Chapter 131

We waited in the shuttle for seven hours.  The mood was surprisingly jovial.  Mozzie and Buckie had a continuous back and forth.  Yes, Buckie had wormed his way into the mission.   I did not even know he was one of the Marines in power armor until an hour into our wait on the hull when he replied to one of Mozzie’s jokes.

It did feel odd being in the thick of the action and not on the bridge as overwatch.  Julie chimed in; she had just edited the mass profile for the battleship so we wouldn’t affect their entry into subspace.  Julie spoke through Chloe and announced the countdown to subspace.  When we transitioned, the team leader announced suit checks.  From the cockpit, Zoe said she was cutting through the hull in five minutes.  

We would be cutting through an access door.  Cutting through the 2.4-meter-thick hull plating of the battleship was just inefficient.  I was to remain at the back of the breach team as we made haste to collect Nila.  We had a custom suit ready for the pregnant Nila.  It was a Geko suit specked for defense.  We moved to the doors when the cutter could be heard spinning up.  Zoe signaled breach, and a breath later, the door was open, and the men and women filed out.  The battleship’s gravity plating made the transition slightly awkward.  It was one of those things that was hard to recreate in VR perfectly.  

The squad comms were short and precise as the two Squirrel scouts quickly hacked and opened the battleship’s airlock without cycling atmosphere.   It would set off alarms in the battleship, but if everything went well, we would be in and out in two minutes.

The Marines moved and started firing a few seconds later.  They were firing electro-sink flechettes.  These darts penetrated into flesh and hopefully stunned the target with high voltage discharge.  We didn’t want to kill the regular crew if we could avoid it.  As we moved through the corridor, the Squirrel bent down and placed a thumb-sized disc on the back of necks of the downed crewmen.  This disc would stabilize them and keep them unconscious.  

Since we had the schematics, we reached the quarters of Nila in just 48 seconds.  I knocked on the door.  A voice I hadn’t heard in years responded, asking if the enemy boarding had been thwarted.  I told her we were the enemy boarding party and we were there to save her.  Then I announced my name.  She didn’t respond, and Mozzie held up a heavy plasma torch, indicating we should just breach as time was ticking.  He could cut through the door in seconds if she did not open the door.

Nila asked me to confirm my identity.  I told her I was not going to take off my helmet.  Eve removed her helmet and moved to the door, and told Nila to open the fucking door so we could get the fuck out of here.  The entire squad went quiet of comms.  The door slid open, and Nila asked if that was truly Eve.  Eve just pushed her back inside and tossed the suit we brought for her on the floor.  Eve commanded her to suit up.  I was getting the sense that Eve was not happy with my rescue mission. 

Enemy fire erupted down the corridor.  The enemy Marines had arrived.  My team switched to plasma penetrator shots.  You would not normally use it on spaceships, but we did not care about collateral damage and wanted to suppress any enemy response as quickly as possible.

The pregnant Nila was slow in getting the unfamiliar suit on, so Eve started to help her.  Julie came on the comms.  She had just activated all the ship hull breach protocols.  Corridors were being sealed and now needed to be manually opened.  It should give us four to five minutes before any significant threat reaches us.   

Nila was asking questions.  How was she being rescued in subspace?  What were other humans doing this far out from human space?  I thought you were dead?  I really should have brought Gwen with us.  Gwen and Nila were friends, and Gwen could have answered her questions easily.  Although Nila looked much older, in my mind, she still looked the same as I remembered—It was just how I saw her.  Buckie ordered the team to prepare for contact as Julie informed us the ship Marines were blowing hallway safety seals rather than manually opening them to reach us quicker.

Then, something we had not counted on happened.  The ship dropped out of subspace.  This was not good.  We had planned to detach the shuttle, enable our subspace field, and fly away.  Now, things got tricky.  The squad leader and Buckie ordered a hasty retreat to the shuttle.  They had probably realized where we were attached to the ship by now.  They could launch fighters and bots to meticulously search the hull.  We needed to get on the shuttle and out into open space.  Even the normally calm Elias over comms asking us to hurry.  

Subspace disrupters started going off, and Nila started to slow.  She was having second thoughts, probably fearing for her unborn child.  I reassured Nila that we had a safe way off this ship.  Eve, not waiting for Nila, just picked her up and carried her.  We reached the shuttle, rushed inside, and secured ourselves in safety harnesses.  Zoe had the stick and was already spinning away from the hull.  Julie said she had lost contact with the battleship computer as it had just completed a rapid reset.  The captain of this ship definitely adapted quickly.

I switched my HUD to see what was happening in the surrounding space.  The battleship looked like a porcupine, sending sensor buoys, bots, fighters, and shuttles into space to search for us.  Our stealth systems were good but not perfect.  The issue was we could not phase as long as the disrupters were active.  If we were on the Void Phoenix, then the alien sensors could map the disrupter’s gravitational wells.  For now, we were left to rely on our stealth.  I unbuckled and went to the cockpit to stand behind Zoe and Elias, who were deeply focused, moving the shuttle further and further away from the battleship but remaining in the regions of space where the battleship had its thinnest search cover.  

Forty-eight minutes later, we had reached far enough distance to switch over our emitters to subspace.  The battleship was still making a concerted effort to search for us.  It was almost comical that we had escaped.

I turned to Zoe and told her to add a wash to our wake when we entered the subspace.  It was a flashy way to enter subspace, leaving a flash by igniting some fuel and indicating a clear directional vector.  Of course, Elias was setting our wash to show a false vector.  When we finally entered subspace, everyone relaxed, and a hoo-rah echoed in the shuttle.  We soon exited subsapce back in the system, and Elias said the ETA for the Void Phoenix rendezvous was 84 minutes.  We docked, and Gwen appeared.  They hugged and cried slightly.  Gwen and Nila had been good friends during the years at the academy before the war started.  I just said Gwen should get her to medical.  I headed for the bridge.  We needed to make a jump and find the refueler and battleship.

I groused, sliding into my captain’s chair, that Nila was not that excited to see me.  She was safe now, and expecting her to be the same person I knew back in the academy was too much.  Besides, Danielle was a good partner who understood me.  Maybe I would agree to have a child with Danielle.  I focused on the task at hand.  My life used to be so much simpler when I only needed to focus on getting a ship functioning at peak efficiency.

Zoe and Elias came onto the bridge shortly after me, taking over the stations and quickly getting caught up.  There were still nine Union Exodus ships in the system—all smaller support ships.  I asked if they had been abandoned.   Julie’s hologram appeared in her uniform and started updating us.  Six of the ships were in the process of being abandoned.  All supplies and crew were being moved to the other three ships.  The disturbance we caused in the fleet had caused a few ships to be made useless and turned into salvage.

Elias let me know he was ready to enter subspace.  The enemy battleship and refueler should have been removed thirty minutes into the transition from subspace.   We could not expect the hostile crew to turn the ship around and jump back to this system in a reasonable amount of time.  Instead, I hoped to arrive, talk to the crews, and convince them to join us.  If not, we would take our targeted personnel and leave.

When we left subspace and started our scans, we found the refueling ship first after forty minutes.  It was going to take eighteen hours to rendezvous, so we planned to make a short jump to them instead.  Damian needed three hours to prep for the short jump.  We searched anxiously for the battleship, but nothing came on scanners.  If they did not drop out of subspace close to the expected mark, it would take many short jumps to find them.  Maybe they never forced the ship out of subspace.  The Brotherhood shuttle didn’t have any subspace drive capability. 

I looked at the different contingencies.  If things went poorly, the Marines were to retreat to the shuttle and then were to detach and wait for us to find them.  If we didn’t find them, the Caladrius would be detached, and then the Void Phoneix and Caladrius ship would leapfrog on the vector to search for the battleship or shuttle. 

The Caladrius was already being prepped for launch.  After we took over the refueler and were ready to continue the search, we would launch the Caladrius.  As soon as we got into easy communication range, it looked like the capture of the refueler had gone smoothly.  There were six Marines from the ex-Union on board.  Two had been injured, and the target, Silas Davenport, was eager to join our crew after talking with our Marines. 

Silas was a brilliant tactician, according to Abby and Buckie.  They had trained him, excelled in squad tactics, and constantly thought outside the box—so far outside the box that he was never recognized for his brilliance.  The other factor was he was from the slums on an industrial world.  That meant he could not become an officer until he completed twenty years of service.  He would be an amazing squad leader once he passed our screening process and trained with the rest of the men.

The tanker transport was also at 87% capacity for maneuvering fuel and 69% capacity for reactor fuel.  It was also only seven years old and part of the 3^rd fleet that was composed of corporate-built battleships.  It did feel slightly good taking that asset from them.  We took the Union Marines to get treated and sent to the brig until they could be sorted.  I left five on my Marines and two Squirrel engineers on the transport and they were to make their way to a binary star system in forty-eight hours.  The system should be empty; it was a four-day subspace trip for them.

The Caladrius launched with Elias and Zoe and four Marines on board.  We began our leapfrogging action to find the missing squad and the battleship.  On our fourth jump, one of the Squirrel came to me with an interesting idea.  It was a subspace beacon.  The beacon should be able to pulse an identification gravity signature in subspace, allowing our alien sensors to detect it.  He wanted to drop the prototype behind us and see if it worked.  I agreed but had him add a self-destruct to the device.  If other sapient species were out there, I did not want to advertise where to find us. 

The device worked as advertised.  The Squirrel physicist thought he could get the beacon functional out to 100 light-years with the readings we obtained—it should even work if the device was in subspace, giving us a means of tracking ships in the future.  This would have been extremely valuable in our current predicament.  Even more exciting was the Squirrel thought the beacon could be further developed to act as instant communication across that distance if there were alien sensors on both ships. 

Eight days into our search, we finally found the battleship.  Well, the Caladrius found it.  From the calculations, we discovered the battleship had dropped out of subspace 43 minutes after entering subspace—13 minutes past the desired extraction time.  We were soon in communication with the Marines on board. 

Because they didn’t want to kill the men and women we wanted to recruit, the progress in reaching the bridge and/or engineering had been slowed more than expected.  They were also outnumbered thirty to one.  It had turned into a standoff until one of the engineers on board had initiated an emergency shutdown of the subspace drive.  In the eight days they waited for us a tenuous truce had been made, and they were planning to return to the prior system. 

It was time for a family reunion after Julie confirmed the battleship was seized and weapons were offline.  Hopefully, this went better than the last one.