CHAPTER 8 – INVASION
The planet Nordland (TOI 700d), 101.2 light-years from Earth in the Dorado Constellation.
06:09 (Universal Time)
Sunday, October 13, 2335
Bridge of the Spacers’ League ore carrier IRON MAIDEN
Emerging in the TOI 700 System, Dorado Constellation
101.2 light-years from Earth
‘’Jump completed! I confirm that we are now in the TOI 700 System, with the planet Nordland ahead at a distance of 0.6 Astronomical Units.’’
‘’Thank you, Miss Cuellar! Sensors, make a medium range panoramic scan! Make sure that no object or ship is on a collision course with us.’’
‘’Aye, Captain!’’
Less than half a minute later, Captain Régis Galix’ sensors officer, Piotr Zivkin, reported back to him from his station.
‘’Nothing within 250,000 kilometers, Captain.’’
‘’Good! Mister Smith, head for Nordland at fifty percent acceleration. We have a lot of steel products to load and little time to do it. On the other hand, I am not sure that Nordland Space Control would like it if we approached orbit like a bowling ball.’’
There were a few chuckles in response to Galix’ pun, then silence fell back on the bridge as the crew of the commercial ore carrier concentrated on their tasks. Régis Galix thus concentrated his attention on the slowly growing small blue ball that was the planet Nordland. There was little remarkable about Nordland as a planetary body, except for two things: it was a habitable world, albeit a rather cold one; and it contained some very rich deposits of heavy metals like chromium, nickel, vanadium and copper. Those metals represented the bread and butter of the IRON MAIDEN, a medium-sized cargo ship specializing in the transport of various metals in either refined ore, ingot or pellet shape. Because many planets which were prime sources of metals still had only basic Space installations, the IRON MAIDEN had been designed to be able to enter the atmosphere of a planet or moon and then land at the vertical where it would pick up its load of metal products. Because of that, Galix’ ship had a well-streamlined shape espousing that of a thick triangular flying wing, which made it easy to control even in heavy atmospheric turbulences. Galix was most proud of his ship, which had entered service some five years ago and which used some of the latest technology available in the Spacers’ League.
Some four hours later, the IRON MAIDEN entered into a low orbit over Nordland, prior to starting its descent through the atmosphere. The planet was by far the farthest from Earth among the worlds of the Spacers’ League and had first been explored and then colonized a mere nine years ago. As a result, it had few systems and satellites in orbit around it and no orbital terminal, another reason why the IRON MAIDEN routinely landed directly on the planet to either unload supplies or load up on metal products. Régis Galix was still debating if he would allow his crew to spend a day or two away from the ship while it was being loaded, in order to flex their legs and breathe some open fresh air, when Piotr Zivkin suddenly spoke up, his voice tainted with surprise.
‘’What the… a very large ship just jumped directly into orbit of Nordland, some 8,000 kilometers away from us. I don’t th… Another huge ship just emerged next to the planet. THEY’RE SPACE PREDATOR ASTEROID SHIPS! MORE ASTEROID SHIPS ARE NOW CONTINUING TO APPEAR AROUND US!’’
Captain Galix froze for a moment in horror at that announcement before he started shouting orders around his command chair.
‘’MISTER SMITH, GET US OUT OF HERE! MISS CUELLAR, PLOT AN EMERGENCY JUMP TO PROVIDENCE AND JUMP AS SOON AS WE ARE READY! TO ALL THE CREW: WE ARE UNDER ATTACK! CLOSE ALL…’’
Galix couldn’t finish his sentence before his ship shook and before all power was suddenly cut on the bridge. Thankfully, the emergency batteries system took over in seconds and some of the lights and most of the work stations on the bridge lit back up.
‘’CAPTAIN, WE HAVE MULTIPLE HULL BREACHES FROM LASER STRIKES, WITH THREE MAIN COMPARTMENTS VENTING TO SPACE!’’
‘’MAIN POWER AND PROPULSION ARE OUT, CAPTAIN!’’
‘’SWITCH TO GRAVITY SAILS! WE MUST…’’
A thick purple laser beam then cut into the bridge compartment, creating a shower of sparks as it burned through the deck and roof of the bridge, also creating a deadly explosive decompression. Galix and his bridge crew, who were not wearing spacesuits at the time, died within seconds, with many of the men and women being sucked out into Space and also being torn apart as their bodies went through the jagged holes created in its steel hull by the powerful laser beams of the Space Predators.
The small orbital traffic control station situated in equatorial orbit around Nordland was destroyed and silenced even more quickly than the IRON MAIDEN, its strong radar emissions making it an ideal target for the Space Predator warships which had arrived by the dozens over the planet. It thus had no chance to launch an emergency beacon drone that could have alerted the rest of the Spacers’ League to the arrival of the monsters in the TOI 700 System. The 27 asteroid warships and accompanying fifteen support ships full of Space Predator troops then spent twenty minutes destroying anything they found in orbit or in the process of flying from the surface towards the planet’s orbit. Next, with the warships covering them and forming an interdiction barrier above them, the fifteen troopships started sending down their 25,000 soldiers, using their transporter beams to bring them on the planet, where they reappeared and immediately started killing the Humans they could find around them.
11:20 (Universal Time)
Downtown New Oslo City, administrative center of Nordland
Greta Thorund was working at her desk, situated next to one of the large windows of the financial services company employing her, when a series of detonations made her jerk and look outside. What she saw then made her mouth and eyes open wide in horror: dozens of tall, nightmarish creatures were running out of some sort of craft that had landed in the middle of the square her building was overlooking and were shooting everybody in sight with sorts of rifles firing purple beams. The best way to summarily describe the creatures was as well over two-meter-tall brownish-red praying mantis with four legs, four arms, a long spiked tail and an elongated head with huge, terrifying-looking jaws. Greta’s heart skipped a beat when she saw half a dozen of the creatures run towards the building she was in and entered it: her three-year-old daughter Frida was presently at the daycare center of her building, on the ground floor!
‘’NOOO!’’
Without thinking further, Greta rushed out of her office to go down to the daycare center and to carry her Frida to safety, wherever that would be. She however thought enough to not take one of the elevator cabins on her floor: it would have been like walking straight into the arms of these monsters. Instead she ran into the nearby fire emergency stairwell and went down the steps as quickly as she could, going down three levels in less than a minute. She was about to go out of the stairwell at ground level when she noticed the glass panel of a firefighting station box next to the door of the stairwell: there was a large fire axe in it next to a rolled fire hose. Quickly opening the panel, Greta grabbed the axe with both hands, then pulled open the door and ran inside the ground level hallway, only to nearly bump into one of the insect-like monsters, who was passing by the door of the stairwell at the time. The creature seemingly was as surprised as her by that encounter and took a fraction of a second to react and pivot on the spot while raising its weapon to point it at her. Greta, pumped full of adrenaline and pushed by her resolve to save her daughter, took that chance and swung her axe while screaming her rage and fury. Swung with the strength of despair, the blade hit one of the four arms of the creature and severed it, making the monster screech with pain as green blood started spurting out from the wound. Greta then swung her axe a second time, aiming for the head of the creature. That blow split open the skull of the monster, near one of its four eyes, with the alien then collapsing on the floor, dead. Not wasting a second in celebrating her victory, Greta started running again, heading for the entrance to the daycare center, only ten meters away. Pushing it open while still running, she burst inside the daycare’ reception area, where she stopped cold at the sight of the daycare receptionist. The mature woman was lying in a pool of blood next to her reception desk, unmoving and with an ugly wound in her chest. Gathering back her courage, Greta stepped over the body of the receptionist and ran towards the playroom where she knew her little Frida would be with another dozen toddlers. That was when she heard a concert of terrified screams coming from that playroom. Fearing the worst, she pulled open the door of the playroom and entered it, still holding her axe. Inside, she was greeted by a frightening sight: Frida and her little friends were all cowering in a corner, faced by two menacing alien monsters. Greta’s reaction to that sight was purely instinctive: she rushed at the monster nearest her daughter while shouting her rage.
‘’DON’T TOUCH MY FRIDA!’’
This time however the monsters reacted quickly enough to her to be able to pivot and shoot their weapons. Purple laser beams hit Greta in the chest, burning straight through it and killing her instantly. Little Frida, crying with both fear and grief, ran at once to her dead mother’s body, all but ignoring the aliens standing nearby and then throwing herself over Greta, shaking her desperately while crying.
‘’Nooo! Please don’t die, Mommy!’’
The alien nearest to her stared at that scene for a second before waving at its companion in order to stop him from shooting little Frida.
‘’Don’t kill her…yet! This youngling biped and the others here will make a nice reserve of living meat for our troops later on, once we will have cleaned up this town. That adult biped must have been her mother. She was most foolish to attack us like this but she was also brave: she died trying to protect her offspring and did what would have been expected from our own females.’’
The other alien slowly lowered its pulse laser rifle and nodded its head.
‘’You’re right, Katarkis! Still, those younglings look very tasty. I can’t wait to feast on one of them later on.’’
18:58 (Universal Time)
Providence’s government central communications center
New Dawn City, Providence, Alpha Centauri B System
105 light-years from Nordland
‘’Anything special to report before I take this shift over from you, Rena?’’
‘’Only one thing.’’ answered Rena Darian, who had just finished her day shift at the Spacers’ League’s government communications center. ‘’The regular daily courier drone from Nordland still has not shown up and is overdue by nearly three hours. Also, our own courier drone sent to Nordland at noon has not returned yet.’’
‘’That’s weird! Having one drone possibly malfunction or be delayed is already unusual, but to have two drones failing to show up is concerning. I will have a second drone sent to Nordland, to ask them what is their problem.’’
‘’Fair enough, Garry!’’ said Rena. ‘’However, if we don’t get news from Nordland by midnight, then you should contact Navy Headquarters and signal this, so that they could send someone to check on this.’’
‘’Will do! Have a good night, Rena.’’
‘’You too, Garry!’’
Rena then walked out of the large communications room, which was filled with communication stations and dispatch desks, heading down to the underground garage where her aircar was parked.
08:11 (Universal Time)
Monday, October 14, 2335
Bridge of the Spacers’ League corvette BALI
Emerging into the TOI 700 System
‘’We are now inside the TOI 700 System, sir. Nordland is ahead of us, about 600,000 kilometers away.’’
‘’Good! Keep electronic silence for the moment. I want us to stay discrete until we know more about the situation in the system. What do our passive sensors tell us, Mister Xavier?’’
The sensors officer of the corvette looked at her instruments and hesitated for a couple of seconds before answering Commander Li.
‘’Uh, I believe that we have a problem, sir: the electro-magnetic frequencies in the system are empty…completely empty. I can’t detect any datalink, radio or video signal.’’
‘’What?! We should at least be able to intercept a few commercial entertainment channels: they are on 24 hours a day.’’
‘’Well, sir, right now they are totally silent.’’
‘’I don’t like this one bit.’’ said Li, thinking for a few seconds before punching the general alert button on his command chair’s console.
‘’Attention all hands, this is your captain speaking! Battle stations! I say again, battle stations! Everybody will don their spacesuits, half of the crew at a time.’’
Li himself waited until his second-in-command arrived on the bridge nine minutes later, wearing a spacesuit, before going to quickly put on his own spacesuit. Once back in his chair, he gave a short order to his sensors officer.
‘’Mister Xavier, break electronic silence and send out one ping from our long-range radar. Navigator, calculate in advance an emergency jump out of the system but keep our vector away from that for Providence. If we have to scram out of here in a hurry, I don’t want to guide any hostile ship towards Providence. Also calculate in advance a second jump, this time towards Providence, to immediately follow up on the first jump.’’
‘’Aye, Captain!’’
A few seconds after that, the sensors officer reported back to Li in a strangled voice.
‘’Captain, I got echoes from 32 very large objects orbiting around Nordland. There may be more similar objects on the opposite side of the planet, invisible to our radar for the moment.’’
Li barely had time to swallow hard before his electronic warfare shouted out in alarm.
‘’ONE RADAR PULSE JUST HIT US, CAPTAIN: IT’S A SPACE PREDATOR RADAR!’’
‘’Dear God! HELM, JUMP OUT OF THE SYSTEM! NOW!’’
Thankfully, the pilot and the navigator of the corvette reacted quickly to his order and the BALI jumped out of the TOI 700 System within two seconds, to reappear in the empty void of Deep Space. Another jump followed after less than three seconds, bringing the ship back inside the Alpha Centauri B System. Li, who had held on to his breath, was finally able to blow air out in relief.
‘’Sensors, make sure that nobody followed us. Comms, contact at once the Admiralty and send the following message on a flash priority basis: the TOI 700 System has been invaded by a minimum of 32 Space Predator ships. The planet Nordland is not emitting anymore on any frequency.’’
‘’Aye, Captain!’’
Li, having done the most urgent thing that needed to be done, then closed his eyes in grief at the thoughts of what the inhabitants of Nordland had to live through right now.
‘’Navigator, remind me of the latest population figures for the TOI 700 System.’’
‘’Yes sir!... According to the latest annual census, there were 2,189,655 persons living inside the system, nearly all of them on Nordland.’’
That information brought tears to Li’s eyes: over two million men, women and children were now at the mercy of cruel carnivorous aliens, unless the Navy could pull out a miracle and muster quickly a rescue force able to face up to at least 32 Space Predator asteroid ships.
09:48 (Universal Time)
Bridge of the A.M.S. NOSTROMO
In orbit over the moon New Haven (Wolf 1061 ca)
Wolf 1061 System, 13.8 light-years from Earth
‘’Is our departing batch of security androids ready to fly out and go down to New Haven to go start their tour of duty there?’’
‘’Yes, Tina!’’ answered Dana Durning from her navigator’s chair. ‘’They should start leaving the ship via shuttles in about fifteen minutes. Our androids presently on duty on New Haven will then brief them quickly before coming back to the ship on our shuttles’ return trip.’’
‘’Good!’’
Tina Forster then looked down towards the surface of New Haven, visible in the lower parts of the holographic display sphere of the bridge complex. The surface of the moon, orbiting the planet New Shouria in the Wolf 1061 System, now looked a lot greener than it had been fifteen years ago, when she had been given it by the Koorivars, now inhabiting New Shouria, as a thank you for rescuing two Koorivar sub-luminic ships filled with refugees in cryogenic hibernation and lost in Deep Space. Thanks to a continued program of seeding, planting and water importation from the nearby ocean planet Thule, New Haven was now nearly completely covered with vegetation. That extra vegetation had in turn helped both boost the oxygen content of the already breathable atmosphere of the moon and had also helped raise the atmospheric pressure from its original 810 millibars to the present 906 millibars, a significant improvement that had helped a lot the lives of its over half a million inhabitants, most of them dispossessed refugees from Earth, whom Tina had helped by offering them a new, peaceful life on her moon. Her New Haven Planetary Corporation was in essence a constantly growing humanitarian refuge and agrarian world which Tina was rightly most proud of.
Less than two minutes later, Tina got an urgent beeping signal on her command chair’s display screen. She stiffened when she saw that Spirit was relaying to her a flash priority message from the Admiralty in Providence via an emergency courier drone that had just arrived in the system. The reading of the short, one-page message made her pale.
‘’Dear God! Dana, stop at once the disembarking of our androids and send down our shuttles empty, so that they could go load up our androids who just completed a tour on New Haven. One of the centuries presently on the moon will stay there to provide protection to it: the Space Predators have invaded yesterday the TOI 700 System and have occupied Nordland.’’
All heads in the bridge complex snapped towards her with eyes filled with dread and horror on hearing that. However, nobody wasted time trying to ask questions about that new information, allowing Tina to direct the emergency retrieval of 300 out of the 400 security androids presently on New Haven. As her fleet of shuttles was launching out of her ship, Tina took the time to review the data she had on the TOI 700 System. It was a secondary mining world with a fairly small population but with rich deposits of various valuable metals. It also happened to be by far the furthest Human world from Earth and, not too surprisingly, was in the Space quadrant adjacent to that where the original homeworld of the Space Predators had been, that is before it was utterly destroyed by the Nostromo nearly three years ago. The choice of TOI 700 as a target by the Space Predators thus made a lot of strategic sense. Those Space Predators may be cruel and merciless but they were certainly not stupid. Next, Tina studied in detail the Space charts of the system, thinking about her next move. The idea of waiting for further directives from the Admiralty in Providence didn’t even touch her mind: she had given up on the strategic and tactical wisdom of the Admiralty, or rather its lack of it, years ago. Besides, with her and her whole crew having resigned ‘en masse’ from the Navy Reserves last November, Tina didn’t have to follow Navy directives or orders anymore, unless her ship and crew were forcibly enlisted by the Navy, something she doubted would ever happen. The message just transmitted from Providence was after all a simple general warning, not a mobilization order. Something in the charts of the TOI 700 System then attracted her attention. Studying that feature, she then made her mind on a plan of action and switched her intercom to ‘ship-wide announcement’.
‘’Attention all hands! This is your captain speaking! We just received a general warning from the Admiralty, advising every vessel and Spacers’ League’s worlds that the Space Predators invaded in force the TOI 700 System yesterday with at least 32 asteroid ships and have landed on Nordland. I intend to soon go effect a combat reconnaissance mission in the TOI 700 System, to ascertain what happened to the two million people living on Nordland. This will be a very risky mission, so all those who would like to evacuate their families down to New Haven before our departure from orbit are to send them within an hour to the Hangar Deck, for embarkation in our shuttles. The same applies to the students of our university and to our commercial partners and their employees. Those who will still be aboard in two hours will be deemed by me to have volunteered for our mission. However, any help will be welcome, as we may have to soon take care of a mass of refugees from Nordland. That is all for the moment.’’
As Tina closed her intercom link, Dana Durning gave her a sardonic smile.
‘’A combat reconnaissance mission? Will it be the kind of reconnaissance in force your late American General George Patton was so fond of, Tina?’’
Tina thought her answer over for a couple of seconds before smiling to Dana.
‘’Could be!’’