Chapter Nine

Nakteti was the captain of the Boom or Bust, a well outfitted colony and resource exploitation ship that represented her species first permitted colony in over two centuries. The fact that the colony choices were either barren or lightly surveyed didn't bother her, not did it bother her that the best bet was a superficially surveyed system in the Dead Zone. The Precursor War had been over a hundred million years prior, which meant that the planets had possessed plenty of time to recover from that war. The fact that it had been surveyed nearly five hundred years before was of no matter, that was just longer for the ecosystems to recover.

With the new jumpspace 'lane' the trip, which would have taken nearly fifteen years prior, only took a mere six months. Nakteti had planned carefully for recreation facilities and animal exercise areas on the ship to ensure that all of her crew, the colonists, and the animals would all be as healthy as possible when they arrived.

Arrival was celebrated throughout the ship when the ship dropped from jumpspace to realspace and the bounty they had received was revealed to them.

The system was more than promised. Twenty two planets, six of them gas giants, two gas planets, three habitable planets inside the "Green Zone" for Nakteti's species. Five asteroid belts, two of them within the Green Zone which made them ripe for resource extraction. There were four dwarf planets, one of them a moon around a gas giant that could be good mineral and gas extraction and refinery base. The star was young, in its energetic phase, and had strong stellar winds.

The colonists were dropped on the best planet, the second one into the Green Zone, between the two asteroid belts, and began the hard work of supervising the automatons that quickly began building the colony. Nakteti watched the Boom or Bust separate into different parts. One to become a wayfare space station; one to become a refinery; one to become a shipping station; six shuttles; and the smaller, sleeker It Tastes Sweet which Nakteti would use to seed the system with buoys, arrays, and do more in-depth surveys of the other planets with probes.

For the first three years everything went smoothly. Buoys in both realspace and jumpspace proclaimed the system was owned by the Leedimak Consortium, the arrays slowly unfolded and began to gather and transmit data, and the probes showed that the area was rich in resources.

There were even Precursor ruins on some of the airless moons and planets, which had the colony scientists rejoicing. Even if no new information could be gleaned from those ruins, old answers to old questions merely proved the old answers were right all along and proved the superiority of old answers over new questions.

But any human could have told her: If it's going to smoothly, it's going to hurt when it's jammed in the rest of the way.

Nakteti had enjoyed her part in establishing the colony. It made her whiskers twitch with pride that her name had been used for the trading capital of the colony. She enjoyed the challenge and hard work of supervising her crew and automated probes as they surveyed and examined the system.

In the coming days, the biggest question that would be asked by the Unified Civilized Races various councils was: Why?

Any human could have told them.

Because it could.

Because it wanted to.

Because you were there.

The first hint anyone had was an anomalous energy reading between the system, which had been labeled "Rich New Worlds" (Usually called Rich System 32), and a neighbor merely 14 light years away. It wasn't realspace scanners or arrays that picked up the energy reading.

It was a navigation buoy tethered in jumpspace. According to the buoy the reading was only two minutes of energy, starting from a light pulse and growing to something massive before dissipating.

The colonists assumed that the buoy had been somehow damaged when the diagnostic reported that the buoy, built and designed to hold position in jumpspace, had somehow gotten jumpscorched.

They had barely had time to discuss the data between the colony's scientific council when the source of the energy reading made its presence known.

By tearing open a tear in space-time that leaked the energy of jumpspace as well as other unknown energies for it to enter the system.

Nakteti saw the scanning tech tear his earpiece away as the scanner reported the energy signature of the tear as a scream that left blood dribbling from the tech's ear.

That scream, that heralded the arrival of the newcomer, was echoed as the ship swept down upon the colony.

Nakteti ordered the Sweet in-system when the colonists began screaming for Sweet to save them. She knew it would take two days to reach the colony. The scanner could detect energy signatures like an artificial star but no ship.

The colony's voice was silenced within two hours.

It took over a day before Nakteti saw the ship on visual scanners, a day before visual light scanners were able to see the ship.

It made Nakteti glad that the visual images were over, the law of light speed delaying the visual for a full day.

"Captain Nakteti, it's on visual," Vekan said. "Putting it up on the screen."

The entire bridge crew stared at the screen.

The planet, formerly blue and green, was nothing but gray clouds. Orbiting the planet was a ship the size of a subcontinent. It was irregular, no smooth lines, like a jagged edged flattened egg. It was black and brown, the details fuzzy by light degradation.

As Nakteti watched, light speared from the massive ship, into the atmosphere, causing the clouds to flee but the atmosphere to bloom up toward the ship.

A few began crying as the ship fired again and again at the planet.

"Energy contact! Eighty thousand kilometers and closing!" Vekan cried out. "Correction, many many contacts approaching rapidly!"

"Debris shields to maximum power!" Nakteti barked. "Action stations! Helm, evasive action! Scan, what are they?"

Slamming shut her visor, Nakteti thought fast. If it was kinetic weapons, the debris shields would brush it aside easily. If it was missiles that would explode the point defense would pick it off nearly a kilometer from her ship, long before even fission weapons could damage the ship.

Lektat ordered the computer to go to evasive action and the ship began looping through a randomized pattern the computer came up with. Vekan queried the computer, ordering it to figure out what the incoming objects were based on by flight profile, makeup, shape, drive status (if any), and any other profile it could use.

"Computer doesn't know. Undiscovered objects," Vekan got out.

"Incoming is compensating, switching to manual," Lektat yelled out, slapping the button and grabbing the joysticks as soon as they popped up. Nakteti almost vomited as Lektat spun the ship and tried to vector away radically.

The ship's superstructure groaned.

"Second wave detected! Eighty thousand and closing!" Vekan suddenly yelled. "First wave at twenty..."

The world went mad.

The missiles detonated at twenty kilometers. Graviton compression on a fusion blast that turned the ravening energy into a dozen spears of charged lightning bolts that raked the ship.

"Engine two is destroyed, engine five is not responding, internal gravity is offline, rear debris shield is offline, reactor two is offline, decks sixteen to thirty are open to space!" Chakuva called out, his voice tight with stress as he had to do his job for the first time in his life. "Damage Control Crews to stations! Repeat!"

"Here they..." Vekan screamed.

Lektat spun the ship on all three axis, seemingly trying to accelerate in three directions at once and retrobrake in two, he reached out and slapped another button. "JUMPSPACE JUMPSPACE JUM...!"

The world heaved again as the missiles exploded twenty kilometers off the ship. The majority of them missed, thrown off by Lektat's desperate manual actions.

Two hit.

One speared through Damage Control Central, killing the six crewmembers.

The other ripped across the front of the bridge. The atmosphere wasn't pulled out, it was compressed, ignited, filling the bridge with plasma.

Three quarters of the bridge crew died instantly. Due to their face shields not closed, they hadn't worn their armor or even their vacuum suits, of they were too close to the corona of the energy bream.

Red, the core of the beam is red, Nakteti thought.

The Sweet vanished into jumpspace.

Nakteti stared at the tear through the primary, secondary, and safety bulkheads, the tear going through the maintenance spaces, the forward shield emitter, and the reactionless thrusters.

Exposing the surviving bridge crew to jumpspace for a split second before the emergency jumpshields managed to spin up.

Nakteti watched in horror as most the survivors evaporated away, their molecules ripped apart and scattered across light-years of jumpspace.

Leaving her, Lektat, Chakuva, and Vekan alone on the bridge when the ship dropped into realspace.

Nakteti didn't remember throwing up inside her helmet, but she must have, she could smell the sharp tang of ozone and scorched biological material from the self-cleaning visor doing its work. She could hear Chakuva gasping, his vac-suit flashing red across the shoulders to signify a major injury.

He was using his two right arms to hold his two left arms where they'd been ripped away by jumpspace exposure.

"Medical to the bridge, emergency," Nakteti coughed.

Chakuva shook his head. "Medical's gone," he gasped. "The beam speared straight through the ships armored and shielded core."

"Making course for the resonance zone boundry, jump drive recharging, Captain, but it's slow, I think it's damaged," Lektat snapped. "Full realspace speed."

Getting inside the resonance zone meant nobody could drop from jumpspace to realspace near them.

It was usually used to avoid pirates.

Not... that thing.

Nakteti felt her ship groan and shudder around her as she got up, moving to the wall to grab the medical pack. She had always thought it wasteful to put one on the wall of the bridge, after all, anything that hit the bridge would kill everything on it.

Maybe it would have been better.

"Don't knock me out," Chakuva said, shuddering. His suit was treating him for shock, pumping him full of chemicals to keep him conscious. The Unified Ethics Council had long stated that the ships having vac-suits and armor that kept someone awake while injured was a crime but now Nakteti was grateful for it as she used the computer to treat his injuries without knocking him out.

"We're across the border. Jumpspace drive is almost charged," Lektat said.

"Plot a course back to..." Nakteti started to order.

She was looking right at. Right at dark space when it happened less than ten thousand kilometers away. She was staring straight through the tear in the bulkhead into the darkness when it happened.

It was like a talon tearing open realspace. As the tear formed, red and purple fire pouring from the rip with purple, neon green, and red energy. Inside the rip Nakteti could see swirling flames and energy, and for a moment she could swear she saw shadows like limbs reaching pleadingly toward her ship.

Flames can't exist in vacuum, her shocked brain tried to reassure her, tried to tell her that it wasn't happening.

The rip split wider, the black edge of the massive ship pushing through it. To Nakteti's eyes space bulged around the rip, like flesh pushed aside by some monstrous blade. As she watched the ship forced its way through the rip, forcing it wider and wider as the ship pushed its way through.

When it fully emerged, the tear rippled for a heartbeat before closing with the sound of a heavy metal door with rusted hinges shutting.

but sound can't transfer in space, Nakteti's mind argued.

Right before the ship screamed. A terrifying high pitched screech of a predator who had found its prey.

On all the screens, for a second, was displayed a simple message.

THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ONE OF US

And everything went dark as the ships computers died.