The Inky Black
Year 2238
Klaxons sounded calling Reginald Harris back to the waking world. Lifting weary eyes he took in his surroundings. He hadn’t a clue what was happening save perhaps the hoped-for mark finally appearing within sensor range of his ship; the Nebula. Haunting this mined-out old sector of the asteroid belt had been inspired. It was a sea of rocks like the old paintings of space depicted and a place where nobody hung their hat. Rocks everywhere of various sizes broken down from planetoids by some overzealous atomic mining some decades before easily shrouded a ship from the sensors of merchant vessels traveling the still active trade route nearby..
He almost wondered if it was a false alarm. A mild buffet in the outer hull, where the common blades all slept and spent their downtime, was the only hint that there was anything to know at all. A sudden, mad shout went over the loudspeaker screaming “Reggie to the bridge! Get yer ass up here! Move move move!” It was captain Thornwood calling for him. Reggie. That’s what they called him, all his shipmates; his friends would too if he had any. Regardless, he started the bounding swim in the zero G environs necessary to reach the bridge.
Entering the inner hull he gripped the riggings; struts securing the center spire to the surrounding walls, and pulled himself along to the spire. The spire had a ladder making it easy to attain the proper level to reach the single habitable ring, the smaller two being there just to balance it, within the ship. He’d done it a thousand times so the journey was no more than 10 seconds. Sliding along the spokes of the great wheel he opened up the airlock door, a safety precaution built in just in case the dual hulls were breached, and fell inside. The microgravity provided by the ring was negligible but let a man feel more in control; as if he stood on something solid. As first mate he had the privilege of frequenting the ring. Most of the crew wasn’t so lucky.
“You called?” was his only greeting. Intent upon his private viewscreen Thornwood gave no reaction for a moment then waved Reggie in, fervently staring all the while.
“Look at this. Look at that ship, boy, she’s … monstrous.”
Staring at the viewscreen Reggie wasn’t sure exactly what his Captain meant. “I see it; a Con-Fed Dreadnought. They’re as big as they get.”
“No! Dammit, you fool, here. Right here!” jabbing his finger into the screen the Captain indicated a sickly yellow thing, faceted like a piece of crystal, in what could only be a standoff position barely 500 kilometers between them.
“That … is an asteroid fragment. We’re surrounded by them. Hiding so ships like that Dreadnought don’t find us.” said Reggie, and he chuckled, raising the captain’s ire.
“Don’t be a fool boy; look! Look at it. Lights.” and the captain’s fingers jabbed repeatedly at the screen, finally settling on a single point with a flashing light.
At first it seemed the light must be reflected from the Con-Fed vessel, then Reggie thought it must be a reflected star but all those possibilities melted away when the ship he recognized started broadcasting.
“This is the CNS Kronus. Pirate captain Thornwood; you are charged with countless crimes against the Galactic Confederation. Surrender or we will be forced to destroy your vessel.”
“Can they see us?” muttered Reggie, dumbfounded.
Laughing the captain shouted out “No! No boy, they’re hailing your ‘asteroid’.” and the bridge crew in the ring laughed with him. “I’ve been listening for five minutes. They don’t know what it is or, rather, they think it’s us!”
“But what is it … exactly?” Reggie asked of his captain. The old Void Strider’s face tensed from jovial to impatient.
“Opportunity, boy. That thing’s an opportunity. One of those big bastards will scuttle the other and we’ll be on cleanup takin’ whatever they have of value. All we need do is run silent for a bit longer.”
Staring at the screen Reggie couldn’t help but wonder. He had a good knowledge of interstellar vessels, especially the ones with an Alcubierre Drive, capable of faster-than-light travel. He, in fact, had studied so many designs that he’d be able to identify anything made after 2100.
“That’s not one of ours.” he stated, matter of factly.
“If it’s not then nothing lost; if so then less competition.” said the captain, sneering and showing his half-there and half-missing teeth.
Reggie wasn’t so sure. To him the whole situation stunk but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. “I felt something in the outer hull, like an impact; what was that?”
Absent-mindedly the Captain continued to stare at the screen, answering “warning shot from the Dreadnought. Took out an asteroid; chunks o’ rock dashed against the hull.”
Nothing sat well with him but, in the absence of other options, Reggie allowed himself to become a spectator. The Nebula’s sensors could detect the Kronus’ active array flashing and scanning constantly, no doubt trying to figure out the unknown vessel. A moment later the unknown vessel moved away slightly and without further warning the Kronus opened fire. It was an overwhelming force of perhaps twenty mass driver rounds, each over a kilogram in mass and launched at incredible speeds, fired into the vessel and striking the center of mass. This full barrage of projectiles each capable of cracking through the crust of a planet or reducing the Nebula, Reggie’s own pirate vessel, to fragments. The pirate’s eyes widened to saucers as he watched, unbelieving in what he saw.
The unknown vessel shuddered under the impact, debris flying away from her at half a dozen points where the rounds had breached the armor, but no atmosphere registered as escaping it’s interior. Without pause it turned, the first obvious action visible since Reggie had laid eyes on it. Unfolding Reggie saw what he assumed to be weapons aiming out towards the Kronus. Something about the way they moved, counterintuitively, in groups of four, almost in a grid pattern and on spindly arms caught Reggie’s attention. Furrowing his brow he pushed in alongside the captain, who grunted an objection, and squinted as lightning flashed between each set of arms each forming an X at what he believed was the port side of the strange ship. At that very moment everything seemed to come apart.
Springing to life at a dozen points along this unknown ship, this stranger, were what registered to the Nebula’s sensors as tiny suns. A powerful, cohesive magnetic field surrounded superheated plasma that flared out in all directions as if barely contained. These weapons answered the Kronus’ simple steel onslaught with fiery death that left a solar flare contrail in it’s wake. Firing it’s thrusters in what Reggie imagined must be tremendous overconfidence aboard the Kronus the massive vessel turned into the fire, showing it’s massively armored prow to the unknown vessel to minimize contact; As a result only two found their mark.
Reggie was witness as part of the drive ring in the most powerful warship built by humanity sheared off; the Kronus’ armor proving to be utterly worthless against plasma fire. Lightning and plasma from the Confederation ships innards was enough for Reggie to register the cause as a catastrophic failure of the ship’s drive reactor despite every safety mechanism the ConFeds could develop. A second shot burrowed through the prow and erupted from her amid ship, atmosphere and fluids venting in both directions. These were mortal wounds.
And then the Kronos fired again. No doubt the crew was realizing, at this point, they had nothing to lose. Three misses from one section of the ship sent mass driver rounds vanishing into the depths of space. Of this second barrage the rest found their home squarely behind the armored prow of the stranger as a massive fireball tore open the side of the ship. Just behind that, Reggie saw, were missiles. Not the heavy nuclear warheads that the Confederation used as their trump card, not yet. Lighter non-sustaining fusion warheads that were designed to saturate defenses and ruin a warship. Any one attack, be it a Mass Driver round or Fusion tipped missile would have been enough to render the Nebula into so much shrapnel but the stranger seemed, if anything, to be angered by it as red light streamed from it’s interior. Reggie had seen ships torn asunder and men laid low and this battle looked more like a man getting torn open than hull and decks of a warship being exposed.
Perhaps the stranger may have been mortally wounded just as the Kronus but it was not dead. Both charged forward and were now far below what was considered point blank range. The inky black between them lit up in a great conflagration that set light to the cosmos and overwhelmed the sensors of the Nebula, all save her video feed. The Kronus dumped every bit of firepower in her arsenal into the stranger with a fury never before seen from a Con Fed vessel. In turn the stranger pelted her with dozens of tiny suns. It would’ve taken only one of the plasma balls to ignite the stored hydrogen, fusion material for weapons and power and even the atmosphere within the Kronus but with this barrage the Dreadnought, pride of the Confederation, began to crumple. .
“The armor” said the captain “it … it did nothing. Knife through butter. That thing could’ve ignored mass drivers and shrugged off a nuke.” He was becoming hysterical and Reggie could see it clearly in his eyes.
“Captain?” something caught Reggie’s attention; the Nebula’s reactors had reactivated in response to the plasma. “Captain, the Dreadnought is going to be destroyed. What are your orders?” A failsafe in the starship, he knew, would kickstart the generation of power in preparation for warp to escape the gravity, heat and radiation of a star she’d drifted too near and the stranger’s weapons had fooled her. “Shit. Shit!” and Reggie recognized the danger as his mind realized as the massive blast wave neared their position. “Kick the thrusters! We’re ghosts!”
Shuddering rough the Nebula let her children know her pain as red lights flashed to show the damage done. They’d been too near the battle from the beginning and the explosion of a ship more than 400 meters long, including its nuclear payload, had been too much. Their hiding place behind a large asteroid turned into their undoing as the blast pushed it right into the Nebula. The rotation of the center ring stopped as the outer and inner hull rent asunder sending the majority of the crew out into the inky black.
The safety harness was all that saved him. The shock of the ship’s impact was enough to dig the straps deeply into his shock frame. He could hear his bones straining against the straps even as his battered body was crushed into them.. He watched a young crewman grabbing at a conduit as the shockwave hit, his arms tearing from their sockets even as he slammed into the opposite side of the bridge. Then he blacked out.
Reginald Harris remembered hearing people around him, lights and movement but it passed and suddenly he was fully conscious again with no idea how long he had been out.
Checking on the helmsman Morrow, one of Thornwood’s chief stooges stated simply “He’s dead.” after the rattling had stopped. “Your orders, Captain?” Morrow’s words were met with silence.
“Thornwood?” inquired Reggie as he looked in the direction he thought must be down and kicked from the ceiling down to where the Captain sat, still strapped into his chair. Suddenly he realized that the topmost portion of the chair was missing and so was the Captain’s head. Ripped from the wall as the ring warped a single square tile of steel had flung through the room like some sort of tomahawk. Buried nearly half a meter into the rear bulkhead it was streaked with blood and, halfway between the Captain’s chair and it’s final destination, floated the Captain’s head. Thornwood had never seen it coming and “more’s the better.” Reggie thought, aware of Thornwood’s panicked state before his untimely end.
Morrow saw it too. “I … that tough old pirate … I never thought.”
“Nobody ever does Morrow. Jenkins! I need a vector!”
“We have inner system,” squeaked Huang, the back-up navigator. He gestured at the limp body of Jenkins, operating the Navigator’s panel at the same time. Jenkins had not locked down the top clip to his harness and the impact had twisted his head nearly all the way off of his torso.
“Huang? Fine. Maybe we can slingshot around this system’s sun to…”
Reggie was about to bark an order when he saw Morrow gesturing towards his Tactical Repeater. Swimming in, cursing the loss of gravity, he got close enough to see. The readout of the specialized radio informed him of something not immediately evident as he realized that the Stranger was not dead. Beyond Morrow Huang added to the chaos as he realized what Reggie already knew. “The hulls are both breached Reggie! Our boys--”
Laser focused, his own station ruined, he kicked off towards the Captain’s chair (now more a stool) and sent Thornwood’s headless body spiraling up and away with a single motion before strapping himself down. “The sea takes unwanted children, Huang! Get us clear of this rock and angle down 22 by 47 degrees to port, bring up weapons and we might get a shot down that ships throat before it even realizes we’re here, and dispose of those,” ordered Harris.
He assessed the situation; the backup life support unit whined as it tried to suck fuel and small debris out of the atmosphere. Other crewmen grabbed the bodies and without any ceremony tossed them off of the bridge even as they strapped down everything possible for battle. The Stranger vented flames in every direction as something inside burned after the battle. Such was the damage to it that, Reggie reasoned, it was disabled. It had to be.
But even as the Nebula began its downwards arc the larger ship began to move. Sluggish, clumsy as compared to before, it nevertheless was a terrifying sight to behold. The Stranger out-massed a Dreadnought, the largest ship ever built and one that absolutely dwarfed the Nebula. In fact the Nebula only had one spinal mounted mass driver to respond with, both requiring her to be facing her enemy. The weapon fired lighter projectiles slower than any of the weapons on the Kronos, but they were still mass driver rounds into a crippled ship.
Realizing their quarry was still alive Morrow paled next to Reggie, considering his options. Reggie knew that Morrow would put a blade in his back if he could but what other options were there? Morrow wasn’t a good officer and he’d never be captain, lacking the charisma and the audacity, but he was a coward and that could be exploited. “Damn it the thing sees us! Morrow, scan the local area! It’s alive and without an ace we’re like to be scuttled!”
The Stranger’s first volley missed as Huang corkscrewed through space. Only four shots even fired, far less than before meaning that the Kronos had done most of the work already. Still its plasma projectiles were deadly and had an effective range much longer than anything he’d seen before so running, he felt, was suicide; hence he chose to fight. “Strafe that gaping wound. Huang, evasive maneuvers!”
Their mass driver caused the entire ship to recoil back and up as it fired and then there was a moment where Huang had to adjust the ship back into a direction where the drive wouldn’t tear them apart. Their vessel’s thrusters had been damaged by its collision with the asteroid and so firing their weapons made for problems maneuvering. Reggie growled as Huang righted their course but stopped his anger when he saw the Stranger’s latest volley sail through where they’d been before firing.
The Stranger’s plasma weaponry traveled at as near the speed of light as to not matter, meaning that, the closer they came, the less time they had to respond; In a dogfight one shot would end the Nebula and her crew would realize it only as soon as the round struck her down. Again an alarm went up as the sensors misinterpreted the Stranger’s shots as tiny stars. Their return mass driver round was flung at more than 30,000 kilometers per second when combined with the ship’s speed and was as impressive and deadly as anything could hope to be. In spite of this, they could see, their barrage of steel did no visible damage to the Stranger.
“We need to bug out,” stated Morrow as he sweat through his shirt, “Repair systems will have warp in a few minutes. We just need to get clear until then.”
“And leave this thing free in human space to kill as it pleases?” retorted Harris, “If it can take down a Dreadnought, then it can take down anything the Con Fed has. Could take down anything we have out here in the Fringe you can be sure!
“We don’t have any weapons that can breach that, you need something Nuclear!” panicked Morrow. His cowardice, Harris realized, could turn quickly against him if things got too bad. Eye contact confirmed that he still looked to Harris, the First Mate, as Captain in spite of his fear but there was no guarantee this would last.
“Nuclear?” his mind raced. He thought of where he was, an asteroid field, and why Thornwood had parked them there, it was near to a shipping lane. Before they crossed this field and it’s star system off as a stop along that lane it was home to a series of mining colonies. “Huang!” he shouted, “check our position. We near any old mining stations?”
“On it!” returned Huang, frantically operating his panel in an effort to pinpoint the nearest mining station.
“Reggie?” Morrow went slack-jawed and sputtered. “Y-you’re not seriously thinking… Mining charges?”
“That’s Captain Harris to you Morrow; and you’re damned right I am.”
Huang squeaked with excitement “I’ve got it Captain!” He was the quick one. “Mining Station Centaur Omega, beacon still operational.”
“Bring up the sensor logs on those inner platforms,” called Harris even as he glared down at his displays, “Those codes we used to get in here; I’m guessing they’re the master codes for the facility.”
“They are” Morrow broke in. “I get good intel, Reggie, even locked the Con-Fed out but what good is it? That thing is after us! We got to bug out!”
“We ain’t bugging!” Harris snapped “And we ain’t friends, Morrow, so don’t you call me Reggie again.”
Huang, little wunderkind that he was, multitasked, keeping asteroid after asteroid in the path of every plasma ball that came their way while Morrow desperately began testing the already-loaded code against the Station. “Captain! Affirmative response from Centaur Omega! We can blow it if we want!”
“And we do want!” shouted Harris. “Set course to buzz within a kilometer of the station’s hull! Get to where that ship’s against the storage platform just by ovaloid rock,” grinned Harris even as two more plasma blasts obliterated the stones they continuously weaved behind. The Nebula shrieked and groaned as they desperately whipped her in an erratic evasive pattern that would’ve hurt her when she was new.
“Repair systems just went down! Damn!” Finally hearing, Morrow caught on, considered and then finally with wide eyes asked “How many do you think will be there?”
“Hopefully they were over-supplied and under-productive,” stated Harris, “We know their auto-factory could have kicked out a thousands of megatons per day and the mining operation shut down suddenly. So we’ll see.”
The Nebula tore past the larger of the two chunks of asteroid that had once been a dwarf planet; skimming its surface even as massive gouts of plasma shattered city sized hunks of material out of the surface. Jutting up from the surface, just over the lip of a cliff and down into it’s crater, was the platform. Huang pulled near and thrust forwards across the rock almost out of sight for cover when the entire ridge in front of them exploded.
Stones tore through the light, battered armor of the Nebula as she ran past. They were going fast, but in the wrong direction, away from the surface. Alarms shrieked, the habitation ring cracked and a large chunk of Hydroponics tore free from the hull only to get caught in the drive field and obliterated in the Nebula’s contrail.
“And there goes the food.” quipped Morrow, his gallows humor returning as he gave up, convinced he was going to die.
Then the drive itself collapsed.
Everything shuddered. The Alcubierre drive ring, technology that warped space and propelled titanic structures across the galaxy ignoring the normal rules of physics, had come free and torn apart taking along with it the Nebula’s twin Fusion reactors. When the drive field went, so did most of their momentum and the emergency thrusters flared driving them towards the dirty snowball of the nearby body. Touching down rough on the surface of the dwarf planet they ground in deep into the dirty snow that made up the outer surface of, nearly buried, and Harris jerked in the Captain’s chair, discovering that the harness had been badly damaged when Thornwood died. Things seemed to slow down. Reggie looked at the bridge crew of the Nebula for the last time.
Huang was unconscious at his station, blood streaming up into the air from the side of his head from where a piece of shrapnel had glanced off his temple. At his own station Morrow was desperately hammering away, trying to get control of the storage platform while laughing hysterically. It had been a desperate hope, Reggie knew it but he thought there had been a chance at both life and to eliminate a threat to humanity.
“I got control! Captain we … we can still…” cried Morrow, returning to himself. “We have a ... a way to detonate the warheads.”
Rising, the Stranger loomed over the planet, sensors barraged them, trying to sort out targets from debris. Even in the thirty seconds it had taken them to cross the distance, the Nebula was already thousands of kilometers distant and all but invisible now separated from it’s reactor but if time was allowed to pass they would be found.
“Do it.” was all Harris said, setting his jaw. Shakily, Morrow pushed the button.
It started as a distant roar as an asteroids worth of nuclear materials detonated in one spectacular flash barely 10 kilometers from the Stranger. It became a black shadow amid a blinding light and the dwarf planet sheared in three. For the crew this turbulence was too much and the last two men left standing on the Nebula were dashed to the floor and their worlds went dark.
In a haze, surprised to be alive and clawing out of a dreamless slumber Reginald Harris awoke to hear words, crackling from interference, breaking through the void “--there are any survivors please--” and then static. Scrambling, and realizing that he had a broken shoulder and collarbone, Harris found Morrow unconcious at his station. He groaned as Harris flailed at the controls in zero gravity , telling Harris he was alive, and Harris frantically tried to operate the communications panel.
“Hello? We’re here! We were attacked!” When there was no response he repeated time and again with increasing urgency “Hello?”. He could see that the batteries that would be charged by the Nebula’s reactor were nearly discharged and the solar panels were all buried. The faint whistle of atmosphere escaping the habitable ring and Reggie could feel the cold of the inky black seeping in. Against all odds he’d survived and the thought of being left to die slow in exile terrified him.
Finally “We read you!” as the signal grew stronger. This is the CNS Hawkeye. Kronus we can’t get a bead on your location. Please activate your distress beacon so we can locate you.”
The Kronus. They thought they’d found the Kronus and it’s crew alive and well. Harris reasoned that, since the Confederation had sent backup, the Kronus had managed to fire off an Arrow; a warp-speed unmanned vessel bearing a pre-recorded message. Knowing this and knowing he’d have a lot of explaining to do, he chose his next words carefully.
“I apologize but this is not the Kronos. My name is Reginald Harris of the starship Nebula. I believe you’ve been looking for us.”
Harris, Morrow, Huang and a lucky few others were taken into custody; imprisoned but alive. Of her 59-man crew only 6 survived. At length some debris from the Kronos were found including its black box but of the Stranger nothing was ever discovered.
In the weeks and months that followed Harris and the other survivors were famously pardoned for past crimes. Someone in the Confederation knew that they had somehow killed whatever killed the Kronos. They were held up as changed men, heroes. To show that they had ‘changed’ (or so they claimed in the news) the lot of them joined the Confederation, becoming citizens, and Confederate Naval Academy.
Already an accomplished spacefarer Harris breezed through. His rise was meteoric as his demonstrated natural leadership netted him promotion after promotion, sometimes at the expense of professional relationships with fellow crewmembers.
A media darling Harris was lauded as "The Pirate with the Heart of Gold" and accepted a position in a branch of the Navy tasked with securing the frontier or “Fringe” against enemies of the Confederation. Ultimately he took command of the CNS Blackburn and helped enforce the will of the Confederation, especially out along the Fringe.
Years later, aboard his vessel, he gazed out at a dark spot in space and, contemplating what he assumed was a black hole, he reflected on how people sometimes forget that only three Protons separate the metal Gold from Lead. Both carry the same weight but only one is precious and the other; pure poison.
“Heart of gold, indeed…” he mused aloud and took a deep pull from the bottle of liquor he kept secret from his crew. Squeezing his eyes shut Reginald Harris forced the memories away, stashed the hootch and departed his chambers to walk the halls of the crew ring...