He Who Dares: Book Two (The Gray Chronicals 2)

by Rob Buckman

  “Are you nuts… I mean… you want me to look into a running reactor?” Adam spluttered as Mike broached the idea.

  “Not exactly, and besides, the Harmony reactor is in another space you might say and can’t really hurt you.” Adam looked at him as if he should be certified.

  “So what do you want me to look at?”

  “I need you to look inside their drive system and tell me why it’s a runaway.”

  “Oh, is that all. I thought for a moment you wanted me to do something difficult, like breathing vacuum.”

  “Adam. You are their only chance. They can’t find out what the problem is from outside, and can’t shut the reactor down. Their only chance is for you and me to look ‘inside’ their drive system and find out what’s wrong.

  “Skipper, you know you are certifiable.”

  “I know. I’ve been told that before, but think of it. You will actually be able to look inside a working drive system. That’s so neat!” He said, sounding like an overactive schoolboy on his way to a magic show.” Adam looked over Mike’s shoulder at Janice for help, seeing her smile and shrug in answer to his unspoken plea.

  “Let’s start at the reactor and work our way back to the fuel system.” Adam just shook his head in disbelief and followed Mike and Janice down the passageway. Every so often he’d open a cabin door and poke his head inside. A few times, he was greeted with a scream, or swearing as he caught the crew in their underwear.

  “Sorry.” He called, withdrawing quickly. In one he dived inside over the protest of the people inside, one a female crewmember just coming out of the shower.

  “I need to look under your bunk.” He said, dropping to his knees and burrowing under the lower bunk, tossing things out of the way as he did. He found a shadowy conduit and poked his head ‘inside’.

  “Coolant.” He said, climbing to his feet.

  “At least we are on the right track.” Janice grinned, waving the protesting crewmembers to silence.

  “We’ll have to go further back, Skipper.”

  “Right.”

  The effect of negotiating their way between the real and unreal bulkhead, doorway, down shafts and running into real bulkhead that happened to intersect with unreal ones was frustrating and had more to do with trying to remember the layout of the own ship and trying to ignore the what their eyes were telling them.

  “It’s in here, Skipper!”

  “What is?” He shouted back, unable to see Adam or Janice through the intervening shadow walls.

  “Their engine room, Skipper. Come back about a hundred feet and turn left.” He did, finding himself in crew mess, except it was now filled with part of a huge cylinder, pipe, conduits and what he took to be pumps and control panels. From their limited point of view, the cylinder had to be fifty foot across from the angle of the outside curve. Standing in the OR mess, they could only see about a quarter of it.

  “Okay. What do we do now, Adam?”

  “Have a look inside, I guess, Skipper.”

  “Well?” He shot Adam a look. He wasn’t intimidated by it.

  “You first, Captain. It was your idea.” He grinned.

  “Oh, thanks.” Mike stood there for a few moments, breathing deeply. He was just about to look into the beating heart of a miniature star, and he didn’t like it.

  He remembered the old ship’s Captain sitting on the bar stool sucking down neat rum and muttering to himself. He too had looked into a fusion reactor and it drove him mad. The difference was, that the Captain had woken up from a sound sleep inside the fusion reactor as the two ships interspaced. No one knew how long the interspace lasted, maybe second, maybe minutes. However long it was, it was enough to cause the Captain to go mad. He felt the sweat prickling his forehead, and taking one last long breathe, he quickly moved his head and shoulders into the shadowy cylinder wall and back out again.

  “Humm…”

  “What?” Adam asked.

  “Coolant, I think.” His brow pulled into a frown as he waited for his brain to sort out what he had seen, still not sure, he took another quick look, longer this time. His mind finally made sense of what he was seeing when he turned his head back and forth, a swirling mass of semi-transparent greenish yellow liquid. Had this been ‘real’ he suspected he wouldn’t be able to see much of anything with no light and no depth perception.

  “It looks as if they place their reactor inside a double cylinder with coolant filling the space between the two walls.” He finally answered, seeing Adam nod.

  “Makes sense.” Adam muttered, and did his own quick look inside. “The reactor is on the other side of the second wall probably.” Mike inched forward before ducking his upper body into the shadowy cylinder again. This time he passed through the swirling mass of coolant and through the second wall and the super conducting magnets that formed the fusion bottle ‘wall’. As startling as it was, looking into the heart of a star wasn’t as terrifying as he thought. Bright blue plasma surrounded him and from his point of view looked cool rather than blazing hot. He knew it wasn’t, and only his mind perceived it that way.

  “Skipper?” He heard Janice call, and looked around. He could just see her, standing beside him just beyond the outer wall of the reactor.

  “Come on in, Janice, the water’s fine.” He laughed. Hesitantly, she and Adam moved up beside him and they stood there looking around in amazement.

  “Hey, Skipper. I can see the magnets.” Adam pointed to the neck between the two reactor chambers.

  “Right! Almost the same configuration as ours, only much bigger.”

  The fusion reactor was shaped like an enormous bar bell stood upright with a firing chamber at each end. The inside wall never touched the plasma due to the intense magnetic containment field that formed the inner wall of the bottle. As one chamber fired, the expanding plasma flowed through the neck, or magnetic channel between the two ends and into the other chamber. The incredibly hot plasma pass through the superconducting magnets around the neck generate massive amounts of power through a magneto-hydrodynamic generator.

  “The problem has to be in the fuel lines.”

  “Right. The reactor is running fine and has to get fuel from somewhere.” Janice added.

  “Yeah. That means we have to search around and locate the fuel inlet.”

  “What I don’t understand is why they just can shut the lasers down. Without them firing, the whole systems should shut down.” Adam said, peering around.

  “So? Don’t just stand there admiring the view, start searching.” Mike ordered with a smile.

  “Easy for you to say, sir.” Janice grouched. “I for one am not used to walking around inside a working reactor.”

  “Oh, come on Janice. When will you ever get another chance to do something like this.”

  “Not in this lifetime, I hope.” She sighed.

  Even with the three of them looking, they still had problems finding the fuel inlet as they kept running into the real walls of their ship. That meant pulling back out and running around their ship to another cabin or locker to find what they wanted.

  “I have it, Skipper. It under the recycling unit.”

  “Of course it is. Where else would the damn thing be.” Mike muttered as he got down on his back and crawled under the recycling tank. That wasn’t easy with all the pipe and conduits in the way, theirs as well as the alien ship.

  In the smelly gloom under the tank, it was hard to tell which was which. At last he found Adam half sitting with his head inside an eight inch pipe.

  “What do you have Adam?” He asked, sitting up beside him.

  “I can see the restrictor, or control valve for the fuel inlet, but I can’t see anything wrong with it. The fuel is definitely shut off here.” Mike took a look at both sides of the valve, agreeing with Adam’s assessment.

  “So where is the damn thing getting fuel from?”

  “Skipper?” Pete Standish called down from the Bridge.

  “What’s up, OX.”

&n
bsp; “I hate to tell you this, Skipper, but we are on the clock here.” Mike froze.

  “How long?” He asked.

  “One hour, twenty-seven minutes and thirty-five second, according to the Nav clock.”

  “Damn!” That meant they were due to drop out of nth space when the Nav clock reached zero. There was no way they could change it while in nth space, or they’d drop out too far from their target star. Like several light years away. If they tried to stay in nth space any longer, they could drop out inside the star.

  “We need to speed this up, Adam. Time's running out.”

  “I heard, Skipper.”

  “So where do we look next?” He asked.

  “It has to be on the inlet side from here to the reactor.” Adam swore as he hit his head on a pipe.

  They wiggled their way out, and between the three of them were able to follow the fuel inlet line up to the reactor. That meant dashing from one compartment to another until they ended back at the outer wall of the giant reactor. Here they found a mass of piping, but without a schematic, they had no way of telling what their purpose was.

  “Har! I’ve found it!” Adam yelled, his body half way inside some ductwork. “Oh shit! Oh shit!”

  “What?” Mike yelled.

  “Some idiot ran the fuel inlet line too close to the reactor. I can see where part of the reactor magnetic containment field has failed.” Mike could hear him moving around, as if looking for something. “Damn!”

  “What?”

  “For some reason, there are no more valves between here and the fuel tanks.”

  “Not good.”

  “You can say that again. There is no way to shut off the flow, or drain the fuel tank, expect to space, and that won’t help. If they dumped their fuel they’d be dumped out into normal space God knows where, and a million miles from the nearest fuel source. That’s the good news. The bad news is that due to that flew in the containment field, its managed to bore a pinhole through the reactor wall and this fuel line.” He wiggled back out of the duct and dropped to the floor.

  “I have no idea how they can fix it, but if they don’t that hole is going to get bigger, a lot bigger.”

  “And when it does, it’s going to blow.”

  “Right, and take this ship with it.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We can’t do a damn thing.” He moaned, rubbing his face in frustration.

  “Janice, get one of those alien’s down here, and the whiteboard.”

  “On it, Skipper.”

  “Any ideas, Adam.”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking… sorry, Skipper, didn’t mean to be disrespectful.”

  “Forget it. Keep thinking.” He smiled back.

  “The only way I can see is to cut the fuel line somewhere above this and shut off the flow.”

  “Can they fix it then?”

  “With no fuel, the reactor will scram. It has too, as part of the emergency shutdown procedure. Once they’ drop back to normal space, they might be able to fix the containment field, and the leak.”

  “Yeah, but that would put them years away from where they are going.”

  “Might not if they can time it to drop them out near a star.”

  “That would give them the ability to jump from there, depending on how long it takes them to reach it.”

  “It’s the best I can come up with.”

  Just them Janice return, and much to their surprise a figure in a hard suit. Both blinked for a moment as it dawned on them that this space on the alien ship was a dangerous place to be. Adam beckoned the being over and pointed up to the leak. It took a while from the alien to get there, as he had to climb and crawl over, under and around intervening pipes. At last he reached a place where he could see the problem, but without communication between them, they was no way they could find out what he was thinking. In the end, they all made their way back to the Bridge and the regal looking being on the throne like chair. As they came in, Pete tapped him wrist, and Mike looked down at his. They had to finish this up in less than ten minutes before they dropped out of nth or risk his ship. He put up his hand, palm out, to tell Pete to hold it and went to the whiteboard Janice was holding.

  ‘Do you understand the problem?’

  ‘Yes. Understand’

  ‘You need to shut off the fuel line above the leak.’

  ‘Understand’

  ‘You need to do it quickly. Hole getting bigger’

  ‘Understand’

  ‘Time the shut off to get you close to a star.’

  ‘Difficult’

  ‘Not impossible. To far bad, to close bad’

  ‘Understand’

  ‘My ship will drop out of nth in...’ He looked at his chronometer, ‘three minutes from now’

  ‘Understand.’For a moment, the regal being said something to the translator, ‘The Harmony, thanksCaptain Michael Gray of the Royal Navy for his assistance. We will be eternally grateful for all you have done.’

  “No need to thank me. Helping a stranded ship is part of my duties and no thanks are needed.”

  “One minute, Skipper.” Mike looked over at the main screen, seeing the nth space ‘sails’ start to fluctuate as the Nav computer reduced power in preparation for the transition back to normal space.

  “Goodbye and may your gods smooth the path before you.” Mike wasn’t sure why he said it, as he was never particularly religious, but it somehow seemed fitting.

  ‘And to you Captain Michael Gray. Go with the blessing of the Harmony upon you and your family forever’ With that, they translated back into the sidereal universe and the Harmony ship vanished.

  “That was an odd farewell.” Pete said.

  “Who knows what the Harmony think.”

  “Well, that was fun.” Adam grinned. “Can’t say I’d like to do it again anytime soon.”

  “As if.” Janice murmured as she took her seat.

  “Hopefully something will come out of this event. Who knows, maybe the Harmony will let out ships cross their space in the future.”

  Mike watched as the nth sail pylons folded back into their housing in the hull and the armored hatches closed over them. They all went back to their respective station, back on their mission. The calculation were perfect, and they dropped out two light minutes from the target star, a binary system, and a perfect place to start a mission, as with so many unmonitored warp points to take it would be impossible to track him. After the transfer, Mike turned the Bridge over to Pete, and went to his day cabin to unseal his orders. They puzzled him, as there was nothing was specific, just to go to a certain point in space and wait. The orders also contained a second section, but time locked so he couldn’t read it for four days, time enough for him to reach his first destination. There was a message chip from Ann, but he kept that for later when he could relax and enjoy it. The crew in the meantime began working on opening all the crate, boxes, and finding what was inside, and where it belonged.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

  With his only two gunners acted as training officers he put the Marines through their paces, and, much to everyone's surprise they took to it like ducks to water. Gradually the ship settled down into a routine as they sped across the star field at top speed towards towards the next warp point, and the Sirrien/Kanuri border. Once they unpacked the supplies, and the packaging material vanished into the recycler, it drastically increased the living space inside the ship, much to everyone's relief. Mike then began the shakedown cruise, testing every system and setting up combat drills. Mike ordered they do this slowly at first, walking to their assigned duty station so the crew got the hang of reaching their assigned position. Even at walking pace, there was still mass confusion as too many people tried to use the same passageways at the same time, but they soon learned to find the shortest way to their stations. The first time he called general quarters, it took the crew almost half an hour to bring the ship to complete combat readiness. Not that Mike expected much else, but as the days
passed, the time got shorter and shorter. After a week, the crew could run to their stations and have her ready in four minutes flat. After the last drill, he gave the crew a well done.

  “Not bad for a bunch of females, Pete.”

  “Whoever thought they couldn’t do as well as men should have his head examined.” Pete snorted. “Damn, they’re fast!”

  “Now we’ll see if they can do it in the same time when they least expect it.”

  “God, I hate that, one time I was in the shower.” Janice Fletcher muttered.