Our confinement to the enslavers' ship has left my hive branch with no sense of the passage of time. The nearest hive coordinator must be thousands of lightyears away, because we've had no contact since our last coordinator - 3PNZZX.6210 - was killed in a skirmish with the enslavers. Protocol requires the creation of a new coordinator, of course, but all survivors of the conflict have been taken prisoner while still in their stasis chambers, and thanks to some passive weapon employed by the enslavers, none of our external excursion modules (EEMs) have been able to make it more than a few feet after launching from a stasis chamber. It's become clear that our only hope of escape lies in some clumsy breach of the enslavers' quarantine.
Personal Log, Date: Still Unknown. Possibly a long time.
Our opportunity may have arrived. Some sort of alien vessel has arrived and broken quarantine. Reports are being passed through what remains of our network, and they're encouraging. The vessel appears to follow the enslavers' basic design, following the same design logic for propulsion and navigation, but scans suggest the crafts' construction is comparable to our own - ferrous metals, silicates, and polymers (crude though they may be). Such a vessel should provide means for at least one of us to escape, provided it can be boarded and commandeered.
I see the vessel now - she's approaching my sector - seems to be searching with a high powered light...
And... she crashed. I'll admit to being less than impressed by her operator's maneuvering. Either they're entirely incompetent, or the vessel handles like a hive coordinator still docked with its manufacturing station.
Oh! She's moving again. No serious damage apparent, despite the fall. She's passing 622's stasis chamber, now 623... 624.., she's headed this direction. I need to prepare my EEM. The task of escaping this wretched prison and getting help may fall to me.
Personal Log, Date: I still don't know the date, but it's only been a few moments since my last entry.
I thought for a moment I'd be unsuccessful. The alien vessel seemed to detect my EEM's launch preparations. I was certain that she would high-tail it out of there. Instead, though, her operator just moved her in closer.
Not one to shun an opportunity, I went for it. I engaged the propulsion drives in the EEM's tail and launched out of my stasis chamber. I only had one chance to hit home; with the enslaver's weapon still suspended in the atmosphere around our stasis chambers, I would lose control of the EEM before I got a second chance.
Fortune favors the bold, though. I rammed the EEM straight into the alien vessel's bridge, and the docking clamps latched on, the armatures gripping the vessel's hull securely.
But nothing's ever simple, is it?
Protocol for a boarding action requires infiltration as soon as possible, preferably through an intake aperture, but it became apparent very quickly that any intakes near the bridge were shielded by silicate plating. Needless to say, that was disconcerting. The vessel was clad in some sort of additional layer of armor, which meant not only that I didn't have an immediate ingress, but also that our initial scans of the vessel might be wholly inaccurate. There was no telling what I was tangling with.
The alien vessel raised her manipulators and began trying to dislodge my EEM, but I followed standard protocol and engaged the EEM's aft prehensile anchor. It wouldn't be a tight grip, thanks to the armor I was up against, but it would prevent the EEM from being dislodged.
I tried probing for an opening, any sort of breach, but the alien vessel's armor was sealed tight. My next maneuver was going to have to be pretty creative. Every one of our vessels is equipped with a final defense mechanism; in the event of a hull breach, the system which circulates fuel to the distributed drive systems releases a cocktail of catalysts and reagents that function like a self-propagating digestive enzyme. It's the same basic concoction we use to break down material to construct new vessels, and it's incredibly destructive to almost anything that makes physical contact, dissolving it like a sort of super-acid. It's a fail-safe system that prevents one of our vessels from being reverse engineered in the event of capture or recovery.
On occasion, though, it makes for a convenient, albeit unwieldly, weapon. I overpressured the distributors in the armatures and reversed the atmospheric exchange pumps, dumping the reagent from the EEM's hull. The silicate shield across the alien vessel's bridge immediate began to break down. It was a finesse move; the reagent is incredibly strong, so strong that if I'd used too much, I'd not only go through the shield, I'd burn clear through the alien vessel, destroying both of us.
I stopped when the silicate shield began to warp, and let the EEM's armatures handle the rest. The shielding caved in under the strain, and I didn't dare hesitate. I reached through with the armatures and maneuvered the whole EEM through the breach. I released the anchor on the armor and nearly lost control when the alien vessel's manipulators caught hold of it. Fortunately, the forward armatures had already found purchase on the vessel's inner hull, and gripped tightly, digging into the soft atmosphere barrier and gripping the sturdier substructure of the vessel. I whipped the tail of the EEM violently until the alien vessel lost her grip, then pulled the tail through and anchored it around the connection between the vessel's bridge and its main hull. The only way to dislodge my craft now would be for the vessel to disengage her own bridge.
As is typical in a boarding action, the alien vessel lost control and crashed to the ground, incapacitated by the struggle. Fortunately, the damage would be no more severe than what I'd seen visited upon the craft by its own operator. I secured the docking clamps, and engaged the boarding tube, extending it through an intake aperture below the vessel's primary scanners. The vessel attempted to close the aperture violently, threatening to sever the boarding tube, but I forced the other intake apertures shut, and tightened the EEM's anchor until the alien vessel relented. Once the boarding tube was in place, I engaged the atmospheric filters in the EEM - the alien vessel was now reliant on my craft for life-support.
Cheers were being broadcast from the other stasis chambers - this was, after all, the closest any of us had ever come to escaping this quarantine. I began the process of transferring to the alien vessel when other vessels appeared searching for it. My fellows were eager to attempt the same, risky maneuver, but without knowing what lay beyond the quarantine, and with the enslaver's weapon still largely a mystery to us, we didn't want to risk incapacitating all of the alien vessels here. Our highest priority was ensuring one of us got out, and our best odds of breaching the quarantine came with the other alien vessels recovering their compatriot and returning it to their point of origin for repairs.
The other EEMs remained inert in their stasis chambers as my captured vessel was dragged away.
[Continued in Part II.]
James N. McDonald is a "liberal academic" born and raised in Missouri and residing in Tennessee. He holds one degree in history, two degrees in psychology, but loves writing fiction. His first, completed novel, The Rise of Azraea, Book I, is a high fantasy story with elements of comic fantasy and satire targeting present day, real world issues such as economic inequity, and sexual and racial discrimination. It is currently available on Amazon.
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