By this time, I was feeling decidedly nauseous. I made sure my vomit suppression option was turned on, and let the medical monitor administer a stomach settler.
Next, I tried to pull out the right leg. It moved, but refused to come out. Of course, the foot was inside the foot mechanism of the combat suit, preventing it from being pulled up. I cut across both ankles, severing the feet from the legs, without doing more than cut a thin line in the suit. Both legs joined the mess in the corner, which now covered several square meters of area with blood, guts, and body parts, in varying stages of being frozen.
And still the combat suit would not allow me to take control.
I had to literally cut out the top of each metal foot, before I could lever out the remains of the boots, with the feet still within.
Finally, the combat suit responded, allowing me to take control of it. The back refused to open due to 'combat' damage, so I was unable to get inside. Mind you, this was probably a blessing considering the amount of blood still oozing out of the holes in the feet of the suit.
The combat suit HUD, transferred to a hollo screen in front of me, informed me the ship was located on the right side flight pod. The suppression field was coming from it. But the code to disable the field, wasn’t stored in the suit. Nor was the code-lock to enter the airlock of the ship.
I pondered alternatives, grateful I couldn’t smell anything, and trying desperately to avoid looking at the mess I’d made.
I could walk the combat suit to the ship, and cut my way in. However, this would take more than half of the available life support there was, and there would be no guarantee I’d be able to get the ship to work.
On the other hand, the Bridge was close.
I made my decision and turned to start back the way I’d come. But in spite of myself, my eyes crossed the mess. The face of Palffy was visible and through the blood looked decidedly unmanly. Nearby was the upper torso, from which the clothes had fallen away from the body.
I froze.
Two breasts were visible.
Palffy had been a woman.
I couldn’t help it, suppression or not, I vomited. My suit formed an opening around my mouth, and ejected the vomit into the existing mess, closing again as my lips began to feel icy cold.
I made a major effort to get a grip, commanded the combat suit into motion, and walked alongside it, my suit still connected. We took the stairs upward just to be safe, and clomped our way onto the Bridge. I walked us to the captain's chair, and sat to ponder the next step.
I did the release for Palffy then and there, and coughed for several minutes.
My PC supplied me the details of distance to BigMother, likely speed of crossing, and the needed life support, leaving me with a few minutes to do what I’d wanted to do in the first place.
I entered a meditative state, and reached out for the souls of all those who had crewed Enterprise across the centuries. I saluted them for the brave souls they had been, as my own ancestors had been. For a moment, I felt connected to all of them, long dead and reincarnated as they were. Oddly, none of the souls were on the planet below, all having reincarnated elsewhere.
I brought myself back to awareness to find I’d spent more time in meditation than I’d intended, but I’d used less life support than had I been in a normal state.
I clumped us over to a main viewport. Unlike my ships, where all views were combination view and screen, this was a real window. I figured it was the most logical place to cut my way out. With four strokes of the sword, the viewport fell out into space, leaving me standing looking out at a view of BigMother. From this distance, the ship didn’t look as big as I knew it was. I sheathed the sword once again.
I commanded the combat suit to stand in the center of the hole, and pulled myself up onto its back. My feet rested on the bottom of the hole I’d cut, and I held onto the head section.
On command, the combat suit leapt through the hole, lined up to land on the hull of BigMother.
We sailed through space. Enterprise shrank behind me, BigMother grew before me.
The expected SD droid failed to appear.
Seven
The trip across the void was long enough to be boring, so I spent the time amusing myself with some suit programming.
As BigMother approached, I began to wish I'd paid more attention to where we were aimed at. I'd selected the front of the ship, which although it offered less of a target, would give me less distance to walk if I had to get onto the Flight Deck by myself.
On the way across I’d checked now and then to see if coms cleared, but it hadn't.
Now I began to worry. I had no way of changing the direction I was heading, or the speed I was travelling.
I'd been pretty spot on about aiming at just above the top hull, expecting to be able to step off of the combat suit in a place where I could grab hold of something.
I’d forgotten one thing, and now I was wishing I'd spent more time setting up the jump.
We were heading directly for one of the turrets. In fact, it was looking very like we would impact on the end of one of the guns. For a moment I had an image of being impaled through the chest by the gun barrel, and had to make an effort to shake it off. It wouldn’t actually happen that way, since my suit would protect me, but what would happen would be I’d bounce off and start going back the way I’d come, without my ride.
As it happened, we neatly fit between the barrels, and the combat suit crashed squarely into the turret dome. Its feet thunked home as the magnetics took hold, and for a minute we imitated bug-kill.
I checked on the life support situation, and was shocked to see it down to less than an hour. Still holding on tight, I commanded the combat suit to climb down off the turret, and then march towards the front of the ship.
Seen from the hull, BigMother was a behemoth! Twenty minutes later, we arrived at the front of the ship. The combat suit walked over the drop off without stopping, and I had to hold on tight to avoid being shaken off by the lurch of the direction change. Once upright again, it was a much shorter walk to the top of the Flight Deck. The whole concept of up and down had changed, relative to the new surface.
At the next edge, the combat suit stopped, and I peered over. It was like looking into a tunnel with no end.
Now for the hard part. I gripped tightly, and commanded the combat suit to jump. It sailed into the tunnel, doing a half somersault as we went, and landed heavily on the opposite deck, where the magnetics caught us, and kept us upright. The Australian judge gave us a 7.1, 7.3 from the British, 7.9 from the American, and 7.2 from the Canadian.
Us. When did I start thinking of an empty combat suit as us? The judges applauded, and vanished. For a moment I stood there on the back of the combat suit and wondered if I was still out in the void gasping my last.
An arrow popped up, and I set the combat suit to following it, as it led us to the nearest airlock. There were no external lights in the Flight Deck, the nearest being over the airlock we were heading for. The old saying popped in, and didn’t want to leave. "The light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train." We made it to the airlock without seeing either light or train.
The outer door was shut, and the com blackout was still in effect. I climbed down off the combat suit at last, and manually opened the airlock. The combat suit clumped in after me, and I cycled us through.
Life support was down to fifteen minutes.
Inside, I found a single two person trolley.
"Hello Hunny, I'm home!" I yelled into the distance.
"Jon?" asked Jane through the speaker on the trolley. "Where the hell did you come from?"
"Long story."
"Give me the speeded up version."
"Boy gets knocked out. Boy wakes up on hulk. Bad-girl tries to kill boy. Boy kills bad-girl. Boy flies the void on a combat suit. The end."
"Jon?"
"Yes Jane?"
"Are you okay?"
"Why?"
"You want to look i
n a mirror before anyone sees you."
I looked down at myself, and saw I was covered in frozen blood and gore. Which was now beginning to melt.
"Fine. First though, you need to send a salvage droid to the right flight pod of Enterprise. There should be a ship there, which you'll need to break into, in order to shut off the damping field affecting coms and sensors."
"What damping field?"
"Did you see me fly the void?"
"No."
"There you go then. Damping field. End it!"
"Confirmed."
"Send a repair droid as well. If there is any computer left on Enterprise, I want it. The official version of what happened to Enterprise doesn’t hold water, and with luck, the truth is still in a databank somewhere on that ship."
"Confirmed."
"Send this combat suit to the nearest armoury. It'll need a clean out and some major repairs. And take me to the access shaft."
"Confirmed."
I jumped on the trolley, and it rapidly took me across to an access shaft. I went up to the Cargo Deck, where another trolley took me the length of the ship to where the original access shafts to the upper levels were. I went up, and then was trolleyed to the empty crew mess. In the bathroom, I found the sword was gone, and under the shower, the mess was washed off my suit, leaving me with just wet hair and face, which I dried. I'd gone to put my guns aside, and found they needed washing as much as the rest of me did. I carefully dried them as well.
Not long after, I walked into my suite, and was given the rounds of the kitchen by a clearly annoyed Angel. It took me a little while to settle her down, before I went into my bathroom, and this time stripped off and had a long proper shower.
By the time I was on the Bridge, Jane announced the damping field had been taken care of, and the teams were standing down on the planet. I moved into my Ready Room to await the inevitable.
The twins and Aline, predictably, were the first through the door, demanding to know what had happened to me. I gave them the speeded up version. I could see Amanda wasn’t happy someone had been able to get past her. She took her bodyguard duties seriously.
"Did you get a name for this assassin?" asked Aleesha.
"Palffy."
"You killed Palffy?" asked Amanda. "Seriously? He has a seriously impressive record."
"She."
"What?"
"Palffy was a she."
"You're sure?"
"Oh yes."
Aleesha turned to Amanda and they did their commune thing.
"What?" I asked them.
"It makes a sort of sense. Palffy was like a ghost. All record, and no substance. And the record isn’t official, since Palffy has only ever been a name."
"Code name?" suggested Aleesha.
"Very likely," said Amanda.
"Very dead," I added.
"How dead?" asked Aline.
"Chopped into small pieces dead."
They looked at me silently. I won't say shocked, as I'm not sure anything shocked them anymore, but certainly it silenced them.
During dinner, I retold the whole story in more detail.
We were in the middle of dessert when Amy went blank for a bit, followed by a huge grin. She waved towards a wall, and the image of a dragon with a figure on top, soared across the starscape.
"This is on the local media at the moment," she said. "Someone took it through a telescope and sent it in to a news service. No-one can explain it, and many are calling it a hoax."
All eyes turned to me. I looked sheepish, but didn’t say anything.
The news report continued, this time showing a Pegasus with a figure on its back. All eyes moved from the report back to me. The image changed again, this time to a figure on a surf board. The grins and chuckles let loose, but I stayed looking sheepish.
No-one said anything. I finished my dessert and headed for my suite. Nut was playing with Angel, so I joined in for a while, until the twins and Aline came in. Without a word, we moved to the spar.
We sat there in the warm bubbles for a long time, before Amanda fixed me with a serious look.
"A surfboard Jon? Seriously?"
"What?"
I finally began to laugh, and the girls joined in with me.
After a while, the twins left for their own suite, and Aline made sure I went to sleep quite late. It had been a stressful day, but the relief of getting through it unscathed overrode the need to sleep.
Aline pretended I was a surfboard, and rode me across the void, err, bed.
Eight
Jane pointed us towards the Sirius jump point while the morning training happened. I was feeling sluggish and not with it, but BA didn’t relent.
Back on the Bridge, I asked Jane if she'd found anything useful on Enterprise.
"I did. The entire computer room was intact. I disassembled it. The repair droids are in the process of putting it back together now."
"Will it work?"
"Should do. It looked as if all it needed was power. Won't know until we plug it in though."
"Let me know when you do."
"Confirmed."
As we closed in on the jump point, the Bridge began to fill.
"So," began Grace. "Why are we going here?"
"Curiosity mainly," I replied. "The Sirius system is the most complicated place man has yet found. There is also a six hundred year old discrepancy between the official description of the system, and the spiritual channeling about it. I've always wanted to go there, and sort it out once and for all."
I didn’t mention this had almost been an obsession for me, since a very early age. I didn't know why, but going here was extremely important. Nothing had ever been said, so I had no concrete link to prophesy, but given all that had happened this last year, it seemed a safe bet.
"What's the discrepancy?" asked BA.
"Enterprise' survey says there are three suns in the system, confirming what astronomical observations have said since the twentieth century. But spiritual channels have always maintained there is a fourth sun."
"Surely not," said Alison. "Just two creates a complicated system. Three is almost unbelievable, let alone four."
"We shall soon see."
The Bridge went silent, and we waited until Jane announced the jump point was close.
"Jump us through," I told her, "and then hold on the other side. Let's do some scans before we go in any further. We better check if that medical shuttle is here as well."
"Confirmed."
I explained what I’d been told about the missing shuttle, for the benefit of the enquiring looks I received.
The jump was routine, and there was nothing waiting for us on the other side.
"Welcome to Sirius," said Jane. "I'll have a system plot up momentarily."
We waited. It took her five minutes to display the system.
"What are we looking at?" asked Annabelle.
Jane looked across at me, and I nodded to her to give the explanation.
"There are three suns I can detect easily. I'm still trying to find a fourth one, if there is one. Sirius A is a blue-white giant star, visible from the Northern Hemisphere of old Earth, and known as the Dog Star. Sirius B is a white dwarf star. Of the two, B is the denser star. The two of them orbit around each other in the shape of the double helix."
"Really?" asked Alison, who was the team's medic, and thus one of the few people here who realized the implications.
"Why is that significant?" asked BA.
"The double helix is the shape of the DNA molecule. It’s the building block for life."
"Ah."
"Both have planets around them," went on Jane, "but none are habitable. A has what we would call a sweet spot, but there is no planet in that orbit. B has only an outer system, indicative of it having destroyed its inner system when it became a red giant, before shrinking into a dwarf. Records indicate B takes mass away from A at the closest they come to each other as they dance around. This is not happening at the moment
, but according to record, it was on Enterprise's first visit."
"Where's the third sun?" I asked.
Jane highlighted it.
"Sirius C is a brown dwarf, orbiting around Sirius A, in an orbit which is unaffected by Sirius B. It has a system of planets around it, and the third one out seems to be the one they say is habitable, but lifeless. We'll need to take a long detour to get there safely."
"Any sign of a fourth sun?"
"Not yet."
The fourth sun was a real enigma, and maybe the answer to an even bigger one. The Sirians were a civilization which had ascended to the sixth dimension. But this was credited as having happened more than four billion years ago. The problem was, the Sirius system was nothing like that old, at most around the three hundred million mark. So was the Sirius system of now the home of the Sirians, and the dating of their ascension wrong? Or was there a much older system here when they were supposed have done so? If so, maybe the fourth sun would prove to be the older system from which the Sirians ascended.
On the other hand, no planet in Sirius A's sweet spot could possibly indicate where a planet had once been before ascension. If so, then a lot of channeling was wrong. Or at best, the right answer to the wrong, or a badly worded, question. On the other hand, it could simply be that the stresses of the system on a planet in the sweet spot, might prevent a planet from forming, or rip one apart later.
Unfortunately, there were no obvious answers.
"What about a rogue planet?" I asked.
"Rogue planet?" asked Grace.
"According to channels," I said, "there's a planet which orbits between here and the Earth system, taking some two and a half thousand years to make the full orbit. It's supposed to be a fourth dimensional planet, inhabited by a race called the Anu, who have metal skin."
"Sounds familiar," said Amanda. "Wasn’t there something like that recurring in Who?"
"Yes. And quite a few other science fiction series as well. Spiritual circles credit the Anu with all the robots which have turned up in science fiction."
"Nothing like that here," said Jane. "If it's real, it must be out in the void somewhere, and as such, will be completely undetectable."
Hunter Legacy 8: Hero to the Rescue Page 5
