Ghost Ship

Merchant Hauler ‘Free Entropy’ en-route Mars to Ceres, carrying Deployable Space Defence Vessel ‘Gungnir-7’

The stars were singing to her when the alert came through.

“Seven - we’re being ordered to warm up the drives”

That was Flight Sergeant Gregory Grimes, or ‘Gee-Gee’ as everyone but her called him. He was aboard the Free Entropy, sharing a meal with the ship’s crew. He spent a lot of his free time in the merchant hauler, eating, showering and shitting in the luxury of their gravity wheel.

“Copy that, Sergeant” she replied in her usual flat monotone. “Systems will be ready for launch by the time you get here”

She hadn’t meant to sound patronising at the end there. The Flight Sergeant was hardly likely to notice anyway, since she knew that to a human’s less refined hearing her voice was flat and without any inflection whatsoever.

“Don’t be mad with me, Seven” the Sergeant responded over their private comms link. “I’ve got a present for you”

Something spiked in her brain at his words, triggering an internal warning from the organic systems monitor. She acknowledged it and binned the alert without thinking, wondering if the data was being watched from Mars Command.

Probably not, she decided. She was only one of over nine thousand Guard clones operating within the Archimedes quantum network. The anomalous readings from a solitary clone far out in space was barely worth the attention of the Artificial Intelligence.

The data stream from the Free Entropy was locked in and the small ship ready for action when she registered the airlock cycle open in the crew quarters behind her. Seven flicked her awareness to the internal cameras, seeing her partner drop lithely into the cramped living quarters, something silvery clamped between his teeth.

Like all Spacers, he moved with easy grace in the zero-g environment. A small man, lean and supple like a cat, well suited to life among the stars. He kicked off towards the cockpit of their tiny ship, snagging his combat helmet from a wall clamp as he approached. Under the rules of their deployment he should have had the helmet with him at all times, even when off-duty aboard the merchant hauler.

Unlike her, the Sergeant only followed the rules when he had to. One of the many perks of being a human she supposed. Free will and all that.

She triggered the interior hatch to cycle open a second before he reached it, allowing him to glide into the cockpit without slowing down. She closed it as soon as his booted feet were clear, earning a toothy grin from her partner as the metal hatch snapped closed mere centimeters from his heels.

“Not this time, Seven!” he laughed, the silvery foil packet let loose as he regarded her with vivid green eyes. He flipped mid-air and propelled himself into the seat at her side, quickly strapping down and locking his helmet into place.

It clicked into the ring collar at his neck and he slid the visor up, tilting his face towards hers.

“I brought your favourite” he said, eyes darting in a conspiratorial way to the small packet now bouncing off of her flight controls. She didn’t need to examine the slowly tumbling object to know what it was.

A chocolate brownie bar. Six hundred and eighty calories of forbidden fruit.

“I am not permitted to consume human rations, Sergeant Grimes” she said calmly, yet her hand lunged out and snagged the errant foil packed treat before it floated away. Without looking at her partner she tucked the bar into a pocket of her flight suit, sealing the velcro tab with a light touch.

“Of course you aren’t, Seven” the Sergeant agreed with a sly grin. “I trust you will dispose of the item after the mission”

“I will ensure not a single trace remains of it” she answered him, refusing to meet his eyes. Her own eyes, the organic left one and the cybernetically enhanced right one, re-checked the status screens arrayed across the forward section of the cockpit.

“The Captain has confirmed there is a distress beacon coming from an uncharted asteroid twenty seven kilometers from our current flight path” she told the Sergeant. “It is one of a cluster of eight small rocky bodies that appear to be in a stable rotation”

“Is Captain Lewis going to change course?”

“Negative” she responded. “The formation would prove dangerous to a vessel as large as the Free Entropy”

“I see” the Sergeant said. “Under Clause Nine of the United Space Agreement we are bound to investigate. If rescue is required the Captain may have to change course after all. Send confirmation that we will go and have a look-see”

“Copy that, Sergeant Grimes”

She transmitted a brief acknowledgement to the hauler then triggered the docking release. External cameras showed the view from beside the airlock as the large clamps disconnected from the upper hull of the Gungnir-Seven, accompanied by the familiar hollow sounding bangs and clunks.

Seven pulsed the micro-thrusters that ringed the forward and rear drive modules, gently easing the narrow ship further from the immense bulk of the merchant hauler. As big as it was, against the vast starfield the hauler shrank rapidly into a vague grey shadow, only the navigation lights giving it substance.

“Safe separation confirmed, Entropy” Seven transmitted to the hauler. “Gungnir-Seven engaging main drive”

“Copy, Seven” the calm voice of Captain Lewis answered her. “Keep the channels open. Let us know if we need to alter course”

“Understood, Captain Lewis” she replied and re-checked the orientation of their ship one last time. “Hold on tight, Sergeant” she said and then fired the main engines.

It was a short burn, barely five seconds of thrust, slamming her reinforced body against the padded seat. She lived nearly all of her short life in the vacuum of space, floating in zero-gee, yet when gravity appeared briefly in these moments she revelled in its crushing grip.

Seven wondered if this was what being hugged was like.

When the burn ended, she couldn’t help but turn her head to check on her partner. His green eyes met hers across the narrow cockpit, that cocky smile still there, as if he wanted to ask a question.

“What?” she demanded, firmly but coolly.

“You only ever smile when we are under thrust” he said and Seven felt another spike in her brain.

“You are mistaken, Sergeant Grimes” she replied flatly. “It is just that the corners of my mouth are stretched by the acceleration”

Seven turned towards her flight displays but not before she saw his grin get even wider.

“Yep. That acceleration gets you every time”

=====

The journey to the small cluster of tumbling asteroids took barely any time at all. They loomed larger in the displays as they got closer, radar and laser scanners sending back readings on size, rotation, density and temperature.

“Just a bunch of worthless rocks” her partner declared in tones flat enough to match her own. He was operating his own scanning arrays, the ones linked to their weapon systems. “Not much reason for a ship to be out here. Not good reasons anyway”

Those reasons were why a cargo hauler like the Free Entropy had been assigned the Gungnir-Seven as an escort. Even in the dark reaches of the Sol system, there were those who would prey on their fellow travellers.

Seven knew from her data files that Pirates had been a thorn in the side of merchant ships since mankind first ventured across the open seas. The gulf between the worlds was a great deal wider but the lure of stealing cargoes and even the whole vessel from someone weaker was still there.

She never ceased to be amazed at the lengths some humans would go to in order to take what was not theirs in the first place. It was the other, darker side of the coin that was free will.

“I’ve got a lock on the distress beacon” the Sergeant announced and she accessed the data stream from his array. “Standard Mars-Tech emergency transponder” he continued, as if she couldn’t see that for herself. Then his voice caught as he examined the data, turning to face her across the narrow confines of the cockpit.

“It’s been anchored to the rock. There’s nothing else there”

She was signalling the Free Entropy when the jamming kicked in. Intense waves of electromagnetic white noise pumped across the ether, sending wailing screams through the internal speakers before she sent a mental command to cut the feed.

“Kill it!” she ordered but her partner was already lining up the forward railguns. That was his job - to operate the weapons while she was only permitted to fly the ship. A single hyper-velocity round flashed across space and slammed into the decoy.

The asteroid flashed brightly as the fake beacon was destroyed, pieces of rock that had probably been undisturbed for thousands of years suddenly propelled away from the impact point as the round penetrated deep into its heart.

Silence fell as the jamming faded away.

“...nir-7, do you copy?” came over the inter-ship radio. “Gungnir-7, please respond!”

“Entropy! It’s a trap!” the Sergeant hollered across the channel and Seven knew it was already too late. A drive flared into life from behind one of the other asteroids, angling out from where it had lain in hiding. Not a ship’s drive. Something smaller and far more deadly.

A deep space combat drone.

Barely larger than an Earth two-person sedan, a compact drive unit fitted with targeting systems and a small weapons suite. Tiny but deadly, like a mouse armed with a cannon. Sheathed in radar reflecting material that coupled with its small size made it near impossible to intercept.

They had to try. It was why they were there in the first place.

Seven felt the systematic thumping through the hull as Sergeant Grimes fired the railguns from the forward turrets. The Gungnir-Seven had two identical turrets fitted on a rotating housing at the very foremost end of the ship, each able to spin and fire their linked railguns and missile tubes in a three-hundred and sixty degree arc.

Even as her partner fired on the drone, Seven spun their ship around using the thrusters, bringing their main drive into an intercept course. The Sergeant swore gently under his breath, the ship’s onboard AI twisting the turrets to match her turn while he struggled to hit the fast moving target.

“You aren’t making this easy, Seven” he growled at her, anxiety adding a rare harshness to his words.

“Brace for burn, Sergeant” she replied with her usual flat tone. He took a moment from his screens to give her a look, then she activated the main drive.

They were both pressed back against their seats as the acceleration shot them towards their target. Seven didn’t smile this time, holding her head still against the power of the engines for the scant seconds of the burn. Then the engines cut out and they were back in free-fall, racing at an unimaginable speed through the blackness.

“God dammit!” the Sergeant swore and slammed his fist against the arm-rest of his chair. “Seven, can we get an oblique on the target?”

She accessed his targeting feed and saw immediately what the problem was. The drone had planned its course perfectly towards the Free Entropy, putting itself in a direct line between the Gungnir-Seven and the lumbering merchant ship.

If they used the railguns, any shot that missed the drone would likely hit the Free Entropy. The hauler had Ceramite plating on the outer hull - all spaceships did - but it was never going to withstand the hyper-velocity shells that the railguns fired.

A single round wouldn’t kill the ship but that was not a chance the Sergeant was allowed to take. The Gungnir-Seven was supposed to protect the hauler, not shoot it down.

“I will try, Sergeant” she responded and did the course calculations in her head within nano-seconds. “Please hang on tight”

Seven pulsed the forward thrusters, angling the small ship onto a new heading. It was only a few degrees, the barest minimum that she could compute. Then she triggered the main drive again for a hard three second burn.

They were still ten seconds from a safe firing angle when the drone launched a salvo towards the Free Entropy. Six micro-missiles, a misnomer in one respect as each was around one and a half meters long, yet tiny in comparison to the huge bulk of the hauler.

“Entropy! Brace for impact!” Seven commanded through the comms as the missiles raced across the intervening space all too quickly.

Six flashes indicated hits on the lumbering ship, sparkling like miniature suns across the dark mass of the vessel.

“Got you, bastard!” Sergeant Grimes snarled and the Gungnir-Seven shuddered as he fired all their railguns in one concentrated volley. Six anti-ship railguns, three per turret, blasted the drone apart.

Secondary explosions painted the ether with lurid red and blue fire as fuel and missile warheads erupted, filling the space with chunks of metal and plastic that scythed into their armoured hull with sharp clangs. Her partner whooped in triumph but Seven’s attention was locked onto the Free Entropy.

“Entropy! Do you copy, Captain Lewis?”

There was only static over the radio waves as the hauler continued on her path, pieces of hull trailing in her wake like streamers.

“Keep scanning, Sergeant” Seven ordered her partner. “I’m going to realign our course to meet the Entropy”

“What am I looking for, Seven?” he questioned her. “We trashed the drone”

As soon as he said the words she saw understanding flood him. He had been so caught up in the chase he had missed the obvious fact.

Something has set the decoy to lure them away from the Free Entropy. Something had deployed the drone to attack the merchant ship. Whatever it was, it was still out there.