14: TYRANNIS

When we arrived in the Caractacalla system I entered another shit storm of controversy. This time it was different. The Council had decided, in my absence, to remove the office of Sky Marshal from Bu-ships. Basically the Baron's minions had won. My prolonged absence from council didn't help the situation, and the baron's minions exploited that absence ruthlessly. They took the easy way out. When I arrived I had found out by the gloating director of Bu-ships. I had 24 hours to clear out my office and vacate the city. It was a case of "on your bicycle, spaceman" all over again. I had at least learned that I was Sky Marshal for another 24 hours. So the last act as Sky Marshal I did was cut 6-month leave orders for all of my 'Quest's bridge crew, so we had the freedom to decide our own fate while the Faraway Quest underwent repairs.

So what to do in the meantime? Apparently my presence was requested on the planet Aventus. The Avens were planning another anniversary to the day the Berserkers were defeated, and since the Commodore was not doing anything this year, he was invited to the ceremonies. The question was how to get there. The 'Quest needed many months of dry dock time for her repairs and refit, while the 'Sister was now ashes in Sidon space. I decided to travel the old fashioned way. I asked my 'bridge crew' if they were in a hurry, and the overwhelming response was "no". So we chartered a freighter that was going to Aventus from Charactacalla. It was the epitomic freighter class – Monarch. It was about as ubiquitous as any tramp freighter. We didn't care, as we were going on a normal and well traveled trade route, or so we thought. The route now was about as stock as any trade route in the Confederacy. We rendezvoused with the Far Ranger in a S-4 shuttlecraft, parking it in the freighter's shuttle bay for the trip. The S-4 was a little slow and cramped for the journey on it's own. We were in some of the few guest quarters just aft of the ships small sick bay

It was much to our surprise that the ship encountered a signal coming from a planet just past the Medusa Nebula. It was a signal out of history, and only by luck did we detect it. Our captain, Lewis, always had a scanner out for possible salvage claims. In this case, he 'struck it rich' so to speak. We diverted to a system just past the Medusa nebula, one that wasn't even in the catalogue. It was only by chance that the signal was discovered, as Lewis had his proprietary routes that went past different planets than most other ships.

It wasn't long before we were in orbit around a planet. Unfortunately for anyone who would colonize this otherwise ideal planet, the parent star emitted Berthold Rays. This somewhat obscure form of radiation occurred on a rare basis, but rendered an otherwise ideal planet uninhabitable. Any humanoid life would last less than 6 months on such a planet. In more intense radiation fields Berthold Rays could kill in a week. The ship found was a Marshall class destroyer, last used during the Romulan War. The scans indicated that there was no life on board the ship, and there was, as expected, no life on the planet.

But that was not all! While we were in the system, there was another contact. An hour later we were flying in formation with an older Earth ship that held a conundrum. I was called up to the bridge. The ship was a real blast from the past. We had found a Conestoga class troop transport from the pre-warp days. After scanning the hull, we found the name. The ship was the Sulaco. But there was a catch. Another ship was docked to the underside of the Sulaco. The ship design was in the database: it was an Elerium ship of Beta class. The Eleria hadn't used that ship type for about 3 centuries.

"So what do you think of this odd couple?" Lewis asked.

"I'd guess that the Eleria found the Sulaco and took it for a merry drag. Then something happened to them. The big question is what?"

"We have some indeterminate life signs on the Sulaco. They also have some power from nuclear batteries. I am sending some men on board."

As a passenger, that wasn't me, or any of my crew. What surprised me was that the Far Ranger had hard docked with the Sulaco, on her upper docks

A few hours later I was in my quarters just counting time. Then the intercom beeped. "Commodore Michael..."

"Here," I replied.

"Do you have a physician with you?"

"Yes. Doctor Toki is here," I replied.

"Good. We found some survivors from the Sulaco, and our sickbay has just an auto-doc," Lewis stated.

"We are going to your sick bay. Just beam over the survivors and we'll take care of them," was my response.

Sure enough three humans in cryo-suspension were beamed to the sickbay, two were adults, one male and one female, as well as a female child. All three suffered from long duration cryo-sleep, but all three were effectively alive. We also had a surprise. One of the three, the adult female had an extra life form inside her. That had to be removed before revival, at least as far as I was concerned. But that was Toki's job, which he executed with his usual efficiency. We now had 4 life forms, three humans and one entity in the quarantine container. I decided to start a gene sequence on the unknown entity. Toki was busy trying to revive the three humans after such a long hyper sleep, even though they all had insulactin treatments. If anyone would be privy to their original mission and its fate, it would be the actual participants.

I hate waiting, I really do. But in this case it was all that I could do. Toki was looking after our human patients, and I was waiting for the gene sequencing from the new life form we encountered. The computer would tell me exactly how much time was remaining, 47 minutes in this case. Toki had set up a revival regimen, and also in about 45 minutes, our human patients would be revived. So I waited ... and waited ...

It was like watching grass grow. Then came the beep. The computer had beaten Toki with the gene sequence vs. his patient revival. Toki wasn't taking any chances. What the computer said had dire consequences ... for all of us.

:Gene sequencing complete:

:Race – Tyranid:

:Subtype – Genestealer hybrid:

We are so screwed, I thought. I pulled out my communicator. "Sara," I commanded.

"Sara here," was the response.

"Get everybody to sickbay NOW!" I ordered. "And bring my toys."

"Which ones?" Sara asked.

"All of them," I replied.

At least Sara would clue in that we were in deep shit. Within five minutes everybody was crowded into the sickbay. Sara entered last, carrying a duffel bag full of, well, mostly weapons. The adult female was the first to come to. Toki helped her up.

"Who are you? Where am I?" Were the first two questions she asked.

"I am Toki, a doctor in the Rim Worlds Navy," Toki responded. Being a cat-person didn't seem to faze the woman, as long as she could understand him. "You are onboard the freighter Far Ranger. You are?"

"Ellen Ripley," the woman stated. "I was a civilian advisor on a certain alien species..."

"Tyranids?" I asked.

"I don't know what those are but we were dealing with an aggressive and xenomorphic race of creatures..."

"Tyranids," I concluded.

"You know what the creatures that we are dealing with are?" She asked.

"In part. You were infested with a two-armed variant of a tyranid genestealer. They are biologically engineered soldiers for the Tyranid race. Consider them shock troops. They exist only in Section-31's files." I finished.

"And here, apparently," Ellen replied.

At that point in time the adolescent girl had awoken from her hyper-sleep, and she appeared about to scream when she saw Sara. "Am I dead?" She asked.

"No, you re not dead, but you suffered a long hyper sleep. I am an angel, but for you I am a guardian angel, here to help. My name is Sara." Sara replied.

"How are you here?" The girl asked.

"That is a long story. Lets just say that Stephen Michael needed an angel to help in his rescues, and that has brought me here. I help him and he helps people like you." That calmed the girl. By this time the third human was awake, and his name was Corporal Dwayne Hicks, of the colonial marines.

"The colonial forces were disbanded about 500 years ago." I informed. "The Federation of Planets and Starfleet had replaced them. We are rim worlders and have happened to discover your ship. Do you know why the Elerium would be docked to your ship?"

"The who?"

"The Elerium, a bipedal race of insect people. One of their ships, an old Beta class explorer is docked to your underside dock. What happened to them is still a mystery."

"Perhaps the Aliens took them out." Ellen responded. "If they encountered an egg dropped off by the queen..."

"An egg?"

"The queen lays eggs that produces face hugging entities that implant you with the alien creature," Ellen replied.

"Probably typical of Tyranid reproduction cycles," I answered. "Unfortunately we are only passengers on this ship. We need to speak to the captain..."

I tried to contact the bridge, to no avail. I left the channel open.

did I mention that I hate waiting? I really do. But in this case it was all that I could do. With no contact from the bridge, we had to wait until someone 'in charge' would respond to our requests. We were only passengers on this ship, and thus had no access, unless I planned on using some Section-31 knowledge, which I didn't entirely rule out. Eventually we received a reply, but not from the bridge.

"Hello. Is anybody there?" Came the question

"Sickbay here – Doctor Toki at your service."

"You're one of the passengers aren't you? We need help!"

"Who needs help?" I asked.

"Were the engineering crew. We have locked ourselves into the engine room. There are alien entities taking over the ship! They have killed all of our bridge crew and Captain Lewis. I don't think anybody else is alive!"

"All of us passengers are here in sickbay," I replied. "We have a good collection of arms, and could come to you..."

"Do you think you can make it with those things crawling around?"

"Yes. I do have a couple of secret weapons with me." I looked at Nergat. Although Sara would welcome the combat, I wasn't about to risk her unnecessarily. "So stand by and expect us when we arrive in engineering."

Time to get out the toys. First off was the phaser – 3 packs, and the phaser extentions. They were another reason to have the Marphak "Sting" model of phasers. Marphak had built a carbine styled booster to their phaser – 2. Coupled with an extended barrel phaser – 1. The Marphak became an easily handled shipboard phaser carbine, extending the firepower of the pistols. I did still have two fully loaded Mark 30-A assault phaser rifles with grenade launchers. Sara picked one up as her weapon of choice. John took the other. I stuck with my dual pistols, letting Maya, Tony, Alan and Brent put together phaser – 3 carbines. K'tee, Toki and Marie had only pistols, like myself. Nergat had his own built-in weaponry. His acid was actually more powerful than Tyranid blood.

Time to talk to engineering again. "Engineering," I called on the intercom.

"Engineering, Mike here."

"Hi Mike. What security do you have on this ship?"

"We have all the blast doors down between the compartments. That and the integrity field is all we've got," Mike answered.

"How about transporters?"

"You would have to be in the transporter room, and that area is infested."

I had a plan. "Tell you what…"

The first compartment went without a hitch. But then it was empty. The sequence was Sara on point with myself as scanner-man. John had rearguard with the other Mark 30. Ellen, Dwayne, Parna and Rebecca were in the 'easy chair' at the center. First scan the next compartment, then have engineering crack the doors and drop the forcefield, lob a grenade with a delay set, slam the doors shut wait for the boom, open the doors and move up to the next compartment.

This we did for the first 4 compartments. Then life became complicated. The next compartment was one of the cargo holds, and it was infested. It wasn't empty either, and there was no guarantee that a grenade would get them all with the cargo in the way. But that's what the disintegrate setting is for. And Nergat. It's time for our secret weapon. We informed engineering that we needed total control of the blast doors, and we got it. Crack the door. Let Sara lob the grenade. Wait for the boom. Open the door and send in Nergat, with covering fire if necessary. Close the doors. Wait for Nergat to crush the opposition, literally.

So here we sat, covering the rear, just in case, while we waited for Nergat. Fifteen minutes later my communicator beeps. "Tell me the coast is clear," I implored.

"You bet. Those creatures didn't know what to do with a living rock, so they all got crushed underfoot! The light is green, the trap is clean!" Nergat exclaimed. Nergat has been watching way too many of my movies.

"Good," I replied as I opened the doors and entered the cargo bay. "Just one more compartment and then we're in engineering."

Twenty minutes later all the survivors of the Far Ranger, the Sulaco and the passengers were all in the engineering compartment. There were 5 engineers who were the last survivors of the Far Ranger crew, and there were the 14 of us, for a total of 19 people.

The Monarch class freighter held a couple of advantages for us. For one just under the engineering compartment was the shuttle bay. We had access to our shuttle, which was still parked in the middle of the bay. The other is that it was still docked to the Sulaco. The simple way to take out the alien creatures would be to blow up all three ships, and the best way to do that was to detonate the Far Ranger's antimatter pods. By now that was something that I was used to, on a semi-regular basis it seemed.

So that is what we did. Another 20 minutes later we were all boarding the shuttles and leaving the Far Ranger to it's fate. 30 minutes later the trio of ships would be plasma, and we would be boarding the Marshall class destroyer still in orbit around the planet.

Something had gone wrong, I was sure. The explosion, while on time, was out of place. Unfortunately we were too busy boarding the Marshall class destroyer to pay particular attention to one explosion. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. But it still beat returning to the Rimworlds in shuttlecraft.

The engineers were put to work on determining the status of the Marshall class destroyer. I was on the bridge trying to determine why the ship is here in the first place.

We had found out the fate of the original crew. They had chased a Romulan ship of their era out this far and had shot it down around the planet of this system. Unfortunately for them they had run out of enough fuel to get back to Federation space, and since they apparently didn't know of the Berthold rays they decided to settle on this deadly planet. The crew was killed within two years after trying to settle the planet, by the radiation. Their ship was left in orbit as a silent epitaph to their odyssey.

Now we needed to activate its systems, and bring online the ship's warp drive. The large S-4 shuttle of mine had a full stock of antimatter that could be used for that purpose. The fusion missiles and the lasers of the ship were in working order, so it only took a few days to bring the ship on line. Since we didn't have to travel all the way back to federation space the warp 3.8 that this ship was capable of was adequate to limp back to the nearest Rimworlds port.

We were heading out of the system when our scanners picked up the freighter. It was powering up its engines. That meant that the Tyranids could run the computers.

There was the medusa nebula within a parsec of the system we had just left. The alien controlled freighter followed us into it. It would be an interesting fight, between a generation 4 freighter with a pair of defensive phasers versus a generation 2 destroyer with a full armament of missiles and lasers. By entering the nebulae we were guaranteeing a fight at impulse speeds, and without shields. That actually put us at the firepower advantage, which we really needed. Even defensive phasers were powerful weapons, actually out-ranging ours, and Tyranids would give no quarter.

The Medusa Mebula wasn't a very dense nebula, but is was sufficient to prevent the raising of shields and kept speed down in the low impulse range. Like any nebula, there were denser knots of materials to 'hide' in, and actual encounters were sporadic at best. In the first 10 hours the two ships encountered each other twice, and stayed in contact on the second encounter long enough to trade shots. That's when we found out exactly how badly we were out-ranged – almost a factor of 2! Even after they got the drop on us no serious damage was caused.

We needed to keep into the thickest parts of the nebula, and only dart out into regions where scanners would detect to the limit of our guns. There were only two other encounters in the first day, again, both indecisive. The Tyranids clued into our tactics and on the second encounter they immediately turned away into the mists of the nebula when the range was too close.

The only encounters that we would have were going to be on our terms. We could hide in here indefinitely, as this was a huge old planetary nebula. Unfortunately the tyranids were relentless. And they appeared to have infinite patience.

We were running 6-on 6-off shifts in 2 rotations as we were understaffed. Standing orders were that everyone off was to grab a meal and get some shuteye. There were two exceptions: Nergat, who didn't sleep anyways, and Sara, who could function for at least a week without any real impairment. Her endurance was being put to the test! So, I was sleeping alone as those two took continuous watch at helm and navigation. I was on bridge watch with K'Tee when we exited the nebula unexpectedly.

When we left the nebula there was a starship on the main scanner. And it wasn't the freighter. "K'Tee..."

"Hailing frequencies are open," K'Tee replied.

Soon there was a familiar face on the view screen. This time he was in a Rim Worlds Navy uniform.

"Commander Treva! Long time no see!" I greeted.

"What the! Every time we meet you are dragging a new ship around! But what's up with the museum piece?" Treva asked.

"That's a long story. Probably as long as the one that puts you into that uniform."

"And that's why I'm here, to find you actually. We're at war!"

"War?"

"It's Baron van Toerbach and Tallimatrix, again. They took out the fleet at Calamain, and attacked Caratacalla. You're the ranking commander of the entire Confederation, I'm afraid."

"Oh, Joy." That is not going to end well...

We evacuated the destroyer, and I took command of my new flagship, the strike cruiser R. C. S. Chandler, and was briefed on current events that I missed. We had one little task to perform, the hunting down and destruction of the freighter. That was easy as we had bait. Towing the Marshall class destroyer just outside of the nebula at low warp brought the freighter into the open where it didn't stand a chance. The Chandler has eight torpedo tubes, four forward and four aft. One salvo and the Far Ranger was reduced to ashes. Now it was on to our larger task.