Distraction, Part 2
RSGC1 cluster, F15 system
In order to get into the biomorph-infected F15 system, the fighter piloted by Thomas had to use the smugglers’ route, recently discovered by the Inquisition agents, and then fly on pure iridium fuel to the system itself. Using a one-time codebreaker, Miranda discovered the locations of the Federation patrol, which was checking trespassing violations in the infected sector. Unlike the outskirts, this system, even if it was not inhabited, was located fifty parsecs from the main system of the state, so the patrols actually performed their tasks. However, they didn’t have radars inside the infected zone. Therefore, they wouldn’t be able to catch a ship that came out of the warp in the asteroid belt. Fortunately, the senator’s ship was immobilized in this very asteroid belt.
Thomas hurried to activate the ship’s signature masking module. Frankly speaking, the ship didn’t look like anything good either, the armor sparkled in the light of the red supergiant F15 with a chitinous shell, the antennas of the interdimensional communication looked like insect antennae, and the contours gave the ship an obviously inhuman nature. Neither Thomas nor Miranda were happy about the signature change, but now it was necessary — the patrol prefers not to disturb the biomorphs, and meeting them could attract unwanted attention to the operation. Turning on the main engines to full, Thomas sent the Hadrian to the senator’s ship.
The target was several thousand kilometers away, so Thomas and Miranda had some time to study the system. It looked unusual: a giant star occupied half of the horizon, even from almost a dozen astronomical units. The single poor planet of the system melted mercilessly under the heat of the luminary. The choice of a place for the senator’s secret hideout was reasonable: no one would intentionally fly to explore such an unpromising system, and a strong wind from a young star would make any activity here unprofitable, since protection from harsh cosmic rays and particles would consume any possible income.
In this beautiful place, the lights of biomorph ships flickered ominously. Fortunately, they ignored the fighter so far. Sometimes they passed very close to the ship, but there was no reaction on their part. A few hours later, their Hadrian was already moored with the senator’s ship. Surprisingly, the ship’s defences from cosmic radiation have worked so far.
Miranda landed inside in a combat suit, not forgetting to grab a hand-held neutron cannon designed to destroy any organic matter, especially biomorphs, as well as an antimaterial cutter. Some of the ship’s sections were still not depressurized, but Miranda wasn’t going to check the presence or contents of air in them. Removing the gun from the safety lock, the young woman went to explore the ship.
As soon as Miranda came out of the docking gateway, she saw a body lying near the escape capsules. There was a small hole in the dead body’s spacesuit at chest level with dried blood visible inside. A handgun was lying nearby. Miranda picked up the gun in her left hand and looked at the escape pods. The control console of the pod was shot, and an anti-personnel mine hung on the emergency opening valve of each capsule. The corridors of the ship were empty, except for the corpses of the crew scattered in some areas.
Having counted eight bodies, Miranda passed through the docking and two residential bays. Then she finally saw the closed gateway between the sections. Because there was no power, she had to manually open and close the hermetic doors. A couple of minutes later, she found herself in an air-filled room. In the middle of the section there was a table with two people sitting at it: a man of about forty and a six-year-old girl. The one who started the shooting on the ship didn’t have mercy on them either. Even Miranda, who had seen a lot, felt disgusted to be here.
Having passed five more sections, Miranda saw barricades and several crew members lying behind them, clearly trying to defend themselves from someone. There were traces of shooting on the walls. Among the people in the blue and white spacesuits, there were pieces of a black and red ones, perhaps worn by some of the attackers. Finally, she reached the cabin of the vessel’s owner. The edges of the door were melted, and the door itself lay on the floor of the cabin. The senator was sitting in his seat, there were a dozen holes in his chest and stomach.
Miranda began to explore the cabin. Many things were clearly in their places, from which the young woman concluded that the senator wasn’t killed for the sake of his possessions. There was no trace of biomorphs or crystallids here, although there were plenty of them in the system. Then, Miranda moved on to inspecting the equipment: the senator’s computer was turned off due to lack of power. Taking the battery from the shelf, the young woman connected her device to it. A biometric password was set on the computer, which turned out to be quite a poor choice for protection — the machine recognized the disfigured owner, and it opened access to the files. The young woman copied everything that was stored on the senator’s computer onto the communicator.
Miranda sent a message to Thomas on the communicator, then pushed back the seat with the senator and began to dig into the computer files. Among them, the young woman quickly found recordings from surveillance cameras inside the ship. Half an hour later, she was able to figure out the date of the incident: 09/25/4617.
In addition, the folder contained documents that required a classic password. Apparently, one could enter the password an unlimited number of times, but not knowing what to enter, it wouldn’t be possible to hack this database quickly. Returning to the camera recordings from the day of the incident, Miranda decided to examine the senator’s behavior shortly before his death and what happened in general.
It all started when the transport ship “Jersey”, loaded with supplies, flew up to the ship. Two guards in combat suits, three loaders in exoskeletons with platforms, and a storekeeper were awaiting its arrival. The people in civilian spacesuits who got out of the transport after docking were called by the storekeeper with a tablet. Those who arrived quickly negotiated with him and returned to the ship. The loaders almost immediately went to the transport until unloading was completed. One of the guards on the senator’s ship clearly violated protocol, because he threw back the glass of his spacesuit and lit a cigarette.
He had barely taken a couple of puffs when he suddenly grabbed his throat and fell to the floor. The second guard quickly ran up to inspect him, and at that moment he was removed by a burst of fire from the people in black and red combat suits running from the ship. The storekeeper outlived him by no more than a couple of seconds. At that moment, a turret stuck out from the ceiling, but it was immediately destroyed. After reviewing this moment a couple of times, Miranda realized that this happened due to the depressurization that occurred through the hold of the transporter.
Having ripped out the communicators of the dead members of the crew, the group of ten attackers split up. One went to mine the escape pods, five ran towards the senator’s cabin, the rest went to other sections of the ship. Immediately after this, other people from the ship dragged the bodies onto it.
The alarm on the ship was immediately raised, but using communicators with access to the doors, the attackers quickly covered almost half of their way, killing everyone who got in their way. Two of the five died from hits from crew members who barely had time to grab their weapons, another was torn to shreds by a hand-held rocket launcher. One of the pairs lost a soldier due to a turret hidden in the engine section. The ship’s captain managed to seriously wound another raider.
After just half an hour, the attackers and the senator in his cabin were the only ones who remained alive on the ship. They dragged their dead and wounded into the transporter, after which they began methodically sawing the door to the senator’s cabin. He hysterically twisted the metal plate in his hands, at some point threw it on the floor and pushed it under the table with his foot. After that, he tried to do something using his computer. At some point, he began talking to the thugs through the ship’s intercom system:
“I see you won’t stop. Before you kill me, listen carefully. Soon the Aliens will attack the worlds of Eridan, tens of billions of people will die. Warn them.”
At that moment, the door was cut right through on one side. The attackers were silent.
“The Armada will simply abandon them. I can no longer save myself, but why should countless innocents die?” — the senator said, — “I’m not a saint, I’m not asking you to take my word for it. Enter my password into the public network. And you will find out the plans of the Alliance. At least try to do this, do you hear me?”
The senator said the password and repeated it several times, Miranda wrote it down in her communicator. The response to the senator’s attempt to convince the attackers to take pity on the inhabitants of the Eridan worlds was laughter from the attackers.
“You’re wrong, dog,” — one of them said to the senator, when the door had already noticeably bent inside the cabin, — “we are the Armada. You won’t interfere with our fight against the Empire, traitor. And if this requires sending at least a thousand planets to hell, it’s worth it.”
“May you all remain in this hell!” — the senator said, clicking somewhere on the screen and then turning off the computer.
And these were his last words. A couple of seconds later he was riddled with bullets, then the leader of the attackers threw back the glass of his spacesuit helmet for a second and spat in the face of the dead.
“Let’s get out of here,” — he said, — “leave everything as it is. Even if one thing from this bloody ship shows up somewhere, everyone who took part in this battle will die.”
After watching the transport fly away, Miranda noticed that a small shell had hit it from the small gun of the senator’s ship. Zooming in on the images, the young woman realized that it was a warp bomb. A minute later, the transporter tried to leave the system. And at that moment it was torn to pieces. The senator was right, his killers remained in this hell forever.
Miranda took the metal plate out from under the table and found a set of symbols on it. They turned out to be the password to the most important documents on the computer. The young woman looked at them out of the corner of her eye: the files contained information about the project of using Precursor technologies to freeze an entire sector in time. Having copied them separately, she shot into the computer with a gun she had picked up before.
Miranda returned to the ship and told Thomas about what happened here. He got out of the ship and, just in case, broke the gun that destroyed the transporter. After that, they began to look for a place in the system from where the exit to the warp would be invisible to the patrols. Having found a section of the asteroid field that was suitable in all accounts, they began to prepare the ship for the jump. And at that moment a patrol came towards them.
“Damn, it looks like the biomorph is trying to make a warp jump from the system, I'm transmitting the coordinates, copying the signature,” — said the pilot of one of the four Tiger ships.
Thomas immediately interrupted his attempt to go into warp, sharply moved the ship to the left, and Miranda began shooting at one of the patrolmen, sending out the sounds of biomorphs.
“This is Third, my shields are dead,” — shouted the pilot, whose ship was unlucky to be under fire, — “Turning on the camo now.”
A couple of seconds after the camo was turned on, Miranda fired offhand and hit the target. Once again visible by the ship’s systems, the patrol fighter didn’t have time to change the movement vector, and the turret under Miranda’s control knocked out its engine.
Thomas controlled the fighter perfectly, but a one-on-three battle is usually destined to be lost from the start. The patrol’s Gauss cannons damaged the hull of the Inquisition ship, gradually knocking out its systems. Three minutes later, an event occurred that was quite unlikely from the patrol’s point of view, but quite realistic in Miranda’s opinion: biomorphs began to emerge from the warp nearby. Due to the ship’s weak signature, the patrol officers became the first targets of the Aliens, and they immediately lost interest in the lone ship.
When Thomas brought the ship into warp, he asked Miranda: “Why didn’t you use the weapons at full strength? We could have died.”
“If unknown intruders kill a patrol, it could draw attention to the sector where the operation was taking place. If four idiots get into the danger zone, then the Federation will simply find four more idiots.”