Fulcrums of the Universe: A TESS NOVEL #2

by Randy Moffat

  They had quickly populated the roof of the chamber with lamps that mimicked sunlight and then run in piping along the ceiling that would mist out liquid water as rain periodically. This gave them the primitive basis of an Earth-like environment. Of course it was dead ‘soil’, but the Tellus had brought up a load of topsoil and fertilizers direct from Earth, specially kept warm for the trip. The dirt had been seeded into the newly manufactured dust in the garden chamber, transferring its load of still living microbes, molds, fungus, bacteria, nematodes, arthropods, and seeds into the surrounding sterile material—all of which aimed at providing the initial dose of something like 5% of organic matter found in the central plot of soils including the requisite .2% of living organisms. The notion was to let its life spread slowly into the surrounding sterile material and measure it all as it went.

  Tanya had proven to be of tremendous help. Johnson had was only marginally aware that a nematode was the same as an earth-worm and had never even heard the term “Soil tilth” until Matthews and done her homework on making the place have enough suitable soil to support plant growth. ‘Dirt’ was cheap on Earth but it was a highly complex mechanism that had taken millions of years to create while the crew of L5 was trying to recreate it artificially in a period of days and weeks. To do that the station had to provide the ultimately correct tillage for seed growth and make sure the dirt contained the right nutrients for plants. Despite the difficulties it was an experiment that was moving ahead nicely. Their first lichens had appeared on the surrounding wetter spots on the rock walls on the edges of shadows unexpectedly two weeks ago and several weeds had surprised Johnson and Matthews by sprouting in some of thinner mix spots of the new soil almost instantly. Life will find a way. Their first dandelion was up.

  Matthews appeared to have a strain of British in her character. A nation of gardeners. Today she had seduced Johnson into burying her hands in the new soil several yards from their ‘seed’ point to smell it. The scent was similar to that original soils from earth. It was spreading faster than expected as the inherently invasive chemical machines of life-forms sought to dominate the new terrain. The Captain had glanced about furtively as she sneaked in a few wild flower seeds into the mix that she had smuggled up on her last trip earth-side. They had high hopes for a garden in a few months and the Captain liked flowers. A few columbines might just sprout up among the beans and squashes busy fixing nitrogen. She and Matthews had had a couple belts the night before to celebrate their first successes and Matthews named the place after one of the most beautiful gardens she had ever seen on Earth; Butchart Gardens in British Columbia. Captain Johnson had sneaked over this morning to peek in and found the name hand painted over the entrance chamber doors.

  She had just been enjoying the almost sensual feel of the ‘new’ dirt over her fingers again when the emergency claxon had sounded.

  “What is it!” She demanded testily to the nearest man in the Tactical Control Center after racing there and arriving before the claxon had actually shut off. She was good.

  Jason Sosinski, the chosen TCC man was an academy wet nose who looked at her nervously and pointed at the communications officer—shedding blame like water from an umbrella.

  Lieutenant Woo was crouched over a keyboard and typing furiously.

  “Trouble at Gaia. A mayday message!” Woo said sharply. “They are under attack and request immediate assistance.”

  The screen above her station held a text message in large font letters from the new experimental Petrovski communications rig they had just successfully tested, but Johnson had yet to rearrange her mind completely around the background notion.

  “Attack? How long ago was this sent?” She asked bringing her mind up to speed.

  Woo looked up at her.

  “Forty two seconds ago our time. A few seconds longer than the time it took you to get here from Butchart Garden. Travel time for the message from the Gaia to us was about a picosecond—roughly 10-12 of a second at a guess… . call it one trillionth of one second… at a guess.” She ended with a precision made dubious by all the qualifiers, but at least conveying the sense of the quantum leaps in her estimates. Woo looked firmly up at Johnson and met her eyes. She clarified. “This message is real time, Captain. Essentially no time delay from them to us. They are under attack right now!”

  Johnson shrugged off her confusion—this was not old school radio. It was communications at the speed of the Petrovski effect. She considered her options. She could call the Tellus and ask them for help, but though the Petrovski ‘radio’ was planned for and perhaps even installed by now inside her hull, it was not yet operational since the initial testing of the rig had been between L5 and the Gaia alone. Their first tests had only just occurred two Terran days ago. To communicate with the Tellus they would have to wait and use rational radio with a huge time delay brought on by the limiting speed of radio waves. And that was assuming the crew of Tellus were accessible and they were monitoring their coms aboard TESS’ number two ship right now which was not a given since she was probably actually on Earth itself. Her schedule called for a quick tweak of problems found during her maiden flights. Bear and the Gaia needed help right now!

  She turned to Sosinski. Once the L5 had been made operational at L5 she had not been intended to ever move again. They had been discussing removing her MacMoran engines and placing them in the next ship in the construction queue. Damn that!

  “We have not mothballed the damn engines yet. Get engineering awake! Bring our McMoran engines on line now! We are moving this mountain!”

  I was swimming along the first deck abaft the bridge and sail with all the frantic haste and with a motion that was quite similar to a salmon in full spawn with the additional encumbrance of the bulky automatic in my hand.

  I could picture things fairly clearly in my mind. The ship had three deck levels. I had torn Rivera away from her Petrovski radio and moved two midshipman with weapons to the first, second and third deck hatches on the watertight heavy bulkhead abaft the bridge so our enemies could not move into the bow section unannounced along any of the levels from inside the ship. I had no doubt that Maxmillian and Diaz would track down any more safecrackers trying to make an end run outside and enter the hull through a hole punched into us somewhere forward; so I figured my main problem right now was aft. The two chiefs had radioed that they had found no more of the attackers on deck aft. The pair of warrants were just now preparing to enter the hull through the hole on the bottom of the ship made by the missile strike from Bogey two. It would put them on the bottom most deck. Meantime I was rushing along the upper deck. My strategic guess was that the boarders were somewhere either on this deck or below me on second deck by now if they had entered the level where Pinta and Gaston were. I needed to place myself between them and the reactor bulkhead so that they could not approach either the nuclear reactor or the McMoran engine equipment which lay astern of the reactor compartment. Damned if they were going to be successful!

  If I was right it was just possible that the Chiefs and I would catch them in a pincer movement from above and below as they tried to figure out how to enter the reactor room while headed to the rear of the ship.

  That was my stupid improvised plan based on my gut guesswork at least.

  The compartment I was passing through was our experimental ship’s gardens. All the plants were dead and frozen. So was our chief botany officer and her two underclass assistants who had been caught by rapid depressurization out of their suits—their bodies were clinging like ghastly limpets to the outer hull where the outrushing air from a series of small holes had dragged them. They were frozen, blue and contorted. It had been a terrifying death. I looked away. I was trying hard not to think about Maureen. I had not heard from her since the attack began and I was sick with worry.

  I focused on my rage instead—there was plenty of that to amuse me for now.

  Sho pushed him men hard. They had f
ound two people in space suits trying to conceal themselves in the cabin spaces as they moved toward the rear of the ship. One had had a knife and come close to puncturing his bodyguard’s suit with it before they killed him.

  His troops were slowed down each time they had to kill someone by taking time for tactical maneuvers. The delays were no good. In the aftermath of each find his me seemed inclined to gawk at the corpses. Sho drove them on relentlessly. Their mission was not just about killing TESS crew members now… though the payback felt good, it was more and more critical to get on about getting information home on the TESS engines and technology. Each man on his team had helmet cameras. Each was transmitting images. He had already placed a re-transmitter on the sub’s hull as they entered and two more re-transmitters along the corridor as they moved for additional insurance. He had paid for every inch of that passage with his men’s lives during the initial stages of this attack and Sho was determined that their suit radio and video cameras find something other than dead TESS personnel to broadcast back to the space station whose crew in their turn would be sending the information they captured from the Marines video output onward to the space center down on earth.

  So far however, they had seen nothing worth sending except bedrooms and dead bodies.

  Intuitively he just knew the mission’s true prize lay further ahead of his men.

  “Move it… . move it.” He growled glancing left into the old shower and toilet facilities—about half had been converted to space capability, leaving the function if not the mechanisms the same. Half was all they obviously needed Sho speculated with a corner of his mind. The crew numbers of the space ship Gaia was tiny compared to what it had been as an ocean going ship. This was Sho’s basic math problem that kept niggling at his mind. The small TESS numbers minus whatever casualties that the Chinese had inflicted left a number that was possibly still small enough to take on with his own dwindling troop. The arithmetic of combat. Every dead TESS man or woman provided a reason why the Chinese still had a chance for success but slowed them from reaching their overall objective.

  To succeed they must move.

  As the Chinese troops spun swiftly past the latrines the half open privacy curtain on the third latrine twitched. Inside the mirrored face plate of the space suit that were concealed by the curtain a pair of intense hazel eyes strained to watch the door and estimate if all the enemy had completed by-passing the entrance.

  With a light balletic movement the suit flicked the curtain aside soundlessly and glided across the camber to flicker a rapid head thrust into the corridor and then jerk it back into the room. On the back of the suit’s breathing unit was a rear admiral’s insignia and the word O’Hara in bold letters.

  The bastards she now hated with all her might had continued on and were gathered in a group in the chamber at the end of the corridor and had left the hatch open for now so that she could see them. They were actually at full stop in a group now. They could not go further because they were blocked by the heavily shielded bulkhead that protected the nuclear reactor compartment beyond. One of them was hunched over near the floor working on something. Maureen forced her breathing under control. These guys were killing TESS’ people. Her people. Maureen cursed her luck again. She had left her quarters at the alarm and Bear’s verbal orders, gotten back to and donned her suit near the ship’s rearmost hatch and had been traveling forward when an explosion occurred that slammed her into the edge of a corridor hatchway. The force of it had banged her head into the back of her helmet and knocked her loopy of a time. It could not have been too long she reasoned. The enemy was still trying to penetrate the ship when she came to. It was hard to focus though. She had awoken a pair of minutes ago dizzy and her head aching. She found herself swallowing hard and trying not to vomit. It was a bad idea to puke into a space suite helmet. She eventually got control of the impulse and though she still felt unwell she now able to focus on the survival tasks at hand one at a time.

  Maureen rarely had need of the suit and had not worn it since her arrival in the ship. Her receiver/transmitter had been making a scratchy sound when she arrived and so she had removed it and turned it over to Sergeant Rivera for repair or replacement. Like so many details it had slipped her mind and when she had donned the suit she had realized it was still missing. She was back in action again, but incapable of communication with her crew mates.

  Without radio Maureen had no idea what was going on ship-wide right now, but judging by the depressurization knew it was not going well and found herself desperate for news of Bear. She had been feeling a sense of panic that demanded she see him face to face when another explosion had occurred and she had caught sight of a Chinese marine entering far up the corridor. The sight had sobered her up. It made her realize she needed to quit worrying and act instead of wasting effort on worrying about him. Time for that later. She’d ducked unseen into the latrine to prepare herself to resist.

  Unlike many crew she had a weapon handy, but was in the ridiculous position of not being able to use it properly. It was a small pistol, a chrome plated Walther PPK like James Bond’s; a gift from Bear for her to carry as a self protection of last resort after he had been shot in the chest. Annoyingly after cocking it well enough she had not been able to fit her heavily gloved finger into the relatively small space within the trigger guard while inside her stiff space suit. Now that she had a proper moment she carefully braced the pistol in her left glove and pushed and shoved to work her suit bulked digits into the small hole and onto the trigger. Her frustration climbing she finally discovered that the only finger that actually could be made to fit was the tip of her pinky which left her after she wrapped her thumb around the hilt of the weapon with her ring, middle and index fingers cocked awkwardly straight up in the air, carefully spaced wide and bent outward so as not to block the slide as it recoiled nor to block the pistol’s shell casings as they ejected out the side port. She finally felt certain she could just barely fire it if she worked her little finger carefully and braced the hilt with both hands in a ludicrous two handed grip that made her look like she was sipping tea at a cotillion.

  ‘Good enough.’ She sighed the TESS battle motto under her breath, took three quick gulping breaths, slid into the corridor and launched herself aft towards the intruders.

  Sho was carefully supervising his last trooper, who was no engineer, but had been pressed into service and was carefully fixing the third of three shaped charge into place against the heavy wall of the bulkhead in a carefully measured triangle.

  Meantime the Major had checked the compartment above and below this one. The one below was open to space from a missile strike. The room appeared from his quick glance to have been a storage compartment for foodstuffs and other supplies. In the room above this chamber he had tentatively identified water use controls and some kind of atmospheric and comfort controls. Nothing useful to him below or above. Certainly no McMoran engine space drive equipment as he had hoped. He had been tempted to destroy everything he could reach on general principles, but he still held some faint hope that his team might be able to reach its original objective of capturing the entire ship and would perhaps need the controls intact for their own use. The compartment they were in on this center deck was a great disappointment too. It had once held the hovering pumps for a submarine and other machinery with application for a ship in water, but much of it had been removed as predicted. The pumps had only been replaced with what were apparently minor electrical systems, but certainly nothing that looked mysterious or critical to TESS generating the legendary Petrovski effect. Sho knew for certain that beyond the bulkhead at the rear of this room was the original nuclear reactor compartment and though he could be not be certain he assumed that the original reactor system had been modified only slightly to provide the TESS bastards with power. The logic of his mission then was that the real prize would likely be in the spaces aft of the reactor. He and his team needed to get back in there to complet
e their mission. To do that they needed to go through the reactor compartment.

  Sho had studied the known diagrams of the old reactor room before the mission began—at least as they had been known when she was a US Naval vessel. There was a great deal of risk in blasting a hole sight unseen into a poorly charted nuclear fission reactor compartment whose bulkhead was notoriously heavily armored, but risk was something this mission had never lacked. The heavy metal of the bulkhead could not be easily breeched—the thickness being a built in safety factor in case of some major challenge with the reactor itself. Luckily Sho had supervised several practice exercises before they ever launched for space. They had built mockups of the ship’s hull and different weight bulkheads including this one. He had seen engineers placing their charges and practice punching holes in them over and over again. It was a good thing he had paid attention since he had no engineers left. They were all among the dead.

  Sho slapped his marine on the shoulder in a comradely fashion and bent to check his placement then signaled that they move upward into the deserted atmospherics and HVAC compartment on the deck above before they blew the charges.