The Dark Ship

by Phillip P. Peterson

  “Sixty seconds,” Joanne said.

  The vector of the little ship on the hologram barely changed direction anymore and pointed toward a blue symbol: their target, Acheron-4. Through the window, Jeff could see a tiny blue dot moving from the right and coming to a stop right in front of them. The planet with the enemy base was still over one hundred and twenty-five million miles away, but they were racing toward it and would pass it in less than seven minutes. If everything went smoothly, it would cease to exist shortly afterwards.

  Suddenly, the pressure eased, and Jeff was sitting in his seat again with normal gravity. He took several deep breaths, then hit the talk button. “Navigation, status!”

  “Perihelion maneuver complete. We’re precisely on course. We’ll reach Acheron-4 in six minutes and ten seconds.”

  “The other ships?” Irons asked.

  “The Neptune and the Spider have also completed their maneuvers. They’re one hundred and twenty-five thousand miles starboard. The Boston is still in the maneuver.”

  “Missiles!” Finni screamed. “Twelve o’clock!”

  Jeff glanced out of the window. But of course he couldn’t see anything. Only Finni, with his positioning system, could see the death-bringers.

  “They’re gone again,” the radar technician let out a sigh of relief.

  “They adjusted their flight path to our perihelion maneuver,” Irons said. “Time until missiles reach target?”

  “About two minutes,” Finni whispered.

  “Talk loudly and clearly, damn it!” Irons ordered, without raising his voice.

  “Let’s drop the bomb and start the evasive maneuver!” Dave Green spoke up.

  “It’s too early,” Irons said. “Come on, don’t lose your nerve.”

  “I can see detonations of hydrogen bombs orbiting Acheron-4,” Finni reported. “They’re very strong.”

  “Damn!” Irons frowned. “I wasn’t expecting that, looks like they’ve stationed kinetic weapons.”

  Jeff gulped. The missiles were bad enough, but the scrap metal now flying toward them at almost the speed of light would puncture the spacecraft like bullets perforating single-layer toilet paper.

  “One minute until the missiles hit!” Finni reported.

  Jeff didn’t answer. There was nothing left to say or do. All they could do was wait. For death or life—those were the only two possibilities. The next five minutes were like a game of Russian roulette—he was holding a gun to his head and all he had to do was squeeze the trigger.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Jeff clenched the armrests. All the simulations and trainings … nothing could have prepared him for this. He lifted his head and looked out of the window again. There was nothing to see but the blue dot of Acheron-4.

  The clock continued its relentless countdown. Any moment now …. It was so quiet on the bridge, it seemed as if time itself were holding its breath. Only the dull throb of his heart echoed in his ears.

  Suddenly, there was a blinding light. Jeff squeezed his eyes shut, but the bright light penetrated his closed eyelids. Tears ran down his cheeks. One of the missiles must have detonated right in front of them. Jeff forced himself to open his eyes again. The brightness had subsided slightly, but he still had trouble recognizing anything. A new sun had sprung up in front of them. Pale yellow, almost white, dazzlingly hot, and they were racing toward it at breakneck speed—they didn’t stand a chance of avoiding it. Already they were diving into the blinding ball of white-hot plasma.

  “Cooling system on max!” Irons bellowed.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  There was a loud crash in the cabin and Jeff was almost thrown out of his chair. The cooling system must have failed somewhere on the ship. It was already overheated after the perihelion maneuver.

  “Plasma intrusion! We’ve lost stabilizer number three!” Green screamed. “I’m sealing off the section!”

  Jeff nodded. At least there was nobody in there.

  “Understood,” Irons replied.

  Then it was dark again outside. They had left the plasma cloud. Portside, more expanding suns came into view, but they were far away enough not to be dangerous.

  “I’ve located forty-four detonations,” Finni said. “Most of them exploded behind us. I think we survived the missiles.”

  Jeff clenched his teeth. It was too early to breathe a sigh of relief.

  “I’m not receiving any signals from the Neptune,” Owl said. His voice was barely audible.

  “Position?” Jeff asked.

  “Yup, I’ve got it,” Finni replied. “One of the detonations was exactly in the flight path of the Neptune. It must have been hit.”

  That could have been us! If they had raced into the plasma ball of the detonating missile just a few seconds earlier, the Charon would now be nothing but atoms. They would have been dead before they’d even registered they’d been hit.

  Major Irons spoke. “Positioning! Can you estimate when the scrap of the kinetic weapon will reach us?”

  “No,” Finni answered immediately. “We don’t have enough data on the strength of the detonation to calculate its speed. But we’ll probably pass it any second now.”

  “How long till we reach the target?” Jeff asked.

  “Two-and-half minutes,” Joanne replied. “We have to drop the bomb up to sixty-two seconds in advance, so we can reach a safe distance.”

  “Good,” Irons said. “WSO, prepare the bomb—”

  All hell broke loose. An almighty crashing noise sounded in Jeff’s ears. Splinters flew through the bridge in every direction. A violent pain shot through his arm as he was hit by a piece of debris. The alarm sirens wailed. Behind him, Green screamed. Jeff felt his ears pop. The cabin filled with mist, the air pressure dropped.

  “Malfunction message!” Irons roared.

  Jeff looked down at his arm and saw red patches seeping through his combat suit before the automatic seal set in.

  “We’ve been hit!” Green screamed.

  “You don’t need to tell me that! Give me a proper malfunction report!”

  They must have passed through a wall of scrap metal. It was anyone’s guess how many bits of metal had perforated the ship.

  “We’re losing pressure in sections one and four. Some of the holes are too big to be sealed off by the gel between the fuselage sections,” Green reported.

  “We’ll worry about that later. Carry on!”

  “One of the antimatter stores must have been hit, too. The voltage in Penning Trap Five is falling.”

  “Falling? How fast?” Irons asked.

  “Too fast! If it carries on like this, it’ll be down to zero in five minutes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Some damage to non-critical systems.”

  “Hyperspace drive?”

  “Appears to be undamaged.”

  Appears ...

  “OK. Send your men to the Penning trap! Weapon system officer!”

  “Sir?”

  “Release the bomb!”

  “Yes, Sir,” Castle said. “Bomb released.”

  “Lieutenant Rutherford, initiate evasive maneuver!”

  Jeff was pushed down into his seat again as Joanne fired the engines. At least the main engine had survived the attack, otherwise they would have crashed onto the target planet along with the bomb.

  “What about the other ships?” Irons asked.

  “I’ve heard from the Boston. They’ve released their bomb, too,” Owl said. “I can see they’ve started their evasive maneuver.”

  “And the Spider?”

  “Disappeared. I’m receiving the typical gamma blast of an antimatter explosion.”

  “Shit! A piece of that wall of scrap metal must have hit the antimatter tanks.”

  “At least we got two of the bombs to hit the target,” Irons said without any emotion in his voice. “Let’s hope they’re not duds.”

  Despite the engines working at full capacity, the blue dot of Acheron-4 was still right
in front of them in the cockpit windows. But it had become much brighter since the perihelion maneuver.

  “Thirty seconds,” Joanne said. “Point seven five million miles.”

  Suddenly there was a loud bang and Jeff was thrown against his console. An alarm siren whined.

  “Status!” Irons demanded.

  “The portside engine pod’s gone!” Green shouted. “It’s just disappeared.”

  That meant they’d lost half of their positioning capabilities.

  “The sensor is picking up traces of uranium and thorium,” Finni said. “They must have shot at us with a particle accelerator!”

  “The particle beam can have only just brushed us, otherwise the Charon would be history,” Jeff said. In a briefing, intelligence service had said it was unlikely for a base of this size to have particle weapons. But it wouldn’t have been the first time the powers-that-be had got it wrong. They’d been lucky. Jeff only hoped they would pass Acheron-4 before the enemy could recharge its accelerators.

  “The Boston has disappeared from the radar,” Finni shrieked.

  Jesus Christ!

  That meant Acheron-4 had two particle accelerators.

  Green suddenly groaned loudly.

  “Lieutenant Green?” Irons asked.

  Jeff turned around to look at him. The engineer was squirming in his seat, his hands pressing against the helmet of his spacesuit.

  “Lieutenant Green!” Irons repeated, then turned to Jeff. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Another groan from Green. “My head. My head is about to explode,” he whimpered.

  “They’re attacking with psycho rays,” Irons said.

  Jeff swallowed. It was the latest development in the Alliance’s weapons market. The rebels tried to influence the human brain with alternating magnetic fields. Depending on the strength of the transmitter, they could control people from afar or drive them crazy. Luckily, the deflective shields in their combat suits offered a certain amount of protection. Green’s shield device must have been damaged. He was screaming as if someone was drilling a hole in his skull.

  “Hang in there, Lieutenant Green,” Irons said. “Just a few more seconds, then it’ll pass.”

  “Passing over the target in ten seconds,” Joanne reported.

  Acheron-4 had changed from a tiny blue dot to a blue marble. The marble expanded rapidly into a gigantic sphere. It looked as if they were hurtling right into the planet.

  We’re not going to make it!

  Had they miscalculated the evasive maneuver?

  But the maneuver was going as planned. They passed the planet, which according to Jeff’s HUD was fifty miles away. There was a brief flickering in front of the windows as the Charon raced through the edges of the atmosphere and the nitrogen atoms turned into plasma.

  Then they were through, and the engine shut off again.

  Jeff knew what was coming next and closed his eyes.

  The light seemed to penetrate straight through the cabin wall and his closed eyelids, as if their spaceship was made out of transparent paper. It only lasted a second, then the light was gone again. Jeff opened his eyes and switched his monitor to the rear cameras.

  Where the blue planet Acheron-4 had been a moment ago, a yellow sun was now blazing. As it expanded, its color changed to a reddish hue. The Quagma bombs had hit their target. Acheron-4 no longer existed.

  “Target destroyed!” Jeff reported to his commander.

  Five bombers had started out on this mission. Only the Charon had survived the attack, badly damaged. As shocked as they were at the loss of their sister ships, they were incredibly relieved to have survived themselves.

  Green had stopped screaming. But he was breathing heavily. “I thought I was going to die,” he moaned.

  Jeff recalled how entire corps had been killed in psycho-weapon attacks before a counteragent had been found. He shuddered. He hoped he’d never have to go through that himself.

  “Radio operator!” Irons ordered. “Send a message to the base. Tell them: target destroyed.”

  It took a few seconds for Finni to answer. “Hyperradio failed.”

  “Then use the backup system,” Jeff said.

  “That was in the portside engine pod,” Finni replied. “This spaceship won’t be able to transmit any more superluminal messages.”

  “Lieutenant Green,” Irons said. “What’s with the antimatter storage?”

  “The voltage in cell five has stabilized again. The air outlet in the fuselage could also be plugged.”

  “Good. Anything else?”

  Green hesitated before answering. “Reactor one has failed completely. Positioning and radio are damaged. The electrical systems are reporting faults in almost every subsystem.”

  “And what about the hyperdrive?”

  “The Casimir converter appears to be undamaged, but we’ll only know if it’s still able to build a horizon once we get to the entry point.”

  “Then let’s hope for the best.” Irons turned around in his seat. “How long to the entry point?”

  “We’ll be far enough away from Acheron in about five minutes,” Joanne said.

  “Good. We’ll remain on combat alert until we’re in hyperspace.

  Jeff looked at the holoscreen, which gave him a view of what lay behind them. The gas cloud of the destroyed planet was still glowing blood-red. The Quagma bombs had done a thorough job. Jeff wondered how many people had been on the base. The intelligence service hadn’t been able to say exactly—apparently anything between an emergency crew of twenty to a deployment point with several thousand infantrymen was possible. Maybe Jeff would find out once this damned war was over. He wondered how many more planets would be reduced to dust by Quagma bombs in the meantime. He closed his eyes as it occurred to him that if they reached the Delta Quadrant, their next target might be an inhabited planet. Then he would be responsible for the deaths of millions, or even billions, of people. Needless to say, it was not what he wanted but he knew there was no other way of advancing on Delphi. If they overlooked even a single base, the enemy would come at them from behind. And after all, the Alliance hadn’t had any scruples, either, in wiping out Deneb-6 in a surprise attack.

  It was that surprise attack, in which his father had died, that had started the war. Until then, nobody had seriously expected the Cold War to turn into a hot one.

  “I’m losing voltage in the Penning traps again,” Green said.

  Jeff turned around and looked over at the flight engineer. There was enough antimatter on board to blow up the ship into a thousand smithereens if the traps ran out of power. In an emergency they could eject the cylinders, but it was a long way to their base on Sigma-7. They would need every bit of antimatter they had for their return flight.

  “Get that under control,” Irons said.

  “Request permission to leave the bridge,” Green responded.

  Irons nodded. “Permission granted. Corporal Owens, take over the onboard systems.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Now Jeff and his shipmates had nothing left to do except wait. It was unlikely that enemy forces would suddenly appear. And even if they did, they didn’t stand a chance of intercepting the Charon until the entry point. Gradually, it dawned on Jeff that he had survived his first bomber mission. He went over the events of the past twenty minutes in his mind. They’d been lucky not to have hit any mines at the exit point. They’d been lucky the missiles had missed them, and they had been crazy lucky that the particle beam …

  “Captain Austin!” Jeff started. “Are you asleep?”

  “No, Major. I was just—”

  “We’re still on combat alert. Please focus on our mission! We are in an enemy system.”

  Jeff nodded, numbly. He looked at the location hologram with the navigation data. They were nearing the entry point into hyperspace. Three more minutes.

  “Are we ready for hyperflight?” Jeff asked.

  “Yup,” Joanne answered. “Course is programmed. We need
about eight-and-a-half hours for the return flight to Sigma-7.”

  “Assuming the hyperdrive wasn’t hit,” Finni added glumly.

  Jeff waited for a comment from the Major, but he didn’t respond.

  A yellow light glowed on the console in front of him. Jeff pressed it. “Green here,” the sonorous voice of the flight engineer echoed across the bridge.

  “Speak!”

  “We have a serious problem with Penning Trap Five.”

  “How serious?” Major Irons asked.

  “It’s been hit by a piece of shrapnel. The voltage is fluctuating and there’s nothing I can do to change it. We can only pray it doesn’t give up the ghost.”

  “OK. Return to the bridge.”

  “Sir! Another thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Shorty is injured.”

  Jeff turned around to look at him. Hopefully not badly. The tall mechanic Travis “Shorty” Short and the two other technicians weren’t in the cockpit during missions, but in the engine room.

  “Private Short,” Irons corrected him. “How bad is it?”

  “He’s unconscious. He was working on the Penning trap when we were hit by the particle beam. Corporal Fields says he was flung against the paneling of the Casimir Converter. Private Short may have a concussion, but he seems to be in a stable condition. We’ve put him on a gurney.”

  “All right. Lieutenant Rutherford will take a look at him as soon as we’re in hyperspace. Come back to the bridge and order your men to buckle up until I lift the battle alert.”

  “Understood.”

  “What happens if the Penning trap kicks the bucket?” Joanne asked. Her voice sounded more curious than worried.

  “Then we’ll expel it, according to protocol,” Irons replied coolly.

  “That would mean we probably wouldn’t have enough power to maintain the horizon the whole way home,” the navigator pointed out.

  “We’ll deal with any problems as they arise, Lieutenant Rutherford.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Jeff saw a movement from the corner of his eye—it was Green, returning to the bridge and taking his seat.

  “We’ve reached the entry point,” Joanne said.

  “Are we clear for hyperflight, Lieutenant Green?”

  “Yes, Sir. Everything ready for entering hyperspace.”