by D. J. Holmes
When he was done James nodded to King to tell her to shut the COM channel down.
“Well here goes nothing,” James said as Jennings boosted Endeavour towards the giant storm of gravitational waves in front of them.
Everyone on the bridge sat in silence as the ship approached their target. When they were less than a couple of light seconds out the ship was buffeted by the intense gravitational waves that washed over it.
“Ship integrity seems to be stable,” Second Lieutenant Julius reported from the auxiliary bridge where she was closely monitoring the ship’s status.
“Continue to take us in,” James said to the bridge crew.
For the next five minutes the ship continued to be buffeted but Julius showed no signs of being concerned. Then all of a sudden everything was calm.
“We seem to be through the gravitational waves,” Mallory said.
“Entering the event horizon in ten seconds,” Sub Lieutenant Jennings said.
As he looked around James was pleased to see he wasn’t the only one who was gripping his command chair as if his life depended on it. Even Suzanna looked more than a little scared, and she had grown up knowing about the gift.
As Endeavour’s nose touched the event horizon time seemed to slow down for James. On the main holo display he could see his ship make contact with one of the balls of intense gravitational force. Yet on the optical feed space looked calm. Even though he was expecting it, he was still shocked to see the front end of Endeavour disappear. His surprise heightened as the optical feed showed more and more of his ship vanishing.
What seemed like a lifetime was actually less than two seconds and before James realized it, the bridge was engulfed in the gravitational anomaly and he blacked out.
Chapter 3 – Old Friends
It is a strange thing war. At one moment you can be fighting alongside someone you see as your closest ally, the next, you may find yourselves locked in a battle to the death.
-Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD
1st March, 2467 AD, HMS Endeavour, unexplored space.
James lifted his head with a start, in concern he looked around. “Glad to see you are back with us Captain,” a voice said from somewhere nearby.
As he surveyed the bridge crew he saw that a few of the Sub Lieutenants were slumped over their command consoles. Becket looked fully alert and was frantically working away. As he continued to look around he saw that it was Lieutenant Mallory who was speaking to him.
“How long was I out?” he asked the Lieutenant.
“About a minute I think,” Mallory answered. “I think we were all affected to some degree. I didn’t black out but I do have an intense headache. A lot of our systems lost power as well but they are starting to come back on line.”
“Are the sensors working?” James called to Sub Lieutenant Malik who was stirring at the sensor console.
“Hold on sir,” he answered as he looked over the information his station was giving him. “Yes, they are powering back up now.”
“Confirm our position, we need to know where we are. Then scan for any nearby ships. We’re supposed to be in stealth but after going through that thing we could be lighting up like a Christmas tree to anyone nearby,” James ordered.
“Aye sir,” Malik responded.
“Julius,” James called over the COM channel to the auxiliary bridge.
“Yes Sir?” she answered back a bit groggily.
“Liaise with the doctor, give me a run down on how the crew fared when everyone reports in.”
“Will do,” Julius acknowledged.
“Well Malik, where are we?” James said, turning his attention back to the Sub Lieutenant.
“It seems we are right where Councilwoman Rodriguez said we would be. We’re ten light years from Earth and less than two from the Alpha system. No sign of any other ships nearby,” Malik answered.
“Unbelievable,” Mallory said. “Almost fifty light years in the blink of an eye. It’s like something out of a science fiction novel.”
“More than you might think,” Lieutenant Becket said. “I have been reviewing the data our sensors gathered as we entered the gravitational anomaly, my best guess is that the intense gravitational field has torn some kind of hole in the normal space time continuum, creating a pocket of subspace linking the gravitational anomaly near Chester to this one. If you look at the holo display, there is an almost identical ball of gravitational waves just off our starboard stern. I think Endeavour exited out of it.”
“So what you’re saying is that we just passed through some kind of wormhole,” Mallory said.
“Well, I think that is what the news reporters are going to call it,” Becket answered. “If Lieutenant Scott was here she might have a rather more long winded name.”
Once again James wished Science Officer Scott was with them to have experienced this. Yet if she were here, she would have insisted they stop to take detailed sensor readings. Despite his own curiosity, James knew they had to move on. “We can all marvel at this new discovery later, for now we need to keep our minds focused on the task at hand. Sub Lieutenant Malik. Are your scans of the local dark matter consistent with Suzanna’s survey data?”
“Yes sir, it looks like we can make a shift jump to within a light year of the Alpha system. We will have to fly through a dense concentration of dark matter using our impulse engines after that. If Councilwoman Rodriguez’s data holds up it will take us a couple of days, then we will enter what was once a dead-end shift passage that will take us to Alpha,” Malik answered.
“Very well,” James said, “Jennings, lay in a course and take us to Alpha at our best possible speed. We have a job to do.”
The shift drive was a wonderful invention. It allowed ships to jump into shift space and travel along a straight line at speeds that greatly exceeded the speed of light. Yet gravitational anomalies like stars, planets and the dark matter strewn between stars prevented a ship from entering shift space. This meant that ships were severely limited in where they could go by the dark matter. They could only travel down areas of space that were relatively clear of dark matter known as shift passages. In theory, Endeavour could use her sub light impulse drives to ignore the dark matter and go anywhere she wanted, but even traveling from the Alpha system to Earth would take decades.
That was why the Gift hadn’t been discovered sooner. There was a shift passage that headed towards the Gift from the Alpha system, yet it ended in a dead end. With so many other possibilities for discovery, the shift passage had been mapped out and then forgotten about by the Earth nations. All that was about to change; the Gift was something entirely new.
If Becket was right, then they hadn’t entered shift space at all as they had travelled from one end of the Gift to the other. He didn’t understand the astrophysical concept of subspace very well, but he knew it was at least theoretically possible to create a tear in normal space that would link two points in space together despite the vast distances between them. It seemed that the early Havenite colonists had found humanity’s first wormhole and used it to get enough distance away from Earth to start their own colony, free from being rediscovered once the shift drive had been invented. It had served them well. Yet now it would become their worst enemy. The Gift would decrease the time it took British freighters to get from Earth to Chester by over forty days, and the time it would take to get to Haven and the two alien homeworlds of Vestar and Kulthar by more than fifty.
In terms of trade, within the British Star Kingdom it would have significant ramifications, never mind how important it would become once trade with the Vestarians and Kulreans took off. James guessed the exit point from the Gift closest to Earth was too near the Alpha system for the British Star Kingdom to claim. The UN Interplanetary Committee would no doubt declare it an independent entity that no Earth power could claim control over. However, the other end of the Gift was another matter. It was very close to Chester and British territory. If Britain could claim it, they coul
d charge transit fees for any ships that wished to use the Gift, the fees alone would be a welcome boost to the government’s coffers. Never mind the increased taxes they would gain from any increase in trade in the area.
James had to suppress a grin as he thought of the implications as Endeavour flew towards the Alpha system. Whatever happens at Alpha, James thought to himself, my uncle is going to just love me for bringing him another discovery that is going to change the balance of power in this area.
*
8th March, 2467AD, HMS Endeavour, Alpha System
Seven days later, James was quietly trying to hide his frustration. They had spent the last six days cruising through the Alpha system in stealth using their passive scanners to search for Admiral Harris and his ships. So far there had been no sign of them. That didn’t say very much though, for the Alpha system was the only way to get to the British, Indian, French and Canadian colonies from Earth. The system was therefore full of civilian and military ships moving through. If Admiral Harris wanted to, it wouldn’t be too hard for him to hide his ships somewhere near one of the main transit lanes. All they would have to do would be to power down their main reactors and engines, and any sign of them would be lost among all the background radiation given off by all the other ships.
Due to their difficulties trying to find Admiral Harris, James and Suzanna had tried a number of different tactics. First they had sent a system wide message from Suzanna to Admiral Harris. It had been encrypted using Havenite technology and had consisted of a simple message recommending that the plan be aborted. The idea had been to allow Harris to save face by withdrawing with his cover intact. Anyone else who decrypted the message would have no clue what the plan was and so the Haven ships could have returned home whilst saving face.
When no reply had been forthcoming, James had been forced to conclude that Harris was still somewhere in the system. He had then tried taking Endeavour out beyond the mass shadow of the system and jumping her back in. As soon as she had reverted to normal space he had put the ship in stealth mode and launched a drone that had been altered to give off the same kind of electromagnetic signature a Kulrean ship would make. The plan had been to lure Harris into revealing his position when he opened fire on the drone. Yet, the Havenite Admiral hadn’t fallen for it.
Now James had resigned himself to waiting for the Kulreans to arrive. When they did, it might show that Admiral Harris had withdrawn, but he rather suspected the Admiral would still be around to launch his attack. From his discussions with Suzanna it was clear that Maximilian saw this as his final move. If he succeeded, it would buy his world enough time to rebuild their defenses. If it failed, then Maximilian knew he was bringing the wrath of the Earth nations down on his head. James didn’t think Admiral Harris had the independence to disobey a direct order from Haven’s First Councilor
As James examined his own thoughts, he knew that there was a strong knot of tension forming in his neck to match the frustration he had been feeling. The Kulrean ship was due today and each minute that ticked by brought them ever closer.
The Alpha system and the Alpha colony on the third planet was an independent colony run by the UN Interplanetary Committee. As Alpha had been the first world discovered by humans from Earth using the shift drive, it had been colonized by over twenty different nations. The resultant hotchpotch of towns, cities, economies, borders and the resultant political infighting was a mess. It didn’t help that as new worlds much more suited to human habitation were discovered, the main Earth powers had abandoned any claims on Alpha and sought out their own worlds. Over the decades Alpha had become a political nightmare as various factions competed with each other for the limited space and resources. In the end, the UN Interplanetary Committee had been forced to step in and take control.
The result of all this for James was that the Alpha system didn’t have a dedicated defense fleet of its own and as there were no British ships passing through the system, he had no one to call on for help. If Harris were to launch his attack, James would be on his own.
Going into battle for the first time in quite a while, James also had some fears, though not about his own safety. The importance of the coming battle couldn’t be overstated. If Admiral Harris managed to scare off the Kulreans it would set back human-kulrean relations for decades, if not the next century. Quite simply, it wasn’t a battle they could afford to lose.
James knew he had been in similar situations before, but in each of those he had also known that if he had been killed or injured, he had a First Lieutenant who could take over and handle his ship skillfully. When it came to First Lieutenant Mallory, he had his doubts however.
I like him, a lot, James said to himself. We have a lot in common and if we survive this I know we will likely become good friends. But is that clouding my judgment?
Not for the first time James questioned his decision to retain Mallory as his First Lieutenant. His uncle, the First Space Lord, had offered to supply Endeavour with a new First Lieutenant, one with a lot more experience than Mallory. James had refused. Even though he knew that Mallory had very little command experience and had probably been promoted too quickly due to the need for more senior officers during the Void War.
His reasoning had been simple; Mallory had stood by him when his previous First Lieutenant had tried to steal control of Endeavour. James felt that that kind of loyalty deserved to be rewarded and so he had turned down his uncle’s offer.
There’s nothing for it now, James said to himself, Mallory will just have to grow into his boots quickly, I know I did.
Dismissing his doubts, he switched his mind to Admiral Harris and for the next two hours he played out a number of different strategies the Admiral might employ. Meanwhile, all around him the tension on the bridge continued to slowly grow.
“Picking up a ship exiting shift space,” Sub Lieutenant Malik called from the sensor command console. “It’s giving off a gravitational signature I’ve never seen before.”
Every ship gave off a gravitational pulse when it exited shift space, one that could be picked up by any ship within a light hour. If Endeavour’s computers couldn’t recognize the pulse, there was only one explanation. “It must be the Kulreans, send everyone to their battlestations,” he ordered.
“Plot the Kulreans’ position on the main holo display,” Mallory said to Malik.
A moment later a point appeared forty-five light minutes off Endeavour’s bow. “That’s within the system’s mass shadow,” Becket said in shock from the tactical station.
“Yes,” James acknowledged. “I guess the Kulreans can jump further into a system than us. We shouldn’t be surprised; they have had more than a thousand years to tinker with their shift drives.”
“For them to jump so far in means their shift drives allow them to get much closer to gravitational sources than ours,” Becket explained. “That would have to include dark matter. If we had their shift drive technology it might open up a whole host of shift passages that we thought were just dead ends because the dark matter closed in too tight for our ships to traverse through.”
James’s thoughts hadn’t got there as quickly as Becket’s but as he listened it hit him too. “You’re right Lieutenant, their FTL technology by itself is a game changer. But this,” he said, gritting his teeth in determination as he continued, “this is a battle we can’t lose. Jennings, take us towards the Kulrean ship, full power.”
“Aye sir,” Jennings responded from the navigation console.
The Kulreans jumping further into the system than he expected had thrown off his plans. Now he would have to boost Endeavour to her full speed just to catch up with them. It would give away Endeavour’s presence to Admiral Harris. James just hoped that the Kulreans’ unexpected position would throw off Harris’ plans as well.
“The Kulrean ship is slowing,” Malik reported. “I think they have detected Endeavour from her acceleration. I’m sure they are more than familiar with our acceleration profile; it looks like
they are waiting for us to catch them.”
“Send them the prerecorded message,” James said.
“Sent,” Sub Lieutenant King reported a few seconds later.
James only nodded. The message contained a short greeting from him and a brief description of the situation explaining the possibility that a rogue human faction may try to attack the Kulreans in the Alpha system.
It took the message just over twenty minutes to reach the Kulrean ship but when it did James was pleased to see Pemel was taking the threat seriously. It seemed that almost immediately after the message reached the Kulrean, he ordered his ship to rendezvous with James’. Once again the speed of the Kulrean ship impressed James, the acceleration rate from Pemel’s ship was almost twice that of Endeavour’s.
