Mad Dog Read online

  Boneyard Dog #2,

  Mad Dog (v1)

  Copyright 2018 by Andrew Beery

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank my wife, Lori, and my two daughters, CJ and Jackie, for putting up with me while I wrote this latest book. Any similarities between people in this book and my immediate family and friends are purely intentional. Of course, I wouldn’t be much of a pastor if I didn’t acknowledge God – to Him be all the glory! To keep up to date on all my books… be sure to follow me on Amazon by clicking the +Follow button on my author's page!

  Chapter 1: Dog Fight

  You know, there are some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed. This was one of those days. My head hurt. There was blood everywhere. My ship was shot full of holes and leaking more gases and fluids than a nineteen-seventy-six Chevy Vega… the one with an aluminum block. I should have just pulled the sheets up and rolled over when I had the chance… I’m Admiral of the Fleet, Jeremy David Riker. My friends call me ‘Dog.’

  Six hours earlier…

  "Prepare for Battle Stations," I said calmly as I walked briskly on to the bridge of the Galactic Order Dreadnought Gilboa.

  Five minutes earlier I had been in the shower when I received a private, priority one, encrypted message from the Tas. The Tas were a slug-like race who were also the curators and guardians of powerful Ancestor technology. They were our allies in a war against the Defilers.

  The Defilers were an enemy we knew precious little about – other than the fact they were utterly ruthless. The sole ship that we had captured, at the start of humanities' involvement with the war, was a small fighter. It self-destructed about an hour after we pulled it into our shuttle bay. In the process, a member of my crew died, and several more were gravely injured… including the Marine Commander and my friend, Colonel Mike Morrison. That had been six months ago.

  The one thing we had discovered was that the enemy used Human-Neanderthal hybrids as forced labor. The corpse we had recovered had an Ancestor inspired device implanted near the corpus callosum in his brain. This alone, gave a clue as to its function.

  The corpus callosum was the main data conduit between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. It was the perfect place to highjack or insert signals into the brain. It was, also, obvious from the autopsy my wife had performed that this device was responsible for the death of the individual we had found. Dead men tell no tales.

  The Tas had reached out to us three times over the last several months. It never boded well when they did. I had no expectation that today would be any different. I had the ship’s AI decode the message. As I expected, the news wasn’t good.

  The Defilers attacked a small colony world in the Stanis system on the outer fringes of the Beehive Cluster… and therefore outer fringes of the Galactic Order. The attack was not without purpose. The enemy had apparently discovered a new cache of Ancestor technology.

  The Defilers craved Ancestor technology. Unfortunately, they were brutal in their quest for it. Our enemy had literally committed complete and utter genocide on multiple occasions to acquire said technology. Of course, the real question is why did they want it? Every time they acquired something new… it seemed they immediately put it to use acquiring more Ancestor tech.

  We had a small window of opportunity to intercept the Defiler dig-team before they disappeared into the unknown. The Faqqa, named after the recently destroyed Taserite homeworld, was the Gilboa’s newly constructed sister ship. They had managed to disable or destroy the three of the four Defiler motherships that had invaded the Stanis system. They were in a standoff with the fourth.

  Without those motherships, the Defiler dig team was stuck on the planet's surface.

  If history was any indication, the enemy would send a fleet to engage the Faqqa. Even dreadnoughts had their limits. Send enough firepower against a target, and that target eventually goes down. That was why we needed to get to Stanis as fast as possible. It was simple math… the cruelest type… two dreadnaughts were harder to kill than one.

  If we could win this engagement, it was possible we could recover the artifacts that had been discovered. These would be turned over to the Tas for safekeeping. It was my hope that we could capture some of the Defilers themselves. To that end we had some new toys the Tas had given us for this expressed purpose.

  The Tas had finally relented and given the Gilboa, Yorktown, and Faqqa limited access to FTL communications. The Tas ambassadors retained control of the tech, but they would allow us to pass messages between our three ships.

  Commander Shelby, my First Officer, vacated my command chair and stood by its side.

  “Status, Number One?”

  “The Chief Engineer reported the primary fusion manifolds are sealed back up. We are a go for full power and Skip Drive.”

  "Very Well, Comms… give me ship-wide."

  “Aye Admiral. Channel is open.”

  “Attention crew of the Gilboa. This is Admiral Riker. I have just received intel that places our enemy in the Stanis system. The Faqqa has engaged the enemy, and we have won the first round. That said, we've all been here before. We can expect a sizeable force to counter-attack.

  “As the Gilboa is only one short jump point away, we are going to be joining our sister ship. I don't expect trouble as we emerge but given the pasting that the Yorktown took last month, we need to be ready for anything. We jump in fifteen minutes. We should emerge twenty minutes after that. You have that long to get ready to go to battle stations. It is my intent to exit Skip Space in a little over a half an hour loaded and ready to hunt bear. Riker out.”

  “Sir?” Shelby asked.

  I explained the situation as outlined by the Tas.

  “It might be worth asking our Ambassadors if they have any more information on the artifact that the Defilers are attempting to recover,” the Commander said.

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  Our ‘Ambassadors' were a pair of Tas that traveled about the ship in a special high-pressure module. The Tas were a hive race, so they had only a very limited sense of self-identity. Many abstract concepts such as names… were foreign to them. As a result, all Tas were referred to as Tas and or their function. Since a Tas is psychologically ill-suited to be alone, they always travel in groups. In our case, we had a pair of Tas that served as liaisons between us and the Tas Hive.

  I tapped a couple of buttons on the armrest of my command chair. A pinging sound indicated I had requested a conversation with the Ambassadors. The Tas were currently in their specially modified quarters.

  A moment later, a holographic slug-like creature with squat legs and a nose-mouth appendage that was tipped with thousands of undulating cilia shimmered into view in front of me. The proboscis served as both mouth and hand. Communication was via the undulations of the cilia as they had no vocal cords.

  A synthetic voice came from the hologram.

  “Greeting Admiral Jeremy Riker. The Tas were expecting your call. Was your copulation pleasant?”

  There was a muffled chuckle from somewhere in the bridge.

  Had I mentioned that I was not in the shower alone? My wife, Lori, was with me when the urgent call from the Tas came in. One of the problems dealing with alien species is they don't always view social boundaries the same way as we do. What was interesting was that Commander Shelby was turning red trying not to laugh. I decided to treat the inquiry as for the polite banter that it was intended to be.

  "Yes, thank you for asking. I trust you, and your mate, are likewise blessed."

  I tried to ignore the muffled snickers emanating from various stations around the bridge. One stern look from the Commander silenced them.

  "On to why I called if you don't mind."

  “Certainly, Admiral Jeremy Riker. You wish to know m
ore about the artifacts that have been disturbed. Is this not correct?”

  “Indeed, it is.”

  “The vault that was tampered with contained many items left by the Ancestors. Several pose a serious threat to our endeavors to retard the efforts of the Defilers. While they most certainly will attempt to acquire such items, it is our belief that they are not the primary goal of this endeavor,” the Tas said enigmatically.

  “OK, I’ll bite. What was the primary goal of their operation on Stanis?”

  "We have been analyzing the pattern of Defiler incursions. Based on these, we have recently formed a hypothesis. The Tas believe they were seeking a regeneration chamber. The Ancestors, over the many millennia of their existence, acquired vast amounts of medical knowledge. The device, the Hive believes, our enemy is after… can operate at the cellular level to repair and regenerate tissues."

  I scratched my chin. Over the last several months I had grown a beard. I found that when I was deep in thought, my hand would somehow find its way to the aforementioned chin.

  “You mentioned a hypothesis and a pattern of attack. I’d like to hear more about both of those.”

  The Taserites spent the next several minutes explaining their thoughts. I didn’t know whether to be happy to finally have an idea as to what was going on… or to be terrified.

  ***

  “Get those shields back up! Bring us about to six-one-two-mark-four. Maximum sublight!”

  It was the Yorktown all over. As soon as we emerged from Skip Space, we were bracketed on three sides. It was almost as if the bad guys knew when and where we were going to drop out of our jump.

  To make matters worse, we continued to have idiopathic failures all around the ship. Failures we had no good way to explain. It felt like sabotage each time it happened; but each time, just like in the Sol system, we had done an exhaustive search and come up dry. This time, if we survived, I would tear this ship apart – one bolt at a time.

  Just as we fell out of Skip Space, our shields failed… every damn one of them. The odds of that happening were astronomical. Winning the lottery would have been easier.

  The ship barely began to move when the first of the plasma beams began to rake her unprotected hull. The ablative armor held for a little while, but it was never meant to take this type of abuse.

  The ship shook and bucked under the onslaught from three sides.

  “Hull breach deck four!” Mitty yelled. The ship’s cybernetic avatar was on the bridge in his physical form rather than the holographic image he sometimes used in order to be two places at once.

  “Try rotating the ship on its axis until we get those shields back up,” I yelled back as I stood up in front of my command chair. I held on to it to keep the bucking ship from tossing me to the floor.

  Before the words were even out of my mouth, we had several more hull breaches. This was bad. The thoughts running thru my head were probably the same thoughts running through the heads of everyone on the bridge. This could be the Gilboa’s last hurrah.

  I sat back down and forced myself to become calm. A level head was the best way forward at this point. There was no way I was going to allow the Gilboa to go down because of what amounted to a sucker punch.

  “Mister Sherman,” I said in a calm and controlled voice, “unload everything we have on those bastards. No point leaving anything in the bank. We spend it all now or risk losing it.”

  “Aye, Admiral. Firing a full spread of KEWs and lighting up all the plasma turrets. Reactor three scrammed but I’m compensating with number four.”

  Our KEW or kinetic energy weapons had hyper-dense neutronium shells that could punch their way through just about anything. They used an Ancestor-developed technology to manipulate the local Higgs field to reduce their effective mass while they were in storage aboard ship. Absent that mass inhibitor, the ship would have folded in on itself like a beer can being crushed.

  The things scared the bloody hell out of me, but boy were they a kick in the teeth for the bad guys.

  The ship shuddered again as more of the Defiler's weapons raked our hull. Mitty reported a dozen hull breaches. The bridge shook like nobody's business. Panels shorted out all across the bridge, and even the emergency lighting was flickering.

  At about the same time my chief engineer hailed from main engineering. “Admiral!”

  “Give me some good news, Whiskers. Can I get shields back?”

  "That's a good question Dog. We're down to one fusion reactor, and it's iffy. If we lose it, I won't even be able to give you a hot cup of coffee."

  I could tell my Chief Engineer was tired. He almost never called me by my nickname in public and while we were on duty.

  “Do we have enough for a jump?”

  “A short one. Maybe a half light year or so.”

  The bridge was a smoking mess. I wasn't sure what controls were working or not. I made a decision. It was time to go lick our wounds so that we could fight another day.

  “Commander McGraw jump the ship from Engineering. Any place but here. Do it now.”

  ***

  2100.1206.9840 Galactic Normalized Time

  The Eshbaal AI cabal awoke from its eons-long slumber. Its monitoring nodes had detected technology of an order, that although primitive, signaled the evolution of one or more species that could be co-opted to the fulfillment of the Great Primary. Quantum flux waves never occurred in nature. It was time to begin the Mahanaim ordained search.

  Chapter 2: Wounded Dog

  “The good news is despite getting hammered; we only have a few broken bones. The areas of the ship that took the most damage were largely storage compartments. The bad news is that most of our large component fabricators are located in those areas," I said calmly to my senior staff in the Ready room.

  It had been three hours since our pasting in the Stanis system. The Engineering department, especially the nimble J’ni had done a stellar job of sealing the hull breaches.

  "And without those large fabricators, we are going to be hard-pressed to bring any of our damaged fusion reactors online," Whiskers mumbled. He had a massive black eye from a conduit that fell during the repair efforts. "In addition to the fabricators, we lost several cargo transit rails. It's going to be hard to move parts from one section of the ship to another for a few days at least."

  “My men will help any way they can,” Colonel Mike Morrison offered.

  "Thanks, Mike, but the issue is the corridors are too narrow to move any of the big stuff. We can steal parts and components from less critical systems but getting them to where we need them will mean disassembly and reassembly. All that takes time, and there is a good possibility of damaging stuff we really need in the process," the Engineer responded.

  I leaned forward. “Mike may be on to something though. Number One, what’s the status of our interior bulkheads?”

  Commander Shelby checked her tablet. “Three are slightly damaged but should be easily repaired using some of the smaller fabricators. The vast majority are A-OK.”

  I turned to my Engineer.

  “What happens if we secure the components we need and then cut our way out of the ship and walk the parts across the hull to where we need them?”

  Whiskers took a moment to think about it.

  "Aye, that would work. It will still be a pain in the arse, but if we are careful, the damage we cause cutting our way out and back in again should be minimal. We should be able to pull parts from one or more of the reactors to fix one of the three damaged ones. That should give us two working power systems. It's not ideal, but it would be a heck of a lot better than the one reactor we have now."

  I turned to Commander Sa’Mi the Engineering second-in-command.

  “What are the chances your J’ni can get one of those larger fabricators online?”

  The raccoon-like engineer chittered for a second and the VOX on his belt answered my question.

  “Minimal, Admiral. Of the four, two are simply gone. One is half melted. The last
is in an area that we have not been able to get into yet. The fact that all internal sensors in that area are burned out does not bode well… but my team is working hard to access the unit for an eyes-on inspection.”

  “OK, what else can we do?” I asked. “Ideas?”

  Whiskers shook his head. “If we were back in our boneyard, we could harvest all the parts we needed… fabricators or no.”

  Mitty leaned forward and wrinkled his nose. I had learned to understand, as much as a human could, what this particular facial expression meant.

  “Mitty, you look like you’re thinking and perhaps are worried about something. Do you care to share?”

  "Admiral, the Galactic Order does not use boneyards per say, but there is a place where we might find an equivalent. The battle of Gilboa, for which this ship was named, resulted in numerous derelicts. Many of the defense platforms were located in Lagrange points. There is no reason to expect those platforms have moved.”

  I nodded. “You believe we can pick through the wreckage and harvest parts and components we need?”

  “The concern I have is that the system was under the control of the Defilers as of a year ago. There is no way to know if they are still there," he answered in his deep voice.

  "And if they are," I said, "are we in any position to confront the enemy in that system? The answer, of course, is certainly not."

  “There is another problem that we need to address,” Whiskers added.

  I nodded my head. I knew what he was going to say. It was the elephant in the room. Why had our shields failed at such a critical point?

  “We still seem to have a saboteur… and a very capable one,” the Engineer said. “I can’t even begin to imagine how they could have pulled off shorting out the shields without being sixteen places at once.”

  Mitty suddenly looked at the engineer. His nose wrinkled harder and longer than I had ever seen. He leaned forward and reached across the table. He brought up a holographic control panel and actuated the privacy field.

  “Admiral. I have isolated my neural net. I believe I may be the saboteur.”