(T’ler, Beta Darconyx System)
Lieutenant Sharel didn’t like that she and her squad were heading further into the alien spaceship that had been attacked and infested with another type of aliens. She didn’t like that they were counting on Charlie and Delta squads to keep the aliens distracted until they could reach their goal. She didn’t like any of it, but that was the mission, so that’s what they were going to do.
The rest of the squad moved along with her, following whatever kind of mental map that Raleda seemed to have gotten from his contact with the alien mind… gem… thing. Whatever it was. That wasn’t important at the moment. What was important was that they had a definite direction to go, and their suits were recording the map data as they went, so they would be able to find their way back. Hopefully. There was no way to know whether the ship would just decide to randomly change things up, of course.
However, Raleda seemed to be confident in his directions, and, so far, they hadn’t run into any blockages or alien swarms, so she was going to count her blessings while they lasted. While they lasted. Damn, she shouldn’t have thought that. Now something was going to happen, for sure!
(T’ler, Bow Section, Beta Darconyx System)
Captain Tustek Hardbrew was nervous. Well, that much was obvious. They were on an alien ship, in the middle of nowhere. Not just ‘poncy knelfi’ alien, but alien alien! It was the largest damn ship he’d ever seen, and it had been beat up straight to hell. If the science types were right, the battle also tore up the whole rest of this system, too. And he was stuck investigating it. At least the nasties that Charlie and Delta had found weren’t showing up here, yet.
His Alpha squad had been tasked to enter through a hull breach near the bow of the ship. Unfortunately, it was too small for the shuttle to land, so they had been forced to EVA across from the shuttle to the wrecked ship. Their goal originally was to find a way to the big door-like thing at the bow of the ship, and see if they couldn’t crack the thing open, to give the science types better access to the ship.
What they had found changed all that.
The Gauz marine looked around, and his eyes fell on one of the privates, the main ‘information specialist’, as Command liked to call them on paper. Everyone else (including Command) called them hackers when they weren’t trying to be official. “Paulidis! Get y’er ass moving! Blair found what appears to be a control station. See if you can’t splice in and find a way to open those doors!”
Slave-Private Pericles Paulidis was one of the refugees from Jagloth that ended up in Black Star’s ‘care’. Best thing that could have happened to him, in his opinion, but no one asked about that. He’d been running with one of the criminal syndicates on Jagloth, and had managed to get off-world before the place got wiped out. He wasn’t a crack shot, but he wasn’t horrible. However, when faced with computer systems, he was a gods-damned ARTIST in getting places he shouldn’t be!
Sliding over to the control panel, he cracked it open, and saw wires running all over the place. All the same color, and none of them labeled, as far as he could see. Fuck, this was a fragging IT nightmare! And they knew from the last console they passed that the power lines were almost unidentifiable next to the data ones. But they’d learned from that, once the team medic got his heart to start beating again.
Cautiously, he tried to concentrate on attaching his backup computer to the controls without frying it. This was a task made monumentally harder given the reports that Charlie and Delta were in the middle of combat, and what they’d found here. He didn’t know what Beta was up to, beyond that they were looking for the brains of this place, but he sure didn’t want to be in their shoes if something happened. And then there was Alpha’s discovery. That was… No! No. He had to focus on the task at hand. Couldn’t let his mind go wandering off until after he got those doors open, or things were going to get ‘interesting’.
(T’ler, Aft Section, Beta Darconyx System)
“CONTACT!”
The scream was punctuated by the staccato roar of gunfire, as the marines of Delta squad opened up on another wave of the blue-violet freaks that infested this ship. The initial contact had not gone well for the Marines, but, once the shock had worn off, they had rallied. The freaks were big, they were tough, and they were deadly, but the Black Star Marines were no strangers to combat, and they quickly began to learn which areas of the beast to target in order to take them down.
FWOOSH!
Of course, it also helped that the General and the Admiral were of the same mind when it came to armaments. With the Marines having the capability to deal with dimensional inventories, they were able to carry a LOT of weapons and ammunition. That didn’t even count what they actually carried on their actual persons. Normal rifles proved ineffective against the aliens, so they switched to a different playbook.
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Oh, sure, most of the Marines had switched to heavier, more powerful rifles, the kind they didn’t typically use aboard ships because they did unfortunate things to the ship’s hull. In general, punching holes in the side of a ship you were conducting a boarding operation on was considered bad form. Even if killing all the enemy forces was the order of the day, those kinds of weapons also tended to cause a lot of trouble when they encountered ship systems. Most vital systems on starships and space stations did not react well to bullets at the best of times. The high-powered rifles and blasters were not the ‘best of times’ as far as those systems were concerned.
FWOOSH!
And there were, naturally, those who decided that the ‘up close and personal’ approach was called for. The aliens were tough, but their armor, which stood up well against normal rifle fire, was less impressive against melee attacks. Or, rather, there were very few things which stood up well against a Black Star Marine wearing their strength-enhancing armor and wielding a sword with a monomolecular blade, before they used Energy Psy powers to coat their blade in fire. And the less said about the ‘power sword’, which was like the unholy fusion of a sword and a chainsaw, wielded in one hand, the better. Especially when Sergeant Akionus dual-wielded one with a heavy bolt pistol in his off hand!
FWOOSH!
But that was not the extent of the unorthodox weaponry the Marines had on hand, ‘just in case’. Heavy-duty flamethrowers introduced the aliens to the wonders that was the modern equivalent of napalm, and brought a reddish glow to the halls. And it was these flamers that turned the tide, allowing Delta squad to hold in this long corridor until Charlie reinforced them.
The high-powered pistols and rifles pierced their armor, and the disturbingly effective melee weapons hewed their flesh, and yet the aliens barely noticed as they attacked like feral beasts. But the flamers? Oh, they reacted to those! That primal fear that all creatures had of fire caused the aliens to halt in their charge, making them easy prey for the other Marines, allowing them to hold the line.
“GRENADE OUT!”
A grenade was lobbed over the line of Marines, landing in one of the openings that the aliens were pouring through. And then, suddenly, night turned to day, as the grenade went off. There was no shrapnel to worry about, because it wasn’t that kind of grenade. The plasma grenade was a frightening little piece of work that, literally, filled an area with white-hot plasma for a moment, with predictable effects on anyone or anything unfortunate enough to be caught within the radius.
Lieutenant Jackson nodded as he saw that the grenade had driven back the aliens for the moment. Looking over to Lieutenant Stella McCann from Charlie, he switched over to a command channel. She was technically his superior, given her longer time at rank, so that made her the one in command of their group, for the moment. “Ma’am, we need to pull back to the next hall before they figure out a way around. Mackenzie has already detected movement trying to flank us.”
McCann grunted, before nodding. “All troops! Fall back to the next hall! We have to keep the aliens busy, while not getting ourselves cut off. Make sure our path to the ‘shuttle bay’ remains clear!”
(T’ler, Core, Beta Darconyx System)
“Blimey, that’s huge.”
“Cut the chatter, Private! We’ve got a job to do.” Privately, Sharel couldn’t condemn the outburst. They’d found their way into a positively massive chamber, so large that their sensors couldn’t read how far it stretched. The path they walked on was a kind of causeway of hexagonal platforms of differing heights, like a Giant’s Causeway kind of setup. In the middle of the chamber, there was an area of light. Even from here, however, she could tell that something was wrong. A large piece of material that had fallen from the ceiling however high up, probably internal damage from the battle that had crippled the ship. “Raleda, that where we’re headed?”
“Yes, Ma’am. The psychic imprint in the gem showed that area. But it didn’t have that damage. Must have happened after the drone locked herself away.”
Sharel sighed. That was just great. Well, nothing they could do about it now. That damage didn’t give a good first impression, but there was always the chance that it wasn’t as bad as it appeared. Unfortunately, it turned out to be every bit as bad as it appeared.
The massive piece of debris had fallen on an object in the center of the lit area, crushing half of it. Still, enough was left of the object that they could tell that it was clearly artificial, and different from everything else they’d seen so far. In fact, she could see lettering on a panel…
“CASA?”
Alvarez cleared his throat. “Continental Air and Space Administration. It was the unified space program for the North American powers back before Earth became Terra and started exploring the galaxy. If this was made by CASA, then it would have to be hundreds of years old. But how…”
Singer chimed in next. “LT! There’s another piece of writing here, on this damaged panel. T L E R. T’ler. That’s where the ship’s name came from, I guess.”
Sharel moved over to look at the panel Singer was indicating. It had been worn, and scarred even before the object it was part of got smashed into oblivion. It looked like part of the lettering was obscured. She used a low-power energy beam to clear away some carbon scoring on the panel, and revealed the rest. “T R A V E L E R 6. Traveler 6.”
Alvarez gasped. “Lieutenant, the Admiral says that Traveler 6 was a probe put out by CASA, but contact was lost with it, and it was believed destroyed when it passed too close to a black hole. Somehow, it ended up all the way over here!”
Baxter, their hacker, frowned as he found a communications port that resembled an old plug. Fortunately, he had an adapter. Why anyone thought they would ever have to use a coaxial connection was beyond him, but he had to give props to whoever it was for being prepared for everything, since it allowed him to access the controls on the platform they were standing on. What he found wasn’t good, however.
“LT, I think this probe was the ‘brain’ of this whole damn ship. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know, but it is pretty clear that things were running through here. The AI that ran this place is dead. Like someone scooping out your cerebral cortex. That’s why this thing’s been drifting since whatever went down happened. And the data in here is insanely massive. No way we’re just downloading it and running off. We’re going to have to remove the ‘servers’ if we want to take it with us.”
“How long will it take?”
“Perfectly preserving everything so that it can be reassembled properly, with as few problems as possible? Hours. Ripping it out of there so we can get moving? A few minutes to rip it out, and then we’ll need to hump them out of here. And the storage media weighs about a ton, altogether.”
A ton just for the storage media? The amount of data that would hold, even if it was only as efficient as their solid-state drives, would be astronomical! But getting it out of here… “How many pieces does it come in?”
“Ten, Ma’am.”
All right, that was more manageable. “Start ripping them out. Fast as you can. Everyone else, pick ten people, and drop 200 pounds of gear from your storage. Start with survival gear and the like. You get to take pieces of the alien hard drive with you. The rest of you? Redistribute weapons and ammo. Make sure we are able to take all the important crap with us if we have to fight our way out.”
She saw one of the marines look at her with a quizzical tilt to his helmet, and she shook her head. “I know Charlie and Delta are making a racket to keep the aliens distracted, but if this goes badly, we gotta count on them coming this way. So we prepare for a fighting retreat to Alpha’s location.”
“LT, Charlie and Delta are saying that the ‘ship use’ weapons are no good against the aliens, except in high concentrations. We’ll need to switch to the ‘special cases’ weapons. High-powered rifles, advanced melee weapons, and flamers all work against the aliens.”
“You heard the man, get to it!”