“Not off the top of my head,” Fix grunted.
“In the galaxy, there is approximately…”
“Minerva,” Jennings groaned.
“There’s a lot, n’est-ce pas?” Lafayette said. “Enough to make most ship sensors go haywire if they didn’t have a way to filter it out.”
“They couldn’t see us because there was enough dust around us to make their sensors filter us out?” Fix asked.
“Yep,” Jennings said.
“Nice,” Fix said with the slightest of nods of respect in Jennings’ direction.
“Fix, you have the conn,” Jennings said. “Lafayette, Squawk and I need to get the shields up and running before my navigational skills get us all killed.”
3
“What do you mean you lost them?” Rocca demanded. “Did they use their FTL to escape?”
“We would have seen that,” the sensor tech responded just as an alarm sounded on his console. His voice seemed to vanish in his throat. “Mr. Rocca, the sensors just read an FTL engine engaging. It was behind us.”
“How did they get behind us?” Rocca asked quietly and deliberately. “A sensor malfunction?”
“All other ships also reported losing contact with the target vessel,” the communications tech offered.
Rocca shook his head and a small, tight-lipped smile crossed his face. Captain Jennings wanted to make this fun. “Can you plot his course and estimate his destination?” Rocca asked as he turned to the helmsman.
The helmsman started punching commands into his Magellan computer. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice full of amazement. “They appear to be heading to Barnard’s VI, but I don’t think they are going to make it.”
Rocca’s eyes narrowed, and he stalked over to the Magellan interface to look at the course the computer had plotted. “Captain Jennings is a crazy son of a bitch,” he muttered in near reverent awe, before his steely tone returned and he ordered, “Plot us a course to Barnard’s VI.”
“The same course?” the helmsman asked nervously.
“No,” he replied after a moment’s contemplation. “We can’t be foolhardy about this. Jump around the intervening system. If we miss him at Barnard’s VI, we can at least pick up his trail there.”
Rocca left the bridge as the fleet began to get into position for the FTL jumps. He was not looking forward to the conversation he was going to have to have with his boss as he stepped into a lift and headed down to the crew quarters level.
Chapter 25
1
So far, Michelle Williams had not been hurt and she found that to be strange and a little bit of a relief. There was a small part of her that thought the Gael would execute her immediately on sight for her supposed crime of terrorism, but they had merely placed her in binders, forced her into a spacesuit, and marched her out of the ore processing center and into a ship that was about five times larger than Captain Jennings’ Melody Tryst.
After being marched up the ship’s gangplank along with Anastasia Petrova, a man named Vosler, and about ten or so more of Petrova’s men (all those who had been left to guard the Grey Vistula), she was led through a cargo bay, a shuttle bay and then to a very small corridor with four rooms leading off of it and two armed security guards sitting behind a desk at the end of it. Both the general whose nameplate on his uniform read Ounimbango and the Gael had accompanied them to what Michelle realized was a brig, albeit a small one. Ounimbango directed Petrova and Vosler into the first cell on the left and seemed to even mutter an apology under his breath to her when the Gael was not looking. Petrova’s remaining ten men were crammed into the two cells on the right, which was then sealed shut by the slamming of a black metal door with an electro-magnetic lock. Petrova’s cell too was sealed and the guards then led Michelle to the last door on the left, one of them beckoning for her to step through. As she did so, she felt the Gael’s eyes bearing on her hard and she was certain there was an emotion on his face that looked something like elation.
The door slammed shut behind her, and she sat on the bunk in the small cell, which also contained a sink, a toilet and a station set into the wall that appeared to control the lights, dispensed water and rations, as well as controlling the sliding shelf that had a change of clothes (orange jumpsuits) and bedding for the bunk. Not feeling hungry in the slightest, but overcome with a wave of self-pity, Michelle made the bed, placed a pillow at is head and then lay down.
She thought she might fall asleep right away, but the image of Captain Jennings suddenly being on the other side of the lift doors, firing at the men who had taken her, rescuing her yet again kept flashing before her eyes. That was a horrible moment, she realized. It was a moment that had given her hope. In that moment, she was saved, and Jennings was going to fulfill his promise and set her free. In that moment, the charges of terrorism did not matter, the fact that her life had been turned upside down did not matter, because at least she was going to be free.
Captain Jennings being shot had changed all that of course, and that image would not leave her mind either. Granted, he had initially been willing to sell her to the Gael, but she had trusted him when he had promised to let her go and when he said he believed she was no traitor. Once she had been captured, there was no reason for him to come back for her, to try to rescue her once again. Unless he was trying to capture you again so he could hand you over to the Gael himself, a cynical voice in her head spoke.
“No,” she whispered, tears running down her cheeks and staining the pillow. “He wouldn’t do that.”
Why else would he have tried to save her? The cynical voice demanded. She was nothing to him. People were not noble, riding to the rescue of damsels in distress, simply because it was the right thing to do, were they?
But Jennings had. She was certain of it. Michelle was fairly certain she would never know what had prompted Jennings to attempt to save her, but she was positive that his intention had been noble. That only made it worse in her mind though, because that meant it was her fault that he was shot and probably dead. A furious stab of anger shot through her when she thought of the smug self-satisfied look on Petrova’s face as she pointed her gun at Jennings, his body already slumping and going down to the floor, his hands clutching the smoking wound. The idea that the woman who had shot Jennings was only one room away from her and that there was nothing she could do about it made her even more furious and drew a frustrated sob from her. She took small comfort in the fact that if she was to be executed, there was at least a small chance that Petrova would be as well.
Her thoughts turned to Lafayette, Fix and Squawk, the three beings who had defended her only because Jennings had ordered them to. Would they get to Jennings in time to save him? Were they already dead? Would any of it matter as the Gael had destroyed the mine’s life support? The last question sprang to her mind unbidden because it was one that she knew the answer to and yet somehow still clung miserably to the small hope it provided. Would they come for her again?
Jennings might have if he had not been killed, she thought to herself. If she was right about him, that suicidally brave sense of honor of his might have led him to come after her, but the others were a different story. Fix would not care enough to risk it and Lafayette, while he was more amiable, was certainly not about to take on the Gael in an effort to save her, someone who he wasn’t entirely convinced wasn’t a terrorist. No, there was no rescue coming this time.
Eventually, Michelle completely gave in to her sorrow, and the tears would not stop coming. She cried for what felt like hours, until at last exhaustion seized her, and she fell into a fitful sleep. She had nightmares of Matthew Jennings being repeatedly shot in front of her, and then she was shot by the Gael as he stared down at her with cold black eyes.
2
“Minerva, time!” Jennings demanded.
“Four minutes eighteen seconds,” the NAI replied.
Jennings pulled himself out of the port wing crawlspace, where the ship’s port shield generator was located
and fell to the floor on the top level. Scrambling to his feet, he kicked aside some of the spent power cabling he had just spent the better part of several hours replacing and hotfooted it back up to the bridge. He jumped past Fix into the pilot’s chair.
Punching the intercom, he shouted, “Marquis! Report!”
After a moment, the Cajun’s voice came on the line, “Bow and starboard generators online, mon capitaine, but aft…”
His voice trailing off told Jennings all he needed to know. The aft generators would not be ready in time.
“Compensating for the lack of one generator puts shields up at seventy-two percent,” Fix reported.
“Minerva?” Jennings demanded.
“Based on Magellan data,” Minerva began. “Seventy-eight percent shielding would be required to successfully navigate this hyperspace vector, captain.”
“Cap’n, you need to pull us out of FTL,” Fix warned. “In two minutes, the ship will be fried.”
“If we don’t take this route or if we stop to make repairs, the girl is gone,” Jennings argued.
“You can nae do her any good if you’re bloody dead,” Fix pointed out, his Scottish accent becoming more pronounced as he became agitated.
“One minute thirty seconds,” Minerva announced. “Binary stars of Castor and Pollux now within sensor range.”
The two suns were magnified in the viewscreen as the Melody Tryst raced down a narrow vector, trying to slingshot in between the two gravity wells of intense heat that no sane man would ever try to navigate through, let alone while going faster than the speed of light. Jumping from his chair, Jennings moved to Lafayette’s and started punching keys on Magellan.
“Cap’n, that is nae a good idea,” Fix said.
“You don’t even know what I’m doing,” he pointed out.
“I know it’s nae a good idea,” he countered.
“Minerva, Magellan says that our course takes us in between the binary stars at a slightly oblique angle, confirm,” Jennings said just as warning klaxons began to blare and warning lights indicating gravity wells imminent began to flash.
“Confirmed,” Minerva’s cool, calm voice responded.
Keeping an eye on the navigational details on Magellan, Jennings said, “Can you rotate the shields so that we are reading seventy-eight percent full across the port and then cut that seventy-eight percent over to starboard when I tell you?”
“Aye, but Cap’n, we need to stop,” Fix protested.
“Readjust the shields to port now!” Jennings roared over the klaxons and alarms.
“Portside shields now at seventy-eight percent,” Fix reported. “Starboard down to sixty-four. Command is set to reverse when ordered.”
“Minerva, I need you to do this one,” Jennings said. “It will happen too fast for a human to do.” Jennings punched a series of coordinates into Minerva’s interface. “At those co-ordinates, I need you to flip the shield strength from port to starboard.”
“Yes, captain,” she responded. “Forty-five seconds until stellar gravity. Stand-by for temporal anomalies.”
“Everyone!” Jennings called into the intercom. “Brace yourselves! We’re going in!”
There were many reasons that ships with FTL drives did not want to go anywhere near stellar masses: the colossal amount of gravity tended to cause ships to crash into suns, heavy temperatures incinerated hulls and solar flares tended to be strong enough to blast their way through radiation shielding while poisoning all the people on board a ship. That was why most ships had automatic safeguards to prevent a ship from coming too near a large gravity well while traveling at FTL speeds. The Melody Tryst’s safety device was currently overridden. A more puzzling and disconcerting feeling, although certainly less fatal, was a secondary side effect of traveling at the speed of light near a massive gravity well: time for all appearances slowed down. It was not the actual amount of time that changed: thirty seconds was still thirty seconds, but everything seemed to move in super slow motion, but the human brain did not. Jennings had read about it before, but was about to see it first hand, assuming of course that his plan with the shields worked and they were not killed.
“Entering solar gravity now,” Minerva said, her voice warbling on the last word so that it was drawn out in slow motion.
The twin stars Castor and Pollux, large yellow balls of helium and hydrogen, not dissimilar from Earth’s own sun, which had only been visible by sensor magnification suddenly filled the Melody Tryst’s entire view screen. Castor was closer, on their immediate left with its equator slightly beneath the Melody Tryst. Pollux was on the right and slightly above the ship. Their planned path threaded a needle between the two stars and would allow them to catch up with the TGF runabout, which had most likely chosen to jump around the system, rather than go straight through it on its way to Barnard’s VI.
The Melody Tryst hit the full force of Castor’s gravity well and a dozen warning lights started blinking in slow motion, klaxons blared so slowly that they sounded only like background noise. Jennings could feel the ship shaking as if it were in a bad storm with wicked turbulence. If it felt like that in slow motion, he was fairly certain he did not want to know what that felt like at full speed.
Fix roared something that sounded like, “Dampeners overloading! Thermal overload imminent!” But his voice was stretched out and strained.
All of a sudden there was a half-moment when everything stopped, the ship was no longer shaking, time seemed to re-accelerate and Minerva began to say, “Re-setting shields,” before her voice was lost, time slowed down again and Jennings was rocked against his safety harness as the Melody Tryst hit the gravity of Pollux. All around him screens shorted out, bright sparks flashing slowly like fireflies dancing in front of him. A vent above his head burst and steam poured slowly into the room moving like the tentacle of a very lethargic squid.
“Almost there,” Jennings kept repeating in his mind as he saw Pollux vanish from the view screen and pass behind them.
Time re-accelerated and the ship seemingly jumped forward, resuming its course at FTL speed once more. A cacophony of warning noises greeted Jennings and he immediately began running systems checks.
“Fire! Fire! Fire! In Main Engineering!” came Lafayette’s voice over the intercom.
Jennings made to jump up to go help, but Fix was to his feet first and said, “I’ll go. Keep us flying.”
“Minerva, talk to me,” Jennings said as he frantically began scrolling through damage reports at the engineer’s station.
“Hull breach in the right wing,” she reported. “Emergency bulkhead in place and appears to be holding.”
“Shield status?” he demanded as he checked on the FTL engines.
“Shields buckled as we left Pollux,” she reported. “But generators are still online. Shields are recharging.”
“Engines look good,” he said to himself. “Jury rigged power plant is functioning as good as it was.” He punched the intercom and said, “Fix! Marquis! Report!”
“Pas de probleme,” came Lafayette’s voice in reply. “We had a minor coolant leak that shorted out one of the sublight engines. The internal housing caught fire, but we have it taken care of.”
“Anyone hurt?” he demanded.
“Negative.”
“Tell Squawk I want a full damage report,” he said.
“Oui, mon capitaine,” he said and signed off.
“Minerva, how are we looking for our intercept?” he asked.
“Based on current projections, we will overtake the TGF runabout twenty-five minutes prior to their rendezvousing with the TGF capital ship,” she responded. After a moment, she added, “Congratulations. Unless I’m mistaken, which I’m not, this is the first time a human has made a successful FTL flight in between a set of binary stars.”
“I’m probably the first human that has been stupid enough to try,” Jennings pointed out.
“Incorrect,” she replied. “Fourteen known attempts have been made. All
resulted in the loss of the ship and all hands.”
“Glad I didn’t know that at the time,” Jennings muttered. “Do you think you can keep an eye on things until I can get Fix up here?”
“Of course,” she replied.
“Oh,” he added almost matter-of-factly. “Between the Tryst and the runabout, do you know which has the better sensor system?”
Intuitively, Minerva read into the question and gave a slightly different answer than Jennings expected, but it was technically the one he wanted. “At one thousand one hundred kilometers, the ship will still be in our sensor range, but we will be invisible to it.”
Jennings smiled and looked around the cockpit of the Melody Tryst, “That’s my girl,” he said kindly.
3
A few minutes later, Jennings had gathered everyone into the Caf and he had a moment to get a good look at his crew. All of them had been wounded in some way or another in the past few days, the most minor of which was the bad bruising that Squawk took from getting kicked in the ribs by one of Petrova’s goons. Jennings probably looked the worse of all of them. When adrenaline was not surging through him, he walked with a slight limp from the shot he had taken in the leg; his side still ached horribly from the shot he had taken there; and there was bruising on his chest from where his armor had stopped the blast the first time Petrova’s goons had shot him.
They were tired. Each man looked like he could sleep for a week and wore the trademark purple and splotched under-eyes of the exhausted. Only Squawk had gotten any sleep since Strikeplain and he looked like he might pass out at any moment. Fix got up and headed to the medbay for a moment and came back with a bottle of pills.
Distributing one to each of them, he merely said, “Pep.”
Squawk looked at him forlornly.
“Safe for Pasquatil,” he added.
Squawk took his and belched.
“Everyone has earned a rest, a meal, and a vacation,” Jennings began. “That’s what I’d like to be saying to you now, but that’s just not possible.” He sighed. “I’m sorry that I’ve dragged you all into this.” Jennings shook his head and struggled to find the words. “I’ve almost gotten us killed multiple times because I couldn’t let an innocent girl die at the hands of that Gael. I know that doesn’t mean as much to all of you as it does to me or you might not believe she’s innocent…”
111 Souls (Infinite Universe) Page 25
