Rockhoppers Chapter 10
Abel Miller checks his console when the vacuum klaxon finally cuts off, but there’s still no advisory that it’s safe to leave his quarters. The scientist had immediately contacted his wife when the breach protocol activated. He knew she was safe only a few doors down in one of the emergency crash couches. Resisting the urge to contact her again in case she had been called to duty in medical, he checks the civilian scientist’s informal bulletin system to see if anyone knew what was going on, but he just finds a mass of confusion and wild theories, each one more dire than the last.
“Dad, is it ok now?” His teenage daughter, due to enter university a few weeks after the Widdershins is scheduled to return to port, pads in to the room in slippers and rumpled pajamas.
“Your Mom’s fine, sweetie, but they haven’t given the all-clear. The section’s still under spin, so it can’t be that bad. We have to stay here for now, why don’t you try to go back to sleep?”
She nods and heads back to her bunk, yawning.
He watches the messages pile up on the bulletin board for a few more minutes, until he’s interrupted by the door chime. The intercom comes on a moment later.
“It’s me, Abe. You have to open the door from your side until they cancel the alert.”
He jumps up and palms the release, and his wife steps inside. Wrapping her in a hug, he tells the top of her head, “I thought you might have been called up.”
She squeezes him. “They can’t. The breach isn’t in our section, if there is one, and nothing gets past the bulkheads until engineering, environmental, and the bridge all key in the all-clear.”
“I’m glad you made it home, but it wasn’t safe leaving the couch.”
She nods against his chest.. “I know. The couch could tell me there was atmosphere, though, and if... if something happened, I wanted us all together. A few other people were moving around, I saw Anna. I told her if there’s no one in her quarters to let her in, she should come here.”
Anna is one of the students doing a microgravity residency in medical. He doesn’t remember who her assigned roommate is, but she won’t be able to get in without someone inside authorizing it. The thinking is, that if there is a breach, it’s better for someone to die in a corridor than to suffocate everyone in the quarters they enter.
“That’s fine, why don’t you check with her and make sure—”
He’s interrupted by the entry chime.
“Nevermind. I guess she couldn’t get in.”
Palming the door again, he does find Anna just outside, although it takes him a moment to process it. She’s lying on her back, the centrifugal force of the residential section’s rotation providing the ‘gravity’ to keep her there. Her pants lie in a wadded clump against the far wall, and she’s making little mewling noises as she masturbates.
Despite all of this, the bulk of Abel’s attention is taken up by the short blue... thing, standing in front of her staring into his quarters with curiosity. It looks at his face briefly before proceeding to ignore him. Raising one hand, it places the tips of its fingers against his chest. It begins gently pushing until he steps back and to one side, allowing the alien to study the room it is entering. Intellectually, he knows he should be resisting, but that feels... wrongheaded.
He watches as it paces the few feet to where his wife is standing. Her attention is riveted on it, and when it reaches up and begins to pull steadily on a lock of her shoulder-length hair, she obligingly sinks to her knees. It touches the semi-hard length of its shaft, still wet with Anna and others before her.
It touches itself again, and touches his wife’s lips. He watches, passively, as the woman who’d borne his child takes the alien in her mouth and begins to encourage it back to hardness with great enthusiasm. The only sounds in the room are the gentle beeps of his console as new messages appear on the bulletin board and the wet smacking of his wife’s lips and tongue around the rapidly thickening penis of the intruder.
Once fully erect, the alien presses gently on her forehead, and she falls backwards easily, kicking off her pants and spreading her legs as it kneels between them. Abel listens to his wife moan as the blue creature sinks into her, and before long the rhythmic sounds of its hips slapping against her drown out his console.
Soon, it finishes, taking a moment to extract itself from the nearly insensate woman. She’s reluctant to let her new lover go, but at its gentle urging she unwraps her legs and drops her clutching hands from its back. The alien stands up, ignoring her now that she’s seeded, and glances around the room. It seems to sniff the air, and then looks at Abel and makes an interrogatory noise.
Abel walks across the room, the alien trailing him, and palms the door to his daughter’s bunk. He can see her sleeping on her belly, covered by the the blanket her mother made for her when she was younger. The alien slips past him, and he watches as it pulls the blanket from her sleepy, confused form.
“D... dad?”
“Relax, sweetie.”
Pressing one hand on her back for a moment, the alien helps convince her to remain lying down. She can’t see it from her position, so she looks at her father instead. He watches as the intelligence in her eyes is dimmed by animal lust. The alien fumbles at her pajama bottoms for a moment, clothing being a concept it has only recently come to grips with. Finally it draws then down, exposing her smooth, firm buttocks, her hips already starting to make small pumping motions as the pheromone claims her.
It carefully crawls on top of her, its penis flopping to rest on the crack of her ass, leaving a moist trail of her mother’s juices. Lying flat on top of her and slipping its arms around her chest in an intimate hug, it rests its cheek between her shoulder blades and begins to work its hips, rubbing against her as it brings itself to hardness once more. Finally, it draws back from her and lines its penis up with her inflamed vagina.
As it sinks its length into her, Abel idly notes how similar the noises of passion she makes are to those of her mother.
As the clangor of the breach alarms fades, Millie Carsens is already moving, leaving her quarters to try and get to engineering to help the Chief. Going over her mental map of the ship, she leaves the main corridor and pops a maintenance hatch, quickly descending two decks and popping out again near a bulkhead she knows will be monitored.
She stands in front of the massive door and waves at the camera mounted overhead.
“Hi, Millie.”
“Oh, good, Jeff, it’s you. I need to get to engineering, can you shepherd me through the locks?”
“I can’t, Millie, you’re in the hot zone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t talk about it. Just... Millie, just find somewhere and hide. Don’t open the door for anyone.”
“You’re scaring me, Jeff.”
“You really, really should be. Now go and lock yourself in somewhere, and don’t open the door for anyone until the Captain says something over the ship comm.”
Millie looks over her shoulder nervously. She looks back up at the camera and considers arguing one more time, but she’s known Jeff since basic, and that sounds like real fear in his voice. Fear for her.
Nodding at the lens, she turns and moves back up the corridor at a hurried walk. She’s almost back to the maintenance access when she sees one of her neighbors trotting towards the bulkhead she’d just left.
“It won’t let you through, Toshi. Jeff’s on watch, and he wouldn’t let me through.“
He slows to a stop beside her, casting a worried look back in the direction he’d come from.
“What’s going on back there?” she asks.
He turns back to her, his brow furrowed. With inhuman quickness, his hands shoot up to her face and begin squeezing the pressure points at the hinge of her jaw. Her lips pop open before she has a chance to register what’s happening. By the time she starts to pull away from him, a torrent of black tar is leaping from his mouth into hers.
“How much of my ship is compromised?”
“The pheromone is present in three decks of the forward section. We believe the blue creatures are the source, Captain. We don’t know if the black creatures have spread further. We do have footage of those taking control of several crewmembers, all of whom have attempted to subvert the breach protocol. The, um, infested seem to have all of their previous knowledge.
“As far as we’ve been able to determine, the aliens aren’t trying to bore through the bulkheads l they did the hull. We don’t know why, but we suspect the action is costly in some way. From what we’ve been able to determine, the hull was compromised by chemical attack.”
“Do you have some means of tracking the spiders like you can the blue ones?”
“Negative. We know that medical nanites can clear an infested human, but we have no way to manufacture enough of them to flood that volume of atmosphere with the density we’d need.”
“Keep working on ideas, Lieutenant. I cannot permit this ship to move inside of Neptune’s orbit until I can be absolutely certain no trace of the aliens remain.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Toggling to a different channel, the captain says, “Chief, report.”
“Not good, Captain. I’ve been watching the system attacks the converted crew have been trying, and most of it is laughable. But in the last ten minutes the sophistication has jumped a thousandfold. I think... they may have my number two.”
“Carsens?”
“Yeah, Millie. That’s a big problem, Captain. I can slow her down, but she’s an order of magnitude better at software than anyone else on this ship. I came up through reactor engineering, but she’s a transfer from AI architecture.”
“What does this mean for us?”
“Well, it puts a clock on things. The nature of the breach protocol prevents her from disabling it all over the ship, as long as you, me and environmental have the keys. The bulkheads can be taken one at a time, though. Each one will take her a good long bit, but she can do it from anywhere in the ship. I can’t even tell who she’s logged in as, it’s possible she’s rotating. She’ll know that, and she’ll know we’ll start looking for her. Engineering is the part of the ship furthest from the compromised area, so she’ll get here last no matter what route she takes.”
“Recommendations?”
The engineer is silent for a time.
“If they take environmental, I suggest we scuttle the ship. If they take the bridge, I’m going to scuttle the ship with your permission or without it.”
It’s the captain’s turn to think before speaking.
“Can you still operate the bulkheads in the clean part of the ship?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to send the Admiral to you. Get her to engineering, and keep her with you. Environmental is trying to come up with some sort of solution to the infested humans, and the remaining marines are suited up. Their filtration systems should make dealing with our blue visitors no issue. Still, if the time comes, do what you need to. And, Chief...”
“Yes, sir?”
“Be thorough.”
“Understood.”
The captain turns to face his superior. “I don’t mean to be peremptory...”
She waves a hand dismissively. “I’m on my way.”
The old woman moves with alacrity to exit the bridge. The Captain points at the two marines stationed by the exit, and they turn to follow her. He turns back to the updating status reports on his console and watches as the Widdershins is slowly consumed.
“Hey, Carl.”
“Yeah, Chief?”
“You have any luck with the systems of that miner on the surface?”
“Nah. I mean,we got in, but nothing is functional down there any more. I could probably stop the reactor, but there’s no real point.”
“Hmm.”
Carlos is quiet for a time as he uses his console to do a little math. He keys the bridge.
“Captain?”
The strain on the ship’s commanding officer is in his voice, ”What is it, Chief?”
“I may have a way to get word of what’s happening back to the UNS. It won’t be in time to help us, but at least they’ll know what happened.”
“Do you need anything from me but permission?”
“Yeah, I need the behemoths.”
The Captain is quiet for a moment. ”They couldn’t help us in here anyway, they can’t fit inside the ship. They’re yours. Do what you can.”
Carlos begins to answer, but the captain has already cut the channel.
“You know bots, right, Carl?”
“You bet, grew up on a miner. What’s up?”
“Come on, we’re gonna go turn on some friends.”
—I am awake.—
“You know who I am?”
—Chief Engineer Carlos Zink, Widdershins. You have command authority.—
“Assimilate the information store waiting in your queue.”
—Assimilated.—
“Can it be done?”
—Barring unforeseen events.—
“Fine. I’m going to upload you now. Once you have bodies, execute.”
—Understood.—
“One last thing. When it fires, I want one of you inside it.”
—Understood.—
Near the planetward tip of the Widdershins, just behind one of the main weapon clusters, four panels lie flush with the hull of the ship. At a command from engineering, explosive bolts fastening them to the vessel detonate. The panels hurtle into the void in clouds of shimmering ice vapor as the atmosphere they protected vents to vacuum. Tenths of a second later four projectiles launch out of formerly concealed tubes.
As they leave the immediate vicinity of the ship, they begin to generate puffs of corrective thrust, until all four are in near-miss vectors with the derelict mining vessel on the surface. A few tens of seconds after they launch, they slam into the surface of the planetoid, raising a drifting fog of gravel and dust that will float in microgravity for hours. Out of the hanging cloud advance four massive humanoid figures, the enormous gripping claws of their feet easily finding purchase on the surface of the planetoid.
Each UNS Behemoth-class assault drone tops eight meters in height, almost as wide as they are tall. They bristle with a dazzling array of weaponry, from dumb projectiles to multiphase lasers to quasi-Turing-compliant clustermissiles capable of transmitting insults before they detonate on target. Their feet are nightmarish tripedal claws, capable of piercing the armored hull of enemy ships for traction or providing enough thrust from inbuilt rockets to nudge small starships off course.
Complex, multi-jointed fingers tip the thicker columns of their arms. Each of the five digits is arranged in an even circle around a palm bulbous with concealed tools. Each finger opposes at least two others and can change surface texture to a limited degree, maximizing grip versatility. The headless torso is dotted with redundant sensors, providing a full sphere of visibility into spectra most humans have never heard of.
Deep inside each of the terrible hulks float the tiny crystal spheres that house the AI persona that Carlos has uploaded into the drones, suspended by thousands of nanofilaments and maintained at temperatures below thirty Kelvin. Though slightly dim by the standards of a modern station AI like Galileo, these four are clones of the same template, designed by AI assisted UNS programming experts to act as a tactical specialist. The goal the monsters have been assigned by the Widdershins’ chief engineer is well below their capabilities, assuming certain factors, but it’s not within their remit to grouse (out loud) about the lack of hostile action.
As they survey the area, conversation between them is kept secure by line of sight lasers. After the briefest pause for assessment, two of them head for the terminus of the abandoned mining rail, one of them for the fusion spigots surrounded by quiescent spider-drones, and one towards the nose of the derelict.
In comically short order, unlocked by the accesses Josh had provided the UNS in his message, spiderbots that have not shifted in decades are grinding into action. They swarm at the behest of the behemoth crouched in their midst. Some it retains for its own purposes, the others it directs to assist its brothers by the terminus. Once it has dispatched its tiny brethren, it rises. Moving underneath the derelict, it approaches what the spider-drones have indicated it would find: a pile of iron slugs, crafted before the Rockhopper had begun its final flight, but after the infested Captain had ordered the disconnection of the rail.
Each fifteen meter long slug is more massive by far than even the titanic assault drone, but in the microgravity it has no issue clamping on to one of them and slowly shifting it away from its comrades. Maneuvering the giant metal pill out from underneath the ship, it takes station next to one of the fusion spigots leading to the final functioning reactor of the Rockhopper. Setting the slug into an angled furrow on the surface created by a small squad of the newly reawakened spiderbots, it cocks one massive arm and begins extruding a cable from what might be called an elbow on a human.
Attaching the adaptive tip of the cable to the Rockhopper’s fusion spigot, it holds up the hand of the same arm. The blister in the middle of its palm retracts, revealing a cluster of tools. From their midst a black bulb pushes itself up. Gripping it between two fingers of the opposing hand, the behemoth pulls, revealing a long, thin wire. Looping it with level precision around one end of the slug, it begins drawing on the full capacity of the ship’s reactor. As the wire begins to emit a hellish glow, the assault drone begins to haul backwards.
The thread begins to sink through the iron, and the behemoth continues to tighten the infernal garrote until two meters of the slug is separated, and begins to drift to the surface of the planetoid. Several small spiderbots latch on to the severed end and pull it away from the bulk of the iron. Using much smaller torches and an array of burs and metal saws, they begin the fine work on the tailing. Meanwhile, their larger cousin shifts the rest of the slug to a new position.
Pausing to rewind the garrote, it extends its hands. Three adjacent fingers on each snug in closely to one another. Their tips shift and become smooth, terminating in a fairly blunt edge. The extra fingers fold backwards, out of the way, and the behemoth is left with a pair of scoops at the end of each arm. Drawing once more on the derelict’s fusion plant, the hard edges of the spades begin to glow. Slowly at first, but with increasing speed, the superheated and superhard alloy of the assault drone’s claws begin to gouge out larger and larger chunks of the simple iron, soft by comparison.
This takes the better part of an hour, with frequent pauses to use a different tool to apply a mist of liquid nitrogen to the hollow it is carving, helping shed built up heat from the carving. Eventually the slug is almost entirely hollowed out, leaving a relatively thin wall of iron only quarter of a meter thick. The interior is rough with cooling claw marks.
The assault drone steps back as its assistant spiderbots swarm into the slug to take care of the fine work. In another thirty minutes, the interior is mirror smooth, except close to the lip, where the spiders have created threads to match the work they’d done on the cap. As they evacuate the slug, the behemoth grips the cap and guides it into place, screwing it down to verify the seal. In under two hours, it has turned the solid iron slug into a hollow, resealable capsule. It’s also airtight, but that hardly matters, as it would be closed in vacuum, and none of the payload requires atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the drone approaching the front of the Rockhopper has reached the are of the hull just outside the mining ship’s tiny bridge. Glancing through the viewport to verify the layout, it begins to shred its way through the hull. The miner was a sturdy craft, but the assault drone had been designed to chew through meters of hull on heavily armored warships, and in under a minute it has pried open the bridge like a tin can.
Moving with greater care now, the drone carefully picks apart the main command console, until it eventually manages to extract one of the Rockhopper’s redundant data logs. There are two more, separated by much of the ship to insure redundancy. Due to the radiation damage the ship’s store had already demonstrated with Josh’s message, the drone’s orders were to secure as many as possible. It didn’t intend to miss any. Placing its prize in a secure container in its torso, it begins climbing the ship towards the piece of the hull closest to its next target.
At the terminus of the rail, the duo of assault drones have cleared the wreckage by main force. Occasionally assisted in finer work by one of the spider drones, some of whom are skittering down the kilometers long length of the rail to ensure free running for the modified projectile, the behemoths reattach the rail to the launcher mechanism by main force. By the time they’ve completed the hookups, their brother has joined them with the newly crafted capsule.
They open it, and one of them begins using a heated finger to carefully carve the reflective identifier markings on the end of the long body, furthest from the cap. That end is still solid iron, several meters thick. Heavier than the hollow end, it will be the leading edge of the bullet. After the metal cools, it attaches the radio identifier tag the target will read at the end of the slug’s journey. Once it has finished, it straightens, takes a wide stance, and offlines its defensive subroutines.
One of its brother approaches, unslinging a two-handled, stubby rifle from the weapon cluster on its back. Aiming the bore low on the torso of its helpless sibling, it fires. A ship-breacher, explosives inert, rips into the guts of the waiting drone. Sufficient to shred the drone’s armor on the way in, it lacks the necessary punch to create an exit wound. Replacing the rifle in the weapons cluster, the attacking drone moves to one side of the disabled behemoth. The third moves to the other, and together they jam their fingers into the entry wound, taking advantage of the introduced trauma to the armor to slowly tear the hole wide enough for their purposes.
Once they’ve finished, the first stands in front of the hole and plunges its hands inward, and then upward, deep into the core of its wounded brother. Carefully, carefully, so as not to finish the job of killing its sibling, it slowly pulls out the meter wide refrigeration sphere housing the AI, jerking it occasionally to sever more tenacious connecting wires.
Cradling the mind of its twin, it walks over to the emptied slug. It passes the sphere to a small phalanx of spiderbots, who move the sphere deeper inside, nestling it at the bottom of the hollow. Once they have it in place and have retreated, the living behemoth opens its tool blister and sprays a stream of rapidly expanding crash foam down over the sphere. Covering it in seconds, the foam hardens to a consistency stronger than concrete as the iron leeches the heat from it.
As they complete sealing their brother into the capsule, the final drone is returning from the Rockhopper, bearing three redundant ships logs in its torso storage, and, in its massive fingers, gently cradling a large diamond in the shape of Faith Adeyemi.
With greater care than they’d used with their own brother, the three remaining behemoths lay the records and the human girl to rest, eventually capping the slug and tack-welding it shut. They maneuver it into the launch mechanism, and begin performing the orbital calculations they require for sharpshooting measured in tens of astronomical units.
The emotionless voice of the behemoth’s AI crackles out of the chief’s console.
—Launch successful. Compromised structural integrity of projectile due to mission requirements and suboptimal power availability from remaining reactor limit launch velocity to six percent of optimal.—
“Revised timeframe?”
—Target interception in approximately one hundred thirty seven years.—
Carlos sighs. “Well, at least they’ll know for the history books. Any issues with the payload?”
—Inserting one of ourselves required terminal dismantling of that chassis. The datastore and log of the Widdershins is secure in the memory of that unit, as is what could be recovered from the derelict.—
Carlos says, “You got everything I asked for from the Rockhopper?“
—Yes, Chief Engineer Carlos Zink. Every physical instance of the derelict’s logs as well as the remains of the human female. All are highly radioactive, though not at levels inimical to the data integrity of my sibling.—
“Very good. Remain on the surface and take yourselves offline until signaled.”
—Very well. We remain.—
Carlos returns to his console to do some rapid math.
“Chief, I’ve had every tech in ops up here working on it, but we can’t stop her. At best we’re slowing her down.”
“Understood, Captain. We need another twenty hours for the message to get clear, but I’m prepared to do what I have to.”
“Is the Admiral there?”
“She just got here.”
A feminine voice interjects, ”Go ahead, Captain.”
“I am hereby transferring Chief Engineer Carlos Zink to your chain of command, Admiral. Carlos, you will no longer report to me, and I cannot order you. The Admiral has all the ship accesses you may need.”
“Something I need to know, Captain?”
“The ship may hold out twenty hours, Chief,—”
The captain watches on the main screen as a short blue alien approaches the bulkhead outside the bridge, and curiously pokes at it, scenting humans on the other side.
“— but the Command won’t.”
Millie is still Millie, mostly.
She knows she’s not really in control of herself, but the thing in her head isn’t smart enough to do what needs to be done on its own. She understand that it’s had to spread itself very, very thin, working with smaller and smaller amounts of itself, losing intelligence with every gram it has to give up. It’s mostly directive now.
That’s the main reason the ship hasn’t fallen. The alien can easily burn through the bulkheads the way it did the hull, but only by using itself as reaction mass. It had already used up more than half of itself just getting in the ship. If it hadn’t had the blue aliens along, it would have already been defeated. It had already almost lost, but then it found Millie.
Millie knows things, machine things, and she can make doors open, given enough time. Millie lets the aliens into a section of a ship, and the hybrids wander through, doing what they do, subduing the human crew without really trying. Occasionally they would come across a marine that wearing a suit, and that was a problem. The marines kill the little hybrids easily, and have no hesitation about doing so.
But the same way Millie can open doors, she can open the suits, although it takes a little longer. They haven’t lost any hybrids at all for the last six bulkheads, and they are getting very close to environmental. Millie isn’t an environmental specialist, but that doesn’t matter. There are plenty of specialists inside that section, and while it’s spread thin, the alien knows how to prioritize.
Millie has opened every bulkhead but one heading to the bridge, but that’s just a trick, like a feint in chess. She’s figured out how to get to environmental in a single move, without hitting any marines, and she’s about five minutes away from executing.
The hatch behind her slides open, and Millie sighs. Well, ten minutes away. The alien in her head blocks the effect of the hybrid’s pheromones, so she can think clearly, but the little blue guys sure like to fuck. Every few hours, a different one will find her, and give her the gentle touch on her shoulder that serves them so well with the other girls. She’d shoved the first one away, irritated, but that hadn’t made the thing in her head happy, so now she just goes with the flow.
Glancing over her shoulder, she grins at the little guy. She hasn’t gotten this much cock since the Academy. The blue guys aren’t much for stamina, but they are... vigorous. She’s made a game of trying to cum before they do. She hasn’t pulled it off yet, but it’s a nice way to pass the time. Tugging her sweatpants and panties down far enough to let the alien get at the prize, she slips a hand down and starts playing with herself, getting a slight head start on the her approaching lover.
She makes a little squeak as the little alien slides into her without ceremony, and for the next few minutes she forgets about bulkheads and chess.
Lieutenant Kozue Yamanaga observes the progress of the alien infestation, as measured by the presence of the foreign pheromone in the ship’s air. Behind her, the environmental staff that had been present when she initiated the breach protocol remains on duty, going through the motions of keeping the doomed ship functional. And doomed it is, unless something miraculous happens.
None of her people are systems experts in a class with Carsens, and it seems inevitable that the bridge will be the next section of the ship to fall, essentially cutting off the head of her command structure. The captain has already ordered her to sever communications with command, and with the rest of the ship. His final order had been for her and her staff to do their duty to the best of their ability for as long as possible.
She frets as she watches the display on her console. If she only had a sample of one of the little blue aliens! Some of her staff were brilliant geneticists, and she’s fairly certain that they could fashion an airborne toxin that would leave humans unharmed, if they only knew the genetic makeup of the invaders.
She’s still thinking about how she might get her hands on a bit of alien DNA when the door to a maintenance closet clicks open. A couple of the little aliens casually walk into the room and look around, to no great fanfare. Kozue jerks as her console beeps to indicate another section of the ship has detected the presence of the pheromone, and she has to stare at the map for a few seconds to understand that the section is her own.
She turns around just before the effect hits her. She’s a small woman, and the alien that is approaching her is only slightly shorter. It gently presses her backwards until she bumps into her desk, then plucks at her shipsuit. She reaches up and unfastens the collar, letting the fastenings slide down far enough for it to slip over her shoulders and fall to the floor. The alien leans towards her and sniffs. It makes a sort of purring noise and reaches for her panties, tugging at them until she slips her thumbs in the sides and slides them off.
Silent, now, it pushes a hand against her flat belly. She slides her rump up on to the desk and spreads her legs, hissing slightly as the alien penetrates her, spreading her wide. She wraps her arms and legs around the little invader as it begins to thrust.
A short time later, she receives the genetic sample she’d wished for.
“Chief, environmental just toggled its breach override!”
Carlos frowns. The remaining bulkheads would hold until both he and the bridge toggled theirs as well. But environmental...
“I want everyone on bottled air, now!”
They’ve just helped the last green ensign get his mask seated when every vent in the ship begins to belch white fog.
Shouldn’t have touched the toggle, Millie, or you’d have us.
Typing on his console, unwilling to risk speaking and breaking the seal on his mask, he issues orders. The engineers leap into action, and in ten minutes every vent has a metal plate welded over it. One of the seniors has jimmied one of the CO2 scrubbers into a general filter, and in under an hour the air in engineering is breathable. They have plenty of equipment to keep it that way for several days, which is more time than Carlos needs.
Carlos flips on shipwide comm. “Nice try, Millie.”
To his surprise, there is an answer, and it’s almost immediate. ”Thanks! What gave it away, the breach toggle?”
“Yeah. That was a mistake.”
“Not mine. The black stuff isn’t very smart anymore. Still, this gives them the bridge. That just leaves you, Chief.”
“Them?”
“Well, yeah. I got one of them in my head, and it’s doing stuff, which is why I’m helping them, but it’s left me my personality. I still have to help it and all, but I don’t want to. Sort of. It’s strange, you know? My emotions aren’t working right.”
“I wish it had killed you instead of this, Millie.”
“I think I do, too? Maybe? Well, anyway, it’s getting impatient, so I have to help them get you. Sorry about that.”
“Not your fault, kid. Sorry this is how it played out.”
“Thanks, Chief! See you soon!”
The next hours are dreadful, the engineering staff fighting for every bulkhead, Millie eventually claiming them, and another section of the ship falling to the aliens. The Captain tries to contact Carlos after his conversation with Millie, but the old engineer ignores the call. The admiral sits in a corner, out of the way, flanked by the last two functional marines on the ship. The soldiers are wearing simple breather masks instead of their suits, Carlos having explained what Millie had done to their brethren. The old woman looks tired and pale, but she sits straight, an anchor of calm in the chaos.
Finally the chief stands up, and stretches. Walking over to her, he salutes. “Admiral, it’s time.”
“It’s clear?”
“As best we can calculate. Millie will be in here in another twenty minutes, best case. After that, this ship will head back to human space.”
She nods, stands, and walks to the middle of the room, flanked by her guard. Carlos signals the engineering staff, and everyone stops work to come listen to the Admiral.
“I’ve never been one for long speeches, so I’ll just say this. Today we die to protect the human race, and I’ve never been prouder to be a member. It’s been an honor to serve with all of you.”
She salutes, and every unconverted man and woman left on the Widdershins returns it.
Carlos walks over to the main engineering console, and toggles the shipwide comm.
“Millie?”
“Hey, Chief!”
“Can the black stuff scrape enough of itself together to hold a conversation? I’d like to call a truce.”
“Uh, hang on. Going by the one in my head, I think so? Give me a few minutes.”
“Millie? Tell it to pick someone else to be the mouthpiece, not you.”
“Okay!”
One of his staff nods at him. Millie has stopped attacking.
Walking over to one of the marines escorting the Admiral, Carlos says, “Son, I need to borrow your sidearm.”
Slinging his rifle onto his back, the young marine draws his pistol and hands it to the old engineer, butt first. When Carlos takes the gun, the marine salutes and unslings his rifle, ready to use it, despite everything.
“Chief?”
Carlos walks back over to the comm and sits down. He takes a moment to strap himself in tightly to the acceleration-hardened chair before answering. “Yes, Millie?”
“I’m gonna put Toshi on, when he talks, it’s the black stuff, okay?”
“Okay, Millie, thanks.”
Carlos cocks the pistol. There’s a pregnant pause, then the comm crackles to life again.
“I am here.”
“Oh, good. On behalf of the people of Earth, fuck you.”
With one hand, the chief engineer slaps a preprogrammed release. Inside the bowels of the ship the antimatter engine ignites, a leashed form of hellfire. With the other hand, less than a tenth of a second later, he puts a round into the machinery responsible for the leash.
Antihydrogen is a finicky element. For decades, scientists experimenting with the substance dealt with infinitesimally tiny amounts of it, no more than a few tens of atoms at a time. The physical infrastructure required to produce and contain larger amounts was prohibitive, at least when confined deep in the gravity well of a planet of Earth’s mass.
Eventually, humanity began dipping its toes into extraterrestrial waters, leaving the nest and slowly spreading outward, colonizing first the Moon, then Mars, then some of the larger bits of rubble floating around the system. This provided access to vast elemental resources not bound up in Earth’s unforgiving gravity, and the first great artificial habitats began coming into being.
About the same time that Galileo came online around Jupiter, tethered to the planet in a trailing heliocentric orbit, the UNS was constructing another station, concealed in the rubble of the asteroid belt. The official designation for the project was Leonidas. The troops and UNS scientists assigned to duty stations there, denied many of the amenities other facilities like Galileo enjoyed, gave it another name: Spartan.
It had no mining infrastructure. Indeed, it had no civilian enterprises of any sort, and only a tiny fraction of UNS military personnel even knew it existed. Spartan was a skunkworks. The UNS used it to develop new military technologies, a number of which eventually trickled down into general use.
One of the most recent projects to come out of the black site was the practical application of antimatter. Given ready access to zero gravity and a truly exorbitant budget, military scientists began working with larger volumes than previously possible. They even managed to synthesize atoms as heavy as anticarbon, but the bulk of the research focused on antihydrogen, the lightest and simplest element of antimatter.
Antihydrogen is a very simple atom. Like its more familiar cousin, hydrogen, it’s made up of just two particles, in this case a positron and an antiproton, locked in an endless dance. It shares every property of its cousin molecule, including its receptivity to magnetism. Scientists produced large clouds of antihydrogen, suspending them in vacuum between magnetic mirrors, the “bottle”. By carefully manipulating the field, they were able to reliably pluck one atom at a time out of the cloud and bring it into contact with an opposing molecule of hydrogen.
Upon contact, the two atoms annihilated one another, producing a burst of gamma radiation. Eventually, Spartan technicians refined the process to a smooth stream, allowing sustained production of incredible amounts of energy, though not quite as much as how much they used to create the material in the first place. The only hurdle remaining for the technology was the size of the apparatus involved. Energy was no longer an issue, but the magnetic mirrors were enormous. Easily installed in something the size of a space station, but hardly practical for a ship of the line.
Still, the Spartans plodded onwards. If volume was an issue, how do you reduce the volume of a gas?
Parallel to the research into antimatter, a different group had been working wonders with plain old hydrogen. Under enough pressure hydrogen liquefies. Under even more, it can become metallic, with a host of interesting properties, but the team wasn’t interested in trying to artificially reproduce levels of pressure found at the core of a gas giant. They were pleased enough with the ability to reliably produce steady quantities of liquid antihydrogen.
The second research group, however, was interested in such levels of pressure, and had managed to produce a container about a meter in diameter, capable of sustaining the pressures required to keep hydrogen in its metal state. One day, while discussing this over bad food in the cafeteria, one of the antimatter researchers asked to examine the vessel. Upon seeing the sphere, she approached it and touched a small magnet to one side, then released it. It clattered to the floor.
“Can you make it ferrous?”
After months of argument, they determined that they could. The final product was an iron sphere a meter in diameter, laced with complex patterns of reinforcing carbon nanotubes. All told, the tiny inner chamber could contain about five kilograms of metallic hydrogen, the release of which was regulated by a fantastically complicated atomic ‘spigot’.
Taking the design back to her team, they spent the next twelve years developing the techniques to make a mirror image of the device out of antimatter. The heaviest element involved was anti-iron, the ferrous component, but the effort producing masses of that paled in comparison to the manufacturing techniques they had to invent to craft anti-carbon nanotubes.
Eventually, the teams had two devices, elemental mirror images. Magnetically suspended opposed to one another, they each fed their respective payload into a regulator, where the liquids met one another an atom at a time, producing an incredible amount of energy in a package small enough to fit on a starship.
That starship is the UNS Widdershins, where Chief Engineer Carlos Zink has just fired a bullet into the regulator.
If the antimatter drive on the Widdershins hadn’t been a prototype, if there hadn’t been a number of concessions to ease-of-access for the engineers monitoring the complex mechanism on its maiden flight, Carlos’ final, defiant gesture might have been an order of magnitude less spectacular.
The thin cowling the bullet pierces would have never been installed, replaced instead with layers of armor designed to resist breach by ship-to-ship munitions, much less a single .45 caliber slug. The bullet from the marine’s sidearm is itself ferrous, and thus subject to the intense magnetic fields surrounding the engine. As it crosses into the boundary governing the bottle, not even a millisecond after it leaves the barrel, it begins to slew upwards, following the invisible eddies of force surrounding it. By the time it reaches the device proper, it has deviated almost a tenth of a meter from its original trajectory, pulled with almost cosmic inevitability straight into the atom-thin stream of antimatter headed into the regulator.
Hydrogen and antihydrogen will annihilate perfectly, leaving no mass behind, a pure conversion to energy. Antihydrogen and the heavy iron of the bullet do not annihilate perfectly. The bullet is far more massive, atom for atom, so a lot of it remains behind as it meets the first positron and antiproton of the stream, although the bits of it that don’t convert to energy are vaporized before the the bullet finishes crossing the stream. Less than one one-hundred-thousandth of the slug converts to energy, but it does so right in front of the font leading to over three kilograms of antihydrogen, which has just been blown wide open.
That first atoms of antimatter produce enough undirected energy to evaporate all the humans in engineering, and the next few take care of everything else living on the ship, alien and human alike. Another near-instantaneous casualty is the standard fusion reactor powering the magnetic bottle. The two large spheres and their extremely high pressure payloads are severed from the regulator, and immediately become spacecraft in their own right. Their contents begin to escape through the ruptured regulator connections, giving them enough thrust to hurl them in opposite directions, through the rapidly expanding wreckage of the Widdershins. The standard-matter sphere flies off into space, where it might have eventually settled into its own heliocentric orbit, if circumstances had been different.
Circumstances, in this case, being its anti-iron twin, dumping anti-hydrogen in a stream behind it. The stream continues to react with the standard-matter bits of wreckage it encounters, creating miniature novas in a glittering trail behind the sphere. The sphere itself miraculously avoids slower-moving bits of wreckage, passing out of the carnage like an escape pod. This amazing run of luck lasts for the fifteen seconds it takes the hurtling boulder to slam into the surface of Sleepy.
The explosions that preceded this impact, which had utterly destroyed the Widdershins and everyone on it, were far more energetic than any man-made destruction that had come before, a dozen times over. When the light they created reaches Earth, several hours hence, anyone on the night side looking up at the sky with the naked eye might be able to make out the brief flash that heralded the starship’s destruction.
As powerful as they were, they represented one one-hundred-trillionth the amount of energy released by the anti-iron sphere as it annihilates itself against the dense surface of the planetoid. The reaction swallows everything within a significant fraction an AU in every direction, creating a temporary nuclear fireball that schoolchildren on the day side of Earth will have to use pinholes in bits of paper to view safely.
The AI Galileo, responsible for every aspect of the functioning of the massive space station of the same name, is looking in all directions at once. It is always looking in all directions at once, through a thousand telescopes of various design and sensitivity. At the moment, in its stabilized orbit trailing Jupiter, it can see Earth, slightly out of alignment with the sun. In the opposite direction, billions of stars.
That side of its array, shielded from the blinding glare of Sol, is configured to maximal light sensitivity, the better to peer out into the universe and further into the past. Galileo is aware of the data streaming in, providing it for the human science staff to peruse and puzzle over. There is an enormous amount to learn, but that particular view rarely changes, except when one of the other gas giants bumbles past, or perhaps when a particularly interesting comet streams nearby.
So, while Galileo is fairly confident in its complacency as regards the view, it’s forced to admit to itself that it wasn’t particularly expecting the advent of a second sun.