Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man’s long strides weren’t too unlike those of a giraffe in Erickson’s eyes, and the captain couldn’t help but grin as he recalled the last time he’d taken his now adult son to the San Diego Zoo. Then just nine years old, the boy had had the time of his life.

  The astrophysicist sat down and powered up the console, then accepted the data from Bellinger. “All right, Captain,” he began, “I’ve got the data now.” His practiced fingers danced over the console as he checked the specs and ran the figures, talking out loud to himself the whole time. “Let’s see now. The alien vessel is approximately six-hundred fifty meters in length. That’s about seven hundred and four yards, or two-thousand one-hundred and twelve feet...”

  Erickson drew a breath and sighed. Several decades ago most of the nations of Earth had come together in peace and formed an international military space force. So why couldn’t they agree on one system of measure?

  “Its mass is distributed almost equally fore and aft for the most part,” the astrophysicist was saying, “so the ship is tumbling and spinning on an axis virtually at its exact center. Very smart design on their part. Circumference of the danger sphere is approximately...six thousand, six hundred and thirty-six feet. One revolution of pitch every sixty-four point eight seconds equals...one hundred two point four feet per second, equals...three point two gravities. One revolution of yaw every one hundred seventy-two point eight seconds equals...thirty-eight point four feet per second, equals...one point two gravities. Three point two gravities of pitch combined with one point two gravities of yaw equals...just under three and a half G’s. Factor in the ship’s slow roll, and...”

  “Hold that thought, Lieutenant,” Erickson said. He doubted his brain could stand to hear anymore without suddenly hemorrhaging.

  “Three and a half G’s, Captain,” the young engineer interjected.

  Erickson looked over at her, inviting more.

  “That’s damn near impossible to work in for very long, sir,” she continued. “Even for someone very strong.”

  “Fighter pilots pull more than that all the time,” someone interjected from somewhere behind Erickson.

  “Not the same thing,” Erickson replied. Then he asked the engineer, “What if they use an exoskeleton?”

  “Those things were designed to compensate for high-gravity planet surfaces, sir,” she pointed out. “We’re talking about centrifugal forces here—negative G’s forcing our man off the surface. Forces that will constantly be shifting, I might add, their exact directions of pull depending on where our man is working.”

  “She’s right, sir,” Donmoyer confirmed.

  “Why constantly shifting, Lieutenant?” Erickson asked, looking back at the astrophysicist again.

  “Because we’re dealing with both pitch and yaw rotations,” the scientist explained. “If the bow of that vessel were the head of a stylus, it would draw a constantly curving line along its danger sphere. And that doesn’t even account for the slow roll, which I didn’t factor in yet. That could add up to nearly another half-G, depending on how far from the center point of the roll our man is, in yet another constantly changing direction. A pretty tight arc, in this case. Even if our man is strong enough to work against all those forces, which I doubt, he’ll also have to deal with a constant lack of balance.”

  “It’s going to be a very dangerous undertaking, sir,” the engineer added, summarizing what had by now become pretty obvious.

  Erickson thought the situation over in the span of about two seconds, then stepped back to his station and thumbed a pad on his command console. “Captain Erickson to Engineering.”

  “Engineering. Commander Doohan here, sir.”

  “I’ve got an interesting challenge for you, Jim. Mister Bellinger and Mister Donmoyer from Astrophysics are sending you some data.” He nodded to the men, who uploaded their scanner readings and calculations to the chief engineer. “Look it over, then meet me in the main conference room as soon as possible.”

  “Aye, sir. I’ll be on my way in a few minutes.”

  Erickson closed the channel, then began to put a plan together in his mind as he started toward the doors. “Mister Donmoyer, you’re with me.” The scientist shut down his console and joined the captain. “Mister O’Connor,” Erickson continued, pausing by the Communications station, “encrypt and encode to Solfleet Central Command our situation. Then have Lieutenant Colonel Zucker and Doctor Zapala join us the conference room.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Erickson left the bridge, with Donmoyer right at his heel.

  * * *

  “So what do you think, Jim?” Captain Erickson asked after he’d explained the situation to his chief engineer. “Can your people stop that thing?”

  The older, gray-haired, chief engineer turned his chair to face the wall screen and stroked his square jaw with his long gnarled fingers as he stared at the image of the tumbling Tor’Kana vessel. “Oh, we’ll stop it, sir, one way or another,” he answered with conviction. He gazed at the dizzying image a few moments longer, then turned back to the table. “But you said it yourself, Captain. It’ll be one hell of an interesting challenge. That thing is spinning like a giant baseball bat that got away in mid swing out there. If it hits something...” he warned, shaking his head, “or someone...”

  He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly as he pondered what they were facing, then finally offered up the first detail of the plan he’d been struggling to develop in his head for the last several minutes. “It would be best if we started with one person, alone.”

  “I agree,” Erickson said. Better to lose just one individual rather than a team of two or more. That was the obvious if cold-hearted reason for that decision. They all knew it, but no one wanted to say it. “So what’s your plan?”

  Doohan snickered. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have one.” Then, with the press of a button in the small panel imbedded in the table in front of him, he replaced the vessel’s image with all the data that had been sent to him earlier.

  “As you can see, the vessel is rolling at only about fifteen feet per second—much slower than its pitch and yaw. Our man would still be pretty unsteady there amidships, but he’d only have to put up with about a negative half-G. At least until he was ready to deploy the thrusters. That’s going to be tricky, regardless.”

  “Excuse me,” Doctor Zapala interrupted. “Roll, pitch, yaw—I can never remember. Which one’s which?”

  “Sorry, Rhea,” Doohan said, smiling at the olive-skinned woman. All traces of black in her hair had faded to silver long ago, but in his eyes she was still as lovely as she’d been the first day he met her, all those years ago. He lifted his arm in front of him to demonstrate as he explained, “Pitch is the ship’s up and down,” he began, raising and lowering his forearm with his elbow as the pivot point. “Yaw is its left and right, and roll is its rotation around its own lengthwise centerline axis. That ship out there has what we call a negative pitch—that is, it’s tumbling bow down and stern up—a negative yaw, or counter-clockwise spin, and a positive roll, or a roll to the right. Basically, it’s rotating on all three axis at the same time.”

  “Which is going to make approaching it extremely dangerous,” Erickson concluded, wanting to get on with it.

  “To say the least, sir,” Doohan agreed wholeheartedly. “He’ll have to set the work pod’s computer to match the ship’s pitch and yaw, then constantly adjust its arc for the steadily decreasing distance as he crosses the perimeter of the danger sphere and thrusts forward toward the center point.”

  “Danger sphere?” Zapala questioned.

  “The imaginary sphere formed by the perimeter of the vessel’s pitch and yaw,” Doohan explained to the doctor. “The line where my guy becomes the baseball to the vessel’s bat.”

  Now there was an analogy that she as a medical doctor could understand all too well. “Oh. I see.”

  “Who’ve you got in mind for this, Jim?” Ericks
on asked, half expecting the chief engineer to name himself rather than expose one of his beloved ‘junior knuckle-draggers’ as he called them to such risk.

  “Probably Lombardo. He’s the strongest guy I’ve got who has the right experience.”

  “Good. I was afraid you might try to volunteer yourself. You just got back on your feet. I can’t afford to lose you again.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Captain,” Doohan said with a smirk. “I’m getting far too old for that kind of fun. Sick or not, my reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and I seriously doubt I have the strength for it. Besides, I’ve got a whole boatload of strong young men and woman down there who still don’t know any better.”

  “The best you’ve got, Jim. I don’t want to lose anyone.”

  “Nor do I, sir. Lombardo’s the right man for the job.”

  “All right.” He turned his eyes to the securituy chief. “Colonel Zucker, I want as many Security Forces teams as you can put together ready to board that ship as soon as Jim’s people bring it under control. Hostile zone protocols again. We’re not getting any bio readings from her one way or the other, so we don’t know what you might end up facing over there.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Same goes for you, Doctor,” he pointed out to Zapala. “And I want at least two medical teams outside in separate shuttles while Lombardo works to stop that thing. If something goes wrong, I want help on the scene as fast as possible.”

  “You’ve got it, sir,” she assured him.

  “If Colonel Zucker’s people find any survivors, I’ll want your medical teams all over that ship, but none without a security escort.”

  “Understood.”

  “Any questions?” Erickson asked, looking around the table. No one spoke up, so there apparently weren’t any. “Okay. Let’s get on this, people. I want your teams inside that ship as soon as possible. Dismissed.”

  Chapter 28

  As Admiral Hansen sat back in his recliner with a cup of coffee and read over his notes for tomorrow morning’s meeting with the Joint Chiefs—God, he was even working on Sunday afternoons now—he started thinking back on what he’d told Mirriazu during that impromptu one-on-one meeting they’d had right after the Timeshift briefing on Friday, and before long he wasn’t seeing his handcomp at all. To quote one of the president’s own phrases, what a song and dance he’d performed for her—telling her that he’d never dealt with time travel before and that he didn’t know anything about altering the past or creating a new reality, when the real truth was that he had dealt with it and that he did know something about it. He didn’t know anything definitive about the results of those efforts, of course, and maybe he never would, but he sure knew something about trying.

  And, as he’d explained to Liz after he got back from that meeting, the unfortunate results of what they’d done six years ago—or to be more accurate, the unfortunate lack of results—would only make sending someone else through the Portal that much more difficult. Günter had never returned from his mission and they’d seen no signs of change. No results of any kind, in fact. Hansen had hoped that maybe, at the very least, even if Günter failed completely, he might make contact with either him or Liz once his timeline caught up to theirs—if such a thing were even possible—but even that had not come to pass.

  Apparently, Professor Verne’s flowing river theory was the right one after all. Either that or Günter’s actions had simply failed to affect on the timeline. Or he’d died before he ever had the chance to try. Whatever had happened, Sergeant Graves, or whoever else they might end up sending back, if anyone at all, would probably never return.

  He hadn’t been able to share any of that with Mirriazu, of course. Not without getting both himself and Commander Royer thrown into prison for the rest of their natural lives. Not to mention half a dozen other officers, at least twice that many enlisted technicians, and even a few government-contracted high-profile civilian scientists who’d been stationed on Window World at that time. He hated that he’d had to withhold the truth from her like that—that he’d had to lie. She was a dear friend in the truest sense of the word. The fact that he’d had no choice didn’t matter to him at all. The bottom line was that he’d lied to someone who trusted his word implicitly.

  At least he’d been honest with her about his nightmares. He really didn’t have any idea how or why they had changed. At least, not beyond the theories he’d brought up at the time. Hell, who knew? Maybe their reality really was connected to some kind of parallel timeline somehow. Maybe two—or three or four or how many more?—timelines were intertwined with each other in some way. Illogical? Ridiculous? Perhaps. But he couldn’t dismiss the possibility of it outright just because it sounded like science-fiction, no matter how hard it might be to accept. To do so would be nothing short of irresponsible. After all, who in their right mind would ever have believed fifty years ago that the Portals could exist?

  And besides, how else could he explain the change?

  Actually, he recalled as he willed his eyes to focus on his handcomp again, he’d been honest with the president about one more thing. The upcoming counterattack in the Rosha’Kana system. He’d told her that he thought that was where they needed to concentrate their efforts. And that was the truth. It might have been for very different, or at least much more specific reasons, but he essentially agreed with her assessment of the Timeshift Resolution. That mission had to be their absolute last resort.

  The comm-panel chimed. Hansen set his handcomp aside and got up with a grunt, went over to the panel, and opened the channel. His heart sank the second he saw the Civil Security sergeant’s face, and he sighed. Heather. It had to be. “What did she do this time?” he asked.

  “Admiral Icarus Hansen?” the sergeant inquired before he answered. He obviously had to verify who he was talking to before he could say anything.

  “Yes, Sergeant, I’m Heather Hansen’s father. So what is it this time?”

  “It’s actually nothing major this time, Admiral,” the sergeant told him. “Just a minor trespassing charge.”

  “Trespassing? Where?”

  “She and some of her friends were caught at the adults-only section of the beach.”

  “The nude beach!” Hansen shouted. “Are you kidding me?”

  Despite the level of authority inherent in his own position, the sergeant seemed to recoil, just a little. “I assure you, Admiral, I’m not kidding,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Hansen said, raising a hand to stop any further explanation. “You just caught me a little off guard with that, that’s all.”

  “I understand completely, Admiral. I have a teenage daughter of my own. With that in mind, you should know that I’ve looked into Heather’s record. I’m aware that she’s on juvenile probation, but I’m also aware of...” He glanced around, then lowered his voice. “...of the service she provided last month.”

  “And?”

  “And I talked to my lieutenant. We’re not going to record a formal charge against your daughter this time. You can come get her and take her home.”

  Hansen let out a breath he hadn’t even known he was holding. “Thank you, Sergeant. Tell your lieutenant I appreciate that.”

  “Everyone here appreciates what you and your people do for us, Admiral...every day. I’ll see you when you get here, sir.” The sergeant reached out of frame, and the screen went dark.

  “Aw, Heather,” Hansen said, shaking his head and sighing yet again. “You were doing so well, too.”

  He snickered. “Adults-only beach,” he scoffed as he got up and headed into his bedroom to get properly dressed. “There shouldn’t be such a thing up here in the first place. Damn Peoples’ Liberal Party majority. Talk about a subculture. Some of them don’t get voted out of office soon, I’m going to end up talking to myself.”

  Chapter 29

  Lieutenant Junior Grade Mark Lombardo had just started his third year in the fleet, and he couldn’t have been happier if they’
d made him an admiral right out of the academy. As a boy, he’d always loved to tinker with things. Every Christmas he’d begged his indulgent parents for the latest electronic toys, only to dismantle every one of them to see what made them tick as soon as he got them. The most amazing thing though was the fact that he’d had a knack for putting them back together as well, properly, and usually on his first attempt. Sometimes he even modified them to add features or just make them work better. So an assignment to one of the fleet’s newest starcruisers as a junior engineer was like a long term vacation in Heaven for him.

  When word came down from the chief that he was looking for a volunteer to fly a work pod out to the alien vessel and rig its hull with a series of portable thrusters to stop its tumbling, Lombardo had been the first to volunteer. Only afterwards, as he was suiting up and preparing to depart, did Commander Doohan come to him and tell him one-on-one that he would have been assigned anyway, had he not volunteered. The commander had then gone on to explain, almost as if to apologize for that, that the job required a better than average pilot physically strong enough to work under the difficult conditions this particular job entailed—specifically, greater than normal G-forces. Regardless of the reasons, he knew Doohan wouldn’t have chosen him if he didn’t have confidence in his abilities, so being selected had been a great boost to his ego.

  Now, if only they had a larger work pod onboard...or at least one with a bigger cockpit. His six foot five inch, two hundred eighty-five pound muscle-bound frame plus double extra-large EVA suit made for quite a tight squeeze. He barely had room to move his arms.

  He piloted the pod to within a hundred meters of the Tor’Kana vessel’s so-called danger sphere—personally, he preferred to call it the sphere of death, though he certainly hoped it wouldn’t actually live up to that name—then brought it to a stop relative to the enormous vessel. Then, having not had an opportunity to see the one they’d found last week because he’d been elbow deep in the guts of the Rapier’s backup reactor at the time, he sat idle for a couple of minutes, just to gaze at the tumbling behemoth. After all, he’d never seen a Tor’Kana ship before, except in pictures, and if the rumors were true and there weren’t many of them left, he might never have another chance.