Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  “Excellent. Swing our bridge away from those bastards. Keep the length of the Path behind the wormhole. Do you understand my intentions?”

  “Yes, Commander. You plan to use the wormhole aperture like a shield.”

  “Correct!” Six yelled and turned to Stephane. “How big an opening can you give me?”

  “Aperture,” Ichabod corrected softly.

  Stephane smiled wickedly at Six, almost reading his mind. “With the casting emitters we have installed, maximum diameter is approximately forty-two meters, but I wouldn’t want to push it.”

  “We might all die if we don’t, doc.” He turned back to Ichabod, holding his hands up as if describe the size of a fish he caught. “Icky, the widest part of No Logical Path is the bridge and crew module at thirty-two meters. I want you keep that opening—”

  “Aperture,” Ichabod said again.

  “Ja, damn you, the ‘aperture’! Keep it between the Path and the hostile. Addy, no matter where they move, you keep the Path behind Icky’s…aperture.”

  “I can create a null object on the Path in the caster software and anchor it to—”

  “I don’t care how, just get it done.”

  “Okay,” Ichabod said meekly.

  “Harrison,” Stephane said, “give us a graphic overly that shows exactly where the aperture and the terminus are, and what their orientation is relative to the Path.”

  “On it!”

  She turned back to Six and they both smiled.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked.

  “Oui, I think so. We keep the Path behind the wormhole long enough for Fazion to get the FTL lifeboat away safely, then wait them out.”

  Six nodded and flopped down into his chair, looking back up at her, still smiling.

  “And here I thought babysitting a bunch of eggheads for a few months out on the edge of nowhere was going to be boring.”

  “I don’t do boring,” she replied, sitting down and offering him another cigarette.

  He looked up at the main holodisplay, watching the stalemate in realtime.

  “You know, doc, we just confirmed that ship-to-ship weaponry can pass through an artificial wormhole. There’s gotta be a bonus clause in the contact that we can twist to include that.”

  “I imagine there is…assuming we live long enough to collect.”

  ***

  Aptor paced back and forth on the main floor of his bridge, in front of and lower than the raised dais his ill-fitting command chair was bolted into. Currentmaster training insisted that leaving the chair occasionally to mix with his bridge officers encouraged their morale and enhanced crew cohesion. Whoever came up with that slop obviously never commanded an egapocidian crew under combat conditions. If Aptor had not been standing right there in front of them, he was quite sure they would have torn each other apart by now, which was why he had ordered them to participate in the first place. He wasn’t interested in their thoughts on tactics, nor their opinions of one another, but he was concerned about the psychological shock they had endured when the humans had somehow reflected their own beam weaponry back at them. The crew had been injured somewhat, but there were no deaths. It was his crew’s will to fight that Aptor wanted to encourage, and letting them argue strategy was doing the trick. Two blood feuds had already been declared.

  LongTree Wavisoc was down there in the thick of things, holding his own against the pack of young officers. One of them would throw in an idea and Wavisoc would bat it away with one or two reasons why it would end in disaster. Aptor left him to it, turning to stare at the main wallscreen, which showed a live image of the unsettling gravitic phenomena he and his ship had been dispatched to find. The Bright Father’s Avatar had told him to retrieve or destroy any ship they found using the effect, suggesting that the humans were involved in research his Savior did not want them to have. Given the implications of the engagement so far, ProudRock Aptor agreed with the Bright Father completely and leaned toward destruction.

  He had ordered several quick orbital and attitude adjustments, trying to get higher or lower than the glowing vortex hiding the human ship, hoping to get an angled shot off to disable the gravitic device on board, but the human ship was smaller and, annoyingly, much more agile. Every time the egapocid ship moved, the maneuver was easily countered by simply turning the vortex to face his ship. The human currentmaster simply had to adjust using attitude thrusters to stay safely behind it. A successful tactic would be the one that somehow got around the vortex.

  He halted his pacing abruptly, the quick motion silencing the bridge officers. They watched as their leader’s six-eyed head snapped up to look at the tactical plot on the wallscreen, heard his teeth clicking together happily.

  Yes…that might just work.

  He warbled his mouth tentacles and shouted, “Resume your stations!” A stampede of chitinous clatter filled the bridge as the crowd dispersed to their assigned consoles.

  Aptor lowered himself into his command chair and opened the right armrest, revealing a small green panel that was connected directly to the gunnery officer’s firing solution computer. Using his slender foreclaw, Aptor started tapping out instructions. He used two eyes to locate his gunnery officer.

  “Gunnery, take this attack pattern and prepare the torpedoes.”

  “Currentmaster,” Wavisoc yelled from his place inside the scrum of bridge officers, “what if they simply use the gravitic effect against us again?”

  “If they move the gravity effect, Gunnery, you will fire all batteries that bear on that ship and destroy it. If they successfully direct our torpedoes back at us, you will destroy them remotely.”

  “Yes, Currentmaster. How many torpedoes do you require?”

  “All of them.”

  ***

  Fazion, feeling a thousand percent better, checked and rechecked his suit seals, making damned sure that the urine catheter was attached, before telling the AI shard to open the bathroom’s hatch. He stepped over the bulkhead and into the robotics workshop module. Still unable to see anything with his right eye and only different levels of light with his left, he kept a shaky hand on the wall, ready to grab hold in a heartbeat. There had been a series of sudden maneuvers while he was in the bathroom, and only the fact that he was wedged in there in the first place kept him from being knocked around. He hadn’t heard anyone over the radio since he’d gone inside, so he tried contacting Erebos Base.

  “Fazion!” yelled Ichabod, “how do you feel?”

  “Icky-Persnickety! Better, man, definitely. What’s the status of the bad guys?”

  “Stalemate, bro, and we hope to keep it that way. Whoever they are, they’re holding station about thirty klicks from you.”

  Ichabod quickly told his friend about redirecting the beam weapon back at the hostile warship and Fazion let out a loud yell, causing everyone listening to flinch.

  “WOOT! I knew it! You, sir, are a steely-eyed wormhole man.”

  “Thanks,” Ichabod said. “Hey, I’m going to turn this over to Six and Dao Van Khan. We’ve got a job for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To save our asses,” Khan said.

  Fazion frowned.

  “Tick-tock, gentlemen.” Six’s voice.

  “Gotcha, skipper. Okay, Addy, please direct our man to locker 434-BB and remove the only carton inside.”

  Fazion followed the AI’s instructions and held up the shoebox-sized carton.

  “Okay, I’ve got it,” he said.

  “You are holding a fully charged Riggins & Hatch class five semi-autonomous ventilation repair bot. Open it up and feel along the top edge. Feel that indentation?”

  “Yeah,” Fazion answered. The sides were solid, but the interior was filled with shaped foam that held the various components in place.

  “Care-ful-ly, pull the VR goggle case out of its slot and open it,” Khan said.

  “VR goggles? Oh…OH! Thanks, guys! I wouldn’t have thought of that.”

 
“Okay, now, Fazion, turn on your wetware’s pairing module. We’re going to power these things on and—”

  “But I won’t be able to see anything.”

  “That’s what I told them,” Matthew chimed in, “but give it a chance, Faze. You’re going to love this.”

  Fazion sighed, realizing he didn’t have a choice, and any chance at seeing again would be worth trying.

  “There’s a little indentation where your left temple would be if you were wearing them. That’s the power switch.”

  Fazion concentrated and moved his fingers in a caress along the VR goggles. It all felt the same through the gauntlets of his spacesuit. Just as he was about to tell Khan that he couldn’t find the switch, his wetware pairing app unfolded in his mind, telling him that there was a device nearby it could connect with. He authorized it and a second later, the R & H Inc. logo floated in his mind’s eye, surrounded by links to various documentation and operational menus. Fazion’s highly developed sense of software design gave a derisive mental snort at the layout which had obviously been designed by an interface amateur.

  “I’m in!” Fazion declared.

  “Great,” Khan said, “now reach into the carton and pull the bot out. It’s folded in on itself, so you’re looking for something about the size and shape of a hockey puck.”

  “I’ve never held a hockey puck before.”

  “Color me shocked,” Khan replied sardonically. “Seriously, though, it’s the only thing left in the carton. Just take it out and shake it. That’ll wake up its little brain and it’ll connect to the user interface you’re probably seeing. Well, not seeing, but—”

  Fazion did as Khan had directed, finding the thick little disc and pulling it free of its foam holder. He shook it and saw a link of green letters appear in the corporate interface.

  DO YOU WANT TO CONNECT?

  “Hell yes,” Fazion muttered, activating the link. The disc spasmed in his hand and he dropped it, surprised. A small window appeared in the interface and Fazion found himself looking up at himself from just above the deck. “Wow! It worked! I can see what it sees.”

  “I’ve got direct control of it,” Khan said, startling Fazion as he drove the little bot up the side of Fazion’s spacesuit and perched it on Fazion’s right shoulder, facing forward. Fazion wondered what it looked like now that it was unfolded.

  The bot’s optics were sending images directly into his mind, bypassing whatever damage his physical eyes had succumbed to. The angle was off, originating from over his shoulder rather than the upper half of his face. Fazion made a mental note to be careful going through hatches. He didn’t want to run his body into the left side of a doorway because his apparent center was off kilter.

  “What if the comms link goes down again?” Fazion asked. “Shouldn’t we put it on autonomous?”

  “Nope. If you do that, it’ll just run off and try to fix something.”

  “Okay, kid,” Six said, “now that you’re not moving a couple feet a minute, we need you to haul your butt forward toward the bridge, and you’re going to have to do it in freefall.”

  “But the gravity’s still on up here,” Fazion said.

  “Correct, but the gravity cables are draining what little capacitor power we have left at a huge rate. We’re going to cut it off now that you can see where you’re going. Now scoot.”

  “You got it, Commander. Where am I going, exactly?”

  “We’re going to get you out of there, son.”

  “Down to the surface with you guys?”

  “Negative. We need you to take the FTL lifeboat home and go get us some help.”

  Fazion started walking toward the hatch leading to the main passageway that would lead him all the way forward to the bridge, expecting them to kill the artificial gravity system at any second, and thought furiously about what Six wanted him to do.

  “You fine with that?” Six asked.

  “I know here’s where I’m supposed to make a big speech, all indignant and such, with maybe an I’m-not-leaving-you-behind thrown in for good measure, but, honestly, yeah. I’d like to get the hell out of here.”

  ***

  Six exited the channel and gave Stephane a small grin. She smiled back and produced another two cigarettes for them. Where she was keeping cigarettes on her person while wearing a sealed spacesuit, Six had no idea. Nor, he decided, accepting the offer, did he care.

  “Your pudgy young mathematician’s built of sterner stuff than I would have thought.”

  “He’s actually quite an amazing young man,” she said.

  “Here’s hoping that he lives to be an amazing old man. In the meantime, we need more options, doc.”

  “For what?”

  “This thing could go bad at any moment. We don’t know who’s in that warship or why they’re here—”

  “Oh, I think it’s quite obvious. They’re here for the wormhole tech,” she said, pointing the two fingers that held her cigarette at him.

  “Possibly. Okay, probably. But regardless, all they’re doing right now is trying to figure out how to kill us, and I’m down to what amounts to a peashooter running on backup power, or ramming them with what’s left of the Path. Icky already surprised us once with creative use of the wormhole. What else can you do with it?”

  Stephane thought about it for a moment and then blew out a thick cloud of smoke.

  “I’m sorry, Sixten, but combat applications of barely understood wormhole technology are not something I had considered. We made no preparations for operating it like this.”

  “Can we open the terminus inside their ship?”

  “I thought about that, Commander.” Prem Mitra, supposedly a whiz when it came to the spooky stuff wormholes were made of, walked up and rested his forearms on Six’s console. “I don’t think we can. Whatever exotic energy they’re using for those defensive shields shows up as opaque to the wormhole casters. We can’t form the aperture or the terminus inside.”

  “Okay,” Six said, “how about this? We turn off the terminus and then try to move the open end down the length of their ship, shields and all. Where would it go?”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Stephane said, exhaling again, the smoke quickly getting stirred upwards by the ventilation system. “Without going into all the gory details, the aperture and the terminus are linked at the subquantum level. One cannot exist without the other.”

  “What if,” Six said, “we try to put the opening—”

  “Aperture,” Ichabod said, without looking away from his holos.

  Six ignored Ichabod’s correction and simply raised his voice to talk over the man.

  “—and the terminus on top of each other right next to their ship? Maybe use the massive power levels you people are always going on about to, I don’t know, short out their shields, or something.”

  “No, that won’t work either,” Prem said immediately. “It’s a function of the four-dimensional volume of the aperture and the terminus. They actually act more like spheres than flat openings in space-time. If you get them closer than a distance determined by the cube of the—”

  “No math!” Six yelled. “What happens?”

  “For starters, no big forcefield-ending kaboom,” Prem said, smiling.

  “What actually happens if you move the two objects closer than that distance,” Stephane said, leaning toward Prem as if to reinforce his side on this mini-battlefield of ideas, “is that both the aperture and the terminus pop like soap bubbles and we’d have to reformat them again. Not sure how long that would take at this point.”

  Six tossed his half-smoked cigarette on the deck and crushed it with his boot. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, looking for options.

  “What if—”

  “Commander Bergman—,” Aadesh 49 said.

  “Incoming!” Matthew shouted. “Two inbound missiles!”

  Six shot to his feet, allowing a subroutine of his combat wetware to unfold in his mind, presenting him with a full range of preset o
ptions and controls linked directly to the Path’s chin turret. Up on the main holodisplay, two points of light raced away from the alien ship in opposite directions before turning toward the Path in wide, shallow arcs. The alien captain, or whatever their designation was, had finally figured out that he/she/it couldn’t attack them head-on. For a split second, Six was thankful that whoever was in charge over there wasn’t very experienced at ship-to-ship combat.

  They should have tried this about a minute after they blew up my missile launcher.

  “Velocity thirty-eight g’s,” Matthew reported. “Impact in 13.6 seconds!”

  “Addy, bracket the launcher on their hull and roll me so I can engage both inbounds.” Neon-yellow brackets appeared over a small bulge on the enemy’s dorsal side before Six had said the word launcher, and the Path started to roll on its long axis before he finished the word engage.

  He targeted the first missile and fired when he had a clear shot from behind the protective diameter of Icky’s aperture, a mere 3.2 seconds after the missile left the enemy ship. At such close range, there could be no chance of missing with weapons that moved at the speed of light, but it took a full five seconds before the thermal energy of the chin turret’s beam burned through whatever ablative or reflective armor the hostiles coated their missiles with. Six’s boosted awareness knew he would never be able to lock and destroy the other missile in time.

  Two-tenths of a second after the first missile started coming apart, turning into an explosive spray of molten metal parts and igniting fuel, the chin turret spun and elevated toward the second missile without Six’s input, faster than he could have managed even with the aid of combat subroutines. The turret fired again when the second missile was only 8.5 seconds from impact and still took the full five seconds to detonate, 0.1 seconds before it would have hit. The fact that the missile hadn’t detonated its warhead against the Path’s hull was irrelevant. The missile was still moving at thirty-five g’s when it exploded, showering the front third of the Path’s unarmored hull. Most of the solid pieces simply punched right through, tumbling as they went, gouging near-linear paths of destruction through vital ship systems. The rest of the missile vaporized and tore into the ship as jets of hot plasma, splashing and expanding inside the superstructure. The comms and datalink to the Path went dark once again, cutting him off from his ship—and from Fazion, and their only shot at making it through this alive.