The Tiacken Tribune

The Ballad of Walkingrazor
Chapter 5 – Homeworld Suckers

The light streamed through a transparent port in the orbital station, refracted through the crystal and filled the hospital room with a thousand scattered beams. Reassuring blips of machinery monitoring my vitals came from the sens/vid terminal next to the a-grav gurney. Across the room was another patient laying on a similar gurney. He was completely wrapped in white bandages in places discolored by brown and red ooze. From the looks of things and the insignia lying beside the bed next to the genetic sampler and ID chip, this was a new recruit that had been severely injured in the disaster that had sent these Federation personnel back to Sol.

I still felt weak, but the longer I stayed here, the more questions would be asked, and the more likely it was that I’d be stuck here, or worse. Thoughts of those Federation intelligence personnel on Tau Ceti sprung to mind and I was on the move again.

A quick scan of the room revealed no visible surveillance equipment. I quickly got off the gurney, and wheeled it across the room next to the other patient. Removing the scanning probes, I immediately placed them on John Dominine, my new roommate, next to the ones monitoring him. After a brief screech, which I hoped the med staff was too busy to notice, they began beeping in time with his scanning equipment.

“Asteroid impact on orbital station outside of Greandin,” I mused, reading his terminal. I stopped that short. No time for thinking about unnecessary things now.

“Fast!” I thought to myself and in spite of lingering queasiness and faint pain from my past ordeals I began to execute. First, from the medical tools table, I took the genetic sampling gun and took two samples from John.

With any luck my sample hadn’t been scanned on arrival for database matches, and with the massive influx of personnel and the groans and activity coming from the corridor and the rooms outside, I thought there might be a chance. I replaced my original sample with the new one I’d just taken. John’s uniform jumpsuit, while a size larger than the one I wore, went on my body in place of the hospital gown, which I shoved underneath his comatose body. I grabbed John’s rank/ID chip and stowed both gene samples in the pockets of the jumpsuit. I disconnected the circular alloy sens/vid terminal, set it to roaming and slipped into the corridor.

Quickly padding to the end of the hall, I grabbed a towel from a linen service cart and stuffed it under my arm. The sens/term responded to my rapid input and I pulled up series of requests: Current position, 3-D layout of the hospital module, and a direct route to the shipyard station. Scanning the displayed hologram for a moment, I committed it to memory and punched the plate for the door… and stepped through into chaos.

Hundreds of injured soldiers and civilians were entering the station, being wheeled and attended by med-robots, doctors and family members. The sound of mourning, misery, injury and pain was deafening. Even with the modern marvels of medicine, the station was overwhelmed with the injured, dead, and dying. Gathering myself from the shock, I began moving quickly towards the far side of the admitting hall, falling in behind a stream of personnel heading towards the pharm dispensers inset in a nook halfway through the room. Dodging a-grav gurneys and bots, I made it to the far door and slid through into another hallway filled with medical maintenance bays and supply rooms. The door slid shut, and mercifully the noise of the admitting bay was hushed with the whisper of its closure.

The hallway was deserted. I sprinted to the end and punched through the next door. This brought me to a series of access hallways that serviced the various specialty wards of the hospital module. I quickly made my way to the third junction and moved left. Quickly checking over my shoulder, I popped the catch on an access hatch set low in the hallway wall. Tying a make-shift sling with the towel, I securely stowed the sens/vid terminal under my arm.

The hatch admitted my body and I closed the grating. After a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dim light, I crawled 20 yards ahead and swung myself into a vertical shaft. The access ladder rungs were dusty with disuse and oxidation and I descended into the darkness below. The ladder ended in a corridor of sorts judging by the sound and echo of my passage and my memory of the location map. Pulling out the sens/vid terminal, I executed a basic ping query and the dim illumination from the holo revealed what I was looking for, the legend on a bio-waste pipe. I shut the terminal down and returned it to the sling. Using the pipe as I guide I carefully made my way in the dark. Counting my steps, I estimated the yardage until I came to another junction and a spill of dim light. Another access hatch opened into the ship-weapons service hallway and I closed it again, quietly. Twenty yards more and I came to another door. I push the button and it slid open to a storage warehouse.

The huge expanse of the warehouse was unsettling. I scanned from side to side as I ran, crouching, across its length. I could see the corridor that was my goal, but I still had 100 yards to go. I heard a sound off to my right and quickly whirled. A security bot had caught me off guard. I cursed my idiocy under my breath. A grid of red laser light emitted from it’s chest and scanned the Dominine ID badge. After a brief pause, it spoke “Recruit Dominine, you are unauthorized for this area. Please remain still and calm until further orders. Security personnel are responding.”

I had been having a bad day and I was in a bad mood. I was beginning to get annoyed.

I grabbed a crate assembly spanner of the table beside me and smashed the bots optical scanner as hard as I could and rolled to my left. Lasers cut the air where I had been standing and cut the table in two. It crashed to the ground as I swung again for the logic unit. A satisfying crunch came from the bot. “Aggressive Intruder, Bay 42-B!” it whirred with alarm. I moved and struck again and again until it stopped its jabber of alarm and the deadly laser blasts. All caution gone, I threw the spanner aside and made for the door. All hope was not lost. I had one more hallway until I could break out onto the shipyards. I ran like I’d never run before.

I was about 20 yards away from the door when I saw the activation light flash. I threw myself to the ground, sliding underneath another maintenance table. Two Federation Security personnel with hand-weapons ran through the door. They scanned the room as I cursed the decision to throw the spanner aside. I saw a holo flash in the HUD eye-piece attached to the guard in the lead through a slit in the table skirt. He crouched quickly, no doubt receiving the last transmissions of the bot and it’s location. The table’s mass should confuse their life-scanners for the present, but the direct path to the bot would take them right past me. Dammit!

I remembered the sense/vid terminal under my arm and I could feel the corners of my mouth turn up into something that was mid-way between an evil smile and a grimace. I un-slung the towel from my shoulder and tied the terminal into one end, snugging it tight.

As the guards crossed the room, I slowed my breathing and tried to clear the panic I felt from my mind. I would have to be fast, probably faster than I’d ever been before. I swallowed hard. These guards were selected for their reflexes and physical skills. And that was before their training. But now I was a man with nothing to lose. A wave of anger began building inside me, white hot and sharp.

They covered each side of the line of their progress with their rifles and moved swiftly and quietly towards the quiet clunking of the injured bot. They approached the table and the moment of truth. As they passed, I moved.

I threw myself at the nearest guard, knocking him off balance and into a motorize mule carrying an NN500 fleet missile. He grunted and fell to the ground, dropping his rifle. Stepping forward, I stepped on the gun and swung the towel-wrapped terminal at the remaining guard as hard as I could. It hit home exactly as I had hoped, smashing the HUD eye-piece and his surprised Feddie face. Again, I was in the zone and a wave of improbable battle-joy surrounded me like a vengeful aura. I side-kicked the guard I had just hit as an afterthought, doubling him over and exposing his back and neck. The terminal/towel flew through the air again as I brought it down on his spine. He fell to the floor and didn’t move.

The other guard sprung to his feet and faced me in a combat stance, drawing a mono-knife from his side sheath.

I wasn’t about to play this game. As he feinted forward I snap-kicked him in the nuts. I was expecting him to counter the gambit, catch my leg, close the distance, and cut my femoral artery, but perhaps combat in the Federation had “evolved” past the niceties of Usube street-fighting and this talent that seemed to come unbidden from my body. In any case, he uttered a strange sound, somewhere between a deep groan and a shriek. He dropped the knife and bent forward to cup his testicles. I dropped the terminal/towel. A rapid step forward and I cupped his head in my hands and twisted. The crack and his transformation into a lifeless bag of meat told me all I needed to know.

I had no idea how long this took, but it seemed like an eternity. My body was shaking with natural adrenalin this time and I wanted to collapse. I chanced a moment and did more breathing exercises to calm and compose. Moving to the door, I slipped down the hall and into the shipyard, just as klaxons began to blare.

Immediately, I took in the launch bay. A passing missile mule whispered by and I ran low beside it using it for cover. A line of shining new Sabres, ships issued to the newest of Federation recruits gleamed close by. I hopped into the nearest one, strapped myself in and booted the computer. The ship came to life in a glow of green and blue light. I was in and I began launch sequencing. As I looked out the view-port and patched into the comm… My heart sank as I watched the door to the long launch tunnel begin to close. They were going into security lockdown! It was only going to be a matter of time before they found me. Already the Sabre’s spool up should be registering on the big board at launch control. Perhaps they would think it was a maintenance check, but for how long?

Just then I heard an angry voice over the launch-bay comm. channel as the comm. gear came on-line. “I don’t care about the security breach, you little shit!” This is Commodore Darmani and I have a priority override from your commanding Admiral. We have Empire tensions in the Neutral Zone and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop my investigation because of your inability to control security in this station. Do it now! I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do to you if you don’t,” the voice snarled.

The comm. clicked for a moment in silence, then the doors reversed their trajectory. A light blue Nighthawk to my right lifted off the lauch-prep pad and I heard the distinctive sound of an anti-matter drive come to life. I had a brief moment to register the insignia next to the cockpit. It said “Darmani” and next to it, a black scorpion emblazed on the logo of the Federation. My brain tried to consider this, but I sent it on vacation. Now was not the time.

The drive noise of the fighter got louder as it reached it’s launch speed. I slammed the Sabre’s drives up to full volume and followed just as the Nighthawk flew out at improbable speed. Caught up in the wave of the anti-matter flow, the little Sabre rattled and shook violently as I drafted the Nighthawk into the launch tube. The closing doors narrowly missed the Sabre’s hull as both ships accelerated down the tube and the superior drive of the Nighthawk left me behind. In two seconds, the Sabre burst into the emptiness and freedom of space. I was alive and I was free!

War!…still?

There is very little news to report from the galactic war front. And by that I mean that the random killings continues and that if I desired to write an article about each of them, you would be reading a novel. Most pilots only assemble now for large assaults that are met by equally large forces. A small group of federation officials managed to break into the Keldon homeworld core last week through a weak MO in Pass-Emp 05. Response has been swift from the Imperial end, but there is a lot of space to defend. How much longer the war will last is anybody’s guess, but it seems as though a small majority of our galactic citizenry is ready to see the end.

ORB dissolved

The alliance ORB was dissolved this week when a mistake in the cloning regulatory commission (CRC) resulted in leader Ultima x being summarily erased from existence. The ORB legal team staged a picket outside of CRC headquarted is Diphda and are rumored to have managed to retrieve a licensed copy of an alternate clone for their former leader. While no persons (besides the original Ultima x) seem to have been hurt in this peaceful protest, we are reporting that the death count is high. Probably at least 10,000 pilots dead. Let that be a lesson to us all.

OLD NEWS

TST gone!?!?

The slaves of the universe breathed a collective sigh of relief several weeks ago when Brackard, admiral of the federation and former slavemaster of the Tiacken Slave Traders, made the decision to dissolve what many consider the most successful slave-trading alliance in the annals of the galaxy. At final count, TST claimed the lives of nearly 3 million slaves. Truly, success of this magnitude is rare indeed. TST’s bold dealings with sheik and slave alike made them truly unique in the universe. They will be missed.

On a related note, TST was equally famous for housing 3 former leaders of CASH (the Campaign Against Stupid Harriers). We are told that Harrier pilots of the universe read TST’s dissolution to mean that they would be relatively safe from harm. They couldn’t have been further from the truth. So far, since TST’s dissolution, the number of harriers killed by their members has rocketed several thousand percent. At the Tribune, we believe that Brackard is making up for lost time (and for Marshmellow…the only harrier ever allowed in TST) by killing every pelican on sight. Harriers…if you see a doomstar, run. Actually…on second thought…go drop him a ton of fuel. We’re sure he’ll show his appreciation.

Tribune is Recruiting

Another year come and gone. As the Tribune continues to move forward, we find that we are once again at a loss for talented writers. If you think you have talent and want to see your name in print by the Universe’s #1 Super-Awesome news source, send Eldritch a news blurb. Reporters and Staff Writers might be paid from the Tribune funds (which currently stand at a mere 34 million due to you all being cheap) but probably won’t be.

Oh, and to Spider Jerusalem, who was a proud member of the Tribune Staff for some months, but saw fit to retire with his sizeable Tribune pension to a remote colony in the uncharted backwaters of space, thank you very very much for all of your hard work. The Tribune would not have been nearly the same without your input and writing.