It wasn’t a word Duggan wanted to hear. “What is it?”
“I’ve got something big on the fars, sir. I have no idea what it is – it’s smaller than the mothership and bigger than the Dreamer battleship. It’s heading towards us at more than two thousand klicks per second.”
Duggan looked at the updated tactical screen and saw the other vessel. It was far to starboard and moving on a course that would bring it close to the Crimson. “Does it know we’re here or is this bad luck?”
“It won’t precisely intercept us, sir. It’ll be close enough to make no difference. For the avoidance of doubt, they will know we’re here from this range.”
“Damnit, why now?”
“There’s a second vessel out there as well, sir. This one’s coming from the other side. It’s a lot smaller, if that helps – another new type.”
A second dot appeared on the tactical – this one only a little further away than the first. Duggan gritted his teeth as he stared at the display.
“Tell the Juniper how crowded it is here, Lieutenant. Priority message.”
“Our primary comms are down, sir. Switching to the backups.”
“They must be modifying their existing fleet in order to get them through the wormhole,” McGlashan guessed. “Increasing their density or changing the shape so they can withstand the stresses.”
“We’re two minutes away,” said Breeze.
“Prepare the fission drives for the launch sequence,” said Duggan, his voice even.
“Warm-up is underway.”
“The enemy warship has launched a wave of fifty missiles – impact in forty seconds. Past data suggests it won’t be long until they can use their particle beams. Once they start hitting us with those, we might lose enough of our engines that we can’t make the jump.”
“We’re caught between them,” said Duggan. He evaluated the situation – if they maintained their existing course, there would be a period during which both enemy spacecraft would be able to attack the Crimson. The timings weren’t easy to work out in his head and he tried to figure out if the Dreamer missiles would be quick enough to reach them if he kept the Crimson on its existing trajectory towards the wormhole.
“Sir, if we turn to intercept the smaller craft and make a quick kill, we’ll buy ourselves some time,” said McGlashan. “The larger vessel is only a little quicker than we are. It won’t close the gap before we can activate our launch into the wormhole.”
“It’ll have plenty of time to launch a thousand missiles at us, Commander.”
“We have no good choice, sir.”
“No, we don’t,” he replied. “Outnumbered and outgunned in a fight we don’t want. Get ready on the countermeasures as soon as you’re able. I don’t want anything else fired – we’ll conserve our ammunition for what lies ahead.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The launch sequence is ready to activate whenever you want, sir,” Breeze advised. “We’re too far out for the time being.”
“Acknowledged.”
The situation wasn’t good and Duggan knew that whatever choice he made it might still result in failure. They needed to get as close to the Blackstar as they could manage, without pushing the Crimson to the point of destruction and without allowing the enemy enough time to shoot them down with missiles. It wasn’t time to dwell on the chance of failure and he made his decision.
“We’re maintaining our existing course,” he said. He had one eye on the tactical screen and saw how close the inbound missiles were.
“Countermeasures away.”
“Launch more.”
The shock drones scattered away from the Crimson, sparkling with the light of their own power cells. The enemy missiles detonated against them, exploding in pure white. One, lone missile remained on its course and its guidance system sent it colliding with the Crimson’s starboard armour. There was a thunderous, reverberating clunk.
“It failed to detonate,” said McGlashan, with a look of shock. “There’s a second wave incoming – this time it’s a hundred.”
“It’s like they’re picking us off at their leisure,” said Chainer. “Disrespectful bastards.”
“Of course!” Duggan exclaimed. “They have no idea what we’re going to do. They must think they have us trapped!”
“The smaller ship’s firing. Fifty more to add to the pile.”
Duggan checked the distance counter – they were still one hundred and fifty thousand kilometres from the wormhole. The larger ship fired a third salvo of one hundred.
“We could make this,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” said McGlashan. “Those missiles are faster than a Shatterer.”
Duggan saw that she was correct and that he’d miscalculated. There was hardly anything in it – no more than a second or two, but the wave of a hundred missiles would reach them at eighty thousand kilometres away from the wormhole.
The tactical display filled with targets, shown as a variety of angry reds depending on their priority. The distance counter raced down towards one hundred thousand kilometres.
“The hull is showing signs of stress, sir,” said Breeze.
The early indications of it appeared with an upward flickering on several of the hull gauges. It began slowly and then at a rapidly-increasing rate. Then, the forces on the hull rose so rapidly that the Crimson went close to its design tolerances within the space of moments. An automated siren began.
“Shut that off!” Duggan shouted.
The siren continued and was joined by the emergency lights. Their rich blood-red light burned in sympathy with Duggan’s growing anger.
Time and distance counted down. Far from being hurried, Duggan found himself able to make decisions almost at his leisure. “We’re going faster,” he said, the words coming as soon as his mind registered the fact. “Nineteen-fifty klicks per second.”
“A hundred thousand klicks from the wormhole,” said Breeze.
“Get ready to activate the launch sequence on my word.”
The Crimson’s speed increased again as it raced towards the wormhole ahead. Two thousand three hundred klicks per second, he thought. I hope the lab guys know what they’re doing else we’ll never escape at the other end.
There was a creaking, groaning sound, coming from all about. To his horror, Duggan realised it was the Crimson being crushed by the immense weight of gravity. The spaceship was little more than a lump of solid ultra-dense metal, so he knew the pressure was unimaginable. We might just escape the missiles at this speed, if we don’t break up first.
The impression of time slowed down further and Duggan wondered if it was a result of their proximity to the wormhole, or nothing more than an illusion created by his own fevered thoughts.
The Crimson shook and rumbled. A harsh, abrasive scraping noise intruded upon the bridge, drowning out the siren.
“Sir? Should I activate?” The words came from Lieutenant Breeze, spoken as if in slow-motion.
The warship’s status displays spoke of nothing but the crew’s imminent death. The inbound missiles were nearly upon them, their Gallenium propulsion and warheads strong enough to resist the pressure. Shock drones appeared on the tactical, their lives measured in moments as the wormhole’s gravity crushed them in its irresistible fist. Duggan experienced surprise when he saw how close they were to the Blackstar. Sixty thousand klicks.
He opened his mouth and spoke the words. “Activate launch sequence.”
The Crimson disappeared.
Chapter Twelve
Duggan opened his eyes. He had no idea how long they’d been closed. Had he simply blinked, or had he been unconscious for an eternity? His limbs and mind felt weighed down by a powerful memory of dislocation. One part of his brain reminded him that early lightspeed travellers had reported symptoms similar to what he felt now. Am I alive?
With a growl, Duggan took his head in his hands, trying to shake off the fugue. He slowly became aware of his surroundings – the siren and em
ergency light had mercifully shut off and he saw with relief that the others of the crew were rousing themselves.
“What?” Chainer muttered, his mouth incapable of uttering anything more significant.
“We’ve got to get moving,” said Duggan, the words sounding like they came from a great distance.
Breeze made a noise, somewhere between a groan and a grunt. He lifted a hand and stared at it in fascination, as though he’d never seen it before.
“Come on!” Duggan urged. He tried to marshal his thoughts and looked at the screens around him. For a moment, he couldn’t make sense of the information and panic rose within him. Then, his mind settled and the swirling disarray snapped into sharp focus. They’d come through the wormhole – somehow, they’d managed what his primal instinct told him was impossible. The time would come for a full status check. For the moment, they needed to move.
Duggan recalled the Dreamer ships on the other side of the wormhole, as though it was years ago. Even blurred by the warping effects of the transit, the memory was enough to remind him of the great dangers they faced. Without sparing time to decide on the best heading, he powered the Crimson away at its fastest speed.
“Frank, I need you!” he called loudly.
“Yes. Yes, sir,” Chainer stammered. He thumped the palm of one hand against his forehead and straightened his back.
“Tell me what’s out there.”
“I can help on the sensors, sir,” said McGlashan.
“Stay where you are, Commander!”
“Commencing scan,” Chainer mumbled. He cleared his throat. “Commencing scan!” he repeated, louder and clearer.
Duggan breathed a sigh of relief to see Chainer’s recovery. “Lieutenant Breeze, I need status updates.”
“It’ll take me a moment, sir.”
“Not too long.” Duggan paused to see if Chainer would give him immediate news. There was nothing forthcoming, so he opened an internal channel to the troops’ quarters. “Lieutenant Ortiz, please report.”
“Ortiz answered immediately and Duggan had to suppress a smile at the chirpiness in her voice, as well as at the details she provided.
“Everything is perfect, sir. A few of the guys have forgotten which day of the week it is, but there’s a calendar hanging on the mess room wall for when they want a reminder.”
Ortiz would have mentioned injuries before saying anything so flippant, but Duggan couldn’t stop himself asking. “Anyone hurt?”
“No, sir. Don’t you know we’re the best the Space Corps has to offer? It’ll take more than the impossible to slow us down.”
“What about our friends from the Ghast navy?”
“Those boys look just fine as well, sir. I spoke to Red-Gulos and he assured me they hadn’t even realised we’d gone through.”
Duggan laughed. “Brave words from our new allies, Lieutenant.”
“They look tough, sir.”
“I’m sure they are. Very well, wait for further updates.”
“Acknowledged.”
The brief conversation gave the others time to rally. Chainer was the first to speak and he provided a brief update of what he’d found so far.
“The good news is, there are no signs of the enemy in our vicinity,” he said. “That’s where the good news ends. The first piece of bad news is that while we were incapable of action, the Crimson’s sensors picked up another enemy spacecraft doing a lightspeed jump towards the Blackstar from a place near to where we arrived. We got lucky, sir – really lucky. If we’d been a few seconds earlier, we’d have got here and been an easy kill for them.”
“It happens,” said Duggan, unwilling to think about what might have been. “Where’s the wormhole?”
“For want of a more technical term, it’s behind us, sir. A good distance behind us.”
“How the hell did that happen?” he asked, when he saw just how far away the Helius Blackstar was. “I thought we were relying on the gravity drives to pull us away. We should be much closer to it.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” said Breeze. “When I’ve finished with the other items on my critical list.”
Duggan turned his attention to Chainer again. “What else?”
“I’ve checked and double-checked our location against all known stars. In summary, I have absolutely no idea where we are. On top of that, we’re on the backup comms. They work well at medium distances, even if they travel at a fraction the speed of a modern comms system. Out here? I have no idea how long they’ll take to get to one of the Confederation’s monitoring stations. What’s even worse is I can’t actually send a message since I have too little data on where to aim the transmitters.”
“In other words, we’re lost,” said McGlashan.
“No more than we expected, Commander.”
“Stealth modules are ready,” said Breeze.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Duggan replied. “Activate them at once.”
From the corner of his eye, Duggan saw the available power for the gravity drives plummet to fifty percent – it was a price well-worth paying for the reassurance offered by the stealth cloak.
Chainer continued. “I’ve still got the fars and super-fars scanning. I don’t need their reports to tell you what’s close by. Look.” With that, he pointed at the bulkhead screen and Duggan saw a computer-generated map of the local solar system.
“A big sun, eight orbiting worlds and a dozen or so moons,” said McGlashan. “So far, so normal.”
“Not quite,” said Chainer. “There’s something on the fourth planet.”
“Any ideas what it is yet?”
“Sorry, sir. I’m using too many processing cycles analysing everything else. I can tell you that whatever’s on the surface, it’s made of metal and it’s fairly large. Do you want me to prioritise the object?”
“No, keep on as you are. You’ve given me enough to go on,” said Duggan. He made a snap decision and altered course towards the fourth planet. “I’m very interested to learn what’s down there.”
“It’s close enough to the wormhole to be significant,” McGlashan answered. “We should count ourselves lucky.”
Duggan understood what she meant. They could have emerged from the wormhole into a place with nothing, many hours lightspeed from anywhere. They’d have been reduced to circling around near to the Blackstar in stealth, waiting to see what happened by. Or perhaps a Dreamer warship could have returned from Confederation space and led them to something significant at sub-light speed. Both possibilities would have been fraught with danger and uncertainty. At least this confirmed sighting of an object on the nearby planet gave them an instant purpose.
The target planet was close to fifteen million kilometres away – a journey of about two hours. Duggan could have ordered a short lightspeed jump towards it, in order to save a little time. In the circumstances, slow and steady was much the preferable choice, especially given the incomplete status updates.
Eventually, Breeze was able to provide the necessary details.
“The hull took a beating, but it’s intact. They built these things well,” he said fondly. “If the pressure doesn’t break it outright, we can assume it’s effectively undamaged.”
“That’s promising for the return trip,” said Duggan.
Breeze went on. “The logs confirm we travelled for exactly zero amount of time, sir. In reality, we have no way of knowing what the AI counted. Maybe we’ve come across half of the universe instantaneously or perhaps we travelled for a thousand years and when we get home everyone we know will be long dead.”
“Admiral Teron didn’t tell us that might happen!” said Chainer in alarm.
“I doubt he knew,” said Breeze. “Anyway, I’m just guessing, Frank. Don’t take it so seriously.”
“Go on,” said Duggan.
“I’m not entirely certain how we made it so far from the Blackstar. The audits show a few things I’ve not seen before. There’s a sustained utilisation jump on the Dreamer core from the m
oment we activated the launch sequence until the time we arrived here. In addition, the fission drives show an unusual reading – as if we’ve performed a double jump.”
“I didn’t think that was possible,” said Duggan, frowning.
“Until today, I’d have agreed with you. Look here, though – the AI was close to burning out during the process.”
“Did they fit overdrive hardware to give it a boost? They must have learned a lot about the Dreamer core to have patched that in.”
“Maybe that’s what they did. The Space Corps doesn’t take risks with its warships, Captain. We can make our hardware run a lot faster than it does – it simply increases the failure rate. Drastically increases it.”
“It sounds like they’ve done some trickery to bounce us from one lightspeed jump to another without any need for ramp-up.”
Breeze held out his hands to show he wasn’t certain. “That would be as good a guess as any. We don’t need to know how they’ve managed it, as long as it works. We’re only a few seconds away from the wormhole if you assume we travelled at high lightspeed once we came through.”
“Will we be able to make the return journey? That’s the important question.”
“I wouldn’t like to do any more transits than necessary, put it that way.”
“One more is all we need,” said Duggan, nevertheless worried by what his conversation with Breeze had raised. Another concerning thought came to him. “Lieutenant Chainer – what are the chances those Dreamer warships we escaped have transmitted details of our presence to one of their home bases?”
“I wouldn’t like to say. Confederation space could be as unknown to them as their space is to us. If we assume they have enough idea of where to point their comms, you could be looking at days, weeks, months or years for messages to travel, depending on their technology.”
“Not hours?”
“Definitely not hours. If you put your foot on my neck hard enough, I would venture a guess that their messages have a delay of several weeks - probably months.”
“That’s far,” said Duggan.
“Yes, sir. We’re talking about distances that make the whole of Confederation space look like a bird dropping on the New Earth Capital Shipyard main landing pad.”
Terminus Gate (Survival Wars Book 5) Page 8
