by Rob Buckman
“I hope you logged it in and recorded it.”
“Yes, sir, I recorded it, but I haven’t logged it. I wanted to talk to you first before I reported it.” She looked nervous, as if suspecting she’d broken the chain of command.
“I can see why you came to me, and I appreciate it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But, I want you to go back to the Bridge and report this to the OX. Tell him you reviewed the recording while on break and thought you should report it directly to him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do not say anything about coming to me first, is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” She smiled, understanding what he was asking her to do. Pete might take it wrong if she said she’d gone to the Captain with this, instead of coming to him first, as the chain of command required.
The odd radio message needed investigating, but he had his orders. They were his primary concern at the moment. Yet, he wondered if the Admiralty had the resources to send out a scout ship to investigate under the present circumstances. He doubted it. On the surface, it looked as if someone had put down on that planet, the question was, who and why? At length they reached another WP and sent a probe through. Reviewing the record from one of the probes, Cooper indicated she’d spotted the spectral signature of a binary star system in the background that came close to the one recorded by Enright. Just to be sure, Mike ordered another probe through for an extended scan this time.
“Launch and hold it a thousand yards off the bow, then activate its program.”
“Aye-aye, sir, launching torpedo.” Pete Standish answered. A moment later the torpedo came into view on the screen, moving ahead of them, then coming to a stop.
“On a short count of five, sir, five -four - three -two -one.”
Blue white energy surrounded the torpedo for a moment and vanished the moment the torp made the transfer. Now it was just a question of waiting for it to return. The first one had taken six days to go there and back, making it a short jump, but only one hour in systems. Seven days later, Gable sent out a warning that the torp was about to return. The data indicated that the torpedo had taken a circular course around the warp point before returning, that way they received a panoramic view of the star field on the other side.
“I’ve got it!” Cooper yelled. “There’s definitely a binary star system near the Class III Giant on the other side of the warp point.” She turned, smiling in glee, seeing everyone else on the Bridge chucking to themselves. Then she blushed bright red.
“Mayhap, there was a, sir, in there somewhere Cooper, but I guess I must have missed it in all the excitement.” Pete shook his head in mock despair.
“Yes, sir, there was, or I think there was.” Then she laughed as well, seeing the Pete Standish was poking gentle fun at her.
“I definitely heard a sir, in there Mr. Standish.” Janice put in.
“And so did I.” Gable added, grinning at Pete.
“You lot are no help at all in maintaining a modicum of naval discipline on this ship.” His steely glare rolled of the Bridge staff like water off a ducks back. “What’s the poor girl going to do if she’s posted to a real ship of the line, Huh, tell me that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, OX. Maybe some of your outstanding leadership qualities will have rubbed off on her by that time.” Pete looked over his shoulder at Mike for help, seeing Mike raised an eyebrow in query.
“Why are you looking at me. It’s not as if it’s my fault. I definitely heard a sir in there somewhere.”
“Well then, I definitely need to go see the med tech and have my ears checked.”
“Oh, waxy build up, Pete?”
“Something like that, Skipper.” He sighed.
“Let’s make the jump and have a good long look before we go any further.”
“Aye-aye, Skipper. Setting up for the jump.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR:
Just as Cooper reported, the spectral lines of the distant binary star system came very close to the one Enright recorded. Now came the risky part, working out a jump that would take them there without getting the shipped ripped apart in the gravity flux between the stars. There was little else in the system of interest apart for a large asteroid belt some twenty-five AU from the star. Reaching the Class III giant star they set up an orbit five AU outside the coronalsphere and started launching probes. Most came back within a few days, or weeks with nothing to show. Two never returned. There were only two reasons for that. One, the distance to the next star system on their programmed entry point, or two, the probe had dropped out too close to the star.
“Grace, work with Adam and Jan to calculate the different angle of entry. Maybe that will help.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” She answered in a firm voice. As she turned back to her consult, Pete Standish turned his head and grinned at Mike, then shook his head slightly and sighed.
Even so, they lost five more probes before one came back looking a little worse for wear. Even its data was a little scrambled, suggesting a very high grav flux and a close exit to the star. The data did show a large asteroid belt and one star in a dance around a patch of darkness even blacker than the space around it. What confirmed that it was a black hole was the accretion disk. Now all they had to do was refine the jump program to get the Nemesis into a relatively clear space outside the influence of either the star, or the black hole. The angle worked, even with the unpredictable shift in position, the probe missed the asteroid field by a wide margin, but put the ship inside the circle between the two. After that, no matter what they did, they couldn’t find a safer place to exit the WP.
“Well, that’s it Skipper. We are almost out of probes, but I don’t think we can get any better than that.” Mike, Pete, Jan, Gable and Cooper sat in the Wardroom reviewing the data one last time late one night. Everyone looked exhausted from weeks of boredom, excitement and strain. Just the thought of jumping into that madhouse was enough to make anyone sweat.
“It’s one hell of a risk, Captain. One number wrong and we end up in either the frying pan or the fire.”
“And we’re not even positive that this is Enright’s folly.” No one bothered correcting the Jan use of the term.
“It’s a very close match.” Cooper put in very softly.
“I don’t see where we have a lot of choice. We either jump or find a way to get home from here another way.” Mike added. “Let’s sleep on it and go over the numbers one last time in the morning.” They all nodded, and one by one drifted off to their cabins.
Mike sat there sipping coffee and looking for inspiration in the bottom of the mug. Here it was again, his decision that could mean the life or death of not only himself, but his crew and ship. Was diving into that stellar nightmare worth the risk? Or, should he just try to find another way home? He remembered his Grandfather's words as the old ‘Prometheus’ sank into the deadly embrace of the Jupiter class planet of his home systems. He’d watched it sink out of reach and implode from the crushing pressure, taking Gramps with it. Was saving the lives of all the passengers and crew of the stricken liner worth one man’s life? Gramps would have immediately answered, yes, knowing he was dying from radiation poisoning even as he launch the escape pod with Mike inside out the launch tube. Now he was charged with the duty of trying to find a way around this deadly trap, and if successful would give Earth a bolt hole the Sirriens knew nothing about. Stack up against all the people and ships it might save, one small ship and its crew was a small price to pay. Everyone on Avalon knew they were at war with the Sirriens, and as Conner said, in war people die and there was nothing he could do about that. He thought of coward and heroes. Would he be a coward if he ran home the safest way to save his life and his ship, or would they call him a hero if he ordered the jump? A sensible man would take the safe way out and avoided the possibility of his own death, so what did it say about a man who ordered the ship to jump?
* * * * * *
“Double check our angle of entry and prepare
to engage engines, OX.”
“Aye-aye, Captain - Helm, double check angle of entry and prepare to engage engines.” He repeated.
“Aye-aye, sir...” Conner coughed to clear his throat, “checking the angle of entry and preparing to engage engines.” The nervous tension on the Bridge was palpable, and more than one was sating a silent prayer.
“Engage.” Mike said at last as he places his life and that of his crew and ship into the hands of God.
“The universe did its usual dance and for a moment they hung over the pit of forever as the ship made translation.
The moment in hyper space was even shorter before they dropped back into the sidereal universe. The moment they did, alarms started sounding off on the main panel, warning of an impending collision, radiation, and close proximity to a celestial object. Cooper, Jan and Gable immediately shut off the alarms while Conner worked the control yoke to keep the ship in a stationary position. A short wind flowed around the Bridge as everyone let out the breath they been holding at the same moment. Conner fought the conflicting gravity waves and everyone could feel the ship being pulled first one way, then another as the star and the black hole tried to pull them towards it.
“Let’s not do that again in my lifetime, Skipper.” Pete said, wiping the fear sweat off his brow.
“I’ll try not to, Number One. Sing out people. What’s our status?”
“Engineering reports no problems, Captain.”
“Environments is good - ships systems holding steady, but it’s getting hot out there.”
“Cooper, can you find up a cooler place to park?”
“I… I… I don’t know, Captain… give me a moment to check.”
“Conner, you see anything better with the VR view?” The ship shifted sideways, as did the crew, and they could feel the inertial compensator straining to keep up with the shifting stress. They couldn’t stay here long before the ship started to pull apart.
“Nothing close, Skipper… maybe… Grace, down twenty degrees, starboard sixty. What do you see?” The ship groaned in protest and they could almost see the hull being twisted out of shape.
“Got it Chief, and you’re right… but… Oh my God… Captain, there another ship already there!”
The digitally enhanced display of the star system on the main screen was impressive. The dark non-existence of the dead star was almost eye hurting in its intensity, black, evil, all consuming, as it sucked in matter and energy from its stellar neighbor. Standing off above and to one side of the black hole they could see a great whirl of plasma streaming between the two as the voracious monster slowly stripped away the mass of the second sun. It was the concentration around the event horizon that drew everyone’s. Here, energy and matter started to rip itself apart, spinning, colliding, and slowly grinding everything into ever smaller particles before vanishing into the maws of the great unknown. What happened passed the event horizon was anyone's guess as nothing could survive in there, and the only thing that ever came back out was x-rayed and heat. Somehow a monster ship was sitting perfectly still in the only real safe spot for thousands of miles in any direction.
“It can’t be?” Pete muttered.
“Janice, send a torp out and let’s get a closer look at that… whatever it is.”
“What?... Oh aye, aye, sir.”
“Can we get closer without ending up in the pull of the black hole, Cooper?”
“Yes, sir, if we stay exactly in the center between the two stars, say about another 25,000 nautical miles and we should still be safe, Skipper.”
“Launching torpedo.” Cable called from operations.
“Acknowledge - helm, take us closer, slow ahead.”
“Aye, sir, slow ahead it is.” Conner answered.
“No wonder Enright had such a disastrous crossing. Whatever it is, it’s right inside the event horizon of the stars warp point.”
“Good God! It’s a ship.” Cooper muttered again, as if she still didn’t believe what she was seeing
.
“Yes, Cooper, we can see that.” Gable snorted.
“Data from the torp coming in, Skipper and from the look of it, that ship is what’s causing a gravitational anomaly inside the WP that pushing ship coming through into the grip of the black hole, or the star.”
“How on Earth is it doing that?”
“No idea, but we know so little about warp point physics.” Jan answered, holding onto her consult. “We do know that two ships passing through the same warp point at the same time from different directions do have an effect on each other.”
“So, why would this ship...” He stopped and thought about it a moment. “That doesn’t make sense, Enright went through this warp point over two hundred years ago, are you telling me that the same ship caused his problem and all the ones since?” Mike asked.
“Don’t know, sir, I can only tell you what the data shows.”
Adam came onto the Bridge and sort of danced over to the engineering console and sat down, quickly buckling himself in. As Conner pushed the ship towards the sweet spot between the two competing forces, the shaking got less, but not by much. Adam plugged the data chip into his terminal, and a few moments later he had the video up on the main screen. All saw at first was a momentary picture of the ship as the probe flashed by.
“See if you can freeze that image on the screen, Adam.”
“Trying, sir.” He played with the data again, then ran it again. Slower this time, and he managed to freeze the image just as the right moment, then skipped forward until he had a clear picture.
“If we snuggle up to that ship, Skipper, we might just be in the clear.” Cooper called out.
“Helm - take us closer.” Conner did, and the closer they got to the huge ship, the less violent the shaking became.
The ship was like nothing any of them had seen before, and definitely not of human origin. From what they could tell, it was about a mile long and cigar shaped, but with bulges and protrusion all over its surface. If it had been there for over a hundred years there was no evidence of it. The hull appeared smooth and shiny at this distance and showed little aging.
“Conner, you been around more than any of use, ever seen or heard of anything like that before?”
“No, sir, can’t say that I have, but at a guess, I’d say she was a warship.”
“On what grounds?” Mike asked.
“Unless I miss my guess, I’d say those bulges were weapon emplacements of some sort.”
“You could be right, but it still leaves us with the question of how we get passed her.” Pete asked.
“Enright managed to get back the other way without problem somehow, Pete, it's just coming this way that you run into trouble.” As they approached the ship, the shaking stopped so Conner no longer had to fight the helm.
“If we go any closer, Skipper, it's going to be another rough ride past the warp point event horizon.”
“Bring us to a stop and see what happens.” Conner did, and to everyone’s relief, the Nemesis didn’t start drifting towards either of the dangers. “Conner, set up an automatic trigger to do a warp transfer if we start getting pulled into the star or the black hole.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“XO, inform the crew to batten down everything that can move, including their socks.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Adam - Gable. Get down to your respective department and check to make sure everything is secure while we can. We have no way of knowing how long this will last..”
“Aye, sir.”
“We’ll give them half an hour, then go and do a visible check from stem to stern, Pete.”
“Yes, sir.” Pete answered, wiping his brow again.
“If Cooper is right, the gravitational sheer is going to be nasty when we try to pull out of here, so we’ll have to check everything twice, I don’t want someone killed or injured.”
In all, it took over three hours to check every compartment and storage locker, and by the time the
y’d finished, Pete, Gable and Adam’s feet hurt from so much walking. At least Mike was satisfied that everything was secure, including the galley. They did have three crew members in the sick bay with injuries, but nothing serious.
“Attention all hands, this is the Captain.” The sound of his voice echoed through the ship. “As of this moment I want everyone in their battle armor and at their stations as a precaution.” Mike switched off and looked around the Bridge. The minutes ticked by, and just in case of a few slow ones, he gave them half an hour.
“Is anyone not, I repeat, not at their stations?” He asked, keying the internship broadcast system. No one came back to say they weren’t, and he nodded to Adam.
“Seal the ship and increase ship's gravity to 1.3 and set the inertia dampening system to Max.”
