock hatch slid back.

Together they worked their way into the lock. It was smarter to go separately, in case the inner hatch opened to full laser fire or a bomb, but time pressed in on them. Cletus almost turned off the countdown clock on his HUD showing they had less than forty minutes left. At most they could explore for twenty, then return to the Shillelagh.

Cletus caught his breath as the hatch swung inward. He stepped forward and took a quick sneak-peek into the chamber beyond. Empty. Leanne followed. The dim, flickering light warned that the emergency systems on the cruiser were dying. He switched on the exo IR sensors. The pale green shimmery outlines showed the hatches leading deeper into the belly of the cruiser.

“We should hurry,” he said. “Mark our path.” He used a low-power laser to cut arrows into the bulkhead.

“There is no need to waste energy. Use your inertial tracking gear.” A tiny blue light popped up on his HUD. As he took a few steps, a new blue dot appeared. “The larger the dot the higher you have travelled. It gives a good three-dimensional representation where you go, using the top of your helmet as the base point.”

He moved forward using the full power of his exo legs and crashed into the hatch, rebounded and realized bulling ahead because he didn’t know the equipment he used was foolhardy.

“You take point. I’ll cover the flanks and rear.”

“Use your 360 degree scan, then.”

A new layer on the HUD popped up, this one in yellow. It took him a few seconds to understand what the sensor reported. Then he motioned for her to go ahead. Cletus took a deep breath, aware how the canned air burned in his lungs. Cycling down to a tenth power allowed him to move without bouncing around, but the artificial gravity field faded under him. He added a touch of magnetics to his boot soles to keep from drifting as they entered the central corridor.

Using his IR, he scanned the darkness ahead. The rooms off to either side showed intensities varying from cool to hot. Cletus stepped through the hatch of the first hot compartment and swung his lasers around. A few crew had lashed themselves together against the lack of gravity. They floated about the compartment, bouncing from one wall to another.

“Recently dead,” he reported. He stepped back and saw a huge infrared spot to the stern. “The liquid sodium is heating up clogged pipes. They should have vented it into space.”

“They died quickly, and the failsafes were destroyed. Your laser fire was most accurate.”

“That was bad luck on their part. All the Shillelagh has are low-power lasers.” He had seen the way the warhead intended for the Shillelagh had damaged the cruiser near the bridge.

“The bridge is airless, but I detect at least five from the crew who are still alive.”

“The emergency suits for the captain, XO and the other three vital command deck officers,” he said. “We might find out what’s going on if we can take any of them back for interrogation.”

Leanne paused by the sealed hatchway. On this side pressure existed. On the bridge side, they rode in vacuum. She switched to a laser comlink to prevent being overheard.

“We blow this bulkhead. The sudden rush of air will carry us forward into their midst. Do not be afraid to use your weapons. Better to fail at taking a prisoner than to die.”

“The exoskeletons will protect us.”

“Do not count on it. The captain has had adequate time to take heavy weapons from his armory. Ready?”

Cletus’ vitals readouts soared, and he knew Leanne saw his reaction to going into battle. He forced himself to bring down his heart rate and controlled his breathing. Only when he was under better control did she twist about to aim her hip rockets at the bulkhead. The ignition roar in the slight pressure was smothered by the explosion as the carbon composite bulkhead vaporized and the atmosphere behind them sent them sailing forward.

“Surrender! In the name of the Commander in Chief Armed Forces, give up!” Cletus broadcast his demand. Two of the five suited figures hesitated using their laserifles. Another fired.

The lash of laser fire licked around the exo. The armor dissipated the energy and diffused the beam, giving Cletus time to use his own energy weapons to vaporize the woman firing on him. He saw how Leanne had dispatched the XO, whose body had been smashed hard against the far bulkhead. Leanne’s laser had burned through spacesuit and XO and left a fist-sized hole in his chest.

“We don’t want to shoot but will if you resist. Lay down your weapons. This is a direct order. I’m Commander in Chief Armed Forces Cletus Tomlins.” Cletus saw the two who had hesitated before obey now.

“You’re really Commander Tomlins?”

“And the Programmer General is aboard the ship you fired on. Did you know that?”

“Captain Lochlan said--” The words died abruptly as a laser speared him squarely in the middle of his faceplate.

“He’s lying. I’m your captain. Obey me!” A new laser beam lashed out and caught the remaining officer in the shoulder.

“You lied to us! You turned us into traitors, and we didn’t know it!” Those were the officer’s last words as Lochlan’s beam finally found its target. The man’s chest melted and the air within his suit rushed outward, turning into a filmy cobweb of water vapor and blood.

Cletus turned awkwardly and launched a shoulder rocket in Lochlan’s direction. In the evacuated bridge the missile did little other than blasting away part of the hull. His exo caught the return fire from the captain’s laserifle. In fascination he watched his damage control displays light up, showing how the armor deflected and diffused the deadly beam. None of the indicators reached the red, but several crept into yellow alert regions.

“Cletus, down!”

He turned on his magnetic boots, clamped firmly and bent forward as a pair of rockets shot past his head. Leanne had fired directly at Lochlan. The captain had anticipated the return fire and ducked into the communications alcove, Faraday cage shielded from any interference generated in the ship.

“Wait, hold back,” Leanne cautioned.

“We can blow him out with a couple more rockets. I wish they were personnel seekers. We could target him and leave the surroundings untouched.”

“There, he’s trying to contact the planetary controller.”

Cletus tried to tap into the beam, also, but his inexperience with the equipment prevented it before Lochlan came rushing out, his laserifle on continuous beam. Cletus launched a rocket that barely missed the captain and drove into the communications alcove. The brilliant flare evidenced huge destruction, but an untouched Lochlan swept his deadly fire in a slashing arc, as if he wielded a sword. Part of the control panel next to Cletus melted away before the fire hit his exo.

For an instant alarms sounded and red lights flashed as Cletus’ right arm came into the beam. Then the clangor died when Lochlan’s laserifle drained.

“My right arm weapons are gone,” he reported to Leanne. “He’s behind the captain’s chair.”

Cletus turned and fired his left-hand laser the same instant Leanne launched a salvo. Captain Lochlan foolishly showed himself, rising from behind the command chair. He fell forward, his palm slamming down on the chair’s left arm before exploding from the assault launched at him.

“He vented the liquid sodium from the fusion reactors. The ship’s going to blow!”

Cletus felt the cruiser shudder under his boots. He cut the magnetic anchor, dived for Leanne, caught her up and began firing his remaining offensive rockets at the bridge’s hull. Then the shock made him feel as if he surfed, caught a wave and was lifted high on the ride of his life.