Chapter 35: The Republic Done Goofed, Part One

Doctor Henry Chapman was sitting at his desk deep in the Republic Advanced Research Program Agency’s Northern Complex going over the latest scans from the debacle that just took place in Barnard’s Star.

Ten of their “babies”, the Fairbairn Stilettos, were gutted in seconds. There was no salvaging them. They were all bound for the scrap heap.

It wasn’t even a fight. That goddamn Samuels person slaughtered them. No, that wasn’t accurate. She could have slaughtered them but instead did just enough damage to completely wreck them without a single death.

Oh, more than a few people were in med pods, and a few of them will have their military careers come to an end due to what could only be described as “extensive injuries" but nobody was killed.

And what’s worse, the ship now known as “Gloria’s Reaper” escaped. God, he wanted that ship! He had absolutely no interest in the coup, any of them. He had only one thing that drove him. The acquisition of knowledge, more specifically knowledge that would further the Republic’s capacity for self-preservation.

He pushed his old-style glasses up, a very useful affectation. They constantly displayed augmented reality screens fed by any of several supercomputers and from a very advanced scanner built directly into the frame.

He felt blind without them.

His drive was borderline insane, but so was the situation in which the Republic found itself. He knew a very ugly little fact that most in the Republic did not. Technologically speaking, both the Republic and the Empire weren’t just a little behind the bug.

They were so far behind it wasn’t even funny.

They only “won”, if you could call it that, by the “strength of spirit” of their combatants who threw themselves and their ships into a suicidal headlong fight against what should have wiped them out.

The numbers didn’t lie. Based on firepower and technology, we should have lost.

The bugs should be converting Terra into another hive-world at this very moment.

And humanity?

What was left of it should be huddling on whatever ships they could grab or packed nut to butt into the Grand Shipyard, hoping and praying that the bug didn’t find that too.

Yes, the Terran people (and the Empire’s) saved the day, but that victory was a truly pyrrhic one, and next time…

Next time they wouldn’t win. The bug will be back, and at their rate of industrial production and technological development, when they do come back, they will have corrected their “mistake”.

Their next fleet will be able to do the job. Hell, a fleet the quarter the size of the one they sent last time would be more than enough anytime in the next few years.

Humanity was doomed unless he could deliver the impossible, a century’s worth of development in the next five years.

Henry’s war never stopped. He was still fighting it every single day.

Taking another gulp of coffee, he ran the footage again. Those missiles were identified as ASGMF30 anti-ship guided fusion missiles…

He ran the analysis again…

Because they were!

Something had been done to them…

Something fabulous!…

But what?

He pulled up all the information he had on that missile. Theoretically, the missile was capable of the performance that he was seeing. It was theoretically possible, but he of all people knew the difference between “theoretically possible” and actually achievable.

While the reactionless thruster used on that missile was capable of that power output and actually did achieve it during its final shield penetration burn, there was a reason why it waited until the final approach before it did so. There was no way that the missile could accurately, and far more importantly safely, acquire the target, correctly identify it as hostile, successfully arm the fusion device and guide itself during the terminal burn. That level of acceleration required every amp from the battery pack, leaving nothing for guidance. It was only capable of doing that level of acceleration in a straight line.

To hit a moving ship at any range with that power distribution, the missile would have to be able to see into the future, which was impossible…

So how did they pull it off, and even more importantly to Henry, who pulled it off?

He pulled up every single thing he had on Janustec. It wasn’t any of those hacks. He was sure of it. Esmeralda was sharp, but this was quite beyond her or her cookbook anarchists.

He played the raid of their corporate headquarters again and smiled. That poor little snake never failed to get a smile out of him. Wait. What did he know about that snake?

His fingers flew across his keyboard.

No, it wasn’t the snake, probably. Still, he should send an agent out to chat with it, see if it knew anything about missiles.

He typed in an order to make it happen, taking care to specify that it be a pleasant interview with a kind interviewer that was dealing with a friendly contact who we wanted to like us after the session was concluded.

He definitely did not want to alienate either the snake or, much more importantly, his new employer, one of the “shadow techs” from which one ill word would silence entirely too many much-needed voices. It had taken years to get some of those people to open up, and one botched “interview” would send that entire sector so deep into the shadows he would never get them or their innovations back.

All of this was made quite clear in the orders. He hated that he had to take care to do that, but he wasn’t the only person for whom the war had never ended, and some of them had only gotten more twisted and monstrous with every year that passed.

Staring down the barrel of extinction will do that to a person. It was getting more and more difficult to keep some of them in line.

That reminded him. He pulled up the latest from Cerberus and frowned. It seems that a “prospect” was one of the two individuals that were taken from-

Holy shit!

It was them, wasn’t it? Gloria was part of Sheila Donovan’s crew, and her ship was almost certainly the one used for the jailbreak!

That means they have the prospect!

His fingers once again turned into blurs.

Sheloran

He quickly pulled up everything he had on her and leaned back as his spectacles were flooded with information.

“Quite the dark horse aren’t you, my little frog?” he muttered after a few minutes. The stories from the Federation were hyperbole laden fluff, as per usual…

But if even a fraction of it was true… She was far too dangerous to be loose and far too promising to allow to disappear.

Wait. Didn’t they have some of her tech already? They did! He contacted the small arms division and called for a briefing.

***

“Neutron-star!” Lucky crowed as she slammed down her cards triumphantly.

“Ugh,” Visha groaned as she let her cards slip from her fingers. “Why do I play this Fed nonsense?”

“Because you are a generous soul,” Lucky snickered as she gathered the loot. “Another hand?”

“I can’t afford it,” Visha replied, “unless you feel like playing a game of chess first?”

“Not after the last...” Lucky trailed off as she saw where the chessboard was being set up, a sensor hole. “… maybe one game. How much is this ‘game’ gonna cost me.”

“Just this,” Visha replied, selecting just a few credits worth of basic commissary goodies.

Lucky’s ears pricked up.

“Okay...” she said dubiously. Visha wanted something, and it wasn’t her stash of honey buns.

Interesting.

“I’m in,” Lucky smiled.

The pair walked across the common area to where the board was already being set up by some of Visha’s crew, who then backed away as they sat.

Lucky’s ears were fully upright. Just her and Visha, huh?

Something was definitely up. This was further confirmed as Visha’s people shooed away the usual crowd of spectators that would gather for one of their epic confrontations.

More than a little concerned, Tizz caught her eye, and Lucky just shrugged and nodded.

“I have to admit,” Visha said as she made her first move, “I thought you guys were having a little bit of fun with us with all of your talk about that Sheloran thing.”

“Oh, she’s the real deal, alright,” Lucky replied as she carefully pushed a pawn forward.

“Of that, I have absolutely no doubt,” Visha replied. “You know who I am with, correct?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we have people up there,” Visha said quietly. “And your girl definitely is the real deal, and then some.”

“Oh?” Lucky replied. “Do tell.”

Visha leaned forward. So did Lucky.

“You know that place is literally airtight, in orbit, the most secure facility there is, yes?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Well, it is now just a little less secure.”

“What?!?” Lucky hissed.

“You heard me,” Visha whispered. “There was an ‘incident’ up there, and two people escaped.”

Visha smiled.

“Care to guess who one of them was?”

“No. Fucking. Way.”

“Yes fucking way,” Visha smiled. “They are keeping it out of the news, but Sheloran and some super-secret someone or another got out. Your frog is in the wind.”

Lucky let out a long contented sigh and leaned back happily.

“Oh, the Republic has to be just about wetting themselves,” Lucky said with a toothy ear-to-ear grin (quite the accomplishment for a Xvli).

“You know that bank robbery they say she was involved in?” Visha whispered.

“Yeah?”

“It was done by Sheila Donovan,” Visha replied as she moved one of her knights. “Ring a bell?”

“Should it?”

“How about the White Star?”

“It was her?” Lucky asked.

“Word on the street was that Sheila hit that bank because she was getting money for the White Star job,” Visha said, “It’s your turn, by the way.”

“Oh, sorry,” Lucky said, realizing that she had forgotten.

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“And guess who is suspect number one for the jailbreak?” Visha asked as Lucky was mulling over the board, causing her to once again forget.

“No!”

Visha smiled and nodded.

“The same people who just ‘happened’ to pick her bank to rob, the bank that they were conveniently able to use to tap into the Federation banking network and steal millions. Our hackers say doing that is nearly impossible and would take days to accomplish… unless it was set up ahead of time...”

“Holy shit,” Lucky gasped. “They busted out a member of their crew!”

“Or more likely an associate,” Visha shrugged. “You need to move something, or this will start to look suspicious, Flopsy.”

“Well, hold off on the next orbital strike until I move, void-lover,” Lucky said as she studied the board.

Visha just sat there, her eyes glittering like a teen who just got asked to prom.

Lucky took her hand off of her queen and looked up.

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

Visha just vibrated happily.

Lucky shook her ears to clear her mind and focused on the board.

***

“Doctor Chapman!” a blonde woman in her forties enthused as she entered his office carrying a small case, “We have completed our initial analysis of the small arms used by Sheloran the Plath during the Harkeen incident as well as the concealed carry piece that she always had on her.”

Henry actually smiled a genuine smile at her approach. Normally when someone approached him that eagerly it was to brown-nose but hopefully… now what was her name again… Sigrid?… no…

Thank God for his spectacles. He flicked his eye over to an icon suspended in his vision and blinked.

Sissel! Her name was Sissel.

“Excellent, Sissel,” he said happily.

Doctor Sissel Haugen beamed at him. He actually remembered her name!

“So,” Henry said, leaning forward, “what do you have for me.”

“Only the most alien fucked-up shit you can imagine,” Dr. Haugen said as she opened the case and pulled out one of the flayers. “This thing is evil!”

“So what is it, what does it do, and how does it work?” Henry asked as Dr. Haugen activated a holographic display attached to her laptop, projecting a schematic of the flayer.

“It looks deceptively simple,” Henry said, looking at the hologram.

“That’s because it is,” Sissel replied. “What she did was take a spool of ‘space wire’ and feed it into a highly modified blaster. Instead of generating and firing a stream of charged particles, it instead accelerated the wire out of the reinforced barrel at near blaster velocity, without breaking the wire… until she wanted to. That’s not the cool part! This is!”

Sissel pointed at a small assembly at the barrel.

“What is that?” Henry asked, completely mystified.

“It took us a minute to figure that one out!” Sissel replied proudly. “It is a type of oscillator that applies wave functions on the wire as it exits the barrel. It is basically a series of charged plates and guides that both vibrate and apply charges upon the wire as it exits. It’s essentially a combination of an ancient-tech speaker and, get this… a cathode-ray tube monitor. The combination of the two functions can apply virtually any combination of waves and directional impulses to the exiting wire. That is what made it so horribly effective.”

The holographic image showed the wire leaving the weapon in loops, angles, swirls, circles… squares…

“It’s basically a cookie-cutter gun!” Sissel exclaimed. “She was shooting ‘blades’ of any size or shape that she chose and was able to vary it on the fly to suit the targets. We reviewed the footage, and over a hundred different waveforms were applied to those poor bastards, and we think that was just the barest fraction of what was possible.”

Slow-motion footage of the incident started to play with the shapes that hit the various targets highlighted.

Henry looked at the weapon’s schematic carefully. Something was missing.

“Where is the computer or signal generator for the waveforms?”

Dr. Haugen grinned.

“That’s the really freaky part!” she exclaimed. “There aren’t any! There is nothing in the weapon that created the waveforms. In fact, there isn’t even a ‘trigger’ as we would define one...”

She triumphantly pointed at a tiny little dot that started to glow on the schematic.

“There is just this!”

“What?”

“A microphone!” Sissel exclaimed happily. She played the tape of the incident again, with the volume turned up.

“The singing?” Henry asked in wide-eyed amazement.

“Yeah, that’s how we looked when we figured it out!” Sissel grinned. “She controlled both flayers with the song she was singing. Analysis of the ‘music’ revealed that it had the waveforms encoded as well as additional commands that involved the feed rate of the wire.”

The incident played again in slow motion, with displays showing the various sung notes.

“We have been able to deduce the tones that cause the wire to feed and stop, causing the wire to break and completing a single ‘projectile’ and the vocal channel that encoded the waveforms in the wire. Both weapons were completely controlled by her voice! She didn’t need signal generators! She is one!”

Henry just sat there in amazement at the simple, brutal… elegance of what he was watching. It was a simple concept, but the precision with which every single part had to be tuned and how they were tuned to work together to operate was…

Beautiful…

And Sheloran built two of them in just a few hours. It would take a team of engineers weeks (at least) to get something like this to work without blowing apart or ripping the hands off of the user.

“It gets better!” Dr. Haugen enthused, “or worse, depending on which end of this unholy beast you are facing.”

She pointed at the “decoration” on the side of the flayers.

“That is the guts from a Takka Migraine Mk III.”

“A stunner?”

“It was a stunner,” Sissel beamed, “It is now a war crime! The signal from the stunner is fed directly into the blaster with no loss of signal quality and is amplified by approximately fifty-thousand times, turning what was a low-energy neural disruption signal into a high-power neural destruction signal. Any contact with any portion of that wire when that function is active will instantly kill any neural tissue triggering instant cell death along the axons (or whatever signal carrier a species uses). If your body uses any electric or electro-chemical mechanism to transmit information through the body, you are fucked. She ripped them into pieces for good measure, but they were probably dying the second the first few millimeters of wire hit them.”

“Jesus Christ...” Henry muttered. That single function was beyond valuable!

“It spreads out from the initial point of impact,” Sissel said as she showed scans of the corpses. “Their central nervous system was destroyed all the way to their median ganglia line. It’s the Threen version of having their spinal column cooked.”

Henry just looked at the scans in disbelief. They had tried boosting a neural disruption signal, but the more you try to boost it, the “noisier” it becomes. Beyond a certain point, you don’t get a death ray. You just get an inefficient electron “blaster bolt”. The power levels necessary to cause this sort of damage should just burn everything before the signal can be transmitted, even with a melee weapon (which these strange pistols resemble as much as they resemble anything)…

Until today…

Sissel was looking at him, eyes aglow.

“And are you familiar with the particular signal that particular stunner uses to incapacitate its target, Dr. Chapman?”

His eyes flickered across the virtual reality “screens” that hovered ever-present in his sight.

He soon had the answer.

Pain. The final scream of their nerves wasn’t just threshold-level pain. It was the sort of agony that kills the very nerves that transmit their final scream.

Sissel let out a giggly nervous laugh when she saw his expression change.

“The neurochemical scans of the brains of the Threen showed… well… Their last moments were NOT nice. We’ve never seen those levels of stress and pain in a Threen brain, ever. That includes that one rather nasty starport accident a few years back. These flayers are worse than being burned alive, much, much, much worse. I… I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like. This… thing was designed to punish them, torture them… utterly destroy them...”

Sissel’s smile faded.

“I’m an atheist, but… Satan himself, or herself, built these.”

“I don’t know,” Henry smiled. “I think it is more traditionally angelic, but then again, that label fits as well, doesn’t it? What about that last one? The one she put through a deli slicer?”

“We don’t have the best footage, but it looks like the initial strokes were without the ‘joy-buzzer’,” Sissel replied. “He was clearly still lucid for many of the initial cuts. She wanted him to know what was happening… God, I’m glad she’s locked up!”

Henry smiled a thin smile in response.

“But,” Sissel continued, “right… here!” she exclaimed as she paused the footage of the Threen boss getting disassembled, “see his eyes roll back? That’s when she burned him. She didn’t let him get off light.”

“Amazing that she kept him conscious that long,” Henry mused as he viewed the carnage dispassionately, “Actually, it looks like she waited for him to lose consciousness before using the neural burn to bring him back for the grand finale. Jesus, remind me not to piss her off.”

He looked down at his notes.

“And what about her little purple glitter-adorned snub-nosed burner?” he asked.

Sissel shuddered as she carefully pulled it out of the case, still in a plastic bag.

“I don’t like this thing one bit. It scares me.”

“Is it worse than the flayers?”

“It’s different… weird…” she said, trying to find the right words. “… Alien...We are still trying to figure it out, actually. We only fired it once, and we dare not do it again.”

“Why?”

“It’s an unholy mix of a ‘dime store’ stunner and… get this… parts from a microwave oven and what we think might be a pocket sewing machine. She claims she learned it from a video game, but that is bullshit. This did NOT come from any video game anywhere, not in this century anyhow. The components are all jammed together in what appears to be no logical order, and the power has been boosted beyond the design limits of any single component. It should explode, but it doesn’t. What it does is send a beam of what can only be described as coherent electrons downrange.”

“Coherent electrons?”

“It projects a beam of electrons all moving in a perfectly straight line, with no resistance, just like they were traveling down a superconductor, but there is no conductor. The electrons, while insanely high voltage, make no attempt to travel to ground until it hits the target, at which time they punch through insulators like a kinetic projectile trying to continue along their pre-existing path, still not trying to go to ground until ‘something gives’ and they then remember that they are in fact, electrons, and start behaving normally. Until ‘whatever’ happens, they act more like a high-velocity laminar-flow fluid than anything else. We don’t understand. And, of course, they carry a murderously amplified universal neural disruption signal because that’s just how she rolls. Not much has to get through to be absolutely lethal to most life forms… we think... The weapon was only fired twice that we know of, and it instantly killed both targets. We don’t have access to the victims, but we are fairly certain they didn’t die from anything ‘traditional’. Video footage shows them just falling without even a twitch. They just went down, went down hard, and never moved again.”

“We need more data,” Henry replied. “Why haven’t you fired it again?”

“Each time it fires, it breaks down further,” Sissel replied. “It was clearly intended for a limited number of shots, its longevity sacrificed for pure lethal power. Until we know more, each shot could be its last, and that last shot could destroy the device. It’s probably why she built the flayers to take on multiple opponents.”

“We should at least-”

“Nope!” Sissel replied firmly. “I’m not even shooting a lab rat with that nightmare, not until we know what it actually does to the target. Now, send me a porkie or the right Terran, and I’ll pop a cap in their ass, but I’m NOT doing it to some innocent animal, not after what those fucking flayers did to the Threen.”

“I will see what I can do,” Henry replied calmly. “I’m sure we can find an appropriate ‘volunteer’ somewhere.”

“Just make sure they are extra appropriate,” Sissel replied. “I have no idea what this thing will do to somebody, but I’m pretty sure it will be truly messed-up… And from what I’ve read, the Plath are supposed to be these sweet little garden gnomes,” Sissel said, shaking her head, “as well as what can only be described as ‘technologically backward’, if you can believe it.”

“So we’ve been led to believe,” Henry replied. “Then again, this one is supposedly an aberration, actually an ‘abomination’ if their planetary media is to be believed. They actually have a ‘religious urban legend’ not officially part of their religion that states that a deal was struck between a figure known as The Great Prophet and The Befouler, their devil. The bargain was that one individual in each generation would belong to the Befouler and would contain all of the evil and corruption of their entire race. Most Plath scholars and theologians believe this to be a means for people to explain the occasional violent or ‘evil’ act that would sometimes happen in an otherwise unbelievably peaceful race.”

Henry displayed a picture of Sheloran in one of her frilly homemade “Little House on the Prairie” dresses with a huge ribbon on her head, smiling a big nervous smile.

“She doesn’t look the part, but you know what, Sissel,” Henry said with a smile, “I think that maybe, just maybe, there might just be something to that legend after all.”

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