Follow The Leader

The Nightstalker and its six escorts accelerated in pursuit of the cloud of fighters. The Eye was on tactical, and reviewed the sensor reports.

"Five thousand, six hundred and forty-three marks, accelerating at eight standard gravities from Suburbia Prime. They're sticking together." The Eye paused for a moment, and a cloud of tiny false-color dots covered the bridge's main view-screen.

Jolt, sitting in the captain's chair, narrowed her eyes. "Their energy storage capacity is limited. If they're going to jump, they'll have to do it soon."

She regarded the cloud of mauve-colored dots. "Do we have fragment bombs?"

The Eye checked her armory display. "Yes, sir, we do."

"Give me a rack of torpedoes with frag bombs. Thresher, relay that to our wingmen. Let's take as many of them out as we can while they're still vulnerable."

Thresher was at the communications station. "Done. They'll fire at our command."

Jolt turned to the First Mate, who was standing beside her. "Fire at your discretion."

The First Mate tensed and turned to a console. "Transfer fire control now."

The Eye complied, tapping buttons on her tactical console. "Done."

The First Mate entered an attack plan, explaining as he manipulated the controls. "If I understand you correctly, Captain, you wish to deploy the bombs just in front of the leading edge of fighters, resulting in kinetic kills as the targets accelerate into the shrapnel."

Jolt nodded. "Precisely."

The First Mate consulted his display. "Between our launchers and the other six ships, we have forty warheads for the first salvo. All racks loaded -- firing."

From the sides of the blade of the spade-like Nightstalker, small cylinders rolled from the launcher racks on the side. The escorting corvettes, stubby cylinders with a pair of movable, wing-like struts with thrusters on the end mounted on one side next to a heavily-armored bridge module, fired more missiles into the cloud of ordnance from their single launcher racks opposite the bridge.

Computers traded targeting information, then the thrusters of the missiles ignited. A standing wave of neutrino pairs was constrained on one side by a nanoscopic gravity gradient, created by a thin film of stable strange matter. To oscillate at its desired wavelength, the standing wave had to attempt to push the barrier out of its frame of reference; the magnetic moment of the neutral gravity band gap skipping forwards through space-time generated blinding light and heat, which was conducted away from the apparatus by a cloud of vaporizing coolant. The missiles skipped forwards through space, leaving a trail of glowing gas.

An additional set of band gaps closed around the standing wave, this time producing thrust not in ordinary space-time, but in the curved and distorted dimensions of hyperspace. The missiles seemed to curve away as their thrust vectors were forced into a time-line with a non-zero imaginary component, disappearing from the local light-cone on a partially time-like path to their targets. This similarity to a naval torpedo, skimming under the surface of an ocean, led missiles with faster-than-light thrusters to be called "torpedoes".

The torpedoes completed their brief parabolic skip in imaginary time slightly ahead of the front of the cloud of fighters. A charge of chemical explosive sent kilogram-sized chunks of iron into a cloud of kinetic impactors.

The fighters were already traveling at a quarter of the speed of light, following a common vector out of the Suburbia system. The oncoming projectiles vaporized the few fighters that were struck; the survivors scattered, and the advance halted as the formation began to dissipate like a cloud.

Jolt watched the screen as the interrocitor observed the flashes of the exploding fighters. The computer collated the casualty figures to her command display. "Excellent. The first salvo literally decimated the targets -- 10 percent casualty rate."

Thresher, manning the communications station, registered hails from a group of a dozen torpedo frigates patrolling the Suburbia system. With the advance of the fighters temporarily halted by the barrage from the faster corvettes, these vessels could surround and bombard the cloud of small vessels, closing off the escape vectors for the small ships. "We have fire support -- I think we have them bottled up."

The Eye scowled. "Wait a minute -- something's coming!"

Twenty huge battleships materialized from deep hyperspace, re-entering normal space-time in a scattered cloud that rapidly approached the cloud of fighters. The neutral particle cannon of the Reyll war-ships fired.

The beams faded away, twisting away into hyperspace, and re-appeared as scorching beams of energy that struck the approaching corvettes. One bolt struck the Nightstalker amidships, disrupting the main power reactor. The Eye cut the throttle rather than deplete the ship's supply of stored energy, as did the other corvettes. "Twenty marks -- out of nowhere! Main power down, recovery in thirty seconds. Breaking off pursuit."

The surviving fighters -- some five thousand ships -- returned to their former vector, approaching the battleships. Jolt and the First Mate watched as the fighters triggered their jump drives and disappeared, one by one, from the screen.

Left Behind

A second episode, the theme music swells again and you're watching a pile of smoking rubble that used to be a fortified entrance to the East Pole police station on Suburbia.

Jolt was still looking at the skies as The Eye approached her. "Jolt? Are you all right?"

"What just happened?" Jolt turned to look at The Eye.

"It looks like M-Seven just launched their attack. We need to scramble!" The Eye was agitated.

"Where's Thresher?" Jolt turned back to the police station.

"I'm up here!" Thresher, lying on his chest, legless, peeked over the edge of the police station roof. "Don't worry about me, get after them!"

Jolt ran towards the smoking crater that used to be the entrance to the installation. "No way!"

She leaped into the air and flew up to Thresher's position. The cyborg had retracted his chainsaw; the bottom half of his body was missing. He pushed himself up and turned his head to look at Jolt, reaching for her with his right arm. She grabbed his extended hand and lifted it over her shoulder, supporting his torso with her other arm. "I'm not leaving a friend behind!"

They rejoined The Eye in the courtyard, and proceeded to the barracks. In a room adjacent to the lockers a scout suit waited in its creche. Jolt had the arm and shoulder assembly unmounted and the breastplate opened, then carefully manhandled Thresher into the apparatus. The breastplate resealed and the spinal sensor array that would normally sync up with neural impulses in the lower back bound to Thresher's control bus.

Thresher stepped out of the creche, and walked in a circle to test his improvised legs. "Thanks a bunch, boss! Now let's get a move on!"

They strode purposefully towards the dry-docks, entering the underground complex leading to the landing bays. Rejoined by the crew of the Nightstalker, the First Mate turned to Jolt. "They found Arsenal's body at one of the blast sites. It appears he's dead."

"I was afraid of that." Jolt doubled her pace. "He has a bad habit of walking into ambushes."

They took their positions on the bridge of the corvette, strapped themselves into their chairs, and prepared for take-off.

The spade-shaped starship started with a jerk, hovered in the air for a moment, and then shot straight up into the air, blade first, leaving the stricken police star-port behind. The horizon curved beneath the Nightstalker as the sky went black.

Once retrieved, Arsenal's hand-held computer had already sent its final message. Jolt reviewed the simulation of the fighter and forwarded it to The Eye, who was at the helm. "Anything on sensors? Have the fighters jumped already?"

The Nightstalker was joined by a half-dozen other corvettes that were sweeping the space around Suburbia Prime for traces of the swarm of one-man star-ships. "Not yet. We've got them!"

"Initiate pursuit -- we're going hunting!" Jolt's eyes narrowed as she braced for acceleration.

The Show Must Go On

The episode began, the well-known theme tune to "Honor Guard" played on your viewing device as a distant shot of the Nightstalker, recorded by an interrociter camera feeling reflected light from some three light years away on Sedgewick Station through a nanoscopic crack in hyperspace, zoomed in to show the stricken garden spade shaped vessel, and zoomed further to an airlock on the right side of the hull.

Thresher stepped out of the airlock and into deep space, extended his right arm, and fired a grabber on a trailing line from his bulky mechanical forearm. The spongy ball clung to the hull of the Nighstalker a few hundred meters ahead, where greebles sparked beneath a blackened and blasted section of grey hull plating.

He reeled in the line, pulling himself along the hull. In theory, Thresher could have used his thrusters to fly over to the damaged section, or simply walked along the hull. In practice, tethers looked cool and were marginally safer.

The cyborg approached the damaged section of hull. Neural impulses that, under more hospitable conditions, would have been speech were converted into data and sent back to the ship.

"Thresher here. I've got some serious arcing under this panel -- I don't think isolating the damaged conduit helped."

"Understood. I'll tell the Chief that the starboard control bus is flaky." It was Jolt's watch; she was on the bridge, coordinating repairs.

Thresher's metallic feet locked on to a section of undamaged hull and his mechanical left hand folded into his forearm and a chainsaw blade extended from the back of his hand. Working carefully, he used it to remove the brown and black mottled section of damaged hull, exposing a partially melted junction between two networks of conduits. Thresher surveyed the damage. "No way we're landing like this. These pretty sparks mean we're leaking gas."

"The only drydock in jump range is down Suburbia's gravity well. It's the East Pole or we spend the next weeks getting our sorry asses towed back to Sedgewick Station." The First Mate of the Nightstalker was a dashing young Fleet officer, one Benito Franco, fresh from the Executive Officers' Academy. His stentorian delivery of damage reports and gung-ho military attitude made him a significant supporting character.

He turned to Arsenal, who was sitting in a chair, reviewing his notes on a small handheld terminal. "Can you get us into the atmosphere with your force field?"

"Yes, sir, I can. The most conservative approach would be to provisionally patch the hull breaches and try to turn everything off in the damaged areas. I'll surround the Nightstalker with a screen and we'll do a simple powered descent in police airspace. That way, even if my screen should fail, we'd be able to make a controlled surface landing."

"Thresher says we have deep internal damage. Those pirates really kicked the crap out of the Nightstalker." Jolt was sitting in the command chair in the center of the bridge, which she turned to face Arsenal and the First Mate.

Jolt was a mutant -- the surface of her body produced vast amounts of static electricity. She wore a skintight matrix of actuators, sensors, and capacitors embedded in a suit that contained her electrical discharges and enhanced her strength and reflexes and powered an antigravity belt and thruster pack. She was a marvel of plastic surgery, an impossibly statuessque perennial pin-up, unapproachable and untouchable.

"I have another option. I believe I can patch the ship's state." Arsenal paged through his notes.

"What do you mean?" Jolt was impatient.

Arsenal continued. "Before Commander Cody commandeered the Nightstalker, I was practicing using my scanning powers on the ship. I discovered something interesting -- objects have a kind of suprisingly memorable being-song. If I can remember a little bit of the song, and play it back into the original matter, I can restore its previous thermodynamic state."

"Boo. Technobabble." Jolt shrugged.

Arsenal looked a little peeved. "I did my best to make it acessible. I originally wanted to call my object-memories a being equation I use to interpolate the state equation--"

"It doesn't help." Jolt drummed her gloved fingers on the armrest of the captain's chair.

Arsenal looked at his notes briefly, then looked up. "I can restore the ship to its state before it was commandeered."

"You're kidding!" Jolt looked surprised. "Well, why not? Let's give it a try!"

"There are risks. I've never patched state on anything as complex as the Nightstalker. I suggest we treat it as an emergency field repair, and have the ship thoroughly tested on the surface." Arsenal looked up from his notes.

"Sounds good. Do it now!" Jolt looked impatient.

"It might not work. The ship could be left in a state our technicians cannot repair." Arsenal flipped through his notes, desperately trying to summarize.

Jolt interrupted him, calling the Eye in engineering. "Hey, Eye! Are we gonna die in the next half-hour?"

The Eye appeared on the viewscreen. She was a lithe female with cream-colored fur. Her eye-sockets were covered with mirrored implants, and a large, oval amulet in the form of an eye was attached to her upper torso. "My sources say no."

Jolt turned to Arsenal. "Just do it."

"Very well." Arsenal fell into a trance.

The lights dimmed and then began to flicker madly. A strange, irregular vibration shook the starship. A few moments later, the lights went out.

Arsenal looked up from his chair, a somber look on his face. "Oh, crap."