“And you are sure this system is protected by something the Elders left behind?” I pressed my point.
“What else could it be, Joe?” Skippy asked smugly.
“It could be the Roach Motel is guarded by whatever mysterious beings threw Newark out of orbit. That was after the Elders left the galaxy, and before the Rindhalu developed star travel. We know there is an unknown player out there, Skippy. How do you know that unknown third party isn’t the one guarding the Roach Motel? Maybe they’re guarding it because they want to keep the Elder tech they find to themselves.”
“Well, shit,” Skippy said disgustedly. “You picked a fine time to ask this question, Joe. Why the hell didn’t you think of this earlier?”
“I didn’t,” I said with an apologetic shrug to Chotek. “I just thought of it now.”
Hans Chotek sat back in his chair and let out a long breath. “Colonel Bishop, I have become aware of how inconvenient it can be to ask questions at a time that is perhaps too late, but such questions must be asked regardless.”
“I’m sorry, Sir,” I said sheepishly. “Until we have an answer, we can jump away-”
“Why?” Chotek surprised me by asking. “I don’t see how our situation has changed. Our only possibility of restoring Skippy to full function is in this Roach Motel, correct? That has not changed. We have already agreed to jump in there, regardless of the level of risk.”
“Yes, Sir, but we thought the risk came from Elder technology, and now-”
“It doesn’t matter,” our mission commander shook his head. “We have no other choice. Any possibility of success and survival is better than the certainty of failure and death we have right now. We go, when the ship and crew are ready, Colonel. Mister Skippy, I assume you are ready at any time?”
“Affirmative,” Skippy replied without a smart-ass remark
“It is settled, then,” Chotek slapped a palm on the table. “We go, for better or for worse. At least,” he said with a wry smile, “we hopefully will get a glimpse of what is so secret in that star system, eh?”
We jumped. The main display blinked and switched from a generic starfield to a view centered on a dot representing a fiery hot orange star, and I knew we had survived entry to the Roach Motel. That was a huge relief, one of our fears had been the ship would be torn apart inside the jump wormhole, or sheared into atoms as we exited the event horizon on the far end. If I died right then after the jump, at least I had gotten a glimpse of the big secret.
Which, truthfully, didn’t look all that impressive. It was a star, like any other star. The sensors were still resetting so we couldn’t yet detect any planets, but the star wasn’t surrounded by a habitable ring or a Dyson sphere or any sort of cool alien megastructure. “Skippy, how are we?” I asked when I was able to let out the breath trapped in my lungs.
“Fine so far, but that could be just blissful ignorance. Sensors are still resetting, Joe, we can’t see much yet. Ooooh, crap. Whatever you do, Joe, do not attempt a jump. We are caught in an extremely powerful damping field. Well, hell, now we know why ships never jump out of here; they can’t.”
“Understood. Colonel Chang, secure from”-
“No!” Skippy shouted. “No no no no no no no! Give me a sec-”
The ship lurched. No, it skewed. Like, half of every particle including whatever I am made of, suddenly slipped sideways from the other half. Instantly, I got a blinding headache and my eyeballs felt like they were going to pop out of my head. The main display went blurry and it wasn’t only my vision causing the blurriness; the display flickered weirdly as if part of it were in 3D and the other part not. “Skip-”
“Jump Option Zebra!” He screeched.
“Jump?” My agonized brain faintly reminded me there was no option ‘Zebra’ in the drive nav system; Skippy must have programmed that option on the fly. “You just told us not-”
“Screw it! JUMP!” He roared.
Desai, who was clutching one hand to her own head in terrible pain, did not wait for my order, she pressed the correct buttons and we jumped.
Or we tried to jump. There was an ear-splitting horrific shuddering accompanied by a shrieking groaning sound of something being twisted and torn, then artificial gravity cut out and I felt the ship, the entire ship, flip end over end. My head whiplashed back and forth despite the restraint field dragging at my scalp. This failed jump was much, much worse than anything we had experienced before. For a split second the ship and crew and everything around me including me went transparent, followed by a blinding light. When it stopped abruptly I wasn’t able to talk. The sensation of every atom in my body being tugged apart went away, then returned full strength a moment later.
That was the easy part.
Skippy was shouting something I couldn’t hear over the cacophony, the only piece of information I could focus on was a section of the main display indicating the coils were building up to another jump. What the hell? We just barely survived one failed jump, why the hell was Skippy setting us up for another attempt?! Before I could ask him, I saw the display flip to a jump countdown, then the drive coils pulsed. “No-” I choked before a flash of light more intense than I’d ever seen flared inside me retinas, and I blacked out.
Skippy later told me I had been unconscious for several minutes, and I was one of the first people to revive because the restraint field of the command chair helped protect me. That, plus a fist-sized creepy spider-shaped bot crawling up my arm to inject me with some stimulant helped revive me. The spider was still attached to my arm when I opened one eye. “Gaaaah!” I gargled through a mouthful of spit and something tasting very bad.
“Joe, it’s Ok!” Skippy’s voice came to me faintly, like he was deep underwater. My head and my eyes and everything hurt. “That is a medical bot, it injected you with stimulants to wake you up and nano meds to counteract the mild concussion you suffered.”
The burst of adrenaline surging through my body from seeing the creepy spider bot was working better than any stimulant he could have shot into me. “Wha-”
“Relax a minute. Relax,” he said soothingly as the spider crouched, then gently pushed itself off my arm to float through the air in zero gravity over to land on Desai’s neck. As I blinked tears from my eyes and tried to focus, I watched as the spiderbot injected our chief pilot, then crawled down her arm to reach its next victim. Next patient, I told myself.
Between adrenaline and Mad Doctor Skippy’s patented wonder drug, I realized I was feeling fairly alert and not remembering when that had happened. The two pilots and the crew in CIC were reviving, and by painfully turning my very stiff neck I saw Skippy had the spiderbots bypassing the inert form of Hans Chotek to attend to more important crewmembers, which were all of them. For a second I guiltily thought Chotek might be dead, then he coughed out a slimy bubble of mucus and whatever he’d last eaten. The bubble hung in the air in front of his face, and that wasn’t the only one; many other disgusting objects were drifting around both CIC and bridge. Ugh! I realized I’d gotten some in my hair, and hoped it was my own.
“Damage report!” I ordered in a strangled voice, and for a brief moment I was channeling my inner Captain Kirk. Spots were still swimming in my vision and my ears were still ringing.
“Unknown at this time, Joe,” Skippy’s voice responded immediately. “The sensor suite is offline, I am working on it. My own internal capabilities are too degraded to be of much use, I am working on that also. I can report that we probably lost the aft engineering section of the Dutchman.”
“We what?”
“The ship’s spine was severed just aft of the docking platforms; we have lost all reactors, plus the jump drive and normal space maneuvering capability.”
“Severed?” I couldn’t speak. With the engineering section, we had lost the part of the ship that made the Flying Dutchman a ship. After all we had gone through together, our pirate ship was broken beyond repair. There was no point asking Skippy, or the dazed CIC crew, about the condition
of what was left of humanity’s first starship. “What went wrong, Skippy?”
“Mistakes were made, Joe,” Skippy said in a dismissive voice that was way more cheery than I expected, given the situation.
“Mistakes were made?” I repeated incredulously.
“Did I say that wrong?” He asked innocently. “The common usage of human rhetorical expressions sometimes confuses me. What is the correct expression for when you know you screwed up, but the worst part of it is some jerk who will. Not. Let. It. Go. You just want him to shut the hell up so you can move on, but he keeps blah, blah, blah yelling at you, like that’s gonna help?”
While I pounded my forehead with a fist, Major Simms in the CIC responded for me. “Mister Skippy, ‘mistakes were made’ is the correct expression.”
“Oh, good,” he said happily.
“You do not,” I scowled up at the speaker in the ceiling because Skippy’s avatar was not operational, “sound sincere about being sorry.”
“I am sincere that I want to forget about it, is that good enough? Anywho-”
“Am I the jerk who will not let it go?” I interrupted him.
“Um, no? Kinda guessing what you want me to say here, Joe.”
“Oh, for-”
“Since we’ve all agreed to put this little incident behind us and move on-”
“Little? We have not agreed to-” I began to say, until Simms caught my eye, shook her head and made a slashing motion across her throat. She was right. And, damn it, Skippy was right also, yelling at our beer can wasn’t going to accomplish anything. “Oh, hell, we can discuss this later.”
“Later is good,” Skippy sounded relieved. “Never would be better. Is ‘never’ good for you?”
Recalling my mother’s advice, I took three deep, calming breaths before answering. “Skippy, forget about what went wrong. What happened?”
“See, now we’re getting somewhere. To make a long story short, Joe, I was correct that this star system is actively patrolled by Elder devices; they are the reason why no ships or probes have ever returned from here. I was also correct, you are welcome by the way, that because I am of Elder origin, these devices would accept my identification codes, and halt their attack. However, and this is something I totally could not have been expected to know before we jumped in here, ugh. Remember, Joe, you agreed to the lame-brained idea of jumping into a star system that is a dead-end Roach Motel. I mean, seriously, what the hell were you thinking? So, when we jumped in, we were instantly attacked by weapons that act as sort of Guardians, and I transmit my ID codes. Everything is good, right? But, nooooooo, that would be too freakin’ easy! Because these Guardians expect me to transmit the proper codes from another phase of spacetime. Which I can’t do, and you knew that before we jumped in, because I told you I could no longer do that.”
Three more deep breaths. It was not helping. I so very much wanted to toss him out an airlock. Maybe a fourth deep breath would help me achieve inner peace.
Skippy continued while I struggled with inner rage. “Getting back to my point, the Guardians hesitated, that’s the reason we’re all still alive now. Then, when I couldn’t talk to them through a higher spacetime phase, they resumed their attack.”
“What was that failed jump for?” Remarkably, I was able to focus on what was immediately important.
“It wasn’t actually a jump attempt, Joe. We can’t jump; this system is saturated with an extremely powerful damping field. What I did was use the quantum resonance of the ship’s jump field to transmit ID codes in multiple spacetimes. The jump field collapsed almost immediately, but I was able to send a message through the jump field, which the Guardians accepted. Unfortunately, they had already begun warping the fabric of space around the ship, and even after they released that effect, it snapped the Dutchman’s spine forward of the engineering section.”
“That was the explosion we felt? The reactors and drive capacitors blowing up?”
“No, Joe,” he used his Professor Nerdnik voice to lecture me like a small and especially stupid child. “If that had happened, nothing would be left of the ship.” He left the ‘duh’ implied rather than spoken. “When I realized the ship had been torn apart, I knew the drive capacitors were about to rupture and the reactors would explosively lose plasma containment; either one would vaporize the entire ship. So, I channeled the drive capacitor energy into a second jump field; this one was designed to create a shaped bubble of spacetime that directed the explosion away from the forward section of the hull. Most of the explosive energy was vented into a phased spacetime bubble; that did turn the engineering section into subatomic particles.”
“How did you make a jump without us pressing a button to activate the drive? You can’t move any ship you are aboard,” I demanded.
“After the Dutchman’s spine snapped, I was no longer aboard the aft section of the ship, duh.” He did say that one aloud. “I am sorry, Joe. The Guardians caught the ship in a spacetime warp and there was nothing I could do to save the engineering section; it was the focus of the Guardian’s attack. I did the only thing I could think of that allowed the forward section of the ship to survive. Since the incident, I have been trying to determine whether there was another, better course of action. So far I have not been able to think of anything else I could have done. It is truly remarkable that I was able to prevent the ship from being destroyed entirely. You know, when you think about it, we are probably screwed, but I shaped a jump field bubble that protected us from reactors and drive capacitors exploding practically right on top of us. Nobody has ever done that before! I impressed even myself with that one. Who da man, huh? Me! I’m da man! Damn, I am still awesome.”
“Excuse me if I don’t immediately express my admiration for your continued awesomeness, Skippy.”
“Oh, no problem, Joe. You’re busy right now. There will be plenty of time to properly thank me later,” he announced with cheery cluelessness. “If, you know, we survive.”
“If?”
“Oh, man, you are slow sometimes, Joe, but, please, try to keep up with current events,” he said wearily. “We lost all three reactors, and any ability to move through space. Our long-term, even medium-term, survival is very much in question.”
“What’s the condition of the lifeboat?”
“Unknown. The docking platform for the lifeboat is still attached to the spine, and, hmm, Ok, yes. The lifeboat is still there, but it is not responding.”
That was not good. The lifeboat had its own reactor and life support; some of the crew could survive there for months, hopefully. “How bad is the damage overall, Skippy?”
“Unknown, Joe. Most sensors are offline, or providing conflicting data. I am too busy with damage control on problems I know of, I can’t spare resources right now to get the sensor suite working at full capacity. I could use another set of eyes out there.”
“All right. We need to know the ship’s status, ASAP. Major Desai, take a dropship and fly out to give us a view.”
“You don’t want me here as chief pilot, Colonel?” She asked, surprised. Usually in a crisis, I wanted her in one of the two pilot couches.
“To fly what?” I responded. “We’re not going anywhere, someone else can control the thrusters. We need two dropships, if we have two that are flightworthy.”
“Yes, Sir,” she unstrapped from the couch and pulled herself carefully hand over hand in zero gravity. “We should launch the ready bird right now.”
“Major Simms?” I asked.
“On it, Colonel. Launching the ready bird in four minutes.”
US Air Force Lieutenant Samantha Reed silently mouthed ‘Holy shit’ to her Chinese Air Force copilot, knowing that sentiment required no translation. Reed and Wu had been seated in a Thuranin Falcon dropship when the Flying Dutchman jumped into Hotel California. That was an assignment they had not especially wanted; sitting in the cockpit of the ready bird, in a docking bay far from the center of action in the CIC. The odds of needing a dropship to
do anything in deep interplanetary space had seemed pretty slim before the jump. Now their Falcon was hanging in space five hundred meters from the ship, acting as an external sensor platform for Skippy and the CIC crew.
Technically, they were half a kilometer from the middle and forward sections of the hull, because what remained of the Flying Dutchman was no longer a starship. Or any kind of ship. Ships, by definition, were capable of moving on their own. Other than thrusters which Reed could see firing intermittently to gradually halt the now lazy spinning of the hull, the Dutchman was not capable of even controlling its motion in space. It certainly could not, would not ever again, be able of moving anywhere on its own. “Major Simms, are you seeing this?”
“Affirmative,” Simms replied tersely.
“The back third of the ship is missing, Ma’am. It’s not broken loose and hanging behind us, it is gone. There is nothing left of it.”
“Understood,” Simms was all business. “Swing around and give us a view of the ship’s nose. Be advised Desai is exiting the docking bay on the port side now.”
“There is another ship in the vicinity, understood. Pratham,” Reed used Desai’s callsign, which meant ‘First’ in the Hindi language. “Avoid the aft end of the spine; there are sparks coming from cables, and pieces breaking off.”
“Aft end is a navigation hazard, acknowledged, Fireball,” Desai replied.
Sami winced at hearing her callsign. It was a long story going back to ROTC in high school, and one she wished she could forget. Wished everyone would forget. Then she pushed it out of her mind as she gently guided the Falcon around to the Flying Dutchman’s nose, which contained sensor gear and projectors for defense shields and the stealth field. She backed the dropship away a full kilometer to be safe. There was debris floating around, with more small pieces regularly breaking off the aft end of the spine. Thrusters on the ship’s hull fired sporadically, but the structure kept spinning and wobbling around its long axis. Sami guessed that with the entire aft end of the ship missing, the navigation computer was having difficulty determining how to compensate for the new center of gravity. Center of balance, she reminded herself, there was no gravity in deep space. She was still automatically thinking in terms of flying an aircraft on Earth, and she needed to stop doing that.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 20
