Fatmarrow's Fanbits

Was it worth it? - Eve short story

2011-09-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images Of Eve Competition 3. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms.

It was barely five minutes since Lars arrived, but it seemed an eternity.

"It’s so big! Look at all those guns!" Lars had exclaimed, peering out of the control room window.

"It's just a frigate," the Director had sighed. "There are two hundred vessels within a moon’s orbit of here that could eat it up for breakfast."

"So where are these other ships?” the comms operator had interjected. "Eating breakfast?"

Lars had almost wished that Agnetta was there. Almost. As a scientist, his dealings with the Republic Fleet had been civilian in nature, but she’d been at the sharp end. There wasn’t a combat ship she hadn’t flown, and many was the time she’d rattled off facts and figures to embellish her latest tale of space heroics. He’d never paid any attention, and that was now a matter of regret.

The Director had chastised the comms operator for his impertinence. Someone was always shouting at someone else in the control room, and it was usually the Director doing the shouting. Lars still nursed a burn from some undiluted growth factor, a raw red patch spreading from elbow to wrist. His lab was filled with toxic this and explosive that, but he'd rather crawl around its messy overgrown nooks and crannies than hang around the control room.

The operator had gesticulated furiously with his hands. "I told you, Director! I can't reach the other outpost. I can't get a signal, nothing from the cameras. Something bad may have happened."

Lars had asked why he had been summoned. The Director hadn’t answered, but had asked him questions instead. Lars answered as best he could, but the Director was clearly left unsatisfied.

“Why did you leave the Fleet?” the Director had asked.

“Agnetta and I, we wanted to settle down. Well, I wanted to settle down. There were opportunities for research here that I didn’t have with the Fleet. I couldn’t turn it down. Agnetta understood,” said Lars. “Agnetta is my wife, Director,” he added.

The Director had kept probing: “Did they know you were coming here?”

“Us? No, we didn’t tell them. Agnetta was worried she’d have to go back. On their terms, that is, not on her terms. I think she missed the old life.”

“But why you, Lars?”

“Me? Well, I don’t see why they would…”

"Got something!" the operator had interrupted, clearly relieved. "Starfield camera number 5, it's in visual range of the other outpost. It points into space but I can turn it around." He had routed the camera to the main viewscreen, which clicked into life, displaying a dim, uniform field of debris. "That's funny," the Director had said. "Where is the outpost supposed to be?"

The realisation had slowly dawned that they were indeed looking at the other outpost, or rather, what remained of it. Lars had remembered a saying about a man’s true character being revealed in a crisis. The Director, it turned out, was still a fairly shouty man, angry and scared, but mostly angry. The comms operator had withdrawn quietly into himself and Lars too held his tongue. All he could do was keep staring out of the window at the twisting form of the Rifter frigate as it swooped round and around the outpost.

Lars was brought back to the present with a bang, as an instantly recognisable thin, blonde woman burst through the control room doors. She was more than averagely attractive, quite dressy, and in a state of panic. She surveyed the room and her gaze settled on Lars. She smiled with relief, ran over and enveloped him in a powerful embrace. The Director threw his hands up in frustration. She was one of the admin staff. Her name the Director couldn’t quite recall, but Agnetta it was not.

Lars held still as a rock, unswaying, his face betraying no emotion. The woman didn’t seem to notice. “What’s going on?” barked the Director. “No, on second thoughts, don’t tell me. Just get to the comms desk, Lars. We haven’t any time left.”

“I don’t care who knows!” cried the woman, defiantly, causing the comms operator to recoil in surprise. “They said some madman is going to blow up the outpost. We have to get out of here. Let’s get a shuttle, Lars,” she implored, turning back to the door and tugging Lars’ arm. He held firm, and maintained a distant gaze out of the window.

“Agnetta was on the other outpost,” said Lars, impassively. “It’s been completely destroyed. She… she’s dead, Livia.” It was barely perceivable, but Lars’ eyes were moistening a little.

The woman stared at Lars for several long moments, before finally speaking: “I’m… well, I’m sorry, Lars,” she said, maintaining her grip on his arm. “But that’s ok, isn’t it? I mean, you left her. You don’t love her, right? You don’t even like her?” The woman narrowed her gaze, as if trying to figure him out. “You left her, right? You told her? I mean it’s terrible, I’m sorry, Lars, really it’s bad. Sorry, I’m talking nonsense. My head is really muddled with all this going on. But there’s still us, isn’t there? We’re alive. And we have to go right now…”

Lars brushed the woman’s hand off his arm in a single, firm movement. She tumbled to the floor in surprise, and her face reddened in anger. Lars addressed the Director: “And why should I go to the comms desk?”

The Director sighed. “Because he wants to talk to you.”

Lars looked at the Director in puzzlement. “Who does?” A moment later his puzzled look grew more intense. “He wants to talk to me? Why me?”

The Director shrugged. “Damned if I know, but that’s why you’re here. So talk to him. I don’t want to put you under any pressure, Lars, but it very much seems,” he sighed, “that our lives are in your hands.”

Lars turned to the comms desk and walked over with a steady gait, but shaking legs betrayed his nervousness. The woman watched him sit down, and slowly got to her feet, brushing down the folds on her skirt. The Director turned his attention to her. “No sense flying a shuttle out of here now, girl. You’d be shot down in a heartbeat.” She opened her mouth to reply, but thought the better of it. She spun round and clattered out of the room on her high heels. Lars didn’t even hear her leave. He was staring at the screen.

There is a scientist called Lars. I must speak to him.

“What’s this about, Lars?” the Director asked. “What dark secret did you bring with you? The Fleet couldn’t let you go, huh? Your work there… was it worth it?” he added, acidly.

“Director, I really don’t know… I really…” he paused. Surely that wasn’t it? They were just rumours, weren’t they? He shook his head and typed out a response:

This is Lars. Who are you? What do you want? We are innocent civilians. Please do not kill us.

He pressed send. The console beeped at him. He peered at the screen again:

This message is subject to a CSPA service charge of 2,950.00 ISK, which you must accept …

He uttered an eye-popping swearword. He pressed ‘accept’ and the mail was despatched. Everyone was watching him. “And why exactly are we exchanging mails?” asked Lars. “He wouldn’t answer any other comms,” explained the Director. “We’ve left everything open, just in case.”

Lars sat back, looking a little sheepish. “There may be one thing…” he said. “The last thing I worked on, it was something they asked me to look at around the time the WEX team came back.”

“WEX?”

“Wormhole Exploration,” continued Lars. “The stuff they gave me to look at, it wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. Really strange, but it was organic. The rumours didn’t make any sense.”

“Rumours?”

“Contact,” said Lars, “with the Jovians.”

The Director’s face drained. “Well, that’s it then,” he said, pointing his finger at Lars. “They’d kill half a galaxy for Jovian artefacts. Damn you Lars, for bringing this on us!” Lars slumped into his chair. “But why kill us?” he mused.

There was a silence, broken by a crackling from the comms desk .

“Lars?” said a female voice.

“Agnetta? Agnetta!” cried Lars. He peered at the desk and tentatively pressed the transmit button. “Agnetta?” he repeated. “You’re alive? What happened? Where are you?” Lars couldn’t help but smile.

Agnetta’s voice sounded again. “Where do you think, Lars?” He stared at the desk in confusion. “Tell me,” she continued. A pause, then: “Was she worth it?”

The Director tapped on the window to get everyone’s attention. Outside the frigate was now motionless, side on, and closer than ever. Lars could just about make out the silhouette of autocannons rotating towards him in unison.

“Once a navy girl, always a navy girl,” Agnetta laughed to herself, for there was now no-one else left to hear.

A distraction from proper work

2010-09-01T07:32:00.001-07:00

(original is here)

The Whispering Wind - Eve short story

2010-07-25T22:47:00.000-07:00

This is my entry to the Inspired By Images Of Eve Competition 2. More details and links to all entrants can be found at Starfleet Comms

"Sir, I've inspected the warp drive, and I cannot find any fault."

A clutch of antimatter shells screeched into the Glorious Death's hull, but she held tight to her orbit around the battleship. The Glorious Death’s blasters chattered away in response, tearing shards of armour off the hull of an enemy frigate.

The crew member's message was entirely redundant of course, and Perisere was well aware of that. The capsule's interfaces ensured that he knew of any malfunctions in the ship's subsystems before they even happened. Somewhere deep in the ship's innards the warp drive idled comfortably, waiting for Perisere's unspoken thought that would launch it into action.

Piercing sunlight filled the viewfinder and the local star tracked a wide arc around the ship's wing in a leisurely, stately fashion. It was too leisurely, and too stately. Three sets of webifier beams licked at the Glorious Death, and another round of shells thudded home, easily finding their mark. The Glorious Death outclassed all of the frigates in the system, and Perisere outclassed all of their pilots. That was why he chose this system for his hunts, prising small bounties from the heads of the local scum. They were smalltime operators, scrabbling over dribs and drabs of prey, never presenting a serious challenge for him. But on this occasion they had managed to put together a very rare and very dangerous display of unity.

The honour of serving a capsuleer was immense, and Perisere never let his crew forget it, lest their minds wander instead to the subject of their expendability. It was more difficult in the Glorious Death; a Taranis class ship did not necessarily need any crew at all, but Perisere had made arrangements for one to accompany him. A technical fault in a Taranis usually meant instant death, but it was a comfort to have someone on hand who could deal with the unexpected. But one man was more difficult to abstract away than hundreds. He wasn't just crew, he had a name. Although exactly what that was escaped Perisere.

The Glorious Death traded blows once more. The enemy frigate again shed scraps of metal, but they were silvered, misshapen and trailed innards from the ship. A second later the frigate's power core flared up, and only a charred wreck remained after the afterimage had faded. Perisere zoomed the view out from the frigate and selected his next target. The incoming fire had reduced and there were now only two webifier streams tugging at the Glorious Death, but the ship was still dangerously vulnerable and another screech signalled that a small but dangerous fraction of the battleship's firepower was still finding its target. Perisere made a quick mental calculation. He could take maybe one more of the frigates before his armour was stripped bare. His repairer was making good some of the damage, but the module would be burned out in a matter of minutes - less even. This did not look good.

Perisere had not responded to the crew member's report on the warp drive and he knew that one interruption was all that the crewman would dare make. He had never met the man face to face; the crew was always hired via an intermediary and the ship's electronic eyes pointed outwards, not inwards. He paid over the odds this way but it was just better. All he ever heard was their voices. This one was fairly high pitched: too much of a worrier, although in this case with a considerable degree of justification. It was nothing like the gravelly voice of the last one: “I will be right behind you,” he had always said. Perisere shuddered at the recollection.

The Glorious Death spun silently as its orbit began to process around the battleship, Perisere mentally willing the third set of thrusters into action. This would buy a little time, but there was barely 10% of armour left, according to the ship’s sensors. The armour repairer ground out another cycle and went dead, circuits reduced to ash as the module’s temperature finally went critical. The crew member took the opportunity to appraise Perisere of this fact. “Also, sir, I can report that the warp drive is fully functional at this time,” the man added, with a nervous quiver in his voice. Perisere was indignant at the man’s impertinence, so much so that he barely registered the arrival of the next wave of shells and the loss of almost all of the remaining armour. The Glorious Death’s target ship was holding well against the blasters’ fury; a webifier beam snaked back from the Glorious Death to its prey, but the frigate was somehow managing to maintain a decent speed.

Vingilo would not have been so disrespectful. “I will be right behind you.” That was all he ever said, no matter what the order was. Vingilo was a man who very much knew his place in the scheme of things. Unfortunately the Revered Freedom had come to something of a sticky end in an unexpectedly barbaric corner of the Essence region about two years ago, and Vingilo with her. Four cruisers had ambushed the ship after it had engaged a destroyer in a veldspar belt. Then, as now, they’d got the ship pinned down and were chewing away at its armour, but Perisere had managed to slip out of range of their warp scramblers. But this was not the way he did things. He’d secured enough bounty to pay for the Revered Freedom’s replacement fifty times over (and no end of identikit replacement crew members), and he was going to take down as many of those damned pirates as he could. “I take it, sir, you are staying to fight, and I am going to die,” Vingilo had said to him as the ship spun back into blaster range of the cruisers. A rare breach of protocol. “I am Vingilo, and I will be right behind you,” he had added, taking strange care to mention his name. Not long afterwards the Taranis was torn apart in a violent explosion, and Perisere’s pod catapulted into the rubble at the end of the belt before making a swift getaway to the nearest station. It had taken even less time to find a replacement ship and crew than he had expected. He hadn’t taken down any of the cruisers in the end. However it was his birthday, he realised, so overall not a bad day.

Perisere was jolted back to the present. The current target wasn’t going down but he was, and fast. 50% hull gone. None of the frigates had fitted a warp disruptor or, incredibly, none of their pilots had the brains to use one. This was his last chance to escape. But this was not the way he did things – he could afford a hundred replacement interceptors and a hundred thousand replacement crew, and with a bit of good luck he could take down that frigate. But then again… Perisere felt a chill down his spine. Fear gripped him. Reluctantly he willed the warp drive into action, but the fear grew stronger. The ship spun around into alignment and its frame was catapulted into the warp tunnel in no more than a couple of seconds. The crew member was undoubtedly breathing a large sigh of relief as he tended to the ship’s broken shell, but Perisere grew more tense. "You'll get to see another fight," Perisere muttered into the intercom, with a scowl on his face.

The ship shuddered with improbable acceleration and stabilised at its blistering top speed, barely impeded by the pounding that the ship’s structure had received a moment ago. Perisere made another quick mental calculation. Seventy AU at thirteen or so AU a second, well that would be just a matter of seconds. It would soon be over, and nothing had happened so far. Soon over. Soon over. The sides of the warp tunnel streaked past like a powerful wind blowing through the very fabric of space. Almost there. Almost there. But a whisper! Barely perceptible. A low gravelly voice. Perisere shuddered again.

“I am Vingilo, and I am right behind you.”