Cardioid Sector, HR-14 System, Warhawk 785

Task Force Alpha was comprised of nearly two hundred crewmen, including half the Singularity’s Marines, and most of the ship’s pilots. Together, the Marines and pilots made up most of the attack group, but the rest of the team consisted of a few engineers and support personnel. The support personnel included sensor analysts, armory experts, supply managers and a medical team under the guidance of Nurse Sanchez – a nurse who’d been around the fleet long enough to be a doctor in everything but title.

All of Alpha team wore vacuum suits, a necessity given their target. The added size of the suits and their associated air recycling packs crowded teams aboard the Warhawks. The little recon ships could function as shuttles, but they hadn’t been designed as dropships meant to carry large numbers of troops. Given that, it took thirty-two Warhawks to carry Task Force Alpha’s personnel and equipment, and that number was escorted by twenty-four fighter-interceptor Arcbird spacecraft.

Sleek, white and deadly looking, Lieutenant Colonel Pflum could not help but admire the fighter escorting his Warhawk. The two heavy blasters under its wings would be more than enough firepower to pound the pirate base into dust, but it was a small lithe craft that could maneuver faster than almost anything else in the worlds, save perhaps racing ships designed for speed. The cockpit of the Arcbird blended smoothly with its body, barely a slight bulge above the gradual thickening of the craft’s needle-sharp nose to its fuselage. The material of the cockpit was translucent and photoreactive. From an outside perspective, the material had turned reflective in the light of the system’s sun, but the effect was only protective. From inside the cockpit the transparency of the material was clear as crystal, just simply kept pilots from being blinded by the unfiltered sun.

The same photoreactive material made up the front and side windows of the Warhawk, so Plfum could only assume that he looked as much like a hazy shadow as the profile of the pilot sitting in the fighter flying beside them. He could only barely make out the round shape of a helmet beyond the shine of the cockpit, but he knew the woman who sat over there. Captain ‘Fireball’ Adams had volunteered herself to fly escort for the lead craft of Task Force Alpha.

Pflum had a slight concern that she might be trying to prove herself after what happened with Squadron 26, where she’d been caught in the squadron’s strange, simultaneous detonations and had her Arcbird destroyed. Ejecting on a plainly lucky vector, she’d barely been found alive. Pflum supposed that would leave any pilot eager to prove themselves again, but the pressure was surely double for the new leader of the Singularity’s support squadrons. Regardless, Fireball was perhaps the most talented Arcbird pilot they had, so Pflum had not objected to her putting herself front and center for the team’s insertion.

“We’re still looking clear, Fireball,” the pilot of Pflum’s Warhawk, ‘Butterfly’ Anasari said. He was a decently talented pilot as well, a man with bronze skin and jet-black hair that never strayed from its part. He wasn’t much for the talkative flamboyance the other pilots enjoyed, but he kept a little butterfly decoration hanging from the mirror of his Warhawk. It bobbed and shifted under the craft’s slight acceleration, its glittery wings dancing as if it were flying. Pflum wasn’t sure if the little charm or the callsign had come first, but most pilots didn’t offer that information up. They liked to keep some mystique about their names.

“Understood, Butterfly,” their escort replied.

As a larger craft, the Warhawk had a larger sensor array and radar range than Fireball’s Arcbird. If surviving pirates or defenses still lingered, the Warhawk would know first. However, as Pflum checked their surroundings, he sincerely doubted there was anything at all left moving in the asteroid belt after the Singularity’s temper tantrum. And yes, he was inclined to call it such. A large chunk of the asteroid belt been blasted into oblivion. That hadn’t been necessary for the mission, just the result of a beast uncaring of the destruction it wreaked in its surroundings.

The dust left behind in that void was pink, shaded by the HR-14 system’s red, throbbing sun. Under other circumstances, Pflum may have thought the color cute, or at least amusing. Here, though, knowing the corpses of a sizable pirate fleet lingered in that dust, even that light shade of red felt garish. It was a reminder, a stiff one, of how powerful the Singularity truly was. Badly outnumbered against Command’s fleet, perhaps her strength had felt mute, but here… There was no denying it. Crimson Heart’s entire fleet, which far outnumbered the Singularity, had been utterly destroyed within minutes, taking a substantial portion of the asteroid belt with them as mere collateral damage. Not even a direct railgun impact had stayed the Singularity from destruction. That damage, a long surgical cut, stretched halfway down the ship’s length, and it hadn’t even slowed her down. Even after a few missiles had impacted that cut, carving deeper damage into the ship, she’d gone onward, the mission not even delayed.

With that kind of power, that kind of endurance, it was no surprise that the Singularity had once been one of the most powerful machines in the worlds. With a kill count to match, she had been feared accordingly. The central worlds had never been the Bloody Singularity’s target, and they, enthralled by newer designs with sleeker hulls and fancier armaments, had disregarded the ship’s strength. The Singularity’s angled armor, physical redundancies and dumb munitions had felt antiquated to them – tools of a bygone era.

Admiral Gives had been content to let the wealthier worlds with their politicians, reporters and governmental meddling forget all about the Singularity, but the fact of the matter was that she was still a flagship-caliber ship. Perhaps, the Admiral had planned it that way. Perhaps he had always intended to steal the Singularity away once the worlds ceased to give her any attention. But no, that was nonsense. If he had wanted to take the Singularity and disappear, he’d had a dozen opportunities to over the years. For some reason or another, Admiral Gives had stayed in service to a government that disliked him, and a populace that feared him.

Pflum could never make much sense of that, but the Admiral had always been something of a mystery. It would not have been Pflum’s prediction to be here, raiding a pirate clan for food to give to a refugee fleet, after separating from Command. Pflum would have predicted a lot of things from the Steel Prince – a thirst for revenge, an attempt to usurp Reeter, perhaps even an intention to lay low and let the worlds tear each other apart. But, Pflum had not expected a quest of mercy. Then again, he had never found Admiral Gives to be the monster the worlds painted. The man had his moments, certainly, flashes of ruthlessness, but Pflum rarely found them undeserving.

It was odd to Pflum that everything could feel so normal. They had made a decision to split from Command, every member of the crew uncertain where that would lead them, but right now, it found them in a strange normalcy. This mission to raid the pirates, it could have been a mission assigned to them from Command. This was exactly the kind of work the fleet, and the Singularity by extension handled in this day and age. This wasn’t the first hostile base the crew had been sent to secure. The robbing part of it was new, but who didn’t like a challenge?

Passing over the base as they searched for their insertion point – the hangar – Crimson Heart’s base looked rather plain. It wasn’t decorated like many of the pirate ships had been, with spikes and weapons welded into place, painted with the age-old skull and crossbones insignia. The base was modular, comprised of small stolen units that had been installed on the asteroid, partially buried.

Pflum himself had seen a dozen mining outposts that looked just like this. Those cubical modules were mass manufactured, not to mention quick and easy to install. In the realm of space structures, they linked together like a children’s toy kit. Each unit could be dropped into place and hooked up to the others, and the base effectively endlessly added onto. Pflum had seen utterly massive constructs made by those modules, sprawled across asteroids like lichen moss. Compared to those, the largest of which had been effectively functioning colonies, Crimson Heart’s base was small.

The blockish structure of the base was half-buried in the asteroid, and anchored by cables driven into the rock. However, none of the pre-fabricated units was big enough to make a hangar. That would have been carved out of the asteroid’s mass itself. So even with few modules, there was still a potential the pirate base was bigger than it looked.

Passing over the base, Pflum’s Warhawk was quiet. The Lieutenant Colonel himself sat in front of the colorful lights and buttons of the copilot’s controls. Pflum preferred to sit there, as it gave him a better view of their surroundings than riding in the back would have.

Pflum was a qualified copilot, as were many officers and Marines, but he was under no illusion that he could handle the yoke and thrust controls of their small craft. Copilot’s training handled radio, sensor, navigations, weapons and decoy controls – things that the pilot would need help with during combat maneuvers. Copilots were trained fundamentally in the flight controls, to a point where they knew what each did, and could theoretically move the craft if the pilot was incapacitated. In open space, that theory was sound. But, landing, docking or any sort of precision flying was well outside a copilot’s ability range.

Pflum tried not to think about having to take over the flight controls as they sailed around to the back of the asteroid. The sound of his breathing, which he’d kept so steady until now, picked up involuntarily in tempo as he watched the natural curve of the beige rock abruptly flatten. “There it is.”

The pilot beside him nodded. “This is Butterfly. Target sighted. Converge on my position.” Task Force Alpha’s other ships had been following in a loose trail, scanning and searching different parts of the asteroid.

Firing the thrusters on the Warhawk’s nose, Anasari brought their slow glide to a halt in front of the asteroid’s flat edge. The cleavage of the rock, shallow and straight spoke to a manmade surface, as if the six metal ports drilled into the sheer face didn’t make it obviously artificial.

Checking the return of the Warhawk’s sensor scans, Butterfly announced, “No traces of active power sources. Looks like it’s sealed tight.”

“Point defenses?” Pflum asked. Outlaws often trapped their hangar doors with mines or electrically charged surfaces to prevent others from stealing their ships and larger equipment.

“No indicators,” Anasari confirmed.

Pflum turned around to look past the headrest of his seat. “You’re up.”

Riding in the back of the Warhawk, on the seats that lined the edges of the small craft’s volume, were three of the Singularity’s most capable Marines: Everett Johnston, Dolce Valentina and Frenchie, who never introduced himself by any other name. Each of them had formidable skills, and together they formed a sort of special forces unit, one that was plenty familiar with zero-G and low-grav combat.

“Aye,” Johnston acknowledged and worked quickly to unstrap himself. Beside him, Valentina slipped out of her acceleration harness with the lithe ease of a cat. She stretched her hands, then went to work without a word, popping open the hatch of the Warhawk.

Everyone in Pflum’s transport and the rest of Task Force Alpha had been suited up since loading aboard the Singularity. As such, the Warhawk’s life support and environmental controls had never been activated to heat and pressurize the cabin. That left the hatch to open with little fanfare.

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A part of Pflum expected a cold breeze, like opening the door of a heated home in winter, but there was nothing.

Stepping out onto the Warhawk’s black stubby wing, Valentina looked up, then down the height of the sheer rock face. The flat portion of the asteroid stretched upward and downward many times her height in both directions.

Most of the asteroids remaining in this old solar system were large. Crimson Heart had accordingly built their base on an egg-shaped asteroid well over a mile in length along its long axis. The flat face of the asteroid had been created by lopping off the narrow end of the egg shape. A false shell had been created to preserve a somewhat natural profile for the asteroid. With that in place, the asteroid looked perfectly natural unless one managed the exact angle needed to peer down past the shell to the flat face. It was a gambit of stealth against practicality, one that had kept Pflum’s team from locating their target until they rounded the back side of the asteroid. However, the practical needs of the pirate base had trumped over the desire for stealth, evidenced by the circular irises of the six hangar doors built into the flat cliff. The nearest door eclipsed the Warhawk easily, but it had been built to allow passage for larger ships: the pirates’ modified freighters.

The freightliners that jogged between humanity’s known known worlds with holds full of goods were small in the realm of spacecraft. They were dwarfed by battleships like the Singularity, and by the colony ships that had flown in centuries past, but freightliners were by no means tiny. Most freighters were the size of multi-story apartment buildings, and the aperture doors to Crimson Heart’s hangar had to accommodate that.

“A little closer,” Valentina said, flicking on a handheld electric torch to study the door in greater detail. The light partially reflected back off the brushed silver finish of the metal.

Gently, Butterfly tapped the thrusters, and a puff of propellant edged them toward the hangar doors. “Found it,” Valentina said, focusing the beam of her torch onto the controller she had spotted on the edge of the aperture ring. The controller was a box, colored to match the rock and covered with a panel of false stone texturing that didn’t quite match its surroundings. Perhaps it never had, or perhaps the sun had faded it differently than the surrounding stone. Either way, the cover couldn’t conceal the shielded wires reaching from the controller to the massive door. They reached out to the door’s outer ring like the legs of an octopus, bulbous and round, never quite laying straight.

Pulling a handheld range finder from her belt, Valentina aimed it at the controller and waited for the Warhawk to drift close enough. When the reading was right, she called out, “Stabilizers.”

Instantly, having waited for her signal, Anasari reached above his seat and flipped on the stabilizers. The system reacted through the thrusters and a series of magneto torquers to halt the Warhawk’s movement and hold its orientation in place, regardless of what further forces acted on it.

Only then did Frenchie stir from his seat. Johnston shifted his mass out of the way just enough for Frenchie to open up the under-seat storage in the back of the craft and pull out a long, black, tubular launcher. With an undeniably eager grin, Frenchie ducked beneath Johnston and strode out on to the Warhawk’s wing, magboots grabbing and releasing the craft’s metal skin with every step.

The launcher had a sight on it, calibrated to assist aiming under gravity, but Frenchie simply slid it out of the way and hefted the launcher up to his shoulder. Valentina stood nearly a foot taller than him, but made no attempt to take the launcher from Frenchie’s small frame. He was, after all, the explosives expert – a former member of a dedicated Marine bomb squad.

Valentina simply raised her arm instead, pointing up to the controller. Following her direction, Frenchie took aim, sighting the shot and nodded his approval. With that, Valentina reached around, or rather over, given Frenchie’s diminutive height, and grabbed the mag-anchor on the side of the launcher. She unwound its tether, twisted it to activate its electromagnets, and flung it down onto the surface of the Warhawk’s wing. She gave it an experimental tug before declaring, “Secure.”

Frenchie laughed, a joyful laugh picked up by the mic of his helmet’s radio. Then he pulled the trigger. With all the speed of the pyrotechnic charge that propelled it from the tube, a second disk-shaped mag-anchor flew across the void, unspooling a length of cable behind it. The anchor impacted on the ring of the hangar aperture and activated, sealing itself against the metal. With the lack of air resistance in space, a toss would have sufficed to cross the distance, but the launcher was far easier to precisely aim.

“Nice shot,” Johnston said appreciatively.

“No problem, big man,” Frenchie told him, patting the launcher affectionately, “this baby makes it easy.” He disconnected the launcher from the cable, leaving the line attached between the Warhawk’s wing and the hangar door. He then ducked back inside the Warhawk’s cabin to make room on the wing for Johnston.

Johnston had been born on a heavy-grav world where genetic engineering was fully legalized and widely implemented for things beyond appearance corrections. Selective genes and high gravity nearly three times that of the Ariean standard applied on ships had been turned Johnston into a mountain of a man. It was common for heavy-grav worlders to have stout, short frames that allowed their hearts to more easily circulate blood, and for their spines to survive the crushing force, but genetic engineering allowed exceptions. Johnston stood nearly seven feet tall, and took up the space of two men. He spoke with a drawl that the central planets likened to unintelligence, but he was sharper than most Marines, and many of the crew regarded him as the rightful second-in-command of the ship’s Marine contingent, even if technically, that title belonged to Sergeant Cortana.

Heavy-grav worlders had not been common in the fleet, and no more than a handful could have been anywhere near Johnston’s size or strength. Genetic engineering to his degree carried risks, and usually had to be implemented over generations, each including more modifications than the last. However, such gene manipulations were not always successful, and many colonies had died out before successfully adapting to their new world. Johnston’s home, Marsed, had been among the exceptions, an old colony group that had successfully adapted to a planet exceptionally rich in rare and valuable metals.

However, Marsed remained isolationist and distant, scorned for continuing the use of genetic engineering on the human genome while refusing to export the technology that had allowed their success, even as other colonies facing similar challenges died out. Marsedai people like Johnston were feared on a more personal level for their effectively inhuman strength, and were widely distrusted in the central worlds, and the fleet, for their devastating role in the Frontier Rebellion. Judgement against the Marsedai had landed Johnston’s initial assignment to the Singularity – Admiral Gives the only commander willing to give him a post.

Johnston had proven himself, and he had eventually taken on another assignment, perhaps hoping to climb the ranks of the Marines in ways that weren’t possible aboard the Singularity. He had met Valentina and Frenchie there, but he had returned to the Singularity with his new team and Ensign Owens in tow, when the moon housing his new post had been blown apart. Ever since, Johnston had elected to stay aboard ship, and headed up many of the Singularity’s most difficult away missions – this raid no exception.

Johnston stooped to unstrap the device that had been tied down on one of the empty seats in the rear of the Warhawk. He lifted it with the ease of someone picking up a pillow, though the device weighed over a hundred pounds. In zero-G, anyone could have lifted something so heavy by nudging it upward, but moving it quickly and maintaining precise control over its direction still took a great deal of strength – strength that Johnston had in plenty.

A steady hand of the device’s side, Johnston pushed it out onto the wing, then planted his mag-boots and pulled it to a stop beside the anchored cable. Valentina had pinned the line to make it taut without stressing the mag-anchors holding its ends in place. She then grabbed the tether of her suit off her waist and clipped it onto the line before reaching over to do the same for Johnston.

The tether and cables were safeties meant to keep the team from drifting free and guide them to the controller. They could have easily jumped from the Warhawk to the door, but jumping without a tether did not guarantee a safe landing, or more problematically, a safe return. Compared to the hangar aperture, the Warhawk was a small target.

Valentina jumped first. Deactivating her mag-boots, she kicked off. Her aim wasn’t perfect, but the tether, sliding along the anchored cable, pulled her back on course. Nearing the target, she reached up and grabbed the cable, using the friction of her glove to slow as she aligned her feet to the aperture door.

She landed gently, bending her knees to take the force, and looked around without moving, searching one last time for any point defenses left by the pirates. She found none, so stood and signaled for Johnston to follow. He took a moment to clip a tether to the device in his hands and set his grip, then leapt.

Near the end of his jump, Johnston slowed himself and the device to a near-stop, then kicked on his mag-boots and let them finish the job, pulling him to the door’s brushed metal surface with the magnetic attraction force. That made for a gentle landing, his cargo securely still in his grasp.

Separating himself and the device from the cable, he tugged it over to the controller. Valentina had already moved on to it, prying off the camouflaged cover and shielding to reveal the electronics of the hangar door controller. She was hands-deep in the wiring, her nimble fingers bypassing the security circuit cards and freeing the required power lines.

No one really knew Valentina’s background – likely excepting the Admiral or she wouldn’t have been allowed on board, but she had a proficiency in breaking in, regardless of if it was into a vault, safe, secured door or social gathering. Theory was that she’d been a member of the Infiltrator Corps, the spies that served Command by gathering information through less than proper means, but it was also possible she’d been a petty thief, con artist or bounty hunter paying off criminal time in the fleet. Regardless, most security systems couldn’t even slow her down. The identify friend or foe sensors of the hangar door controller were no exception. She had them removed in minutes, along with the remote activation receiving array and power cables.

She threw that security equipment into a bag, and replaced it with their own. “Ready.”

Johnston put down the device he’d been holding and activated its magnetic anchors. It stuck securely to the ring of the aperture on its own – a battery-operated power supply.

Valentina had to contort herself around to grab the leads of the power supply. She could not step around as her mag-boots would have no grip on the natural rock compound of the asteroid. The stone was nonmagnetic. As all masses did, the asteroid had a gravitational field, but it was no greater than the Singularity’s natural field, which was to say that it was effectively non-existent. One could easily push off and escape the gravity well without realizing they had ever been in one.

With the leads, Valentina quickly connected the power supply. With the pirate base’s power down, the only to open the entrance, or rather one of the six entrances to the hangar, was to power it from the outside. With their own power supply, and the controller rewired, Task Force Alpha could now control entry to the hangar, opening or closing the door with their own remote sigal.

“Done,” Valentina declared.

Johnston hit the switch on the power supply and it hummed to life, pumping a voltage differential to the dead circuits. He then checked the display. “Good fuh five hours, suh,” he relayed to Pflum back in the Warhawk. If they needed to open or close the door after those five hours, the power supply would be dead and they’d have to retrieve and wire in a replacement.

However, if everything went even mostly according to plan, the door would only need to be opened once. And well, five hours should be far more than Task Force Alpha needed.

Leaving the power supply anchored on the aperture ring, Valentina danced past the mess of cables she’d made, clipped her tether onto the line and leapt toward the Warhawk.

Johnston waited for her to land, then picked up the anchor that attached the line to the door. With a tug, he pulled himself toward the end still attached to the ship. He landed on the stubby wing with considerable grace for a man of his size, well-practiced at moving without gravity. He spooled up the mag-anchors’ cable, then deactivated and picked up the remaining anchor on the wing. He brought it with him as he returned to the Warhawk’s hatch and closed it behind him. Stooping in the cabin’s small space, he dropped the double-sided anchor into storage below his seat, and began to strap himself back into his acceleration harness.

Pflum waited until he was secure and then looked to Butterfly. “Get us clear.” There was no way to know what was waiting on the other side of the door.

The pilot needed no further prompting. Reaching up, he disabled the stabilizers and shifted the ship to the side of the aperture. The rest of the task force waited there too, out of the line of sight for anything that exit the door.

Once they were clear, Butterfly hit a button on the panel between his and the copilot’s seat. It transmitted the open signal to the controller they’d just modified, and slowly but surely, the aperture began to yawn open. First it was just a crack, then it was a rectangle of darkness across the center of the circular entrance.

It took a full minute for the jaws of the door to open completely, and the team waited tensely, but nothing emerged.

“Fireball,” Pflum prompted.

“Aye,” Captain Adams acknowledged, deftly rolling her fighter into view of the opening.

Nothing took that bait either, so Fireball slowed her evasive jig and looked down into the open door. Only darkness waited beyond, the stone walls swallowed by shadows beyond the reach of the system’s pulsing red sun.

Fireball lined up her craft with the center of the opening. “My turn,” she announced with all the confidence she could muster, then fired the thrusters and dove into the tunnel.