The Others, found our ships, being orders of magnitude more advanced than the Da'ha'mal, the more important target. And they attacked the Rift Jumpers. It was by the grace of the gods of the cosmos that the Rift Jumpers were able to get home to Earth to warn them that the Others were coming to neutralize Earth though most of their ships were lost.
It took the heroic effort of Captain Barret from the North Star projecting his gravity drive's microscopic black hole into, and ramming the Other's vessel, sacrificing the ship to stop the Others as they tore through what little defenses Earth had back then.
We've been in an off again on again war with them for centuries now. And we have still never even seen what they look like or have ever made contact with them.
And here was a Hunter Killer in our system. I swallowed.
The woman at the coms center called out, “Pacification activation code has just been sent unidirectional toward Prime.”
Abigail growled, “They're in for a surprise when it reaches Prime in a few minutes and nothing happens.”
The entire ship hummed and dimmed for a moment and tactical called out, “The area is being scanned. They've painted us and are charging weapons.”
Captain Voss watched the tactical displays and said as he placed his hand on the shoulder of the woman manning the weapons console. “Ok, let's knock at their door, Guns. And Kyoto, hail that ugly monstrosity. Activate chirpers.”
Our weapon... was already charged, and the Vega sent a shot literally across their bows as tumbrils started spitting out of the carriers by the dozen.
The comms woman pointed at him and he started talking. “This is Captain Voss of the Tau Ceti Prime Dreadnought Vega, to Galactic Federation Fleet. Foreign military vessels are not cleared to enter our system. And you may wish to have your attack tumbrils pull back as they are about to enter a dense quantum-phasic minefield. Which extends five light minutes in a sphere around you. You should be reading the warning markers' telemetry.”
He finished with, “You have fifteen minutes to reverse your course and spike out through the rift, or we will consider it an act of war and our incoming fleet will be cleared to engage.”
The mute icon showed on the screen and he gave us a dubious smile. “Let them chew on that a moment.” Then he asked tactical, “Is the other part of Miss Hasher's plan in motion?”
The seated man looked a little impressed as he added plot icons of incoming gravity signatures that were emerging from the shadow of Prime and starting the two-week journey to the rift. Gravity, once thought to work in waves that only traveled the speed of light, was found a few hundred years after that theory was introduced, to be mostly incorrect.
It has dual natures both as a wave and a force, much like light travels both as a wave and a particle. And gravity footprints travel FTL and are for all intents and purposes instantaneous. I could give you the quantum decay and frame-dragging math, but I don't want to bore you with it.
We used this in our deception and parked a rotating shift of Betweener tumbrils exactly eight light minutes from the rift termination with gravity projectors that mimicked the energy and mass footprints of various warships, making it look as though we had almost forty capital ships when they detect the gravity footprints of an unscheduled transit.
This would give the illusion of us already having a fleet that was half the size of the one which protected Old Earth herself. And the long-range scans they just now sent out to identify those ships will have a sixteen-minute round trip. That gave us basically fifteen minutes to scare them off before they found it was a ruse. That was it... that was all I had until they left, then we had one more gift in our goody bag.
So right now it was imperative to sell the bluff.
The screen crackled to life, a video channel activating, displaying a clean-cut, silver-haired man who looked to be hardened by war, with a granite jaw and a perfectly pressed Galactic Federation uniform which had an insignia that wasn't in our records. I had no doubt that insignia was for their covert Pacification Fleet. His voice rumbled just as I had imagined it would, but not in an arrogant manner I had imagined, instead, he was calm and almost professional. “Captain Voss, this is Rear Admiral Baker of the Defender. We do not recognize your authority in this manner. Tau Ceti is a member of the Galactic Federation.”
He held his hands out, face up. “So I must respectfully ask you to power down your weapons systems, and prepare to be boarded.”
Voss shook his head sadly, and in a just as professional and conversational tone, said, “After an attack on our system by a cloaked Galactic Federation tumbril carrier, which wound up killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens, we have declared our independence from Earth and the Federation. We now have our own fleet for self-defense, and are prepared to stand in defense of our people.”
The Admiral exhaled, his shoulders drooping as he said, “It is a shame it has come to this then.” He pointed to someone on his own bridge and we saw her hit a button and a transmission was sent to us.
Glitch pretended to go berserk and I called out, “Oh no, the pingers have gone crazy!” Vash backhanded both of us. What? A little good comedy goes a long way in tense situations. The Captain looked at us dryly and Glitch settled down.
Then Voss told the man. “Nothing in the Tau Ceti System is vulnerable to your Pacification Code any longer, Admiral.”
The other man gritted his teeth, losing his professional demeanor for a moment. Then reined in his frustration and smiled. “Your ships are weeks out, we can just board you and then advance on Prime.”
Now, this was where I had to hand it to Captain Voss as he smiled in a predatory manner and said, “You are welcome to try, sir. But our tri-cannons have a little something special for any ships who approach, and that is if they can make it through the mines.”
The other man wasn't looking at him, instead, he was studying those of us who he could see in his frame of view. “You know, Captain? I'm not so sure you've have had the time to seed your system with as dense a minefield as you are intimating. You're bluffing.”
It was Vashon who stepped forward and said in the steely tone I've heard from her in the past when she was about to lay down the hurt on an adversary, “Is he though, Admiral? We were already moving the mines into place when we first caught wind that your pacification fleet was interested in Prime.”
She motioned to space. “If you scan the minefield, one three five, by twenty-three, two hundred thousand miles in system, you'll find the remains of the stealth tumbril carrier you sent in to transmit the rogue code. It was unfortunate for us they got the code out before hitting our mines.”
I heard a whisper in his bridge, “That's Captain Peregradopolis,” which made his back stiffen. Interesting, my girl's reputation precedes her it seems. That made me smile a little.
We had towed in the wreckage of that tumbril from where Vash had destroyed it with the point singularity from the bump drive of New Terra. The floating debris was to help sell the minefield myth.
A man near the Admiral looked up from his station and nodded once grimly, and Baker's mouth thinned as he pressed his lips together. He was starting to buy into our story. “Destroying a Galactic Federation vessel is an act of war and...”
Lady Perigrine stepped beside the Captain and hissed, “You had already declared war with your attempted genocide of our system...” She had one eye on the clock above the transmission like she was waiting for something, “...and we defended ourselves as we do now.”
Twenty more icons bloomed on the screen from five light minutes deeper in space, moving toward us. It was a single deep space tumbril dragging a chain of gravity projectors, to look like we were boxing them in with warships.
I schooled my face as their tactical officer started barking out the new contacts. Well played and well-timed Abigail.
She said in a cool tone, “Tell your leaders, that the President of Tau Ceti Prime has declared our independence by a vote of our people, and declare our system
a military free zone. Any military vessels entering our space will be dealt with, decisively. Feel free to share we are willing to negotiate a ceasefire and peace treaty in this war you have brought upon us.”
“You now have seven minutes to return the way you came.” The main cannon finally came online again as she said that. I silently wondered if there was some sort of class in politics that taught that kind of timing. She was a stone-cold badass as she said, “Captain Voss, target their bridge with the new quantum-phasic cannon. Kindly fire when the countdown reaches zero if you please, and see if their armor is any match for an inter-phasing blast.”
She was just ad-libbing now, and her background as the prior head of covert sciences was evident in her terminology. Quantum-phasic mines were one thing, an instant burst of inter-phasing energy. And the holy grail for the military had been incorporating that sort of technology into warship cannons. It is still a pipe dream, but they didn't know that.
The man appeared torn like he was going to stand and fight, but there was the slightest shadow of doubt on his face in the crease of his eyes. Then he turned to his navigator. “Signal all ships, reverse course back to the rift. Emergency spike.”
Then he looked at us and inclined his head as if acknowledging a loss in a chess game. “Captain.”
“Admiral.”
Then the man looked for a long moment at Vash before turning to Abigail. “Madame President. I will relay your message, but I must warn you that I'm quite sure we will be instructed to return in full force and give you the war you are asking for.”
She sighed sadly. “I'm sure, Admiral, and that will be a sad day indeed for both our peoples. I truly hope it does not come to that. Peace is always the preferred outcome.”
The man looked tired and resigned as he just nodded his agreement. He actually saluted her then pointed to someone and the screen went dead. A moment later I felt nausea overwhelm me as their ships spiked one at a time, vanishing back into the rift.
We all just stood there silently for a few long moments, until Captain Voss said, “Well holy fucking shit. It worked.” Then he looked at me. “Remind me never to play poker with you, dirter.” His use of the dirter slur didn't sound derogatory, more ironic, so I didn't bristle. I felt my cheeks burning.
Then a cheer went up in the space as Glitchy squeed in what one could almost see as adrenaline-fueled relief and elation.
Then Voss said, “Hey Guns, you might want to power down the main cannon before we blow ourselves up. We still don't have all the regulators installed and I quite like not being a fireball at this juncture of my life.”
A nervous chuckle went around as I winced. He wasn't wrong. I wasn't sure if we'd have been able to get off a second shot. He started barking out orders to send out an order for all decoy tumbrils to reset until after the final shipyard translated to our system.
I sighed because then that would signal my most ambitious solution to give us the time we needed to make our fake fleet real. There was a point singularity generator parked in the corona of the Tau Ceti sun. Once we had all our vessels in system, it would activate, projecting a persistent singularity three light months out, ninety degrees above the perihelion from the rift termination. This would cause a 'navigation deviation' bending the rift.
As long as the sun powered that generator, anyone attempting to reach the Tau Ceti system in the rift will get dumped out over a year's sublight travel to Prime. That gave us, if the Rear Admiral travels back to Earth with the news, and turned around with a fleet immediately, eighteen months give or take to finish the first phase of our fleet as more ships are churned out.
We may not have been ready for them this time, but next time, if the bullies come knocking at the door, we'll be able to give them one hells of a fight!
Sai yowled out, “Now that... was intense. Anyone else need a drrink?” She hopped up on top of Glitch and purred as we all broke into nervous laughter.
I moved over to look through the blast windows into space, Vash joining me at my side, and I thought about how a dirtside pinger mechanic from Agri-Grid A1 found herself here at the rift, on a rickety, unfinished warship, and all I wanted to do was to just go home.
Who knew what the future held for us in the Tau Ceti system, but I took comfort in knowing that I would face it together with the people I most loved.
I voiced that to the Sky Ranger of my heart. “I love you, Vashon.”
She sighed and pulled me to her as we looked out across the stars. “And I love you too, my Vega.”
We just stood and let our words be witnessed by the endless expanse that lay before us.
The End
Bonus short story Prequel – Rift Jumpers: Faster Than Light
Rift Jumpers: Faster Than Light
By Erik Schubach
Copyright © 2014 by Erik Schubach
Published by Erik Schubach
P.O. Box 523
Nine Mile Falls, WA 99026
Cover Photo © 2014 Algol / ShutterStock.com license
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, blog, or broadcast.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Manufactured in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Chapter 1 – Nexus
“Holy bejesus Trinn!” I spat out as I dove across my console on the bridge to slam my palm down on the giant red abort button on the gravity projection drive beside my navigator and second in command. She gasped at my sudden outburst as the sounds of the capacitors discharging and the hum of the drive shifting into standby filled the bridge.
I looked at her. “We’re on the fringe of a rift! Can't you feel it?”
She looked at me sheepishly. Her sharp, exotic features twisted into a look of shock colored with a tinge of fear as she seemed to concentrate a little then her sharp brown eyes widened as she spoke in her low register, “Oh my god Commander Henningsly, I... I couldn't feel it, it was so faint!”
We sat there for a few seconds to get our breathing and heart rates to get back to normal. I took a deep breath then smiled at her. “No worries. We're still here and in one piece.”
She chuckled nervously back at me.
This was the risk of deep space travel. If our gravity drives projected an artificial point singularity into one of the weak points between space and subspace, otherwise known as a rift, they would find debris from our ship scattered along a few light years on a straight vector from when our point singularity inadvertently transferred into subspace, dragging our vessel along with it at hundreds of millions of light years per second in real-space.
The singularity would instantly cease to exist in real space and reemerge at a point where the rift twists and turns along the fracture lines created where stars play a tug of war of mass across the fabric of space. But with us tethered and snapping to it like a rubber band.
It is theorized by the once-leading rift researcher— that would be me, Commander Jane Henningsly—that while our projected energy mass could translate, the kinetic energy of our momentum to impossible speeds in real-space would cause our ships to shred apart under the stresses of such an acceleration of mass.
Think of it like this: our energy mass is not subject to the untold g-forces that would be associated with the ungodly acceleration to hundreds of thousands of light-years per second because it resides in subspace, where it has apparently not moved at all, but the matter connected to it in real-space, our ship, would still be subjecte
d to those g-forces as it caught up to the tethered energy when it reemerges from subspace.
It would take the energy of a thousand stars to power our inertial dampeners enough to prevent the vessel from tearing itself apart and prevent any living beings on board from being instantly liquefied. Even if our shipboard systems could handle that much energy, there was no way we could possibly generate enough power to even attempt it. At least that's what everyone else thinks is an immutable fact.
But... I have also theorized a different idea. One that my colleagues at the United Space Travel Engineers Guild had called me mad for. One that got me thrown out of the guild. One that got me private funding from an aging, eccentric, self-made trillionaire on Earth who has the vision of visiting an alien planet before he dies. One that got me the command of the most advanced research vessel in the solar system.
Earth has lost many ships to un-mapped rifts, like the one we just stumbled upon, in our deep space exploration over the last century.
There are other forms of propulsion that can get a vessel near the speed of light, but they take weeks or months to build up to those velocities. However, with our preferred method of “bumping” with gravity projection drives, and using antimatter generators to power the inertial dampeners, we can attain .8 C, the speed of light, in just seven hours using five sixty-minute “bumps” spaced thirty minutes apart.
That's why the Rift Contingent was formed. To map the known rifts and to discover new or weaker rifts and mark them with warning buoys to protect our deep space mining, research, and exploration vessels from certain death.
Over the past eighty years, the Contingent has paved the way for even deeper space exploration. With the hope that one day soon we can send out a “sleeper” ship to send men to the nearest star with an Earth-class planet, fifty-seven light years away, making humans an interstellar species.
Fixit Adventures Anthology Page 26
