A House United

by Caleb Wachter

  “True,” he said with muted satisfaction.

  “Bringing the turbo-laser array online—power up the weapons grid and cycle the torpedoes, but don’t arm them until we’re ready to fire. I don’t want to give their targeting sensors any more to work with than necessary,” she ordered, turning to Waldo—the comm. droid who had demonstrated remarkable proficiency interfacing with the base’s disparate systems.

  His telescopic optical receptors flickered for a few seconds before he acknowledged, “Weapons grid online; torpedo launchers standing by; all turbo-laser emitters have successfully complete diagnostics and now require three minutes of final preparation before they are ready to fire.”

  She confirmed as much from her own console, but issuing the order through him had saved her nearly a minute of work. “Good. Tremblay, see if we have anything on these particular warships: repair records, service logs, commanding officers—anything we might be able to use to pick which one to send the 24 at.”

  “Destroyer Three is the Fist of Valor,” Tremblay replied promptly. “As of three years ago it was running with a modified power grid…engine output looks right for a ship of its class, but its commander—Lieutenant Commander Stephanie Gyles—seems to have a penchant for pushing her ship a little too hard during combat maneuvers. We might be able to knock her power grid temporarily offline with a well-timed torpedo—assuming the torp doesn’t destroy the ship entirely.”

  “I’d like to save the turbo-lasers as long as possible,” she said with a nod, “so the Fist of Valor it is. I’ll work up a firing solution using launchers Six and Seven. You keep mining whatever data we have on these hostiles—I want every edge I can get.”

  “You’ll have it,” Tremblay nodded before resuming his task of data mining.

  “I’m surprised at you, Tremblay,” McKnight sliced a glance the Intelligence Officer’s way as she processed the incoming sensor feeds. “You don’t strike me as the ‘last stand’ type.”

  “Who said anything about making a last stand?”

  “We’ve got one ship up on the pad that’s FTL capable,” she said as she transmitted a course to the 24 via the short-range p2p link. “And even with its stealth suite at maximum, I’d put our odds at less than thirty percent of surviving the trip to the hyper limit once the rest of the Imps arrive.”

  Tremblay kept his eyes focused on his terminal, “I think that your math could do with a little re-checking.”

  She shook her head wryly, “You really do like to play things close to the vest, don’t you?”

  “I do what works,” he said flatly, and she was more convinced than ever that the Intelligence Officer had something up his sleeve—and she knew that soon she would learn exactly what it was.

  “Base Command just sent over a course,” Fisher reported as he powered the 24’s engines. “Looks like it’s ‘go’ time.”

  Lu Bu examined the comm. panel, verifying McKnight’s orders had been followed by the jack-of-all-trades Fisher. “Do it,” she confirmed.

  Bethany, who had been completely reclusive until the evacuation, sat near the front of the bridge. Apparently she had not given birth, as the rumors had gone, and Lu Bu smirked at seeing the ‘noble’ woman’s masked discomfort as she shifted in her chair. Flashing an irritable look which likely would have intimidated most of the ship’s other occupants, but did no such thing to Fengxian, Bethany scowled, “You had best hope your Captain knows what she is doing.”

  “If she did not,” Lu Bu snorted derisively, “you would not have survived this long.”

  The 24’s engines burned near-max, driving the spherical transport ship across the orbital plane of the moon which had housed them all since their arrival in the Empire of Man. To Lu Bu, the sight of that quickly-shrinking worldlet held no nostalgia; it had been just another stop on their journey across the galaxy, and frankly she was glad to be rid of it.

  She only hoped that Captain McKnight and the others would make good their own escape after securing a path of egress for the 24 and its more than three thousand occupants.

  “Good luck, Captain,” she muttered in her native Qin before turning her attention to the berthing of passengers and stowing of gear.

  Forty minutes later, the 24 had nearly reached turbo-laser range of the nearest enemy Destroyer. McKnight had waited until the last possible moment before clearing the path for the surprisingly quick transport, and now that moment was upon them.

  “Launching torpedoes from Launchers Six and Seven,” she intoned, as a volley of high-powered projectiles went streaking from their launch points near the north pole on the moon’s surface. Eight distinct signatures appeared on the tactical viewer, and she knew those signature would show up just as clearly on the Imps’ sensors as they did on hers. “Reloading the tubes,” she said after the torpedo salvo was away, prompting the painfully slow reload cycle to initiate on Six and Seven. She doubted she would get more than three more volleys from those launchers, given that the Imps had certainly logged their location and would scrape them from the moon’s surface as soon as they were within range.

  “Time to impact: twenty three minutes,” Tremblay reported unnecessarily. “The Fist of Valor’s course and speed remain unchanged.”

  “Of course they do,” she muttered before noticing something on the power grid’s readout. “Waldo, I’m getting some kind of interference from the southern grid, Node Twelve. Find out what it is.”

  “Processing,” Waldo acknowledged as his optical receptors flickered almost too rapidly to see. The flickering ceased a few seconds later and he reported, “Node Twelve apparently thought this would be an ideal time to perform some routine maintenance. I communicated the urgency of the situation and, after a somewhat lengthy palaver, convinced the belligerent bot to stay focused on the task at hand. You should experience no further trouble from it.”

  McKnight shook her head grimly, “The last thing I need right now is for the automated defenses to go droid—no offense to present company.”

  “None taken,” Waldo shrugged, its spindly arms clattering softly during the gesticulation, “Node Twelve has to be the rudest automaton with which I have ever come into direct communication—and I must stress that is a statement of significant meaning.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘I assure you that’s saying something’?” Tremblay deadpanned, prompting McKnight to fight back a grin at the Intelligence Officer’s goad. Waldo, it seemed, was less than well-equipped to deal in idioms, axioms, and other turns of phrase—but the comm. droid seemed utterly incapable of recognizing when or how he failed to reproduce a given phrase faithfully.

  Her lips moved in unison with Waldo’s voice as the droid grumbled, “I believe I said that.”

  For the next twenty minutes, she watched those torpedoes as they streaked toward the defiantly-oncoming Fist of Valor—which would soon be in firing range of the 24.

  “Main power plant draw up to forty one percent,” Winters reported as they unlocked yet another layer of Archie’s shell. “All coolant and relay systems are operating in the green.”

  “Good work, Power,” Tiberius acknowledged, checking on their progress indicators which showed they had pulled sixty percent of Archie’s layers apart with the Key’s hyper-powerful gravity field. Unfortunately, the deeper they went into the Core Fragment’s defenses the harder the job became. Even though the operation was still proceeding according to schedule, he found himself feeling frustrated with the slowed progress of peeling back each successive layer.

  “We are approaching the first neutronium pellet,” Jarrett reported. “We should reach it in twenty nine minutes.”

  “What happens when we do?” Spalding asked of Jarrett before giving the Senator a probing look.

  “I have no idea,” Jarrett shrugged.

  “If my information is accurate,” Bellucci mused, “then nothing at all should happen—aside from a brief, relatively minor energy release as the pellet expands to a more stable matrix. The Key should contain the resulti
ng material for as long as our local power grid is active and feeding the gravity field.”

  “And if you’re wrong?” Spalding pressed.

  Bellucci smirked, “Human neurons take longer to relay sensory information than the time it would take for the pellet to destroy everyone and everything in this chamber, Mr. Spalding.”

  He snorted loudly, “Well that’s a relief.”

  “The Fist of Valor just took down a second torpedo,” Tremblay reported with clinical professionalism—or it might have been a sociopathic lack of concern, truly McKnight had no idea which was more likely. “Time to impact: forty six seconds.”

  “All we need is one blossom to clear a path,” McKnight muttered as the six remaining torpedoes streaked toward their target with increasing velocity, “and two probably cloud it outright.”

  “Another torpedo down,” Tremblay reported as the Fist’s forward batteries sniped another torpedo from existence, “and another…and another,” he called out as the impact countdown neared zero.

  Then the Fist of Valor’s time expired, and a blossom of sensor-scrubbing energy bloomed outward from the Imperial vessel’s location. It took McKnight’s sensors—most of which were on the moon itself, with nearly a third of her sensor capability being provided by a wide net of sensor drones—nearly three seconds to confirm that the Fist of Valor had indeed been struck.

  A few seconds after the initial data stream hit her feeds, she permitted herself a short sigh of relief before she reported, “The Fist of Valor has been neutralized.”

  “Their forward hull is gone and they’ve ejected their fusion cores,” Tremblay added approvingly. “I’m showing two direct strikes and a third near-strike which contributed to the hull damage with its shock-wave, The Eye of Man and the Blessing’s Herald are altering course to intercept the 24.”

  “They won’t catch them,” McKnight said confidently. “Not after Fisher hits the turbo.”

  “The path is clear,” Fisher hollered over his shoulder, his voice echoing throughout the 24’s largely-empty corridors after he had activated the ship-wide’s, “best y’all buckle up in the next ten seconds if you haven’t already done it.”

  The 24’s engines were running at maximum output, and had been since shortly after breaking orbit, but what no one outside of Chester, McKnight, Fisher, and Lu Bu knew was that the 24 had a second set of engines which had been cleverly-concealed along its flanks where two of its larger cargo bays should have been.

  There was a loud ‘clank’ sound as Fisher explosively detached the outer hull sections which had concealed those engines, and the big guy’s grin was infectious as he called out, “Here comes the gas in three…two…one…lightin’ ‘em up!”

  Her head snapped back into its cushion, as even the 24’s overpowered grav-plates had momentary difficulty coping with the sudden acceleration. Lu Bu briefly feared for the well-being of the younger passengers situated below decks, but fortunately the grav-plates quickly compensated.

  When she looked at the sensor feeds she saw that if their current acceleration continued they would easily clear the hyper limit before the second and third Imperial Destroyers could bring their guns to bear. The plan had succeeded, and the 24 would almost certainly reach the rendezvous point ahead of schedule as a result.

  Still, Lu Bu could not help the feeling that she had somehow failed in her duty by not staying at her commander’s side back at the moon base.

  Chapter XXVII: Density vs. Destiny

  “This next layer contains the first neutronium pellet,” Guo remarked with his usual cool. “It will take nineteen minutes to unlock it.”

  “Are the gravimetric readings consistent with the pellet’s existence?” Spalding asked Jarrett, who promptly nodded.

  “Everything the Senator gave us lines up with what we’re seeing,” the spud-faced hacker said firmly. “And our previous projections—those that didn’t include the pellets’ presence—have already been demonstrated to be in error. There’s something in there that we didn’t originally expect, and it does appear to be consistent with the information Senator Bellucci provided.”

  Spalding checked his command console and looked disbelievingly at the readout indicating how much energy was being expended simply to perform the computations needed to keep the Key operational at this stage in the process.

  There was almost enough energy pouring into the Key’s distributed intelligence system to power a Corvette in battle. The constant stream of virtual commands necessary to keep the Key from tearing itself apart—and them along with it—was one of the more frightening facets of this particular operation.

  Frankly, Tiberius thought he’d be lucky to get through the op with his sanity intact.

  “Keep digging,” he ordered. “But I want to slow the process once we reach two minutes to go; I’d rather take a little extra time and make sure our readings are accurate on this first one. If we don’t hit any hiccups, we’ll run the next pellet faster than this one.”

  “Understood,” Guo and Shiyuan acknowledged.

  “Madam Librarian,” Spalding turned to Dench, “is there anything else you need in order to employ the Elder Protocol Fragment?”

  “No,” she replied simply, “but I must reiterate that once we activate it, all interconnected systems capable of receiving it will be rendered inoperable—perhaps permanently.”

  “Understood,” Spalding said with a nod. “Before you activate the Protocol Fragment, all of the grav-plates in this chamber will be switched to local control. That will maintain whatever configuration we establish once we reach the heart of the Core Fragment.”

  “How long can local control be maintained?” Dench asked skeptically.

  Tiberius shared a meaningful look with Penelope, who knew just as well as he did that they had no way of knowing the answer to that question. But he did what any commander did in his shoes—he bluffed, “Long enough.”

  “Young man,” Dench quipped, “I am old enough to be your six-times-great-grandmother. Do you really think you can deceive me?”

  He cracked a grin, “Someone of your experience should understand the value of maintaining solidarity in the face of uncertainty.”

  She gave him a withering look, “Cheeky boy.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said before returning his focus to the task at hand.

  The minutes passed with all proceeding according to plan, and then they reached his two minute mark and he ordered, “Decelerate the process to ten percent normal speed over the next minute.”

  “Decelerating,” Jarrett acknowledged, and the unraveling of the Core Fragment’s shell slowed until it was barely faster than a crawl compared to what it had previously been. “Ten percent reached.”

  “Ok…let’s inch this thing forward,” he instructed. “If anyone’s board shows anything out of the ordinary, I want to know about it before you’ve determined whether or not you think it’s a problem.”

  A chorus of assent was his reply, and for the next ten minutes the team painstakingly worked in near-total silence. Tiberius’ forehead was covered in sweat, and his fingers had even begun to shake badly enough that he needed to stop and crack his knuckles every thirty seconds or so just to keep them loose enough to function.

  Then Penelope called out, “I’m getting some kind of feedback in the power grid.”

  Tiberius was at her side even before she had finished the report, “What is it, Pen?”

  “I…I have no idea,” she said in frustration, “it’s almost like there’s some kind of…I don’t know…radiation stream sweeping back and forth across the grid, but it's hard to pin down exactly what it is.”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  “The Core Fragment's interior,” she replied, confirming his worst fears.

  He looked out to the center of the cavern, where the Core Fragment seemed to silently challenge him as flickering loops of light danced across its surface. “Slow the process to one percent,” Spalding instructed, and a few sec
onds later he received confirmation from Jarrett that he had done so. “Pen,” he said under his breath, “you know more about power grids than anyone I’ve ever worked with. Everything in your life has led you to this moment, and you’re as ready as you’ll ever be to face it. So I need an answer, and I need it now: can you compensate for this radiation beam’s interference?”

  She pursed her lips as her fingers danced across her workstation’s interface, and Tiberius thought he was going to have to snap his fingers in front of her face to get her attention so he could repeat his query. But thankfully, she proved her mettle by nodding sharply, “I can—but I might lose a reactor or two in the process if the radiation keeps rising.”

  That was far from the perfect answer, but it was one that would work so Spalding nodded, “Can I help?”

  “You can,” she nodded, and he began to slide into place beside her before she added, “by taking five steps back and shutting your mouth while I do this.”

  He felt himself flush from the neck up, but he made no rebuke as he slowly backed away from the station. Minutes ticked by while Penelope’s fingers flew from one interface to another, where she worked to balance the reactors’ loads across the grid by manually compensating for the strange interference being thrown out by the Core Fragment.

  Then, suddenly and without warning, her station lit up with a dozen different emergency-level alarms.

  “Process is accelerating!” Jarrett said anxiously.

  “Slow it down,” Spalding growled, moving to stand beside the highly-talented operator.

  “I can’t!” Shiyuan cried, and a chorus of alarm chimes filled the platform as the Core Fragment flared with a pure, white light that was so intense it caused the photo-reactive film which protected their eyes to go completely opaque, plunging the platform into near-total darkness with the only illumination being what was projected by their workstation screens.