Science Fiction

CONTENTS (Click on the title to go to the story)

Antari Trader - Even in deep space, there are very human dangers.

Alien Attack - So many people thought Aliens were just science fiction.

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Antari Trader

The journey between Sirius and Andromeda was long one; and dangerous.

The merchantman StarTreader was black in black space, no trace of light escaped the matt black hull shield. Set to absorb every particle of energy that fell upon it from both within and without. The shield rendered StarTreader virtually invisible, as she rode the vast dark caverns of empty space between the stars.

StarTreader was a class K4. A perfect sphere, 5 kilometres wide, capable of travelling at almost seventy percent of the speed of light. But with little armament, too little for these wild regions far from the civilised worlds at the heart of the Empire.

They had spent three months under acceleration. The fusion motors pouring plasma like a small sun in a stream two thousand kilometres long. A beacon to any Raider in a billion cubic hectares of space. They were nervous days.

Master at Arms Chu had prowled the corridors, coaxing and cajoling the laser cannon teams as they strained anxiously at their sighting monitors. These men were not warriors. In the Wars of Rebellion, Chu had seen fighting men calmer during battle than these Traders sitting amateurishly at their guns. But these were, even Chu had to concede, dangerous times.

Since the end of The Rebellion Wars too many men trained only to fight had found the Empire had no use for their skills. Too many Warships, now redundant had been sold for conversion to traders. Now largely unconverted, they plied the outer trade routes as pirates, raiding anything not strong enough to withstand them. The StarTreader, riding its pillar of fire through the starless wastes, had been lucky. The ceaselessly probing sensors had remained quiet, nervous gun crews had been idle.

Chu could now relax, just a little. The gun crews had returned to their normal duties. Now his main task was to monitor the passive sensing devices as they received and studied the radiations from surrounding space. He leaned forward to stare at a flat screen scored with coloured lines and stumbled. At least, he thought, during acceleration they had proper gravity. The artificial gravity that operated while the ship was in freefall was not very efficient. It added to the strains of a long flight and his small team would, as always, soon be busy with the inevitable disputes and brawls of interstellar voyaging.

For the moment Chu was alone in Central Monitoring cabin. He got himself a cup of coffee from the vending port and carried it carefully back through the unsteady gravity to the operator's console. Chu was a Fleet veteran, one of the lucky ones able to find proper employment doing what he was best at. Many others had returned their farms, factories or offices and when he met them, as he sometimes did, he saw in their eyes the vague and distant longing for the immensity of the space.

Chu had been lucky, but as space never quite left his old comrades, the War never quite left Chu. He was born an extrovert, laughing and open, but the War had marked him.

Battle cruisers of ten thousand men. drifting helpless into white suns; Bodies sliced by lasers; fused rock where once children had played; these things had closed him. Now he hid behind a face as blank as the shield that defended StarTreader.

Formality and order were his defence. He did not enjoy quiet moments. Things best forgotten might rise in the mind like monsters from the id, to gnaw a man to the bone.

The Motion alarm gave a soft but insistent beep. Chu swung in his chair to face the screen. The Motion sensor had detected an inconsistent movement in the stillness of space. Probably a meteorite, but it was a long way from a planetary system for debris of that sort. He stared at the monitor trying to decipher the enigmatic threads of colour that webbed the screen. Somewhere behind them. Big. Still impossible to track, a bad sign. natural phenomena should be easy to see.

He reached quickly across to the intercom and informed the Managing Commander that he was initiating a Starplot. The central computer bank would chart a large sector of the space behind the ship. Every star would be observed all the time. If they were being followed by a Raider eventually it would intersect the light from those stars and reveal its presence.

If. If he had picked the right sector. If there was a Raider. If it did not attack first.

The Managing Commander Beryl Goodbar watched her Master at Arms arrive on the bridge with a mixture of anger and relief. She had been trading the Starlanes for Eighty years. Her combination of charm and toughness had won her respect and good profits for most of them. But she did not at all feel at home with the cat and mouse game that that Chu would have them play. Fifty percent of the computing power of entire ship was trying to track a Raider that might, or might not, exist.

The bridge was taut, with every mind straining for the smallest hint of the Raiders presence. Chu and the Commander stared at the main screen that covered a side wall of the bridge. Like a giant window into the void, it showed the rearward view and, so far, only distant stars.

In an instant the view was transformed. From a single point in the top right of the dark screen, a burst of coherent green light spread across the blackness of space. Radiating from a central point in a cone, bolts of laser light thousands of kilometres long probed for their victim.

Gasps of dismay filled the bridge and the first rising tensions of panic were in the air. Chu turned to the Commander.

"They know we are here. We have got to switch the Shield."

"They don't know where we are." Beryl Goodbar tried to calm her pounding heart. "These are just probing shots. If we switch the Shield they will have us."

"If they catch us with a lucky shot with the Shield on Full Absorb we are all dead! Even a near miss will destroy the ship!" Chu's voice betrayed his desperation. She must listen.

StarTreader had been lucky again. No bolt from that first burst had come nearer than seventy thousand kilometres. The Commander considered. To switch the Shield meant changing its matt black surface absorbing all energy, to a mirror, reflecting all energy. This would protect the ship from Laser light by simply reflecting it, almost one hundred percent of all radiated energy would be reflected by the Shield. Almost. No human creation was perfect.

And a slight imperfection in the mirror finish, during manufacture or from damage, would be there. A Hot Spot. A thousand battles might not reveal it. It might implode with the first hit. Her Traders instinct was to lie low.

Chu increased magnification, the screen jumped through a series of images each altering its perspective slightly as the raiders craft was centred in the middle of the wall. At maximum magnification the image shimmered and moved, but the Raider was clear enough. A perfect silver sphere on a ground of deepest black. Once more the brilliant pyrotechnics of green light began. Javelins of deadly energy launched into space, this time more concentrated but aimed away from StarTreader. Beryl Goodbar breathed deeply with relief. Chu soon disillusioned her.

"They are quartering the sector." He said. "They will bombard each part in turn until they find us. It's just a matter of time."

Indecision stalked the Commander. But in all her long years commanding StarTreader she had become experienced in crisis management and now her very indecision told her what she must do.

"Master Chu," she said. "We are at war. This is not my field of expertise. It is yours. The command of the StarTreader is yours until this crisis is finished." Then added softly," Pray God we survive it."

Chu paused a minute in surprise, then leapt to the nearest intercom.

"Switch the Shield!" He shouted into it. Then in a series of rapid commands he ordered gun crews to their cannons and all other personnel to the centre of the ship, away from the more vulnerable perimeter. Sections of the ship were closed down to save power and all available energy diverted to the cannon batteries. They were ready for battle. And battle would now inevitably come.

On the main screen the Raider's laser fire swung to focus on the newly revealed target. The ship shook slightly as the first salvo of energy splashed harmlessly against the reflective Shield.

"Return fire!" Said the Master at Arms. Beams of tangible light flashed from StarTreader towards the Raider. Suddenly remembering, Chu grabbed the intercom,

"Set batteries Four and Five on automatic." He yelled against the roar of a second salvo arriving. "And do it damn quick!"

The crew of battery Four feverishly set the controls of the cannon for automatic and sat back. Their only task now to check and monitor the instruments. The laser performed its strange dance, sweeping its sector for incoming missiles, now smoothly graceful, now jerky and nervous. Occasionally crackling with life as it fired huge bolts of energy into the void beyond. Perhaps at missiles, perhaps at phantoms straying across its electric imagination. Either, beyond the reach of the men who now merely tended this uneasy leviathan.

The two ships hung in the void, silver baubles linked by threads of light. On the bridge Chu watched the wall screen and knew, in a battle of attrition, StarTreader would loose. A lightly armed trader must eventually succumb to the sheer firepower of the Raider. He spoke to the Commander.

"What Atomics do we have?" She only paused a moment, this was no time for coyness.

"Three cobalt torpedoes." She replied quietly. An admission that under other circumstances, could have cost her traders licence.

"Good." Said Chu. "Three will do it, if they get through."

"Three cobalt bombs! That could lay waste a planet!." Said the Commander.

"That Raider is virtually a full Imperial Battle Cruiser!" Replied Chu irritably. "It will take all three to overload defences like that."

Beryl Goodbar reluctantly agreed and the final, ultimate defence of the StarTreader was committed. For this, only the Managing Commanders direct order would suffice. A small trusted team of crewmen unlocked the most secure vault, and pulled three trolleys to the forward exit chute. Such small devices, a metre high and three metres long. Containing and constraining the power to break worlds.

They slid silently out into space. Driven by jets of liquid helium only slightly warmer than the dead cold of the surrounding vacuum. Matt black and shielded, they should be undetectable. Even to an Imperial Battle Cruisers perceptive senses.

On the Bridge all eyes watched the screen as endless minutes passed. A sudden white blinding flash filled the room before the automatic monitors could react to dim the glare, and a roaring cheer greeted this new brief sun. Chu did not join the celebration.

"Only one." He said softly. "They got the other two. It will not be enough. Not for a war ship."

As the glare dimmed the screen refocused and the raider was still there. Instruments said it was almost twenty thousand kilometres from its original position. The blast had moved it but, Chu thought, in soft space the hammer had no anvil. He spoke softly and through clenched teeth to the Commander.

Together the torpedoes would have crushed her like a nut in a nutcracker, but now there are no more torpedoes. Our situation is not good."

Beryl Goodber sat stunned that any object could withstand such power, and the cheering died quickly, as the raider was revealed unharmed. A groan rose as a new light shone from its silvery hull. This light was different, yellow and malign it blazed constantly in a thick intense beam.

"Sodium laser." Hissed Chu. "Now it's personal. They are trying to burn us down".

The brilliant Sodium laser focussed on a single spot on the hull of the StarTreader. The most perfect mirror cannot reflect all energy, some must be absorbed. Even now the temperature of hull was rising dangerously.

"Rotate the Shield!" Chu shouted into the intercom. "We must dissipate the heat."

But even as the Shield began to move he knew they could not long survive this onslaught. He stood rigid at the console operator's chair, mind racing for solutions. Perhaps they should treat. But was death in space worse than a pirate's mercy?

"The manifest!" Chu shouted at a startled crewman. "Don't just stand there idiot, get me the bloody manifest!" The crewman pressed keys and the ship's manifest scrolled across the Master at Arm's screen.

"The observatory! Find the bloody Observatory!" The figures scrolled again, Chu's agitation reached fever pitch.

"There it is!" He yelled into the intercom. "I want thirty men, two cargo crews - Beta and Delta - and droids get into hold twenty three K, go to bay twelve, get the parabolic reflector pack addressed to Thorton University Observatory. Destroy anything that gets in your way. But do not damage the reflector. Bring it to..." He paused while he checked the co ordinates. "Level eighteen, section twelve. Do it now!"

He jumped to his feet and ran to the lift door, shouting over his shoulder. "Send a power team and our best comms team, and make it quick!"

Section twelve was already hot. Despite the rotating shield, heat was already seeping into the hull behind. They were directly behind the point where the Sodium Laser was drilling at the ships heart. In frantic haste the crewmen sweated to assemble the parabolic reflector. Technicians hooked the machinery to improvised power supplies and lastly the computer men began their work.

Chu looked at the giant reflector thirty metres across, lying flat on the deck. As the power began to flow into its hydraulic cradle it stirred slightly. Then like a giant grasshopper, suddenly swung its massive bulk upright to face the hull, now glowing a deep, sullen red. The computer operators were bent over their screens as the great dish hunted restlessly back and forth across ever decreasing arcs.

"It's done!" A technician addressed him. "All locked into the main tracking programme in the main computer bank."

"Good." He replied. "Now get out, and get the rest out."

Back on the Bridge Chu said a silent prayer. The wall screen showed the yellow Sodium Laser still fixed between the two ships, an obscene, rigid umbilical cord, signifying not life but death.

He then gave the order to open the shield.

The Crew stared open mouthed at Master at Arms who had clearly gone insane. A rising tumult of voices started to protest at this suicide, and Chu turned in desperation to the Commander.

"It's our only chance. I don't have time to explain!" He shouted above the rising din. "For the love of God make them do it!"

More in resignation than belief, the Commander rose to her feet and the hub bub quietened.

"Make it so." She said simply. And crewmen, so recently mutinous, bent to her will and opened the Shield. The yellow thread flared suddenly bright as the parabolic mirror reflected the Sodium Laser exactly back along its path into the cannon's Maw. Then it blinked out. In the Bridge rapturous shouting began as reprieved men celebrated their new lives.

"Watch your screens!" Shouted Chu. "Close the shield, it could be a ruse! Keep your eyes on the screens!"

"Have we done it Master Chu?" Said the Commander.

"We have given them something to think about." Replied Chu. "They won't be trying that again. But we cannot relax, that is an Imperial Battle Cruiser, we must use the time to escape."

"Quite right Master Chu." The Commander was returning to her previous confident role. "Start the fusion motors." She called to the Reactor team, and turned again to Chu.

"If we overload the Reactor and fire the motors early, we can start in four hours. Can you hold out that long?"

"I think so," said the Master at Arms. "We must double the watch for torpedoes, now they have failed with the lasers, they will send in atomics."

"Very well. Make it so."

"And we should set a course vector back towards the Raider."

"Towards her! Are you sure. . .?"

"Yes! Not too close of course, but it will be the last thing they expect. When they detect our motors warming up, they will start to lay in their own vectors. They will assume we will head away from them more or less along our old course. Run for home. By the time they have realised we are going in the opposite direction, laid in a new course and made the turn, we can be a million kilometres away and accelerating hard!"

The navigation crews were huddled over their consoles, plotting the new course while detection teams listened and watched for the incoming missiles. The Raider's lasers were still. Chu glanced over the feverish, hopeful, activity on the bridge and left to inspect the laser cannon crews.

Some hours later a fearful StarTreader powered within twenty thousand kilometres of the wounded Imperial Battle Cruiser. Her fusion motors were straining at maximum thrust and the crew struggled under 5 gravity acceleration. As she passed, a nervous burst of blue laser light from her cannons licked at the still quiet silver raider.

On board the Raider, corridors gutted clean, rang with the chimes of cooling metal. No life disturbed these dark tunnels. Down these passages, once bright with light, had roared an incandescent firestorm of vaporised metal. Men had flared briefly in that white-hot gas, like gnats in a candle flame. Some had left shadows burnt onto metal bulkheads, most had no memorial. There was no hiding place from that fearsome heat. It had wiped clean the interior of the ship, sterilising it as dead as the surrounding vacuum. When a Sodium laser explodes, it dims the sun.

The merchantman StarTreader grew smaller as it accelerated into the void, just another silver point in that infinite starry night.

Alien Attack

It was his last night at home. He sat and watched as the Sun sank below the horizon, spreading red fingers of light across the sky. His wife was quiet. Sitting in the living room not speaking, staring blankly at the wall. The children were away. Those good byes, at least, were over.


His eyes roamed the street. It was an ordinary town. The roadway expired the heat of the day and soft warmth would linger through the night. He would not sleep well. Tomorrow he must leave for the Space Depot. It would not be a long journey and soon, very soon, he would be on the shuttle. Then he would transfer to the frigate 'Bright Scale'. Then they would leave for the killing grounds.

Strictly speaking he was too old. At one hundred and twenty four years, he was well into his middle age. But young men were becoming scarce. The war was extracting a terrible price. He could not, of course pilot a space ship. His age and lack of technical training made that impossible, but he had a good eye and fast reactions, and they had made him a Gunner.

During basic training he had ridden the Gun tower, a huge gantry that crouched like a grasshopper on the Eastern Plain. There were two in the gun crew and they sat in a tiny pod at the back end of the main barrel. When the gun was called into action, the grasshopper rose on its legs and the barrel swung in great sweeping arcs across the sky. The pod was flung this way and that as they homed in on their prey, diving and swooping to avoid the beam. Then the moment of elation when they locked onto the target and released a searing bolt of laser light. In training, in the atmosphere, it ripped across the sky, tearing the very fabric of the air. Blindingly bright and deafeningly loud, the laser filled their brains with the pungent stench of ozone as the target dissolved in flame.

But that was training. In training they always won. The younger men were eager to meet the enemy, eager to test their training against the real foe. He was more realistic, and, although he did not speak, he knew they were flying to their death.

Losses were heavy. This was like no other war his people had fought. This was no ordinary enemy. Who could fathom an Alien mind? The first skirmishes with the Aliens had been simple affairs. They seemed ill prepared; they had fought poorly and lost. One might have reasonably assumed they would have learnt their lesson and gone away. But they came back. They fought with a mindless ferocity, ruthless and vicious. Their technology was advanced and they seemed careless with their lives. The lives of their enemies were chaff before the wind.

Yes. He knew he would die and his wife knew it too. They had not spoken the words, there was no need. Although she could not agree with his action, she knew why he had volunteered. They could not live in subjugation to an Alien race. Now they knew they were just a small outpost of resistance to a huge and growing Empire that stretched for light years across the sky. But the conquerors must be stopped. These mad and dangerous animals must be resisted.

He stood and looked out across the lake, trying to fix the sight in his mind for the lonely weeks and months to come. His hand idly stroked down his beautiful iridescent scales as they gleamed in the moonlight. Yes, any sacrifice was worthwhile; these Human Beings must be stopped.