The Lost Star Gate (Lost Starship Series Book 9)

by Vaughn Heppner

  The gigantic blast sent waves of gamma and x-rays, heat and EMP, but those didn’t matter in the greater scheme of things. The front motherships took damage. But, given the massive number of ships present, that mattered very little.

  What did matter was the destruction of the nexus. It was gone. Thus, there would be no more hyper-spatial tubes from the Omega Nebula to anywhere else in the Sagittarius or Orion Spiral Arms.

  -106-

  The severely battered starship sped through the hyper-spatial tube, journeying one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-eight and a quarter light-years before Victory exited the tube.

  Seven minutes and thirteen seconds later, the tube faded away, leaving Victory alone in a distant star system in the Sagittarius Spiral Arm.

  At that point, people began to stir on the starship. Maddox wasn’t one of them. He’d barely made it to medical before the ship raced for the tube entrance in the Omega Nebula. In medical, a doctor had given Maddox a shot, inducing sleep so his body and mind could start healing.

  Ludendorff was worse off, with broken bones, torn ligaments and a severe concussion, although the professor would live. Sergeant Riker had been rendered unconscious earlier, but had sustained relatively minor injuries compared to the professor.

  All three of them were under sedation.

  From the bridge, Lieutenant Noonan initiated an investigation of the new star system. Data quickly flowed in. The system had a giant red star, one terrestrial planet—the star had probably devoured any other inner terrestrial planets when it had originally expanded. There were three outer gas giants with two asteroid belts mixed in and a thick Kuiper Belt beyond the last ice giant.

  “I’m not finding any indication of Swarm ships or colonies,” Andros Crank reported from his station.

  “That’s a relief,” Valerie said from the command chair. “I want you to analyze our hull next. I have to know if we have a ship or not.”

  “Clearly, we have a ship, as we’re intact,” Andros said. “While we’ve taken heavy damage, we have hull integrity.”

  “I need to know more,” Valerie said. “Lots more. We’re far from home, and I don’t see any nexus—”

  “Found it,” Andros said. “This nexus is just beyond the terrestrial planet’s orbital path. Makes you wonder if the nexus used to be closer to the star, when the star was younger, I mean.”

  Before Valerie could comment or ask why Andros was checking for nexuses when she’d just given him an order concerning the hull, the hatch to the bridge opened.

  Lieutenant Keith Maker waltzed onto the bridge. He had a huge smile, and his uniform jacket was open all the way. With his right-hand thumb, he loudly popped off a champagne cork from a glistening bottle in his right hand. He gripped the bottle by its neck.

  “Congratulations, mates!” Keith roared. He watched the cork sail against a station, laughed, and raised the gushing geyser of a champagne bottle. He must have shaken it pretty hard on the way up.

  With another laugh, Keith moved the bottle to his lips as he slurped bubbling champagne.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?” Valerie demanded, with her arms crossed.

  “Cheers!” Keith roared, raising the bottle high, marching toward the lieutenant.

  “Mr. Maker!” Valerie shouted. “This is the bridge.”

  “Right you are,” Keith laughed, guzzling more champagne. “This is the bridge and you’re the finest acting ship’s captain any vessel in Star Watch ever had.” Keith looked startled, blinked with theatrical showmanship and nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said in a different voice. “She is a fine one, lads, and with an ass that never quits.”

  “Keith!” Valerie shouted. “Behave yourself.”

  The ace hunched his shoulders and wagged a forefinger at her.

  “I am not going to behave myself, sir,” Keith said. “Not after I singlehandedly destroyed the great and terrible menace in the other nexus. You know the one I mean. The one Meta and Maddox had to use a star gate to reach.”

  “You’re drunk,” Valerie declared.

  “Drunk on victory, lass,” Keith said, grinning wide, taking another healthy swallow of champagne. “We did it,” he said, marching up to her and throwing his arms wide—all while keeping hold of the champagne bottle.

  “Keith, stop,” Valerie said. “We have work to do.”

  “I sure do,” Keith said. He engulfed her in a bear hug and kissed her smack on the lips, and his breath tasted like champagne, all right.

  “Keith,” she said, after fighting free of the embrace.

  The ace grabbed her more forcefully, but he didn’t kiss her again. Instead, face to face, he said, “You have to bend once in a while, love. When you win the super victory that just saved everything in Human Space, you’re allowed to cheer, kiss the girls—well, I’ll do that part—and have a party. Let’s party, love.”

  “Keith,” Valerie said, and there was pleading in her tone.

  Maybe for the first time, the ace looked around the bridge and at everyone staring at him. He released Valerie afterward. “Where are we in terms of our galactic position?” the ace asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to determine,” Valerie said.

  Keith swigged more champagne. “You gotta admit that we beat the odds.”

  Valerie nodded, and she wondered if the ace didn’t have a point about celebrating their fantastic victory.

  “We won!” Keith roared, raising the bottle high and guzzling like a maniac afterward. “You want to know the best part?” he asked.

  Valerie shook her head.

  “It was my idea to fire the antimatter missile through the star gate. I lined it up and I launched it from the floor. That was slick, don’t you agree?”

  “I do agree,” Valerie said.

  “Right,” Keith said. “This time—” he looked around the bridge. “This time, I saved the day.”

  Valerie couldn’t help herself. She smiled and said, “You’re the hero, Mr. Maker.”

  “Ah-ha!” he cried. “I hereby request you to join me in my quarters to have a party and celebrate.”

  Valerie nodded. “I will. Later. You go drink. You deserve it. Sleep it off and later, you and I will—”

  “Make out!” he shouted.

  Valerie blushed.

  Keith blew her a kiss, turned to Andros and aimed the top of the champagne bottle at him. “Figure out where we are, mate,” the Scotsman slurred. “I want to get home and tell everyone what I did. This is the best mission ever.”

  “The ship is seriously damaged,” Andros said.

  “I figure that’s so,” Keith said. “Well, don’t fret. I’ll think of something. First, though, first I’m going to celebrate our victory against this Ghar-Yon-Tog. Who would have thought it would be my missile that finished off the monster?”

  “You go and have your celebration,” Valerie said. Keith deserved a party, but she didn’t like seeing him drink so openly. That wasn’t good for him. She’d have to talk to the captain about this. Speaking of—

  “How’s Maddox?” Valerie asked as Keith left the bridge. “Does anyone know?”

  Galyan appeared, and the holoimage gave her a rundown on Maddox, Riker and Ludendorff.

  “I have a question, Valerie,” Galyan said.

  “What is it?” the lieutenant asked the holoimage.

  “If Professor Ludendorff is out of commission for a time,” Galyan said, “who is going to go and talk to this nexus? How do we make a hyper-spatial tube from this far out that can get us home? Yes, I talked the last nexus computer-core into helping us, but Ghar-Yon-Tog had corrupted it. I do not believe the Old One will have corrupted this computer-core.”

  Valerie didn’t have a ready answer. And she knew Galyan was right about distance.

  Andros had already calculated their distance from Human Space. It was outside the safe hyper-spatial tube-traveling limit. They had beaten Ghar-Yon-Tog and escaped the massive Swarm invasion fleet, but they might never be able to reach
anyone in Star Watch to tell them.

  -107-

  Maddox stirred and realized he felt too groggy. He must be under some kind of sedation. A glance around showed the captain that he was in a medical facility aboard Victory.

  He scowled. Why did he feel so…so weird? Yes. It felt as if his thoughts traveled through molasses.

  A jolt of pain in his head—his brain, his frontal lobe—welled up then. The jolt made him wince and rub a spot on his forehead.

  “I would leave your head alone if I were you, sir,” a nurse told him.

  She was a pretty young thing, an ensign. This might be her first voyage out.

  “Is something wrong with…?” Maddox stopped talking. His tongue felt as if it was twice normal size, as if he was slurring his words.

  “You’re highly sedated, sir,” the blonde-haired nurse said. “I’m surprised you’re talking at all. That has to take great effort. The doctor is hoping you sleep.”

  “What’s wrong with me?” Maddox asked slowly.

  “I’m not supposed to say, sir.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She peered at him, looking frightened, but shook her head just the same.

  The questioning exhausted Maddox. He closed his eyes and lay back. His frontal lobe throbbed several times, and it struck him that his mind ached. He had a strange memory of screaming—but that couldn’t have been him.

  He wasn’t able to finish the thought as he fell into troubled slumber.

  ***

  Maddox stirred later, and a vision swam before his numbed eyes. He saw a nurse as through a water glass, as if he was a kid leaning his chin on the table and staring through his glass of water at his grandma.

  Maddox could barely tell it was a nurse. Maybe she was the same nurse that had refused a direct order.

  His head throbbed. He tried to reach up to rub his forehead, but something held his hand down.

  It took him a good long while to focus his eyes on his right hand. Was that a strap holding down his wrist? By damn, it really was a strap.

  It took far longer for his head to make the journey to stare at the other half of his body, the left half. After a time, he looked down at his left wrist. A strap held it down, too.

  “Nurse,” Maddox said, although it came out jumbled, as if he’d crammed a ton of marbles into his mouth.

  The indistinct nurse hovered over him. Maddox could no longer tell if she was pretty or not, or if she was the one who had disobeyed his direct order.

  “What’s wrong with me?” Maddox slurred.

  “You’re under heavy sedation, sir,” the nurse said.

  “Why?”

  “The doctor will tell you later.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I can’t.”

  She didn’t seem bothered by refusing him this time. Before he could figure out if it actually was the same nurse, his eyes closed and his world became blank.

  ***

  The days passed like that for Maddox. No one visited him that he could tell. His head throbbed most of the time, but the sedation robbed it of its full power. That was the captain’s verdict anyway.

  Then, he woke up one day with a startling conclusion. Ghar-Yon-Tog must still be alive. The Old One still screwed with his mind. This was his punishment for what he’d done on the haunted nexus.

  After that, Maddox became cunning. He feigned sleep and watched with hooded eyes.

  Yes, a nurse, a big beefy fellow, this time, gave him an injection. After that, everything became blurry and indistinct.

  When the captain woke up again, he feigned sleep once more, and when no one was around, he worked on loosening his binding straps.

  He was a prisoner. That wasn’t going to last.

  Maddox had a secret with one of his fingernails. Some time ago, he’d had it lacquered and then sharpened. Not even Meta knew about it. With the lacquered fingernail, he carefully sawed off one strap.

  Later, when it was dark, he worked furiously on the other straps. His head pounded as he toiled, and his mouth became bone dry. He felt nauseous, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him.

  Finally, with everything sawn through, he was ready, and he feigned sleep yet again.

  A beefy nurse came later—Maddox couldn’t tell the time. The man approached the bed, and Maddox sat up, whipping the covers over the man’s head.

  Swiftly, Maddox surged to his feet, and his eyesight swam as he tried to maintain his balance. He had to clutch the side of the bed one-handed, and by that time, the nurse had freed himself from the sheet.

  “I have to give you an injection, sir,” the nurse said, holding onto a hypo. “It’s for your own good.”

  “Yes, my mistake,” Maddox said, feigning total exhaustion. It wasn’t that hard to do.

  The captain waited as the nurse stepped nearer. Then Maddox sucker-punched the man in the gut and kneed him in the balls, making the poor fellow double over in pain. A last kick and the nurse went down hard.

  Maddox bolted from the chamber, walking swiftly through medical. He only spied two others on duty, working elsewhere. He actually made it to a corridor, hurrying down it as his eyesight swam and as he dragged his left hand along the wall for balance.

  A holoimage appeared before him.

  Maddox staggered back in surprise, and his head truly started throbbing.

  “Captain,” Galyan said. “You have to go back to bed. You have received possible brain damage. The medics are trying to cure you.”

  Maddox decided this had to be a trick, and he charged through the holoimage, hurrying for his quarters.

  Meta, in the company of several medics, met him three corridor-turns later.

  “Dear,” Meta said, with worry etched across her face. “You’re still under treatment. You’ve been getting fractionally better—”

  “No more sedation,” Maddox snapped.

  Meta looked at Dana Rich in her white lab coat.

  “Fine,” Dana said. “No more drugs.”

  Maddox would have nodded, but that would have hurt his head too much.

  “You don’t look well,” Dana said.

  Maddox did not address that.

  “Is your head hurting?” Dana asked.

  “Ghar-Yon-Tog did it?” asked Maddox.

  “That is the prognosis,” Dana said. “You mumbled most of the story in your sleep. You also roared with pain before we figured out why you have these headaches. You’ve taken some brain damage, sir.”

  “Where is the ship?” Maddox asked.

  “Galyan and I have almost reached the answer,” Dana said. “We’re far out in the Sagittarius Arm. The real question is, ‘Can we go home again?’”

  Maddox stared at Dana. The world was starting to grow dim around the edges.

  “It’s happening again,” Meta said.

  Dana nodded, but did not comment.

  “Sigma Draconis,” Maddox whispered. “Take us there.”

  “To the ship yard at Sigma Draconis?” asked Dana.

  Maddox nodded, and that was the last thing he remembered this time around.

  -108-

  As Maddox endured the sedation—at lower doses now—and his throbbing headaches, the rest of the crew worked on getting home again. The Sagittarius star system was over one thousand light-years beyond the safe traveling distance through a hyper-spatial tube. Five thousand light-years was the limit.

  Still, a hyper-spatial tube was the only way Victory could hope to reach Earth again. Traveling through the Swarm Imperium with the star drive and with Laumer Points did not appeal to anyone.

  At Valerie’s orders, the starship maneuvered to the nexus. She held a staff meeting, and agreed with Dana that they might as well try the direct approach. The longer they stayed out here, the less chance they had of surviving. The hull was intact, but that was just barely true. Far too many ship’s systems had broken down and every day new ones broke down.

  Dana led the expedition to the nexus—this was her show in more than on
e way. Without the professor’s help, Dana figured out how to break inside the silver pyramid. The place seemed dead inside, but that was normal. After several hours of interior exploration, Dana and her team came upon the old Builder computer core.

  It turned out that this nexus—or the computer core, at least—did not have any hostility against Victory or humans in general, nor did it have any wish for the Swarm Imperium to expand. This nexus’s computer core had gone haywire—to use Dana’s precise technical term—approximately three hundred and twenty-one and a half years ago.

  Fortunately, Dana and Galyan were able to figure out how to jumpstart the hyper-spatial tube machine inside the nexus. That machine took an entire day to find. Using the starship’s computers and working for twenty-nine straight hours, they calculated distance, power and other specifics.

  At Dana’s request, Valerie held another staff meeting. The doctor went over their chances. This could go wrong in any number of ways. She looked at Valerie.

  “Let’s vote,” Valerie suggested.

  Dana nodded.

  Everyone voted for trying the hyper-spatial jump. Morale, which had soared after their victory over Ghar-Yon-Tog, had begun to plummet again.

  “You all know the odds, right?” Dana asked.

  “We voted,” Valerie said. “Now, let’s do it.”

  Preparations took fifty-three hours of intense work.

  “This is Joe Magee work,” Dana said at one point.

  “What is that?” Galyan asked.

  “The professor uses the term sometimes,” Dana explained. “It means this is a makeshift, jury-rig operation.”

  Galyan’s eyelids fluttered. “Yes. I understand,” he said.

  Finally, the moment came as the starship waited ten and a quarter kilometers from the nexus. Soon, a silvery swirling mass appeared. It didn’t quite have the same shiny-silvery sheen the others had shown.