by Hellfire
“I mistook you for a Solarite pirate,” Mata explained.
Matthew marched past him toward the helm, muttering, “I accept your apology.” Rook and Jordan followed him in, then took positions covering the hatch, in case any Solarites were still out there.
“Matthew, Darling, we have a problem,” Change stated calmly, without missing a beat.
“There are several pirate ships between us and the Refining base. If I don’t slow down, we won’t be able to dock. If I slow the ship enough to dock, the pirates will overwhelm us. And I am open to suggestions. Did I mention we have no weapons?” Driver contemplated the situation. There was little time do this. Within seconds, they would be in firing range of the pirates. “Could we draw them away from the base in some way.”
Eliza got a crazy smile on her face, “I’m going to try something.” She pushed the thrust levers forward, knocking everyone off balance with the sudden increase in acceleration.
“What are you doing, Eliza,” Driver asked.
“I’m going to lure the pirates away from the station,” Eliza Change answered. “By diving directly into the sun.”
“That might work,” Driver said, with a forced element of calm. “Although, it will probably kill us…”
Change chuckled. No one had ever heard her do this before. It was unnerving.
“Nonsense, darling, the radiation sensors are off-line, but I think I can pull us out before we get a lethal dose.”
Driver carefully maneuvered along the wall until he come to a ship’s intercom.
“Attention, all remaining crew, proceed toward the center of the ship and shield yourself against radiation as best you can. That is all.” He turned to the crew on the main bridge. “You all should do the same.” He cocked his head toward the hatch. Rook and Jordan took the hint and moved out. The ship’s interior would be marginally better shielded than the command sphere.
“You’ll worry yourself to death,” Eliza admonished him. She continued closing on the stations.
“Several Solarite pirate ships are pulling off from the station perimeter,” Mata reported.
“They are coming for us.”
Eliza Change nodded and touched a lever at the side of the control column. Sun shields deployed over the remaining portals at the front of the ship. “All right then, let’s dive into the sun.”
Within a few seconds, temperature inside the Bridge became noticeably hotter. Eliza kept a steady course deeper and deeper into the fusion atmosphere of 200 200 Ara.
“Are the Solarites following us?” Driver asked.
“We have no way of knowing,” Mata answered. “Sensors can’t penetrate the solar activity at this level.”
“They’re there,” Eliza insisted.
“They can take hard radiation better than us,” Driver reminded her. “They live in this.”
“But their sensors are no better than ours,” Eliza responded. “Now, time to lose them.” She banked the ship hard to starboard, then rotated it along its longitudinal axis 180 degrees (i.e. she rolled the ship over). Artificial gravity and magnetic boots kept them rooted to the deck, but the result was a little sickening to the stomach.
“What are you …” Driver began to ask.
One after another, alarms began lighting up on her control panel. “Fire Warning! Fire Warning! Fire Warning!”
“The ship appears to be on fire,” Driver observed.
“The sun probably super-heated some of the external atmospheric exchange conduits,” Eliza said. A schematic activated, showing flame-shaped symbols in three separate spots along the hull. “I thought this might happen.”
“Those fires are being fed by our oxygen supply,” Driver pointed out. He didn’t have to get into the implications. If the ship didn’t reach the Hellfire base before their air was consumed, there would be yet another way to die.
Almost as an afterthought, Change added. “This ship doesn’t handle very well.” Hellfire Station 3
200,000 kilometers short of the station, Liminix CH-53 emerged from its plunge into the stellar interior. Its outer hull was burned black on black. There were two large fires burning along its back, fed by ruptured liquid oxygen lines, and another from the underside of the front sphere, below the bridge. It bore down on the station like a refugee from the shipyards of Hell, trailing a tail of smoke and fire.
Liminix CH-53, Main Bridge
The ship’s internal atmosphere was contaminated with smoke and stellar gas and the oxygen content was rapidly thinning. The Bridge crew wore breathing masks, but this only marginally improved their situations.
When she thought she was clear enough, Change opened the sun shields. The alloy groaned. The extreme heat had warped both the shields and the mechanisms that deployed them. Slowly, the right one opening more with considerably more complaint than the left, they halfway re-opened and the crew saw they were back in the diffuse red-yellow glow of the star’s outer atmosphere, and in the midst of it, a large round dot: The Hellfire 3 Refining Station.
“Sensors coming back,” Logo reported. “Two Solarite pirate ships are still in position near the Refining Station.”
“I think I can handle two of them,” Change said. “I just have to make it hard for them to get a weapons lock on us. Hold on.”
She cut power to the engines and approached the base on thrusters, still moving at a decent clip, but slow enough that the braking thrusters should be enough to stop them when they reached the docking ring… hopefully.
The two pirate ships moved in to flank her as she approached. She banked hard to port and twisted the ship away from them, tossing the crew around the deck once again. She then spiraled the ship to starboard. Solarite compression charges detonated near the ship, but not near enough to do any damage.
“Almost there… another 2,000 kilometers…” she told them. The Solarite pirate vessels regrouped on her tail. She banked hard to port again, but failed to shake them. The pirates had adjusted tactics. They kept Liminix between then as they moved into weapons range.
“There’s nothing else I can do,” Eliza told Driver, as she hit the braking thrusters. “I have to hold us on course to the station. We’ll either make it, or we won’t.” The Solarite pirate ships moved closer. Eliza tried to zig-zag evasively. Compression charges detonated around the ship. And they were getting closer.
“100 kilometers,” Eliza announced, and hit the braking thrusters again. The Hellfire station was getting larger in the forward viewer. Suddenly, it was surrounded by a thousand points of light.
“They’re firing weapons. The station defense grid doesn’t recognize us as friendly,” Mata announced.
“We still have no communications,” Logo reminded Change. “They won’t be able to recognize us as a friendly ship.”
“Perhaps they will figure out we’re on their side when they see the Solarites shooting at us,” Change replied irritably. She had to brake the ship again. Now, Liminix CH-53 was in range of the station’s weaponry, exploding around them in fireballs, rocking the ship. One blast hit just above the mount of the number three engine, which took heavy damage and would have exploded if it had been functioning.
Liminix CH-53 shook in the onslaught, like a dog shaking off water. The base concentrated its fire on one of the pirate vessels and managed to drive it off. The other kept coming, and coming, and coming.
Hellfire Station 3
As they got close, the crew saw what Hellfire Station 3 looked like for the first time. A network of latitudinal and longitudinal girders created a spherical framework of metal about 10
kilometers in diameter. Inside this framework were a number hemispherical devices that looked a bit like ancient radio telescopes, lined with bright gold foil, that fed into an agglomeration of pods, tanks, docks, and spheres that refined the tritium from the star’s outer atmosphere and stored it. There were two clusters of these spheres, connected by a central axle that rotated them gently in space. Additional cylinders were stuck to the axle.
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br /> A thousand years in the blazing sky of a dying sun had left its outsides burned and pockmarked… like an old cookie sheet left in the oven for a few years.
The tanker passed inside the rings that marked the boundary of the station, burning like a meteor. The last of the pirate ships was right behind it. Eliza Change guided Liminix CH-53 to the inner docking ring of the refining station. Two docking armatures, one fore and one aft, locked onto the ship. The forward armature connected to the airlock on the side of Liminix CH-53’s command sphere. Umbilicals deployed from the armature, connecting station power and data transfer.
When the crewing tunnel locked onto the ship, a small squad of firefighters in silvery spacesuits charged into the ship carrying a hose with them. The station concentrated its defensive fire on the remaining Solarite ship until it, too, gave up the attack and moved back toward the siege line.
Liminix CH-53, Main Bridge
When the ship came to rest, Mata rose from his post and went to the rear hatch. “I am going to the Engine Control Room to check on Technician Tama.” Rook and Jordan met him at the hatch. “We’ll go with you to Check on Lieutenant Jeff.”
Matthew Driver gripped the back of the chair as Change was just undoing her restraints. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Never better,” she answered, swiveling in her chair and stretching languorously, like a woman who has just enjoyed a particularly satisfying session of sexual intercourse. At one time, this would have bothered Driver, but those days were long since passed. “What happened to your eye?” she asked.
Driver touched the spot above his left eye and was surprised to see blood on his fingertips. “I must have cut it when the shuttle was attacked.”
“We’ll ask the Hellions if they have any dermal sealant,” Change said.
“I’m sure it’ll heal,” Driver said.
Change touched his forehead and, for the second it took her fingertip to make contact, Driver had an intense memory flash.
The tall man with the shaved head was looking at him sternly. At his side was a shirtless boy in an overcoat. “You have to go back,” the man said. “You have to save the children at Gethsemane.”
And then he was back on Liminix CH-53, slumped against a bulkhead, and Change was asking him if he was all right.
“Wh’happen?” Driver stammered.
“You almost fainted, darling,” Eliza told him. “Are you all right.” He stared blankly at her. “For a second, I was back in the Chronos Universe.” They became aware of someone … not quite weeping, but trying not to. They turned to see Logo kneeling over the body of Ono. A pool of blood was spreading beneath it. Logo had turned her face up from the deck, and it was clear she was dead.
“What happened?” Driver asked.
Change looked up toward the roof of the bridge and spotted a small hole punched neatly through it. There was another on the deck, and Change was sure they would find matching holes on a straight vector through the ship. “Micro-asteroid,” she pronounced as the cause of death. “I wondered why she had gotten so quiet.”
“There’s nothing more to be done for her. Let me help you up,” Driver said, extending a hand to Logo. Logo took his hand, but said nothing and wouldn’t look at him as they exited out of the main bridge.
“We are docked against the port side airlock,” Change informed them, leading them over to the passage between decks. They made their way two decks down to the docking deck.
Smoke, acrid and choking, from the fires that still burned in the outermost decks, was beginning to reach the front of the ship.
The airlock was in the adjacent compartment. When they opened the hatch, four men, in Crucial Space Fuels coveralls and body armor, waving short plasma charge weapons yelled at them. “Hands on your heads! No talking! Hands on your heads!” Jeff, Rook, Jordan, Mata and Technician Logo were kneeling on the floor with their hands on top of their heads. Driver, Change and Logo assumed the same position.
As the Hellions inspected their gear, Technician Tama was carried through on a stretcher. Eliza turned to see that there were burns on the woman’s face and hands.
A guard approached her and barked, “Face the wall.”
“Listen to me,” Logo pleaded with them. “Check the uniform of Warrant Officer Ono.
There is an encrypted datacard in the front pouch. It will confirm everything!”
“Who is in charge?” demanded a small, trollish little man who wore a pair of thick lenses over his eyes (bio-electronic vision augmentation).
Change put her hands down. “I am the mission commander. I identify myself as…” The trollish little man cut her off. “I have orders to take you to the Station Manager. The rest of you aliens will be escorted to holding cells. If you resist, our orders are to kill you. Do you understand?”
Change indicated that she did. The others were escorted by a team of eight men in padded gray uniforms to holding cells in another part of the Hellfire Refinery Station. The Hellions put gray hoods over their heads for some reason. Change was taken to the Centralized Control Center.
Hellfire Station’s Manager was a sad, gray little man named Aso. His office occupied a lozenge-shaped alcove separated from the station’s primary command center by a wall-sized hatch that split into three parts and retracted into the walls when fully opened. The space was just large enough for a shabby desk with switches and controls built into its surface, and an oval-shaped table with six chairs.
“Sit!” he ordered Change, gesturing toward the table and chairs, trying to sound gruff and hard, but not quite pulling it off. She took her chain. The station manager pulled himself into a chair of his own and began interrogating her as a guard with a plasma pistol stood by the door. Aso’s first question was the most basic, “Who are you?” Section 05
Hellfire Station 3
C h a n g e ’ s I n t e r r o g a t i o n
Change: Lieutenant Commander Navigator Eliza Jane Change of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus, exactly as it says in the data we provided for you.
Aso: What is your purpose here?
Change: The Company has offered us 600,000 liters of Tritium to be supplied by this facility. In exchange, We are going to pilot that tanker we rescued out of here, and draw the Solarite pirates away while you and your people escape.
All of this is contained in the data…
Aso: We are working to verify the data you provided.
Change: Your own people…
Aso: I have difficulty believing the Company would give away 600,000 liters of valuable tritium. That is almost a full pericycle of production. And I have difficulty believing someone like you would offer to sacrifice yourself on a suicide run.
Change: Don’t worry about us, just hold up your side of the deal.
Aso: There is no deal unless I say there is. Where do you people come from?
Did you come from Moraine? From Fallon? From Gethsemane?
Change: Never mind where we came from. The fact is, we know you have three ships loaded with fuel that you need to get to your home planet. But you can’t escape from this refining station because the Solarites have you surrounded.
One ship could distract enough of them long enough for you to make your escape. I volunteered to pilot that ship. A Guilder lives by her word. And I’ve always kept mine.
Aso: Two of our people died recovering that tanker. None of yours did. Explain this to me.
Change: Your pilot was killed when a Solarite mine destroyed the cockpit of your shuttle craft. Warrant Officer Ono was killed by a micro-asteroid impact strike on the command sphere.
Aso: I would call those deaths suspicious. Do you have any proof?
Change: My proof is the scarring on the ship’s exterior from the Solarite plasma charges. You can also see the impact marks from the micro-asteroids.
Aso: Every aspect of your story will be thoroughly reviewed. You may rely upon that. You also claim to have piloted the ship through the asteroid field.
Change: I did. Your
people can verify that. They were in the control center with me. And if you don’t believe them, inspect the hull for micro-asteroid fractures.
Aso: Did you receive training from The Company in the operation of our ships?
Change: No.
Aso: Then how were you able…
Change: It wasn’t that hard. I’ve been helming mining ships since I was a meter high.
Aso: So, I am to believe that you simply strapped yourself into the pilot’s seat and navigated a Class Five Tanker through a dense debris field.
Change: Yes
Aso: And you drove the tanker at high speed, even though your sensors were blind.
Change: Speed was essential to evading the Solarites.
Aso: And then you crashed the ship into the stellar atmosphere.
Change: It worked, didn’t it?
Aso: Not even our most seasoned pilots would attempt such a feat.
Change: I can’t speak to the competence of your pilots.
Aso: How did you navigate through the debris field between the corona and this refining facility without sensors?
Change: It doesn’t matter how, only that I did.
Aso (shouting): It does matter! Two of our people are dead, and another is near death in my infirmary. But no one from your ship was even slightly injured. You claim you never piloted one of our ships before, but you navigated a dense debris field at a reckless speed even our most seasoned shipmasters would not have attempted How is that possible?
Change: That’s not entirely true. Matthew Driver received a 1.2 centimeter cut above his left eyebrow.
Aso (shouting): Your forward viewports were half gone, your navigational sensors were ineffective. How did you see where the planetoids were?
Change: I didn’t need to see them, I felt them.
