by B. V. Larson
I then outlined a plan privately to Ursahn. It was risky, it might not even be possible, but I considered it to be our only option.
“Your plan is madness!” she declared when I’d finished.
“It’s the only way.”
“We’ll scatter. By the nine suns of my people, we’ll scatter right into a star’s corona!”
“We might, Captain,” I said. “We might. But that is the definition of bravery—taking chances to achieve victory.”
She closed the channel, and our two ships plunged toward one another.
We watched the rift open as we came near. The enemy Hunter was right on my tail, but still out of effective range.
That was by design. I wanted the enemy to be right behind us when I plunged behind Killer into the rift. Maybe, just maybe, it would follow us.
If it did, I had a surprise waiting for it on the far side.
After a nail-biting run in normal space, the Hunter almost caught up to us as planned. I wanted it to be almost within reach when it had to make its decision.
Right at the end, it seemed to ease off. Perhaps it was estimating that we would escape it.
“Abrams,” I called to the lower decks. “Drop our gravity-pulse unit overboard.”
“That’s impossible, Blake,” he snapped back.”
I showed my teeth in anger.
“I won’t ask you again,” I said. “Put the friend-or-foe unit into an airlock and push it out into space. Make sure you leave it switched on. If you don’t do so, I’ll push you in the airlock instead.”
“That’s a valuable piece of equipment,” he complained. “Earth needs my prototype so that we can build more of them.”
“Abrams,” I said, getting up from my command chair and waving for Gwen to take over. “I’m coming down there. You’d better be following my orders.”
“Part of my lab was damaged in that madness earlier,” he complained. “I’ll have a great deal of difficulty repeating my work later. A prototype, adjusted correctly, may cause the enemy AI to ignore us again. Besides which—”
I cut the connection. I was already floating down the central passageway, hand-over-handing it expertly along its length. When I reached the correct hatch, I darted through the floor to the lower decks.
When I reached his labs, I found him scrambling to lever the unit away from its moorings. He’d done nothing to prepare the system for deployment in space until I’d threatened to come down there in person.
He made a squawking sound when he saw me and clawed at the bolts on the bottom.
I shoved him roughly aside and put a power-wrench on the bolt heads. They came off one at a time in rapid order.
Had he been stalling? Even now when I was physically present and raging? It was hard to believe.
At last, I got the thing free from its moorings. It floated once I lifted it from the floor, as we were in anti-gravity mode.
“Help me, you stubborn bastard!” I grunted.
He joined me, and we manhandled the object into an airlock. It barely fit.
“That’s our last one,” he complained. “You’ve left a unit on two worlds, and now, without giving me a chance to duplicate a thousand careful settings—”
“Shut up,” I said. “If this works, it will all be justified.”
I slammed the palm of my hand down on a large, flat button and the airlock doors whooshed shut. Striking another button—a red one this time—I watched as the object was launched out into space by a puff of escaping gas.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, panting, and watched through a tiny triangular window. The friend-or-foe system, which the Hunter AI had now reclassified as “foe” spun around end over end.
“Do you think this will work?” Abrams asked me.
“We’ll find out soon enough. Prepare to enter the rift. We’re jumping in about forty five seconds.”
=64=
We spent a long time in hyperspace. Usually, entering a rift and exiting the other side took only minutes—this time it was closer to half an hour.
I didn’t exactly know what that meant, but it was frightening. One of the biggest worries complicating any long jump across lightyears was the possibility of “scattering” and ending up separated and lost. I knew that ships were sometimes able to return after scattering—but not always. Support ships like Hammerhead couldn’t create rifts on their own. If we scattered, Killer would probably never find us.
Even if we held tightly to our mothership, any mistake could be deadly. What, for example, would we do if we came out within the gravitational reach of a black hole? The closer you got to the center of the galaxy, the closer such objects became. When a capital ship scattered, it wasn’t able to jump again for several minutes—a delay that could be fatal to an entire task force.
There were plenty of more mundane hazards as well. Even a misplaced planet could ruin your day when you were traveling at speeds approaching a million miles an hour and popping out of the far end of a rift.
Not only were we making a long jump this time, but we’d been flying at speed when we entered. That momentum would still be with us when we came out the other end, possibly dooming our ship.
“What is our beacon star?” I asked Chang.
He didn’t answer right away. I frowned at him and turned around. As our astronavigator, no question could be more important.
“Chang?”
“I’m still processing, Captain,” he said. “Ursahn set the beacon herself, and she didn’t inform us about it or the final destination. Perhaps there wasn’t time, or she went right up to the final moments before making the decision. Right now I’m navigating purely by maintaining a tight relationship between her ship’s course and ours.”
“That’s great…” I said. “A long jump, no beacon star for independent measurement, and we can’t talk to her due to being inside a stellar flux. We’re flying by gravity influences alone, right?”
“Essentially, Captain. But I do have an educated guess as to what beacon we’re using… I would estimate we’re using Wezen.”
I squinted at him. “Wezen?”
“Yes, a yellow supergiant otherwise known as Delta Canis Majoris.”
“That’s pretty far out…”
“It’s about six thousand lightyears from Epsilon Auragae, the beacon star closest to our point of origin.”
A moment of stunned silence reigned on the bridge as this sunk in.
“We’ve never jumped more than a thousand lights before,” Gwen said, “if that.”
“Can we even go that far?” Samson asked.
Gwen nodded. She was white-faced and even Miller looked worried.
“We can,” she said. “It’s just not a good idea. The farther you go in one jump, the greater chance you have of scattering and ending up somewhere you don’t want to be.”
“Why’d Ursahn choose such a distant target then?” Dalton asked. “Does she want to die in the dark out here?”
“People,” I said, deciding it was time to confess, “we’re striking deep into Imperial territory.”
They looked alarmed. More alarmed, even, than they’d looked when they’d learned we were jumping six thousand lightyears.
“That’s crazy!” Gwen said. “Why?”
“If it works out, you’ll all understand. Just wait—I think the terminus is coming up. We’re exiting hyperspace soon. Get everyone strapped in.”
They scrambled to obey. Klaxons rang out all over the ship. Every deck, including the damaged compartments, reported in. We sealed every bulkhead and stoked up our shield generators to maximum.
If we were to encounter any light debris when we returned to normal space, our shields could have absorbed it all if they were full power. Unfortunately, the shield generators in the prow had been taken out.
I didn’t bother to point this out to anyone, and neither did Samson. If they’d been paying attention, they probably already knew.
Less than a minute later, we burst out of hyperspace
and into normal space. The transition gave me an odd feeling, as always. We suddenly existed again, and we were moving at speed on an unknown course. Immediately, alarms began to shriek and the ship began to vibrate.
“I’m getting particle hits, sir!” Samson reported.
The update was hardly necessary. The whole ship was bucking and the hull was screaming like it was on fire. We had a light, fully-encompassing shield up, or we would have been cooked by friction. Even a single mote of dust in every cubic foot could turn into a brick wall at high speeds.
“Spin around and decelerate!” I ordered. “All power to aft shields!”
Dalton worked the helm. He was ahead of me, having already engaged a script to do exactly that the moment we broke through into normal space.
“Hull temperature rising—we’re disintegrating, Captain,” Samson said.
“Captain,” Chang said evenly. “At this rate we’ll burn up before we can slow down.”’
“Damn…” I said, thinking fast. “Dalton, can you see Killer?” I demanded. “Use my perception feed.”
For reasons I’d never quite understood, I was better than most at slaving our sensors to my sym and using the technology to “perceive” our surroundings in an overall sense. It was like having a three-dimensional vision that could zoom-in over distances. That was one of the major reasons I’d been successful as a fighter pilot.
In this case, we were partially blinded by dust strikes which rendered most of our sensors useless. Optical pickups, sonar, radar—it was all useless when you were in the middle of a dust cloud that was probably lightyears across.
But our most reliable detection systems in such environments were gravity sensors. Even if you were in the middle of a storm, you still felt the Earth’s gravity when you stood on her surface.
By processing micro-gravitational influences, we were able to locate Killer. I relayed that data to Dalton.
“I… I’ve got her, Captain. Thanks for the feed.”
“Get closer to her. She’s decelerating too, so all we have to do is coast. Tuck into her stern wake. She’s got full shielding.”
“Right… I’ll give it a go!”
We lurched and the hull sang loudly around us. We were gliding instead of braking, burning our hull in order to get close to Killer.
“We’re down to sixty percent hull integrity,” Samson said. “We’ll start losing compartment stability in the next minute or so.”
“Gwen, order the crew to abandon the most dangerous compartments,” I said, feeling sweat trickle over my body. I tried to absorb all the data the ship was feeding to me.
“I’ve got Killer aligned,” Dalton said. “Closing...”
“Ease us in. Gwen, try to contact Ursahn.”
“Too much interference.”
My fist pounded idly on the arm of my command chair. “Damn it. We need just a few more seconds…”
“Our speed is good,” Samson announced. “We’re overtaking Killer, so I’m gradually going to try to merge our shields with her.”
“Good idea…” I said. “Good…”
He did this, and the turbulence subsided. We had more time to breathe with our fantail almost nudging Ursahn’s much larger ship. With the envelope of two shields locked together, we were in less danger.
After another tense minute, we docked with Killer and fell into her comforting orbit. Carrier ships had powerful shields. Their basic mode of battle was to send out clouds of fighters as offensive weapons then focus on surviving whatever came at them using passive defenses like shielding.
When we were physically docked with Killer, Ursahn was finally able to contact us.
“What are you doing, Blake?” Ursahn asked.
I explained the situation. She’d never gotten a full damage report concerning my ship earlier—there hadn’t been time.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll decrease our speed and help you make repairs. Let’s link our navigational computers and let AI pilot both ships until we get out of this dust pocket.”
“Are you sure it’s a pocket, sir?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Every expanse of dust in the galaxy is finite. We just have to find our way out of it.”
The channel closed, and I chewed my lower lip thoughtfully. She hadn’t said anything about detecting an enemy ship.
That simple fact depressed me. My gambit had failed. We’d obviously scattered to God-knew-where—worse, my trap hadn’t worked.
The Hunter hadn’t followed us into the rift. It must still be back in the Gondwana system, eating planets.
=65=
Once we managed to slow down and stop the erosion of our hull, the dust storm we’d encountered became only a nuisance.
The cloud of debris was nowhere near as thick as one might encounter on Earth, of course. If it had been anything like a sandstorm on Mars or the Sahara Desert, we’d all have been instantly killed. Dust clouds in space were quite diffuse, but they were also very large. They tended to obscure vision, making stars appear ghostly and wreathed in velvety soup, but they rarely blanked out regions of space completely.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked Chang about twenty minutes later.
“We’re out of immediate danger,” Dalton answered, sighing and massaging his neck. “That’s good enough for me.”
Chang studied his data closely. It was mostly gravimetric-based, which took some effort to interpret correctly.
“We’ve scattered,” he announced after several minutes.
Samson groaned aloud. “No shit, Doc! But where?”
Chang brought up several screens, which formed a three-dimensional image on the hull all around us.
“The beacon star is here—about seven lightyears off. This local region of space is populated, but the nearest star is around a thousand AU away.”
“A thousand AU…” I said, marveling. “That would take us days to cover at low speeds.”
“Yes… worse, it’s on the far side of the dust cloud we’ve just come through. Circumnavigating it would take—”
I shook my head. “We’ll never do that. There’s no point. This mission didn’t work out as I’d hoped.”
“Our ship survived,” Miller said. “The enemy Hunter has been left behind. What more did you hope to accomplish?”
“I’d hoped the Hunter would follow us,” I explained. “That was the plan. They were supposed to chase us into the rift, and end up here with us—only ‘here’ was supposed to be closer to an Imperial star system.”
Miller shook his head, unbelieving. “So this was your plan?” he asked. “To jump into enemy territory near an Imperial home base?”
The rest of them looked confused for a second, but Dalton caught on first. “I get it! What a rat-fucking good idea!”
“You’ve got nothing,” Samson said to him. “You’re just trying to sound smart.”
“Not this time,” Dalton said. “Our captain is a vicious man. He meant to lead the Hunter into the middle of an Imperial system and let it eat their planets for a change.”
I nodded to him and gave him a conspiratorial smile.
“That wouldn’t work,” Gwen said. “The enemy ships all seem to have friend-or-foe systems. The Hunter wouldn’t attack them—oh, wait…”
Dalton formed a pistol with his fingers and shot her with it. “Now you get it! The scheme is diabolical. The local Imperials would have turned on their little bug-repellant machines—and instantly driven our Hunter mad.”
“Yes,” I said. “That was my hope. The AI has been retrained to attack ships that generate the ‘friendly’ signal. The Imperials would have had to deal with a serious enemy.”
“In the meantime, we could slip away again,” Samson marveled. “Such cunning. Mark me as impressed, Captain Blake.”
“But what do we do now, Captain?” Miller asked. “Since it didn’t work?”
“I guess we’ll repair our ship and head back to Rebel space,” I said, and everyone breathed a sigh of re
lief.
“Captain…” Gwen said in an odd tone of voice.
Something in that tone made me turn to her immediately. “What is it?”
“I’m picking up—yes, there’s a signal being broadcast from inside this vessel. A signal I can’t decode.”
“Where is it coming from?” I demanded.
“The brig, Captain. Lael must be doing it somehow.”
“Captain,” Miller said seriously, “we are in Imperial territory.”
“Damn it,” I said. “Alert the security team, have them meet me at the brig!”
Hammerhead was such a small ship it didn’t have much in the way of prison cells. At some point the designers must have calculated that during long voyages in space, someone might need to get locked up—but they hadn’t put much thought into it.
As a consequence, our brig was makeshift at best. It consisted of a single cabin on the lower deck, located between the engine rooms and Abrams labs. The cabin was in all ways identical to a standard crew cabin, built to hold up to four bunks in extremely tight circumstances. The only real difference was the door, which had no porthole, and could only be locked from the outside.
As the ship was built out of tough layered alloys, it was impossible for a prisoner to escape. Even the ventilation ducts were only a few inches wide.
When I reached the cell door, two security people stood at either side of it. They looked at me, alarmed but determined.
“What have we got, Captain?” asked the chief who’d been put in charge of the cell and its sole occupant.
“Incompetence and failure in your department, Chief,” I said sternly. “The prisoner is sending out encoded signals somehow. In case she’s managed to arm herself as well, I requested your help.”
The chief went pale. “I—I don’t understand, Captain…”
“All will be made clear soon,” I said, taking a physical code-key out of his numb fingers and applying it to the cell door.
The two men lifted their weapons and tensed. I flung the door open.
Lael was there, lounging on the bottom bunk. Her face bore a smug expression.
