by T. R. Harris
“Sherri, how are the patches coming?” Adam asked through the suit comms.
“Okay. We’re using chemical welding panels. They work great. Just slap one over a crack and they go to work melding with the bulkhead. It’s like it never even happened. The problem is we have five more cracks to seal and about a dozen small puncture holes before we can restore atmosphere. I heard what Kaylor said. I wouldn’t risk engaging the drive until we have more of the cracks repaired.”
“Heads up everyone,” Riyad’s voice echoed in their helmets. “We may not have a choice. The bad guys are coming fast…and our weapons are down. Our only option is to run.”
Adam looked at Kaylor and nodded. “Take is easy…and we may catch a break seeing that there’s no atmosphere in the ship creating internal pressure on the hull.”
“That is a very good point, Adam. But still, I will go easy. Get ready…I’m activating the gravity drive.”
If Adam thought the vibrations through the deck had been bad before, he hadn’t seen anything yet. Something was off-balance in one of the huge generators spinning up in the room, and if the pull of the singularities from the grav-drive wasn’t enough to tear the ship apart, the violent shaking was only moments away from doing the deed itself.
Kaylor cut the drive and the shaking cycled down.
“Another light-year was all I could do, Adam. I couldn’t risk running it any longer.”
“That’s fine, buddy. Riyad, where are the Nuoreans?”
“Coming about and tenacious as ever. We’re going to need the TD drive if we expect to survive.”
Adam unhooked his magnetic boots from the metal deck and floated over to Kaylor. He scanned the data on the diagnostic screen, surprised he could understand the readings with relative ease. Once again, he thanked the mutant tumor in his head.
“We need to tap directly into the gravity generators—at least the one that isn’t out of balance. But we can’t channel the power in directly, it has to be filtered through the batteries.”
“They’ll explode,” Kaylor said.
“We need an inverter—the ship’s power module!”
“It is too weak, Adam.”
Adam began to tap on the keyboard of the control console. “Capacitors…I’ll stream it through the matrix. Hold on everyone. This should work.”
Twenty seconds later, a new and steady vibration was felt through the deck as the working gravity generator spun up. After a moment, a power bar on the screen for the TD drive began to fill in, climbing higher up the scale.
“Ten seconds. We’re set for a fifty light-year jump out into the void. Hopefully that will give us breathing room to make the repairs before the Nuoreans show up.”
The ship jumped.
“Threat board quiet, Captain Cain,” Riyad reported a moment later. “Looks like we’ll live to fight another day.”
“That’s always the objective, Mister Tarazi,” Adam sighed. He looked through his helmet lens at the relieved faces of Kaylor and Copernicus. “Okay, let’s get the repairs going. There’s still a lot of work to be done before we can go home.”
Sherri’s voice came through the speakers. “I’m glad you added that last part. I was afraid you’d tossed that option out the window a while ago.”
“Believe me, sweetheart, suicide is the last thing on my mind. Besides, we’re just at the point where our true mission begins.”
A chorus of moans was heard through the speakers. Adam figured his constant string of mission resets didn’t sell any longer, not with this crew anyway.
Chapter 16
Morlon was in the main control room of the LP-6 space station, surveying the progress of the specialists realigning the massive gravity generators, when a Third Cadre messenger rushed into the room
“Commander, the alien warcraft has breached the LP-5 transit zone.”
Morlon stared at the young officer, questions exploding in his mind. “It survived? How?”
The messenger handed a databox to his superior. He spoke as Morlon read. “The aliens flooded the landing area with tiny metal ballistics. The waiting ships had to deviate course to avoid damage.”
“It says here the Human ship shifted course dramatically once entering the zone. How was this possible? Their engines were offline.”
“Chemical reaction jets, Commander. The turn was sharp and unexpected. By the time our ships were able to resume the pursuit the enemy ship had vanished.”
Morlon paced the room, not out of anger or fear, but from excitement. Adam Cain was indeed a worthy opponent, and the only regret Morlon had was that the two of them would never met in the arena. But now he had to play the game, calculate the odds, create a new strategy. The Humans were coming to LP-6, that was a given. That gave Morlon the place. And the time was soon.
“Alert the station’s security forces. Prepare for outside intrusion. And set a screen of defenders around the generators and venting complex. Pull all ships from the transit zone to assist.” He glanced at the huge clock on the wall that was constantly counting down the time to the next transit. Sixteen hours. Adam Cain would move within that time if he hoped to catch the return pulse through LP-5. Yet what would be his strategy? Morlon needed time to think.
He dismissed the Cadre messenger before barking out additional orders to the station commanders. There were fourteen hundred Nuoreans onboard, plus another six hundred scattered over the huge generator complex. Cain had a single ship with a crew estimated to be less than eight. Surely the complex was not in danger.
But that’s just the type of thinking Morlon dismissed. He couldn’t afford the luxury of assumptions.
He retired to his assigned stateroom—the largest and most-luxurious aboard—to think. Previously, his only concern was how Cain would make it to LP-6. Now that he was here, Morlon had to put himself in the Human’s place and determine how he planned to destroy the station. Only when enemy plans were deciphered could truly effective deterrents be put in place. Morlon had to think like a Human if he expected to defeat a Human—a Human named Adam Cain.
********
“We’re screwed,” Copernicus said to Adam. They were in the engine room staring at the thick iron shell of one of the gravity-drive generators. “An internal fan blade broke off and shredded a couple around it. We can’t replace them and we can’t run the generator the way it is.”
All the breaches in the hull had been repaired and atmosphere restored to the ship. The two men wore jeans and t-shirts, after spending almost three hours in the spacesuits.
“The other generator still runs,” Adam pointed out.
“Yeah, but it takes an incredible amount of energy to feed the dynamos that create the singularities. We can get maneuvering wells out of the one still operational, but nothing above light speed.”
The TD drive was smaller—yet infinitely more complex. It had been designed by the immortal mutant genius Panur and consisted of a bank of modules anchored to the aft bulkhead of the engine room. The drive didn’t require generator power to constantly feed the unit, only a store of electricity from a series of batteries set in the inner wall lining and deck plates of the spine corridor. All the drive had to do was open a portal to another universe and then another back into theirs. There was no real propulsion taking place—just a manipulation of time and space. The drive was an amazing piece of technology, and one the scientists back on Earth had yet to fully comprehend. They could duplicate the effect, but only through the application of prodigious amounts of energy. Panur’s device did it with only twelve ordinary fuel cells linked together.
The TD drive was fully functional now, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was they couldn’t go around jumping everywhere. At some point they needed to use conventional gravity propulsion—even chem drive—for precise movements and maneuvers. The chem drive only had twenty percent of its fuel reserves left, and the grav-drive could only achieve sub-light speeds. And to make things worse, the missiles they carried were launched through a rail-g
un apparatus, which also required a considerable amount of electricity—electricity normally pulled from the grav-generators. With only one unit operational, it was either run the engines or fire the missiles. You couldn’t do both at the same time.
With all these limitations and considerations, Adam’s mutant-enhanced mind was working overtime on workarounds.
He shook his head at the disassembled gravity generator. “It is what it is,” he said to Coop. He accessed the ship’s comm system with his ATD and made an announcement. “Okay team, let’s meet in the common room. We’re pretty much set for the run on LP-6. We just need to figure out what we’re going to do when we get there.”
********
Morlon lay on his bed, an arm resting across his forehead and staring wide-eyed and unblinking at the ceiling. He was attempting to recall everything he knew about Humans—and Adam Cain in particular. The Third Cadre was tasked with studying the thousands of alien races the Nuoreans encountered, be they innocuous or Jundac. The Humans had been classified Jundac several months ago—with some of his kind suspecting they were so even before the invasion of the Kac. As a result, the species was the most-studied and analyzed of all the races in the alien galaxy. Morlon was privy to all this data. In fact, he was the ranking officer charged with this information, making him the foremost expert on the Human race.
Over the past thirteen days, all his superior knowledge had done him no good. Cain still succeeded against every obstacle Morlon set before him. Yet in most cases, the Cadre officer had been merely reacting to events, and when he sought to control them, artificial timelines were placed on him that gave the appearance of failure on his part. The only true setback Morlon felt responsible for was the failure of his ships to destroy or capture the Human starship when it appeared at LP-5. That round he awarded to Adam Cain. But the contest was far from over. In fact, it was just beginning.
Morlon’s first step in predicting the actions of Adam Cain was to determine the ideal outcome for the alien’s plan. He and his fellow saboteurs would want to destroy the midpoint generators…yet not before they could travel back to the Suponac and catch the last pulse through LP-6 to their home galaxy. That meant the ordinance would have to be time-delayed and impervious to disarming. Next, they would have to know the location of the LP-6 transit zone and have the time to reach it before the next launch. Following the best-case scenario, Cain would expect the zone to be located somewhere along the rim of the galaxy—as were all the others—probably within a thousand light-cycles or so of Nuor, a destination easily reachable using his teleportation drive.
If all these factors came to fruition, the Humans would consider their mission a success.
Now Morlon had to think of obstacles and countermeasures to make sure their mission failed.
The fact that Cain was unaware the generators were now aimed at his homeworld made little difference at this point. That would come as a surprise. And add to that, the new transit zone for LP-6 was not within a thousand light-cycles of Nuor, but rather over six thousand inside the galaxy, dictated by the target at the opposite end of the transit line—the planet Earth.
Could Cain set his bombs, transition back to the Suponac, and travel six thousand light-cycles to the transit zone in—Morlon checked the time again in his personal watch—a little over fifteen hours? Highly unlikely…but not impossible.
If faced with this scenario, would the Human choose suicide over complete victory? The Nuoreans long understood the concept as a viable means of achieving a goal, yet they did not respect it. Sacrificing one’s life in a losing cause was not the way of the skilled player. The strategy was taught in school, but not widely practiced.
Morlon considered what Cain would do knowing his world was about to be destroyed? He would surely seek to either destroy the generators or change their focus. By diverting the aim, the Earth would be saved and the Humans would still have an opportunity to make it back to the Kac. This would be their preferred option over suicide.
Yet if Cain couldn’t shift the focus, then he would certainly hasten the destruction of LP-6, even if it meant being trapped in the Suponac for the rest of their short lives.
So Morlon’s next challenge became: Stop Cain from changing the aim of the generators, which he would attempt to do before choosing suicide as the last resort.
The fifteen hundred miles of generator complex was controlled from the space station. Hundreds of maneuvering jets could change the alignment by fractions of a degree or by miles if necessary. Morlon could disable the controls aboard the station, but there would always be the possibility Cain could find ways around that. The only sure way was to destroy the link between the station and the generators. Morlon was not a technician, but he knew there was a control room in the Io-Generator—the number one generator—where all comms were centered. He would break the link there…as well as on the station. He would build challenge upon challenge in an effort to confound his worthy adversary.
Following his thinking further, Morlon next had to figure a way to stop Cain from destroying the complex prematurely—as a last resort. To do this, Morlon would have to stop any explosives from being set, or disarming any that were. Although the Humans had never seen the midpoint generators, they had to imagine they were of incredible size and come prepared for the challenge. This would involve the use of either nuclear or even gravitational bombs. Morlon had no idea how hardened the generator facilities were, or whether the builders had even considered the possibility of sabotage? Would one bomb set off a chain reaction that could destroy the entire complex? He would investigate this question further when he made his journey to the Io-Generator.
That’s when Morlon laughed. All his careful planning and strategizing would become moot if he could hold off Cain for another fifteen hours. There may be some follow-up damage done to the facility, but the fate of Earth would be sealed.
After that, if Adam Cain wished to visit his homeworld, all he would have to do is travel six thousand light-cycles to find the shattered half of his world that had been transported to the Suponac. If that fantasy ever came to pass, Morlon hoped he could play host. It would be immensely satisfying to see the look on the Human’s face.
He got up from the bed, straightened his uniform and then set out for the main launch bay for the space station. He would personally inspect the generator control room and remove the comm link. He also wanted to get a feel for the security measures in place on and within the huge complex.
He checked his watch again. Fourteen hours, forty-eight minutes.
Morlon had to admit he would be disappointed if Cain didn’t show up on schedule. He so wanted to meet this particular Human.
Chapter 17
It was Riyad’s turn at the nav computer, and when he coughed and cleared his throat, everyone on the bridge got the message.
“You know that fleet that was chasing us a couple of hours ago? Well I found it.” The main screen lit up, showing a long solid object next to a much smaller round contact. And intermingled between and around the two objects was a minefield of contacts classified as enemy warships. There were more than forty—the strength of the contingent at the transit zone. A quick computer count placed the number at sixty-one, plus a dozen small shuttles zipping between the major structures.
“Looks like someone is serious about keeping us out of their playground,” Coop said.
Adam was in the pilot seat, crunching numbers for the next jump of the Najmah Fayd. In a normal situation, he would accelerate the ship to a respectable velocity outside the range of the enemy ship’s sensors and then go dark, coasting in without being detected. But the maneuvering wells and chem drive couldn’t get them going fast enough. In addition, it was almost impossible to go dark with a TD charge building up for the next hop. The aliens knew they were coming and there was no subtle way to make the approach without being seen.
Another complication: Adam needed to learn the current TZ for LP-6 in the Andromeda galaxy. Assuming they could place
the charges—and they weren’t disarmed—they needed to know the way back home and the quickest way to get there. That meant boarding the space station and wringing the truth out of the aliens. Riyad was chomping at the bit for a little Human-on-alien action, and whole-heartedly volunteered for the duty. That was normally Adam’s job, however, so he denied the request. Besides, Riyad had another task to perform.
Fortunately, most of the Nuoreans ships weren’t coming out to meet them. They were content to form a screen around their precious LP-6 complex and shoot anything that came in range.
“That’s a damn big station,” Sherri pointed out. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a thousand or more crew aboard. That’s a lot of heads to bash. And that’s after we get past the starships.”
The chronometer on the bulkhead had been reset to count the hours until the next pulse through LP-6. A smaller clock was mounted below it that showed the time to LP-5’s next transit. Although the launch points operated on different recharge schedules, they were nearly synced up for their next shots. LP-5 was four hours fifty-two minutes away; with LP-6 at five hours forty-one minutes. Theoretically, this was a near-perfect scenario for the team. They could set the bombs and pass back through to Nuor in just under five hours, followed by a TD jump to the LP-6 transit zone and the pulse back to the Milky Way forty-nine minutes later.
And then the bombs would go off.
Mission accomplished.
That was assuming no one tried to mess with their time-table….
********
Time-tables would be studied later. For now, the crew was distracted by the long, thin tube floating in the void between galaxies. The white line on the screen was deceptive, until numbers began to appear next to the object.
“Am I seeing that right?” Copernicus asked. “Almost fifteen hundred miles? That thing is that long?”
