The Dream of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  “Faster than three point eight. But the Cho-ta’an aren’t built for high gravity, and they don’t use stasis. Pulling anything more than three gees for more than a few hours is going to be an ordeal for them.”

  “It’s not exactly going to be a pleasure cruise for us either.”

  “No, but we can keep most of the crew in stasis. How long until we reach the gate?”

  “At three point eight gees?” Carpenter did some quick calculations on his screen. “Just under twelve days, if we spin around at the midpoint. But sir, you can’t seriously be suggesting we spend twelve days at three point eight gees? Even in stasis, the damage—”

  “I doubt it will come to that. Just get us around that planet, Carpenter. As soon as we’re clear, give it all you’ve got.”

  Yes, sir.”

  *****

  Almost an hour later, Carpenter’s frantic voice came over Mallick’s comm. “Sir, you need to see this! Hurry!”

  Mallick ran to the bridge. He arrived in time to see a series of flashes erupting on the planetoid’s surface.

  “What the hell?” Mallick said, rubbing his bleary eyes.

  “Missiles,” Carpenter said. “Apparently nuclear. Looks like our mystery ship took out the Fractalist facility.”

  They watched as several more flashes appeared and then winked out.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mallick said. “Their own people.”

  “People they consider traitors.”

  “Well, it tells us one thing. The Cho-ta’an High Command isn’t interested in seizing the bomb. For all they knew, there was another one of them hidden on that rock somewhere.”

  “They don’t need it,” Carpenter said. “They’re going to win anyway. They just need to make sure the IDL doesn’t get the bomb.”

  Carpenter was right. The odds were against the IDL even before the Cho-ta’an gained the secret of hacking the gates. Now victory was impossible without the bomb.

  “The good news is that apparently the bomb is for real,” Mallick said. “They wouldn’t expend this much effort if they didn’t believe we were a threat.”

  They watched for a bit longer, but the explosions had stopped. “How long until acceleration?” Mallick asked.

  “Twenty-three minutes.”

  “Everything is dialed in?”

  “Yep. In twenty-three minutes, the thrusters will come on at full. We’ll pull three point eight gees until the program is manually overridden.”

  “Good. I want you in stasis by then. You and the others.”

  “You’re staying up?”

  Mallick nodded. “For a while, anyway. Somebody’s gotta be conscious in case these crazy bastards do something unexpected. You’ve transmitted our new course to headquarters?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else did you tell them?”

  “Just what you said. That we’ve got a package to deliver, we’re being pursued by a hostile ship, and we need a tech team standing by. Couldn’t give them an ETA because I don’t have a clue when we’re arriving.”

  “All right,” Mallick said. “I’ll take over. Go get in your pod.”

  *****

  Mallick sat in the acceleration chair, breathing deeply from an oxygen mask while clenching and unclenching his fingers and toes. Even with the stimulating vibrations of the chair encouraging blood flow to his extremities, he could feel his arms going numb. A fit human body could tolerate up to twenty gees for short periods of time, but three point eight gees was damned uncomfortable for anything more than a few minutes. Mallick had been at it for nearly three hours. He could only imagine what the Cho-ta’an were experiencing. Yavesk had lower gravity than Earth, and Cho-ta’an biology was ill-disposed for stasis. That meant the entire crew of the Cho-ta’an ship was conscious and extremely uncomfortable. Mallick could only hope they gave up pursuit soon.

  A crackling voice came over the ship’s comm. It was in the Cho-ta’an language, but an English translation appeared on the nav screen:

  Attention, human vessel. You have an object on board that is the property of the Cho-ta’an High Command. Cease acceleration and prepare to be boarded, or we will destroy you.

  “You guys never were much for subtlety,” Mallick grumbled.

  His words appeared on the screen with a prompt:

  Transmit? Y/N

  “Belay that,” Mallick said. “Attention, Cho-ta’an vessel. This is Captain Aaron Mallick of the IDL ship Andrea Luhman. This is an exploratory ship, not a military vessel. We have nothing that belongs to you. And I can keep this up longer than you can. Go ahead and transmit that.”

  A minute passed. Another transmission came:

  Human vessel. This is your last warning. We will fire on you.

  Mallick managed a chuckle. “If you were going to fire, you’d have done it already, you motherfuckers.” He paused a moment. “Don’t send that.”

  Five minutes passed and the missiles didn’t come. After twenty minutes, Mallick allowed himself to believe it: they weren’t going to waste missiles at this distance. They must have figured out that Andrea Luhman’s chaff would be deployed and dispersed before the missiles got within five hundred kilometers.

  When the Cho-ta’an ship’s acceleration rate began to drop, Mallick breathed a sigh of relief. For now, they were safe. He waited another ten minutes to be sure. The alien craft had dropped to two point four gees and was holding. Mallick reduced Andrea Luhman’s acceleration to a more tolerable two point eight gees and waited an hour to see if the Cho-ta’an would respond. Their acceleration remained at two point four. Andrea Luhman had won this round.

  *****

  When the Cho-ta’an ship had dropped nearly a light-second behind Andrea Luhman, Mallick decided it was safe to go into stasis. Even if the Cho-ta’an cranked up their acceleration again, it would be hours before they were in missile range. On the off chance it was necessary, Andrea Luhman would deploy countermeasures automatically.

  When the ship’s computer awakened him a week later, he braced for a warning of incoming missiles, but it didn’t come. After he was certain there was no immediate threat, he allowed himself a few hours to acclimate and then did a thorough survey of their situation.

  Andrea Luhman’s velocity was now close to a tenth of light speed and increasing. The Cho-ta’an ship continued to accelerate at two point four gees and was now nearly a hundred million kilometers behind them. That was the good news. The bad news was that to use the jumpgate, Andrea Luhman was going to have to lose most of its speed. The gates were designed to accommodate ships traveling at no more than ten percent of light speed. That meant that the Cho-ta’an ship was going to have plenty of opportunity to catch up to them. The Cho-ta’an knew that, of course, which was why they’d let Andrea Luhman go so easily.

  While he had been in stasis, a message had come through from IDL headquarters. It read:

  New heading received. Tech team standing by. Request additional information. What is the cargo?

  Mallick sent back their current heading along with the message:

  Cargo may be an item of high strategic importance. Unable to say more at this time.

  It was highly unlikely the transmission would be intercepted, and the Cho-ta’an would have to decrypt it to read it. Still, there was no point in being more candid in their transmissions. Even if he were one hundred percent certain what Andrea Luhman was carrying, the IDL would insist on conducting a thorough investigation of the artifact before altering their strategy—and at this point it wasn’t at all clear Andrea Luhman was even going to be able to deliver it.

  Mallick ran through the math three times. Carpenter was better at this stuff, but Mallick was pretty sure he’d gotten it right. If they went through the gate at double the maximum recommended speed, they might just be able to stay far ahead of the Cho-ta’an ship to avoid its missiles. But that strategy had its own dangers, and in the end Mallick decided it was too close to call. He needed Carpenter’s expertise.

  Carpenter wasn’t t
hrilled to be awakened from stasis, and was even less happy to be pressed into performing complex calculations a scant hour later.

  “Sorry, man,” Mallick said, as he watched Carpenter punching numbers into the computer while trying to combat nausea. “If we weren’t on the razor’s edge here, I’d have gone with my gut.”

  Carpenter waved him off in annoyance. Mallick decided to shut up and give him some space. In less than an hour, they were going to have to make a decision about when to start decelerating, and how fast.

  Forty-eight minutes later, Carpenter sat back in his chair and gave a defeated sigh.

  “That bad, huh?” Mallick asked.

  “To be safe, we’re going to have to hit the gate at point three light speed.”

  “Will the gate even work at that velocity?”

  “Oh, it will work. The question is whether we will hit it. Andrea Luhman’s a comparatively small ship, so we’ve got some margin of error, but still. This is like shooting a bullet through a keyhole a million kilometers away.”

  “And if we miss…”

  “If we miss, the best-case scenario is that we end up traveling at a third of light speed in the wrong direction. Worst case, we hit the gate, destroy it and blow ourselves up in the process. And of course even if we avoid hitting it, the Cho-ta’an ship might still take it out, stranding us in deep space for the next twenty years. We’re six light-years from the next gate.”

  “Or we could miss the gate and they could go through.”

  “Right. Then we’d have a Cho-ta’an ship traveling at interstellar speed inside the Geneva system. Assuming that’s where we’re headed. Which is another problem I was going to mention….”

  Mallick groaned. That was a whole other consideration: Andrea Luhman would emerge into the Geneva system at whatever speed it was traveling when it entered the gate. Several ships went through that gate every hour. “What are the odds we’ll hit another ship?”

  “They’ve got shuttles running all day, evacuating civilians to the stasis ships. Those things don’t carry enough fuel to make major course corrections. If we transmit an ETA within the next few hours, they might be able to clear us a path in time. But even if they do, the Geneva gate is too close to the sun for us to come in at over point one light speed. If we’re lucky enough not to get pulled into the sun, we’ll shoot right past it. It’ll take us weeks to backtrack to Geneva.

  “Okay, so we can’t use the Geneva Gate. We need to find one that’s not as busy.”

  Carpenter shrugged. “At the speed we’ll be traveling, we stand a pretty good chance of hitting something, no matter which gate we use. Even the planets the Cho-ta’an wrecked have salvage runs. They’re all in use.”

  Mallick thought for a moment. “Not all,” he said.

  Carpenter’s brow furrowed. “You’re thinking about using the Sol gate? Is it even active?”

  “Sure,” Mallick replied. “They still send probes through once in a while to monitor the system. But for all practical purposes, it’s clear. And it’s farther out in the system than most of the other gates, so we’re less likely to get pulled into a gravity well.”

  “Could work,” Carpenter said. “We try to lose the Cho-ta’an in the Sol system, ricochet around the sun and head back through the gate to Geneva. Hopefully at a less insane velocity.”

  “Exactly. It also gives the IDL some time to clear us a path, if we can give them a definite velocity.”

  “I like it,” Carpenter said. “This could actually work.”

  “We’ve got another problem, though,” Mallick said. “If the Cho-ta’an can hack the gates, how do we know they won’t shut it down before we get there? Or change our destination? Hell, for all we know, they’re capable of rerouting us through one of their gates. They might be tricking us into delivering the bomb right to their doorstep.”

  “I don’t think we need to worry about that,” Carpenter said. “If I’m right about how they’re hacking the gates, they’re controlling the gate mechanism itself, not subverting the control circuits.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I think they can control where the gate sends them. I don’t think they can control the programming of the gate.”

  “So they could go wherever they want, but they can’t remotely program the gate to send us somewhere else?”

  “Right. I’ve been pinging the gate since I got up, and the responses are all nominal. No sign of meddling. I think the possibility of the Cho-ta’an screwing with the gate is the least of our problems.

  Mallick nodded. “Okay, we’ll assume the gate will work as planned, then.”

  “I’ll run the numbers again with several different scenarios and try to figure out our best move.” As Carpenter finished speaking, a light blinked overhead. “That’s the halfway point,” he said. “I’ll cut the engines and spin us around.”

  “Good,” said Mallick. “Tell the IDL what we’re doing. I’m going to get some rest. Keep me updated.”

  *****

  They spent the next several hours in free-fall, and it was a glorious relief from the crushing gravity they’d been tolerating. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last long. Soon they would need to begin decelerating to avoid missing the gate. At their current speed, a miniscule trajectory error could send Andrea Luhman hurling into deep space, dooming humanity to genocide at the hands of the Cho-ta’an.

  The Cho-ta’an ship continued to accelerate at two point four gees, slowly closing the gap between them. Carpenter calculated that for Andrea Luhman to slow to twenty percent of light speed by the time it reached the gate, it would have to decelerate at just over one gee for most of the trip. That was certainly manageable; the problem would be that it would allow the Cho-ta’an ship to get within missile range well before they reached the gate. Carpenter woke the captain to tell him the bad news.

  “What’s the fastest we can go and be sure we’ll make it through the gate?”

  Carpenter sighed. “The aux thrusters just aren’t precise enough for anything over point two light speed. No matter how closely I line us up now, I’m going to have to make minute adjustments when we’re a few hours out. And there’s a margin of error of a hundredth of a degree on any one of those adjustments. If we even brush the edge of the gate as point two light speed….”

  “We’re vapor, I get it.”

  “And that’s assuming they maintain acceleration of two point four gees. If they increase their acceleration, it’ll be even closer.”

  “I understand,” Mallick said. “For now, get us to one gee and maintain it. No point in provoking them into an acceleration race. If they increase their thrust, we’ll reassess.”

  “Got it, Captain.”

  The two ships maintained their respective acceleration rates for another six days. Andrea Luhman was now forty AUs from the Finlan Gate, traveling at just over point two light speed, with the Cho-ta’an ship less than an AU behind and gaining rapidly. Mallick began to think they were actually going to make it when Carpenter reported the Cho-ta’an ship had increased its acceleration to three point four.

  “They’re going to kill their entire crew,” Mallick said, watching the readout in disbelief.

  “Maybe that’s the plan,” Carpenter replied. “Put the ship on autopilot. Program it to fire all its missiles as soon as we’re in range. The Cho-ta’an High Command would certainly consider it a small price for denying the IDL a planet-killer bomb. So what’s the plan, Captain?”

  Mallick’s brow furrowed. “Assume they’ll maintain this acceleration rate for the rest of the trip. Lower our deceleration rate to stay at least a second in front of them. If they get within that range, we’re dead.”

  “If we try go through the gate at over point three light speed, we’re probably dead too.”

  “That ‘probably’ is all we’ve got,” Mallick said. “Do it.”

  When Andrea Luhman was less than an hour out from the gate, the Cho-ta’an ship cranked up its thrust again, reaching an accelerati
on rate of three point eight gees.

  “I wonder if there’s anybody left alive on that thing,” Carpenter said.

  “If there weren’t, they’d be going even faster,” Mallick said. “I think they’ve overestimated our defenses. If they were smart, they’d have gone all out. Sacrificed their crew to get within range. They must think we’ve got antimissile measures on par with the IDL warships, so they’re playing it safe. Trying to stay alive to follow us through the gate if they need to.”

  “This sure doesn’t feel like playing it safe. If I lower our deceleration rate any further, we might as well just figure on missing the gate altogether. Change course to the Perseid Gate.”

  “And get there in twenty years, after the war is over?”

  “Better than blowing ourselves up.”

  Mallick thought for a moment. “How close will they get if we maintain our current decel rate?”

  Carpenter punched some numbers into the computer. “By the time we reach the gate, they’ll be within a hundredth of an AU. About point eight seconds behind us.”

  “All right,” Mallick said. “Maintain current decel rate. No matter what those assholes do from now on, focus all your attention on threading that needle. We’ve done everything we could. Call me if you need anything. Otherwise I’ll stay out of your way.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Carpenter said.

  “You’ve got this, Carpenter,” Mallick said.

  “Get the fuck out of here. Sir.”

  *****

  At five minutes out, the Cho-ta’an still hadn’t fired. The gate was finally visible on the nav screen display, a tiny dot of light only marginally brighter than the stars trillions of kilometers away. The insanity of what they were doing finally registered in Mallick’s mind: in less than five minutes, they were going to try to fly right through the middle of that nearly microscopic dot, traveling at a hundred thousand kilometers per second. He pushed down the sick feeling in his gut, rejecting the temptation to second-guess himself. They had no choice. If they didn’t make it through the gate, they were going to be killed by Cho-ta’an missiles. And humanity’s chances at survival would die with them.