Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  ~~~~~~

  The medical ship, Interface, captained by Devon Randell, contacted the Defender three hours before Genys would have felt justified in sending a follow-up message. Something along the lines of, Fleet, did you hear us the first time? This is time-sensitive, ticking-bomb-serious. But far more official-sounding and politely worded.

  By the time the Interface made rendezvous, the Defender's crew would be finished with all the repairs necessary to stabilize the Corona for towing through jump gates. All the reports would be finished, ready to send to Fleet. Handing the cocoons over to the Interface would reduce a massive strain on the Defender's systems and resources. M'kar promised she would have a report on dracs for whoever would be dealing directly with Flinders, Dulit, and their dracs, when both injured men were ready to emerge from their healing sleep.

  Best of all, M'kar could get that drac egg shipped to Le'anka, along with the eggs and sleeping dracs taken off the Corona. Genys didn't have to worry about eggs hatching, and baby dracs bonding with her crew.

  "You're just relieved that it was a medical ship and not another E&D ship," Treinna said, when Genys shared the news over dinner with the command crew. "Can't fool me. You want all the adventure you can get your grubby paws on."

  "And you don't?" She was in too good a mood from the positive development to let a little teasing bother her. Which just showed how all the responsibility had been weighing on her, battling with the itch to get to work finding that Chute.

  Treinna just fluttered her eyelashes, earning laughter and muttered comments in several different languages from the others around the table. Jasper didn't even glance up from the tablet he was working on with one hand while eating with the other.

  Chapter Ten

  "Philosophical question," M'kar said, as Genys crossed the dusky quiet observation dome, twelve hours after the Interface left with its living cargo, headed for Le’anka.

  She didn't lower her gaze from the panorama of the stars overhead to meet her captain's, but stayed seated with her legs crossed, leaning back against the support pedestal. It was empty, waiting to hold equipment that could be installed if there was ever such a breakdown of the bridge's systems that the ship needed to navigate visually.

  The observation dome hadn't been used for such a contingency since Le’anka established the Alliance and the Fleet. The designers of ships had a long tradition of planning for every need and emergency and possibility -- mostly in the belief that preparing for every disaster and freak accident helped prevent them. The early days of spaceflight and exploration had had plenty of incidents where navigation by sight, like the old planet-bound ships had been forced to do when crossing the rolling seas, had been all that saved a ship's crew. M'kar liked traditions, as long as they had valid reasons behind them. The ancestors, her father had been fond of saying, weren't quite as stupid and superstitious and gullible as modern men preferred to believe. Right now, the tradition of having an observation dome provided her a place to get away and think in ensured quiet and solitude, with reduced psionic intrusion.

  When Human emotions ran strong and many people focused on one specific goal, she got spillover, glimpses into thoughts. Sometimes it was negligible, like the spray from sitting in the bow of a ship going at high speed on rocking seas. When that happened, she could move out of the range of the people broadcasting their shared feelings. Other times, the broadcast threatened to overwhelm and drown her. The observation dome was her special retreat. She hadn't even shared it with the children. Genys was another person who regained her balance and rewove the frayed edges of her strength and calm with silence and solitude.

  Father just received word on the Interface’s estimated arrival, Thyal said. He will go to Anwesta to retrieve the box.

  Good. Have you thought about a name for your drac?

  I would prefer to wait until he, or she, has hatched and revealed its personality. Names should mean something.

  Why not name it Legs, then?

  Thyal's laughter eased a large chunk of the ache and exhaustion that made it hard for her to completely relax.

  "Philosophical?" Genys sat down on the side of the pedestal, leaving a meter between them. That indicated she had come up here for some rejuvenation and not to find M’kar for another talk about the dracs and the images still seething through her mind.

  "What exactly is a moot … and if it does have a point, where is that point and what does it do?" She finally turned her gaze away from the fascinating smear of stars across the top curve of the dome. "The point of the point, so to speak."

  "You've been getting spillover from the redundancy corps." The two shared a smile. "They knew when they signed on an E&D ship there would be times when they wouldn't have anything to do. Except catch up on their paperwork."

  "They're just getting antsy because everybody else is running themselves ragged. Taggert and his team have to be forced out of their stations by Brea and Tahl, who are reaching new heights of efficiency and preparedness. And praying to Enlo they don't need to be ready for a massive disaster at a moment's notice. Jasper and his crew -- well, I swear they're all near to drooling over the possibility of a bumpy ride through the Chute, just to prove how steady and solid the Defender is. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, there's only so much preparation we can do. We can only spend so much time reading through all that drek Dulit gave me, once we've decoded it, comparing it with what wasn't fried in the Corona's logs. Even if we knew everything they had learned about the planet and dracs, and knew exactly where the Chute was hiding in space, how much good will it do us to keep reading the same thing over and over again? How much will that preparation harm us when we go dirtside?"

  "I've noticed something interesting," Genys offered. "Everyone is still saying when we find the Chute and when we go through it and find the dracs' homeworld and when we go dirtside. Not if. No doubt. Just tension over when it will happen."

  "Then there's Decker and his drinking buddies in Engineering. If that plan of theirs works, their heads will be too big to go through doorways. Even the shuttle bay doors might be too small."

  "Well, that baffle they've been tweaking and refining for years seems to be doing what they claim. Scrambling our emissions and distorting our trail, so no one knows we're out here." Genys shrugged. "Or we're running at bloody-orange alert for nothing, because no one is out here to begin with and we're entirely wrong about the Chute in the first place."

  "I'm guessing you haven't been approached by the doom-and-gloom delegation."

  "Uh huh." She scooted to the edge of the pedestal to slide down the side so she sat on the deck with M'kar. "Which ones are those?"

  M'kar sat up a little straighter against the pedestal. "The newcomers that I wish Command had let us screen before they dumped them on us. The ones speculating that all the clues we found to the Chute were planted by the Hivers, and we're heading into a trap. Or there were no Hivers, it's the Ankuar trying to trick us into going into contested space to provoke a war."

  "Just how do they expect us to get into trouble without knowing we crossed the boundaries?"

  "Somewhere out here is a jump gate disguised as a Chute. Programmed to dump us out into the middle of radioactive territory -- physically and metaphorically."

  "The Ankuar have been trying to steal that technology for decades.” Genys snorted. “Even if they managed to get hold of it, they couldn't duplicate it because none of their worlds have the necessary elements to create the space-warping frequencies … Unless they managed to find a way to dismantle the Gates on their worlds and somehow turned the parts into a new kind of jump gate. But Ankuar are too arrogant to find something like that and keep silent while they use it to provoke a war. They're more likely to crow from one end of the universe to another and rub it in our faces. Not that anyone has been able to penetrate the skin of a Gate, much less disassemble one …" She sighed. "From the way you're grinning at me, I have this awful feeling you've been letting me ramble for some nefarious motive of
your own."

  "That's why the naysayers in the crew haven't approached you with their fear yet. They know better than to present a theory without solid backing. Besides, when someone theorizes the chances of dismantling a Gate, several others point out they're more likely to destroy half their planet in the attempt." She tipped her head back and studied the starry expanse above them. "No, I’m convinced we're about to land right on top of a Chute and find ourselves swirled out on top of a totally new planet in an unexplored sector of the galaxy. The Defender is the same class as the Inquest, and it's about time we earned a reputation equal to our sister ship."

  "I'd prefer to have a reputation for keeping my crew alive and undamaged, thanks very much."

  "And that's why we love you."

  ~~~~~~

  The next morning, Genys chose to stay in bed rather than go to the simulation room for a self-defense workout. She had things to think through, and stepping out of her cabin was an open invitation for the universe to throw distractions at her. She curled up on her side and let her mind roam. Despite knowing no one in her crew was here under duress, and they all supported her decisions despite the pessimists among them, Genys felt the pressure growing on her. The pressure to succeed, to make all their theories come true. This mission might just be the turning point in her career, falling downward with disappointments and misplaced hopes, or shooting upward like the meteoric rise of Captain Shryne. Genys didn't have time to psychoanalyze herself right now, but she knew her own misgivings colored her perceptions, because the knowledge of her crew's loyalty still made her squirm. It was a heavy responsibility with a niggling sense of being unworthy, despite knowing Fleet Command wouldn't have given her the Defender if she hadn't proved herself worthy.

  Finally, she turned on the light and moved to her desk. It was best to take the optimistic view and plan on success. What would they need to do when they reached the planet? She chose teams for the various tasks necessary when a new world was approached. As each world was different, and the levels of civilization dictated the need for different specialists, nothing was ever set in stone. Assuming all the information about the dracs and their planet salvaged from the Corona's files was true, Genys didn't have to consider the various teams of anthropologists and sociologists and technicians. The people who would analyze the social structure and governments and levels of technology in the world before revealing the presence of the ship and the existence of the Alliance. As far as she could tell, the dracs were the highest sentient lifeform on the planet, and the Corona had already made the existence of Humans known to them. At best, the Defender would be approaching them as allies offering protection. At worst, her crew would be there to avenge their deaths.

  Genys considered the members of the crucial first landing party, including some, weeding out others, until her stomach let her know she was half an hour past breakfast. The call came just after she finished washing up for the day.

  "Bridge to Captain," Norgon said, talking over the three beeps of the hail signal from the communication panel.

  "Arroyan here." Genys reached for her uniform, laid across the end of her bed.

  "Ma'am, you need to get up here." The fumbling scientist's voice thickened with excitement -- another of Norgon's positive qualities was that his voice got deeper and he talked slower when he was excited, instead of squeaking and tripling speed like some people did. "There's an anomaly dead ahead."

  "We might be on top of the Chute," Anya broke in.

  "On my way."

  She fastened her boots in the lift on the way up to the bridge and raked her fingers through her wet hair to straighten it as she crossed the bridge to her command chair. Nobody turned to bombard her with reports, because everyone's attention was glued to the forward viewscreen. Taggert and his team were reading off the information displayed on one side of the screen and guiding the helmsman and navigator. A few people glanced away from the simulated swirl of energy displayed on the screen, superimposed over what would normally be just a dark, dead patch of vacuum without the translation provided by sensors.

  Genys swallowed hard and didn't care if anyone heard her gulp or not. Studying Chutes while at the Academy was one thing. Seeing an unexplored one on a screen in real-time and knowing a space-time anomaly that certainly looked like a whirlpool was maybe thirty kilometers in front of her ship was something else entirely. For a moment she wanted to ask why no one had made a ship-wide announcement, warning everyone of what lay ahead of them. Families needed to prepare and emergency response teams had to head to their stations. And anyone in a particularly pessimistic frame of mind would have time to kiss their backsides goodbye. Just in case this all went horribly, insanely wrong and they hit the galactic whirlpool of energies at just the "right" wrong angle, so they ended up smeared across four different galaxies at a thickness three molecules deep.

  No, wait, that was her responsibility.

  "Is there any way of knowing if anyone has gone through the Chute and come out more than once?" she said, thinking of the discussion she had had with M'kar half a shift ago. "Could we get through to the other side and find someone waiting in ambush?”

  "Chute science isn't exact," Taggert said, stepping backwards from the screen. He kept his gaze on the readouts constantly shifting and scrolling across the far right side of the main viewscreen. "The best I can tell from the readings of the surrounding area is that energy emissions and a trail of fuel solids of the class appropriate to the Corona seem to be leading away from this end." He stepped up next to the command chair, still positioned so he was focused on the viewscreen as he talked. "The rate of decay and dispersal puts the trail in the time frame of the ship's estimated passage through this sector."

  "So we're the first to approach since the Corona left, and right now we're the only ship in the discernible territory."

  "If you can see the enemy, that means he can see you," Qinteer, the helmsman on duty, muttered.

  "True." Her lips actually hurt from the smile trying to pull up one side of her mouth. Genys mentally commanded herself to relax. "All right, how soon until we can take the dive and get ourselves out of sight? Jasper," she added, seeing the lit indicator light for an open channel with Engineering, meaning everyone in the main control room could hear everything being discussed, "how is that miraculous baffle doing? Still keeping our trail hidden?"

  "Working like a charm, and I’m wondering why Decker keeps wasting himself in Security," the chief engineer responded in his usual dry, even tone.

  Genys muffled a chuckle. Other chief engineers would be in a panic at the mere thought of having to make a dive into a Chute with no guidance data. They would be trying to handle thirty adjustments and ten different control panels at once, screaming at anyone who asked them a question, including the captain of the ship. Jasper took everything in stride, even if he did have a tendency to imply everyone around him was an interruption and an inconvenience. He was a bear, but he was the Defender's bear, and Genys could depend on him to keep her ship ready for any contingency.

  "An hour, tops," Taggert said, answering her first question when she raised an eyebrow to him.

  "Good enough." She turned to look at Meckles, at the communication station, and nodded to the skeletal, golden-skinned man. The royal purple pinspot of light lit on the left arm of her chair, indicating an open line to the entire ship. "Attention, crew. We have found the Tyers Chute and are preparing to dive. Everyone to their assigned stations. Enlo guard and keep you all. Captain, out." She tapped the purple light and it went out. Letting out a loud lungful of air, she sat back in her chair. She gave herself ten minutes to relax physically -- mentally was impossible.

  ~~~~~~

  Anticipation was always the worst part of anything. M'kar knew that, but sometimes knowing didn't really help. She kept herself busy herding the children out of their early morning class, what had come to be called "Huntress 101." In the informal class, which she rarely planned, she let them bombard her with questions about surv
ival skills and tactics and took them through simulation games to teach them alertness and train their bodies to be limber. How she ever became a favorite aunt, she still couldn't comprehend. Maybe because she didn't treat them like children, but more like cubs.

  Finally, the last child had been delivered to either their parents' quarters or the schoolroom. There they would be watched over by personnel better trained in keeping children in one piece during the transition time down a Chute. The problem was that each Chute was slightly different. No one could anticipate the energy patterns, the frequency modulations and the physical stresses particular to that Chute until a ship had gone through it. Fortunately, the patterns stayed the same for all transitions after that. At least, they had stayed the same since the beginning of monitoring each Chute, since the space-time anomalies had been discovered and put to use. Once a Chute's energy fluctuations and physical impacts had been measured and recorded, every ship making transition after that knew what to anticipate. However, the data on transitioning this particular Chute had been destroyed with the Corona's other vital files. Her ship and crew didn't have any help preparing for this first ride. The Defender had to be ready for anything and everything. That ranged from simple nausea, to headaches that threatened to split skulls open and implode brains. Dimensional warping could make people feel their bodies had turned inside out, and all the possible variations of discomfort and what had been sarcastically termed extremes of "allergic reactions." The only comfort the medical team of the Defender had in all this was that the crew of the Corona had survived their trip down the Chute four times now. The children didn't seem to have been negatively impacted. Then again, their parents may have just taken the sensible precaution and sedated them until the voyage was over.