The Infinity Brigade #3, Stone Breaker Read online

  In reality, they had picked up a replicant who was part of a coordinated suicide mission. The replicant had detonated an explosive charge on the Yorktown in the hopes of degrading their response to a secondary attack by an Ashtoreth clone posing as Senior Fleet Admiral Imera.

  Imera had set the plan in motion several months before. Dragos had been captured and cloned. The Ashtoreth replicant had been put in place in the hopes of just such an opportunity occurring. There were undoubtedly several more sleeper replicants hiding in plain sight… but that would be a problem for another time.

  The coordinated attack took the form of a small armada of GCP ships. Undoubtedly most of their crews were unaware that they were being led by enemy plants. Imera’s flagship led the attack. The ship he commanded, the newly built GCP Titan, was a formable machine of war.

  Ironically, the Titan was equipped with a next-generation weapons system designed by none other than Admiral Kimbridge herself. The system was especially effective against the type of shielding used by GCP ships. As no other powers were currently known to employ hyperfield shields, the systems had never been deployed… until now.

  The Titan’s missiles shredded the Yorktown’s defenses. As a result, the Yorktown had been forced to make an emergency jump into hyperspace. When they emerged, they found themselves inside a dust cloud called a dark nebula. Without the benefit of stars to reference and given the nature of the jump… the Yorktown was effectively lost.

  A week later, I stood in the Operations Center of Marine City. My friend, Lieutenant Jeremy James Hammond, and I were reviewing the live FTL feeds from the GCP Yorktown.

  The irony that the Yorktown was literally lost in space… and yet, we were still in constant contact with it via our quantum entangled communications network, had not been lost on me. Quantum entangled photons were not concerned about such mundane things like location and distance.

  The Yorktown had been making its way slowly through a dark nebula. Her hyperfield jump engines were severely restricted because of the high density of near relativistic particles in the area. It was nearly impossible for the ship’s active shielding to protect the crew from the radiation resulting from collisions with such particles for the milliseconds the shields were down during hyperfield jumps.

  In the end, the boffins on the Yorktown had decided on a risky scheme to create – what Admiral Kimbridge called a snowplow—to clear a path for the Yorktown to fly through. In this case, the snowplow took the form of antimatter explosions detonated in front of the ship to clear its path of the highspeed particles.

  Everything had been working as planned… until it didn’t. After several hours making mini-jumps... the Yorktown arrived at a star system provisionally designated Beta-2.

  To say they jumped out of the frying pan into the fires was an understatement. Within seconds of emerging from hyperspace they were surrounded by hostile ships and had multiple weapons locked on them. To make matters worse, the Yorktown’s hyperdrive was down as well as her active shields.

  We watched helplessly as alien boarding parties made their way onto our flagship.

  “Frustrating isn’t it, Mate?” JJ said as he nodded at the live feeds.

  “Completely,” I agreed. “And to be honest, it pisses me off. They are in the middle of a knock-down, drag-out fight as we are stuck on this rock with no way to help them.”

  “Yeah,” JJ grumbled. “Why should they have all the fun?”

  “Decent men would reach out to help their friends in a time of need like this,” I added cryptically.

  JJ smiled. “Arr ya think’n what I think yer think’n?”

  I returned his smile. “Probably... assemble a volunteer platoon. I think it’s time we schedule a tragic live-fire accident on the shooting range.”

  “I know just the thing to do the trick,” Hammond grinned. “I’ve been wanting to play with some C4 for a while.”

  ***

  The reality of the strange world we live in… is that… because of quantum entanglement, information is not restricted to a specific location at a specific time. The only thing preventing us from being on the Yorktown… and being able to help… was the niggly little detail that our bodies were here, and they were there… wherever ‘there’ was.

  The Ashtoreth had supplied us with a solution to this problem… albeit a distasteful one. Once a marine died, any bio-generation chamber could receive the person’s genetic patterns and create a clone copy. At the same time, a current copy of the marine’s memory engrams could be copied to that clone.

  There were great theological debates as to whether or not a person’s soul was part of the transfer process… and while these debates concerned me… I couldn’t allow myself to be paralyzed by them. There was a greater good at stake and I had to hope the Creator would make allowances for that.

  With all this in mind, our strategy was a simple one. We just needed to die.

  Admiral Kimbridge had put ethical subroutines in place within WhimPy-101 designed to prevent multiple copies of an individual from concurrently existing. Once we were dead however, the ethical subroutines built into WhimPy-101 would no longer apply. We could be resurrected on the Yorktown. It would take a little while for us to fully decant from the bio-regeneration chambers and join the fight, but the med bays were some of the most heavily protected areas of the ship.

  Lieutenant Hammond was as good as his word. In no time we had over a hundred and fifty ‘volunteers’ dying to be on their way to the Yorktown via an FTL data stream.

  I was the first decanted from what we liked to call the pickle jars. Some medical goon was shining a bright light in my eyes. I was hoping it would be Janice Pulaski but alas, unless she had suddenly grown a beard and come down with a bad case of the uglies… I was under the tender care of somebody else. I brushed the light he was shining in my eyes away.

  “Enough with the bright lights already,” I grumbled.

  A second med-tech leaned forward. In my view, she was a vast improvement over my previous tormentor. The female med-tech smiled. It was a pretty smile which I found much more engaging than the flashlight.

  “Well, I’d say he’s ready for action, Commander,” the tech said to someone standing outside of my field of vision.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Ben First said as he stepped around the table and offered me a hand up. “I suspect you will be busy decanting Marines for the next several hours, so I’ll get this one out of your way.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” the tech replied. “The new enhanced bio-generators are an order of magnitude faster than the originals we got from the Ashtoreths. We’ve got nineteen more men and women decanting now and should have the second batch decanted and on their feet in the next twenty minutes or so.”

  Ben whistled. “That is an improvement. I don’t suppose they’ve figured them out enough to handle Human-D’lralu hybrids yet?”

  The young woman sighed. “Sadly, no, Sir. Your mind is already safely buffered and being updated but the bio-generation system was never designed to handle cybernetics. I’m afraid you would have to choose to become fully D’lralu and lose your human engrams or…”

  “…fully synthetic and lose my remaining organic components,” Ben finished. “I suppose I’ll just have to make an effort not to be killed.”

  “That would be best, Sir,” the young woman responded with a wink.

  The Yorktown’s First Officer looked at me for a second. “I’m not sure Cat would approve of the way you got here but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. We could use your help.”

  Over the next several minutes while I got dressed, Ben briefed me on the situation. The bad guys… and we still had no clear idea who they were… had deployed an odd mix of tech. Some of it was quite advanced and others were hopelessly outdated.

  They had managed to create a localized disruption of the Yorktown’s hyperfield shielding. Then they used some type of breaching pod to enter the ship. What was truly astonishing was that the number of en
emy combatants entering the ship through the breach was totally disproportional to the size of the breaching craft. The only logical answer was that the breaching pod contained some type of translocation hyperfield portal technology.

  I knew from reading histories that humanity had experimented with permanent hyperfield portals, but the technology had been abandoned because jump-capable ships had made it obsolete before it was ever deployed. The portal literally allowed a person to walk from one location into another.

  As was typical Cat Kimbridge style, the Admiral had taken it upon herself to personally scout the enemy portal.

  ***

  “OK, boys and gals… it’s party time,” I barked over our Stark suit comms. There were about twenty of us on the exterior hull of the Yorktown. We were approaching the breaching pod. It looked like a massive bullet embedded halfway into the ship.

  An equal number of my marines were under the command of Lieutenant Hammond. This last group was supporting Commander First who was coordinating his attack with ours. The hope was that by hitting them from two sizes at once… their response would be chaotic and ineffective.

  My team’s plan was to blow a small, marine-sized, hole in the hull of the Yorktown and charge the defenders. It was a simple plan. It seems, unfortunately, that it’s the simple ones that are the ones that are most spectacular when they go south for the winter.

  As soon as Sergeant Peters had set the explosives, I had my men lock their magnetic tethers in place and signaled Peters to blow the hatch. Commander Ben had given us the thumbs up from his side.

  What happened next was… in a word… spectacular… in a bad sort of way.

  The hull ruptured as expected… and the air in the corridor flooded out of the breach. The moisture in it froze immediately and it looked like escaping stream. This was all per our plan… but the gasses continued to vent. I became worried that somehow, we were decompressing the entire ship… and then the color changed.

  Rather than white frozen ice particulates… the venting gas now had a distinct reddish tint.

  I looked at Peters. “Did you hit a plumbing line or something?”

  “Not a chance, Sir. I scoped out this entire area before I set the charges.”

  I toggled my comms. “Ben, are you seeing this?”

  “Affirmative AG. I think you are sucking atmosphere and dust from whatever is on the other side of that portal.”

  As if on cue several pieces of debris flew out of the hole Peters had created. I knew immediately that they were not from the Yorktown.

  “Well, that can’t be good,” I muttered.

  “We’ve got a problem AG,” Ben yelled over the comms.

  “Ya think?”

  “It’s worse than the little wind storm we’ve got going on. The Admiral just climbed through the ring-gate portal. I think she is trying to shut the gate down from the other side.”

  “She’s what? Why didn’t you stop her?” I yelled.

  What I didn’t realize was that Commander Ben was even now trying to reach Cat. He had had Yorky erect a containment field to protect the rest of the ship and had entered the dust-filled torrent.

  This was the beginning of a hectic few weeks that were, ultimately, a distraction for an even bigger problem looming in our future. Let me take a few moments and summarize our situation. In the immortal words of my first Drill Sergeant, ‘if crap came in a basket… we would be the basket’.

  The next several weeks were punctuated by a series of progressively worse misadventures. The first was the death of my friend, Commander Ben First. He had the misfortune of being half-way thru the ring-gate when Admiral Kimbridge finally managed to shut it down. As a result, half of his body was on the Yorktown… the other half was several lightyears away. Normally, this would not have been a problem because most of his body was mechanical in nature. Hardware was easy to replace. Sadly, this was not the case this time. His brain case, which contained the organic portions of his mind, was part of what had been cut in half.

  As Ben was not a candidate for our resurrection technology, this meant he was well and truly dead… more-or-less. Death meant a lot less than it used to.

  The massively powerful Heshe AI known as WhimPy-101 created a robotic facsimile and loaded Ben’s previously stored, and recently updated, memory engrams in a specially engineered AI core. It wasn’t truly Ben, but the result was self-aware, thought of itself as Ben and responded as the D’rlalu cyborg would. His new body was very similar in nature to Harry Bedmore’s wife, Honey, who was also an artificial lifeform.

  Ben 2.0 was just as adept as his previous incarnation at being Cat’s executive officer. This was good because we were facing an unusual new adversary called the Nesters. In the coming days, Cat and I would both need his administrative skills.

  The Nesters had a ‘conquer or be conquered’ mentality that completely defined their society. Coexisting with other groups was possible, and even desirable… but only within the context of their caste system.

  Groups that had been subjugated had two choices in Nester society. They could honor their superiors with a contribution to the larger society… usually in the form of a specific high-value technology or service… or they could function as slaves.

  The Nesters had already captured and subjugated a group of humans many years before. In their mind, this meant that all humans were now their subjects. They seemed intent on adding the GCP Yorktown to their little empire. Understandably, we had other plans. This disagreement led to open conflict.

  Our conflict with them was complicated by a couple of things.

  First, we soon discovered the laws of hyperfield dynamics were changing. Some type of dampening field was spreading across the known universe. At some future point in time, arbitrary hyperfield jumps between disparate points in space-time would no longer be possible. As it turned out, part of the territory controlled by the Nesters was already enveloped by this ever-expanding dampening field.

  The Nesters compensated by erecting massive ring-gates that kept preexisting hyperfield conduits open. This created a network of hyperfield jump points which effectively made travel over interstellar distances possible.

  If the GCP didn’t initiate a crash program to do the same, there was every possibility the Galactic Coalition would fail as the ability to travel interstellar distances evaporated. This would be many times worse than the Great Disruption that limited travel to specific jump points. Without the ring-gates there would be no jump points.

  The Nesters and their subject races had already established a moderately sized gate network. It was even possible that some of the ring-gates in the network were still outside of the region being affected by this unknown phenomenon. We needed to locate a ring-gate that was outside of the dampening field, so we could return to GCP space.

  The second complication we ran into was more nefarious in nature. Reports began circulating on the interstellar communication networks that a strange new race was sending ships to survey GCP member worlds and, in some cases, the survey ships were annihilating entire planets. The reports were scattered across a wide area which was why it seemed likely we were looking at some type of invasion force.

  To make a long story short, we dealt with the Nester situation as quickly as we could. Cat managed to kill herself a fourth time but in doing so she managed to save the lives of hundreds of infant Nesters. In gratitude, the new Queen, She-Who-Sings freed the human slaves and established a schedule for the emancipation of all the other member races.

  We utilized a map of Nester ring-gates She-Who-Sings provided us and eventually found ourselves outside of the dampening zone.

  We returned to GCP space and shut down the Replicant operation. In the process, the Yorktown taskforce was cleared and was no longer classified ‘renegades.’

  In a move that probably saved many lives, the replicants were offered a chance to aid the GCP by beginning what would become one of the largest endeavors in the history of our little corner of the Milky Way… the
establishment of a massive ring-gate network.

  This left the Yorktown taskforce free to address this new threat. We were to learn over the next several years the true meaning of fear.

  Part 2

  Chapter 13: Three Beers…

  This morning was no different than any number of other mornings… except for one small detail. I had no idea where I was. In fact, there were a lot of little things I didn’t know… things like: Who was I? Why was I here? How come I was so hungry? …and what the hell was that smell?

  Did I mention my mind was kind of flitty and confused? It felt like I was running three beers shy of a six-pack.

  I scanned the room I was in with eyes that seemed unaccustomed to the bright lights. It was a small room and seemed medical-ish… I wasn’t even sure that was a word.

  I was alone, and I was covered in some type of slime. It was the source of the malodorous stink. It was definitely not the type of fragrance that would grow on you over time. The best description of it would be to say it smelled like a combination of rotting algae and Korean kimchi.

  It seemed odd that I could remember the name of an old Earth country and a staple of their cuisine, and yet, I could not remember who I was.

  Small machines whirled around me with lots of blinking lights. As I watched, tubes that had been connected to the med-bed I was sitting on began to retract. A door slid open and a small chamber was revealed. Above the chamber a horizontal green light began to slowly flash brighter and then duller. The chamber itself was perhaps a meter by a meter square and a little over two meters tall.

  I got up off the bed. My muscles felt strong, but I was having trouble coordinating my movements. As I began to move, a stream of water began to spray from the ceiling in the recently exposed cubical.