“There! Right there! ” Ashley pointed to the asteroid behind them.
“You want to-”
“Send us in the opposite direction so fast they can't keep up,” she finished for him.
He plotted the course quickly, just over fourteen thousand kilometres. “At your peril,” he said, throwing up his hands.
“More like-” Frost started.
“Two, one, mark!” Ashley interrupted loudly.
Finn's hand came down on the final initiation button for the particle emitters to send a burst of hyperspace particles out across the hull of the Samson and their cargo that would allow them to accelerate at many times the normal rate and for a split second the Samson increased speed at a rate of several thousand kilometres per second, effectively stopping it's motion in one direction fast enough to begin sending it careening recklessly towards the asteroid. Fighters, gunships and the asteroid itself whipped by as Ashley fought to guide the small ship right across the bow of a destroyer, past a wing of fighters that had freshly launched from a more distant carrier. “Plot our course fast!” she said through gritted teeth. “I'll have to blink sometime.”
Larry's fingers worked the console as quickly as he could. “Can't get a clear exit path, keep it together just a few more seconds Ash,” he said in a tone that feigned calm as he struggled with the math and constant trajectory updates.
As the exotic particles coating the hull dissipated evenly across the vessel it started becoming more difficult to make course corrections. The engines were firing at full thrust as they swivelled and swung at the ends of their thin pylons. “Hurry, hurryhurry,” Ashley whispered.
“Got it! Locked in!” Larry announced.
Ashley quickly rotated the engine pods in the right direction, locked the manual controls and initiated the automated hyperspace entry sequence. The Samson lurched under the sudden increase to full thrust and as the hull was once again coated with energized exotic particles it accelerated to faster than light speeds.
“Energy shielding down to four percent on the dorsal section and I have no power reserves to reinforce them. The rest of the ship isn't much better,” Laura announced as she watched the hull start taking direct strikes from antimatter enhanced gauss cannon rounds. She winced as a torpedo struck the upper quarter of the aft section. “Aft down to one percent.”
“The Samson 's clear!” Price announced.
“Explosive decompression reported in section A12, we just lost the main lines to the primary port engine,” came the announcement from engineering.
“Time to leave. Best speed to my designated point,” Captain Alice Valent ordered, marking a point in space on the main tactical and helm displays. “Let's see if they're willing to play chicken. Bring all weapons to bear on the command carrier and open fire.”
The remaining torpedo launch tubes, beam weapon emplacements and all the turrets aboard the Triton took aim at the command carrier ten times her size as Panloo fired the engines towards the largest ship in the fleet trying to combat them. Every knuckle on the bridge was white as all but the forward and bottom shields on the ship failed, the ablative hull began taking hits and the massive command carrier in the distance slowly began turning, trying to accelerate out of the way.
“Gunnery deck here, we're down nine cannons and sealing into sections! Get us the hell out of here!” shouted Frost's third in command.
“If you panic and fall apart, I swear I'll go up there and shoot you myself! Keep it together!” Alice shot back.
“We've lost containment in compartment E71 to E84,” Price said sedately. “No casualties.”
The carrier's main batteries began to open fire as the three destroyers and many other smaller ships moved out of the way.
“Forward shields are taking massive fire, they'll be down in eleven seconds at this rate,” Laura said, trying to keep her voice steady and calm.
Lalonde, Randolph
Spinward Fringe Frontline
“Nice of them to clear a path for us,” Alice said with a wolfish grin. “Plot a course that takes us into hyperspace at a six degree upward angle from them. Panloo, start on this trajectory right now,” she said as she sent the course to her station.
The Triton angled up with a jerk, reflecting the anxiousness of her pilot and started suddenly away from the line of fire, but through a narrow, clear space between the engaging ships.
“Course ready!” announced the sweaty navigator to her right.
“Go!” Captain Valent ordered.
The Triton accelerated suddenly and before anything else could get in her way they were far from the defensive fleet.
Loose Wiring
Ayan's attitude was unprofessional, inappropriate, but that didn't change how she felt. I'm a highly trained engineer whose worked on starships, developed new technologies, analysed mysterious devices and even consulted on a new class of ship. There are several bots and even a few people just a hundred meters away who could do this just as well, but I'm here because none of them could squeeze inside this tiny claustrophobic space hundreds of meters up.
“How's it going in there?” Jason asked through the slim line that extended from her suit all the way back through the tiny darkened passageway that ran the length of the landing pad the Regent Galactic and West Keeper soldiers were holding position on. They had entered the blocky, thick hulled general purpose vessel that was on the pad and were dug in.
“It's fine,” she answered peevishly. “Still moving.”
Three more small combat drop ships had made hasty landings since they had joined the random gathering of resistance fighters adding over two hundred soldiers to the fray. They pushed the resistance fighters back behind their secondary makeshift barriers, a much more dense, well built wall made of bulkheads and other heavily constructed equipment and hastily moved and welded fixtures. The soldiers wanted access to the subway station behind the resistance, which used it to move between different key levels in the spaceport and were keeping it open for more refugees and survivors to join them. More worn and injured people arrived every hour, and though the numbers in the resistance was swelling, the more well armed and prepared soldiers were still winning ground.
Ayan had started looking at schematics and blueprints of the starport as soon as she had a handle on the immediate situation and within an hour a plan was formulated. The enemy had cut the communication and power lines that linked the ship to the spaceport, but the landing gear of the ship was still locked to the landing pad and there was no way of severing that connection without using heavy cutting equipment. Thus far the resistance had been able to keep the enemy away from the forward struts effectively enough so the physical cables were still linked from inside the landing platform.
Her plan was simple. Someone would climb inside the tiny cable passage with power and data cables and tap into the hard mooring systems under the old general purpose vessel many of the West Keeper soldiers were using as a base of operations. With no one else her size equipped with the basic knowledge to make the link, or wearing a thermal and sound dampening suit, that person would be her. Being sent on the errand shouldn't have been insulting, she had infantry training and had been sent into small spaces before but there was a nagging thought in the back of her mind; I'm about four hundred meters up and the sheathing for this passage is about half a millimetre thick.
Sweat beaded on her forehead and wetted her palms, the suit took care of it before it started to be a problem and she knew the metal support she had her safety hook around was strong enough to bear ten times her weight but her fear of heights was an irrational thing and as she came up on the section of the landing pad's underside where the protective sheath had been blown away she stopped. The monitor on her faceplate informed her that her heart rate was elevated, her overall stress level was increasing fast.
Ayan made sure her safety tether was securely attached to the support running the length of the pad and took a deep breath while her hand followed the pair of slim lines
leading to her belt and shoulder. Everything was secure, regardless of how high up she was she was completely safe. Biting her lip, she pushed off slightly and felt the comforting thin metal sheeting disappear from beneath her as she moved out into the open air to hang by two strong lines the thickness of human hairs.
It took all her concentration and determination to combat the fear that twisted her stomach in knots, forced blood to rush to her head so severely that she could hear her heart beating between her ears and made her sweat profusely.
“Ayan, your vitals are way too high, are you all right?” Jason asked again.
“Shut up, oh please shut up!” she snapped.
“Oh no, you're-”
“Afraid of heights! That wasn't in my intelligence jacket? Guess you spooks don't catch everything, do you?”
“Guess not,” Jason chortled. “Just focus on your safety line and what you have to do.”
“What do you think I'm doing!” She moved carefully along the support rod, one hand moving above the other rhythmically and methodically. If for some reason the hook or lines gave way she could always hold on to that rod until her suit could form a bond with the smooth, hard underside of the platform. Her breath caught in her throat as the rod she was attached to ended. The blueprints said that the support rod went all the way to the end of the platform, not that it bent inside the metal above then came back out several meters later.
Her instinct was to look around in an effort to find something else to attach her safety line to. She looked in the wrong direction first. Peering over her shoulder and down into the yawning depths of the dark inner station landing pit, her heart leapt into her throat. Landing platforms jutted out from the sides like shelves and spoons leading to hangars, transit ways and hallways. Her eye was drawn mostly to the shadowy depths in the center. The bottom was a thing imagined and not seen, a place where her mind's eye painted her crushed and ruined. “Jason, I'm sorry I snapped at you,” she whimpered.
“It's okay. I understand.”
Ayan laid her forearms and shins against the underside of the platform and her suit started to form a bond with the metal. Her heart felt like it was going to break free of her chest, she just wanted to stay right where she was until someone else could come get her, come save her. Her military training was winning, however, even if just barely. “The support rod ends, I'm going to have to use the climbing tech in the suit to get across,” she whispered in a hurried, panicked tone that surprised her when it echoed in her ears. She'd only heard herself sound so frightened once before.
It was during her first tour on the Sunspire, before she met Jonas Valent. Her Captain had ordered her and a few of the engineering crew into the reactor core to shield them from a massive electromagnetic burst that killed everyone else on board. The darkness, filled with drifting corpses who had been her friends, and the possibility that their enemies could return to salvage the ship, to kill her and everyone else who had survived was something she'd never forget. They managed to get the ship back to Freeground, but for weeks she couldn't so much as look at an image of that ship, it was enough to send her into tears.
At first she thought being put in charge of the Sunspire's recommissioning by Freeground Fleet Command was some kind of cruel joke, but it was an opportunity for her to advance her career, to prove that she could survive one of the most horrifying experiences any technician in the fleet had survived in recent history. The ship still felt wrong somehow until Jacob Valance was given command and they changed the name.
It was like he gave the ship and crew purpose, direction, made it a place where people could accomplish something. He was out there somewhere, or at least someone who had all his memories, who would probably want to meet her, someone she needed to meet. He wouldn't have trouble getting through this. The thought crossed her mind as the display on her headpiece confirmed a lock with the underside of the landing platform.
“We can try to send someone else, maybe a bot to just cling to the bottom away from the cable cover,” Jason offered.
“They'd be detected for sure, I have a chance at this and it's just a little further,” she replied hurriedly as she slid her splayed body, one forearm, one leg at a time. All the while she watched the indicator on her visor to ensure that the surface of her suit was firmly bonding with the metal. Several centimetres of her left shin wouldn't bond and she thanked God that she had managed to remain flexible thanks to a regular yoga regimen as she spread her knees out to the side and let the suit bond a good portion of her thighs, stomach and chest to the platform.
In theory she could hang by one shin and hold half a ton, but with the dark void just waiting for her to fail, to fall, she couldn't bond securely enough. It was slow and before she had gone five meters she was breathing heavily because of the exertion of the act. Ayan's vacsuit didn't have a problem bonding to the metal of the platform, but sliding upside down, doing anything upside down, took a lot more effort than crawling normally. Now this is something I should add to my workout regimen. Maybe at a height of four feet, but still, this is anything but easy.
“You're almost there, four more meters and you should be able to see where they burned through the platform side mooring cables.”
Ayan looked up along the underside of the platform and to her relief she spotted a pair of eye hooks for fastening servicing equipment right beside the box that hung under the landing gear clamps that forced a power and data connection to the ship and prevented it from lifting off. She crossed the distance and carefully pulled one arm away from the platform underside to fasten her hooks to the heavy metal loops made for supporting several tons of equipment. “I'm at the box, linking into the port now,” she reported as she drew a slim cable from her command and control unit and plugged into the multi-purpose port on the side of the heavy white box.
The display on her command and control unit reported that the codes Yves had given them were working and that the ship was still linked to the hard connection on the landing platform. “They didn't cut the interior cables,” Ayan said with a relief.
“Fantastic, can you get the box open?”
“Yup,” the access hatch on the side of the box flopped down and plummeted past her. For a second her eye followed it and she momentarily froze before shaking her head and focusing on the data and power lines that once led to the spaceport computers. She disconnected them with a quick turn and gentle pull and hurriedly pulled the power and data line that was attached to her leg free, firmly seating the end in the socket. “You should see a good connection to the ship now.”
“There it is! Now get back here so we can start causing some damage,” Jason exclaimed excitedly.
Ayan pulled the small data cord leading from her arm unit free and started back, hesitating before detaching herself from the heavy support hooks. She was crawling backwards, watching the surfaces of her shins, knees, thighs, arms, chest and stomach hold fast to the metal surface of the platform's underside. Most of her suit was working properly, but fear drove her as much as anything until she made it back to the support rod and attached herself to it.
She moved as quickly as she could without getting herself tangled with the cables that shared the cramped service space with her and at long last her feet came out of the thinly sheathed service shaft into open air. The main service conduit was almost beneath her. It was built out of heavy braced metal grating and led back to the main platform above. Her boot touched the solid edge and she unhooked herself from the support rod. As she removed the second safety line hook everything shook so violently that all she could do was grab for the support rod. Her attempts to secure herself failed as she was flipped onto her stomach atop the thinly walled, creaking cable sheath.
Everything was creaking, quaking, bouncing her around inside the small space violently enough to force sections of her suit to harden, keeping her from seriously bruising or breaking bones and the sheath was rattling loose, giving way under her weight and the twisting pressure of the sudden motion. Sh
e quickly tried to turn so she could face the underside of the platform again and only made it half way before the cable cover gave way and her body started to fall with it into open space.
An instinctive grab with her left arm caught the support rod. Her right hand joined it as her body swung free, dangling out over the yawning pit with the safety of the interior service tunnel just two meters away.
The world was still shaking and she hung on for dear life, her grip, her sanity tested as she prayed she wouldn't be killed in a tragic fall. She squeezed her eyes shut and gripped the support rod as hard as she could. When the shaking stopped she scrambled, thoughtlessly, desperately to grip hand over hand to the service crawlway and safety. The safety rod ended prematurely, leaving her to cross the last half meter on her own. She didn't give herself time to think about her options; instead she fortified her grip and swung her lower body away then towards the opening, letting go at the last second and hurling herself into the meter high service passage. She lay on her back, just catching her breath for a moment when a though occurred to her. I could have taken that slowly and bonded my suit to the metal of the structure, made my crossing that way instead. Would have been safer. Hey, maybe I'm getting over my fear of heights after all. She turned over and brought herself up into a crouch, looking over her shoulder at the sheer drop behind her before starting into the much safer service tunnel. Vertigo threatened to overtake her at even that slight glimpse from relative safety. “Nope, definitely still afraid of heights,” she chuckled to herself nervously.
“Are you all right Ayan?” Jason asked.
“What the hell is going on up there?” She replied, trying to catch her breath as she moved as quickly as possible to the ladder that would take her to the access hatch in the floor behind Jason.
“Judging from the sensors on the ship you just connected me to, someone just overloaded a fusion reactor inside the mountain. No one could have survived in there.”
Frontline sf-4 Page 46
