by A. D. Bloom
Hank agreed with his 2nd officer. Energy was falling through the cracks to the ever-hungry sub-dimension already. The ball of fire had clearly begun to shrink in the moment before its surface in regular space tore. It ripped as if it had been made of tight-stretched rubber and fell in on itself from all sides, leaving only residual plasma and exotic particles that skated a thin, permeable, two-dimensional membrane between regular space and the newly created transit. Beyond the terminal membrane lay a fire-walled, undulating vein. If you looked down it just right, you could just make out the stars at the other end as seen from the Eridani system.
"Who goes first?"
The spent breaching ship turned on maneuvering thrusters and lit her engines to get clear. She didn't stop to say goodbye.
"This is Ariadne. We'll go in first. I suggest we stagger our ships to reduce the possibility of either side foolishly attempting to gain an advantage over the other during transit."
"Voracious agrees. We'll follow after you, Ariadne...so we can enjoy a rear view of Commander Dana Sellis all the way to the next system."
The plasma on the membrane broke in splashes over Ariadne and then over Voracious' towers as she crashed through next. "NAV," said Hank, "Take us in. Maintain 5 Ks distance."
The plasma splashed over the bow and the windows of the bridge. Exotic particles still unexplained briefly pooled and seemed to glow from a half-meter deep inside the hull. The arrays went blind for a moment, and then, they were inside, shooting fast between the waving, fire-skinned walls of the interstellar vein. "Seven minutes to Alpha Eridani," said Hank. "Mr. Kik, order the forward batteries to maintain both fully charged capacitors and updated firing solutions on the Voracious."
"Firing anything inside the transit is madness," said Millet.
"All the more reason to aim very carefully."
The first of Randall's gunboat escorts steamed closer behind Absalom than he liked, but it didn't bother him enough to actually get on comms about it. Slightly above and behind the gunboat and its add-on turrets and hand-load torpedo tubes, Split Aces and her junks rode three abreast. The gunboat behind them rode too close as well. Hank pointed to the projection above his XO's console. "What's the range between Marquis Blanc back there and that gun-covered hauler?"
The Shediri enlarged the information for him at the same time he clacked and whined like a reed instrument. "They're all too close. Getting closer." said the translator, but the machine voice didn't convey the slight alarm that either of them felt.
Millet said, "Why the hell are they doing that? We'll be there in minutes. Are they just messing with us?"
"Negative," said the arthropod XO. "hull behind us now 3.4 Ks. Decreasing fast."
"They're going to attempt to pass us," said Hank.
"Why?"
Hank knew. Up in the Ariadne they'd be having this same conversation right now and at least a few of the people there would know too.
"Only reason," said. Kik Sin, "To reach terminal membrane of transit and exit into Eridani system before our ships. Then, destroy transit."
"What, you mean take us as we exit?"
"Possibly," Hank said. "Or something nastier perhaps. They could try to rupture the walls of the transit."
"But we'd all be sucked out....lost in interstellar space...never heard from again."
"Not all of us. The ones that got out cleanly would make it. I saw a pilot named Steinmetz do it in 2165. They never did find all those Squidies that were chasing her."
"This is Ariadne," Ram Devlin's voice said over comms. "All ships accelerate to maximum. Looks like we're racing Fancy Randy for the terminus."
"2.8 Ks," said Mr. Kik. "They're definitely maneuvering to pass. NAV block them. Sending vectors."
While Absalom blocked one of the fat gunboat escorts that dwarfed her, another used speed none of them knew the converted freighters had to out-accelerate them. The others steamed close behind while Ketok and their ad hoc tender, the Marquis Blanc struggled to keep up.
"We've got to open fire now," said Millet. "We've got no choice."
"I tend to agree," he said thumbing comms to Ariadne, but Ram Devlin was already calling out to Fancy Randall in a futile exercise.
"This is Ariadne. Voracious why the hell are your ships accelerating?"
"They're fast ships, aren't they," said Fancy Randall. "They're faster than yours. That's going to turn out badly for you."
"Ariadne, this is Absalom. After they exit he's going to rupture the transit. We've got to open fire now. Get back here before he thinks he can hit you without taking a chance on missing and killing himself too."
"NAV, get ready to turn and burn if we have to."
The Shediri at NAV, Ti'vt, clicked out, "Why?" and swayed his head with worry as Hank nodded out the windows of the bridge. Far out over the bow, Ariadne's hull turned to show them a broadside. She spun to face them and juiced the Shediri made drive coils on the bow directly against their line of travel. That turn and burn maneuver decelerated them quickly enough to effectively hurl the Ariadne backwards past Voracious and the gunboats, all eight of which had caught up and now rode in a line, two abreast. Hank winced watching how close that steel and chitin hull came to colliding with Fancy Randall's ships as Ariadne hit the brakes. In less than five seconds, the hybrid was among them, steaming close with Absalom, Ketok, Split Aces. Marquis Blanc steamed to the rear.
"Voracious," Devlin pleaded. "Come in Voracious."
Two formations of ships now steamed fast down the Alcyone-Eridani transit separated by 9 Ks of space that grew at an alarming rate. Hank said, "How long will we be in here after they exit at the terminus?"
Hank's first officer gestured over the tactical console. "There will be time to collapse transit before privateers escape."
"Ariadne!" Hank shouted into his mic. "Open fire!"
"We can't goddamn it!" shouted Chun's voice over comms. "If we miss we'll rupture the transit!"
"He's going to do that to us in less than thirty seconds anyway! This way if we miss at least he'll be lost in space with us. Give the order! He's going to kill us!" Hank killed the transmission and nodded to his XO to give their own gun captains order to fire just before Ram Devlin got his wits back and gave the order himself.
Every gun captain in every one of their batteries knew the risk and set for tight spreads on the railgun blocks, hurtling their sabot at point blank range in salvos no wider than the blocks themselves. The bridge and the chair under him shuddered with the release as the supercharged magnetic rings drove the sabot to speed before they left the blocks.
The pale streaks against the fiery background drew a straight and instant line to the last of Randall's gunboats. The impact flashes lit up its aft end at the same time a salvo from Ariadne landed. Molten metal sprayed and sparked and turned to a hail that impacted the command tower and hit the diamond-pane windows hard enough to create a piezoelectric show.
The plasma trail from the first ship they hit went dark the instant the first salvo hit. Now, he could see the damage clearly. The freighter had taken at least one sabot straight up the exhaust vectoring while the other five had punched molten holes in the thin armor between the engines and driven their way inside. The ship in front of it pitched and yawed out of line driven by a plume now jetting from the topside of its aft section. It veered down towards the walls of the transit while maneuvering jets fired in an attempt to keep her in line inside the 2K-wide corridor. Neither of the wounded ships slowed down, but neither would be firing at them in the next seconds.
"Change targets!" he barked as Ketok opened fire with a risky ion cannon blast that got up past the exhaust vectoring of a third gunboat and flamed out the engines. Split Aces' guns hit it on the keel as it pitched upwards. Secondaries cooked off from the turrets they hit on the keelside.
Voracious suddenly lit up with a detonation at her aft end and lit all her escorts in silhouette.
Hank said, "Was that what I think it was?"
"Spectra confi
rms limpet mine detonation," said Millet.
"He tried to remove the mines Ms. Sellis attached to his hull. That wasn't very smart." Hank zoomed in to see the damage. Randall's engines were out. The vape craters in the hull from the fusion mines were less than ten-meters across, but they'd blasted away enough armor to do serious damage inside. Those engines wouldn't light again for many hours. But it didn't slow Voracious down.
"24 seconds until they exit the transit," said Kik Sin.
Fancy Randall's voice sounded anything but fazed. "This is Voracious calling Ariadne. I'd like to thank you, Ms. Sellis for that pair of mines you affixed to my hull in such an unsportsmanlike manner. My XO... you met, Mr. Jocko...He swore if he cut away enough hull around the mines then they wouldn't detonate. Commodore...Governor Devlin are you there? I want you to know it was playing out of your depth that put you here."
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"You planned to betray me all along. Deceit and betrayal are my domain," said Fancy Randall. "Don't skip rope in the hangman's house."
"Fifteen seconds until they're out...then they'll launch torps at the transit walls."
"This is Ram Devlin. All privateer ships carrying Shediri spatial breaching charges, prep and fire on bearing 0 mark 0, now, now, now!"
"Wait," Millet said, "a Shediri spatial charge is for breaching space and opening transits. We're IN a transit now. What the hell is going to happen?"
"They're out in eight seconds. Do it, Mr. Millet, quickly!"
The little maneuvering jets up and down the Shediri spatial breaching charge stutter-fired as it left its tube in the side of the command tower and blasted itself forward on a tiny chemical rocket. Ariadne to starboard and Ketok to port fired launched them as well. The chitin-casings looked like runt torpedoes as they passed.
"Five seconds until they reach the terminal membrane..."
The Shediri ridiculed the use of colliding particle streams to breach space, finding it particularly funny that Humanity always fell back on throwing rocks as a basic solution to any problem. Bullets, sabot from railguns, charged particle streams - it was all rock throwing to the bugs. Shediri charges for breaching space didn't throw mass/energy willy-nilly at a point in space hoping to bridge stellar distortions in n-space the way colliding particle streams did. The bugs' devices were really pulsed field coils, a sophisticated sort of pinch that manifested an n-space distortion directly without much in the way of fireworks.
The first flash was the brightest, then they all three spatial breaching charges shone with a verdant light almost more powerful than the hellish glow from the walls of the transit. The three, fast growing balls of warping space crackled with charge and swelled inside the transit. As the distortions grew, they pulled the waving, fiery walls closer, bending the transit around them.
"NAV, don't try to avoid the distortions. Full speed ahead."
The Shediri navigator clicked disapproval and maintained course.
"Three seconds....and...they're out!"
Between the bending walls of the transit and the fast-growing spatial distortions from the charges, Hank saw the flares behind the spread of torpedoes launched from Voracious as she escaped. The four warspites cut hard turns after leaving her port side tubes. They slalomed around a pair of gunboat freighters, flying close over the hulls and turrets before pointing their noses at the wall of the transit, just inside it.
"All hands, brace for impact."
He lost sight of the torps before detonation because each of the Shediri spatial charges hurtling in front of them had now waxed to 700-meter-wide balls of pale, greenish hellfire. The light of the stuttering fusion flashes from the torpedoes was unmistakable. The brilliance of a tiny, brief-lived sun flooded the transit, and he swore he looked out to port and saw the membranous wall of the vein through n-space tearing and bursting in slow motion, ruptured skin contracting on itself to reveal the sub-dimension. Darkness broke through the ruptures and flooded in like inky seawater. Where it met the plasma from the detonations, it dimmed it to a barely glowing fog until the fury of the fusion dets flickered and died like doomed embers.
The transit walls were gone. The terminus and the sight of Randall's escaping ships was gone, too. Only the infinite darkness of n-space surrounded them until the ever-growing spheres of the Shediri spatial charges in front of them intersected and reached some kind of critical threshold. In that region, they flashed brightly and blinded Absalom's arrays. The windows of the bridge dimmed as did his helmet, but Hank still caught sight of the ships around them, illuminated with some unnatural radiation that shone through them so that he saw their hulls and insides all at once, even the fighters in the holds of the Marquis Blanc and the two-bug crews waiting in the cockpits.
Before the light of the threshold engulfed them all, Hank saw another spread of Fancy Randall's torpedoes on the far side of the new spatial breach. The Mk5 fusion torps splashed through the exotic particles skating the surface membrane and disappeared at the same time Absalom and the rest of Devlin's Privateers plunged in.
He couldn't tell if the detonating torps knocked them out of the newly formed transit or if they'd simply reached the terminus and been spat out at the same time the spread of warspites blew.
They detonated early, 300 meters off the bow of Ariadne, converting their casings to a dense plasma that slammed the privateers, snapping shunting panels off and battering their hulls. When the nuclear flashes were over and both his helmet and the windows of Absalom's bridge had cleared, Hank's heart swelled with genuine relief to see the stars' familiar pinpricks against the black.
"Regular space!" said Kik Sin. "NAV, starfix!"
"Absalom is...Eridani...but..."
"But what?"
"Running NAV diagnostics..."
The representation over Mr. Kik's console showed the system's angry star and its baked planets, but the off-scale image of Absalom had been placed up out of the ecliptic by only 50 million Ks or so. "Is that correct, Mr. Ti'vt? Are we where we appear to be?"
"Starfix and NAV functioning. Absalom is 53 million Ks from the transit."
"Get me damage reports, Mr. Millet."
"I can tell you right now we lost a few stealth panels."
"New contacts! Bearing 283, mark 263. It's Ariadne. And Split Aces. Ketok is farther out. They look damaged."
"I can see Marquis Blanc now. Barely. Our formation is strung out over about 10 million Ks."
"Hail them all quietly using the IR lasers."
"Don't want to tip off Fancy Randall we're alive, Captain Hank?"
"I'd much rather we surprise him."
Chapter 5
Outer Eridani System
ICV Absalom
Outside his ship was the only place Hank could get a view of the damage to the energy shunts lining the hull. Once he emerged from the airlock set in the starboard side of the command tower, he tried to spy the other ships he knew would be closing on them now and was pleased to not see a thing on his helmet's passive LiDAR. Only the Ketok reported no damage to her stealth from the engagement in the transit. The rest of them were semi-visible and thankful they emerged in the dim, outer reaches of the Eridani system. Out here, the local star shone so faintly that its claim to the outer system's exiled planetoids and lost rocks seemed a matter of gravitational formality.
Hank pushed off to clear the forest of shunts on the command tower and then used the gasbelt he wore to propel himself down the ship's spine to the battered grove of n-space energy shunts on the side of the engineering module aft of midships. Chief Barley and her team of veteran redsuits and engineer bugs hovered over and under panel #6 looking for fractures. One of the Shediri with a multispectral imager in each hand proclaimed it, "mostly good" over local comms.
"This one should still work is what he means," translated Barley.
"Should work?" said Hank over a private channel. Kinda' hard to bet our lives on 'should'. How many of these shunts are going to work for sure?" In her helmet's inte
rior lights he saw her eyebrows raise before she looked left and right at the denuded mounting stumps where at least five panels had been blown off by hyperaccelerated plasma generated by close fusion dets.
Chief Barley said, "If you powered up these panels right now, it'd dim us here and there, but it wouldn't be enough to rely on. This thing wasn't built with redundancy with respect to the stealth panels. We need each and every one of them to be doing their job."
"How many do w-"
"Seven. We need seven more replacement panels because we only had six. And Split Aces says they're missing more than we are so we can't get 'em there. Same with Ariadne. I checked. I'm sorry, Skipper. We're not going to be sneaking up on anyone today."
ICV Ariadne
Ready Room
Ram Devlin poured generously, drank, and wasted no time once Hank, Ix, Asa Biko, and Captain Morey of the hauler Marquis Blanc arrived. "Right now, Fancy Randal is drinking fancy Champagne and celebrating our deaths while his men scramble to repair his engines. It'll take him at least twelve hours to even limp fast. We hit three of his escorts too. They'll all be making repairs somewhere near the transit."
A wave of his hand brought up a projection of the outer system charts from the matchbox computer on the desk. It showed the relatively close interstellar passage and the lanes that would, sooner or later, bring unwanted or unlucky visitors on their way from Eridani to Alcyone.
"Twelve hours of repairs? That's a dangerous place to do it," said Biko. "There's going to be haulers and maybe even UNS passing through at some point."
"Lucky for Randall, Mesperyian is only 270,000 Ks from the transit right now. That's where he'll lay low and hide. The planetoid is less than a thousand Ks in diameter, but if he holds station low over the section of its dark side facing away from the transit, then nobody's going to find him unless they're looking hard. And he thinks the only people who would do that right now are lost between Eridani and Alcyone."
Ix clacked and hissed. "Interrogative:" said the bug's translator. "He is certain?" The VIP bug's 58 legs rippled in little waves on wither side of his lower body.
