I was a gunner, while this was a ship without guns. I couldn't be more useless!
And what if I were to take it over, somehow?
I couldn't fly the thing. I couldn't even stop it. Any interruption of a starjump process would result in a guaranteed misjump.
Where ever he was headed, I was headed.
Whatever fate he'd forged, he'd forged for me as well.
||||||||||
nine
* * *
I'd never seen such precise flying in my life.
Mavis matched our every move with General Store's. Because a vessel that size had to clear each tiny adjustment with the traffic monitoring and assignment authority in-system, properly known as Orbital Control, or just OC (in this case, located on Mylag Vernier itself), and because we were listening in, she got a heads-up on every move the big ship made. These actions ranged from the use of their main drives, to the firing of lateral thrusters, to even the tiniest course-maintenance burns from mini-maneuver nozzles.
For the entire duration, the captain didn't need rest or even bathroom breaks, and only drank some Vaussermin or coffee when she called for it. She had John and Stinna (who covered Sensors in alternating shifts now, so that there'd be someone available at all times) filter out any non-essential traffic chatter and course data, and pipe the big ship's announced propellant burns directly to her skull. She could parse data and control our ship systems very quickly, and each time General Store moved in any way, either along its plotted course, or along one of it's three axes, Shady Lady did the same, with perfect synchronization. OC was certainly watching, as their radio activity confirmed, but the cyborg at the helm displayed such precision and timing that no one saw us as anything other than some innocuous piece of dark machinery mounted on (actually hovering a few meters above) the giant ship's hull -- just one odd projection on its surface among hundreds of others. It was a feat I'd have bet hard credit was impossible -- a bet I would have lost.
But it didn't matter what I did or didn't think, just as it didn't apparently matter that we no longer had a plan in place, the last one having gone up in smoke (or mass propellant, more like). If we tried cracking General Store's sensors to institute a failure now, while they were en route to the heavily trafficked L2 position, it would have certainly constituted an emergency. There'd be tugs dispatched, crisis services placed on standby, and even more eyes from OC and Fleet looking our way.
For my own part, I felt crippled; unable to be prepared. With our close proximity to a non-hostile vessel, Gunnery was effectively locked off. Even if legitimate targets presented themselves at some point while we were doing this, it would have been patently crazy, even by my standards, to begin shooting. It was a universe away from an ideal situation, and I chafed under that merciless tyrant, Discretion. Helm, Sensors and Engineering focused upon, and attended to, their duties closely and professionally, but all I could do was work on the mystery of that big final flash with Chris.
In reality, the supply ship could have out-paced us easily, using its six swiveling engine nozzles on extended arms (one for each major section of the boxy outer hull: that is, port, starboard, fore, aft, dorsal, and ventral), any five of which could have been engaged when main drives were active.
That would have indicated urgency. This pokey little pace did not. Indeed, Mavis had been concerned, at first, about them opening up and making some real speed, but General Store had logged a slow, circuitous course, requiring nearly five days of transit, and we were able to keep up just fine. It was hard on the nerves, though, especially for the captain; my single hope during this relatively small side-trip was that she could hold up for the duration.
Meanwhile, the ML and I searched through mountains of logged data points. We entered in minor variables by the score, but it was now mostly a matter of tweaking. The boredom associated with manipulating such a sea of minutia would have been a trial all its own, let alone while under the shadow of such precariousness.
It was a crawling, racking form of labor, thereby, different in character even to what we'd already done for this sim. There were specialized computer applications just for this sort of work, and I had entire simulation construction suites available to me, the caliber of which were state-of-the-art. But we were dealing with a complete unknown here, and nothing aboard this ship -- or likely anywhere else -- could have resolved this data collection automatically.
We ran formulae, hunting up and inserting the small numerical details they pointed to. We ran other equations to determine the associated variables, and then passed them through a long list of logical sub-processes so that on-the-fly tailoring of the answers could be made, if or when required, based on calculations derived previously (or simultaneously) within the sim.
Time crept by, but after various minor milestones, as we went along in the perfect ballet of those few days, performed for us by a woman only half human, Chris and I ran the simulation again and again, fixing, trimming, recrafting. Indefatigably, the truth of the moment we studied -- far, far too subtle to be registered by an organic mind, except as an after-image of brightness and debility -- revealed itself.
We were nearly at the Lagrange Point when the data seemed to fall into place all at once, some minor tweaking to a simple computation finally pulling back the veil (or, at least, a veil to our liking -- it was, after all, a constructed thing), and we sat for a long moment just watching it replay, over and over.
"Well, would you look at that..." Chris muttered admiringly, as the explosion looped in our individual displays.
"That's not at all what I was expecting," I added, in perfect keeping with his wonder.
"But...how?"
I shook my head to put the surprise at some distance, then stopped the loop and started it again slowly.
"That's not the only odd thing going on here."
"Okay, yes. Step-by-step: go."
"All right, see here?" I indicated, using a pointer tool that interacted with the piped display, to circle the initial spot of our directed energy strike. "We actually did hit first. Our laser hammers them here, and walks back to here. As a cycling multi-spectrum weapon, it ran through all its available frequencies at least twice, even in this short amount of time. So it hits this spot, just behind what I'm assuming was the cockpit, before finding a charged state that cuts through the outer and inner hulls. Boom. That was a killing blow right there, but of course, the shot isn't done. It continues cutting back to this point amidships, until we get a fast rupture back here -- but this time, it's from the inside."
"That's easy," he put in, an uncharacteristic intensity in his voice, and a shark-like focus on all the details. "It's the weapon capacitors bursting."
"You'd think so, but no," I countered. "It's the right location, but not the right behavior. The juice is running through twin resistor banks at this moment, slowing it down for the accelerator components to make use of. In the civilian world, this kind of gun has an inherent delay at that point from magnetic folding, slowing the whole process down. It's a limitation of the tech. Military-grade guns have gotten around it though a very expensive sub-system called a guide comb, which creates a parallel magnetic field state surrounding the entire gun. This essentially holds the excess energy in a non-expressive state for a few thousandths of a second. That's what we're seeing here, if we run that custom EMF filter we put together yesterday."
I gestured a bit, and the filter dropped into place. Two amorphous blue blobs suddenly appeared around the guns.
"That's a model of the volatile energy being held by the combs in these exact milliseconds."
"Which means...?"
"The power isn't, in fact, discharging from the capacitors -- it's already out. This inner rupture," and I circled the energy point bursting through the hull from within, "has to be from something else entirely."
"Power generation?"
"I think so, yeah. We already know from sensor data that the fusion reactor and power plant were new designs."
"But a hit to the reactor should have shut it down cold..."
"Actually, once the casing on it was ruptured, its magnetic bottle would have have failed catastrophically. There'd have been a nano-second flash as the fusion ball inside dissipated."
"We haven't modelled that here," Chris replied, sounding puzzled, "And it wouldn't cut through the hull, anyway."
"Normally, no. Not with a conventional power plant. But we're also getting unfocused high-energy particles everywhere at this moment -- see here, on the cross-ref? This wasn't conventional. It wasn't normal. We're looking at something entirely original and unstable. Likely it was as innovative and experimental as the stardrive itself."
He soaked in the details for a long moment, scrolling through accompanying data timelines, and replaying this very tiny moment again and again.
"So," he said at length, sounding measured and conservative in judgement, "we have a spillout of exotic particles from their crazy new power plant rupturing."
"That's right -- and hold that thought," I replied, moving the sim forward, until the really weird stuff started happening.
A point of light appeared suddenly, behind the freejump model, growing wide and long, extending both towards the small ship, and further on back.
"Yes, yes!" he cried, all reservation suddenly tossed aside, and my own excitement flared with him. "We have a crazy explosion here, outside the vessel! Radiation and particles span the freqs and go off the scales."
"But we're still collecting data at this point," I added. "Look at this..."
I dragged down a side list of changing particle densities, which were all updating as the sim progressed. Finding one in particular, I dragged it to the fore, and expanded it so he'd get a good view.
"Graviton? Okay...so why is that special, when we have all sorts of discharges going on? There's no stratified cone, or even a comprehensive focus. Why are gravitons more extraordinary than the other particles at this moment?" He wasn't being querulous, just curious -- even fascinated.
"Here," I replied, zeeing-out the other particles and radiation discharges, and then opening up a sub-sim I'd put together only an hour before, for this data specifically. It displayed a random cloud of hyper-light gravitons, which I made a glowing pink color for emphasis. It looked like a splash of Vaussermin (Gut-wrenching Grapefruit?), spraying out into space from a single sudden point, just aft of the freejump.
"This is only the graviton burst," I said, "with everything else filtered out. Nothing definite, right? But what if we run that spray pattern through a ripple sim of its own...?" And I played the sub-simulation for the gravitons as they wobbled like a half-formed clay bowl on a potter's wheel, turning, turning, forming, shaping. "What looks like a chaotic burst of quantum energy is, in fact..." And with a visual snap, the gyrating cloud became a cone -- short, truncated, but clearly a cone.
"What?!" Chris nearly shouted. "Wait! Then the ghost image coming up next..." and he put the rest of the sim back into it's previous playback speed, showing the clear image of a second freejump forming behind the first, "It isn't a ghost at all! It's another of those things trying to jump into the fight, just as Jaybird exploded."
"Two ships, one stone," I replied, feeling, I'll admit, a bit smug.
"Ah, but not quite one," he reminded me.
"The missiles? Oh, it was all over but the echo by the time those two impacted. They were FaF-enabled, that is, Fire-and-Forget. Once they left our tubes, and were away from the scrambling beam the station was projecting, they followed their own courses. The freejump ship -- or ships -- were already gone, with only a ball of energy or plasma, or whatever that was, left behind. The flash blinded onboard sensors for the two lead darts; they registered that loss as hits, followed protocol, and just blew. Since they were all tied to us through UV Pulse-Comm, we were able to log their kill and abort sigs."
"Then, what was the source of that powerful flash that followed this?" Chris asked.
"My only guess is that the second ship misjumped when it arrived, because it landed directly inside an active explosion. The flash could have been a burst of exotic extra-dimensional particles."
"How's your starjump physics?" he asked.
"Not good enough for this."
"Then we leave it for the eggheads back home." He then drew a line between the two vessels with a stylus. It came back with a distance of just over ten meters. "That's mighty close to be popping in to help. They're nearly touching."
"Another mistake. They would have collided a second or two later if they hadn't both been destroyed."
"And this is what happens when one of these things misjumps? If so, why would they send, not one, but two of them after us? That flash knocked out sensors and communications all across the star system."
"Well, I doubt they ever studied anything like this. It was series of bad choices, compounded by bad luck."
"More grist for the mill," he concluded. "The more UH knows about these things, the better for all parties involved. Fine work, Ejoq. Again."
And that was that on the mysterious flash for the moment.
He and I logged everything, packaged it up as a separate report, signed it, and relayed what we'd figured out to our crewmates, who, frankly seemed to resent the interruption.
We were rolling up on the Lagrange Point by this time. It must have been a relief to them, because even if things went badly at the last moment, at least the pressure, and the need for such brutal concentration, would be at an end. But things didn't go badly when General Store and Shady Lady arrived, locked in their hidden dance.
Mylag Vernier was a lot bigger than I expected, even though I'd already studied its general specs. As a Wayfarer Class Multipurpose Deep Space Station, produced and delivered en whole by Mylag Industrial Research Facilities, it was too huge to be a highdock. Really, it could have been a mid-sized colony craft, capable of supporting tens of thousands of souls quite comfortably. Right now, it was fitted out as a research station, and it bore all the markings of ability. Countless sensors and antennae littered its hull, some huge and some minute, some quite powerful and exacting.
Like its ilk, Mylag Vernier was a rotating wheel, simulating gravity for all those within. Though Artificial Gravity was a common technology (and, indeed, a very old one now), centrifugal force was ultimately safer on vessels of this size. In the case of a station-wide power loss, people and equipment wouldn't go floating off into the air if they were being held to the floors by the natural laws of physics. Some horrible accidents early in the era of star travel (disasters, really, involving whole station populations) had put it all into tragic perspective. Now artificial gravity was seen as a tool to be used for the right job only.
The Hub of any station with this basic design would normally be in apparent zero or microgravity. Many, if not most, used AG here, the convenience factor of shifting cargo and working on repairs using standard techniques outweighing the relative risks involved. Mylag Vernier, according to library records, was no different in this regard.
As cargo ships went, General Store was of a very nice size for a single hull, non-modular hauler. Compared to the station it might have been small, but it was at least big enough to block four docking ports on the Hub, were it to link up in the normal manner. This would have been prohibitively inconvenient to the station in the long run.
Decrypted communications implied the ship would be staying close from now on, for the sake of security and efficiency. It parked about two kilometers from the station, then fired maneuvering thrusters to set it spinning along the pitch axis. When it matched the speed and movement of the Hub, it extended a huge gantry tube from a cavernous bay on its starboard side. The tube was fully wider than Shady Lady was long! It connected to a docking port dead center. Listening in revealed that the tube, like the Hub, sported artificial gravity. When fully set up, they'd be able to send motorized cargo rollers and large shipping containers through there, like driving across a bridge to and from a busy city.
After
some hurried discussion, and while General Store was still finishing its docking maneuvers, the captain moved us down and away from the big ship at the exact moment it cast a deep shadow from the yellow brightness of 216-11B across one of the rotating station's spoke-like pillars. With a perfect puff of a perfectly pre-cooled attitude thruster, and within the space of only a few terrifying seconds of concealing darkness, we floated down and laterally until we came to the inner rim -- that is to say, the upper hull -- of the station proper. The cyborg then moved us across the face of it, still running with the big ship's shadow: just a black streak within transient darkness.
Spinning comfortably as it did in the Lagrange Point, Mylag Vernier had bearing upon it predictable and unchanging cycles of light and dark. As we had been approaching the station, hidden in plain sight next to General Store, our two Sensor Specialists had been carefully analyzing the complex inside-surface of the wheel, laden as it was with sensors, conduits, power and support systems, and more. They studied and looked, running dark/light comparisons and analyses, until they finally found what they were after: a wide, solid protrusion, the base of which was always in shadow while the station spun round and round.
It was here that, with the gentlist of bumps, Mavis settled us down, and we vanished in an instant.
OOOOOOOOOO
"We're less than forty-eight hours, subjective time, from Blue Light Station, over the border, where we will stop and take aboard Corporatespace reps. They'll almost certainly make an intelligence inquiry while we're on their home turf. This is shaping up to be a firestorm, and you look like you've been playing with matches."
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 11
