“I wish I could,” Jake interrupted. “But I don't think she would quite understand just how dangerous a secret it is, that I'm asking you to keep.”
“You underestimate her Jake,” David insisted. “But it is a burden I wouldn't want her to carry. She has a hard enough time sleeping as it is.”
It took considerable planning on David's part to arrange for Elisabeth to deliver a large oblong crate along with the usual supplies. Not to mention making sure that her stepfather was too busy with other work to come along with her. He met Elisabeth at his private pier.
“Hello Elisabeth,” David said as she tied up the barge. For her part Elisabeth just waved. “Tell me Elisabeth,” David eventually continued. “Did that lamb's leg I ordered make it to your farm in time for this shipment?”
“Sure did prime,” Elisabeth replied. “A right lean piece of meat it is too.”
“Good!” David said. “Would you mind bringing the skid with the lamb up the ramp right away? And be sure to call Judith's attention to it before she starts fixing something else for dinner.”
Elisabeth chuckled.
“Consider it done,” she said as she slipped the manual pallet jack under the appropriate skid.
While Elisabeth was busy pulling the produce skid up the ramp, David stepped onto the barge and untied the protective tarp covering the oblong crate. He lifted the edge to peek under it in such a way as to cause the edge of the tarp to extend over the water. Where even though he was looking under the tarp at the time, he scarcely noticed the slight ripple. As the side of the crate was pulled open and it's contents were switched with something outwardly identical, that had been hidden under the water. He did this very carefully because one never knew for sure when some security prime might choose to use satellite monitoring to check on his safety. It wouldn't do for them to notice the switch.
“Hey!” Elisabeth suddenly yelled from behind him. “That's my job!”
Then just as suddenly she was on the barge beside David. At which point Elisabeth firmly pulled the edge of the tarp from David's grip and quickly re-secured it's lashings.
“Pardon me for yelling at you prime Miller,” Elisabeth pleaded. “But you should know better than to loosen the tarp on such a fancy crate as this. At least until I've got it safely on the pier.”
It actually took nearly 25 days in the specially modified hibernation chamber for Jake to make the daggerthorn cluster understand what he wanted to do. Then it was another 3 days before he was sure it had agreed. His dreams had hinted at some of the improvements he thought he could make with a bit of genetic tinkering. He had also dreamed about it taking a very long time before he would find a branch of humanity who would be receptive of the idea he had shared with the daggerthorn. He had even warned that it might be that his tinkering would fail. That he feared that none of the seedpods he was asking for would survive.
He also dreamed about the far reaching long term prospects that success could bring their descendants. Along with those of any humans he could get to embrace a symbiotic relationship with them.
Eventually Jake left Slowlane behind him. As he slowly got himself and the seedpods, as far out of the guild's active territory. As the Captain and his Nearkin thought he had already gone. There he eventually found an ‘uninhabited’ terraformed planet. There wasn't much left of the ‘colony ship’ that had sent down the robotic terraforming equipment. It had evidently been waiting for the planet to be ready for human habitation. When something went catastrophically wrong with it's power systems. None of it's human crew had survived the explosion.
It was a place where he could safely tinker with his daggerthorn without fear that a mistake on his part could spell disaster for any human inhabitants. Because there were no humans there. He built a secret base where he began a long series of experiments. He was well aware that it could take more than a few million years to effect the kind of changes he was attempting to make. He also knew that even if he was successful, finding a group of humans who would actually embrace the experiment would likely take even longer.
It would be several thousand galactic standard years before his next foray into regions known to be frequented by guild vessels. The occasions when he did so were relatively few and far between. Even so he had had to face more than a few questors in personal combat. Before he really embraced his hermit like existence. Then it was that he seemed to disappear from all human awareness and became to most little more than a half remembered myth. During which time, the technologies routinely employed to travel the space ways by the majority of Freespacers, had changed significantly.
It had started with a successful misinformational campaign by the guild that exaggerated the danger of depending on synthuel based power systems. Which they combined with the release of a high capacity energy sink system under the same terms as the Free Space Accord. This effectively put an end to the proliferation of synthuel drones. Making it easier for the guild to locate the ones Jake used. It also meant that it took longer for jump ships to ‘charge up’ for their next jump.
Then some Freespacer genius invented a way to fold space itself. The new technology had nearly twice the range of the jump ship technology that Jake had licensed for Freespacer use.
It took a very long time for Freespacers to expand their territory beyond the borders of guild controlled space but the guild itself had effectively stopped growing. Meanwhile the Freespacers became less worried about being able to travel all the way back to the home galaxy where the guild still maintained it's strongest presence. Few of the outlying edge of so called Freespacers still identified with the actual fraternal order of Free Spacers that Jake had pledged to. It wasn't like the old days when all the accessible space was essentially regulated by a single powerful civilization. Even so mankind continued to spread across the universe, gradually getting closer to Jake's secret base of operations.
Chapter 43 a shadow of hope
Captain Wilber Rivermon had a problem. Worse, he was running out of options. His vessel, ‘The Starskewer’ had been severely crippled by the initial weapons burst from one of the two marauding dreadnought class pirate ships. That now had it tightly held in the mutual grips of their primary object manipulator field arrays. There was no doubting their intent.
They would briefly scan the Starskewer. Then if there wasn't anybody on board that was unlucky enough to be worth special attention. They would slowly increase both the particle attractor and the particle repulsor field settings. Until what little remained of their defense screen failed. Then the pirates would be able to easily tear any worthwhile cargo from her hold as they began cutting the hapless ship into it's component parts. Scavenging anything of marketable value as the hard cold vacuum of space accounted for anyone still onboard. Then when the Starskewer had been reduced to slag. The pirate's junior cadets would get to use any lifepods found in the vicinity for target practice. There wouldn't be any survivors. Worse still they would simply get away with it.
Unless the captain did something crazy. So crazy that only a madman could even imagine that anyone could possibly survive it. There was no time to think about it. If he was to do anything, he would have to do it quickly. He did have one advantage though. The pirates had no way to know that he had already disabled the automatic control system overrides before they blasted the warpguide assembly. He had done so in preparation to recalibrating the warp field generator. This meant that he did have a slight chance of actually engaging the warp generator before they noticed that he could still turn it on.
Most likely, he wouldn't live long enough to know if the warp generator got to fully initialize. Or if the pirates detected their peril in time to stop him. Which was too bad. He would have liked the satisfaction of knowing for sure that his Starskewer had managed to annihilate the two dreadnoughts, as it became the focus of an unstable fold in the fabric of space. He did not expect that the Starskewer would be able to gain sufficient control over the process to drop out of the warp field in time.
The unstable fold would of course, assuming it was successfully generated, reduce everything within the vicinity of it's point of inception to subatomic particles. The dreadnought's only chance would be to completely destroy the Starskewer before the warp field matured enough to begin to fold space. Because without the warpguide assembly to shape the inner structure of the warp field at it's heart, the fold itself would fluctuate wildly until either the unfocused control field collapsed and everything within the focal zone became a small short lived singularity, at the center of where space was warped into itself. Or it would complete the process of generating a wormhole. Which under the circumstances would most likely only exist as a relatively short range phenomenon.
In that unlikely event, there was little that could be done to control the essentially random distance involved. Though there would then be some possibility that he might be able to select the direction to which the wormhole would extend but unless by some random fluke of fate, the warp field happened to form in the exact configuration the warpguide assembly was designed to effect. He would not have time to do more than point his ship at the nearest star system and hope that they didn't wind up inside the star itself.
“Zap it!” he said as he threw the power system's override control to maximum.
Then he attempted to manually tune the unstable warp field into a pattern that would eject the Starskewer in the vicinity of the uncharted star in question. When the captain regained consciousness, he was surprised to find that he was still inside a functioning life support system. Then he noticed how little power remained to run it. He could ill afford to divert any of this power to the sensor array but he needed to know if they were within thruster range of an inhabitable world.
The image was unmistakable. The twisted and charred remains of the Starskewer was on a collision course with a small rocky planet. He needed to divert every bit of available power into converting his ship's meteoric plunge into something resembling a soft landing. He almost made it. Unfortunately the ship's overloaded inertial thruster systems and with them all inertial compensator functions, disintegrated just before ‘landing’ on the surface of the sea.
The Starskewer slammed into the water with such force that captain Rivermon almost lost consciousness. It was fortunate that he had kept with the traditional formality of routinely strapping himself into the command chair. He knew that most of his crew and passengers wouldn't be so lucky. The ship was now far too damaged to stay afloat long and he would have to spend most of that time just checking if any of the crew or passengers had survived the crash. There would be precious little time left to find something that could be made to float and even less time to gather provisions. He noted however, that by some twist of fate the planet's atmosphere appeared to be breathable. So no matter how poor his chances were, he was going to have to give it his very best try.
Only two of the survivors had any recollection of how they came to be adrift on a raft with a makeshift deck which was crudely fastened to a salvaged pair of partially filled cargo containers. The captain himself and senior technician George Agroman. Who distinctly remembered returning to consciousness to find his captain, holding a portable life sign detector in one hand, while he was using the other to drag him into the remains of the number 3 cargo hold.
“Ah, your awake!” the captain had said. “Good! I could use your help.”
George looked around the cargo hold. Something was radically wrong. Something besides the fact that most of the light in the hold was coming in from outside of a large hole in the outer hull. Something other than the fact that the hold was about half full of water. Then suddenly he realized that the slanted ‘deck’ they were standing on was actually a wall. The gravity simulator had to be off line. Yet there was a sense of gravity. Then he remembered.
“The Pirates?” he asked.
“Reduced to subatomic particles,” the captain replied. “But we didn't fare much better. According to my scanner we're all that's left.” The captain gestured towards the four unconscious forms next to them. “Everyone else is already dead. And we won't be far behind them if we can't rig some kind of lifeboat from the debris before the Starskewer finishes sinking. Worse, we'll have to make do with what happens to be in this hold to do it. The Starskewer is slowly losing buoyancy George. A major part of what's holding her afloat is the air pocket on the other side of that door. And every time I've opened it, a gush of air has been pushed out. I'm not sure just where the water is getting into the habitat section from. But we can't afford to let any more of that air leak out.”
George wasn't one to panic easily but he'd been close to loosing control when his captain asked his advice.
“About the only thing we got to make a lifeboat from,” captain Rivermon began. “Are those two loose cargo pods that are floating over there. They won't be very stable out there in the waves. But I think that if we can fasten them together somehow, we might be able to use them to stabilize each other. At least enough to keep the access doors on top of the water. Our other problem is that once we have our lifeboat, I'm not sure how we're going to get it out of the hold. Big as that tear in the hull is, it's uneven. We're going to be hard pressed to get our lifeboat outside before the Starskewer drags us down with her.”
Then captain Rivermon noticed the panic in his technician's eyes. So he forced his voice to sound more encouraging.
“There are a few bright spots George,” he said. “The auxiliary cargo manipulator is still high and dry. I've also found a collection of emergency power packs. As well as a highly unusual collection of tools and partially disassembled equipment full of salvageable parts. All in one of those cargo pods. The other one appears to be half full of emergency provisions. I've also managed to salvage a portable plasma cutter. So we do have a slight chance George. But I can't do it by myself. I need you to snap out of it and help me get them out of here alive George.”
It hadn't been easy but George had been able to adapt the auxiliary manipulator to use the nonstandard power he could feed it from the half dozen power packs he'd hooked up to it. Of course, the power wasn't fully compatible. He could only use it for a few subcyclets at a time but he'd been able to loosely attach one of the pods to a jagged piece of the hull plating that was hanging inwards from the hole in the side of the Starskewer. Then as the Captain used the plasma cutter to sever the other end of the twisted section of hull plating, that they had decided to use to connect the cargo pods together with, George used the manipulator to nudge the other pod under the other end. Then in a last burst of power, before the incompatible power burned out the control circuits, he'd been able to ‘grab’ the freshly cut end of the new ‘deck’ as the Captain finished cutting it free and to set it down gently on top of the other pod.
Once they'd done that, it was a simple matter to use the plasma cutter to punch some strategically placed holes. So that they could apply some deckbolts to securely fasten the pods to the deck. Then they had to carry the still unconscious forms of the other four survivors on board the improvised craft. They placed them inside one of the cargo pods that now served as pontoons for their “lifeboat”. Then they cut away a few more jagged sections of the hull plating out of the way so they could float out through the hole in Starskewer's hull. They only just made it outside before there was a burst of air bubbles welling up inside the nearly submerged cargo hold.
A couple of subcyclets later, the Starskewer's twisted form slipped below the surface. Thus it was that George alone of those few lucky enough to survive, saw the captain collapse into a weeping heap of self recrimination and despair. George's words appeared to fall on deaf ears when he tried to tell his captain that it wasn't his fault and that he'd obviously done everything he possibly could. Then George shook his head sadly and tried to get through another way.
“Alright sir,” he said in a less kindly voice. “Maybe it is your fault after all. I don't see it that way. But it could be. What I do see is that we are in trouble. We're adrift on some kind of sea and
in dire need of a strong captain to see us through it. Frankly sir, the way you are now just isn't good enough. So if the vows you took when they gave you command of the Starskewer still mean anything to you. Your going to have to shake this load of self pity and remember your job. Now pull yourself together sir, before the others see you like this.”
His captain just looked at him. For a brief moment George saw a haunting wounded look and perhaps a plea for mercy in his captain's eyes. Then he saw the captains expression turn to stone as his eyes burned with something closer to anger. Then, just as suddenly, his eyes became as devoid of all visible emotion and as cold as the deck plating. At that point the Captain squared his shoulders.
“That's enough!” he barked at George. Then he continued in a cold voice devoid of any perceivable emotion. “There's to be no more of that. I know my duty better than you do Mr Agroman.” Then after silently staring at him for nearly a two full subcyclets, captain Rivermon's voice softened slightly. “Thank you for reminding me George.”
Then the captain turned and climbed inside the cargo container to check on the others. Over the next couple of days, George rigged a mast of sorts out of some piping. He also used some tough fiberoptic wire to stitch together some shipping blankets to form a makeshift sail but the wind began to blow with such force that it threatened to capsize them. He'd had to pull in the sail. So it was that they were at the mercy of the prevailing currents and the tide as they were relentlessly driven towards the distant rocky shoreline of an island with a very foreboding appearance.
Before they got there however, something slammed into the side of one of the containers hard enough to put a dent in one of side panels of it's delicate airtight frame. A few subcyclets later, there was an impact on the other side that was severe enough to start a small leak.
“A few more hits like that sir,” George said to his captain. “And one or the other of those cargo containers are going to rip wide open.”
NanoSymbionts Page 62
