Once more unto the breach...

"Once More unto the Breach..."
By Andrew Cabell

The explosion threw Genis through the air and slammed him into the bulkhead on the opposite side of the room. His arm hit the wall and he felt it crack sickeningly. He bounced off the wall and continued to float through the weightlessness of his room. He reached for his belt with his good arm and brought out a small vial which he snapped open over his broken arm. The vial spilled a liquid that stuck to his arm and then hardened to create a cast that would drop off when the arm healed.
* * *
The ship shuddered as another volley of kinetic torps hit the hull and split it wide open. Air howled through the rift as it was sucked into the vacuum of space. With its hull breached, the ship fought to regain control of its vital internal systems. It managed to seep a healing liquid onto the breach before its positronic matrices shut down. The ship went dark.
"Sir, the AI’s gone down. We’re trying to get auxiliary power on line now. There we go, got it, sir."
The lights came back on with a groan as the emergency systems kicked in. The lights revealed a scene of utter confusion. Crewmen sailed around the command center, hitting pieces of floating rubble as they tried to get the dying ship under control. With the AI down everything had to be done manually, complicating matters infinitely.
The captain of the ventureship Shrike grabbed onto a console that stuck out from the wall at a right angle as he drifted by. He swung around and read that statistics that scrolled before his eyes. With a few deft keystrokes, he brought up a 3-D representation of the surrounding truespace. He did not like what he saw. At least four enemy cruisers and two enemy ventureships were closing in on his foundering Shrike.
He saw the inevitability of the future such a clear way that only a doomed man could. He lowered his head to the collar of his bright, proud tunic and barked, "This is the captain. Abandon ship. I repeat abandon ship."
He looked back at the console in time to see a swarm of small blips heading straight for his ship. . .
* * *
The command center of the Shrike erupted in a massive discharge of energy as fifteen kinetic torps hit it and exploded. The shockwave swept across the ship right behind the captain’s order to abandon ship. By the time the order reached Genis, he was already halfway to his escape pod. He threw himself threw the air and hit the palm-pad of his cryotank. The door hissed open and he pushed himself inside, bouncing against the padding of the back of the tank.
The door closed and he felt a small needle pierce the skin of his upper arm. "I’m giving you a sedative to keep you in hibernation until I can give you even a slight chances of surviving," a quiet, sibilant voice said in his ear. It was then that he remembered that his familiar would follow him into space. The familiar was a small AI that was implanted in all of the high-ranking battlesires on the ship. The ship. . .
He looked down through the cloud of frozen water particles towards the ship. He could see it massive bulk beginning to break up and fall into pieces. Hundreds of escape pods and battlesire fighters swarmed away from it. As he watched, a clan of Il Catra fighters bore down on the escape pods. Chamber after chamber burst like ripe fruit, spilling their unconscious occupants into space.
The sedative coursed its way through his veins until he was almost too drowsy to keep his eyes open. He dimly felt a thump and the tank ejected itself into space, away from the doomed ship. Below him, his room caved in and was vaporized by a sea of flame that was engulfing nearly an entire square acre of the ship’s hull. Suddenly, the Shrike broke in half and, as Genis blacked out, exploded into millions of tiny fragments.
* * *
The battle had been raging for nearly fifty kiloyears. It had started when two large fleets, one Chith Alderan and one Chith Il Catran, met at a particularly dense region of truespace. Regions this dense could be mined for the g-matter, which powered the ventureships as well as supplied the matter for their devastating g-matter cannons. The battle had been started by two of the best tacticians in the known Galaxy. Since then, still better commanders had succeeded, so it had been a stalemate for almost all of the five hundred centuries, with neither side gaining the advantage for long.
Genis’ ship, the Shrike had been sent to the battle about ten kiloyears ago, only about half a k-year after he had been transferred to the Shrike. He had been fresh out of the battlecreche when his entire cohort, the Saret Cohort, had escaped the destruction of their previous ventureship, the Dog of War, and had been sent to the Shrike by the Chith Alderan High Command. For ten k-years he had been fighting the Il Catrans in fighters, cruisers and in the hard vacuum. He had even fought the Il Catran elite warriors in onplanet battles across the mineral rich system of Barren. Now, though, his ventureship was destroyed and he was floating in space, alone, save for his escape pod and an AI, which only existed in his head.
* * *
Genis slowly came back to consciousness. His field of vision continued to widen as he stirred and groaned.
"Feeling better? I hope I didn’t give you too much sedative. You should be returned to full functionality within ten minutes."
"Is there a specific reason you woke me up, familiar?" Genis said, eyeing the synthdiamond fiberglass of the escape pod’s window nervously. "And how long have I been unconscious?" The glass was scarred and damaged by centuries of debris and meteors.
"My calculations put the destruction of the Shrike at ten kiloyears ago. And to your first query, yes, there is a reason I woke you up. My sensors indicate that a ventureship has pierced the proximity sensors. I do not know which side it is on, but it is your only chance of survival."
"Where is it, familiar?"
"Look out the pod window."
Genis looked and, sure enough, there was the massive bulk of a ventureship’s solar sail completely obscured the view of space. The sail was a huge expanse of nearly mono-molecular thread which caught the solar winds thrown out from any nearby sun and converted them to energy usable by the ship. And the pod was heading straight for it.
"Genis, I’ve detected an energy signature coming from that ship. It’s definitely an Il Catran ship. I’ve changed our speed and heading so we won’t punch right through that sail and keep on going. But after we land, it’s going to be up to you to get us inside and keep us alive. I‘m just an AI."
"Got it. When do you estimate we’ll be hitting the sail?"
"I would say that we should make contact in about two hours."
"By the Lethe. That’s not much time. We’d better start preparing for the crash."
* * *
At 13:87 NR, the small escape pod from the Chith Alderan ship Shrike crashed into the solar sail of the Chith Il Catra ship, Brilliance of War. The pod hit the material and broke into a hundred pieces. Most of the pieces bounced off of the sail and flew back out into empty space. One piece, though, stuck to the sail. This was the piece that the pod had been manufactured to protect. It was Genis and his invisible component, the familiar.
When the pod broke apart, Genis had used a pair of metalloplastic hooks to dig into the fabric. He asked the familiar uneasily, "Alright, now what?"
"Now you climb along the m-fabric to the hull of the ship, where you cut your way in."
"And then?"
"Then we’ll think of what to do when we get there."
Genis cautiously lifted one of the hooks out of the fabric and then inserted it again a few feet away. Then he did the same with the second hook, pulling himself along the stiff, golden weave. Soon he was moving at a good pace across the golden plains of a taught substance so thin that if he could have looked at it from the side it would be almost invisible.
After Genis had moved nearly four kilometers, he was about to hook into the sail again when a massive ball of flame silently slammed into the sail only six meters from where he was. It punched straight through and hurled a shockwave that knocked Genis’ hooks out of the sail. He was thrown away from the sail and just managed to hook it before he flew into space. A rift in the fabric was rapidly flying towards the very spot where Genis was perilously hanging. He pulled himself to the sail and then rolled to the side as the rift shot past him and the void of space became visible through the solar sail.
Genis yelled to his familiar, "What was that?"
"It was a fighter that was hit by a fusion initiator. In effect, a small star. You. . . we are very lucky to be alive."
Genis mumbled his agreement and continued to pull himself out of the frying pan towards the distant fire.
* * *
Three hours later, Genis had scaled the rest of the Brilliance’s solar sail, and reached the hard hull of the ship. He reached to his belt and pulled out a synthetic bio-substance that he attached to the hull. The substance ate through the hull until there was a hole large enough for him to get into the ship. Eventually the hull was breached and he slipped inside.
Immediately inside, he could see that he had burned his way into a storage room for extra equipment. That was good, since this place was kept decompressed, it would not show a major hull breach on the bridge. Genis looked around and wondered which way he had to go to get to the fighter bay, where he could steal a fighter and escape.
As if in answer, his familiar displayed a holographic display on the inside surface of his suit’s faceplate.
"This is a schematic of the Brilliance’s deck plan," the view zoomed in on a section near the aft of the holo-ship, "You must get to this section of the ship to hijack a fighter from the fighter bays," one of the larger rooms became highlighted in red.
Genis thanked his familiar and launched himself off of one of the walls. He headed towards the correct door, which opened for him on as he glided through it.
* * *
On the bridge of the Brilliance of War, Captain T’Chalramaj floated in his personal quarters and thought. He had been practicing shalakar, the zero-g fencing of the battlesire caste. Around him hung drapes of the purest organic silk that could be found in the Galaxy. None of them had been ripped or damaged in the least showing T’Chalramaj’s proficiency with the multi bladed swords, which now hung in the rack of pure gold on the wall.
Only a few minutes ago, his second in command had notified him of a hull breach. This was nothing unusual, but there was something odd: nothing could account for the breach. There were no enemy fighters, mines or swarms of smart k-torps in at least two a.u.'s. The Brilliance had been slowly pushed to the fringe of the battle over the millennia and now it was almost in interstellar space.
T’Chalramaj thought for a few minutes and then raised his wrist to his mouth, "Sub-Commodore, please send and armed attachment to the sector of the ship where the hull breach was detected an hour ago."
* * *
Genis moved quickly. He had heard the patrol coming using the heightened senses of his enviro-suit. He glided over to a protruding bulkhead and hid behind it, securing himself to the wall with a bio-suction mass. Then he pulled out his energy blaster, which was specially designed for use in a zero-g environment because it could fire a beam of cohesive energy without recoil.
On the map on the inside of his helmet, suddenly four red dots appeared and they were rapidly moving towards his position. "This is the position of the enemy patrol as extrapolated using the senses and the computer data from your suit," a quiet voice whispered in his ear as if not to disturb the heavy silence of the approaching danger.
He waited, his arm tense as it gripped the gun, which he rested against the protective bulkhead. In a few seconds, the first of the four-man patrol rounded the bend in the hallway. He hit the opposing wall and recoiled off of it heading further down the hall. Soon three other soldiers in full battle dress followed him. Genis steadied his gun and fired.
There was a flash of light and the smell of ozone permeated the air. The bolt of energy went faster than any human eye could follow as it streaked towards the first of the soldiers. It hit his armor and threw him back into the other wall. Immediately, the tactical overlay on Genis’ helmet showed the phase fields of the enemies morphing almost faster than Genis could keep up. He felt his familiar activate his own phase field, which encased all of the universe within a half-meter radius in a pocket of space that was slightly out of phase with the rest of reality.
It only took a split second for the enemy to react and begin to return fire. Blasts of energy hit Genis’ field and were absorbed by the non-reality of it. Then, one of the randomly fluctuating phase fields of the enemy perfectly matched Genis’ own. He pulled his trigger. Again, the flash of light and the enemy soldier was being thrown backwards out of sight around the corner. The enemy soldiers began to move closer to Genis.
"You have to get out of here!" a voice screamed in his ear, "We don’t stand a chance with these odds."
"Alright, we’re gone," Genis yelled back as he set a phase grenade and attached it to the wall behind him.
He made sure the counter was going and fired a fast barrage of energy before pushing off of the wall hard and soaring down the hallway towards the fighter bay. He had only gotten a few more meters down the hall when he felt a massive eruption of out-of-phase matter fly past him, demolishing the section of bulkhead where he had just been hiding. He had not done this to make them think he was dead as much as to surprise them and gain himself more time.
* * *
Captain T’Chalramaj heard the sound of his communicator before he saw the light on it flashing. He struggled slowly to consciousness as the quiet beeping began to gain intensity.
He pressed the button and heard a voice emerge from the small device, "Sir, it was an intruder and we lost him."
It took a moment for the captain to figure out what the Sub-Commodore was talking about. Then he remembered, "You didn’t catch him?"
"No, sir. He injured one of our battlesires and set a phase grenade to escape. We do have a trace on him, though. He is heading for the fighter bay."
"Get another platoon down there. I don’t want him to get to the fighter bay. Keep him out of there at all costs."
"Yes, sir."
Captain T’Chalramaj floated back to his bunk and, as he drifted back to sleep, wondered why he had been cursed with such inept subordinates.
* * *
An alarm blared in Genis’ helmet. He had been catnapping in a secluded section of the ventilation system when the familiar warned him that the enemy had gotten a lock on his position and at that moment a platoon of fully armored battlesires where converging on his position. He had managed to survive two more assaults by enemy troops after the first engagement, but he was getting exhausted and he couldn’t take much more. He had to find a way to keep the enemy away while he got to the fighter bay.
"Genis, I’ve got an idea. Find me a computer outlet and I’ll keep them off your back, for a while anyways."
Genis launched himself into the air and began to move down the ventilator shaft. After a few minute of aimlessly wandering, Genis found himself in front of a computer outlet. He raised his hand to it and watched as two small wires threaded themselves out of the tip of his finger and inserted themselves into the computer. He let his mind wander while the tireless familiar continued its work. Soon it signaled that it had finished and Genis detached from the computer and returned to his hiding place, hoping that the familiar had done its work well.
* * *
By the time the captain got the news, he had been awake and in the command center for almost two hours. His subordinates had been reporting to him on the status of the manhunt which had been consuming too much of the ship’s time and energy. Then, at 16:53 DR, everything went wrong.
"Sir, the ship’s AI has just documented a massive power surge through all of its systems. We’ve lost internal sensors and COM relays. We’ve got no idea where the intruder is."
"Get those systems back on-line now!"
"We’re trying, sir. It’ll take a few minutes, though."
The COM officer was as good as his word. Within five minutes all of the systems had been restored.
"Uh, sir, we’ve got a problem here."
"What, can you still not find him?"
"No, sir. That’s not the problem. We can find him, but now there are hundreds of ‘hims’ on the internal scans."
The captain flew over to the console and saw that instead of one red dot, there were many. They were in every corner of the ship. It was impossible to tell which was the real one because he might have moved too far to be traced during the blackout.
"I want at least one soldier at every one of those points," the captain barked.
"Yes, sir."
* * *
Suddenly, all of the enemy soldiers converging on Genis’ position stopped for a few minutes and then turned and began moving away. Whatever the familiar had done, it had done the trick beautifully.
"Genis, that should keep them out of your way long enough for you get to the fighter bay and get out of here."
"Good work, familiar! Let’s move."
He began to soar down the deserted corridors toward the fighter bay. Soon he had made it. The only thing between him and freedom was one pair of metal doors. He set a phase grenade and blew them apart. As he had expected there were enemy soldiers guarding the fighters. Before they could get their phase fields up he lobbed a stun grenade into their midst and watched as they began to float, unconscious, in the zero-g of the fighter bay.
He soared over to one of the fighters, blew off the lock with his energy gun, and pulled himself inside. He grabbed the controls, which, luckily for him, were the perfectly standard configuration of all of humanity’s vessels. Soon the familiar had hacked into the fighter’s onboard computer and had taken it over completely. With the controls tightly in hand, Genis eased the fighter into the air and turned it towards the rear of the bay where the launch doors were.
He started the forward thrusters and began to speed through the long hall. As he started to near the bay doors, he fired only two kinetic missiles at them. They shattered and were blown outwards into the hard vacuum of space. In moments, Genis had cleared the entryway and was in open space. He was free. He had escaped. In the distance in front of him he could see a huge ventureship, which was easily identifiable as Alderan from its shape and design. Of course, there was one piece of unfinished business that Genis had to attend to.
* * *
"Sir, we’re getting a communication from an unknown vessel. It looks Il Catran but I can’t get a distinct reading."
"Fine, let’s have it," the captain answered wearily. Almost all of the points had been checked out. All of them had been false, so far.
"I’m forwarding it to your console now, sir."
Captain T’Chalramaj looked down at his console and waited for the message. On the pitch black of the console, seven words appeared on his screen: "Good Game captain. But I still win."