Episode Ten: Interstellar Diplomacy
The battle is on as the Marius races towards Jupiter, all weapons firing.
The Space Cruiser USS Marius, CS-1
Jupiter-Io L2 Lagrange Point
June 2056
Command engaged the big nuclear thermal rocket motors and drove the ship at top speed to engage the enemy. None of us on the bridge, certainly not me, knew what came next—no one had ever fought a space battle before.
Acceleration forced me against the safety harness of my workstation chair as the Marius left its protected shelter behind Io. The moon slid out of view as we headed towards Jupiter, to an orbit directly above the invaders: a massive whirlpool of orange, brown, and red, surrounded by lightning storms that would dwarf the Earth, concealing the invaders’ ship but not the enormous damage it was inflicting as they siphoned vast clouds of glowing gas into the maelstrom.
To address me, the captain swiveled in his chair. “Chandler. Keep an eye on your AI. I want to know immediately if the invaders try to contact us. I don’t want to keep shooting if they surrender.”
“Yes, sir.” I engaged Lexi’s avatar adjacent to my view of the action surrounding the ship. “Lexi, I need you to focus on the centimeter band. Listen for any signal.” Lexi merely nodded in acknowledgment. But I could swear her eyes were widened, showing fear if she’d been human.
The captain’s commands drowned out the hubbub on the bridge. “Comms, keep channels 7 and 8 open. Put channel 8 on the bridge speakers.”
“Channel open, sir.”
“Attention One. We are beginning our attack run. Move into position and keep the shield active.” A fast-moving eddy in the bands of gas on the planet’s surface told us Shield Officer 1 was moving to the battle space.
The bridge grew quiet. The captain scanned the bridge crew and then straightened in his chair. “OK, everyone. This is what we trained for. Bring all weapons to bear. Target the center of that whirlpool. FIRE.”
My split screen view flared as lances of a multi-hued inferno burst from the Marius. Sparkling blue, red, green, and violet particle beams and peta-joule lasers shot from the ship and converged on the invaders.
As our firing continued, a brilliant flood of red plasma, redder and brighter than when we arrived, erupted from the planet. The Jupiterians fired a bolt of blue counter-valent energy—absorbing some, but not most, of the invaders’ attack. The shield collapsed, and an intense scarlet bloom rushed towards us.
The red plasma struck the Marius, shaking the ship in a high-frequency vibration. Bolts of energy flashed up and down the central spine. Storage modules exploded; a fuel tank sprouted a geyser of escaping water—but the engines continued thrusting.
I voiced a quiet ‘Thank God’ that the crew had evacuated the area.
“Bring her around, Helm, point the ship head on to the blast. Weapons on full, keep firing. Ops, deploy the ablative shield. That should hold off another blast. And launch the targeting drones to stations outside the shield sensor shadow.”
Seen through the front viewports, the enormous shield deployed from cribs around the circumference of the command module, covering the entire front of the ship and forming a carbon-foam protective cone around the Marius like a three-hundred-meter-wide, black hood.
The viewports switched to display screens as the drones took their positions around the ship—a swarm of eyes keeping the bridge apprised of what was on the other side of the shield.
I don’t know how the captain stayed calm with the destruction flashing on the bridge monitors. Rivulets of sweat dampened my shirt. I wiped my hands on my pant legs, as much to ease the tension as to wipe off the moisture. But the captain and the bridge crew stayed focused.
I did my best to follow their example and concentrated on staying engaged with Lexi. No reports of communications—yet. But my attention bounced between checking Lexi and watching the battle raging in space.
As the Marius swung around, a particle beam, more intense than any we’d seen yet, flared from the planet and swept down the length of the ship. The beam tore apart the entire starboard side. Containers and fuel exploded into space—half our provisions were gone in a high-energy flash.
Before the beam cut off, it focused for dreadful seconds on the starboard nuke and sliced the engine open, shearing off the shielding and severing the engine nozzle. Fortunately, the second engine kept thrusting.
A crackle came from the bridge speakers. “Captain, this is engineering. We lost engine number one, including the control mechanisms. The bad news is the reactor is going to go critical. I need to take both engines offline for thirty minutes to cut it loose or lose the other engine and half the ship—I’ll need all that time.”
The captain glanced at the overhead monitors. “We don’t have thirty minutes, Chief. It’ll be over in ten if I can’t power the weapons.”
“Watson has an idea, sir. I’m sending her your way. You need to find us the time, or the weapons won’t matter.”
“Understood. Helm, engage the continuous thrust engines and back us out of here. Use thrusters if you have to, but keep the shield between the ship and the planet.”
The helmsman spun around. “Captain. If I do that, we’ll have no fuel to get home.”
“Lieutenant, if we don’t get out of range of that beam, there won’t be anybody left to go home. We need to buy time. Engage—NOW.”
So, the captain bought us some time.
But what in the hell had Celeste cooked up?