Endeavour (Atlantia Series Book 4)

by Dean Crawford

  With nothing to emit light, the Atlantia’s hull beyond the observation platform was unable to reflect anything and thus also invisible, utterly consumed by the darkness. Idris stared into the blackness but saw only his own reflection staring sombrely back at him, as though his own ghost were judging him from beyond reality, beyond the grave. Short grey hair framed a rugged, angular face deeply scored by the ravages of time.

  ‘Captain?’

  Idris turned as Andaim Ry’ere, the Commander of the Air Group, climbed the steps to the observation platform and joined him. Young, with a square jaw and calm blue eyes that missed nothing, Andaim had become a senior officer despite his youth both because of his skill as a pilot and leader, and because there were so few human beings left to choose from.

  ‘Sit rep?’ Idris asked.

  ‘All systems secure and operational,’ Andaim replied. ‘We crossed the Icari Line two weeks ago, captain. How much farther do you wish to progress at super–luminal before we drop out and take a look around?’

  Idris sighed as he stared back out into the darkness. The Icari Line was a boundary around the Colonial core systems of Ethera, a sphere some forty light years across that held within its embrace several populated systems of various races. Established to protect those fledgling races from the unknown beyond by the Icari, an ancient race of beings trusted by all, it had now become a place of danger for humanity after the catastrophic collapse of society before the wrath of the Word and its Legion.

  Safely ensconced in super–luminal cruise, there was nothing that could touch either Atlantia or Arcadia. Massless and effectively invisible, the two frigates could cross the entire galaxy if they so wished and never be seen, although to do so would take centuries even at such high velocities. The captain did not enjoy admitting it to himself, but the only time he had felt entirely secure since that catastrophe was when he was at super–luminal, safe from whatever horrors awaited outside.

  ‘We’ll remain here for a while longer,’ he replied to the CAG finally. ‘The crew needed the rest after what happened on Chiron IV.’

  ‘That was a month ago, captain,’ Andaim replied with a patient smile. ‘Now they’re getting itchy about being cooped up aboard ship for so long. My pilots haven’t flown for two weeks. They’re not the sort to be happy sitting about, especially Evelyn.’

  Idris lifted his chin.

  ‘Evelyn is not the commander of this vessel,’ he pointed out as he turned to face Andaim. ‘However, I don’t like the idea of her getting agitated. I take it that she has apologised to Ensign Rollins for the assault?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, captain. She apologised for hitting him, and then suggested that she should simply have shot him.’

  ‘We can’t have officers striking fellow crewmen,’ Idris insisted.

  ‘Ensign Rollins was out of line captain and we both know it. He attempted to…,’ Andaim hesitated as he sought the right word, clearly offended by what had happened. ‘He attempted to interfere with Evelyn while she was sleeping and he got what he deserved. Frankly, given Evelyn’s history, he’s lucky to be walking at all.’

  ‘None the less,’ Idris said, ‘I expect Evelyn to conduct herself as an officer should, not a convict. I wouldn’t want her to lose her flying privileges.’

  ‘No, captain,’ Andaim agreed.

  ‘And I wouldn’t want to think that her commanding officer was treating her preferentially to other pilots.’

  Andaim looked as though he had been slapped. ‘I wouldn’t do that, captain.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Andaim stared at Idris for a long moment, and then the captain’s face creased with a grin. ‘I wouldn’t blame you, you know. We’ve all got somebody aboard that we care about.’

  Now it was Andaim who lifted his chin. ‘Duty comes first, sir.’

  Idris glanced out once more at the darkness. ‘Doesn’t it just,’ he replied, and then with a heavy heart: ‘Very well, inform the helm that we will be dropping out of super–luminal shortly. Arcadia won’t be prepared, apart from her Quick Reaction Alert fighters, so we’ll launch six Raythons to cover her as well as our own QRA fighters. Make sure Evelyn is on the launch.’

  ‘Aye, cap’ain.’

  ‘And make sure the Corsair bombers are also ready in case…’

  The captain was cut off as the voice of Atlantia’s communication officer, Lael, broke through on a speaker mounted nearby on the observation deck.

  ‘Captain to the bridge, urgent.’

  The dim lights around the deck of the observation platform turned red as the entire ship was placed on a low–level alert. Idris turned and with Andaim hurried to the steps that descended from the centre of the platform down onto Atlantia’s bridge.

  The silence and darkness of the observation platform was replaced by a galaxy of lights and the murmur of voices as the command crew went about the business of running the massive frigate. A circular command platform holding the captain’s chair, that of the Executive Officer and the CAG was surrounded by a guard rail, and beyond that manned stations all facing a large viewing screen and tactical display. Idris Sansin strode to his chair as Lael read from a data screen before her.

  ‘Gravitational wake trace bearing oh–two–five starboard, Colonial signature recognised.’

  ‘Colonial?’ Idris asked as he settled into his seat and watched a stream of data pouring down the tactical display nearby. ‘That’s not possible, we’re far beyond the Icari Line.’

  ‘It’s an older signature,’ Andaim replied as he scanned the same data display, his brow furrowed in concentration. ‘But it checks out, it’s one of ours alright.’

  Idris rubbed his jaw with one hand. A gravitational wake was a twisting of the fabric of space–time left by a vessel travelling at super–luminal velocity. Much as a sailing ship left a wake in the ocean, the gravitational wave expanded out from behind a spacecraft and could, with the correct equipment, be scanned and information about the craft that left the wave determined. In this case, the shape of the wave denoted a Colonial mass–drive, and that was what bothered Captain Sansin.

  ‘Maybe survivors of the apocalypse?’ he suggested.

  Lael shook her head, her short–cropped and metallically–tinted hair flickering as it caught the light.

  ‘Too old,’ she replied, never looking up from her display. ‘The wave is several light years wide and extremely weak, so it must have been left here many years ago.’

  ‘Before the apocalypse?’ Andaim echoed Lael’s statement. ‘What the hell was a Colonial vessel doing beyond the Icari Line way back then? There’s only a single ship that officially went that far, before the Icari made first contact. You don’t think…?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Idris replied, and then looked across to the Executive Officer’s chair to speak to Mikhain. Idris had to catch himself as he remembered that his former XO was now aboard Arcadia as its captain, and he had yet to select a suitable replacement. He looked instead to Lael. ‘Can you determine if the trail was left by a civilian vessel?’

  Lael frowned as she studied her screen, and the captain noticed Andaim next to him also scrutinizing an identical display of his own.

  ‘Gravity wake suggests an older design of mass–drive, possibly a civilian venture, and given the age of the wake itself…’

  ‘It could be her,’ Andaim confirmed as he leaned back in his seat. ‘It could be Endeavour.’

  Captain Idris Sansin sat for only a moment before he called out a series of commands.

  ‘Bring us out of super–luminal, effective in ninety seconds. Helm, lay in a pursuit course. Lael, prepare to signal Arcadia and send them our data as soon as we drop into sub–luminal cruise, although I doubt they will have failed to spot and identify the same trail.’

  ‘Aye, cap’n,’ came a chorus of replies as Idris leaned thoughtfully back in his seat.

  ‘Endeavour,’ Andaim murmured beside him. ‘Nobody ever knew what happened to her.’

  ‘We might be about to find out.’<
br />
  They waited as the ship’s computer ran a diagnostic on the wake trail, and then a small beep from Lael’s station signalled the completion of the scan. Lael’s eyes widened slightly and she look at the captain.

  ‘Computer confirms a Mark III mass–drive, Colonial design, registered to civilian vessel Endeavour, hull mass one hundred thousand tonnes. It’s her, captain. We found Endeavour.’

  ***

  III

  The bridge fell silent as the command crew considered the implications of their discovery.

  ‘A pristine ship,’ the captain said. ‘She was launched so long ago, she might have had no contact at all with the Word or the Legion. Her crew might even still be alive.’

  Ever since mankind had found his way into space, from the very first dangerous and yet thrilling rockets that had soared into Ethera’s atmosphere along with the dreams of the men aboard them, to the cosmos–travelling ships like Atlantia, a means had been sought to overcome the natural physical laws that governed the universe. The greatest of those laws was that no object of mass could ever reach or exceed the speed of light. It had been the universal constant, a single immovable law that governed everything in the visible universe. Engineers had spent decades searching for a solution to this crippling obstacle to true galactic exploration, seeking ever more powerful engines that propelled star ships to ever increasing velocities, but none ever had broken through the speed of light.

  Until just a few decades prior to the keel of the Atlantia being laid.

  It had, as so often was the case, taken a genius to figure it out: a man capable of thinking beyond the cube. Deri Feyen, an astrophycisist and theorist, had realised that everybody had been going about it all the wrong way. The laws of physics stated, quite clearly, that no object of mass could exceed the speed of light. Light itself, comprised of photons, moved at the speed of light because, uniquely, they had no mass. Therefore, Feyen reasoned, rather than produce ever–more massive engines one only had to figure out a way to negate mass in order to accelerate to, and controversially, beyond the speed of light.

  It was Feyen’s manipulation of the fundamental particles that gave objects mass that opened a window onto space travel like nothing the colonies had ever seen. Theorizing that if a particle existed that gave atoms mass, then there should by logic be a way to manipulate photons to take advantage of their massless properties, Feyen devised a mass–drive. Put simply, the drive surrounded the parent vessel in a sphere of negative mass that perfectly offset and cancelled out the vessel’s natural mass: it became, in effect, massless.

  Pioneer, the first vessel to test Feyen’s mass drive, launched just a few years before the great man’s death. It accelerated using its normal fusion–core powered ion engines to a velocity that generated enough energy to engage the mass drive, upon which moment the tremendous thrust provided by its ion engines accelerated it up to and beyond the speed of light in a matter of moments. What was more, the massless nature of the vessel meant that many of the mind–bending effects of faster–than–light travel were also negated: the vessel did not travel in time as any vessel of normal mass would. What Feyen had achieved was a means to traverse the stars and not return home to find the graves of the young and healthy friends and family you left behind, overgrown from decades or even centuries of neglect, when you had been travelling at super–luminal velocity for only a few months.

  The exploration of the cosmos had begun and within a few years mankind was spreading out into the galaxy and finding new worlds and new species. Much of the time those species were little more than algae floating in pools of boiling water on barren, volatile worlds. Sometimes, they were sentient species that bore little relation to the human form: one, the Icari, were tenuous beings who drifted like tendrils in the atmospheres of giant stars and communicated by light waves. The Icari had been the first species to make direct contact with humans, having detected mankind’s ability to directly observe other stars and terrestrial planets–the hallmark of an intelligent species reaching a technological level sufficient to initiate first contact. Others species still, like the Vetra, were bipedal and recognisably human in form but for their small, stocky stature: a consequence of their homeworld’s intense gravity.

  A few years before the Icari had contacted mankind and established the Icari Line, a single vessel had left Ethera’s orbit on an astounding voyage. Funded by crowd–sourcing and utilising what had then been the most advanced version of a mass–drive available, Endeavour had been built in Etheran orbit and designed to simply travel to the stars with a compliment of crew large enough to indefinitely sustain a population aboard. Millions of intrepid Etherans volunteered for what was advertised as a ‘place aboard history’, the unique opportunity to witness man’s first tentative reach for the stars, to be present at the first birth beyond the solar system, the first death, the first landing upon a foreign world capable of supporting human life, of which many had been detected by remote observation.

  Endeavour had launched with the entire core systems watching, and sailed out into history. Four months later she signalled the birth of a young girl, the first deep–space Etheran birth. Headed for a stellar cluster some one hundred light years distant from Ethera, she had continued to signal home for three years, until she had suddenly fallen silent.

  No signal was ever received from Endeavour again, nor had any ship caught sight of her or detected her presence in any form.

  ‘Almost a hundred years,’ Andaim murmured to himself. ‘If it’s her, she could still have her compliment aboard. But the Word was present even back then. We can’t guarantee that Endeavour is clean of infection.’

  Idris nodded in agreement. The Word, a creation of quantum physics, was in effect a computer. It had evolved out of a major milestone in human engineering, The Field: a digital record of all information that had been accessible to all humans. The growth of human knowledge had accelerated, reaching all corners of the colonies through the sharing of information, and technology had likewise grown and expanded at a phenomenal rate. This massive database of information had been fused with quantum computing by a team led by another scientific legend, Dr Ceyen Lazarus, to create The Word, a depository of knowledge designed to be able to make decisions based on pure logic and an understanding of myriad complexities that were beyond the human capacity to assimilate and thus form cohesive responses and policies. Tasked with find solutions to the most complex problems in history, ranging from space exploration to crime to medicine, the Word eventually became the founder of laws, the arbitrator of justice and the icon of mankind’s prolific creativity.

  The one thing that nobody on Ethera had predicted was that the Word, through its sheer volume of thought and understanding, would have concluded that mankind was a greater threat to itself than any other species and thus must be either controlled or eradicated. Thus had been born the Legion, and mankind silently infected long before anybody even realised what was about to happen. However, when it had arrived, the Word’s apocalypse was so swift and so brutal that nobody had been able to figure out just when its plan for domination began. The early quantum machines that led to the conception of the Word were far older than the mass–drive, having been created almost two centuries before: indeed, it was the quantum computer’s immense capacity for calculations that had led to the technology that made the mass–drive possible at all.

  ‘The first laws laid down by the Word appeared before Endeavour was even conceived,’ Idris said finally. ‘It’s possible that she is every bit infected as most of the rest of humanity was. We’ll have to assume that she is a hostile vessel and that we’ll be boarding under fire. Have General Bra’hiv assemble his Marines, and prepare to signal Arcadia to likewise prepare for an assault as soon as we locate Endeavour.’

  ‘Preparing to drop out of super–luminal in fifteen seconds,’ Lael called, her voice broadcasting across the ship in a ghostly echo that was just audible on the bridge.

  ‘We can’t fix her current loca
tion,’ Andaim informed the captain as he scanned the readouts on his display screen. ‘The wake is too old, but we’ll be within an hour or two of her and should be able to detect her on radar.’

  ‘Don’t use radar. Go passive upon sub–luminal,’ the captain instructed. ‘We’ll treat this as though we’re tracking an enemy vessel.’

  ‘Aye, cap’n. Sensors passive, all systems stand–by.’

  Lael’s voice echoed through the frigate.

  ‘Sub–luminal velocity in five, four, three, two, one…’

  Atlantia surged as her mass–drive disengaged and all at once a hundred thousand tonnes of metal decelerated from high sub–luminal to deep space cruise. The captain’s experienced gaze immediately detected Arcadia’s presence alongside Atlantia on the readouts as Andaim’s orders snapped out.

  ‘QRA launch, bays one through four, go now!’

  Even as he spoke a screen showing the launch bay depicted four sleek, aggressive looking Raython fighters accelerating under full power along their magnetic catapults, the craft flung through narrow gaps in the still–opening bay doors as they rocketed out into space. Idris glanced at display screens around the bridge now showing dense star fields where previously there had been nothing but blackness.

  ‘Status?’ he demanded.

  ‘Mass drive disengaged and stable,’ Andaim replied. ‘Four Raythons launched, two more just launching from Arcadia. No other craft in the vicinity at short range, waiting for long range passive scopes to detect emissions.’