Project Behemoth

Control Center

TCS Edmund Teller

Petunia System

Professor Manson Ellington was just as glad to get off of that ice ball, even if it were just for a single day. He and his staff have been locked away on frozen Petunia IV, off in a quite corner of the Hawking Sector, for the better part of a year. Their home, if one could call it that, was a dome built beneath the glacier of Mt. Pettasiun. Gulagstadt was what the physicists and other scientists that lived there were called. Officially, they were dead. Each and everyone of them has, in the official Confederation papers, their own death certificate. Ellington, former Major Ellington of the Confederation Army, was listed as K.I.A. in the Niven System a couple of years back. Ellington was dead, killed by the Cats in defense of Niven Station.

His family was told that he died a hero, that he made the ultimate sacrifice for humanity. The latter was true enough; he gave up his former life to serve on this project. The brass told him that it would end the war in one swift stroke. Ellington always snorted when he thought about that. Yeah, end the war, he would believe that when it happened. He was but a year old when the Confederation made first contact with the Cats. He was just starting first grade when war was declared. He did not remember much of those first few years, and understood less, save that his parents and all the adults were scared.

Twenty-eight years later, and he fully understood why. Before “giving his life” for this project, he fought the Cats since he was twenty-one, and fought to liberate quite a few worlds in the Vega Sector. Seeing what the Kilrathi had done to those worlds– his parents would have been fools not to be scared witless. Now, they think their only son is dead, and probably eaten by the enemy. As does his wife and children. Who knows, if this project does end the war, years hence, he might be able to return.

Of course, his children would not remember him, and his wife would have moved on. He had no idea if Helen had done so. Confed does not allow personal news to enter Gulagstadt. They must be afraid one too many valued scientists might fly the coop– or blow their precious brains all over the wall. Damn the Kilrathi. He has lost almost everything to them and their damned war. Last he heard, his children and Helen were still in the Tethys System, in the Avalon Sector, about as far from the Kilrathi one could get and still be inside Confederation borders.

Most of the scientists under his command have made similar sacrifices, but they were mostly the types that married their careers. All but seven were childless. They were in a far better mood than Ellington. Part of that had to do with being let out of the glacier, if even for a little while. Ellington was glad to look out the window and see something instead of white. Now, on the bridge of this freighter, he looked out and saw nothing but black. A nice change, but still as monotonous.

On the bridge of the aptly named Edmund Teller, technicians did the last bit of wiring and programming to the ship’s computers. In only a matter of minutes, the first stage of the project would be complete, or it would have to start all over. If it were to fail, Ellington hoped it to be a catastrophic failure, and not something as mundane as having another amp blowing out. That happened more than once under the glacier.

“Professor,” one of his scientists called out. Ellington was still not use to be called that. Even with his own degree in particle physics, he was a long way from being worthy of his new official title.

“Yes, what is it?” he asked, with a slightly bored tone. He tried to stay detached from his crew, like any good commander. It was worse with Doctor Marlene Mistrique. She was a true doctor, with the doctorate in the same field as Ellington. She was the top of her class, everyone of her professors calling her brilliant. She was “killed” only a year out of school. Worst of all, she looked so much like Helen, that it drove the former Major crazy.

Her smile was much the same as well. “The Phase Transit Cannon is ready to fire.”

The Phase Transit Cannon, the biggest cover-up of the whole damned war. PTCs are powerful, single shot weapons. They take quite some time to recharge after they fire, but that one shot is powerful enough to bust a Fralthi-class cruiser outright. Officially, it was to be installed on a new class of battleships, and older battleships would be refitted. Some of the Confederation-class carriers were even having them installed on their bow. All official reports state the cannon will be ready for field actions by 2661– this year.

Hopefully, the Cats will buy that report, and not learn the real reason this cannon was developed. At least not until after it was too late to do a thing about it. Ellington did not make eye-contact with Marlene. “What of the superconductive amps, Doctor Mistrique?” He was always formal with her.

“They are cooled to near zero, Professor Ellington,” she said with a slight with a slight laugh. Like most of the scientists, she saw no reason to be so stiff, especially since they were all legally stiffs to begin with. Most of the Gulagstadt’s female staff took a hint and reciprocated the professionalism. But not Marlene– Ellington was wondering if he had become some sort of challenge for her. Most of the young scientists and staff have already paired off. Marlene was one of the few who had not. He could not understand why; she was certainly attractive enough–

No, he pushed her from his mind. Ellington was still married, and even if the entire universe said that part of his life was gone forever, it would remain in his heart. “If all is well, fire as soon as the target comes into sight,” Ellington ordered.

Marlene gave him a mock salute. “Yes sir,” she said before turning and leaving. Ellington refused to watch her depart, with her provocative sway.

Ellington rubbed the bridge of his nose. Damn this war, and all it has taken away from him. If not for those furballs, he could have lived quite the happy life. Right now, he would be back in Tethystadt, with Helen and the kids. He would probably be working at the spaceport, maintaining starship’s jump drives.

“Are you alright, sir?” asked one of the pilots, who sat below his station. Like Ellington, young Violet was an army officer. She piloted shuttles to and from battlefields, evacuating quite a few wounded soldiers, that is until her own luck ran out. She lost part of her left leg when a shuttle crashed. Had it been an internal organ, a replacement could have been grown and her put back into service after rehab, instead she was listed as KIA in the crash and conscripted into this mad project. Like everybody on board, she was officially dead.

“I’m fine pilot,” Ellington lied, sort of. For him, fine simply met everything was normal. In his case, normal sucked. “Just cursing the war.”

Violet nodded. “Oh, that. Haven’t we all, sir?” Ellington liked the ex-Army, and even ex-Navy personnel on the project. They knew how to behave professionally. Violet had her own man, somewhere out there.

Ellington remained silent, standing on his catwalk above the operations of the bridge. He stared outside, trying to spot their target. It was hopeless, for the kilometer wide asteroid was almost as black as space, and at least fifty kilometers away. With so many valued staff members onboard the Teller, the brass were not about to risk them. Besides, when the full model of this weapon was finished, years from now, it would not be fired anywhere near its target. Hours seemed to pass, but in reality only twelve minutes ticked away before Marlene reported to him again.

Avoiding her was difficult during this little test. He was nominally in command of the test firing, and she was his second-in-command. “Professor,” she said, with a hint of tease in her voice. So utterly unprofessional. “The target is in range, and locked on.”

He glanced over at his shoulder at her. “I assume the PTC is fully charged.”

Marlene nodded. “You assume correct. Both sets of amplifiers are near absolute zero as well.”

“Then by all means; fire,” he ordered.

Marlene did not relay the order. “Would you like to do the honors?”

Ellington snorted. What honors? Blowing up an asteroid was hardly honorable. Vaporizing it was just downright wasteful. “Have Mac fire it; it’s his job after all.”

“Any famous words to record?” Marlene asked.

Ellington’s face twitched. “Just fire the damn cannon!” he snapped.

Marlene gave him a sly grin. “Words for posterity.” She called over to Mac. “You heard the man.”

Lighting on the bridge flickered as the PTC fired. It did not fire directly outwards, but the energy was cycled through one set of superconductive amplifiers, and then another. More power was drawn from the system. As soon as the flickering started, it ceased as a pulse of energy raced across space at light speed. In an instant, the target vanished in blinding flash, as it was rapidly reduced to sub-atomic particles. Ellington covered his eyes as it blew, but still had to blink away the spots from his eyes.

“Target status?” he asked.

“Gone,” came the reply from the gunner, who sounded quite proud of the results.

He was not the only one. The entire civilian partition of the bridge crew let out loud cheers, loud enough to overload his ears in the way the flash did his eyes. Yes, the test was successful. Now, all they had to do was send that same shot through a far larger network of amps. When finished, it would be, without a doubt, the biggest gun in the universe.

“Well Manson, the test was a complete success. Nothing on board blew out.” Marlene said, slapping him on the back. Ellington gave her a look of reproach, but said nothing. Yes, it was a success. He could now report to the brass that Stage One of Project: Behemoth is now complete.

The Life-Eater Virus

Biochemical Test Facility
Sorn II
Sorn System, Mshrak Sector

Natkva nar Che’ri hated what she had to do, but her Pride were some of– no, the best biochemists in the Empire. None could match the Che’ri Pride in their ability to engineer genetic material. She hated this particular material, but when the Kilrah Pride issues a command, none are strong enough to ignore. She growled as she looked at the latest reports on her failing computer. Billions for genetics, but not a single coin for a descent backlit monitor. Since all this equipment came from Kilrah, naturally it used the red light of the Homeworld. The Che’ri Pride’s planet orbited a much brighter star, and her eyes were accustomed to something greater than this glume.

To kill when threatened, be it territory or cubs, was one thing, but what the Emperor had in mind was quite another. It was killing on a scale that boggled the mind. She expected indiscriminate killing from any male, but even the brutes on the frontline would be appalled by this. They wanted to get their claws bloodied, to crush the skulls of their fallen victims beneath their boots. They would be crushing many skulls once Life-Eater was perfected; plenty of lifeless bodies. How could the Emperor order such a weapon– no, this was no weapon. The Terrans have a word for it; ‘murder’. They had to borrow it from their language, for the Kilrathi are not a people to kill enemies from the shadows, without issuing a challenge. Prey perhaps, but never enemies.

Prey or not, the Apes deserved better than this. Natkva looked over at her sister, Mrisha, who finished typing her own report. "Status, my sister?"

Mrisha, whose hair was a few shades darker than Natkva’s own golden-brown, glanced at her with a board expression. Or perhaps depressed. "Life-Eater has proved 100% contagious in the limited tests, but we will need a much larger population to get solid numbers."

Natkva bowed her head in shame. More victims. A shipment of Terrans arrived on world a few days ago, some two octaves of the Apes were set up in a pen. The walls were tall enough to prevent them from escaping, but not so tall as to skew test results by trapped pockets of air. The planet’s warm air will blow the virus all about. It will be a good test, one that will see just how lethal the virus could be in an open environment.

Natkva quietly cursed the war. Like all of her Pride, she too has lost cubs to the Terrans. Out of five males she has born over the course of ten years, only two are still alive. The younger of the two served with the Imperial Guard. She thought of him with some pride, despite having no love for the Imperial Pride. To be selected to serve in the Kilrah Pride’s own fleet was the highest honor, accorded only to the best.

Her oldest– she did not like to think about him. He was sent to Repleetah, that slaughter house of a planet, and was taken under the wing of a veteran. Last she knew, both were on the rebel planet of Ghorah Khar. If he still lived, he was lost to her anyway. She did not wish to lose any more cubs to this war, nor did any of her sisters. If this virus could end the war, and prevent more of Che’ri Pride’s sons from dying, then perhaps it would be worth it.

She looked over some of the stills of the slaves. They looked new, recently captured from who knows where. The Terrans did a masterful job of pushing the Kilrathi out of the Enigma Sector. "These are new captives?" she asked her sister.

Mrisha snorted. "Of course. The Emperor doesn’t care how many sickly Apes Life-Eater will kill, only how many healthy ones."

Natkva tried to inquire the computer system as to their origin, but received no reply. They looked to be young, at least by Terran standards. The way some marched, still trying to maintain their dignity despite the shame of imprisonment, made her believe they must be warriors. Perhaps ejected from one of the numerous Terran ships destroyed in Enigma. She briefly wondered about the Terrans’ own mothers. Did they mourn their losses the way she did her own cubs?

Terrans might not be as cultured as a Kilrathi, but even the mothers of the lowliest species would fight to defend their offspring. And, at least she had the comfort of knowing her cubs died in battle. Terran mothers would never know their own children died as nothing more than experimental subjects. Died as laboratory rodents, and their deaths would no be nearly as quick as that of prey.

"The subjects are in place?" she asked her sister.

Mrisha tapped a few buttons on her keyboard. "Just about, give it a moment."

Natkva snarled, not at her sister but the whole situation. "Tell the guards to hurry them up. I want to get this test done and over with." The sooner the Apes were dead, the sooner she could push them from her mind.

Stardust: Apocalypse, chapter 9

Chapter 9 of Stardust: Apocalypse is now up on its site. And no, it is not about the end of any world.

On board the Absolution

For the rest of it, click here.

Pilot’s Quarters
TCS Absolution
Granita System

Lieutenant Colonel Brenell Zollern, head of Absolution’s security, stood over the corpse of one Lieutenant Edgar Mainz. Cause of death was fairly clear. The stench of charred flesh and bone has yet to be filtered out of the quarters by the ship’s life-support. It was a smell that brought back many memories, none of them good. The thirty-one year old Marine was veteran of several ground pounding engagements before the wound he received from a nasty slap by a Kilrathi soldier in the trenches of Repleetah. After rehab, he transferred to fleet security. He had enough of the trenches, and by the time hit vat-grown left eye had been fully accepted by his body, most of the men under his command on that Godforsaken planet were already transferred off, or dead. Which was just as well, Zollern had enough of up close and personal with the Cats.

He glanced over at Lieutenant Commander Mirat, one of the ship’s doctors. She was a fair lass, if he did say so himself, a petite blonde with the face of an angel. Reminded him of his own daughter, though she was only three years of age. Since Ellie died while she was visiting her parents on Sirius Prime, during that damnable “truce”, Zollern had not much time for women. He suppose he should thank God for minor miracles, as the Catholic chaplain of his old T.C.M.C. outfit would say, that Serena was left with his parents back in the Luyten System. Otherwise she too would be a rotting corpse under the shine of Sirius.

After the bio-attack on Epsilon Prima ten days ago, along with the subsequent evacuation of the Absolution task force to the Granita System, it was not a wonder that more suicides had occurred. He has seen enough of this as well back on Repleetah. Some Marines just could not handle the day upon day, month upon month of death. He briefly touched the three scared gouges across his left cheek bone. That planet cost him an eye, and cost many of his men a great deal more. If not for his own wound, he might have died with the rest of them on that planet, be it by the Cats or his own hand, he could not say.

“What’s the verdict, doctor?” he said, his slightly Germanic accent raising its head again. Since he joined the Corps, and spent so much time around all these English speakers, his own accent was slowly fading from Luytener Deutsche.

“He’s dead,” she said as a-matter-of-factly. Zollern knew for a fact she did not require a fancy full-body scanner to tell that. The fact that part of his head was missing was sort of a giveaway.

Zollern scowled. “No kidding.”

Mirat glanced over her shoulder at him, shooting him a look of reproach. “Suicide; self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. It was a pulse weapon, but you would know more about weapons than I.” Mirat was not fond of war– who was?– but she was of the impression that Marines were a little bit on the death-hungry side.

Zollern could not admit to innocence to that, at least back when he first signed on. Kicking the Cats out of the Enigma Sector cost the lives of a majority of his graduating class; out of fifteen graduates of the Luyten Academy that enlisted that week, only Zollern and two others were still breathing. They were all lolly-ho about the war, at least until all of them ended up as replacement officers in Repleetah.

“I need details, Commander,” Zollern told her. He felt no particular reason to explain his actions to anyone, but with a dozen other items on his daily agenda, he wanted to wrap this investigation up. “I have a report to write up, and Captain Powers is a bigger stickler for the regs than even me.”

This time Mirat did not even bother looking at him. “Self-inflicted shot to head from a pulse pistol. Judging by the coolness of the wound, I’d say his time of death was less than an hour ago. That would have been just before he was scheduled to go back on patrol, I assume.” Mirat knew little about the operations of Old Abby’s fighter compliment, a squadron of Epees. Zollern knew the schedule; after all, the wing commander was the one who reported Mainz missing. It was a silly report, as far as Zollern was concerned. Missing? Just where on this ship was he suppose to go?

As always, he took the direct approach and headed to the pilot’s quarters, assuming the W.C. overlooked the Obvious. Sure enough, he was there, dead on the floor. After that, Zollern summoned medical personnel, and informed the captain. Powers was none too pleased. “Can you certify suicide?” This time Mirat looked back at him, questions in her face. “I’ve already scanned the pistol; only Mainz’s fingerprints were on it. I need one of the medical personnel to certify it before I commit it to paper.”

Mirat gave a most unladylike snort. “Are you suggesting somebody killed him?”

Zollern shrugged. “I wouldn’t be much of a security chief if I ever discounted the idea.”

Mirat shook her head. “No, this man was a suicide, count on it.”

Zollern said nothing. The captain was not one for counting on anything short of solid evidence. He was already angry over the loss of a second pilot in a week. The previous one was a Lieutenant Hatford, and she was K.I.A. while the task force was “evacuating” the Epsilon System. Evacuating my foot, Zollern had thought. The Cats just pasted Epsilon Prima with the Life-Eater and the Commodore of this little flotilla decided to escape before one of the locals brought the disease on board. They were running, no two ways about it.

“What do you know of Mainz?” Zollern asked. “Aside form his medical record?” Zollern knew nothing about the pilots defending this old battleship, save what was on their files. They all kept their noses clean, and as a ground pounder, he had little desire to mingle with those hot shots. Still, it could have been worse. The last pilot to die took her fighter with her. At least Mainz did not take his Epee with him. Zollern had known of more than one pilot to go out in blaze of glory.
“No,” Mirat admitted. “I’ve never spoken with him outside of sickbay. Here’s a thought; you could go ask his fellow pilots.” She said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

Zollern had no immediate comeback, snappy or otherwise. Instead, he turned to leave the quarters. “If you find anything out of the ordinary, do let me know,” he said, leaving the room without waiting for her to have the last word.