by Craig Allen
“This is Washington,” someone responded. “Understood, Banshee Five One.”
Rodriguez spoke. “This is Actual. See if you can tow that thing back to Washington after shutting it down. I see no reason to leave it floating out there.”
“Roger that, Actual. We’ll break out the towlines. Banshee Five One out.” Hayes waved a hand at Sonja once the comm cut off. “You ever shot a towline before, Gunny?”
The words had barely left his lips when a bright flash crossed the canopy. The hopper shivered.
“God damn!” Hayes jerked the stick, and the hopper lurched to starboard, careening into a chunk of ice. “Hold on!”
Cody saw another flash before the hopper crashed into yet another chunk of ice in a desperate attempt to get some distance. The mystery of the device attached to the bridge sat had been abruptly solved as the graser blew a chunk of ice into pieces. The sound of the ice bouncing off the hopper’s hull made Cody’s heart race even more quickly.
Outside, ice shattered across the canopy as the hopper twisted around. The internal gravity kept Cody from bouncing around inside his harness, which was good. If the internal gravity failed, the maneuvers Hayes was making were strong enough to crush the life out of all of them.
The graser fired again. Alarms sounded, and lights flickered across the damage display on the HUD. A good chunk of the armor on the port side had been carved away. Another hit in that area would breach the hull. Getting sucked out of a cockpit into space was about as horrifying an idea as Cody could imagine.
“Pretty powerful graser for such a little piece of shit.” Hayes gritted his teeth. “Hold tight. Gunny, bring grasers online. I just need to get a better angle to shut that fucker down.”
As Sonja pulled up the weapon systems, something finally occurred to Cody. Shut down. Damn. His fingers flashed across the open holoconsole. The hopper shuddered again, either from ice or from graser fire. He desperately clung to the wall while his free hand raced through the command structure. In seconds, he had the root commands.
“All right, to hell with shooting it down.” Hayes steered between two of the largest ice particles Cody had seen yet. “We’re out of here. We can let the Washington worry about—”
At once, the graser fire stopped. Ice chunks continued to careen into one another from both the graser fire and Hayes’s piloting, but nothing else moved. Cody’s shoulders sagged as he tried to catch his breath.
“Jesus, what happened?” Hayes pulled up the sensor readout, which showed the satellite as dead. “Doc, talk to me.”
“I still had access.” Cody was surprised he was out of breath. “I sent the shutdown command.”
“No power readings,” Sonja said. “Even the fusion engine is down.”
“Well, damn.” Hayes nodded approvingly. “Nice work, Doc.”
Cody didn’t have the energy to respond. He suddenly realized why he had never joined the military when the war broke out.
“Cody,” Sonja said, “can you check the logs and see what we got from that thing?”
Relieved to have something else to do, Cody ran over the log files, and finding something didn’t take long. “This bridge sat sent a signal a few hours ago. It looks similar to the signal sent from Kali earlier.”
“Any idea what it says, Doc?” Hayes asked.
“It’s coded. It could take time to figure out. But I believe Kali broadcast their signal to here. Then the bridge sat resent the signal to… I’m not really sure.” Cody sent the information to Hayes’s console. “Here’s the navigational information on the direction of the bridge sat’s signal.”
Hayes displayed a star chart on the HUD. “Gunny, see if you can pinpoint the signal.”
“On it, sir.” Sonja ran her fingers over her controls for a moment. “These coordinates are about two light-years out. Right near the… Holy shit, it’s inside the globular cluster.”
“There’s nothing there,” Hayes said. “Just a bunch of gas and a shitload of stars.”
“They’re sending messages there for a reason.” Up on the hopper’s HUD, Cody displayed text he’d found in the latest transmission. “There’s not many messages in actual text. This one is weird, though. The bridge sat received it about two years ago, before Spinoza or Washington showed up.”
The message shone against the canopy. Be ready for the fire.
~~~
Cody stood in the launch bay with Sonja. Lieutenant Hayes was still in the hopper as it sat on the launch platform. They had to bring in a crane to grasp the ten-meter-wide bridge sat, which had been brought in via another docking tube, and lower it to the floor of the main bay. Parts of its transmitter and outer casing had dents from the ice it had been grasing, but it was otherwise intact.
“I hate this planet,” Sonja said.
Cody resisted the urge to put his arm around her. “Yeah, me too. Wish I were somewhere else some days.”
“Yeah? Where?”
“Somewhere with mountains.”
She faced him, and for a moment Cody thought she’d break protocol altogether and let the PDAs fly. Instead, she came to attention, as did everyone else on the launch deck.
Admiral Rodriguez crossed the deck. “As you were.”
Everyone relaxed again.
Rodriguez stopped next to Cody as the crane hooked itself on the cradle of the bridge sat. “We’ll have the techs examine it and see what else we can find.”
“We had a look at the data on our way back,” Cody said. “The bridge sat was piggybacking signals from Kali to the globular cluster. Most of it makes little sense.”
“Be ready for the fire.” Rodriguez folded his arms. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Unknown, Admiral,” Cody said. “The toads interpret English very differently from us.”
“What’s next, sir?” Sonja asked. “The toads violated the orders we gave them. Do we go after them?”
“Still waiting on a response from the brass at Camp Murray. They’ll probably want more information first. Which brings me to you two.” Rodriguez frowned, as if he didn’t want to say what was on his mind. “I’m sending both of you along with the hopper to those coordinates in the cluster.”
“Me too, Admiral?” Cody asked. “I was under the impression you didn’t like me going on these missions.”
“I don’t,” Rodriguez grumbled. “But I don’t have a lot of choice, either. It’s really starting to look like a third party is involved with all of this.”
Cody raised an eyebrow. “I take it you’ve spoken with Dr. Donaldson.”
“Yes.” Rodriguez smirked. “I didn’t think much of his theory at first, but…” He clenched his jaw. “God damn it, if it’s the Spicans trying to get back at us…”
“They wouldn’t do that, Admiral,” Cody said. “They didn’t even know about Kali until we told them.”
Rodriguez watched as engineers swarmed over the bridge satellite. “If it’s not them, then we have another player. And I’ll be damned if I know what they’re up to.”
Chapter Nine
Sitting in the cockpit, Cody had never had such a perfect view of travel at superluminal speeds. The Alcubierre field surrounding the ship picked up particles that gathered along the thin bubble, which produced a light show of blues and violets and even reds and yellows from time to time.
The Alcubierre field disconnected the hopper causally from the rest of the universe, which meant nothing could be seen past the field. Traveling via a Daedalus engine was like running through a flat, barren desert with one’s eyes closed. The odds of hitting something were remote, but if the runner did, the results were unequivocally bad.
Accurate star charts improved matters, as did luck, which Cody prayed would not run out anytime soon.
Sonja piloted the hopper while Hayes slept in the bay, a situation that would have driven the brass up the wall but didn’t bother Cody one bit.
Cody drummed his fingers on his helmet. None of them wore a helmet, mainly because no obvio
us danger existed. Donning it would take him about two seconds, but if they had a breach, he would be dead, helmet or no, especially at the speeds at which they traveled. Still, the odds of such an event were remote. Even an attack at those velocities was impossible.
“All that boy does is sleep,” Bodin said, leaning in close to Sonja and Cody. “Shit, I should go to OCS.”
Cody glanced at Hayes as he responded to Bodin. “You tired of working for a living?”
“Yeah.” Bodin grinned. “I should be a pilot.”
As if he heard, Hayes awoke. “Time?”
“Twenty-five seconds, sir,” Sonja said.
Cody stared at the sensor array on his console, which was off due to its complete uselessness while the Alcubierre bubble was up. “Hope there’s nothing in the way.”
“There isn’t.” Hayes yawned and scratched himself. “Space is too vast. And those coordinates are on the outer edge of that globular cluster. Stars are half a trillion miles apart. The odds of hitting something are way too remote.”
“I remember from my civilian days, sir,” Sonja said. “But I never went superluminal in a globular cluster before.”
Hayes snickered. “Just be glad we’re not in the center of the cluster. Hell, I’ve heard of stars in a cluster being a hundred billion miles apart. Practically best friends.”
“Hope we don’t go that deep into the cluster.” Sonja watched the ETA on the HUD. “Drive’s off in three, two, one, now.”
The rainbow colors of lights vanished, replaced by thousands upon thousands of stars, so close together they nearly overlapped one another. Most seemed to gather below them, relative to the hopper. A globular cluster could contain millions of stars in an area a few light-years across, but to actually see it was baffling.
“See? We made it.” Hayes yawned again. “Gunny, is Banshee Four Niner in sight?”
Sonja brushed her fingers across the sensors, and a green light appeared on the HUD. “Aye, sir. Two nine zero by one nine five, five thousand klicks. She just shut down her Daedalus drive. Nothing else on gravimetrics in the immediate area.”
Cody whistled. Two hoppers traveling eighteen trillion kilometers and ending up within five thousand kilometers of each was a downright miracle of computation.
“Good.” Hayes stretched. “Contact them, and see—”
The comm whistled briefly, then Lieutenant Sinclair spoke. “Banshee Five One, this is Banshee Four Niner, do you read, over?”
Hayes did side bends. “Well, answer him, Gunny.”
“Aye, sir.” Sonja brushed her hand through the flashing blue light on the holoconsole. “Copy that, Nailer. Read you five by five. Hope you had a good flight.”
Cody desperately wanted to ask how everyone got their call signs but also wanted to be able to sleep without leaving one eye open.
“Oh, sure,” Lieutenant Sinclair said in a singsong voice. “Charging at superluminal speeds toward a globular cluster is a blast. Speaking of which, we’re reading the main coordinates are two hundred million klicks away.”
Sonja raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t know we’d be that close.”
A second voice piped over the comm. “Precision navigation.”
Hayes cut in. “Yeah, good work, Ensign Francis.” He leaned into the cockpit and pulled up star charts and flashed them across the HUD. “Gunny, disengage the Daedalus collar.”
The hopper shuddered as it disengaged from the circular ring around it, which contained the Daedalus engine that generated the Alcubierre field. Carefully, Sonja accelerated away from it. “Disengaged. Collar stabilization systems engaged and camo fields engaged.”
On the hopper’s lidar, the Daedalus collar was visible one second and gone the next. They couldn’t be more than a hundred meters from it, and the hopper’s lidar couldn’t pick it up, which meant any toads in the area wouldn’t find it either. He just hoped everyone remembered where they had parked.
“Confirmed for Banshee Four Niner as well,” Sinclair said.
“Good. Don’t want the thing floating away, do we?” Hayes tapped Cody on the shoulder. “You’re in my seat, Doc.”
Cody gave half a smile as he climbed out of the cockpit to let Hayes slide into the seat. Cody sat in the seat behind Sonja and pulled up a holoconsole so he could monitor the main sensors. He’d gotten into the habit of seeing the same information as everyone in the cockpit. In the next seat over, Bodin leaned back, bored.
Hayes did a cursory scan of the area. “Now, a survey team ran through here a while back, but they didn’t get much. We’ll collate the external view with those charts, see if we can… What the hell?”
The HUD lit up with a map of the immediate region. Thousands of stars covered the three-dimensional image, but in the center, a large mass had been highlighted two hundred million kilometers away—at the same coordinates as the signal they were chasing.
“Contact,” Sonja said. “Christ, that’s huge. Gravimetrics are off the chart.”
“So what is it?” Bodin asked. “Another ship?”
Cody pulled up the readings on his own console. “Tidal forces are far too great.”
Sinclair spoke, abandoning radio protocol. “Hey, guys. Is that what I think it is?”
Hayes waved a hand toward Sonja. “Let’s have a look, Gunny.”
“Aye, sir.”
The hopper rotated in place. When the object appeared, Cody nearly swore.
A small blue sphere sat in the distance, almost like a planet, but it had no features other than a sort of bluish blur that changed to purple toward the center. Along the outer edge, the stars in the background stretched across the sphere, like noodles on the edge of a plate, and a halo of light highlighted the entire body.
Cody had never seen such a star up close before. “Ladies and gentlemen, that is the remains of a massive star that died, collapsed, and didn’t quite graduate to black-hole status. Otherwise known as a neutron star.”
“Oh, shit.” Bodin suddenly didn’t look bored any longer. “We get too close, and it’s over.”
“It could’ve been worse,” Sinclair said. “If we’d shut down our drives a second later, we’d have been almost on top of it.”
“Just dumb luck we’re still alive.” Hayes stared at the neutron star as if it would leap at them at any moment. “That signal pointed here. There must be something around.”
Sonja lit up the sensors, passive and active. While she did, Cody locked into an exterior camera with his internal viewer and zoomed in on a pattern in the infrared on the surface. The pattern was random, as were most patterns down there, but what struck him was that the pattern remained in place.
Remained? Cody checked again to confirm. “That’s odd. The star isn’t rotating.”
“It’s not?” Hayes shrugged. “Maybe it’s just slow.”
“Slow for a neutron star is one revolution every few seconds.” Cody pointed at the image. “Relative to our position, the patterns on the surface haven’t changed. That means this star is just sitting there.”
“What are the odds of that?” Bodin asked.
“Dying stars spin faster and faster as they collapse. That’s how neutron stars get their spin. So the odds are essentially zero.” Cody tilted his head. “At least, there’s a zero chance of that occurring naturally.”
“This thing’s twenty-five kilometers across, but it’s as massive as the largest stars. How could you stop…?” Sonja’s eyes widened. “Wait. Antediluvians did it?”
“No one else could have,” Cody said. “Any one of a dozen species that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, back before they all disappeared, made this star stop spinning.”
“Too bad they all vanished a hundred thousand years ago. They could’ve told us why they did this,” Sinclair said. “Hey, think they left any toys behind?”
“We have to assume so,” Hayes said. “We need to be careful. Antediluvian technology is too unpredictable to just—”
“Contact!” Sonja put gravimetrics on t
he HUD against the canopy. “Passives picked up something, sitting right over the star.”
She zoomed in on the image. Sitting against the blue background was a small black dot. Sonja magnified the image further. Cody couldn’t believe his eyes. The black dot had the cross section of a spaceship.
Bodin leaned over Cody’s shoulder. “That looks like a Kali vessel.”
“Confirmed.” Sonja brought up a cross section of the UEAF Kali and placed it on top of the image on the HUD, and it was a perfect match. “The coordinates of the bridge sat’s signal point right at that ship.”
“That’s the destination of the signal sent from the bridge sat we found in the rings of Kali V?” Cody examined the readings more closely. “Space around a neutron star is too convex to make a wormhole, even one that’s only microns across. For that matter, how is that ship sitting there and not falling into the star?”
“She’s in orbit, right?” Bodin asked.
“Not a chance.” Cody examined the scans of the ship and the star then did some calculations. “That ship is only about ten kilometers over the surface. At its current altitude, tidal forces would rip it to pieces. And… wait, is that right?”
Cody put what he saw on the gravimetrics on the cockpit’s HUD. The gravity in the general area was so high the star should tear anything to pieces and pull those pieces to its surface, yet the Kali ship was floating in the midst of those unimaginable tidal forces.
Also, Cody saw why, though he couldn’t believe what the hopper’s sensors were telling him. All around the Kali vessel was a dead spot in gravimetrics, where gravity had ceased to function. That dead spot rose away from the surface in a column of zero gravity that stretched up and away from the star like the devil’s middle finger.
Ensign Francis spoke. “Are you guys getting this weird gravity reading?”
“Reading that, Cracker, and I’ve never seen anything like it,” Hayes said. “Gravimetrics are off the goddamn scale except for an eighty-three-meter-diameter tube.”
