Galactic Thunder

by Cameron Cooper

  In my Ranger academy days, a physics professor had explained it by holding up a flexible polymer sheet with four orbs on it. A short line ran between two of the orbs, both hovering in the center of the sheet. They represented planets. A much longer line connected the remaining two planets, which were both on the farther edges from each other.

  The professor had bent the sheet so the two shorter ends were together. “When you bend space as a wormhole does,” he said, “The farther apart your end points, the shorter the space between them.” He touched the two far apart planets, which were close to the ends of the sheet that were touching each other. There was barely a centimeter between them, now.

  The sheet, viewed edgewise, made an upside-down teardrop shape. The two planets which were much closer to each other when the sheet was flat now sat at the top of the tear drop, and the space between them bowed out, putting nearly a dozen centimeters between them.

  Not only did the physics of wormhole space-bending still hold despite no longer using array gates, but crescent ships had added another variable which hadn’t existed with the array gates. The faster you entered a hole, the quicker you transitioned through it.

  I had been assured by the scientists at Sarov, who had developed the concept of crescent ships, that it was actually a function of both speed of entry and that crescent ships were pulling the front edge of the wormhole along with them the moment the ship entered the hole. With the array gates, it hadn’t mattered how fast you entered the hole. You traversed it at the same constant speed.

  They were still unsnarling the physics of that at universities across the galaxy, nearly thirty years later, while us spacers just shrugged and souped up our ships to enter the wormholes as fast as possible to cut down our transition time. The lack of formulas didn’t take away the facts.

  The Supreme Lythion had always been a fast ship, which was why we returned to normal space on the far side of the galactic arm away from where we had started only a few hours after we left.

  We crowded around the viewscreen to look for the wildcatter ship, even though we all knew intellectually that the ship would be a dark pinprick against the nightside of the planet hanging behind it. Not even the far-away blue sun could reflect upon the ship and make its location known with a temporary twinkle.

  Nearly a dozen craters on the lifeless sun-lit crescent of the unnamed planet were large enough to be seen from space, which probably explained why there was no atmosphere. An extinction-level-sized asteroid or two slamming into a planet would give it no chance to recover. A dozen of them would be a disaster for everything on the surface, not just the warm-blooded oxygen-breathers.

  There were many reasons why I preferred to live in space. This was one of them.

  I shook my head and moved away from peering hopefully at the screen. “Lyssa, can you overlay the view with a schematic and show us where the ship is? Have you located it?”

  “Yes, Colonel,” Lyssa replied.

  The screen built up with a series of pale lines and curves, showing the outer edge of the planet, and breaking the planet itself up into dozens of sections. One of the sections pulsed.

  “Up close, please,” I murmured.

  The section expanded until it filled the screen. A small circle in the top right corner pulsed.

  “Can you get a better image from here?” Dalton asked

  “Not visual.”

  “Can we even confirm it is the Ige Ibas?” Fiori asked softly.

  “I have scanned the exterior with a passive sweep. The dimensions and details confirm that it is the Ige Ibas,” Lyssa replied. “I have not yet attempted to contact them using human channels.” She glanced at me and raised a brow.

  “Yes, go ahead,” I told her.

  For a moment, the bridge was utterly silent. Lyssa did not vocalize her hail. I grew aware of a drumming sound to my right and glanced over at Fiori. She still leaned against her shell, but now her hand was trembling against the hard casing on the side, making it thrum.

  She caught my glance and snatched her hand up and crossed her arms.

  That was something she had learned from Dalton, that belligerent posture.

  Dalton scowled at the screen as if his gaze could make this all go faster. Yet he knew the Ranger protocols for approaching a ship of unknown status as well as I did. There were steps to take, in the right order, that would maximize the safety of the crew aboard the approaching ship. The policies and protocols had been hammered out over centuries of experience in the field. Each step was there for a very good reason. Often those reasons had been learned through bloodshed and death.

  This couldn’t be hurried.

  “What’s happening?” Fiori demanded.

  “Wait,” I murmured.

  “But—”

  “Wait, Fiori,” Dalton repeated.

  She shut up.

  I mentally reached toward the back of the ship and told Vara she could come to the bridge, and bring Darb with her, if they were quiet and careful not to smack anything with their tails. It was crowded in here with the shells, the dashboards and the banks of servers that ran everything on the bridge. The servers were backups for the main computer servers kept in a sterile room in the engineering compartments. If ever the ship was boarded, we could seal the bulkhead door at the top of the bridge ramp and isolate ourselves, then control the ship from here.

  Wedekind had been an odd man, but he wasn’t stupid.

  Two full sized parawolves, one of them male, took up a lot of room, but I suddenly wanted them with me. I didn’t question the impulse. A few broken server crystals was a small price to pay if my gut instinct was accurate…and it often was.

  “What’s happening?” Fiori insisted.

  Lyssa answered her. “I am hailing the ship on all frequencies, including all those once reserved for military ships and the Imperial Shield, plus the previously exclusive frequencies for the Imperial family. I am sending the hail in Common, and also in Uqup, as Major Dalton told me the captain, Eliot Bryne, is from Uqup Pedrottle. I am repeating the message every thirty seconds.”

  Uqup was one of the oddities in the galaxy. They had their own language which they fought to preserve despite Common being standard everywhere else. But that was the Uqups for you—they were snotty about their very long history and liked to proclaim they were the first world to be settled, although no one had ever produced evidence to support the claim.

  Had Lyssa sensed Fiori’s building tension and sought to placate her with a calm and detailed explanation? Even if she hadn’t, the effect was undeniable. Fiori let out a shaking breath and gave a nod. She stopped demanding explanations.

  We waited a few more seconds. I heard the soft clip of claws on plasteel flooring and turned to watch Vara and Darb lope up the ramp and onto the bridge. “Over here,” I told Vara.

  “Did you invite them?” Dalton asked me.

  I nodded and thrust my fingers into the thick fur behind Vara’s head.

  Dalton’s eyes narrowed. He beckoned Darb over to him. Darb bumped his shoulders against Dalton’s thigh and sat.

  “Three minutes, Colonel,” Lyssa said softly.

  “Interior scan, then. Superficial and fast for now.”

  Lyssa nodded and focused forward again. We waited another sixty seconds, then she said, “There is no movement on the ship and no heat signatures.”

  That wasn’t good.

  Fiori gave a soft sound, half sigh and half moan.

  No heat signatures wasn’t conclusive. There were sections on a ship which couldn’t be reached with the first fast scan.

  “Is there atmosphere?” I asked Lyssa.

  “The interior is pressurized.”

  That meant the hull was holding atmosphere successfully. It didn’t tell me if the air was breathable, though.

  I nodded. “Move into deep scan range.”

  The ship shivered as the reaction engines kicked into gear.

  “Dalton, switch your dashboard over to weapons and diagnostics,”
I said.

  “Already there,” Dalton murmured, his gaze upon the desk in front of him.

  “Let me do something,” Fiori said. There was a note in her voice that told me she was only just managing to avoid begging me for distraction.

  “Lyssa, route the biomarker channel to Fiori’s dashboard.” I looked at Fiori. “Anything with a heartbeat, I want to know about it. Anything warmer than a popsicle. If you see a semblance of life, check bio status—I want to know if they’re healthy.” An epidemic on the enclosed ship might explain the lack of movement over there.

  Despite constant upgrades and improvements, short-range scanning of other ships was still an inexact science. Too many elements could interfere with the scans and provide false positives or report inaccurate negatives. Status spectrums could be skewed by ion storms, solar flares, or an extra few centimeters of hull thickness, but none of that would show on our results.

  It was like peering through a muddy window to discern what lay inside an unlit room, but it was better than stepping into the ship with no data at all.

  The Lythion’s engines cut back. Maneuvering engines flared briefly, bringing us to a complete halt.

  “Dalton?”

  He shook his head, his gaze on the board before him. “Nothing out there.” He paused. “Not on this side, anyway.”

  I nodded. To be absolutely thorough, I should order a circuit of the planet, to see what lay behind it, but that would take a day or more and I had a feeling that neither Dalton nor Fiori would easily withstand such a delay, not when the Ige Ibas was right there in front of them.

  We could see it for ourselves, this close. It was exactly what I had been braced to find—a second-hand converted crescent ship with a battered hull, bristling with scanner dongles and probe launch tubes. A retrofitted shuttle hunched upon the upper fuselage.

  “Shuttle’s still there,” I murmured. “Only one shuttle?” I asked Dalton.

  He nodded, his expression grim.

  We wouldn’t have to head to the surface to find anyone, then. They wouldn’t bring the shuttle back from the surface while people were still down there. Ergo, no one was dirtside.

  At least, I hoped the hell there was no one down there. After four days, they’d be out of air.

  “Start the scan,” I said.

  “Scanning,” Lyssa murmured.

  I straightened and stretched.

  “How long will this take?” Fiori asked, staring at her dashboard. From where I stood, I could see that no data was showing there, yet.

  “It could take hours,” I warned her.

  “It’s a small ship,” Lyssa said. “Three hours, from engine cowling to nose antennas.”

  “Another three hours?” Fiori breathed, her tone stressed. She glanced at the big windows, where the Ige Ibas hung motionless. We were barely ten klicks away from it. I imagine it felt to Fiori that she was close enough to reach out and touch the ship.

  “There’s plenty to do in the meantime,” I told her, which was true for me, but not necessarily for her. I had a feeling that there would be scant bio data for her to analyze.

  I looked up at the Ige Ibas myself. It looked just like any other ship parked in orbit around a planet, which was to say there was nothing to see. Yet I could almost feel the emptiness inside it.

  I already knew we would have to go over there and check it out in person. The lack of movement and warm bodies would need to be confirmed. Besides, both Dalton and Fiori would insist upon seeing the inside of the ship for themselves, so they could accept that the scans were correct and there was no one aboard.

  As the senior officer onboard, I could decide against going over and investigating in person, and there were a lot of good reasons to make that choice. The lack of response, lack of movement and zero warm bodies said stepping inside the ship was an unacceptable risk.

  If I had still been with the Rangers, I would have chosen to withdraw and let a first-in team investigate.

  But there were no Rangers anymore. No specialist teams, no other authority groups who would care enough to go in. There was just me and two anxious parents.

  And Fiori would slit my throat with a laser scalpel if I announced we were not going to enter the Ige Ibas ourselves. Dalton might even help her.

  While Lyssa did her deep scan, which would likely give us no definitive answers, I could prep the shuttle and suits.

  And the weapons.

  If that really was an abandoned ship drifting out there, then where the hell had everyone gone? The possible range of answers was narrow, and all of them dangerous for us on the Lythion.

  —8—

  Dalton was a better pilot than me. He had actual training, while I winged it based upon watching a thousand pilots do their job. So I let him take the shuttle controls, while I nudged Darb out of the way so I could reach the co-pilot seat.

  “You really had to bring them?” Dalton asked. I could tell from his tone that it wasn’t an idle question.

  I fitted myself into the co-pilot chair. We were all wearing environmental suits, even Fiori, who sat on the passenger bench running down the side of the compartment behind us. Vara sat obediently beside her.

  The suit made the chair a tight fit.

  “We’re in suits, and they aren’t,” Dalton pointed out.

  “Yep.” I brushed a lock of hair out of my eyes with an irritable wave.

  “Gut talking?” Dalton asked softly.

  “Yep.”

  He drew a breath. Let it out. “Okay.” He raised his chin and spoke into the air. “Release when ready, Lyssa.”

  “Detaching,” Lyssa’s voice said, emerging from the speaker overhead.

  The shuttle gave the little lurch that announced we were free of the overhead gantry and independently moving.

  Dalton nosed the shuttle forward.

  A few kilometers could normally be covered in less than a handful of minutes. I said, “Dead slow, Dalton.”

  He didn’t argue, even though it would triple the time it took to cross over to the Ige Ibas.

  I pulled up the short-range scanners and got them going. Lyssa would be scanning, too, but I wanted the redundancy. My heart was clipping along way too fast for sitting on my ass.

  As I worked, I could feel the distance between us and the Lythion increasing. My uneasiness built the farther we got. We were vulnerable out here. At least while on board the Lythion, no matter what the threat, we could turn tail and run like hell.

  While we were on the shuttle and, in a few minutes, on the Ige Ibas, running wasn’t an option.

  Vara gave a soft whine. She sensed my jitters.

  I drew in a breath, just as Dalton had. And another one.

  “Hey,” Dalton said.

  “I’m fine,” I said shortly.

  “Your heart rate is elevated,” Fiori said.

  Checking over one’s shoulder while wearing a suit was near impossible. Doing it strapped into a tight-fitting maneuvers chair upped the difficulty factor, but I managed to turn my head enough to glare at her. “You’re monitoring me?”

  She lifted her forearm to indicate the flat panel mounted on the sleeve of the suit. “Medical panel.”

  “Great.” I looked at the ship we approached, my middle winding up into a good, hard knot. I needed a distraction. “What was Mace doing, running with wildcatters, anyway?” I put the question out there between the two of them.

  Silence.

  Fiori cleared her throat. “He’s an adult. Capable of making his own decisions.” But her tone was apologetic.

  “I let him go,” Dalton said, his tone flat.

  I looked at him, surprised. “With wildcatters?”

  Dalton didn’t look at me. “If I hadn’t said yes, he would have gone anyway. This way, I could check the ship out, talk to the captain…I know Eliot Byrne slightly—he’s opened up two of the worlds we’ve lived on. He’s sensible, for a wildcatter.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  Dalton rolled his eyes. �
��He’s had two good finds. He doesn’t need to prove himself or fight to make it.” He shrugged.

  That did make a difference. If the captain was already successful, already raking in the royalties, then he wouldn’t feel the need to take stupid risks.

  “So Mace wanted adventure,” I murmured. “Sounds just like you.”

  Dalton’s smile was small, but it was there.

  I sat back and watched the Ige Ibas creep closer and tried to keep my heart steady. It had been a very long while since I’d shipped out with a medic watching my tell-tale vitals. I was out of practice.

  The ship drew closer and details grew clearer. There were a lot of probes and scanners—some of them I could name and some of them were like nothing I’d ever seen before. I even spotted an ancient radar scanner.

  If your job entailed exploring unknown dirtballs, it made sense to scan the shit out of the place first. If we had this vast range of scanning choices aboard the Lythion, perhaps we might have been able to figure out the mystery of the Ige Ibas without actually going there.

  The shuttle drifted up close to the hull of the Ige Ibas. I could see score marks from meteorites and space debris. If the hull had ever held a color, it was gone now. The metal was raw and dull.

  The hull was convex. My heart sank.

  “Curved hull,” Dalton said. “We can’t connect directly, then. We could use a molecular barrier tunnel to cross.”

  “I’m going over alone.” I pointed. “Get as close as your nerves will let you.” I unclipped the belts and struggled out of the chair.

  “You shouldn’t go alone,” Fiori protested. “What if something happens to you?”

  “That’s why I want you two to stay here. You’re my backup. If something happens to me, you either come in with guns blazing, or you run like hell. Dalton gets to make that call.” I paused to let that sink in. “Clear?”

  Fiori’s eyes narrowed, but she nodded. “Clear, Colonel.”

  I moved into the compartment and over to the security panel next to the big side door. There was a matching door on the other side of the compartment, but this one faced the Ige Ibas. I punched up the molecular barrier controls and set up the barrier as a cylinder, then extended it out until the control panel told me it had reached a metal barrier.