by G. H. Holmes
On the screen, the enemy fighters grew in size and gained a menacing presence.
"How will the ship take many successive jumps, Sir?"
His gaze on the star map on the tabletop, Ben was entering jump coordinates. "I don't know, Lieutenant. I'd say between us three—that is the ship, you and me—I'd hazard a guess that you are the weakest link—physically speaking." He glanced at her. "That's nothing personal."
"I know, Sir." Cherry said with her best professional voice. She didn't like it, but he was right.
"You are our canary in the mine, Lieutenant. If something goes out of whack, you'll be the first one to notice. So please, tell me when you get nauseated or impaired in some way."
"Aye, Sir." Cherry braced herself.
She sat rigid when the billion points of light exploded around her. But while she passed through the glory cloud, a familiar exuberance came over her and she inadvertently shouted with joy. A few moments later the light vanished and she sat up straight again.
Harrow's eyes were still on her. "You okay?"
"Yes, Sir. Pardon my shout."
Post-transition, they were now one klick behind the swarm of x-jets that had been racing towards them. The computer chirped and whistled softly as it calculated again and found workable target solutions.
On the big screen, Cherry saw the burning pods of many x-jets flying away from them.
As soon as the computer had found a target solution for the last of their challengers, Ben touched the fire button.
Twelve morning stars shot out of the Western Sun's nose cone in rapid succession. Cherry saw how the bright balls appeared on the screen and fanned out to lock onto their targets. The universe in front of them swarmed with active little stars.
Since the enemy jets had expected to travel another three to five minutes until they'd reach the incoming spacecraft, they hadn't engaged their energy shields. Their pilots sat unprotected except by the metal and vitrum that made up their crafts. None of them had expected morning stars to appear just one klick behind them virtually out of nowhere. Now it was too late to get the shields up. The morning stars were traveling way too fast.
When the twelve bombs exploded, they obliterated the Vamrah x-jets and rocked their piece of the universe. They would have blown the Western Sun to smithereens, too. But by the time they blew up, Ben and his ship were already a million miles away.
Harrow now jumped into the battle with both feet. He took on swarms of Vamrah fighters and helped Gemina cruisers and frigates in distress.
One time, when he hovered in space for almost ten minutes without jumping, a Vamrah cruiser suddenly appeared behind them and aimed a volley of torpedoes at the Western Sun. But by then Ben had figured out how to manipulate the quantum wind drive and he was about to weaponize it. Thus, when the torpedoes had hardly left their tubes in the Vamrah cruiser, Ben had the target computer calculate their position and once they were established, he projected the heat atop the Western Sun onto those torpedoes via QW-device.
It was an experiment.
Ben had been wondering whether he could make immaterial parts of the Western Sun to jump, such as the heat on its top. When a flash, bright as a star, appeared by the enemy cruiser, he had his answer.
The torpedoes exploded in the close vicinity of the giant ship and tore holes into it. Ben zoomed in on the damage and they saw how equipment and man-sized ants were sucked out of the broken ship.
Blue energy pulsated from the battle domes of the cruiser and raced towards the Western Sun.
Ben engaged the quantum wind drive and a few seconds later he appeared behind the enemy ship, while the intense light from his own ship's top still hovered in the old position. The cruiser kept on firing at the brightness ahead. The cloud of fire vanished and was once again atop the Western Sun.
Ben was ready to try out a new weapon, the plasma jet. So far he'd been reluctant to employ it, because he wasn't sure how his boat would handle that kind of energy consumption. But since riding on the quantum wind worked so well, he decided to chance it. If need be, he could always swing by Gemina's twin suns for a recharge.
This was a revolutionary new way of making war.
Ben's hand came down on the fire button and a bright white lance shot through space, reached the cruiser and began to cut it in half. After five seconds Ben decided to terminate the attack. He could sense what a drain it produced on the overall energy reserves of his ship. It was so pronounced that it dimmed the lights in the cockpit; on the monitor appeared optical noise.
Cherry seemed to bathe in lightning.
A few seconds later the twin suns of the Gemina system filled the screen once again. Charity saw them and began to sweat. She screamed when it appeared that Harrow was steering them straight into one of the balls of fire. Its surface came so close, they seemed to dive into it. Cherry feared that, along with the ship, she might flare up any second and braced herself in her chair. But suddenly a billion points of light rushed up around her, cooled her and enveloped her—and once again she was far away from the two stars.
In rapid succession Harrow brought the Western Sun up behind swarms of enemy fighter craft, which invariably turned into dying comets. He hammered frigates with his impulse lasers until they disintegrated and turned into floating rubble. It didn't take terribly long for the enemy to realize that a true predator had entered the pond and they began to flee him. Even cruisers, the most powerful battleships of the Vamrah, thought it prudent to enter defense mode as soon as Harrow's ship lit up in their vicinity. Invariably their energy shields went up, handicapping a lot of their weaponry, and they tried to motor away.
The Western Sun jumped in and out of Planck Space so rapidly that in the end Cherry started to get dizzy. She heard the hiss and roar of weapons as they discharged. The explosions pictured on the wall screen multiplied. They melted into one giant explosion until it seemed that the entire universe was burning.
Her eyes were on Harrow's hands. She'd never seen anybody move his fingers faster than he did. His head, his eyes, his entire being move much quicker than any human she'd ever seen. He looked as if he were living life in fast forward. Cherry shook her head and covered her face with her hands. What she was experiencing right now was just as surreal as the episode that had her stuck in Deep Space. Her thoughts began to jump like crazy hares and she began to doubt her sanity. What she was seeing—what she was experiencing was so far out of the ordinary that she had a hard time suspending disbelief.
Ben noticed her distress.
"Cheer up, Lieutenant Jones," he exclaimed. "There's a million things for you still to learn about this universe. Welcome to my world!"
Cherry had the hardest time to take her eyes off him. The way Ben Harrow sat in his commander's chair was the way a king might sit. At the same time he was highly alert and working the tabletop with both hands.
Again Charity sunk into the cool cloud of lights as the Western Sun jumped to a new location. But this time the experience didn't stop. Instead, the bright white light turned silver and when it faded, the cockpit and even Ben Harrow no longer looked as they'd looked before.
Harrow seemed to notice, too. He held up his hand before his face and turned it over while he studied it.
He looked over to Charity. "Do you see what I see, Lieutenant?"
Charity's heart was hammering in her chest. "The world's turned to silver, Sir."
And it was true; their ship was still solid, but it had gotten transparent somehow. The edges were now more pronounced than before and all flat surfaces seemed to be made of silvery vitrum. Marveling, Cherry's monochrome index finger slid over her arm rest.
"It seems that we've discovered a new dimension," Ben Harrow said.
Cherry looked up because she could see people walking around in the cockpit. A second later they seemed to have vanished and she wondered if her mind hadn't played a trick on her.
No! They were still there.
If she didn't look at them, she could perceive t
hem. But as soon as she tried to focus on them, they mysteriously vanished.
"Sir, who are those people walking around in here?" Her voice was steadier than she felt.
Harrow was aware of them, too, because he addressed them. "Who are you?"
But there was no answer.
Cherry felt light as a feather. The headache that had begun to nest in the back of her head was blown away.
Perhaps they had died and didn't know it?
Cherry giggled. If dying was like this, it wasn't so bad. She wondered what Harrow thought about that.
"Sir, have we passed on?"
"I haven't died often enough to claim authority on the subject," he replied. "But it seems that we have entered a new dimension—or another one, if new is the wrong word."
Cherry still tried to capture the image of the people walking around the cockpit, but try as she might, she couldn't. They remained elusive. Elusive like ghosts.
Were they ghosts—or angels?
Suddenly she had the sensation of falling; it was as if the entire ship had gone over a cliff and was now descending through a waterfall. While this sensation persisted, the silver sheen left the objects around her and their natural color seeped back into them. They dropped into the local Euclidean space around Terra Gemina and everything was as it always had been.
"The stories we'll have to tell!" Ben shouted.
Cherry noticed, he wasn't intimidated by what they had just experienced. Instead, he reveled in it.
Chapter 30
Ben had just turned a Vamrah frigate into floating debris, when an unusual signature appeared on his target screen. His gaze went to the wall screen at the front. Quickly he zoomed in on the approaching craft. It was glowing orange like a flame and drew a comet's tail after it.
Cherry finally recognized the craft's design. "Sir, this looks like the bandit that attacked Harrow's Dale the other day. I made war on it and, and…"
And got shot down, she didn’t have to add. He knew.
Ben, his eyes still on the screen, nodded. "I've seen it, too. What we're looking at is an extremely rare Delta cruiser. Classified Human Union design. It's used for hit and run missions. Very powerful and very fast."
Cherry gnawed on her lip. What he'd said explained why she herself had been unfamiliar with this kind of cruiser. The navy obviously kept some things hidden even from its alpha-certified fighter pilots.
The Delta cruiser rushed up and passed them on their port side, all the while firing short impulse lasers at them. The shafts of light started out white and turned orange and then green and blue the closer they came to the Western Sun. A whole field of lances was now rushing towards them. Cherry watched them close in while Ben Harrow calmly entered coordinates into the QW-destinator. She tensed. Her heart slammed in its cage and she was sure that this time they'd waited too long. This time they'd go up in flames as so many Vamrah craft had done. But then the saving river of light washed around her and when she could see clearly again, the Western Sun hovered behind the Delta cruiser.
But the massive ship turned around horizontally, like an iron on ice, and its nose was pointed at their own ship again.
"How did they figure out so fast where we are?" Cherry said.
"Superior technology," Ben explained. His eyes were still on the tabletop.
Light erupted from the tip of the Delta cruiser and a bright ball of fire raced towards the Western Sun.
"A morning star, Sir!" Cherry yelled.
Ben briefly looked up and saw it on the screen. The target computer chirped. As soon as it did, Ben's finger came down on the plasma-cannon button and a thin white lance shot out and met the incoming ordnance. The bomb exploded and turned into a short-lived yellow sun.
Limber as a fighter jet, the Vamrah cruiser rushed by on their starboard side and fired blue laser lances at them.
Ben's fingers raced over the tabletop at close to the speed of light. He had to work quickly to get the Western Sun out of harm's way, because this time the distance between the two spaceships was very small. Relatively speaking.
Just as the billion points of light broke lose around them, there was a brief impact, which made Cherry to shout.
"Ouch," Ben said.
That was the drawback of not having any protective energy shield on board. The Sun was only an experimental craft, after all.
As soon as they'd arrived in their new location, about five hundred klicks away from the Delta cruiser, Ben checked the systems status. A laser lance had hit one of the tiles atop their craft, but it had ruined only that one tile, not the entire surface. The fire atop the Western Sun was still burning brightly.
Ben glanced over to Charity. "Relax, Lieutenant. All systems are in the green."
Charity exhaled and relaxed, but not very much.
After Ben was sure that there was no secondary damage, he computed the trajectory of the Vamrah cruiser and its speed, and computed how long it would take until it had reached a certain point, which it couldn't evade, given its speed and direction. Then he flew there via quantum wind and deposited a mine. A second later he winked away and appeared behind the Vamrah cruiser.
When the enemy ship saw what was lying in its way, it desperately tried to correct course and missed the mine by about thirty meters as it rushed by. The charge exploded and threw the Delta for a loop. It remained integrated, though, which spoke for its powerful armor.
Ben followed it and immediately fired roentgen laser rays, thin as a hair, at the cruiser in an attempt to cut through its orange energy shield. But the invisible laser beam only made the shield to crackle at the precise point of impact.
"Awesome…" Ben muttered under his breath. This cruiser was sturdy like a fort.
When the Delta accelerated and made its thrust-pods to flare, Ben saw his chance and sent a volley of short laser pulses into them. The electric blue light in one pod was dimmed to orange and then conked out.
Panic seemed to come over the Vamrah cruiser's crew, because it began to zigzag away. Ben followed the Delta under just the power of his own pods.
"How come aliens are using human technology, Sir?" Cherry asked. If the Delta was a classified vehicle design, how come the Vamrah were using it?
"There are no aliens, Lieutenant," Ben said, "but I know what you mean."
He fell quiet and Cherry wondered if she hadn't asked her a question at an inappropriate time. It was probably not wise to talk to a general while he was making war on a formidable enemy—even if his name was Harrow.
"Considering that this is an unusual craft we're pursuing, and considering that the Human Union doesn't share its classified technology, I'd say the obvious reason his treason. Somebody gave it to them. At least the design."
"But who would—"
A volley of colorful lights was streaming towards them and Cherry fell silent and stared at the screen.
Ben deftly maneuvered and avoided the blizzard of laser pulses by diving under it.
Cherry imagined she heard the charges crackle as they went by overhead.
"We'll have to find out," Ben said. He raked the likely waypoints of the Delta cruiser with a barrage of laser lances. The Delta was hit three or four times, but was only rocked by the impact, because its orange shield was still burning brightly. Ben was still trying to figure out how he could eliminate it.
Suddenly the Vamrah cruiser spun around on its axis once again and fired a plasma bomb at the Western Sun. Ben saw it coming at the last moment and tried to evade it. He did, but only almost. Ben leaned the top of his craft towards the plasma bomb and when it went off, most of its energy was absorbed by the tiles there. But Ben immediately sensed overload in the system. The roof of the Western Sun was getting too hot. The systems status computer flashed a blueprint of the ship into the glass of Ben's command table and he saw that a duct was glowing red in the otherwise blue model of the ship.
He immediately stood. "Lieutenant Jones, it may get very hot in here in the next minute or two. I want you in the
pilot's chair, where you will steer this craft away from the entrance to the pylon road. I'm sure you noticed that this cruiser is trying to go there. Speed our ship up, find an asteroid and hide in its orbit."
Cherry's eyes were wide. "Will I be able to fly this craft, Sir?"
"You'll find the pilot's station to be a duplicate of the cockpit in your x-jet. I need to go now."
And before Cherry's eyes Ben Harrow began to expand. He began to glow, until he'd turned into a radiant cloud of blue energy—the walls of the bridge turned blue, reflecting his light. His clothes fell away. Like a lightning Harrow hit an outlet in the wall and was gone.
Charity was shocked. Her mouth was dry and she found that she couldn't move.
Had she really seen what she'd seen?
Or had her eyes betrayed her? She looked around the bridge, but Harrow really was gone. Cold shivers went down Cherry's back at the thought of what she'd just witnessed. Like a robot she got up and staggered over to the empty bucket seat in the front, where a human pilot could manually steer the ship, if need be. It was a built-in redundancy. She was thankful for that safety measure right now.
Blinking, she sunk into the bucket seat, and when she sat, the floor opened and a HOTAS-stick came up, together with a panel array similar to the one in her fighter jet. The familiar environment relaxed her. Her feet found the pedals and her right hand found the throttle, and when the system came alive, Charity did as she'd been told.
The Western Sun streaked through the universe like an arrow.
Less than ten minutes later Ben Harrow suddenly stood behind her again. She bolted when she heard his voice. A glance over her shoulder showed him buttoning his blouse.
"I see we're still flying straight," Harrow said. "I'm taking over, Lieutenant. You are relieved."
While Cherry was watching, the system panel in front of her went blank and it and the HOTAS-stick were retracted into the floor.
"You can stay where you are," Ben said.
