Vanguard Word Update

2k words

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Chapter 5: First Strike

The importance of the Cordon Incident degraded aboard the shipyard like a discarded apple core. The minimalistic crew would force excitement out of anything – rumours always circulated that the shipyard was haunted, interpersonal affairs were spoken about in length, and bets were held in small circles for those who could correctly guess what class the next docking ship would be. It sounded mind-numbing, but that was because being a crewmember for an underutilised repairing yard couldn’t be summed up with any other word.

That was why Eleanor found it so fascinating that the rest of the crew took her incident with the Cordon with a grain of salt. “It’s not like we don’t believe you,” they said, which was the most obvious prelude for someone with doubt on their mind. “but how long’s it been since someone came down there to run some checkups? Six months?”

The story had run amok for maybe two weeks, and then it was thoroughly dropped. People stopped talking about the Cordon around her for fear of bringing the topic back up. For a crew who could talk about who slept with who for days on end, she found this very strange, and a sense of foreboding overcame her. She couldn’t deny what she’d seen on the monitors, but she almost wished she could. Her handy proverb - ears open, eyes closed – had followed her to her quarters via a portable communicator she placed on her bedside dresser. She prowled the bands every night and got so little rest that she could feel the bags forming over her eyes.

True to his word, Steven had sent down a technician to make sure her equipment was in working order. She could see in the way the techie moved from dash to dash that he didn’t expect to find anything, and neither did Eleanor, neither did anyone on the shipyard, for the matter. This whole thing was just a gesture to placate her.

The technician said that everything was in working order. Steven had told her this on more than one occasion, treating it like a reassurance, but Eleanor saw it as more of a gloat. No messages had been sent to the Hub, and contact with the Cordon remained unventured.

Maybe it was a simple glitch, Eleanor thought. But that warning - , connection lost with Post-299 – there had to be failsafe’s in place so the system didn’t display that warning readily. And why hadn’t the people on 299 put out an assurance? They must have known they were offline for a few minutes, didn’t that warrant a check-in?

But that could be explained away. The rules for sending signals in and out of the Cordon were ironclad. The Confederates had their own radio operators out there, probably hunting over the same bands as she was. All her troubles had excuses, but she was satisfied with none of them, and this duality battling within her was constant and drained her of her already limited energy.

Her regular sleep schedule was already a depressing mess of mismatched times, but there was one place she knew she wouldn’t be bothered too much. They had designed the operator chairs to be a nice balance between practicality and cushion, so they weren’t comfortable, but if Eleanor angled herself just right, leaned just the right way, she could lull herself into the pull of exhaustion within twenty minutes. Napping on the job was bound to get her in more trouble than she could ever imagine, but who would care? Steven didn’t believe her, the crew didn’t either, and the chair was her one respite.

Eleanor awoke in the green light of her monitors, that foreboding presence clinging to her shoulders tighter than ever. She glanced at the clock, her sluggish eyes comprehending she had slept for just under three hours. Spikes of fear coursed through her, and she straightened up, fumbling for her headset. All those weeks of training to get here, and she let her tiredness get the better of her!

She completely expected something had happened in the meantime, the Cordon blaring out warning, enemy boarders, an attack of some sort. Yet all was quiet, the shipyard gently stirred in the background of her viewport, the bands quiet except for the occasional Alliance chatter, and her heartrate slowed.

If something had caught her while she’d been unawares, she’d never forgive herself. She needed a coffee.

She peeled off her headset, putting through a call to main tower that she was out for her two-minute leave. She stepped over the bulkhead that sealed off her station, turning left in the corridor beyond. Exposed pipelines and nests of wires surrounded her on all sides, her boots clocking against the metal tiles. Shipyards were skeletal and bare-bones by design, especially in the arms furthest away from the docking ports and hubs, where only the occasional crewmember or two were needed to run the rounds.

Fortunately, this didn’t mean she was completely without amenities. A small storage area down the next turn had been repurposed into a mess hall, complete with a refrigerator and a coffee machine. Eleanor was the only one close enough to use it regularly, and while she didn’t mind having her own quiet space, she wished some of the crew visited more often.

She placed one of the caffeine capsules into the machine, listing to it hum against the wall as she placed a mug below the faucet. There was a viewport built into one of the walls of the mess, an angled view off the shipyard taking up one side of the glass, while starry space took up the other.

She sipped at her steaming drink, the bitter taste tingling the roof of her mouth. She sat on a nearby crate and watched the view for a while, thinking about the Balokarids and the images she’d seen of them on the intranet. Maybe one would get posted to the shipyard one day – she’d read that they made excellent engineers and worked remarkably fast – now that would be something worth talking about.

She saw a star flicker on the upper left corner of the viewport, remembering how meteors and comets had enthralled her when she was a girl. Nowadays she’d seen enough sooting stars that there was very little magic left in them.

She clutched her warm mug in both hands, watching that star burn brighter, and then wink out, almost like it was pulsing. Perhaps not all the magic was gone after all.

The white dot reappeared, a little more to the left of where it’d last been. No, it wasn’t a star, it was something else, something moving close enough for her to detail its course with her eyes alone, and burning brighter.

She concentrated on that dot, and she saw that it wasn’t pulsing in and out, but swerving to the sides, the light vanishing behind its bulk. A ship? Why hadn’t they called in? At this proximity, they should have requested docking hours ago.

She almost had her answer, but in that next moment, the dot bloomed out, became shaped, and the white light was not from a star but from a single propulsion thruster. That premonition of foreboding dug a pit into her guts.

The plume of flame burned brighter, but that was the last she ever saw of it. At speeds of upwards from seven kilometres a second, no human eye could track something that fast except for a vague kind of blurring shape.

The incoming projectile ripped into the conning tower that jutted from the heart of the shipyard, Eleanor covering her eyes as a bright explosion ripped the structure in two, the flames dying almost immediately to the vacuum. There was a sudden, powerful tremble as the shipyard recoiled from the blast, pipes rattling all around her as the force of impact travelled down the lengths of the crane arm she was in.

Eleanor gasped in horror as she watched the little pieces of debris shoot into the void, but some of those pieces had distinctly human shapes, limbs curtailing in odd directions. Steven’s post was in the conning tower…

She dropped her mug, the ceramic shattering between her feet, Eleanor racing for the door. Not a star or a ship, a torpedo, and if there were any more on the way, she may only have seconds to live.

The arm of the station she was currently in was shaped like the letter L, and she was sprinting up the long arm towards the corner, her ponytail flapping from shoulder to shoulder. Walking to the mess had taken no more than a minute, but now the far wall seemed to stretch away before her, like something out of a bad dream.

Another great tremble rocked the station, and at first Eleanor assumed it was another torpedo. She tried to sprint harder, but her foot never connected with the deck. She cried out, the feeling one gets when they’ve stepped off a ledge permeating her chest as her body began to drift in the air. The generators controlling the centrifugal spin must have been knocked out, Eleanor finding herself flailing in microgravity.

It was fortunate that she had been so close to the wall at the time, or else she’d have been stuck there with no form of propulsion to save her. She gripped the wall tight enough to turn her knuckles white, trying to get her breathing under control. Her station. She had to get back to it before the shipyard was ripped apart.

Kicking off the wall like a swimmer, she launched herself down the length of the hallway, eyes tracking a red toolbox that had been laying on the deck a couple minutes ago.

She reached the bulkhead that sectioned off her equipment, Eleanor hitting the panel that opened the door. It was a mess. She wasn’t a clean as you go person, dozens of crumpled papers and plastic cups tumbling from corner to corner, but at least her equipment was in working order.

Up through the viewport, she got another view of the shipyard’s central structure. Only a quarter of the conning tower was still connected to the yard, everything else had disappeared into space. Chunks of the hull had been chewed out near its base, probably secondary explosions from the centrifugal generators, as they were located roughly around there.

Trying not to think about Steven’s fate, she pulled herself up to her dashboard, her hands dancing across the keyboard. She discarded the warning messages and calls for evacuation, opening up the three-dimensional map of the shipyard and the sector. Her station leeched off the main power grid, but it also had a couple secondary battery banks built into the hull below her feet that would allow her to stay operational in the event of an emergency.

She pulled up the digital representation, zooming out towards the vector she’d seen the torpedo come from, using the shipyard’s orientation for reference. There were proximity warnings in that direction, warning boxes flickering over four more incoming masses. Were those more torpedos?

As she watched, the four projectiles began to streak through the void in different directions, three of them swerving around the shipyard in wide arcs. The station had no jamming capabilities, only a handful of point-defence cannons, or PDC’s for short, and it seemed nobody was manning them. With the main communications tower destroyed, it would take a while before anyone knew what was going on.

One of the incoming masses closed in on the station, Eleanor preparing herself for another blast, but it never came. She looked out the viewport, spying an oblong, dart-shaped vessel cruising towards the yard, just barely skimming the outer torus. It was hard to gauge sizes without reference, but it was about the size of a bus, its dark panelling coated in a sheen of black paint.

It careened towards one of the docking yards, and she assumed it would barrel straight into the station like a knife, but right as it touched the station, it stopped. It turned its nose towards the outer docking clamp, which was a flat deck where engineers could go to access a parked spaceship’s hull and do minor field repairs.

A panel on the strange craft slid aside, and a group of people piled out, legs snapping to the deck at the moment of contact. She couldn’t gleam much detail at this distance, but she recognised the shapes of guns in their hands, and their padded gear indicated they were wearing combat armour.

They walked along the flat deck like they were in gravity, guns sweeping along as they moved to one of the airlock doors. Boarders.

Eleanor was struck with a moment of clarity. That was why there had only been one torpedo. It would only take a small number of explosive ordinance to level the shipyard, but that wasn’t the Confederate’s goal. They had knocked out their communications intentionally, and those other three boarding craft were here to capture the station.

Post 299, she thought, remembering the warning she’d received. They had neutralised it, opened a door leading them straight into the sector. How they had done this, how they hadn’t been detected on the inside of the boarder, it didn’t really matter now.

She had been right along, but Eleanor didn’t feel the slightest bit satisfied. At least one of her friends was dead, and she would be too when the boarders found her.

To say she had planned for this moment wasn’t quite correct. Eleanor had taken precautions, despite her and everyone else’s doubts. She’d been forbidden from sending any messages, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t get a data package ready and have one of her dishes aimed towards Alliance space.

Her warning could be sent whenever she was ready, btu she took a moment to prepare some additional information. Four boarding ships, one torpedo launched, one compromised listening post – these were all things that could help her rescuers get an advantage, assuming help arrived in time.

A little scream left her lips as she heard gunfire behind her, the shots travelling loudly up the arm. Time was a resource she did not have. She rushed to compile the package, hearing heavy footsteps draw closer and closer.

She pushed the send prompt, and despite everything, she let relief wash over her floating body. Today was very likely her last few moments alive, but the Confederates wouldn’t take the station as easily.

Another gunfight echoed up from the hallway, a short gunfight exchanged with some of the security guards, probably. Eleanor’s eyes darted to the footlocker by the door. There was a pistol and three magazines of ammo inside it, but she had never touched it. Hell, she’d never fired a weapon since basic weapons training six years ago. She wasn’t a soldier, she wasn’t trained to repel boarders with automatic weapons.

Another boarding craft cruised across her viewport, disappearing behind the station to some other access point the Confederates planned to hit. Everyone knew how bloodthirsty the UEC was when dealing with rebellion and traitors, but would they shoot a simple operator? If she was armed, definitely, if she wasn’t…

It was cowardly, she knew that, but her fight was in wavelengths and transmissions, and in that regard, she’d fought to her very best.

Eleanor faced the door, her palms open and floating by her sides. There, she awaited her fate.