Earth Song: Twilight Serenade Read online

  Lilith reached out with both hands held flat, palms against each other. Tiny tendrils of blue crystal raced along the back of her arms and down to her hands, and an instant later Minu felt a familiar shiver run up her spine. A gravitic field! Lilith slowly turned her hands until they were palm out, then pushed them forward. Minu looked and the hull shuddered. Lilith’s fists clenched and she moved her hands apart.

  Moliplas and dualloy crunched, shards of metal flew like projectiles and everyone got out of the way. Several pieces bounced off Minu’s armored suit and she saw many sparkles as they were deflected from Lilith’s forcefield. The bot on her back was obviously providing feedback because Minu could see the lines of stress on her daughters face as she exerted force. After a few moments of straining, the hull opening was more than a meter.

  “That’s enough dear,” Minu said, “the Beezer crew can use their jacks now.” Lilith relented and lowered her hands. The crew looked from the hole to the tiny human woman and back, obviously in complete awe at the spectacle. Minu gestured at the hole and they shook themselves from the spectacle and set to work. “That was impressive,” Minu said.

  “It takes a lot of power, but I can manage it a couple times on one charge.”

  “What else can you do with that?”

  “In this configuration? Fly around at a few hundred meters per second. Cut a few centimeter thick plates of dualloy. Maybe move a couple hundred tons of mass.”

  “Wow! In that configuration? Are there others more powerful?”

  “Yes. The People used the bot assistants as a form of combat suites. In that mode you are almost a tiny warship. Though survivability of the user was a factor because of the amounts of radiation that kind of energy use creates. Still, they were rather like your people’s gods when they used the bots like that.”

  Gods of destruction, Minu thought. The Beezer succeeded in spreading the corridor the rest of the way open and the first of them were already climbing inside.

  In the few short days of working in space they’d become incredibly adept at operating in zero gravity. Not as much as Lilith, but still impressive. They preferred to scramble along the wrecks and inside the salvaged Ibeen using handholds than to utilize the complex maneuvering packs. Minu didn’t have any such preference. With tiny plasma jets sputtering, she followed her daughter in through the hole.

  Once inside the sense of deja vu was overpowering. The halls lacked the recessed subtle lighting of the living Kaatan a few hundred meters away, and some other elements she couldn’t quite put a finger on. Take that away and she was back aboard her daughter’s ship. A few meters in she even knew where they were. Just ahead the Beezer crew were standing outside a compartment waiting. They’d found the first body.

  As Minu had suspected, it was the Kaatan’s medical bay. This ship’s med bay was configured much larger than their Kaatan’s, with more than two dozen treatment beds. While the beds were all empty, a solitary body floated near the center of the bay. Minu moved through them to drift closer. The body slowly was spinning on all three axis and probably had been the untold centuries.

  Like the first time they’d seen one of the beings Lilith called The People, this one was almost identical. A vaguely monkey resemblance with elongated ears and a very human looking face and big expressive eyes. Perhaps the jaws were stretched slightly giving it rather foxy look. The only major difference was their body covering of light downy fur, and a meter long tail. The seating on the Kaatan had given them fits for quite some time until Lilith came along and was able to reconfigure it. They were like humans in the galaxy, one of the rare hominids to evolve.

  This being, which had died thousands of years before humans first learned to make fire, was remarkably well preserved. It wore a simple jumpsuit without arms, a utility belt that held some tools and an all too familiar blue crystalline tablet. The eyes were closed and it looked almost to be asleep. Minu looked around to see the others all around her, Lilith included.

  “We knew we’d find corpses,” Minu reminded them. The Beezer seemed more curious than anything. Lilith, though, looked… apprehensive. “You okay, dear?”

  “They’re as much my people as you are,” she said. “I guess I was not as prepared to see this as I thought I was.”

  “Do you want to go back?”

  Lilith considered for a second, turned her elfin head to examine the bay. She took a deep breath and let it out. “I am too valuable to this effort,” she said finally, “I will persist.”

  “Good girl.”

  “They do look human,” one of the Beezer said as it reached out to stop the body from spinning. To everyone’s surprise, the touch made it begin to crumble. Everyone moved back as the reaction spread and in seconds the entire body fractured into a cloud of dust.

  “How long to do that?” Minu wondered.

  “A million years or more,” Lilith said, and moved away without another look.

  Away from the slowly dissipating cloud of alien remains to one of the inactive computer control nodes. She held out her hand and a dozen miniature blue crystal bots launched out to land on the node. They moved onto and several disappeared into the structure. Suddenly the computer came to life. Lilith accessed the controls with quick, deft motions and a moment later panels in the walls began to pop open. Inside were various containers that Lilith began to remove and float towards the Beezer.

  “These are supplies for the medical system,” she told them. Please transport them back to the Kaatan where the bots will take them.”

  “We shall,” the Beezer said as one began storing them in a flexible fabric bag attached to his suit. Lilith had already recovered the miniature bots and was swimming out into the hallway. Minu followed and the others did once the goods were secured.

  Lilith led them down a corridor and then transited to a lower deck via an inter-deck tube. Around the corner of another corridor and Lilith was again using the bots to access a control panel. More hatches opened but this time they revealed only more controls. Displays came alive listing materials in script. Having worked with the Kaatan’s tactical controls, Minu recognized the icons.

  “Shipkillers,” she said.

  “Yes,” Lilith nodded, “though not as many as I’d hoped for. They’d obviously been in an extensive battle.”

  Minu looked at the display. Eleven missiles were inventoried. Lilith activated controls and new icons appeared. “The exterior stores access for this launcher is open,” she told the Beezers and instructed them how to remove the weapons.

  “Are they dangerous?” the huge Beezer asked.

  “No, they have to be primed with plasma from the ships systems. There is a small detonation charge, but it is impossible for it to go off without any plasma in containment.” As she talked she was tapping commands into the controls, trying to coax information from the long dead system. Seeing her mother watching she explained. “Involved in a task force like this, there are possibilities that the Kaatan was armed with more than shipkillers.”

  “Was it?”

  “I can’t tell. This weapons hardpoint is not communicating with the other that is contained in this hull section. We’ll have to check manually.”

  They moved down the corridor and found a huge gash penetrating from the outside hull through deep into the ship section. “Probably why the systems couldn’t communicate,” Minu suggested. Lilith nodded and flew across to the other side of the gouge, the Beezer right behind her. Minu glanced out the hole in the hull to see stars twinkling. She swallowed and pushed across.

  Lilith found the other access and checked. This hardpoint proved to not be empty. A bit later Minu watched as the Beezer team removed the missiles one at a time. She’d seen the damage those death dealers dealt out and was shocked to see them each only slightly longer than a meter and no thicker than her leg. “So much power in a small package,” she remarked to no one in particular.

  Another pair of Beezers took the medbay consumables and the missiles back across the void to the
functioning Kaatan while Minu, her daughter, and the original salvage team floating a half a kilometer to the next large ship hulk. Their ship followed a short time later, remotely piloted by Lilith once the transfer team had their cargo aboard.

  This fragment was a big after section of a ball. Minu had no idea if it came from the same ship they’d been in before. There was likely no way of telling. The shuttle bays were both intact and using her little bots, they made their entrance there. An even half dozen bodies floated there.

  They couldn’t move around them so the Beezers went through them. Like before, the incredible age of the corpses and time they’d been exposed to vacuum made them disintegrate on being touched. Two of them became a dissipating cloud in their suit lights as they moved through.

  Affixed to the rear of the hanger was a pair of shuttles identical to the ones on Lilith’s ship. “Excellent,” Minu’s daughter said and clapped her hands together. It was the first time Minu had seen her excited since they’d come over to these floating tombs. She opened the connecting lock between the bays and found the other also head two shuttles.

  “Good find,” Minu observed.

  “Absolutely,” the other woman agreed. “The Kaatan shuttles are basically lighter versions of the Eseel gunboats and can serve the same purpose in a pinch. All but one of the aggregate wrecks has shuttle bays so we could stand to harvest forty shuttles!” Minu smiled, that was good news.

  The remainder of that ship held nothing more of value so they moved to another section. That one held a medical bay not as large as the first but with full consumables lockers that were salvaged. It did, though, have a full launcher complement of twenty shipkillers that were moved back to the Kaatan.

  They’d been in space for seven hours already. Lilith wanted to keep going indefinitely, but Minu said only one more section. It ended up being a good call.

  The final salvage of the day was almost an entire ball. The rear of the needle was crushed as if from and impact, and the front melted like a candle tip. The ball was burned in a dozen places, the hull melted through providing no entry points, including both shuttle bays. Inside they were a scorched ruin providing no salvage. Eventually, Lilith settled on having to do even more damage to gain entry.

  “Can’t you access the weapons bays from the outside?” Minu asked her.

  “Unfortunately, no.” Lilith explained that the hulls were designed to be nearly seamless. Access panels would ruin their integrity. It was why there were only five ways in. The two shuttle bays, two airlocks (one on each side amidships), and the ventral cargo bay access. “What I will do is use an A-paws on low power to cut through into the cargo bay. The hull is already damaged there, it will not take much.”

  “Won’t the discharge just cause more melted blockage?”

  “It is possible,” she said with a shrug. “But it is that or abandon this one. And it is the most intact section.”

  The anti-missile lasers would provide insufficient power to penetrate the hull which was also mirrored in most places and would dangerously deflect the beams. After discussing the pros and cons, Minu reluctantly agreed.

  The team took shelter behind a twenty meter wide section of mangled hull plating as Lilith closed her eyes and the Kaatan came alive. It rolled and yawed to bring its nose to bear. Minu had never seen the weapons fire and realized she had no idea even where they were. The A-paws, or anti-particle accelerator cannon, was located just above the needle in the ball. A nearly blinding flash of light connected the two ships and began to pulse almost faster than the eye could detect. After only a few seconds, she shooting stopped.

  “Let us go inspect the damage,” Lilith said and flew around from behind their shield.

  They were forced to fly directly behind her. The only one with a forcefield, she used it to push away a cloud of glowing fragments the gunfire had thrown into space. Luckily the heat was radiating away quickly. Minu could still feel her suit’s cooling system engage and chucks of molten dualloy the size of her head floated by a few meters away casting heat like little suns.

  They reached the hulk and stared in awe at the damage. The A-paws had been turned down to ‘almost the minimum’ as Lilith told them. And still the hull looked like a watermelon after being ravaged by huge claws. Red tears glowed with thermal radiation in a dozen places and two massive sections of hull floated free.

  “Fuck me,” Minu hissed, remembering how they’d unleashed those weapons at ground targets on the Rasa home world. A finger of destructive vengeance from orbit.

  Lilith used her bot’s forcefields to shove the multi-ton section of armored hull to either side revealing the interior of the cargo bay. Some of the weapons fire had penetrated beyond, scoring huge glowing gouges into the unarmored interior bulkheads. But the access hatches were intact.

  “Well done,” the Beezer team leader huffed and Minu nodded in agreement. They waited for a time until the glow from the energy beam-sliced hull was less intense. As before, the Beezer lead the way inside.

  Lilith got them through the interior door and into the corridor outside of the cargo bay. She’d been precise enough with her weapons fire that the damage didn’t penetrate much beyond the interior wall of the cargo bay. “That was some precise shooting, dear.”

  “Thank you, mother.” Lilith used her bots to access the first operations panel she encountered. Unlike the previous ones on the other wrecks, this one came to life without additional coaxing. “Some power remains,” she told them.

  “Is the ship salvageable?” Minu asked.

  “It is unlikely, or The People would have done so.” She withdrew her bots and looked down the corridor. “It would be easier to evaluate the ship’s condition from the CIC.”

  “Then let’s go there.”

  They moved on a familiar route towards the very heart of the ship. Unlike the others, no bodies were found and evidence of damage was rare. “This ship was brought in mostly intact,” Lilith observed. “The damage was controlled to some degree.”

  “What would take this powerful ship out of action?” asked one of the Beezers.”

  “The end of the needle section and the point contain the gravitic drive components.” Minu nodded in understanding. With the drive destroyed, the ship was unable to maneuver. Lilith had explained long ago that a big part of the Kaatan’s combat prowess was its ability to strike and move. “They likely used the Ibeen to tow the wreck here for salvage.”

  “And then the star went nova,” Minu said. “What’s the chance of that?” Minu thought as the floated down the corridors, dropping deck after deck, remembering the battle on Planet K where they’d broken the Mok-Tok siege and the subsequent space battle that had ended so suddenly with the system’s primary star going supernova.

  The group reached the entrance to the CIC, the unlit white circular passageways just as hauntingly familiar as the rest of the ship. Unlike the rest of the ship’s interior doors, the door to the CIC was closed. Lilith held her hand out and a pair of little bots leapt to the wall and disappeared into cracks. A moment later light flickered on in the recesses around the door and it split to slide away into the walls, floor, and ceiling thus revealing the dark interior.

  Lilith pushed through, catching the pair of bots as she passed the threshold, the others followed. Their helmet lights and the little blue beams from Lilith’s bots moved around the circular space, as completely void of anything as they’d first found the Kaatan.

  Instead of sending a few bots over like before, this time Lilith checked her momentum in the middle of the CIC, sent herself into a graceful pirouette, and let a spray of them go along the arc of her arm’s travel.

  Minu used her maneuvering unit to come to a stop, trying to avoid the stream of tiny bots, but a pair landed on her, one on her arm and another on her helmet. She had an incredible close up look of them. They looked like spiders. She resisted the urge to brush it off as the machine took a second to examine where it had landed, realize it wasn’t where it was supposed to be
, and leap towards the wall.

  One of the Beezer had one land on him as well. More curious than Minu, he grabbed it between a couple fingers and moved it up to his helmet to examine. There was a little flash and he released it with a grunt.

  “Please don’t interfere with the bots,” Lilith admonished them. The Beezer tech shook his hand and grumbled an apology.

  Like before, the bots disappeared into the walls and a moment later the room’s lights began to flicker to life. But instead of the recessed control and access panels, this time a single holographic panel popped into being with a single line of script. Lilith looked shocked.

  “What’s wrong?” Minu asked.

  “The combat intelligence is still resident!”

  Chapter 8

  January 26th, 535 AE

  Ghost fleet, Deep Space, Galactic Frontier

  They met in the CIC of the hulk Kaatan after returning to their ship and resting. When they returned Lilith brought along one of the large EPC arrays meant to power the salvaged ships.

  “What is your intention?” Minu asked as they met up in the cargo bay, the humans and Beezer suiting up when Lilith floated in, EPC in tow. Lacking any of the massive specially made EPCs that ran large starships, Chosen engineers had created a package the same size which held an array of smaller class capacitors. The result, while less than half the nominal amount of power held in a ship’s EPC, was still sufficient for the situation.

  “The intelligence that operates the Kaatan is too extensive to easily relocate. Lacking proper power, it has entered a safe mode to protect its data. We will have to repower the entire ship to access it.”

  “Is there any risk?”

  “To the intelligence? Yes, some. But it is not going to recover itself without outside assistance.”

  “No, I meant danger to us.”

  Lilith looked down at the EPC and seemed to be considering her answer. “Perhaps.”

  Minu held up a hand. “Then we need to be clear on these risks, especially considering we have Beezer on this operation. Do we need Kal’at back from Ibeen Alpha to assist?”