FTL-9...Faster Than Life.

Chapter 9

The rolling thrum of the grav sheer is running through of all of us like the breathing of some great unseen monster breathing down our necks. I’m reading scans on my section as thorough as I can I’m feeling the sweat building under my clothes and running down my spine.

It’s really tense and scary so quiet you can hear the sheer hitting the shields in what I imagine that waves would sound like.

Time gets this strange sort of fugue thing going where the minutes seem far too long and as scared as I am there are other cadets even more scared than me. There has to be something I can do right?

Think woman! Think!
Huh…woman?
I said that to myself without thinking.

“Something funny Stone?” My Nav-commander asks quietly.

“Yessir.”

“Care to share?”

“Nosir.”

“Share anyway.”

“It’s just it seems every time I seem to learn something big about myself I’m way too close to dying.”

“Welcome to the joyful wisdom of military service.”

We shut it for awhile after that and I’m watching scan on my section as best we can in this soup when we shake hard. There’s alarms going off around us and flashing light in my minds VR screens.

[Extreme Caution ship is under fire.]

My scanners are going frelling wonky on me there’s some random interference. There’s something else too the instruments are saying we’re dumping speed? All the gyros are off too.

It’s getting worse with every major shake.

We’re slowing down.

That can’t be good.

Slowing us down means capture right?

“Sir? What ever they’re hitting us with it’s blinding us we need to launch out some probes.”

“You’re right, good thinking Stone. Erikson send out a full set of orbiting drones. Let’s get a look out there.”

There’s a few moments between the order, the launch and the re-link to our sensor suites. We’re all assigned drones to use and the first thing I do is take a look back at ourselves and see what they hit us with.

Grey sparkly goo all over the shields. How the hell do you get something to stick to shields?

I fly one in and get a better look. Full scan and spectral too.

Mercury? Scan magnification shows nano-tech of some kind in there. “Sir? They’re splattering us with this stuff I can’t figure it out.”

He comes over and looks at my screens. “Mass-packets dammit!”

“Mass-packets sir?”

“Mercury is very dense but it’s also the liquid medium for the mass-packet nano. They are designed to taste the mag frequency of our shields and latch onto them by matching the polarity and then they cause chop in our shields.”

“So we drop the shields?”

“No, the same thing their doing to the shields they’ll do to the grav plating in the ship and the drag will make us so heavy that we’ll eventually stop.”

“But we’re getting blinded by the splatter and slowing anyway and aren’t these things painting us for them too?”

“Right again kid.” His eyes flicker in that On-Body-Computer link use. I get and idea and start getting a memory dump from shields on all or splatters. Add then together, judge movement and point of commonality… I send two of my probes there adjusting a bit in from and back and setting scans to full gain on the other two I have and… “Sir I have a firing solution.”

“What?! How? Never mind send it to tactical and hang on1”

“Yessir!” ………..hang on?

[AG field now off line, Inertial dampeners now offline, Shields offline, Engaging in full burst sub light jump, in 3…2…1…]

Full burst sub light.

No gravity, no inertial dampeners…It’s like ancient Earth’s recording of a planet to space Apollo launch…I think our ships aptly named and I do hang on. Again there are those caught unawares or just still in shock to react and people go flying into walls and bulk heads and some are alright.

0.18 light is fast. It’s the core in this case that keeps us from becoming goo but it’s still like being in zero gravity which we are and our ship/ place we’re in jerks forward several hundreds of mph.

Three thousand miles away in one tenth of a second give or take. We shed the mass-dampeners like a canine shaking off mud from its coat.

I blow my two drones I sent out and the thermo-nuclear explosions won’t do any damage but they make a frelling heck of a lightshow. And the enemy ship is a lot denser that the fog. We net a clear image shape and we can see the trails and tracer of our own weapons firing at them.

Three thousand miles is the edge of medium range ship to ship warfare. The speed of beam weapons, and rail guns, and missiles have limited range sub light thrusters.

We see hits and then a sub-light flash of them moving and we’re taking fire too…there’s damage and casualty reports going off everywhere.

I’m seeing a burst of multiple targets at multiple vectors and… “Sir I think they just launched fighters!”

“Pass everything to Tactical and keep you eyes open for weak spots all of you.”

“Yessir!” we all shout.

I see a symbol on one of the fighters with my drones. A red shield with a black sword crossed with a black sickle. I beam it to the commander and he sends it to tactical. “Sir what government is that, they’re not Tekkers?”

“Balkorvan, they aren’t part of the union and are a militant raider culture.”

“Are we at war with them?”

“No, not as a nation this ship is a privateering vessel. It won’t get back to them because each Captain is responsible for his crew and ship.”

“How?”

“They’re guild run; Each Captain is an independent government rank there.”

“That’s pretty crooked.”

“It is but they sell to enough non-union governments that they have enough friends if someone decides to fix their hash then it’ll definitely spark something.”

“Oh…thank you sir.”

“It’s okay Stone this is the Apollo we’re a training ship that means lessons in the middle of combat.” I can hear the smile in his voice. Fixing their hash…I’ll have to look that one up.

It comes to this heavy fighting. We’re bigger nearly four times their size but they’re faster and smaller and armed to the teeth and very well armored compared to us. We have more turrets and are able to cover ourselves better and they have fighters out there, two minutes after that so do we.

This little patch of space becomes very, very busy. We drive them off after a pitched battle; it ended after we stopped taking fire from their missile banks and rail guns. They must have run out of ammo. We have lots of ordinance on board so in the end they tuck tail and run.

There’s a lot of us that are upset and want to give chase to them but we contact our closest interceptor ships and we head out to attend to the adrift Merchant vessel. Well we don’t we’re scanning and navigating and they left mines adrift around the Merchant ship and it was a long shift as we hunted mines and looked for anything out of place.

By the time I was done I had worked a twenty six hour shift. I know that there were replacements but there was also a massive list of other duties from checking our ship going all over the hull and others were busy with repairs and section rescues the wounded and the dead.

Maybe there wasn’t bodies to spare and maybe this aftermath thing was a test too?

The Merchant ship had been heavily damages and we belly to belly locked them down and I guess they had been boarded. A lot of the crew had been killed and others badly hurt…women and children…I heard that these ships take their families with them.

I’ll ask Patrick about it he had been on the boarding parties. Between both ships not counting the enemies over five hundred wounded and seventy three dead.

There are names on the KIA (Killed in Action) holo list that I know.

I’m just too tired and numb to bawl right now this close to the Tekker attack. I do manage to have enough sense to hit the mess hall and request an On-Body-Computer sedative pulse for my system. I know I’ll freak out at some point maybe but I eat…Spaghetti, the real stuff and a slice of cheesecake after that and lulled by my system and a belly full of “Comfort food” I barely get to bed before bunking out.