Exploration

by Beery, Andrew

  Captain Running Stream reasserted control. "Seal those breaches and get me a status report, ASAP!"

  He used his trunk to flip on an intercom.

  "Engineering... I need power for shields and jump drive, in that order. Give me an update."

  A voice filled the bridge that Cat assumed was the Chief Engineer. "I can give you 80 percent on the shields now. The rest will take a dry-dock. As for the jump drive... I'll need ten minutes."

  "You have five!" Running Stream snapped.

  "Captain..."

  Running Stream cut him off. "Make it happen, Engineer!"

  "Yes, Sir."

  The ship continued to shutter as the asteroid shield was repeatedly hit by massive beams of focused plasma traveling at near relativistic speeds.

  Running Stream looked at Cat who was still sitting at the navigation station. She started to get up but he waved her down. The crumpled and dying form of the previous navigator was fifteen feet off to the left of the station where he had been thrown. In fact, his bridge was in a shambles. Only two other officers seemed to be on their feet and functioning.

  "I have no idea how you learned to fly this ship with a total of ten minutes on the bridge but right now I need a navigator and you're it. Give me your word that you will do your best to protect the lives of all on this ship and I'll give you a provisional commission here and now."

  "Agreed," Cat said "If the offer is extended to my two friends." She pointedly looked at Sassi and Ben.

  "Done, and done 'Commander' Kimbridge," the Modos captain agreed. "Lieutenant Sassi, our computer interface is pretty much fried. I understand you are something of an expert. See what you can do."

  The Ashkelon stood as tall as a four foot hairy moth could and returned a sharp "Sir, yes Sir!"

  "That leaves you Lieutenant Ben..."

  "Sir, I'm a power systems engineer. I may be more useful in engineering helping to get your drive back online than here on the bridge."

  "I agree, but I don't have anybody free to guide you to engineering."

  Ben smiled... a startling sight in a six legged canine. "You forget, Sir; I'm cybernetic. My internal computer had a pretty complete map of this ship several days ago."

  Captain Running Stream looked at him and raised an eyebrow in yet another very human gesture. He toggled his ship-wide intercom.

  "This is the Captain. We have been attacked and are still under attack. It seems our secret has been discovered. For the moment there are more questions than answers, but despite those questions I need each of you to focus on your individual areas of expertise. We will live to fight another day. All slaves are to be confined to quarters except those needing medical attention. From this point forward they are our guests and are to be treated according.”

  Looking speculatively at Ben, he continued without pause,“Inductees 6, 9, and 4 are now to be considered crew. Commander Kimbridge and Lieutenant Sassi are assigned to the bridge. Lieutenant Ben will be serving in engineering. I need major systems available in the next five minutes."

  He paused to look at the decimated bridge. Cat swore she saw a tear in the corner of his eye. Slowly, deliberately, with grave solemnness he continued in a softer tone.

  "Aside from our newest members, this crew knows better than most how important our mission is and why it is critical that we survive this day. That is all."

  ***

  Ken watched the scene from the Bluefin Bridge unfold on his holographic display. He felt like he could reach out and touch his friends and yet despite his proximity he might was well be in another universe. He felt powerless.

  The comments the captain had for the Modos crew were intriguing. Clearly more was going on than had been initially apparent.

  "Cat, do you have any orders?" Ken queried via his commlink.

  Cat sub-vocally responded immediately.

  "You and Ricky continue to feed my AI your sensor data. We are almost blind here. Deploy a nanite sensor mesh over critical areas of the Bluefin hull but be careful to keep them hidden. If any sections are at risk of failure, at your discretion extend your shields to protect them. It seems apparent that despite their ability to jump between universes; our hyperfield technology is far more advanced than theirs."

  Ken heard his friend and commanding officer open a channel to Ricky Valen on the Honey Dipper.

  "Ricky, can you and Honey set something up for me?"

  "Sure thing, Madam Admiral, Sir. What do you have in mind?"

  ***

  The captain of the Dreadnaught Red Tide swore. The traitorous quarry should have been destroyed by the first dozen salvos but their cunning captain was using their transit shield to delay the inevitable. He yelled at the young fry scurrying about the massive bridge.

  "Move us closer! I weary of this game... let us end it now!"

  As a unit they jumped to implement their irate captain's latest order. Too many of their former colleagues had met an early demise by taking too long to respond to his orders.

  Slowly the powerful plasma drives began the task of countering the existing momentum and moving the ship on a course that would bring it closer to the Bluefin. The power of their beam weapons was a function of the square of the distance between the ships in question. As the vessels moved closer the amount of energy delivered to the target increased rapidly.

  The Red Tide's strategy was not sophisticated. It was simply to bludgeon the enemy vessel with its primary beam weapons until its intended victim was so much detritus floating among the stars.

  ***

  Honey leaned forward and pointed towards an asteroid field that was near enough to be useful for Admiral Kimbridge's plan to work.

  "There," she said in a husky voice that Ricky found vaguely distracting but not as distracting as the excessively tight jumpsuit she insisted on wearing. For an android she certainly knew how to 'flaunt her hardware' as it were.

  Ricky coughed to clear his mind from where it was going as she leaned forward. He looked at the spot she had indicated.

  "Go ahead and deploy a cloaked Sandy and extend the repulsion shields to give our little friends a tiny push."

  ***

  Cat watched Ricky's progress. The Sandy was a weapon developed during the D'lralu war. It was a device that released a specialized group of construction nanites. They were programmed to tear apart any physical matter they ran into. In this case they would be tearing apart fifty-three metric tons of water and methane ice. The asteroid in question had been pushed into a path that would shortly place it between the attacking ship and the Bluefin.

  A slowly expanding cloud of dust slowly moved between the two combatants. The plasma beams had no trouble punching through the wispy vapor. Cat smiled. The intent was not so much to stop the beams as to destroy their cohesion. The result was a dramatic fall off in the beam intensity. There was an immediate and dramatic decrease in the ship's shuddering.

  Captain Running Stream noticed immediately. "Sensor team—analysis! Have they scaled back their attack?"

  "Negative, Sir. There seems to be a bit of interstellar dust between us and the dreadnaught. It's dispersing the beam a little."

  "Navigation, plot a course and apply lateral thrusters. Try to get more of the cloud between us and them."

  "Aye, Captain" Cat said as she punched in the coordinates she had already calculated.

  Slowly the Bluefin shifted in space. Between the movement of the dust cloud and the now slightly lateral movement of the Modos slaver, the energy dissipated against the transit shield fell by another 10 percent. Cat estimated this bought the rapidly disintegrating shield another three minutes of useful life. It had already been six minutes since the attack had begun.

  Cat was reluctant to tip her hand by having either Ken and/or Ricky intervene. Either of their ships could be a game-changer given the hybrid Human/Heshe technology employed by both of them. Fortunately she was spared this choice. Just as she had decided to instruct them to extend their shields the light on her panel indicati
ng a functional hyperdrive flashed violet, which was the Modos equivalent of 'Green.'

  "Captain, we are 'go' on hyperdrive!"

  "Lieutenant Sassi does our computer have a set of jump parameters for us?"

  "Negative, Captain. The computer is still offline. I've manually calculated a set of jump coordinates that will move us eleven light years towards the galactic core."

  "Manually?" Running Stream looked at Cat as if to confirm he had heard correctly. She smiled and nodded her head.

  "Why eleven light years?"

  Sassi turned in his seat to face the Bearephant. "Eleven seemed like a nice even number."

  Running Stream shook his head and turned towards Cat. He had previously confirmed that she knew how to engage the engines for a hyperjump. He nodded to her now.

  "Jump us, Commander."

  "Yes, Captain. They will, of course, follow us," Cat said as she engaged the hyperfold engines. Mentally she sent the new coordinates to the Honey Dipper. Ken's pinnace, being attached to the Bluefin like a lamprey would come along for the ride regardless.

  "True," Running Stream acknowledged. "But it will take them time to reacquire a targeting solution. Time that we can use for repairs."

  The stars changed as the Bluefin reemerged in normal space. Ricky confirmed from his vantage point on the Honey Dipper that the Dreadnaught engaged its hyperjump engines and followed the Bluefin in its own hyperfold.

  "Shields up!" Running Stream yelled as soon as the jump was complete.

  Ken relayed sensor data that showed the big ship had jumped into their region of space a good .25 parsecs father away. Clearly the level of tech was not as advanced as the GCP. That having been said, the beast still packed one hell of a wallop.

  Cat looked at her available sensors on the Bluefin navigation board. Surely there would be some way of detecting a hyperfold event in the mass of sensors available on this board. Most, unfortunately, seemed to be geared toward detecting gravity waves. Cat supposed this was critical for a ship that used supermassive black holes to travel between parallel universes.

  Captain Modos saw her searching frantically over her board. "Is there a problem, Commander?"

  "I'm looking for the hyperfield perturbation array."

  "I'm not familiar with such a device…at least not one we call that. What does it do and perhaps I can help."

  "It detects and locates nearby hyperfold events. If that big bully jumps after us I want to know where it is."

  Captain Modos looked at her for a few seconds before he did something completely unexpected. He laughed, rocking back and forth in a purely Bearephant manner as he chortled.

  "I knew you were what we needed! Tell me Commander, how does one detect a hyperfold?"

  "Well," Cat considered the question. "It's not terribly dissimilar to detecting a gravity wave but the angle of incursion is ninety degrees out of phase. I suppose I could modify your gravimetric sensors to do something similar but you would not be able to use them for dimensional transits until they are restored."

  "And this will tell us the terminus of a vessel that hyperjumps in our vicinity?"

  "Negative, Sir. It will tell us how far away they are but not the direction. We would need three observations points to accomplish that."

  Captain Running Stream hit his comm. "Engineering. Prepare two gravimetric sensor probes. Commander Kimbridge will give you instructions for modifying them."

  Cat smiled. She loved it when a plan came together. She and her companions would do their level best to help this captain and honor their pledges, but at the same time they were gathering incredible intel for the GCP.

  '…if they could ever report it,' she mused.

  Chapter Seven: Escape...

  The newly minted Modos officer Lieutenant Ben stood in the Bluefin's fabrication bay. Four gravimetric probes lay on tables. Their guts where splayed out. Ben was working with an old friend of his. Yhsif it turned out was a reasonably competent junior engineer.

  "See if you can't get that solder joint a little cleaner. We need to be able to get all of this stuff back inside when we are done."

  Ben had decided to modify four of the probes rather than the two requested. This would give them two spares in case they could not recover a set between jumps. He was just closing up the second of the four when the ship shuddered. Emergency klaxons resumed their wailing.

  "I guess our friends have found us again" he muttered.

  "They're no friends of mine," Yhsif grunted as he folded the modified circuit board back into the third probe.

  "So..." Ben started to say. The ship rocked again, a bit stronger this time. He opened a direct link to Cat. "Cat try rolling the ship to disperse the energy across the shields. We just got these bad boys working again. I would hate to burn them out."

  "Not my first dance, Commander... er... I mean Lieutenant," Cat shot back.

  "Yeah about that...," Ben thought back. He was interrupted by Yhsif who was completely unaware of the silent exchange between the GCP officers.

  "So?" The Bearephant echoed.

  "Sorry... I became distracted by the bad driving upstairs."

  Yhsif grunted.

  "So why do you suppose are we being attacked?" Ben continued.

  Yhsif looked decidedly uncomfortable. "I best not answer that. It's something that the Captain should probably address."

  "That bad?"

  ***

  Yhsif carefully and covertly made his way to a storage locker on a lower level. The ship's manifest listed its contents as defective electronic hardware. The type that accumulates over time in any ship as complex as a star ship. What Yhsif was after, however, was not a piece of defective hardware.

  His fingers felt around the side of the door to the locker and he pulled free a small remote control. He hated what he was doing but he had no choice. The Modos syndicate had his wife and children.

  Quickly he typed in a few commands and a series of coordinates. He pressed the send button and replaced the small remote. Silently a small probe, one of several dozen stuck randomly about the hull, detached from the side of the Bluefin. It looked like a piece of dirty ice or rock. It remained passive. Its message would be transmitted only in response to a specially coded signal.

  ***

  Cat's finger hovered above the button that would flood the hyperjump nodes scattered about the exterior hull with exotic matter. The influx of these particles would begin a cascade of events that would ultimately result in hyperfold occurring in time-space. Captain Running Stream had instructed her to be ready. As soon as word came from Engineering that two of the modified probes were ready to launch they would jump.

  The ship was in no immediate danger. The Dreadnaught had apparently jumped considerably further out and so their beam weapons were far less effective than they had been during their first encounter. In addition, Ricky had used another of the Sandy's to create a dust cloud between the two ships. To be sure, the Bluefin was being hit, but it was nothing that her shields could not handle for a few minutes. The transit shield that had been their main defense earlier was essentially gone... worn away.

  Finally the word from engineering came that all was ready and the Captain ordered the jump. As soon as normal space reappeared the sensor officer launched two of the probes.

  "Probes away," Cat confirmed.

  Sensor data began to stream in. The sensor officer, a young female judging by the color of her fur, whistled. Cat had not heard any of their former captors make that sound so she looked up with a start.

  "Sir!" The young officer said perhaps a little too loudly. "If I am reading this correctly I am reading two hyperjump termini forming."

  "Two?"

  "Yes, Sir... but..."

  "But what, Ensign?”

  "Sir, I can only confirm one ship with optical scanners."

  Running Stream stepped out of his command chair and walked over to the sensor station. He ordered the two probes to be recovered now that they had accomplished their inten
ded function. He looked over the Ensign's shoulder at the displays on her station.

  "It would indeed appear like there were two hyperfold events but only one ship appeared. Any thoughts, Commander?"

  "It's hard to say, Sir," Cat answered. "It's makeshift technology and we don't have a fully working computer to filter anomalies. It is probably an artifact that we can mathematically suppress once we can crunch a few numbers and understand what we are looking at."

  "Perhaps you are right," Running Stream said, but to Cat's ears he did not seem convinced. Cat of course knew the second blip on the sensors was the Honey Dipper.