by T. R. Harris
“It could be three minutes or more while the batteries recharge sitting in the middle of an enemy fleet.”
Adam smiled back at his friend. “Yeah, that could be…stimulating. Certainly better than a hot cup of coffee. Speaking of which, I need one. I’ll meet you on the bridge.”
“Hurry, the party can’t start without you, Mein Fuhrer.”
Adam entered the bridge two minutes later with a cup of coffee in his hand and a spring in his step. This was the moment the team had been waiting for. All the other gravity waves detected so far had been too distant to reach in one jump. By the time they arrived, the transit’s return pulse was already gone, along with any waiting Nuorean invaders. That last part was fortunate—and disappointing. That meant the entry point was dead and the aliens would realign the midpoint generator to a new location on the edge of the Milky Way. For four long months they’d done nothing but chase their tail across half the galaxy.
But two hundred light-years was a walk-in-the-park for a trans-dimensional jump starship like the Najmah Fayd; they could make that in a single hop. The only question was what kind of reception would they get at the other end?
Kaylor surrendered the pilot seat to Adam, taking the second seat instead. In the past, the Belsonian muleship-driver had been considered the superior pilot. But recently something had changed. Adam was just a little bit quicker, a little more prescient at the controls. Adam knew why; the others mistakenly chalked it up to the alien’s advancing age.
“The wave was detected sixty-one hours after its creation,” Riyad reported from the comm station to Adam’s left. “Once the techies were able to triangulate the location, it’s left us with only an hour to get on station before the next transit pulse.”
“First wave in the sequence?” Adam asked.
“That’s affirmative. If there’s a second transit, we should be able to catch it.”
A month ago, the team had spent six days sitting in the middle of an entry point, waiting for it to be reactivated. It never was. This confirmed their suspicion that only when enemy ships were present would a repeat transit take place. If the aliens had already bolted for the interior of the galaxy it meant the entry point was abandoned.
The gravity generators of the midpoint station require three days to recharge, since it takes a lot of power to create the pair of super-massive blackholes needed to link space across two-and-a-half-million light-years. Once created, however, space between the two opposing points would be drawn to the midpoint. Then in the blink of an eye, polarity was flipped, allowing the opposing points to switch places. The generators would then be shut down, allowing the space/time continuum to return to normal. In the process, what had once been in Andromeda was now in the Milky Way…and vice versa. The resulting surge of returning space was what created the ripple effect of the gravity waves.
First detected over six months ago, the waves were now monitored as best they could by an array of several thousand passive buoys laid along the leading edge of the galaxy closest to Andromeda. But the Milky Way was a huge place. It would take a million more buoys to make for timely detection of the shockwaves, at least enough for allied forces to arrive on station to counter the incoming alien war fleets.
For now, the desperate people of the Milky Way were fighting a losing battle. Just when they had a bead on a new Nuorean entry point, the aliens would shut it down and shift to a new location. The difference could be as little as a few hundred light-years, all the way to ten thousand or more—and only the Nuoreans knew where the next entry point would appear.
By consensus, the midpoint generators were the problem. And it was Adam’s mission to take them out…by whatever means necessary.
Adam swiveled his chair around and looked at Sherri Valentine, seated at the nav station, the tiny bear-like alien Jym at her elbow. “Can you get us in close without being spotted?”
“Already plotted,” she answered. “There’s a star system about half-a-light out. We should be able to hide our arrival and slip in for a closer look after we land.”
Her expression was anything but enthusiastic. A year ago, she and Copernicus Smith had accidently been sucked into the Andromeda Galaxy through the very process Adam’s was trying to replicate. It was by sheer luck the pair made it back. The prospect of a replay wasn’t something she was looking forward to.
Adam looked next to Copernicus at the weapon’s console. The two men shared a nod. No matter how this turned out, there was a good chance there would be some shooting along the way. Coop was ready.
Everyone strapped in, their expressions conveying the shared belief that this jump was different from the others. This could be it. Within minutes they could be in another galaxy, with no back-up, no quick-extraction plan, and no friendly forces to help. Once committed, there would be no turning back. Either they succeed…or they never come home.
If the six people on the bridge of the Najmah Fayd were having second thoughts, none chose to voice them. Instead they turned stern-faced to their stations, resolute in their mission.
Call them heroes if you like, but someone had to step up to the plate. Besides, Adam didn’t trust anyone else but him and his team to get the job done.
With a firming of his jaw, Adam Cain activated the controls to the trans-dimensional jump drive.
A greenish glow filled the forward viewport—the sign of a transit to a parallel dimension. A moment later the glow vanished, after which the Najmah Fayd spent the next twenty-four seconds in an alien universe—a universe separated by only the width of a hydrogen atom from their own. After a slight shift in the return portal location, the glow returned. There was a sensation of nausea throughout the jump, but Adam’s team was used to it. Even still, when the stars of their home universe reappeared through the viewport, they breathed a sigh of relief. Each jump into a foreign dimension was a crap shoot. They had no idea where they would appear—in open space, or the middle of a star. There was no way of telling; they didn’t carry navigational charts for parallel universes.
But now they were back, two hundred light-years from where they had been only a minute before…and a hundred thousand miles from a fleet of several hundred alien warcraft.
“Shields up!” Coop cried out. “Some of the gray bastards have already fired on us.”
“I’ve located the entry point!” Sherri Valentine yelled out from the navigation station.
“Too soon to jump,” Adam pointed out. “We can’t sit in the middle of a transit zone for an hour.”
“We cannot say here, either,” Kaylor added. “The Nuoreans have a protective screen out to a light-year around the entry point.”
“How long until we can jump?”
“Seventy-seconds…give or take a lifetime,” Riyad replied.
The Najmah Fayd rocked as the first plasma bolts impacted the diffusion shields.
“Second round incoming,” Copernicus reported. “We can handle one more full charge. After that, the shields could fail.”
Adam scanned his active screen. There were hostiles everywhere. He cranked up the maneuvering well and shot farther into the stellar system Sherri had placed them in, the one swarming with enemy warcraft. It wasn’t her fault. The Nuoreans were serious about this entry point. It was located in an obscure region of the galaxy, lightly populated and poorly defended. They could bring in three or more fleets before having to break off. That many ships in one contingent would be hard to counter. They could stake claim to half an arm of the galaxy with a force that large.
As Adam guided the Najmah Fayd into the star system, the cluster of alien warships following becoming a bright mass of contacts on their six, their gravity signatures melding into one. The dominant star in the system was a main sequence yellow, about three times the mass of the Sun. There were the requisite rocky inner worlds, but none classified as habitable. No help—in the form of allied starships—would be lifting from their surfaces.
Adam checked the chronograph on the bulkhead. He still had fifty
-one minutes to kill before he could safely jump over to the transit zone. He knew of history-altering space battles that didn’t last that long. He could always jump to another location, but before making the final leap to the TZ they would have to make sure they could safely land without crashing into another starship. And that meant a close-in recon.
“They’re coming from in-system now,” Riyad reported, “trying to box us in. Might be a good time to exit stage left.”
“Are we ready?” Adam asked Kaylor.
“Fully-charged.”
“Where to?” Sherri asked.
“Take us to the other side of the entry point. We still need a look at the TZ. We want to be in the middle, and not along the edge. Too risky.”
“You’re good to go.”
Adam jumped the ship.
As he was expecting, there were Nuoreans here as well, but the defensive screen they’d established was beyond this new location. Once inside the main defense line, the enemy ships became scarcer.
That didn’t mean they were out of hot water. Two main-line battlecruisers were changing course, heading their way. With three minutes required to recharge the TD batteries, the Najmah Fayd was trapped in normal space, operating on standard gravity-drive, just like any other starship.
Without warning, Adam gunned it, racing headlong toward the enemy warships. Flashes from bolt launches lit up the hulls of the invaders, as six fiery balls of plasma headed their way.
“Hold on,” Adam ordered.
The inertia compensators within the Najmah Fayd were rated AAA—the best available—but the corkscrew maneuver Adam executed to weave his way through the incoming bolts strained their limits. Everyone—except Adam—cried out as shoulder restraints cut into tender flesh and g-forces rattled brains. Fortunately, the pain didn’t last long, before the ship was beyond the attackers and coming about for a run from behind.
Copernicus fought to bring his eyes back into focus, but soon he had the alien warcraft lined up in his sights. He fired a barrage of powerful flash cannon bolts at near point-blank range. Energy bolts have a nasty habit of losing intensity over time and distance, but this close they blasted through the diffusion shields and slammed into the aft maneuvering engines of the Nuorean warships. Hull metal deformed into wide blossoms on each ship as the fiery glow of the engines faded. The ships slowed, falling to a steady velocity based only on forward momentum.
Adam slowed the Najmah Fayd as well and steered his much smaller ship just above the top-oriented hulls of the invaders. Viewports were lit, and from within he could make out tiny dots—aliens holding their breath, defenseless against the will of the Humans now that their engines and weapons were dead.
Before departing on the mission, the Najmah Fayd had stocked up on some of the latest weapons from the Human military research departments, as well as from the Juireans, Formilians and even the Incus. Some were exotic, others throwbacks to a simpler time.
“Why don’t we test out a couple of those bunker-busters?” Adam said to Coop. He felt no compassion for the helpless crews on the other ships. They were the heartless enemy and would continue threatening the Milky Way if allowed to live.
“My thoughts exactly. Give us some separation. I wouldn’t want to scratch your fancy new paint job.”
The two small devices Copernicus launched against the Nuoreans weren’t exactly bunker-buster bombs, but they served the same purpose. They were designed to penetrate the hulls of enemy ships before detonating a mini-nuke deep inside. If just one of these tiny weapons managed to get through, that was all she wrote.
The polarizing feature of the forward viewport protected those on the bridge from the blinding flash of two simultaneous explosions. Adam smirked. Although there were an estimated four thousand alien warships surrounding the entry point, he found solace in the fact that they could now subtract two from that number.
“How much longer?” Adam asked, annoyed. He was anxious to get the real mission underway, and all this screwing around at this end of the transit line was getting old.
“Ten minutes,” Sherri reported. “But I wouldn’t cut it too close.”
“What’s the traffic like?”
Sherri and Jym studied the nav screen. “Pretty thick in the middle. Looks like a lot of ships are rotating back to the home galaxy.”
“Can you get us in?”
Sherri smiled, a wicked, confident grin. “Piece of cake, Captain Cain. Give me ten seconds.”
The next jump ended up almost too close for comfort. The Najmah Fayd appeared near the center of the transit zone, the huge bubble in space which was the primary area that would be sucked to the Andromeda Galaxy. A clunky-looking spacecraft lay off their starboard quarter at a range of about two thousand meters. That was razor-thin by space standards. Adam looked at Sherri, his forehead furrowed.
She just smiled back and bounced her eyebrows.
“Threats?” Adam asked the room.
Riyad studied his board. “Take your pick. There’s about two hundred ships all packed in here, waiting for the train ride back home. Most are giving off minimal offensive signatures; probably a lot of supply tubs. But there are a few squadrons of warships—none of the biggies, though.”
“What are they doing?”
“Not much. I don’t think they expected us to jump into the fire—at least not voluntarily.”
The clock on the wall was down to four minutes. If the Nuoreans held to schedule, the jump would be coming anytime now.
“The ships on the perimeter are initiating their gravity drives,” Kaylor announced. This was good news. Vessels outside the main transit zone were still subject to the effects of the powerful gravity-well. They powered up their engines to keep from being drawn in.
“Looks like this is the real thing people!” Adam called out.
“Incoming warship,” Riyad reported. “Lining up to fire.”
Adam looked at Coop. “We can’t move…not now. We have to hold them off.”
“A Hades?”
Adam nodded. “Good idea, Mister Smith. Give ‘em hell.”
A moment later the ship lurched, as Copernicus launched one of the new Hades IV missiles at the incoming warship. This was one of the weapons that used primitive technology to overcome advanced countermeasures. Defensive energy shields draw power from attacking plasma bolts, as well as any other device relying on electronics for guidance and detonation, rendering them ineffective until the screens became fully saturated. The Hades missile was conventional in that regard; it was the warhead that made the difference. It was packed with several thousand metal ball bearings the size of marbles. They would be released moments before the missile impacted the shields. The missile itself would be destroyed, but the cloud of deadly ballistic hull-shredders would pass through the electronic barrier with impunity, until they perforated the enemy ship like a mini-gun through rice paper. The weapon was new…and the Najmah Fayd had a compliment of thirty-five such missiles onboard—now thirty-four.
Riyad manually angled the shields to counter the incoming bolts from the Nuorean warcraft. Without maneuvering, this was the only way to achieve maximum defense; however, he didn’t have to stay at the controls for long. A moment later the entire forward quarter of the alien warcraft disintegrated.
All exploding warships follow the same basic evolution. First the hull is breached with incoming fire. Next the interior atmosphere explodes outward with the force of a powerful bomb, using pressurized air to multiply the effect of the initial attack.
As the Nuorean ship dissolved into a cloud of debris, fragments buffeted the shields and hull of the Najmah Fayd, causing little damage. Adam still scowled at Copernicus. “There goes my paint job!”
Coop just shrugged.
After dispensing with the man-o-war, Adam noticed the supply ship next to them begin to move away on maneuvering jets. Another vessel to its starboard side was late in clearing a path and the two ships came together. There was no explosion or other catastrophic dam
age, just a lot of dented metal, along with—Adam imagined—a fair amount of yelling between the two captains.
“It’s happening!’ Sherri yelled. “Oh damn…here we go again!”
92
It had never been fully settled whether the transit over two-and-a-half million light-years happened instantaneously, or whether those taking part in the journey experienced some kind of time lapse. Either way, it didn’t matter.
One moment the Najmah Fayd was in the Milky Way Galaxy…the next it was in Andromeda.
Yet there was one thing the crew discovered conclusively upon landing in the huge, alien galaxy: Passing through a pair of super-massive blackholes on the way here drained most of the batteries and caused diffusion shields to, well…diffuse.
“How long to recharge?” Adam barked out. This wasn’t asked simply for information, but for survival. All the ships that had made the jump now rested in the center of a huge, open area of space. And just outside the boundary of the transit zone sat five thousand Nuorean warships, each waiting their turn to make the next jumps to the Milky Way.
“Raise the shields!” Riyad yelled.
“I got nothing!” Copernicus replied.
“The batteries—for both the shields and the jump drive—will take ten minutes or longer to recharge,” Jym reported. The tiny alien strained against his safety harness, his natural excitability held in place by the straps.
Adam’s heart was in his chest. He wasn’t expecting this. Maybe a few minutes to build up a jump charge, but not ten minutes sitting defenseless in the middle of the largest enemy fleet he’d ever seen. But then he noticed something curious.
None of the enemy ships were moving to engage.
“I think we caught them by surprise,” Kaylor said from the co-pilot’s seat.
“Yeah,” Sherri agreed. “We’re the last thing they expected to see appear at this end of the rainbow.”
Their fortunate reprieve didn’t last long, however. Their jump companions were bolting away on chem drives from the Najmah Fayd, moving off in every direction. Adam was also sure comm links were blowing up with reports of the intruder. Still, it took the Nuorean captains a few moments more to get the message, after which several of the huge battlecruisers began to move into the transit zone.
