“Can I see it?”
Betty stared at him for several seconds, shrugged, and said, “Be my guest.” She entered another code and the nearest of the two hatchways opened. Brian pushed the hatch open with the toe of his shoe and peered inside. As Betty had indicated, the bin lift was enormous. Parked in a garage-type compartment, the yellow vehicle was easily three stories high and as wide as five school buses parked side by side. Thick manipulator arms at the front of the vehicle held a large, rounded, blue bin. A bin, Brian assumed, used in transporting thousands of pounds of grain stores. There were both wheels and thrusters along the sides of the vehicle. Looking up, he found what he was looking for—a small, windowed cab area.
“That where you’d pilot the thing?”
“Yep.”
“So this thing transports grain between ships in open space?”
“Or at a space dock. But I know what you’re thinking. It moves pathetically slow. You can walk faster than this thing moves. Don’t even think about traveling in space with this.”
Brian continued to look at the gargantuan vehicle. “Oh, I’m not, but by the size of those thrusters I’m guessing there’s mega-horsepower here.”
Betty nodded but didn’t seem to make the connection.
“Enough to slow or maybe even stop this freighter?”
That clicked for her and she nodded. “I guess we can give it a try.”
“You can operate this thing?”
“Easy. Even that thing could do it,” she said, gesturing toward the hopper.
* * *
It wasn’t as easy as Betty said it would be. She soon began to communicate with someone, perhaps with one of the T-shirted guys back on the bridge. Brian could hear only her side of the conversation. She referred to eight fifty a few times and then Brian remembered: they called each other numbers and used abbreviations of those numbers as their names.
The three of them were now huddled together within the tight quarters of the bin lift’s cab.
“I still don’t know why the hopper couldn’t wait in the garage. There’s barely enough room for one in here, let alone two plus your hopper. And did I mention its breath is foul?”
“I try not to tell it what to do. Why don’t we concentrate on the job at hand?” Brian asked her.
Betty sat behind the controls and was busy configuring settings on a barely-illuminated touchpad display. Holding a comms device to her ear, she again talked to eight fifty. “All right, I think we’re set. Go ahead and cycle the atmosphere.”
With the disappearance of atmosphere came a welcome silence from outside the cab. Brian hadn’t fully registered how noisy it had become in the cab until then. A series of red lights blinked on, then became a steady amber color. He felt a mechanical vibration as two massive doors started to separate. Beyond, open space. The sparkle of millions of distant stars now entirely filled his field of vision.
“Powering on thrusters,” Betty said.
The vibration increased as the bin lift rose ten feet off the deck. She goosed the controls forward and the bin lift slowly headed out of the garage toward open space. From an intellectual level, Brian knew the bin lift was traveling at the same speed as the freighter itself, but that didn’t stop him from holding his breath as they maneuvered between the open doors and held steady at the aft end of the ship, along its outside starboard hull.
“You know, this idea of yours may not work. In fact, we may get ourselves killed in the process.”
Brian only half listened to her, instead watching the hopper continually lick the glass on the side porthole. Betty furrowed her brow and made a disgusted grimace.
The singular drive throttled up, bringing up the sound level again in the cabin. They needed to yell to speak to each other.
“I’m maneuvering to the aft area of the freighter. If we’re not perfectly locked on to the exact right location, this won’t work.”
The hopper began to rifle through an old cooler stowed at the back of the cabin. It came up with something that, at one time, may have been edible, but was now nothing more than a clump of mold. Not at all discouraged, the creature ate it in one bite, licked its claws, and returned to searching the cooler.
The aft section of the freighter was a mess. There would not have been any possibility of repairing the damage. Gaping, jagged holes riddled the drives and it appeared as if much of the aft section could break away at any time.
“Shit, this won’t work.”
Brian quickly saw what she was referring to. Nothing was solid on the hull; things would flex under the stress of any resistance introduced from the bin lift.
“You’ll just need to find an area that is solid.”
“You think?”
The freighter was turned backward in space, with its aft section heading forward. As Betty maneuvered the bin lift around the stern end, now the forward end of the freighter, Brian couldn’t help but think about the massive amount of deadweight tonnage lying before them. Both manipulator arms were moving. Carefully, Betty articulated the clawed ends to open, and then close, around protruding sections of the mangled drives. She tried this maneuver several times, and each time sections of the drive came loose and pulled away from the freighter.
“This is useless. Like trying to grab on to sand.”
“Up there. Don’t try to clamp to the drive. The framework looks to be solid up there,” Brian said, pointing to a section thirty feet above.
Betty let out a controlled breath and maneuvered the bin lift higher. Again, she brought up the manipulator arms and articulated the two claws. This time they held fast.
“We’re not dead center like I’d like to be, but this might work,” she said.
The touchscreen blinked out.
“What just happened?” Brian asked.
“Well, this thing’s old. Temperamental. We’ll just give it a second to come back online.”
Ten minutes later the screen was still dark. Brian gave it a gentle slap.
“Oh, so you’re now going to manhandle it? Really show it who is boss?”
“Easy. I’m just seeing if there’s a loose connection. You can’t tell me you weren’t going to try the same thing. There’s a rule in the military: the older the vehicle the more bitch-slapping it requires.”
“Oh really, you didn’t just make that up?” Betty asked, her lips fighting a smile.
Actually, he had, but he certainly wasn’t going to tell her so.
“Look, it’s coming back on.”
Betty huffed, but wasted no time in bringing the bin lift’s thrusters to life. She brought up a visual indicator showing that they were still within safe-output parameters.
Back on her comms, Betty talked to eight fifty again.
“Well, if you have any better idea, feel free to get your fat ass out here and give it a try. For now, this is all we’ve got.”
“What was that about?” Brian asked.
“He’s just complaining again. Says we’ll over-stress the rotary securing mounts at the back of the ship. As if the fucking things are securing anything of importance now anyway, right?”
Brian nodded, although he wasn’t really sure what securing mounts were, and that brought up more thoughts of deadweight tonnage.
Betty steadily increased thrust. The cab vibrated and the noise became physically painful in their ears. The hopper stopped rooting around in the cooler.
The drive’s temperature level was quickly moving horizontally, from green toward the red side of the indicator.
“Eight fifty says we’re slowing.”
A new sound emanated below them, from the bin lift’s internal drive.
“What the hell’s that?” Brian asked.
“What do you think it is?” Betty snapped back. “This thing was never designed to stop a freighter moving in space at close to the speed of light. She’ll hold together.”
Fully in the red now, the indicator began to rapidly blink on and off. Then everything stopped. The noise, the vibrati
on, everything.
Betty made a few more taps on the screen and turned toward Brian. “That’s it.”
“What? Did the drive give out?”
“Huh? Oh, no. I shut down the thrusters. We’re dead in space. It worked, Brian.” Betty looked as if she wasn’t sure she should believe her own words. She stood looking relieved and fell into Brian’s arms. Uncomfortable with the closeness, he patted her several times on the back. Then, to his surprise, she started to cry into his shoulder.
Chapter 42
Chapter 42
The Lilly shook as both Dreadnaughts completed their coupling process. Now, at three miles wide and almost ten miles in length, the Meganaught held its position at the forward apex of the three fleet groupings.
Earlier, Jason and Billy had stood on Han Di’s bridge while the final maneuvering adjustments were completing, just prior to the three Dreadnaughts becoming one gigantic vessel.
“There’s no way the other Dreadnaughts can separate themselves on their own, is there?” Jason had asked.
“No, that order would have to be instigated by this bridge, an executive-level command,” Han Di replied, still seated in his command chair.
“And you’ve locked them out from detecting our forces, as well as our video feeds?”
“Yes, your forces remain undetected.”
Jason continued to watch the main corridor feed. Thousands of small bodies stood motionless. It had taken longer than Jason had anticipated to round up all of the Craing crewmembers and lock groups of three, four, and sometimes five Craing into the cages along both sides of the main corridor. For the most part they huddled together silently, and had put up little if any resistance.
Now, back on board The Lilly, Jason studied the display. Billy, two fingers to his ear, was on comms talking to his SEAL team leaders. The forward display showed the main corridor and twelve hundred-plus rhino-warriors poised on three separate levels as they waited for the inter-ship main corridor bulkhead walls to disconnect from each other, separate into thousand-foot-long sections, and recede back along the surrounding hull bulkheads. Looking for Traveler among the rhinos, Jason spotted him at the front of the Greys on the top-most level. Traveler had lost thirteen Greys and four Reds during their previous battle—taking over this, the first, Dreadnaught. Although they had never fought side by side, the level of camaraderie between the Reds and Greys seemed to have improved.
Ricket arrived on the bridge and headed directly for Jason, seated in his command chair. He was disheveled, hair messed, and his jumpsuit rumpled-looking, as if he’d slept in it. Jason watched him approach and tried to read his expression. The fate of his crew, the fleet, and even Earth, could very well hang in the balance, and could depend on what Ricket had to say.
“Captain, I would like to give you an update.”
Jason took another quick look at the display and the waiting SEALs and rhino-warrior teams.
“Go ahead, Ricket.”
“I believe I have figured it out. But it’s not as simple as the Drapple, or the interchange, would have us believe.” Both Perkins and Orion came over to hear what Ricket had to say. Jason hadn’t thought the interchange made it sound all that easy at the time, but he let Ricket continue.
“I was approaching this from the wrong angle. But once I took into the mix how the Caldurians travel into the multiverse with relative ease, things started to come together.”
Jason took another upward glance at the display and hoped Ricket would cut to the chase soon; he had a battle to fight.
“We need to tunnel into the fifth dimension, Captain.”
“Okay, go on.”
“I found that when two black holes entangle, then separate, what emerged was a wormhole, a tunnel through space and time. At first, I thought wormholes were held together by gravity. But this concept seemed to suggest that in the case of wormholes, gravity is an effect, but they actually come about from the more fundamental phenomenon of entangled black holes.”
“Where is all this leading, Ricket?”
“This led me to quarks, the sub-atomic building blocks of matter. I wanted to see what would happen when two quarks entangled. I mapped the entangled quarks onto a four-dimensional space. Gravity exists in a separate dimension; it acts to bend and shape space-time, thereby existing in the fifth dimension.”
Jason was ready to put a stop to Ricket’s lecture when he continued.
“To see what geometry may emerge in the fifth dimension from entangled quarks in the fourth, I employed holographic duality, a concept in string theory. While a hologram is a two-dimensional object, it contains all the information necessary to represent a three dimensional view. Essentially, holographic duality is a way to derive a more complex dimension from the next lowest dimension.”
“I need to stop you, Ricket …”
“It gets better, Captain. What we’re talking about, again, is holographic duality. I derived the two entangled quarks and found that what emerged was a wormhole connecting the two. So we have the creation of quarks simultaneously creating wormholes. Again, gravity emerges from entanglement. Thus, the geometry, or bending of the universe, is a result of entanglement—such as what happens between pairs of particles strung together by tunneling wormholes. Captain, we will use the phase-shift capabilities we employ all the time. Entangled particles can be phase-shifted!”
Ricket held up his hand, holding Jason off from stopping his monologue.
“Using the formula, mathematical properties from the interchange, I’ve created micro-wormholes in my lab on 4B.” Ricket took a breath and seemed pleased with himself.
“So, are you saying you can do this? Create wormholes in space?”
“Yes.”
“And we can bring the Allied fleet here?”
“No, not all at once, anyway.”
“Ricket!”
“I apologize, Captain. It seems we were not given the entire formula. The Lilly, with its phase-shift capability, can, in fact, manifest the necessary in-and-out points for spooling a wormhole. And could, subsequently, travel through that wormhole. What we cannot do, at least not yet, is provide this ability unilaterally to anyone else. In effect, The Lilly needs to be the one spooling the wormhole.”
Jason said, “So, we’d need to communicate coordinates, go ahead and spool a wormhole, have them enter it and arrive back here in the Alcara system. Is that correct?”
“Partially. The wormholes are a finite size and stay open a finite length of time. I estimate only one or two other vessels could make the transition. They misjudge this and they’ll be destroyed in the process. At least at first, it may be better for The Lilly to play escort.”
Jason was exhausted just listening to Ricket. Although this new development was incredible, its application wasn’t what he’d hoped for. The Lilly needed to be here, not jumping back and forth between distant sectors.
“Can the Pacesetter do this?”
“Actually, yes, as well as the Epcot, the Caldurian shuttle. Both would need to cycle back into The Lilly to recharge their power banks after each round trip. One more thing, though: to make a wormhole large enough to allow for the size of the Independence, we’d need to utilize The Lilly for that round trip.”
Jason looked at Ricket and nodded. “What you have accomplished is nothing short of incredible, Ricket. Thank you. XO, get on comms and inform the admiral of this development. Orion, I want a viable strategy proposal for bringing the fleet here piecemeal. Present this to both me and the admiral as soon as you have something.”
“Aye, Cap,” both replied, and they headed off in separate directions. “Ricket, get whatever is necessary to retrofit the Pacesetter and the Epcot.”
* * *
His third NanoCom communication within the last hour with Traveler ended, and Jason was relieved to see Orion and Perkins back with their reports. Traveler and his rhinos were impatient to get underway. They were still waiting for Jason’s command to open the inter-ship’s main corridor bulkhead
that kept separate the first of the two Dreadnaughts. The third Dreadnaught would remain closed off from the others until the rhino forces had successfully secured the second one.
“What do you have for me, XO and Gunny?”
Perkins spoke up first. “The admiral is encouraged. He’d already given the orders for what remained of the Allied fleet to make their way to the Alcara system. We should expect the arrival of four hundred warships within several hours. The outpost fleet, along with the Independence, is underway, but will be several days out with the limitations of FTL.”
Scrapyard Ship 3 Space Vengeance Page 22
