Dreaming of Atmosphere

by Jim C. Wilson

  “Acquired target! Tracking! Firing solution valid! Firing!” I called.

  “Weapons release detected!”

  “All hands! Brace for impact!”

  “Detonation detected! Sensors offline!”

  Internal sensors indicate several hull breaches in aft cargo and engineering space echo-9.

  “Hergo! Denno! Are you still in aft cargo?” called Max, “Damn it! I should have told them to get out.”

  Deck Hand Denno reports they had moved back to Deck 2 immediately after jettisoning the debris, Captain.

  Max breathed a sigh of relief.

  Engineer Cutler reports that engineering compartment echo-9 is sealed and is airtight. Minor damage to life support module ‘echo’ reported, redundant systems online.

  “What can we see, Seth? Anything at all?” she asked.

  “Negative, we are blind on all sensors.”

  We sat in silence for several moments, waiting for our sensors to come back online, or for us to be blown to pieces by the enemy fighter. Suddenly, the ship reverberated with several loud bangs.

  Hull breach detected, Deck 1 aft ventral shaft. Losing pressure on Deck 1 command deck.

  “Never mind, we’re safe in here for now.” said Max.

  Another series of hits sounded from somewhere in the ship, the bangs travelling along the metal of the ship’s structure.

  Damage detected port nacelle. Condensing stream unstable in Module 4 of the port propulsion.

  Max grabbed the PA. “Mal, we’re losing module four on the port nacelle. Switch us over to hydrogen emissions.”

  “Sensors are coming up. They’re initialising.” reported Fel, “Calibrating…EM, gravity, radiological, optics are online, the rest are still calibrating.”

  “Radar?” I asked.

  “Standby.”

  More hits rocked the ship, but Tac didn’t report any damage.

  “Tac, damage report!”

  Nothing.

  “Tac?”

  “Captain, I am receiving text from Tac, but it appears he has suffered some damage. I am unable to make out the content of his messages.” said Fel.

  “Shit. Must have hit the sensor nexus.”

  “Or there was a power surge that feeds the nexus.”

  We could make out the fighter now, as the optical sensors started to feed data to our displays. We still couldn’t track the fighter with enough accuracy to fire with the beamer, we’d need our radar up and working for that. I gripped the console faring with both hands and took a deep breath. I was about to flood the console with my nanites and take control of the ship again, but Zoe’s words rang in my mind. If I suffer a seizure again, I could put the crew in great danger. I had to trust the ship to get us through the next few seconds.

  “Beamer charging!” I called instead, removing my hands from the console.

  “Radar coming online, collimating… radar ready!”

  I waited for the radar to start tracking the target, and watched the beamer controls and indicators eagerly.

  “Target acquired! Tracking! Beamer firing!”

  The sweet, sweet howl of the beamer eclipsed all other sounds briefly as the energy beam swept out into space and sprayed over the fighter. In less than a second it chewed through the weakened shield and then it was all over, the beam pierced the fragile hull and speared out through the rear of the ship. The glare of the fighter’s propulsion drive flared out and the ship tumbled out of control, a dead husk.

  “Target destroyed.” I said, slumping back into the chair. I heard the others release their breath in concert.

  46.

  Maxine left the command module to go help with damage control after that. I could see Fel was eager to go too, but Max put a stop to it right away. She wanted at least two of us on watch for now. The command module hatch opened with a hiss of escaping oxygen, and our ears popped with the change in air pressure. She shut the hatch as she grabbed one of our few remaining polycrete foam dispensers.

  It wasn’t too long before the damage reports started to come in. We didn’t realise how close we’d come to buying the farm, so to speak. There were over a dozen hull breaches across the three decks, and several in the engineering spaces. Strangely, for once, there were none in the mess deck. The main propulsion system had suffered some damage, and would remain offline until the extent could be assessed, and Max made Mal focus on that as a priority. Artemis, Zoe, Maxine and the two Argen spent the next eight hours making the ship space worthy again, and only once all the hull breaches were plugged did they get to the sensor nexus, where Tac was housed.

  Thankfully, Tax was fine, but our local network had suffered a break down after several power relays had burnt out. Fel managed to talk Max into allowing him to start work on a workaround, and she sent Zoe up to the bridge to replace him.

  When she got to the command module, I was feeling pretty out of it, and started to do some stretches in the chair to loosen up a little. I had a long shift ahead of me, and little sleep to back me up. Zoe was rather accommodating, and started off by giving me a shoulder massage from Max’s chair.

  “How are we looking?” I said, as she worked a knot out of my left shoulder.

  “Bit of a mess. Place smells like ozone and polycrete foam.”

  “When is Crege fit to get back to duty? Fel and I are going to be on here all the time, pretty much. At least until we hit the Jump Gate.”

  “He’s almost good enough for light duties, but I don’t want him walking around. If that bone graft doesn’t heal right, he’ll be in pain for the rest of his life. Or he undergoes very long and very painful surgery.”

  “Can he take this chair?”

  “Give me one more ship day, then I’ll do an assessment. As long as we can lift him in here, I suppose it will do him some good. He’s going mad with boredom.”

  “I bet. You’re actually the first doctor who he hasn’t threatened to kill on board this ship, you know?”

  “He has called me some colourful names, though. Usually in his native tongue.”

  We made small talk for a while, and it was good to have her near. It was usually at times like this that I found it easy to talk to her about my Star Marine days, and by extension my post-traumatic stress. I thought about it, but found that I didn’t really have anything to say that I hadn’t already talked to her about before. I think she sensed my mood, and her massage stopped. I didn’t have to see her to know that we was adopting what I called her ‘listening pose’. She would put her hands in her lap, bow her head slightly and keep her back straight. She would nod occasionally to indicate she was following what I was saying, offering short questions regarding my recounts, or probing for more information about my thoughts. She would then analyse what I’d said and interpret what I was going through, how my mind was processing things and how I could alter my perceptions and perspectives on certain aspects of what I had told her.

  When I didn’t say anything for a few minutes, she started to ask her questions.

  “We’re probably entering the most dangerous part of this leg of the journey, wouldn’t you say?”

  “We certainly are.” I agreed.

  “We haven’t spoken much lately, you and I.”

  “I’ve been pretty busy. I haven’t been avoiding you.”

  “I understand. I’m actually glad, to be honest.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You don’t feel the need to talk as much. It’s telling about how much progress you’ve made. You still have a long way to go, but I think I’ve given you all the tools you need to fight this last battle alone.”

  “You make that sound so final.”

  “I’ll always be here, but you don’t need my guidance anymore.”

  “I think I’ll always think of something to say to you, even if it’s just to say I’m fine.”

  “I’d like that very much.” She paused for a while before beginning again. “What do you think our chances are? Of making it to the Gate?”

 
; My first impulse was to reassure her, but it didn’t feel right to offer platitudes, not while she was in her listening pose. She always saw through my excuses or when I was telling myself lies to protect my subconscious.

  “Not good.” She waited for me to elaborate. “We’ve got a few days left, in which time the gap between us will close faster and faster. They’ll have a very good chance of just saturating our space with rounds, too many for us to avoid. It’s what I’d do.”

  “You’ve been fairly accurate with your guesses so far.”

  “Unfortunately, yes. We’ve used them to cheat death or capture so far, I just can’t see a way out of this one without blind luck or…or…I don’t know.”

  “You’ve also been able to outsmart the Corporates so far.”

  I sighed. “Sooner or later, odds are going to get so stacked against us that being smart or not won’t make a difference.”

  “I believe in you.”

  “I’m not infallible, Zoe. I’m old enough that inflating my ego doesn’t really make me think better. I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I really have nothing.”

  “I believe in you, Seth. Even if we fail, I’ll still think you’ve gotten us this far, you’ve done your best. That’s all a girl wants from a man.”

  “I wish there was some way to get you off the ship, I’ve faced death so many times that I’m used to it, but this time it’s different. The thought of you dying with the ship…it just…”

  She must have sensed my tension, as I suddenly jolted with an idea.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “...get you off this ship…”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  I grabbed the PA mic and called for Maxine to get to the command module. I wish I had Tac with us, I needed his calculations. I cleared one of the displays that I wasn’t using to monitor the space around us and started to gather sensor data and information about the Blade of Xerxes. Zoe could see that I was in the grip of something fierce, and kept silence while I worked. When Max arrived she merely stood behind me and watched.

  “I need someone to check these numbers, my math is not as good as yours or Fel’s.”

  “What am I looking for?” asked Max.

  “I need to know relative velocity, our acceleration differential, the inertial stabiliser field of the Xerxes, and whether or not the grav-plates in the Dreaming of Atmosphere can sync with the Xerxes’ stabiliser.”

  She gave me a funny look, and I sent my calculations to her overlay. She sat down and I watched her eyes darting to and fro as she read the data on her retinas. Her fingers twitched and poked at images on her overlay that only she could see as she tweaked the calculations and ran the numbers.

  “I’m still not following you but the numbers look solid. You want to throw our grav-plates at the ship?”

  “Sort of. With me attached to it.”

  They both gave me a collective “What?!”

  “It’s called an axial deployment. I jump out the aft cargo hatch, the grav-plates synchronise with the Xerxes’ stabiliser field and that arrests my inertia. Mostly.”

  Zoe’s mouth was just hanging open, while Max was shaking her head in disbelief.

  “And what in the name of the all the stars is that point of that?” she said.

  “What do you think we did in the Star Marines?”

  “Space stations! You did it on space stations!”

  “We trained on moving ships as well. We would get deployed in the middle of a fleet action, when the differential velocities were acceptable, and disable ships that way.”

  “Have you done it before?”

  “Several times…in training. Once in combat.”

  “And what are you going to do when you get on board? That ship has got to have over a hundred people manning it. Easily more!”

  “I’m going to disable the engines.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I’ll get off. I haven’t thought that far ahead, okay?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “We need to do this. We might be able to avoid this railgun a few times, over the next few days. But that lead time will get smaller and smaller. Even that plan we have to counter the laser guided shell is dicey at best. You said so yourself. What if they fire several rounds at once? They won’t even need to use nukes, standard explosives will be enough to smash us to atoms. We need to try something else.”

  “And you think jumping out onto the ship is the best idea?”

  “It’s what I’ve been trained to do.”

  “Care to share with us what the success rate of this…axial deployment is?”

  I stared at her. “Lower than fifty percent make it. Most of us splat.”

  “Splat!” cried Max, “You go splat!”

  “It’s just a slang word!”

  “You have a slang word for killing yourself on the bonnet of an organo-ship bearing down on us to kill us?”

  “Look, Max. It’s our only chance. You know we won’t survive a barrage at close range. That captain is going to be so pissed at us right now, that he won’t give a shit about recovering the Jump Gate, he’ll just want it gone and us along with it.”

  “I’m NOT losing another friend on this trip. I will NOT allow this madness to…”

  “I believe in him.” said Zoe. She’d been quiet up until now. Her small voice cut right through Max’s screaming at me. She just clamped her mouth shut and turned to Zoe. “If Seth says he can save us by doing this. I believe him. He doesn’t put himself needlessly at risk. It’s always a calculated risk.”

  “Zoe…I…”

  “It’s why you sent him to the military. You said so yourself. You needed him to have skills more like his father than you. You couldn’t teach him those things, but the Star Marines could. So you sent him.”

  “That’s not…I mean, I didn’t want him to…”

  “Look at him.” she pointed at me, and Max turned her face towards mine, “Really look at him. He’s whole. He’s strong and he’s smart. He’s this way because of you. Because of the choices you made that guided his life and his career.”

  She looked into my eyes, and I held them, daring her to deny me. I saw many things in Max’s eyes. I saw pride, fear, outrage and I saw raw pain.

  “If what he says is true, that the chances of escaping this ship alive fall with each passing hour, then what will it matter if he dies trying to stop it hours before we all die anyway?”

  “You’re both mad.” said Max, but her words lacked conviction. I smiled at her then.

  “No, we’re in love. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

  “You sound like bloody Fel. Was that some of that Way nonsense?”

  “Actually, it was Nietzche.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “That which does not kill us makes us stronger?”

  “Oh, that guy?” I nodded. She let out a great sigh and leaned back in her chair. “You are crazy, you realise that?”

  “Crazy enough to save the two girls I love most in the galaxy. Crazy enough to die trying.”

  “Don’t talk like that. If you do this, I want your word. You work out how to get back to us. No point in all this if we have to leave you behind.”

  “I’m already thinking of a plan. I’ll need Mal, Artemis, Fel and Crege to help me. And Tac.”

  “What else?”

  “A bomb?”

  “Pretty sure we got a few of those lying around here somewhere, asked the bitch for one.” She leaned back and grabbed the PA mic from its recess. “Cuts, Artemis, can you meet Seth in med lab. Fel, pull Tac out of the nexus and bring him up as well, repairs can wait a few minutes.”

  “Thanks, Max. I won’t let you down.”

  “If you die out there, I’ll kill you. Go, Zoe and I will cover the bridge. We’re going to have a little woman to woman chat about emotional manipulation.”

  I got up and climbed over the seat. As I passed Zoe I lean
ed down and we kiss passionately for a long while. Eventually Max cleared her throat, a little too loudly to be coincidental.

  “Enough, I’m getting all misty over here.” she said.

  47.

  My plan was simple, sort of. In order for ships to undergo any amount of high gee thrust there needs to be an inertial stabiliser that negates a portion of those g-forces felt within the ship. Propelling shuttles and ships to the speeds needed to reach escape velocity was often a painful, and at best uncomfortable exercise for early crewmen. On top of this, in the early days of space travel, there were a number of health considerations identified that made long term living amongst the stars undesirable. The loss of bone density due to low or zero gravity along with other concerns that meant human physiology would change over time made long distance travel a dangerous, and often one directional, journey for starship crews. With the advent of gravity technology, this solved both problems.

  The ability to manipulate gravity, at least in relatively small areas, meant that ships, space stations and habitats could simulate comfortable gravity levels, and negate some of the effects of inertia. The larger stations, like the giant torus styled affairs that were popular in the Eridani System, used centrifugal force to create gravity, or at least a downward pressure that could pass for gravity, but for stations like the Corus Cluster in the Argessi System that were cobbled together they needed gravity plates to hold its citizens and occupants to the decks. A grav-plate was a small scale device that would replace classic deck plates on a ship, or station, and would generate local gravity within a certain range of the plate. The Dreaming of Atmosphere had them all over the ship. Some of the engineering spaces didn’t need them, or they would interfere with the Ion Drives in some way. In the aft cargo hold, the gravity plates are unable to reach the very top of the compartment, and so the upper thirty seven centimetres of the hold are zero-g. It was a strange little quirk of the Meridian Class transports.

  The other thing my plan relied upon was the inertial stabilisers of a ship. I mentioned briefly about the need for Jump Gates to be within an area of space that is relatively free from the effects of gravity. The only way a ship is able to interact with the Gate’s event horizon instead of simply pass right through it is by negating the ship’s inertia so that it doesn’t interrupt the Gate’s complex energy fields. All stabilisers, therefore, were designed to extend beyond a few metres of a ship’s hull. This also has the added benefit of holding the ship together when it suffers undue stress and damage. They are rarely modified or turned off, so I was fairly certain that the Blade of Xerxes had one as well.