Cardioid Sector, HR-14 System, Arcbird R-864
The light of the HR-14 System’s red giant star vanished almost entirely the instant Adams entered the aperture. There was a ghastly crimson glow coloring the smooth texture of the stone tunnel for a moment, but not even the long wavelengths of red light could penetrate the depths of the bore to any meaningful degree, so a perfect inky blackness soon swallowed her whole.
Adams had flown sorties in interstellar space. There was a darkness between the stars, undisturbed and vast. But still, there were stars. They were distant pinpricks that gave no meaningful illumination, stars that were perhaps long-dead by the time she saw their glow, but still, stars.
The darkness of the hangar passage was something else. Perfect, oppressive, it felt almost fluid, filling the tunnel as her fighter pushed through. There was no end to it, and now, having lost sight of the entrance, there was no start. Black encased her, surrounded her, and weighed down upon her. In this flawless lack of visual stimuli, she suddenly felt overwhelmed, claustrophobic.
A feverish chill swept across her skin, as she was already sweating beneath the rubbery material of her flight suit. She could hear nothing in this suit beyond the thrum of her own heart and the uneven rasp of her breathing. She could feel nothing beyond the slick texture of her suit gloves and the shape of the control stick in her grip. She could see nothing beyond the dim glows of her fighter’s dashboard lights, colorful but just as steady as the darkness beyond. She suddenly resented the unscented and tasteless air recycled by her suit for depriving her of her remaining senses.
Adams steadied herself by taking deep breaths and focused on the readouts of her proximity sensors. They would warn her before she impacted anything, though they were hardly needed since the tunnel was long and straight. Its surfaces were smooth, likely drilled out by laser. The superheating effect of the focused laser beams had sublimated the rock and melted the nearby parts that had not been directly targeted for removal.
Taken by an instant of weakness, of simply needing to see something other than nothing, Adams steered toward the wall, close as she dared. The proximity sensors cried out a warning, a miserable wailing sound, but Adams ignored them and steadied her craft with the starboard wingtip only two feet from the edge of the tunnel.
Still, she could see nothing, the darkness too thick, until she reached up an turned on her helmet lights. A short strip of small bulbs, her helmet lights weren’t particularly bright. They were not meant to blind anyone she looked at, just generally help illuminate her surroundings. Handheld torches, movable lanterns and spotlights were used for work that required good light.
In the absolute darkness of the tunnel, however, even the ill-focused light from the bulbs on her helmet stood out like a coastal searchlight cleaving across a churning sea. They were bright, bright enough to make Adams wary of being seen, but she was moving slowly, and still some distance from the end of the tunnel. Thus, she risked a look to the stone around her.
Immediately, she almost wished she hadn’t. The melted-then-hardened history of the rock gave it an almost glossy sheen, as if still wet. It had a subtle, almost rippling texture as she sailed past, like the throat of a giant animal salivating for its prey.
No, Adams chastised herself, don’t think of it that way. This asteroid wasn’t going to swallow her whole and digest her alive. Even if the rock’s texture looked organic, it was still a lifeless gray. The last creature that had nearly eaten her alive had been much more colorful, and she had seen the inside of its throat.
Her helmet radio crackled, bringing the accented voice of Lieutenant Colonel Pflum to her ears. “Fireball, you still with us?”
“10-4,” Adams confirmed. “No sign of resistance so far.” At last, she passed over a metal ring implanted in the natural rock of the tunnel. It wouldn’t have been the first, nor the last, but seeing it shattered the organic illusion of the hangar passage.
Inserted smoothly in the stone, each metal ring contained a set of doors – an aperture like the one they’d powered open at the tunnel’s entrance. Apertures segmented the tunnel at regular intervals, capable of sealing off small sections. All of the apertures were locked open now, but when they were enabled, they quickly opened and closed for passing ships like blinking eyelids. Air was faster to add or remove in smaller volumes, so some pressure would be added or removed in each interval, depending on the direction the ship was heading. This system allowed the hangar to be kept pressurized, if desired.
Keeping a hangar at atmospheric pressure made it easier to do certain repairs and cargo transfers such as the transportation of livestock, but it could make other things harder. Air created the potential for fires during refueling, and on a base like this, it was generally safer to keep large spaces at vacuum. An explosive decompression from an intentional or wayward impact could crack the entire asteroid open like an egg.
True to form, when Task Force Alpha had forced open the apertures in the tunnel by rewiring and powering the controller, it had not let out a burst of precious air. The hangar, as expected, had been at vacuum, simply sealed to prevent entry.
Adams had volunteered herself to be the first through the tunnel and scout the hangar, which mandated she fly without lights. There was no way to know if the hangar would be guarded, but if it was, likely, it would only be guarded by pirates with environmental suits and small arms. Firing larger weapons risked damaging the apertures or docking equipment. Given that, if she flew dark, they wouldn’t see her coming, and whatever battery-operated lights they put up to look for intruders would give them away.
Adams turned off her helmet light, resigning herself to the inky darkness once again. A bit of her paradoxical claustrophobia returned, but it wasn’t as strong, having seen the tunnel’s surface.
Another long minute brought Adams to the end of the hangar passage. She was blind to it. No light from emergency lanterns or torches bled into the stone bore, but the range on her proximity sensors was rising, the tunnel’s diameter suddenly widening. The transition period was small, and the proximity warnings abruptly disappeared as her craft coasted into a much larger space.
By the naked eye, Adams could see nothing. Even the passive sensors of her craft were blind. Deep inside the asteroid, there were no natural emissions to read the reflectivity of. Only her Arcbird’s radar system, sending out regularly timed pings, painted some picture of her surroundings through its returns.
The hangar was longer than it was tall. A generous ovoid volume that had been hollowed out. Dimples on the wall behind her represented the hangar’s half-dozen exits, five of which were still sealed tight. The walls appeared smooth; the hangar chamber likely laser-bored as the tunnel had been. The main volume of the chamber was, however, not empty.
Trusses, elevators and cranes rose upward, spaces for Crimson Heart’s ships to land, move cargo or perform maintenance. The imaging of the radar wasn’t particularly sharp, but she could identify the repeating structure of eight docks. Six lay in line with the tunnel entrances, and another two had been built on what was currently the ceiling, though when artificial gravity was applied in here, Adams supposed it was probably the floor. Large freight elevators connected the lower two docks to the walkways that ran between the other docks. The structure of those walkways indicated the exit from the hangar to the rest of the base was dead-ahead, in line with the main six docks. However, the exit was flush with the wall, so it made no appearance on her Arcbird’s radar return.
A few more irregular structures appeared in the radar return images, perhaps component or tool storage, but the details were too fine for the wavelength of her ship’s radar band to resolve. Still, throughout the hangar bay, the radar picked up no movement. The radar displays highlighted moving returns as potential threats, but stationary returns were marked as passive obstacles, such as walls and docking strucutres.
“No sign of movement in the hangar,” Adams announced through her helmet radio. “I’m going bright to make certain.”
“Understood, Fireball,” Pflum answered. “Be careful.”
Taking a deep breath, Adams reached over to the auxiliary controls. Built into the side of the cockpit, they weren’t meant to be used during combat. A heavy-G load would have made them almost impossible to reach, but now she was almost stationary, drifting very slowly toward the center of the hangar chamber. She flipped one of the switches, powering on the spotlight mounted below the nose of her craft. Often used to illuminate areas for repair work or to light landscapes for search and rescue missions, the spotlight was tremendously bright, nearly 100,000 lumens. It cut across the hangar’s volume like the finger of a young sun, casting the structures into a crisp, white light.
The sudden appearance of such a bright light certainly would have startled any pirates, prompting them to throw up their hands to protect their eyes, but nothing moved. Nothing leapt from the shadows, nor skittered away from the light. The spotlight only blazed a path through the hangar to light up one of the docks. Shadows fell beneath the trusses and scaffolding, giving the rock a distinctly striped appearance. The shadows shifted as she maneuvered her craft, adjusting to the angle of her light, but they were the only thing that moved.
Adams was thorough. Before the incident with Squadron 26, she never would have been so thorough. She would have swept the hangar and called her comrades in. Now, desperate to not be caught by surprise again, she scoured beneath the docks, checked every one of the round room’s infinite corners, and then checked them again.
Still, there was nothing. Only the empty walkways and unmoving elevators, waiting to take freight loads up and down. One end of the hangar’s ovoid shape had a pile of scrap. It looked to be ship parts, either defunct or waiting for attachment. She spied a few pipes in the midst, sticking out like needles in a pincushion. They were used. She could tell by the obvious corrosion along some of their lengths. Likely, those corroded pipes would have been sharpened to a point and welded to the hull of one of Crimson Heart’s ships. Now, the pipes would sit defunct, like the junk they were, since Crimson Heart’s entire fleet was littering the asteroid belt as debris.
The opposite end of the hangar held the refueling station. There was room and support for two ships beside the pump – a tall, gangly thing with exposed pipe and flexible tubing that could bend to reach the fueling port on various types of ships. A carousel rested behind the base of the pump, round and several stories tall. Each of its circular layers was sectioned off and stacked with metal drums of fuel. The carousel rotated on a central axis, bringing old fuel to the front for use, and sending new fuel to the back for storage. A crane hung over the carousel, set to lift the fuel drums into place alongside the pump.
Most of the shapes on the carousel were standard drums, taller than they were wide. Painted in chipped red paint, they had clearly been emptied and refilled many times over as Crimson Heart drained the fuel stores of their victims and brought it back to power their own fleet. Warning markings were tattooed across the surfaces of the fuel drums for explosivity, flammability, skin irritation and other health concerns.
However, there were other barrels seated on the carousel. Between the chipped red drums were shorter containers that glinted white like pearls in the mouth of a clam. They were shorter, wider and only marked with black stamping that Adams couldn’t quite make out. She found herself fixating on it, squinting down from her cockpit as her Arcbird’s light illuminated that corner of the hangar .
“Fireball to Task Force Alpha,” she hear herself say, “you are cleared to enter. No sign of hostiles.” Still, she found it hard to tear her gaze away from those odd fuel barrels. There was something about them… Something she knew was important.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
As the rest of the team began to file into the hangar’s entrance tunnel, Adams flipped on her ship’s stabilizers, and felt them take over, steadying the fighter where it hung in the hangar’s volume. Her Arcbird was equipped with mag-anchors and regular grapples that could grip nonmagnetic surfaces, but there was no need for any of those in the hangar’s enclosed space. The stabilizers would keep the craft steady, so she reached up and undid the latches for her cockpit canopy. It slid back with ease, the tracks well-greased.
The fighter-interceptor design of the Arcbird was meant to be light and fast. It ditched everything considered to be non-essential including life support equipment for the cockpit. By result, the Arcbird pilots always had to wear flight suits with individual air recycling packs. The suits were designed with slight differences from the traditional environmental suits that were worn on space walks. They had less radiation shielding, and a longer-range distress beacon, but the functionality remained similar overall. Both types of suit were meant to provide air and temperature control for the wearer.
Adams was right at home in her flight suit. She wore it for every sortie she flew, though she supposed this one, like her ship, was new after the detonations of Squadron 26 had destroyed her last fighter and ruined her suit. It had barely, only barely, managed to keep her alive long enough for the search and rescue teams to find. All the same, this suit’s silvery material felt the same as the other one had as she unclipped her acceleration harness and climbed up to stand on the ejection seat of her craft.
Adams kept a steady hand on the rails of the canopy until she was ready to push off, then she let go, and leapt out into the volume of the hangar. The force of her jump caused the stabilizers on her ship to correct slightly, firing a brief burst of propellant from one of the maneuvering thrusters, but the ship held stationary as she drifted away from it.
There was chatter on the radio, the rest of the team drawing near, but Adams had only one objective: a closer look. She needed to see those odd white fuel barrels up close. Something about them was important, extremely important. She just couldn’t exactly remember what. It was right there, the memory almost tangible, but it was still hazy, slipping through her thoughts like fog.
Taking the mag-anchor and tether off her waist, she activated it and tossed it onto the docking structure beside the fuel pump. After it grabbed onto the metal of the walkway on impact, giving her a line to pull herself that way.
She landed easily, well-practiced in zero-G maneuvers, as all born and raised spacers were. Picking up her mag-anchor, she carried on to the fuel carousel, everything but that unimportant.
The bright floodlight of her fighter shone down like an artificial sun. It gave her shadow a crisp definition as it mirrored every step she took. Stepping up onto the nearest section of the carousel, she leaned over the standard barrels. They were stamped with the material classification: Kronium, ship fuel of the standard grade. The origin and refinement date of the barrel had been marked when it was originally filled. The pirates had marked that out, even if they hadn’t corrected it to the current fuel stored in the drum. Likely, they didn’t know its origin, only that it was fuel, pumped directly from the stores of the ships they had robbed. Adams wasn’t interested in that though, stretching over a few of the barrels to try and get a clearer view of the shorter one in the back.
Adams could see the markings on the barrel just fine. They were plain and black, stenciled onto the barrel’s iridescent white surface. The smaller drum was clean, perhaps unused. Or, perhaps it was made of a different material than the rest. Grabbing the electric torch off her belt, she flicked it on and turned it on the drum, scouring its surface for any other markings. There were none. The warning labels stamped and stickered onto the other barrels were absent from this one. All it had was the black stenciling around its midsection. But there was something about that… Something about the barrel she knew she was missing, even as those markings stared at her. She could read them. Oh, she could read them just fine, but they had no meaning. Not to her.
She didn’t know how long she stared at that barrel, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in her mind, but the next thing she knew a big hand came down on her shoulder. She jumped at the contact, utterly unexpecting it, and tore her gaze away to find Johnston behind her. “You good, Cap’n?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she shook her head, attempting to clear it. “Just trying to make sense of this.” She gestured over to the strange fuel barrels, still lit by her ship’s light and the torch in her hand. Truly, there weren’t many of the white barrels. Only a handful among the regular Kronium fuel drums.
Johnston stepped past her and took a look. “Those markings… I can’t read ‘em.” They weren’t in Standard, the common language of the worlds.
“I can.” Perhaps that was what had confused her the most.
“What do they say?”
“Negrium,” but that word. It meant nothing to her. “Just ‘Negrium’.” It was stenciled on each of those white barrels, over and over again, around their center in a band.
“Negrium,” Johnston echoed. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” the word was familiar. She knew that, but it just didn’t have a meaning. However, if those barrels were being stored here with the other fuel, there was only one assumption to make. “It’s fuel.”
“Hydrian fuel,” Johnston corrected. Those markings had to be Hydrian script. While there were human worlds that spoke dead languages, the tech-monks among them, the centralized government insisted that all supplies be stamped in Standard lettering, even if there were other additional markings. Anything pulled off a transport ship should have been marked in Standard, and the pirates wouldn’t have stolen anything that wasn’t.
I can’t read Hydrian, Adams wanted to say. For humans, that was an exceptionally rare skill. The structure of the Hydrian language was so utterly different from their own that there were rarely direct translations. Learning to speak or read it usually involved fundamental, practical examples, rather than translation practice. Still, that confusion was secondary to the realization. “What’s Hydrian fuel doing here?”
Johnston studied Adams furrowed brows through the faceplate of her helmet. “Maybe you didn’t hear.” The transmission may have not come through this deep in the asteroid, or perhaps she simply hadn’t been listening, so distracted by the mysteries of these barrels. “Actual called. Warned us there might be Hydrian tech on the base. Could be a damn livin’ Hydra too. This only proves it.” Of course, Johnston had never doubted the Admiral’s warning.
The big Marine reached up to his helmet, switching from the local band to the wide-band that would reach their ships, and be relayed back to the Singularity. “Base, this is Unit Beta-One. We have identified barrels of what appear to be Hydrian fuel in Crimson Heart’s hangar, but there is no sign of any ship.” Even he could tell that the hangar was empty. All of Crimson Heart’s forces had been dispatched to engage the Singularity. “I repeat, there are barrels of what appears to be Hydrian fuel in Crimson Heart’s hangar.”
Stars, Adams stood there for a moment in utter shock. Hydrian fuel. Why was there Hydrian fuel on this base, the base of a known human pirate clan? It made no sense. And the repercussions… She could feel herself beginning to shake. “That’s war, Johnston,” she said on the local band. “If there’s a Hydrian ship here, on our side of the Neutral Zone… That’s war.” From the day they began training, every soldier was warned about the Hydra and how utterly horrible the Hydrian War had been. They were told of the Argentinean Accords – the treaty that ended the War and established the Neutral Zone between the Hydrian Empire’s territory and that claimed by humanity’s central government. From the day they began training, they were told that any violation of the Neutral Zone’s boundary by either side was grounds to restart that horrible, horrible War.
The importance of that training had faded over the years. After fifty years, there weren’t any Hydrian War veterans left in the fleet. There weren’t many left in the rest of the worlds either. Those trained soldiers had been pulled to fight for both sides in the Frontier Rebellion, and younger soldiers like Adams had spent their entire careers policing humanity’s space, worrying about the threat other humans created. She had run the Neutral Zone patrol a few times, but it was one of those things that was more symbolic than anything. There as no way to constantly patrol such a large section of space. The ships that ran that patrol never expected to find anything. The idea of a Hydrian ambush had been banished years before Adams had joined the fleet.
“Ain’t nothin’ we can do ‘bout it now,” Johnston drawled. “We stick to the mission. Let the Admiral handle the rest.” If there was a commander in the worlds prepared to handle a Hydrian incursion, then it was Admiral Gives. He hadn’t served in the Hydrian War, but he was the most experienced commander humanity had.
Adams couldn’t bring any words to her lips, so she just nodded and followed Johnston back to where Pflum, Frenchie and Valentina were preparing.
Butterfly had parked their ship on the flat surface of the nearest dock to the door. The dock had been designed for larger ships, so the little Warhawk only took up a fraction of it, leaving plenty of room for Task Force Beta’s other ships to land as they streamed through the open hangar tunnel.
Frenchie, the overzealous demolitions expert, had added a bandolier of grenades to his outfit. That was hardly surprising. His tendencies were well known to the entire crew, and he was nearly vibrating with excitement. Adams really tried not to pay attention to it until she saw Johnston picking up two tower shields. They were made of a clear material with a huge handle built into the interior side of their curvature. The shields weren’t brought out often, too bulky to carry very far, but for small area actions where they expected trouble, they made an appearance. Pflum had one shield in his hands, and Valentina had one shield next to her as she worked on rewiring the airlock controls. The last of the shields was leaned up against the Warhawk’s black hull for Adams to grab.
She took it and joined the others at the door to the airlock where Pflum wordlessly handed her a regular combat helmet and a set of night vision goggles. There hadn’t been much room in her fighter to carry that, so Pflum had brought them and the combat shields in the Warhawk.
Adams attached the helmet and the goggles to her flight suit’s belt. Her flight suit’s helmet was good for holding air, and it had lights built onto it, but it wouldn’t offer the bullet-protection of a combat helmet, nor would it mount the night vision goggles. Conversely, the combat helmet wouldn’t seal with her suit and giver her air, so she would just have to switch helmets once they were through the airlock and into the pressurized part of the base.
Kneeling beside the airlock controls, Valentina paused and turned to Pflum. “You ready?”
Pflum checked the readiness of the team around him: a spearhead of five including Adams, Johnston, Frenchie, Valentina, and himself. Butterfly would be staying with his Warhawk to assist in mapping the base and communications. “Aye.”
Valentina connected the last few wires, and the outer airlock door stirred to life, opening slowly. An emptiness waited within, but the airlock was large. The only access point to the hangar, all supplies necessary for or stored on the base had to move through this chokepoint.
As they had strategized, the spearhead moved into position, aligning their shields in front of the seam on the next door. Routing the controls through a data pad, Valentina had set the doors on a timer, slipping through as the outer doors began to close. She took her shield and filled the remaining position on the group’s edge. When the outer doors closed, sealing them off from the hangar, she announced, “Cycling. Thirty seconds.” Air would be pumped into the lock from reserves, equalizing its pressure with the atmospheric standard that waited on the other side.
Hoping to disorient any ambush waiting on the interior side of the airlock, the pressure cycle would be interrupted before completion. Valentina had set the doors to open while there was still a pressure differential. Air would be sucked from the surrounding corridors and surge into the airlock, the change hopefully causing discomfort and disorientation amongst the enemy.
Adams braced herself behind the shield and saw the rest of the spearhead doing the same, generating a protected arc on their side of the interior door. With his massive size and strength, Johnston could easily hold up two of the shields, while Pflum, Adams and Valentina held one. Frenchie crouched behind them all, eagerly counting down the seconds as he pulled a grenade from his bandolier.
The wait took an eternity, and yet the opening of the doors came altogether too soon. A gust of wind burst in through the smallest crack in the door. The large area of the shield caught it like a sail and tried to take off. It took all of Adams’ strength and the grip of her mag-boots on the floor to keep it from being pushed back, but soon the gust silenced and the door opened a little wider.
There were screams, shouts of pain and hatred, and then came the report of gunfire, a deafening noise that started to come faster and faster. The shield in front of Adams shuddered, taking one blow, and then another. She could feel it trembling in her hand, shaking off the kinetic energy of the impact, and then Frenchie stood. The door was finally wide enough, so he pulled the pin and tossed the grenade up and over. It flew over the shields in a graceful arc, sailing through gap in the doors and then clattered to the floor, rolling into the corridor beyond.
“Eyes,” Johnston called turning his helmet away as best as he could manage.
Adams did the same, squeezing her eyes shut as she counted the seconds before the timer ran out.