The Deadliest Catch
Space
“Detach parasites. Good hunting.”
“Virtue-1 detached.”
“Virtue-2 detached.”
Hakar listened to his counterparts sound off, then go quiet. As each whaling gunboat separated from the mothership, it vanished behind a wall of radio silence. They could communicate by laser, but there was nothing to say. Not yet. Everyone knew what they had to do. If you didn’t, you died.
His turn. He flipped the lever and squeezed his foot on the throttle, and watched the mothership fall away on the screens.
“Virtue-3 detached.”
Despite her low-profile coating and sleeping reactor, the Supreme Virtue was still a freighter, with a large sensor signature. She had to wait half an hour from the whaling location or they would risk alerting the prey. Even cows could flee or put up a vicious fight if forewarned, and you never knew how close the bulls might be lurking. He recited this wisdom to himself. It made him feel older, wiser. Like he wasn’t still new to this.
Minutes ticked by, one by one.
This was the worst part. In the moment, there was no time for anxiety. After the fact, you were triumphant or you were dead. But before it, there was just a slow grind of apprehension. Pleione had told him he would get over it, but three sorties later and he still felt the same. Maybe he just wasn’t cut out for this.
He looked round at her, floating there in the gunnery harness behind him, hands and feet on the controls for the main gun and flak cannons. Pleione was a war veteran, who cut her teeth on Magnate raiders in the waypoint systems. She was used to watching and waiting, for weeks on end. She didn’t fidget like he did. She just sat there, staring at her screens, watching stars scroll past too slowly for the human eye to see.
“How long are you going to keep staring at me?” She looked over her shoulder and caught Hakar’s eyes. He panicked for an instant and almost turned back, trapped in indecision, then realised this had made his decision for him.
“Are you this interested in every combat veteran you meet? There’s no shortage of us. Or is it just the saz? I’d think you’d be over it now, you’re no stranger to ship work.” She stretched out her arms to the controls, watching the way her nanolayered spacesuit shifted to maintain a seal. “My husband always says he envies crews.”
Hakar jerked back round, flushing and wincing as that last sentence snuffed out a suppressed yet resilient flame of hope inside him. His eyes darted to the bridge’s last occupant, commanding officer Alshain, who granted him the small mercy of not visibly reacting to the altercation.
Pleione sighed behind him. “You’re too jumpy. You need a cool head for this, you should work on that.”
“I don’t know if I’m really cut out for this.”
“We weren’t cut out to fight decades of total war, and look where we are now. Humans weren’t cut out to live in space, but we’ve changed ourselves to thrive. There’s nothing more you can do each time around than try to better yourself and others.”
“That’s, uh...”
“What the priest told me when I asked her if I should volunteer for combat duty. Modified a little for history.”
“Thanks, I guess.” Hakar felt rather adrift.
“Why’d you sign up, anyway?” Pleione put the screws into her captive audience. Hakar had dreamed of the day she started talking to him. He hadn’t wanted it to be like this.
“Well... I was a dockworker before, cargo loader, but I was alright on the flight sims...”
“So you wanted to make a better buck, huh?”
“No, I...”
He snapped shut as the light flashed red. Alshain’s clipped voice cut across the silence. “V2 flashing us, reporting contact. Checks, bringing up.” Screens shifted, showing a slowly rolling asteroid ahead, a full kilometre across. A half-dozen black specks moved across it, letting loose occasional twinkles of light. The drones were harvesting. Speakers crackled to life, filling the bridge with the faint, stuttering screech of dronesong.
Hakar raised his hand and clasped the sign of ascent around his neck. By mastering this world he would elevate himself and others to the next. If the providence of God’s creation smiled on them today, they would weld another strut to the work of Ascension. And he would go home alive.
“Having difficulty deciphering. Others report same.” Alshain fiddled with his console. “They must have updated. We’d better not wreck them, we need their codes.”
“On the upside sir, that’s a bonus for us if we grab a brain intact.” Pleione reached back and slapped Hakar on the shoulder. “Stakes are raised today. You’re a good pilot, so don’t screw up.”
Hakar didn’t feel very encouraged. He breathed deeply, tried to calm down. To start half-meditating like his father had taught him. That kept you calm and alert, if you could pull it off. Foot clasping the throttle, hovering just above the point of thrust. The drones might not have spotted them yet, but an engine flare would definitely give them away.
And then they moved. The drones stopped feeding and skittered over the asteroid, then off into space and away, flares lit.
“Dammit.” Pleione spat. “Spotted, they’re running.”
“Boost.” Alshain ordered. “We can run them down, we’re faster. Just watch out for return fire.” He keyed the intercom. “Engineering, output up to combat ratings. We’re going live.”
“Boosting.” Hakar squeezed the throttle, and with the other two gunboats raced after the fleeting workers. Just over a minute now until they passed the asteroid, and then a few handfuls of seconds before they were in weapons range. And if they didn’t pick them off with opening shots, the drones could turn and shower them with plasma. Judgement time.
“Something’s bugging me...” Pleione raised her voice over the crescendoing hum of the thrusters, as the asteroid passed beneath them. “Why are they running?”
“To... get away from us?” Hakar had enough on his plate without her distracting him.
“Drones don’t run if there’s no point. At this range, they know they can’t get to safety, so they should be standing and fighting around the asteroid.”
“Maybe they’re just stupid!” Hakar turned and snapped at her. Maybe she could carry on a conversation on the brink of a combat situation, but he couldn’t. “So what, nobody knows how drones think!”
“That, or...” She started looking around the screens. “Or safety is closer than we...”
A blazing white lance crossed the sky, terminating in a brilliant explosion.
“V2! We lost V2!” Alshain shouted above the screaming alarm. “Evasion!”
Hakar yanked the controls and span the ship as shouting filled the air. “Yes sir! Random walk active! Where is it? Why didn’t we...”
“I don’t know! V1, can you see it?” Every screen showed blankness, save for stars, the asteroid, and distant fleeing worker drones. “Passive is blank, active can’t see a thing!”
Another bolt of plasma passed bare metres from their bow, whiting out the cameras.
“Wait, there’s a... no it’s... there... I can’t keep a lock! V1, do you see it?”
“Oh no...” Pleione’s voice was laced with fear. Hakar had never heard that before. But he knew she was right, and naked terror cut through the adrenaline of combat. “Ghost! It’s a ghost! How the hell did they get this far? They haven’t been sighted within five jumps!”
Hakar pulled the gunship back towards the asteroid, desperately scanning the sensors for any sign of the enemy. Another shot burned the sky, going wide once more. The gunboat light cannons hurled shots back, but they sailed into nothingness. They weren’t even sure where they were aiming.
This is impossible! screamed Hakar to himself as he hurled himself around in his harness with g-forces. How can we fight it this way? We have to...
“V1 has it! Run too hot, lit itself up!” Alshain hammered at his console, and the signal popped up flagged on Hakar and Pleione’s screens. Faint and flickering, but there.
“Got you!” Pleione snarled, and the ship reverberated with cannon fire. The flicker darted aside, lightning fast, spiralling between shots and closing in.
“It’s too fast! Too small and too-”
V1 blossomed into a tiny, transient sun. The warrior drone recovered from its shot and rolled into a new position
Hakar felt a numb panic fall over him. All the others were dead. He hadn’t wanted this. He thought it would be glamorous. He was going to die. He didn’t want to die yet. The silent wall was scary. He’d come back, but what as? He always intended to live a pure life next year. He had to get back to the ship, no matter how long the chance. The gunship zig-zagged away, dashing towards the asteroid, careening wildly over the surface pursued by the invisible assassin and its white-hot knife.
“Slow down, Hakar! I can’t get a shot!”
“Are you crazy? That thing will fry us! We have to get back to-”
“Hakar!” Alshain’s voice raised itself above the argument. The tone of command grasped basic circuits in Hakar’s brain and wrenched him back to reality. “Perform standard evasion. That’s an order. Trust your gunner and give her a chance.”
He’s right. The ship is too far.
Don’t run if there’s no point.
He slowed down, regained control. Worked with the computer’s random walk to skim the asteroid, watching the flickering signal come closer to them, burning brighter every moment. How long since the last shot? 3... 2...
The drone darted sideways from another hail of fire. Still too fast. A ridge approached behind him, the lip of the scar of some ancient collision.
1...
He hurled the ship down, and the plasma lance detonated on the ridge as he passed it, whiting out sensors and showering the hull with debris. “Agh! Fuck!” Someone spat. Hakar thought it might have been himself, before realising the voice was Pleione’s. The superheated cloud buffeted the ship, hurling it away. But their hunter was surely only seconds behind.
Hakar gripped the controls, and sent the ship flying back in the other direction. Thermals recovered to show a wall of burning gas and dust dispersing, that obscured all the stars and rock behind it.
“Hakar, what the fuck...”
“If it’s dumb enough it’ll...”
The drone entered the cloud, protected from the heat by its glossy resin armour. Clear as day on the sensors, a black mass cold as the background of space stood out amid the fiery mist. Pleione fired, and a slug of iridium punched straight into the heart of the creature and out the other side in a spray of plasma and liquefied metal.
“Die, you bastard!” she screamed. A hail of flak pummeled the drone, and then a second shot from the main gun tore through its guts. The creature was blasted away and bounced off the asteroid, then floated silent.
There was no sound in the gunship except the hum of strained systems and the sound of their breath. And then it filled with a ragged cheer.
“It’s dead! We’re alive!” Hakar could scarcely believe it. He had prepared himself for another orbit, but here he was living and breathing with the others. He glanced at them. Alshain was busy trying to talk to the mothership. Pleione was looking at him again.
“Don’t just stare, kid. Send a harpoon to pick it up.”
“Huh... oh, y-yeah...” He scrabbled over the controls, and despatched one of the ship’s autonomous thruster units to collect the corpse.
“That thing’s a warrior drone, with ghost resin and a plasma lance. It’s worth its weight in dust. Technos would kill for it. We lost two crews fighting it, we can’t leave it.” She sighed. “Dammit. We were totally outclassed. Plasma shells, new electronics... that stuff needs to filter down from the military already, if the drones are raising their game this much.”
“Do you think with the breakdown over they’re working up to fight the Core?” Hakar watched the body come closer. It was smaller than his gunship, maybe twice the size of a modern fighter. Gel trailed out of the gaping wounds, not yet congealed.
“Who knows? Not me. Not even the technos know how drones think. But I wanna know how you think. You never finished telling me why you signed up. If it’s not the money, then what? Glamour?”
“Not... exactly...” Hakar chewed the words, then sighed. “There’s a girl I like. Worked on the same line as me at the docks. She never noticed me and...”
Pleione’s uncontrollable giggling cut him off. “Really? That’s why? Lemme give you some advice, Hakar. When we’re back from this mission we’ll get a bonus for this catch. Take it, quit, and go invite her out to dinner, and ask her to start a relationship. That’s what my husband did, when we got back from the War. The rules are the rules for a reason.”
“I guess...” Hakar watched the drone come ever closer. That thing had almost killed him, he thought, as it slowly rotated. The lance crawled into view. Rumour had it the Magnates had deployed them, but rumour had it that the Magnates did everything under the stars. Then a cold bolt of realisation hit him, and he froze.
I am about to die.
It’s playing dead. We crippled it, but the lance is intact. Drones are smart these days, it’s just waiting for a chance.
The lance rotated, moving with the drone, turning to face directly at the ship and-
“Hakar!” Pleione shouted, and he started. “We got the drone. Get on with picking up the salvage and bodies before the mothership gets here. Heaven above, you’re lucky I was watching the thing. If it’d pulled a trick on us with you zoned out like that we’d all be space dust now.”
“Uh, yeah, sorry.” Hakar scrambled for the controls and tethered the drone, then flew off in the direction of the other gunships’ wreckage. The plasma lance turned past again, with the natural motion of the rolling corpse.