by Bobby Adair
That question puzzles Phil. As far as any of us know, it’s a question that’s never been posed. A sub-light bubble jump in a world where hyper-light speed jumping was a reality? Why even think about it?
Into Phil’s silence, I turn to Tarlow, silently shifting the question to him.
“I’m no physicist,” he tells me. “It’s not my job to know everything, is it?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, only half-joking. I reach over and slap him on the back. “You need to unwind. We’ll be headed home soon enough.”
“I doubt it.”
Penny rolls her eyes. Tarlow has decided not to give up on the mood he’s spent so much time cultivating.
“So,” I ask, “Let’s say they do arrive and—” I turn to Phil as a new thought interrupts my question. “What if they aren’t coming here?”
“This is the best gas giant in the system,” he answers. “Around Cygni A, all the planets are rocky except for a Venus-like planet orbiting in close. Its atmosphere doesn’t have much free hydrogen. Of the two gas giants around Cygni B, this one makes the most sense. Chemically, it’s the solid choice for harvesting H.”
“And their bodyguard was here,” Penny adds, referring to the cruiser we knocked out of commission, the one floating in the gas clouds a few hundred klicks off our stern, far enough that the Trogs inside will be unlikely to brave an excursion out in just their suits to mount an attack on us. We’re close enough to the orbital position they staked out that when the tankers show up to do their work under their shepherd’s watchful eye, we’ll be able to ambush.
“Any activity from that cruiser?” I ask, now that it’s back on my mind. “Any Trogs coming out?”
“They’re all over the hull,” Phil answers. “It’s difficult to make anything out clearly with all the ring debris between us. They aren’t coming this way yet. I think they’re assessing the damage. Maybe starting repairs. They have the equipment onboard repair a lot.”
“Do they know we’re still in the neighborhood?” I ask, wondering if any cruiser could possibly self-repair all the damage we did
“Impossible to say,” answers Phil, with a labored sigh. “I keep telling you, Nicky and I share thoughts. We can pick up some of what’s around us, but we’re not omniscient.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I sigh, too. “We’re good, though, right? None coming this way? You’d know that for sure?”
“Probably.” Phil turns his attention to his console. “If not when they leave, then before they get here. You’ll have plenty of warning, Captain.”
Great. Now Phil is getting surly, too. “What,” I ask, “does it tell us if the tankers can only make light speed—barely light speed?”
“It tells us how long it takes to get here,” says Tarlow, as though the circular deduction is any help at all.
“You think they only have the one tanker design?” asks Penny. “You think they all move at the same speed?”
“Of course,” answers Brice, beezling into the conversation. “That’s what we know about them for sure, right Phil?”
Phil nods.
“That’s one of their weaknesses,” I explain. “Neither the Grays nor the Trogs are creative races. They don’t invent things, not like we do back on earth. They find a design that works and don’t see any reason to improve or replace it. Ever. My bet is if they have one type of tanker for harvesting H, then they’re all the same.”
“So if they all travel at light speed," deduces Tarlow, finally getting his quirky, smart brain involved, "that might explain the beginning of the war two years ago.”
Tarlow’s conjecture captures the attention of everyone on the bridge.
With the ego affirmation of having everyone looking at him, Tarlow smiles and says, “If the Trogs started chasing the rogue Grays from 18 Scorpii toward Earth pretty much right after the rogues escaped, traveling at light speed, the tankers…” Tarlow stops talking, a perplexed look coming across his face.
“What?” Brice asks.
“It’s forty-five years,” says Phil. “18 Scorpii is forty-five light years from earth. Any tankers sent to earth from there would still be on the way.”
I make the deduction first. “That means at least some of these supply bases existed before the war started, before the Grays even arrived on earth, thirty years ago.”
“What if,” asks Brice, “the Trogs were in system before the war started? What if they were already out there in the asteroid belt, setting up their supply bases, and our Grays knew about it all along? With the size fleet that eventually attacked, and knowing the kind of logistical support we now know they had to have, yeah, I’d say they did.”
"And our Gray masters knew war was coming that whole time.” This idea makes Brice angry. "And they could have told us, but they didn’t. They could have prepared us better, but they didn’t.” Brice lost a lot of friends in that first surprise attack that came on the moon. Only our Grays probably weren’t surprised.
“They knew,” Penny muses, agreeing with Brice’s conclusion.
“Or our Grays were negotiating with their Grays,” guesses Tarlow, “trying to avert a war. They wouldn’t have told us about that, probably not even the North Koreans. Why would they? They wouldn’t want the lowly humans to think the godly Grays had any equals in the universe. That would undercut their power over us.”
“It didn’t matter in the end,” I conclude. “The war came. Humans were slaughtered by the billion, and the little Gray bastards are still in charge.”
“A ship just exited bubble jump,” says Phil. “One of the tankers.”
Chapter 47
Tarlow marks the time.
“How long before the next one arrives?” I ask.
“If they travel at exactly the same speed,” answers Tarlow, “four minutes.”
“Distance?” I ask.
Penny is shaking her head. “We can’t get in range before number two shows up. They came out of bubble too far from the ring.”
“Course?” I ask.
“Headed this way, generally,” answers Phil. “Cruising. No rush. No hesitation. Looks routine. They’ll be down in the atmosphere in about twenty minutes.”
“And the other three will be here by then?” I ask.
Tarlow answers in measured words. “If they all travel at the same speed—the exact speed.”
Of course, I know there could be some differences in speed due to manufacturing imperfections. There have to be. Trogs and Grays are competent at building spacecraft, but they don’t seem to have the knack for creating machinery that’s perfect. So far, the humans of earth are the best race we know of for that. And the Turd, despite its dubious beginning, is a finely-honed tool of war.
"If we wait for all four to arrive," suggests Phil, "if we wait for them to get down in the atmosphere, they won’t be able to bubble jump away. Bubbling out of atmosphere is suicide.”
“Suicide for sure?” I ask. “Or theoretically?”
“Theoretically,” Tarlow answers.
“There’s that cruiser,” says Phil. “Early on in the war, the Captain was flying it out of the Arizona shipyard and tried to bubble jump before he was ten thousand feet up.”
Everyone grimaces. The images of that huge monster going supernova in the air over Arizona are burned into everyone’s brain.
"The air will slow us down, too," I conclude, knowing we have more to lose in terms of speed than those lumbering tankers do. Air friction isn’t a linear function. It whips your ass exponentially as your speed increases. “It’ll severely limit the range of our axial plasma gun.”
“Can we dial it back?” asks Tarlow. “Reduce the speed of the rounds so they come out solid instead of plasma?”
Out of breath, from reloading the axial gun’s magazines, one of the techs comes on the line. “That’s an enhancement they were working on back on Iapetus. It’s harder than it sounds, synchronizing all the components to push projectiles at variable speed
s. Bottom line, we can’t. Maybe future guns will.”
“What range can we expect to get out of our gun down in the atmosphere?” I ask.
“Depending on how deep we go,” the tech answers, “the composition of the atmosphere, other factors, humidity, wind, temp—maybe five or ten thousand meters. It’s impossible to make an accurate guess.”
“Trial and error, then?” I tell Penny. To the tech, I ask, “Are the magazines topped off?”
“Yes, sir,” she answers. “That’s what we’ve been working on down here since we killed the cruiser.”
“Good job,” I respond. “Keep ‘em full. We may need the extra rounds.”
Lenox jumps up from her seat and heads toward the doorway. “I’ll put Peterson and Silva to work hauling the rounds out of the storage bins to the magazines.” She looks at me with a confident smile. “You won’t run out until the whole ship runs dry.”
“This is still round one,” Tarlow reminds us. “Trinity Base is still back there with a lot more bad boys aiming to do us harm. These tankers are unarmed—”
“That’s an assumption,” Brice tells him. “Just because we—”
“Okay, okay,” Tarlow concedes as he focuses on me. “Just don’t blow everything on these tankers. We may need our ammo.”
“Noted.” But he’s wrong. The tankers and the base all have to be destroyed for our mission to succeed. If we burn up all of our plasma rounds taking out these tankers, then so be it. We have the nukes for Trinity Base. They’ll be enough.
“Second ship just came out of bubble,” Phil reports.
Chapter 48
Ships three and four come out of bubble less than a minute apart, just a few hundred klicks away from one another.
The first ship is slowing as it aims for a gentle drop down into Cygni Saturn’s atmosphere. Tanker number two is following the same trajectory, giving us a strong hint about what’s to come. Even number three seems to be doing the same. Only ship number four is behaving oddly. It didn’t engage its drive after popping out of bubble. It’s hesitant.
I’m suspicious. “Can they sense us here?”
Penny has the Rusty Turd partially obscured behind the biggest rock we could find in the rings without going too far from the dead cruiser. Still, more than half our ship is visible—mostly visible—through the slurry.
“They’d have to be looking right at us,” says Phil. “Nobody’s going to just happen to see us unless Penny flares the grav plates.”
“And the Trog cruiser?” I ask.
“Those cruisers are enormous,” answers Phil. “They have to know it’s there. In the thick cloud of asteroids where we left it, it’ll be hard to make out that it’s damaged, but the crews in those tankers have to be curious why no Gray onboard is talking to them.”
“Then let’s get busy.”
Chapter 49
The Rusty Turd bursts to blue, scintillating grav wash as my sense of balance spins, disagreeing with what I see through Penny’s monitors. She slams every amp of spare power into the drive array, knowing that at the range between us and the tankers, there’ll see us. There’ll be no sneaking up on them.
The ship spins and turns as it accelerates. Our bow comes almost immediately in line with tanker number four, the last to arrive. It’s maybe fifteen hundred klicks distant.
We don’t expect fire from the tankers, so our grav lens isn’t powered to full, yet it strobes brightly as Penny rips through her first shots. At the range we’re at, with travel times of our plasma jets at nearly thirty seconds to target, we’ll be lucky to hit anything. We’ve got little to lose in trying.
Five, maybe seven seconds pass before any of the tankers reacts. As has worked to our advantage on nearly every fight with these collective decision makers, the Grays are slow to react.
It’s not tanker four that’s the first to respond, though I’d have expected that given their wariness. It’s number three. Their grav plates plume a bright, ragged field around the hull.
Phil says, “They’re trying to use their payload stabilization plates to create a defense.”
Even I can see how badly formed and weak it is. It’s primitive compared to the Trog’s cruisers we’ve been fighting. The tankers weren’t built for battle.
Penny shoots again. Not a long burst. She’s just rolling dice, because there’s no telling in which direction tanker four will turn. She’s just scattering rounds in its area, looking for an intersection of steel on steel.
“Tanker four is turning,” says Phil.
Everyone on the bridge knows what that means. Because of the planet, the rings, and the mountainous debris formations piled high to one side, tanker four only has a few choices on where to flee. It can spin one hundred and eighty degrees and bubble out the way it came, or pour on the acceleration to dive through the rings to free it up to make a jump once through the other side, but given its current heading, that choice will take it closer to us.
“Tankers one and two are diving into the atmosphere,” Phil tells us, urgently, “hoping we can’t track them down in the turbulence.”
“Are they right?” I ask.
The Rusty turd is picking up speed at a frightening rate as the hull rumbles and strains under the stress of the power Penny is pushing through our computer-optimized drive array. The first of our rounds are passing number four, and its broadside is exposed to us as it tries to make its turn.
Penny fires again. Several long bursts, made more lethal by the ship’s speed added to the muzzle velocity of our gun. The whole sky in front of us is filled with glowing plasma in long streaks, bearing down on the target.
Number three, realizing it’s not a target, has given up on defensive shielding and is rerouting its power to evasive maneuvers. It’s going to try and get around the curve of Cygni Saturn before trying a jump in safety. At least that’s what its course change looks like to me. Too bad for them, they don’t yet believe what their grav sense is telling them, that the Rusty Turd is an ungodly fast beast that’ll catch ‘em no matter where they run.
Penny fires again, but stops as number four’s hull erupts.
One of her previous bursts found its target.
“Keep after it,” I tell her as the distance between us and the target as already shrunk by three quarters.
The Rusty Turd lurches like it just ran through a wall.
"Slowing down," Penny calls. She’s fully focused on what she’s doing, and the excitement of the hunt is in her blood.
“Good move,” I tell her. If we gather too much speed in our pursuit of number four, we’ll have to waste long seconds burning hard to get moving back in the direction of our next victim.
The steady blue grav plume from number four’s array splatters into chaos.
“That does it,” Phil tells us. “Their array is down. They won’t be able to jump.”
“Forget ‘em for now,” I tell Penny and the ship immediately pulls hard into a turn.
“Tanker number 3?” she guesses correctly.
“Before they get away,” I confirm. Turning to Phil, I ask, “Can you still sense the first two down in the atmosphere?”
“I have them,” Tarlow assures me. “They’ll have to go a long, long way down before I lose ‘em.”
I turn and give him a quick nod. “Good job.” When I look up, I see number three already in our sights.
Penny rips a long burst of plasma at them.
It looks to me like the rounds will miss.
Practically reading my mind, she says, “Shooting out ahead of them!”
The bridge crew on number three sees what Penny is up to and they veer right. It’s then that the harshest truth finally sinks through to their cerebral goo. They’re the slow turtle, and we’re the nimble-fast shark. Running for the other side of the planet was a bad choice. They angle for the atmosphere, hoping what seems to be working for the first two tankers will save them, too.
The distance closes
way too fast. For them.
Penny fires.
The rounds cross the vacuum in the space of a breath, tearing tanker steel.
It looks like we’re closing in fast enough to ram the tanker as Penny sprays a long burst that tears through amidships. It’s splitting in two when the reactor explodes, sending hunks of its fiery carcass in every direction.
“Two down,” Penny tells us as we pull hard into a turn.
“Give us a course,” I tell Tarlow.
Chapter 50
Penny pilots the Turd across a low orbit, following the curve of the planet until Tarlow calls the mark. “Now!”
Penny drops the ship straight into the thin atmosphere. It’ll thicken up to crushing pressure soon enough.
Penny decelerates.
“Slow down,” Phil tells her, “or we’ll burn up. This isn’t vacuum.”
The Turd shudders again, and I wonder how much abuse our iron crate can handle before its sloppy welds surrender to the wear and tear of battle abuse.
“I see it,” Phil tells, us as he shunts more power into the grav lens. “I need to punch a hole through the atmosphere,” he explains, “until we lose some of this speed.”
“Good thinking,” I tell him. To Penny, I ask, “Can you make out the target?”
“Barely.”
“Don’t waste any shots until we get closer,” I remind her. “Just remember, no matter how slow we go, we can still move faster than they can in this soup.”
She nods and continues to decelerate.
“Tarlow?” I ask. “Do you have a range?”
“Of course.”
“You know what I’m asking?”
“I do,” he answers. “I’ll tell Penny when we’re within five thousand meters. Maybe another forty seconds.”
“I’m losing ship number one,” Phil tells us, a touch of panic in his voice.
“I still have it,” says Tarlow, glued to his monitors. “It’s diving straight down. Accelerating.”
“How deep can it go?” I ask.
“Not as deep as we can,” answers Penny.
