Ty motioned to Svenson and Harris, the sensor operator, to come over to him.
“What’s up sir,” she asked as the stopped in front of him. Harris just stood quietly.
“We’re going after the Stiletto missiles. Either of you have any experience with them?” Both shook their head no. He took a deep breath before continuing. “They’re a long range fire and forget anti-ship missile. The Alliance loves the things.”
“Fire and forget?” asked Harris.
“Yeah, they shoot it in the general direction of a known target. Then it’ll find the target by itself and home in on it. The missiles talk to each other too. So if there are multiple targets, they’ll decide which missile goes after which target.”
“The Adventurer can take them out with its primary laser easily enough. But as soon as we start active tracking to aim the laser, they’ll wake up and someone will certainly shoot back at us.”
“How can they shoot back?” asked Harris.
“They have a self-shaping penetrator warhead. Its nasty stuff! They’ll rotate the terminal attack module, a one meter diameter silver ball. Then an explosive charge fires. The charge destroys the rest of the missile, but it also propels and shapes the penetrator. Our armor won’t slow it down much and the shields won’t do anything to slow it.”
“How do we avoid it?”
“We move out of the way by changing our course. Where we are now in the solar system means accelerating or decelerating. We can’t move radially.”
“Sounds easy enough,” said Svenson.
“It won’t be. When the terminal aiming charge fires, you’ll have just seconds to react. You might have some warning if Harris here detects the terminal module rotating to fire, but it’s a sphere, so there won’t be much of an indication. Our best defense is to keep moving around. Svenson, that means you’ll need to be really sharp to aim the beam.”
She nodded, “I can do that, sir.”
“Questions?” Neither individual said anything. Ty continued, “Remember, there are seventy-two missiles out there. They can kill this ship. So, we’ll take them one at a time. If we work quickly, we can get them all before they’re a threat to the convoy. Svenson, just start with the closest missile. Harris, you watch for counter fire shots. I’ll be moving the ship.”
They returned to their stations and Ty turned to face Anderson. “Here goes,” he said. “Sound general quarters with Code Blue, depressurization protocol.”
As the klaxon sounded through the ship, he donned his helmet and checked Anderson to make sure her suit was correctly installed. When the stations responded that they were ready, he aimed the Adventurer at the first missile. As soon as the sensors began illuminating the missile to refine the firing solution, the missile spun around and aimed its second stage motor at the Adventurer.
“Aspect change on target, it’s pivoting,” said Harris.
Svenson’s hands flew over the controls. The Adventurer fired. The missile exploded sending the warhead back at the ship. Ty powered the drive motor to push the ship out of the way. Seconds passed, then they heard a staccato tapping sound reverberate through the ship.
“What’s that?” asked Anderson.
“Just debris from the missile casing.”
They continued to the next missile. They got this one before it could fire, but another missile fired back at them. They avoided the warhead, but the EMP burst of the terminal firing charge blinded them for a few seconds. Half-way through the missiles, they encountered a new twist.
“Sir.” It was Harris. “We’ve got a globe of twelve missiles ahead. They’re all in one spherical formation. All of the missiles are pointing out from a common center.”
“Svenson, target a missile on the far side of the sphere, let’s see if that confuses them.”
“Aye, sir.”
When she fired, two of the missiles facing the Adventurer fired. As it tried to dodge them, several more fired. Ty commanded a more aggressive course change. More missiles fired. Soon a cloud of projectiles were coming at them. One hit the Adventurer in its forward sensor dome. The penetrator lanced through the electronic modules behind the sensor panel and into the spaces behind it. It struck and destroyed one of the main power busses in the ship before ripping a thirty foot long tear in the outer hull as it exited the ship. The Adventurer shuddered from the impact. Hull breach warnings began sounding throughout the ship. Red lights appeared across Ty’s panel indicating multiple system failures and faults.
Anderson gazed at the lights before speaking, “We just lost main buss B, the forward sensor array and primary targeting system. Looks like the forward thruster module is off line too. Decks Echo and Foxtrot, forward of frame twenty are depressurizing. We’ve got a major hull breach along deck Foxtrot between frames eighty and one-ten. No casualties indicated, so far.”
Ty joined her at her station. From the number of red-lights on her status board and the sections of the ship which had flashing red borders around them, he knew a lot more than what she’d told him had happened.
“What can I do to help?” he asked.
“Just stay out of the way for now and don’t go after any more missiles until we can get things under control,” she said.
He nodded and returned to his panel. With the sensor array down, he could no longer see what the missiles were doing.
At least we’re down to twenty missiles, he thought to himself.
After a few moments, she motioned to Ty to have him join her.
“Ok, here’s where we are,” she started. “We lost our backup main buss. It was off-line at the time, so we’re OK with power as long as we don’t lose main buss A. We’ve lost deck F for the time being, damage is too severe. I’m having it evacuated and setting up an airlock so repair teams can get into it later. Forward tracking sensors are gone, no way to repair them. I can get targeting back but only by cannibalizing components from the aft sensor array.”
“Do we have laser link?” Ty asked.
Anderson nodded yes.
“OK, I’m going to launch the Dragon and slave our guns to it’s sensors and press the attack.”
“Sounds good. I gotta go now.”
Ty nodded and walked back to his display.
“Dragon. Command.”
“Dragon.”
Ty checked the Dragon’s status on his display before answering. The fighter was still loaded for an anti-ship mission.
“Vince, I need you to go missile hunting for me. That hit took out our forward sensors. We can still shoot, we just can’t aim.”
“Can you slave your guns to the Dragon?”
“Yes, between your missiles and our guns, I think we can get the rest. But we’re running out of time. Launch now and I’ll set things up on our side while you start acquiring missiles.”
“OK, I’m headed for the cockpit now. I’ll be out in thirty seconds.”
“Good, be careful, Vince. These missiles have cooperative attack AI in them.”
“Roger that.”
The Dragon launched shortly after. The small fighter spun around and moved away from the Adventurer so it could see all of the remaining missiles. Once they set it up, the targeting system in the fighter actually controlled the rail guns on the Adventurer.
Next they attacked a cluster of five missiles. They got the first one, and avoided the penetrators from the other four, but a sixth missile not in the cluster fired too. Its penetrator struck the Adventurer amidships.
The ship shuddered again and heeled to starboard from the impact. The penetrator punched through a crew berthing area and into a power cell before exiting the ship. The power cell exploded as it shorted out.
More alarms sounded in the engineering space. The power cell’s explosion threw most of the people to the deck. A power management console exploded as electrical shorts arced through the system. Then main power failed. Gravity and lights blinked for a moment then came back on as emergency circuits came on line.
Fire alarms and warning lights were sounding. Ty staggered back to his feet and looked at the ship’s status board. There were fire lights in three decks. Two sections of the ship showed de-pressurization warnings. He could see Red-One and Red-Five were moving to fight the fire. Smoke began to fill the engineering space. He saw several suited crewmen rushing to the power panel with extinguishers and first aid kits. Someone he couldn’t see was screaming in pain.
Anderson was sprawled on the floor where she’d been thrown by the explosion. Black scorch marks marred the gloves and sleeves of her engineering pressure suit. Her helmet’s faceplate was blistered and cracked.
As he knelt to help her, he tapped the intercom switch on his suit.
“Dragon, Command.”
“Dragon, Need help?”
He spoke as he examined her. The quick-check light over her right breast was yellow. “Negative on that. Do you still have a link to our guns?”
“Negative.”
“We’re out of the game for the time then. I need you to move further away from us and engage with your own missiles. When you use them, come back and rearm with more Heli-arcs and a gun pod. I’ll notify Dragon Ops. Command out.”
“Wilco.”
“Dragon Ops, Command”
“Dragon Ops.”
“Get another full load of Heli-arcs and a gun pod ready. When the Dragon returns pull those Plasma-arcs off. Got it?”
“Dragon Ops copies.”
Ty turned his attention to Anderson and glanced down at his right glove. The atmosphere indicator was green, so he reached for the releases on Anderson’s helmet. As he took it off he called out to her.
“Susan!”
She blinked her eyes. They went in and out of focus as she looked up at him. “Susan, can you hear me?” She blinked her eyes, then nodded her head. “You want to try standing?” She nodded again. He reached under her to help her up.
“I was over by the power panel there when we got hit. The arc went through my suit. It must have thrown me over here.”
“Looks like it.” Ty noticed there was no crying now. “Someone else got hurt though.”
She wobbled as she got to her feet and held on to Ty for a moment.
“Probably Dean, the arc got him worse than me.”
“Command, Red one.”
“Go Red One.”
”Sir, we have the fires out. The port side number three power cell is toast. We also found two fatals and three wounded in the crew berths. We’re moving the wounded to the infirmary now.”
“Command copies.” Ty glanced at Anderson. Concern was in her face too. “Red Five, command.”
He heard some heavy breathing before someone spoke. “Red Five.”
“Sit rep”.
“Sir, fire is out. We’re working the starboard side hull puncture at frame two-oh-seven, radial four-thirty. We’ve got a single wounded in the compartment with us, missing arm, sir. We’re doing buddy air until we can get a patch in place.”
“Command copies.” Ty pursed his lips and shook his head. “It’s only going to get worse.”
“Command, Dragon.”
“Go Dragon.”
“Splash three stilettos. Coming back to reload. Those suckers are nimble.”
“Good work, Dragon.” Ty turned to Anderson, “We’re down to eleven.” They both looked at the clock. “It’s gonna be close.”
“Well, we can’t shoot without main power. We have to get that power cell isolated before we can bring main power back up.”
“OK, that’s your specialty, just remember, each missile represents a freighter at this point.”
“I’m going to supervise isolating the power cell. Don’t break anything else while I’m gone,” she said. With that she walked stiffly towards the entry way. She motioned to one of the other technicians to accompany her.
An eternity later, a call came from Dragon.
“Command, Dragon.”
“Go Dragon.”
“Launching now. We’ve got a gun pod and twelve Heli-arcs.”
“Good hunting. Command out.”
Ty could only wait while others worked to repair the ship. The wait was worse than waiting to hear from the fleet about his promotion. Ten minutes later, Dragon called in.
“Command, Dragon.”
“Go Dragon.”
“Good news, we got eight more. Bad news, three launched before we could kill them. Three freighters lost, no survivors.”
Ty slammed the display panel with his open hand in anger. He took a deep breath to compose himself before speaking. “Command copies. Return to the ship.”
Vince double clicked his mic in response.
Ty looked at a display that showed the ships in the convoy. Red lines appeared through three ships, Tiny Maru a freighter carrying livestock, Trade Winds a freighter carrying spare parts for the fleet and October Harvest, another freighter carrying food.
He looked at the symbols representing the ships in the convoy. In another seven hours, they would need to be decelerating to make the turn around Jupiter.
He called out to the technician who was monitoring their communications systems on an adjacent wall panel, “Hey, Harris.”
“Yes, sir,” answered the man.
“We still being jammed?”
The man entered some information into a keypad on the panel. He studied the results before answering, “Yes, sir.”
“Ok, I’m going to rack out in the snooze tube over there.” He motioned with his head towards a glass half-cylinder wedged in between two panels and some conduits. “If I don’t wake up in three hours, wake me. Ok?”
“Sure thing, sir,” answered the man.
Ty walked over to the device. It looked like a test-tube cut in half along the long axis of the tube. The diameter of the tube was just wide enough to for a single person to stand inside. A small control panel was embedded at eye level in the inner face of the cylinder. Ty tapped in the number 180 then turned to face the room and stepped backwards into the tube. When he leaned his head back into the glass-like material of the tube, he felt himself grow weightless. Sleep came quickly after.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Defeating the Aatrixx
ADVENTURER: T-MINUS 14 HOURS
A voice in the tube was telling him to wake up. He felt his weight on his feet. Anderson was waiting for him with a concerned look on her face.
“What’s up?” Ty asked as he stepped off the pad.
“Sorry to wake you early. It’s only been about an hour, but an Aatarr battleship transitioned into the system just a moment ago. It’s burning for Mars as we speak.”
“What?” Ty felt a pit in his stomach. “Why Mars? What about this system is so important?” he asked as he walked with her to the main display. “We need those sleep tubes in command centers by the way,” he said. “How do you guys rate this?”
“Well, we don’t have chairs,” Anderson answered deadpan.
Ty winced. “So, what else do you have for me?”
As she spoke his mind raced about this latest development. He shook his head and focused on what she was saying. She said, “We're matching course now with the convoy. There’s still about five hours before they need to decelerate for the turn. Those two Aatrixx are braking into orbit around Jupiter now. That Aatarr is damn fast, it’s accelerating faster than the Aatrix. It’ll arrive at Mars within the hour.”
Ty shook his head and held his left hand clenched in a fist to his mouth as he contemplated the news. She waited for him to look back at her before she continued.
”Repair teams have finished shoring up the bulkheads on bravo and charlie decks. The power cell has been isolated. We’re back on main power. I’ve got targeting back for you, but we’re blind aft now. I’ve got Red-Seven putting scabs on B-deck overheads so we can re-pressurize the deck. Red-four is sealing off portions of Foxtrot deck. That hole is too big for us to repair it all. I think we can get about half the deck space back.”
“What’s our casualty count?”
“Bad, twelve missing. I’m sure they’re all fatals. That’s the entire bridge team and Red-Team one. We have seven fatals, all of Red-six plus three crewmen in the berthing compartment. Three other serious injuries were caused when the power cell blew, burns.”
Ty wondered what that count would be by the time they got away from the system. “Can we fight?”
“Yeah, we’re still in the game. We can shoot, but without buss B, we can either move or shoot when the shields are up but not both. My biggest concern is the shields. The dorsal shield generators actually didn’t get touched when we lost the command center, so we have full hardness of our shields but just two-thirds of their capacitance.”
“Three shots, instead of four or five?”
She nodded.
“What else?”
Anderson checked her notes before continuing, ”The crew berth is pretty severely damaged. I’m using it as the morgue right now. We lost one of the pri-fli controllers in the run in with the LongBow, but we’ve got the other two, plus Junior. The bee-bee stackers wanted me to tell you the Plasma-Arcs launch initiator was replaced. It benched bad so they replaced it from stores.”
“What does the Dragon have left?”
“Vince shot off twenty Heli-arcs and seven hundred rounds of thirty-mike rounds taking out the Stilettos. We’ve got four Plasma-arcs, five Heli-arcs, and a thousand rounds of thirty-mikes left.”
“Anything else?” Ty asked.
She shook her head no.
“Well, the Aatarr changes things. I felt confident we stood pretty good odds of handling the two Aatrix, but I think we need to have the convoy divert. If the Alliance knew how close they came with that volley of stilettos to taking out all of the convoy, they would be tempted to try again. I know we’d be hard pressed to stop them if they did.”
“Well, here’s hoping we persuaded them to not try it again.”
“Yeah,” Ty said as he stopped a moment to think. “There’s no finessing this. At this point, if the freighters can’t leave now, we’re likely gonna lose some, if not all that stay behind. We could escape pretty easily if it weren’t for the convoy.”
“Well, let’s get them all on the line. We need to talk.”
It took a few minutes to set up the conference. Ty had the Adventurer take up a position in the center of the convoy. After a roll call of all the ships, Ty spoke.
“The situation in system is pretty grim. There are two Aatrixx heavy cruisers in orbit around Jupiter. They’re orbiting the planet in easy weapon range of the apex of our turning trajectory. Additionally, a third Alliance capital ship, called an Aatarr has entered the system. It’s more powerful even than the Aatrixx that are already here. Currently it is burning for Mars. It’s intentions aren’t clear yet.”
A voice spoke on the call, cutting Ty off, “Feather Wind here. If it’s going to attack Mars, what are your intentions?”
Ty rubbed his forehead with his left hand. “My orders are to get the convoy safely through to Beta Hydri. We have been cut off from the Fleet by Alliance jamming, so standard fleet doctrine applies. I can render assistance to Mars only after I know you are safe.”
“Good, although it didn’t do Trade Winds much good.”
“Understood Feather Wind, but be advised, we can’t stop another attack like the last one. A lot more missiles will get past us if they attack again.” He continued, “Now, the briefed pre-turn escape jump is to Delta Pavonis, it’s still a good option, but you have to make a forty degree free turn there to jump to Beta Hydri and you need to make a five degree free turn here to escape to Delta Pavonis. Let me know your intentions either way.”
Ty paused to let the ships answer back.
“Maru Tau here.”
Ty found the name on the ship list. It was the fuel carrier, the most valuable freighter in the convoy. He cringed inside waiting for the captain to speak.
“We are unable to make the free turn, Adventurer,” said the captain.
“Adventurer copies. We will do what we can to escort you through the system.”
In the end, all but nine ships could make the escape jump. Ty watched the ships on the display intently as they began emergency braking to decelerate enough to change course with just their maneuvering thrusters. It took them fifty-two minutes to decelerate, a few minutes to change course and another hour to accelerate back to jump speed. Then they were gone. During that time, the crew of the Adventurer continued to make repairs as best they could. After the last ship jumped away, Ty turned to Anderson.
“Nothing is going to happen for the next eight hours, let everyone catch up on some sleep. I’m going to talk tactics with Vince and Stan before I rack out myself. You need to get some rest too.”
She simply nodded. Ty left the engineering room and headed to the fantail. He could see the midship section of the passageway where it had contained the fire burning below. The flooring was discolored and warped from the heat that had existed on the other side of the deck. The lights in the section weren’t working either.
It was silent in the fantail. Ty noticed all of the snooze tubes were occupied by mechanics. Vince was crashed out on the old sofa. He walked over to it and jostled Vince’s leg which hung over the end of the sofa. The man sat up, looked at Ty, and blinked.
“Kill-joy. Don’t you know I need my beauty rest.”
“Heh, it wouldn’t help.”
Vince rolled on his side. “Not what my wife says.”
“Well, I’m not your wife. I need to talk tactics. Since you and Stan are the only other guys on board who know anything about Alliance ships, you’re elected… even if you’re just stick actuators.”
Vince shook his head and chuckled, “No argument from me on that. You’re the guru on that topic, Ty. All we could do is smile and agree with whatever you say.”
“So agree with me or tell me I’m full of it.”
“You are full of it, but I’ll listen anyway.”
Ty smirked, “Yeah, well, here’s the situation. There are two Aatrixx camped out at the apex of our turn around Jupiter. There’s an Aatarr headed for Mars for who knows what reason. While the rest of the convoy is gone, I’ve still got nine ships, including a fuel carrier that have to make this jump. My job is to see that they survive.”
“So, how do you like command now?”
Ty shook his head, “Vince, I never wanted command. Certainly not like this.” He waved at the darkness around them. “I certainly didn’t want to end up in command with the captain dead and bodies in the morgue. I just wanted to stay in the service. I like being a tactician.”
Vince laughed. “You crack me up sometimes Ty. I’ve flown against you in the simulators and I wouldn’t want to fight you. I’ve never been able to come up with any attack that stops you, so I don’t think I could offer you a helpful idea. For what it’s worth, I actually think we have better odds of surviving with you calling the shots than with the captain.”
Ty chuckled, “Humor me.”
“Knowing you, you want something way outside the box. Something they’re not going to expect.”
“That’s the only way to fight in my book.”
“Mine too, Ty.” Vince reached up and placed his hand on the blunt snout of the Dragon fighter. He looked at the space and then at the bay doors and then back at Ty. “Well, near as I can tell, we’ll have to bag the Aatrixx the old fashioned way.”
“Blind them by taking out their sensor towers, then kill them with Plasma-Arcs,” said Ty, though it was more of a question.
Vince nodded, “Timing and getting in the correct jump lane will be tough, what with their proximity to Jupiter. You’ll have to stay around long enough to acquire the towers and shoot at them before you jump out.”
“Yeah,” said Ty. “The topography of the gravity field means our escape jump is going to be towards Jupiter so we’ll be jumping to a place in range of their energy weapons.”
“So, let’s assume, I can pull this off enough times to disable and or kill both Aatrixx. I still have that Aatarr to deal with. I do have a couple of ideas on how to deal with the Aatrixx, but not that Aatarr, not yet at least.”
“I’ve got a wild idea for you on that one, throw rocks at it.”
Ty cocked his head and scrunched his face in a quizzical look.
“Look, the fleet hasn’t used kinetic weapons besides light rail guns in decades. The Alliance is all about defeating energy weapons since that’s all we use on them.” Ty nodded in agreement. “So, grab some boulders. The asteroid belt out there is loaded with them. Get enough to fill this bay here. Jump out however far you need. Make a run at that Aatar, fast as the engines will go, release them, or just shove them out the bay here. Jump away and see what happens.”
Ty contemplated the concept of several tons of ice and rock slamming into the armor of an Aatarr at a thousand miles per second. It made him cringe and smile at the same time.
“That’s a stupid, fabulous idea,” he said at length.
“Glad I could help. If it works, I get the patent,” said Vince. They both laughed.
“Well, if it works, it’ll work just once.”
“Yeah, but there’s just one of them,” Vince added.
Ty rolled his eyes, “Not the way my luck’s been going. Every time I defeat a ship, another bigger one comes to take its place.”
“Good for you then that the Alliance doesn’t have anything bigger than an Aatarr.”
Ty headed back out of the room. Over his shoulder Vince called out, “If it doesn’t work, it’s not my idea.”
Ty waved behind him as he entered the airlock into the rest of the ship.
A voice in the tube was telling him to wake up. He felt his weight on his feet. Anderson was waiting for him with a concerned look on her face.
“What’s up?” Ty asked as he stepped off the pad.
“Sorry to wake you early. It’s only been about an hour, but an Aatarr battleship transitioned into the system just a moment ago. It’s burning for Mars as we speak.”
“What?” Ty felt a pit in his stomach. “Why Mars? What about this system is so important?” he asked as he walked with her to the main display. “We need those sleep tubes in command centers by the way,” he said. “How do you guys rate this?”
“Well, we don’t have chairs,” Anderson answered deadpan.
Ty winced. “So, what else do you have for me?”
As she spoke his mind raced about this latest development. He shook his head and focused on what she was saying. She said, “We're matching course now with the convoy. There’s still about five hours before they need to decelerate for the turn. Those two Aatrixx are braking into orbit around Jupiter now. That Aatarr is damn fast, it’s accelerating faster than the Aatrix. It’ll arrive at Mars within the hour.”
Ty shook his head and held his left hand clenched in a fist to his mouth as he contemplated the news. She waited for him to look back at her before she continued.
”Repair teams have finished shoring up the bulkheads on bravo and charlie decks. The power cell has been isolated. We’re back on main power. I’ve got targeting back for you, but we’re blind aft now. I’ve got Red-Seven putting scabs on B-deck overheads so we can re-pressurize the deck. Red-four is sealing off portions of Foxtrot deck. That hole is too big for us to repair it all. I think we can get about half the deck space back.”
“What’s our casualty count?”
“Bad, twelve missing. I’m sure they’re all fatals. That’s the entire bridge team and Red-Team one. We have seven fatals, all of Red-six plus three crewmen in the berthing compartment. Three other serious injuries were caused when the power cell blew, burns.”
Ty wondered what that count would be by the time they got away from the system. “Can we fight?”
“Yeah, we’re still in the game. We can shoot, but without buss B, we can either move or shoot when the shields are up but not both. My biggest concern is the shields. The dorsal shield generators actually didn’t get touched when we lost the command center, so we have full hardness of our shields but just two-thirds of their capacitance.”
“Three shots, instead of four or five?”
She nodded.
“What else?”
Anderson checked her notes before continuing, ”The crew berth is pretty severely damaged. I’m using it as the morgue right now. We lost one of the pri-fli controllers in the run in with the LongBow, but we’ve got the other two, plus Junior. The bee-bee stackers wanted me to tell you the Plasma-Arcs launch initiator was replaced. It benched bad so they replaced it from stores.”
“What does the Dragon have left?”
“Vince shot off twenty Heli-arcs and seven hundred rounds of thirty-mike rounds taking out the Stilettos. We’ve got four Plasma-arcs, five Heli-arcs, and a thousand rounds of thirty-mikes left.”
“Anything else?” Ty asked.
She shook her head no.
“Well, the Aatarr changes things. I felt confident we stood pretty good odds of handling the two Aatrix, but I think we need to have the convoy divert. If the Alliance knew how close they came with that volley of stilettos to taking out all of the convoy, they would be tempted to try again. I know we’d be hard pressed to stop them if they did.”
“Well, here’s hoping we persuaded them to not try it again.”
“Yeah,” Ty said as he stopped a moment to think. “There’s no finessing this. At this point, if the freighters can’t leave now, we’re likely gonna lose some, if not all that stay behind. We could escape pretty easily if it weren’t for the convoy.”
“Well, let’s get them all on the line. We need to talk.”
It took a few minutes to set up the conference. Ty had the Adventurer take up a position in the center of the convoy. After a roll call of all the ships, Ty spoke.
“The situation in system is pretty grim. There are two Aatrixx heavy cruisers in orbit around Jupiter. They’re orbiting the planet in easy weapon range of the apex of our turning trajectory. Additionally, a third Alliance capital ship, called an Aatarr has entered the system. It’s more powerful even than the Aatrixx that are already here. Currently it is burning for Mars. It’s intentions aren’t clear yet.”
A voice spoke on the call, cutting Ty off, “Feather Wind here. If it’s going to attack Mars, what are your intentions?”
Ty rubbed his forehead with his left hand. “My orders are to get the convoy safely through to Beta Hydri. We have been cut off from the Fleet by Alliance jamming, so standard fleet doctrine applies. I can render assistance to Mars only after I know you are safe.”
“Good, although it didn’t do Trade Winds much good.”
“Understood Feather Wind, but be advised, we can’t stop another attack like the last one. A lot more missiles will get past us if they attack again.” He continued, “Now, the briefed pre-turn escape jump is to Delta Pavonis, it’s still a good option, but you have to make a forty degree free turn there to jump to Beta Hydri and you need to make a five degree free turn here to escape to Delta Pavonis. Let me know your intentions either way.”
Ty paused to let the ships answer back.
“Maru Tau here.”
Ty found the name on the ship list. It was the fuel carrier, the most valuable freighter in the convoy. He cringed inside waiting for the captain to speak.
“We are unable to make the free turn, Adventurer,” said the captain.
“Adventurer copies. We will do what we can to escort you through the system.”
In the end, all but nine ships could make the escape jump. Ty watched the ships on the display intently as they began emergency braking to decelerate enough to change course with just their maneuvering thrusters. It took them fifty-two minutes to decelerate, a few minutes to change course and another hour to accelerate back to jump speed. Then they were gone. During that time, the crew of the Adventurer continued to make repairs as best they could. After the last ship jumped away, Ty turned to Anderson.
“Nothing is going to happen for the next eight hours, let everyone catch up on some sleep. I’m going to talk tactics with Vince and Stan before I rack out myself. You need to get some rest too.”
She simply nodded. Ty left the engineering room and headed to the fantail. He could see the midship section of the passageway where it had contained the fire burning below. The flooring was discolored and warped from the heat that had existed on the other side of the deck. The lights in the section weren’t working either.
It was silent in the fantail. Ty noticed all of the snooze tubes were occupied by mechanics. Vince was crashed out on the old sofa. He walked over to it and jostled Vince’s leg which hung over the end of the sofa. The man sat up, looked at Ty, and blinked.
“Kill-joy. Don’t you know I need my beauty rest.”
“Heh, it wouldn’t help.”
Vince rolled on his side. “Not what my wife says.”
“Well, I’m not your wife. I need to talk tactics. Since you and Stan are the only other guys on board who know anything about Alliance ships, you’re elected… even if you’re just stick actuators.”
Vince shook his head and chuckled, “No argument from me on that. You’re the guru on that topic, Ty. All we could do is smile and agree with whatever you say.”
“So agree with me or tell me I’m full of it.”
“You are full of it, but I’ll listen anyway.”
Ty smirked, “Yeah, well, here’s the situation. There are two Aatrixx camped out at the apex of our turn around Jupiter. There’s an Aatarr headed for Mars for who knows what reason. While the rest of the convoy is gone, I’ve still got nine ships, including a fuel carrier that have to make this jump. My job is to see that they survive.”
“So, how do you like command now?”
Ty shook his head, “Vince, I never wanted command. Certainly not like this.” He waved at the darkness around them. “I certainly didn’t want to end up in command with the captain dead and bodies in the morgue. I just wanted to stay in the service. I like being a tactician.”
Vince laughed. “You crack me up sometimes Ty. I’ve flown against you in the simulators and I wouldn’t want to fight you. I’ve never been able to come up with any attack that stops you, so I don’t think I could offer you a helpful idea. For what it’s worth, I actually think we have better odds of surviving with you calling the shots than with the captain.”
Ty chuckled, “Humor me.”
“Knowing you, you want something way outside the box. Something they’re not going to expect.”
“That’s the only way to fight in my book.”
“Mine too, Ty.” Vince reached up and placed his hand on the blunt snout of the Dragon fighter. He looked at the space and then at the bay doors and then back at Ty. “Well, near as I can tell, we’ll have to bag the Aatrixx the old fashioned way.”
“Blind them by taking out their sensor towers, then kill them with Plasma-Arcs,” said Ty, though it was more of a question.
Vince nodded, “Timing and getting in the correct jump lane will be tough, what with their proximity to Jupiter. You’ll have to stay around long enough to acquire the towers and shoot at them before you jump out.”
“Yeah,” said Ty. “The topography of the gravity field means our escape jump is going to be towards Jupiter so we’ll be jumping to a place in range of their energy weapons.”
“So, let’s assume, I can pull this off enough times to disable and or kill both Aatrixx. I still have that Aatarr to deal with. I do have a couple of ideas on how to deal with the Aatrixx, but not that Aatarr, not yet at least.”
“I’ve got a wild idea for you on that one, throw rocks at it.”
Ty cocked his head and scrunched his face in a quizzical look.
“Look, the fleet hasn’t used kinetic weapons besides light rail guns in decades. The Alliance is all about defeating energy weapons since that’s all we use on them.” Ty nodded in agreement. “So, grab some boulders. The asteroid belt out there is loaded with them. Get enough to fill this bay here. Jump out however far you need. Make a run at that Aatar, fast as the engines will go, release them, or just shove them out the bay here. Jump away and see what happens.”
Ty contemplated the concept of several tons of ice and rock slamming into the armor of an Aatarr at a thousand miles per second. It made him cringe and smile at the same time.
“That’s a stupid, fabulous idea,” he said at length.
“Glad I could help. If it works, I get the patent,” said Vince. They both laughed.
“Well, if it works, it’ll work just once.”
“Yeah, but there’s just one of them,” Vince added.
Ty rolled his eyes, “Not the way my luck’s been going. Every time I defeat a ship, another bigger one comes to take its place.”
“Good for you then that the Alliance doesn’t have anything bigger than an Aatarr.”
Ty headed back out of the room. Over his shoulder Vince called out, “If it doesn’t work, it’s not my idea.”
Ty waved behind him as he entered the airlock into the rest of the ship.
The Frigates
ADVENTURER: T-MINUS 21 HOURS
While Ty reveled in the having the ship back up and running. He began to take stock of the situation and to see just how badly the Adventurer was hurt by that first blast. He pushed thoughts of Commander Roper out of his mind. The damage indicated the weapon that had hit them was a high energy laser with power comparable to the main battery of an Aatrix.
It would have still done some damage with the shields up, but as it was it had ripped open the Adventurer like it was made of foil rather than ceramic armor.
As Ty examined and analyzed this, an alert sounded from his console.
"Alert. Multiple translation events detected. Six Fresco class frigates and an Aatrixx class battle cruiser has emerged at solar three-twenty-seven blue two. Point seven AU's from solar center."
"What?" asked Anderson. She stepped over to the console and punched up the solar system display. A cluster of flashing red triangles just inside the orbit of Venus indicated the other ships.
"Ty," she looked at him with a concerned face. "What are we up against here?"
Ty didn't need to look anything up. “If a battle lasts just a few seconds, we can go toe to toe with one, but they’ve got much deeper energy reserves than we do and they have feet of armor to our millimeters or armor. Fortunately for us, they maneuver like barges compared to what we can do, or could do with a healthy outer hull. But, can we take them in a fight? I did it all the time in simulators. The frigates are going to make it tough. If they act as a cordon around the Aatrixx, we’re in for a really long afternoon.”
She nodded. “What are they up to?”
“I need to get a trajectory, which won’t take the controller long to figure out. That Aatrixx is here just to finish us off. It’ll never catch the convoy. Those frigates on the other hand have the speed to intercept the convoy and destroy it.”
As he spoke the controller spoke again. It was another Aatrixx transitioning into the system.
"They're serious aren't they?” Anderson commented. "How well did you do against two Aatrixx in the sim? Did you ever fight so many frigates?”
“When it comes to Aatrix, I always got one, it was fifty-fifty on the second one. Depends on what they do. For the frigates? I don’t know. I’m not a miracle worker.” He let out a heavy sigh.
“Why do you think they sent so many? Can Mars station help us?"
"Not a chance, it's just a science station. No weapons to speak of."
As he watched the display of the two groups of ships, their trajectory quickly became apparent. They both emerged near Venus and had executed a tactical split. The frigates were burning hard for the jump point to Beta Hydri. The two Aatrixx were coming straight to Jupiter after the Adventurer.
Ty watched the formations split. The Aatrixx stayed in a tight trail formation with one ship following after the other. The frigates formed a sphere where each ship was completely protected on one side by other ships.
“They’re forcing me to go after each formation individually,” said Ty out loud.
Anderson came over to him thinking he’d called out to her.
“You rang?” she asked.
Ty looked up at her, “Sorry no. Just thinking out loud. It’s something I do.”
She turned to go back to her station when Ty, holding one hand up stroking his chin called back to her.
“Change that. Can you come and talk?”
“Sure,” she said as she walked back over to him.
“I need to bounce some ideas off of someone. Stuff doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like the timing on the arrival of the Longbows. That was right after we jumped into the system. And then there’s the Longbows when they came after us when we jumped away. They were moving towards us before the light of our jump reached them.”
“You know what you’re saying right?” asked Anderson. He looked at her, cocked his head to one side as the awareness set in.
“They know where we jump? That’s the only thing that makes sense!”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and with both arms shook her with great intensity.
“Whoa there,” she shot back.
He released his grip and began pacing back and fourth as he spoke.
“They know where we jump? How do they know where we jump? How in the world does the Alliance know something we don’t?” he asked.
“The rules governing jumping while complex are very consistent,” answered Anderson. She ticked off the following points with her fingers as she spoke: “If you know jumping object’s vector at time of jump, the gravitational gradient at the point of jump and the time of jump, then you can make a pretty precise guess where the landing point of the jump will be.”
Ty continued to pace back and forth as he talked. “However they do it, they do it well enough to predict, accurately enough for a firing solution for that matter, where we’re going to exit a jump, when we jump. The question is how? Since they know where we’re going to jump, their defensive solution is pretty easy to set up. Hence the blatant lack of any kind of defensive attitude in their tactical choices.”
“What?”
“They know where we’re going to be, whenever we jump. It’s not a surprise to them. They feel pretty confident that it’s not a tactical advantage to us any more. And…,” he tapped his finger on the console in front of him as he spoke, “they’re certain we don’t know nor that we can do anything about it.”
“So far, they’ve been right.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.” He thought of the gaping hole in the ship a couple decks above them that had been the command center. “I’d like to know what else they know besides exit and entry points.”
Anderson picked up the conversation, “You familiar with the jump process?”
“Superficially, I know the physics behind it and the general physics involved, but not much more than that.”
“Well, the hole in your theory is that we don’t even know where the exit point of a jump is going to be. We know the physics governing where it must be, but beyond that we can only approximate where the exit point is.” Where upon she went into a quick summary of the process.
Ty listened intently. “So, the only thing that really matters is the gravitational flux, right?”
“Yes, they have to be identical.”
“And energy is conserved. We have the same motion vector exiting that we had when jumping. Right?”
“Yes.”
“So, if the Alliance doesn’t know, because we don’t know where our exit point is. How do they know where it is close enough to hit us?”
“Well, if they knew our jump point and vector when we jump, it wouldn’t be hard to extrapolate our trajectory to a region of space with a matching flux density.”
Anderson’s face went ghost white. “We broadcast the jump every time we jump.”
“What?”
“The jump engine has an integral comm routine in it. As part of the firing sequence, every jump engine sends its position to the fleet via secure high-link a millisecond before onset of transition for fleet tracking purposes. We give spatial coordinates, gravity flux reading of the jump point and our energy vector along with ship ID and overall status. It takes, just the tiniest fraction of a second to send.”
“You’re saying if they had that transmission, they could anticipate our exit point?”
“Easily, but there are several good reasons why they can’t, that code is so highly encrypted, no human knows the cypher. Even Fleet-Prime, the fleet’s computing center, would need several hours to crack one cypher, let alone a normal day’s worth of them. And… they’d need to be able to match the ship code to the one they’re tracking. Those codes change often too. Additionally, even if they could match the cypher sequencing, they’d still need a high-link communication system to receive the message.”
“Yeah, two of our most highly guarded technologies. How else could they do it?”
Anderson looked at him and shook her head slowly, “No other way fits the evidence.”
Ty glanced at the tactical plot and considered what had happened in light of Anderson’s conclusion. “I’m assuming there’s no way to disable that is there?”
A smile appeared on his face, “Junior doesn’t phone home.”
The realization struck Anderson too. “You’re right he doesn’t. But don’t think about ripping code out of the controllers. We did our work in an environment where we could start over if we screwed something up.”
“Yeah, and we did that a lot,” Ty answered.
“Then compromise. We use both. Telegraph our jump with the controller and do the real jump, somewhere else, with Junior.”
“Now, that’s a tactician speaking,” said Ty.
They spent an hour programming the new instructions into the controller. When they were done, the two Alliance groups were wide apart. When they finished, Tye said, “We’re going after the frigates first. Here’s how we’re going to do it,” he said.
An hour later, the Adventurer burned hard to match trajectories with the frigates. After letting the power cells recharge after the course change, the Adventurer jumped into the center of the sphere using the jump commanded by Junior. She pivoted, aimed and fired her main projector in a rapid sequence of pulses at one of the trailing frigates. Immediately after, she fired a volley of railgun slugs at the ship. As soon as the rail guns fired, she jumped out using the controller’s jump system to a position a light minute away from the formation. Their total time inside the formation was less than a second.
From their vantage point, Ty and Anderson watched the minute old light of the encounter. They saw the Adventurer appear in the center of the formation and pivot. The first couple of pulses hammered down the ship’s shield. They saw the shield generators’ energy dissipation busses explode in a ball of sparks and electric fire as they absorbed more energy than they could handle in such a short amount of time. A few seconds later, the volley of slugs ripped through the ship. A corona of sparks and flashes marked the entry points of the slugs where they slammed into the thin armor of the frigate. Several other larger, less energetic puffs on the far end of the ship showed where the slugs exited the ship. It’s drive flare winked out immediately. Clouds of vapor and mist began expanding away from it. The ship quickly fell out of formation and began to tumble end over end due to the thrust effect of the venting atmosphere.
As they watched, an alert sounded. “Incoming fire,” it said.
“Anderson, decelerate the ship. Let the weapons pass in front of us,” said Ty.
“Decelerating,” she answered. The generator thrummed as it pumped energy into the linear accelerator. “We’re pushing against Jupiter, level four deceleration.”
One of the technicians who was manning a sensor panel, called out. “Three stilettos sir. They just fired their terminal aiming motors.”
Without hesitation, Ty answered, “Immediate lateral acceleration on heading red two-seven-zero, four seconds at level two”.
The generator thrummed again as it provided the energy the drive needed to push them out of the way of the warheads. They missed.
“Which ship fired?” asked Ty.
“Looks like lead ship sir,” answered the technician. “Sir,”
“Yes?”
“Detecting multiple missile launches from all of the frigates now sir.”
Everyone in earshot of the man, stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
“At us?” Ty voiced the question everyone was thinking.
The technician shook his head. “No sir, at the convoy. Or at least in the general direction of it.”
“At this range?” asked Anderson. “Seems like a ‘Hail Mary shot’ to me.”
“It is, but those are stilettos. They’re pretty good at Hail Mary shots.” Ty stepped over to the panel the technician stood at. “Good job on detecting the launch. Show me the missile tracks.”
The man worked the panel’s controls for a moment. A wireframe representation of the frigates, the Adventurer and the missiles appeared. The frigates were red cubes. The Adventurer was a green cube. The missiles were red dots. Every object in the display had a small arrow sticking out of it showing its motion vector on the display. At the scale of the display, the motion of the missiles and ships was not visible.
“Zoom back out to show the convoy.”
In response the scale of the display changed. The symbols for the frigates, missiles and the Adventurer collapsed into a single mass of lines and shapes. A string of white dots appeared. They formed a line aimed at Jupiter.
“OK. Show the trajectory of the missiles.”
The technician worked the controls again. A single red dashed line appeared on the display angling up at the convoy.
“Now, show me the convoy’s trajectory.”
A dashed white line extended down towards the planet.
“Show me the closest approach for the two based on time. Zoom in.”
The screen zoomed in until two lines were all that displayed.
“Put a one-k scale on the display.”
A solid white line with two ticks on it appeared across the bottom of the screen. Ty shook his head. He knew the missiles would see the freighters and that if they weren’t stopped, they’d destroy every ship in the convoy.
He turned to the technician, “Tag these missiles. If they change coarse let me know. OK?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ty nodded and walked back to Anderson.
“They’ll take out the convoy if we don’t stop them. But while we’re here, we’re taking out the frigates.”
For the next hour, one by one, the Adventurer took on each frigate in the squadron. In the end, nothing remained but a formation of derelict ships headed on a one-way trajectory at ten percent of the speed of light, out of the system.
“That was easy enough,” said Anderson. “A lot easier than I thought it would be for sure.”
Ty nodded in agreement, “I’m not complaining. Now we need to take out those stiletto’s. That’ll be trickier. They can retarget themselves autonomously.”
He began programming in a course change maneuver to get the Adventurer behind the missiles. After several minutes he finished and stepped back from the wall console and stretched. He went through several contortions pulling his back and arms.
“We’re on a pursuit trajectory that’ll get us in firing range in half an hour. I’m going to sit for a few in the wardroom to figure out the safest way to destroy those missiles.”
“Fair enough. See you in a few.”
Ty turned and left the engineering space. After climbing two sets of ladders to get to the wardroom he found an empty lounge chair and dropped into it. He glanced at the comm-booth where he’d made the call, what seemed an eternity ago. Instead of the stilettos, he thought of his wife who was probably in the middle of her day now tending to his kids and cleaning up the house. He tried to imagine laying close to her for a minute. He recalled the fragrance of her and the softness of her skin. He yearned to be close to her.
An announcement over the PA disturbed his reverie. “Attention all hands.” It was Anderson. “We’re standing down from general quarters for the next thirty minutes. Watch chief’s rotate your positions. Give your people a chance to rest. We’re not out of this yet.”
Ty got back up. He knew he should be thinking of the missiles, but couldn’t get his head around them yet, so headed down the passageway to the fantail to get a feel of how the crew was doing. Adhering to an age old tradition, the Adventurer’s main deck was the longest deck running through the centerline of the ship. A passageway that ran from the engineering space to the fantail split the deck evenly in two, with a port and starboard side. At the aft end of the passageway, Ty could hear laughing coming from the Goat Locker. He paused at the entry way and smacked the outer wall with his palm of his hand.
“Request permission to enter,” asked Ty.
The laughing stopped immediately and a crewman answered, “Enter.”
Ty poked his head in the door. “As you were gentlemen,” he said with a smile.
One of the crewmen in the room answered almost hollering, “No gentlemen here, sir. Just a bunch of Alliance ass whippers. Sir!” He ended emphatically. Everyone in the room broke out laughing again.
Ty smiled and backed his head out saying, “Carry on,” as he did.
Everyone in the room cheered, then shouted, “YES SIR,” in reply.
He shook his head and palmed the control to the hatch at the end of the passageway. As the inner hatch slid into the wall, Ty stepped through the opening into the airlock that separated the fantail from the rest of the ship. He waited in the room while the inner hatch resealed itself. Once it did, the outer hatch slid into the wall allowing him entrance into the fantail.
It was the largest open space inside the ship. The space was large enough to hold two Dragon fighters, even though just one was assigned to the ship at the time. The fighter sat in its launch cradle. Several umbilical lines snaked from the ship to the fighter. The cockpit canopy was raised and an access ladder hung off of the canopy rail. Ty noticed a couple of technicians had taken an access panel off of one of the two large Plasma-Arc missiles that were attached to the fighter. In the other cradle was the load trainer this team had used to spoof the existence of the Dragon. It still had a full complement of missiles hung on it. The drive calibration stand and Jersey generator sat nearby.
The room was brightly lit from overhead and wall lights so there was little if any area of the space which had any significant shadows. It made the space appear smaller than it was. Vince noticed Ty as soon as he entered. Vince had been sprawled out in a beat up old sofa that had been smuggled onto the ship long before Ty joined the crew. He hopped up off the sofa and jogged over to Ty. He had to duck under the nose of the fighter.
“Hey, Ty, Welcome to our lair.”
“Hi, Vince, I had a few moments to get away from engineering to stir some blood.”
Vince nodded in understanding. “Nice work by the way handling those two LongBows and those Fresco’s.”
“It was easier than you think. The Alliance has figured out a way to intercept and decode our jump parameters.”
Vince blinked and shook his head at that.
Ty could tell he was angered at the fact. He continued, “I entered a fake jump coordinate in the main controller and then made the real jump using Junior. It’s worked every time so far.”
Vince harrumphed, “Serve’s ‘em right. Live by cheating, die by cheating. Have you gotten this intel back to Fleet?”
Ty shook his head. “Can’t. We’re being jammed pretty hard. Hey, by the way, what’s with the Plasma-arc there?”
“Oh, that?” Vince turned towards the technician working on the missile. “The missile’s launch initiator failed. We’ll need to pull it off and repair it before we can use it. Alvarez there is buttoning it up before him and his loaders pull the missile. We’ll be ready to go before you get back to engineering.”
“Ok, keep me posted. FYI, we’re chasing down a bunch of stilettos that got launched at the convoy. We engage them in about twenty minutes. I don’t think we’ll need the Dragon, but have her loaded for an anti-missile mission OK.”
“We’ll be ready. Just give the word.”
“Thanks, good luck.”
Ty headed back out of the room and waved behind him as he entered the airlock into the rest of the ship. As the hatch sealed, he could hear Vince giving orders to change the load out on the Dragon.
Back at the engineering section, he felt a little more refreshed. He noticed Anderson wasn’t in the space so he walked over to the panels displaying the sensor data. The two Aatrixx were just about to Jupiter. No additional Alliance ships had entered the system.
While Ty reveled in the having the ship back up and running. He began to take stock of the situation and to see just how badly the Adventurer was hurt by that first blast. He pushed thoughts of Commander Roper out of his mind. The damage indicated the weapon that had hit them was a high energy laser with power comparable to the main battery of an Aatrix.
It would have still done some damage with the shields up, but as it was it had ripped open the Adventurer like it was made of foil rather than ceramic armor.
As Ty examined and analyzed this, an alert sounded from his console.
"Alert. Multiple translation events detected. Six Fresco class frigates and an Aatrixx class battle cruiser has emerged at solar three-twenty-seven blue two. Point seven AU's from solar center."
"What?" asked Anderson. She stepped over to the console and punched up the solar system display. A cluster of flashing red triangles just inside the orbit of Venus indicated the other ships.
"Ty," she looked at him with a concerned face. "What are we up against here?"
Ty didn't need to look anything up. “If a battle lasts just a few seconds, we can go toe to toe with one, but they’ve got much deeper energy reserves than we do and they have feet of armor to our millimeters or armor. Fortunately for us, they maneuver like barges compared to what we can do, or could do with a healthy outer hull. But, can we take them in a fight? I did it all the time in simulators. The frigates are going to make it tough. If they act as a cordon around the Aatrixx, we’re in for a really long afternoon.”
She nodded. “What are they up to?”
“I need to get a trajectory, which won’t take the controller long to figure out. That Aatrixx is here just to finish us off. It’ll never catch the convoy. Those frigates on the other hand have the speed to intercept the convoy and destroy it.”
As he spoke the controller spoke again. It was another Aatrixx transitioning into the system.
"They're serious aren't they?” Anderson commented. "How well did you do against two Aatrixx in the sim? Did you ever fight so many frigates?”
“When it comes to Aatrix, I always got one, it was fifty-fifty on the second one. Depends on what they do. For the frigates? I don’t know. I’m not a miracle worker.” He let out a heavy sigh.
“Why do you think they sent so many? Can Mars station help us?"
"Not a chance, it's just a science station. No weapons to speak of."
As he watched the display of the two groups of ships, their trajectory quickly became apparent. They both emerged near Venus and had executed a tactical split. The frigates were burning hard for the jump point to Beta Hydri. The two Aatrixx were coming straight to Jupiter after the Adventurer.
Ty watched the formations split. The Aatrixx stayed in a tight trail formation with one ship following after the other. The frigates formed a sphere where each ship was completely protected on one side by other ships.
“They’re forcing me to go after each formation individually,” said Ty out loud.
Anderson came over to him thinking he’d called out to her.
“You rang?” she asked.
Ty looked up at her, “Sorry no. Just thinking out loud. It’s something I do.”
She turned to go back to her station when Ty, holding one hand up stroking his chin called back to her.
“Change that. Can you come and talk?”
“Sure,” she said as she walked back over to him.
“I need to bounce some ideas off of someone. Stuff doesn’t add up.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“Like the timing on the arrival of the Longbows. That was right after we jumped into the system. And then there’s the Longbows when they came after us when we jumped away. They were moving towards us before the light of our jump reached them.”
“You know what you’re saying right?” asked Anderson. He looked at her, cocked his head to one side as the awareness set in.
“They know where we jump? That’s the only thing that makes sense!”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and with both arms shook her with great intensity.
“Whoa there,” she shot back.
He released his grip and began pacing back and fourth as he spoke.
“They know where we jump? How do they know where we jump? How in the world does the Alliance know something we don’t?” he asked.
“The rules governing jumping while complex are very consistent,” answered Anderson. She ticked off the following points with her fingers as she spoke: “If you know jumping object’s vector at time of jump, the gravitational gradient at the point of jump and the time of jump, then you can make a pretty precise guess where the landing point of the jump will be.”
Ty continued to pace back and forth as he talked. “However they do it, they do it well enough to predict, accurately enough for a firing solution for that matter, where we’re going to exit a jump, when we jump. The question is how? Since they know where we’re going to jump, their defensive solution is pretty easy to set up. Hence the blatant lack of any kind of defensive attitude in their tactical choices.”
“What?”
“They know where we’re going to be, whenever we jump. It’s not a surprise to them. They feel pretty confident that it’s not a tactical advantage to us any more. And…,” he tapped his finger on the console in front of him as he spoke, “they’re certain we don’t know nor that we can do anything about it.”
“So far, they’ve been right.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.” He thought of the gaping hole in the ship a couple decks above them that had been the command center. “I’d like to know what else they know besides exit and entry points.”
Anderson picked up the conversation, “You familiar with the jump process?”
“Superficially, I know the physics behind it and the general physics involved, but not much more than that.”
“Well, the hole in your theory is that we don’t even know where the exit point of a jump is going to be. We know the physics governing where it must be, but beyond that we can only approximate where the exit point is.” Where upon she went into a quick summary of the process.
Ty listened intently. “So, the only thing that really matters is the gravitational flux, right?”
“Yes, they have to be identical.”
“And energy is conserved. We have the same motion vector exiting that we had when jumping. Right?”
“Yes.”
“So, if the Alliance doesn’t know, because we don’t know where our exit point is. How do they know where it is close enough to hit us?”
“Well, if they knew our jump point and vector when we jump, it wouldn’t be hard to extrapolate our trajectory to a region of space with a matching flux density.”
Anderson’s face went ghost white. “We broadcast the jump every time we jump.”
“What?”
“The jump engine has an integral comm routine in it. As part of the firing sequence, every jump engine sends its position to the fleet via secure high-link a millisecond before onset of transition for fleet tracking purposes. We give spatial coordinates, gravity flux reading of the jump point and our energy vector along with ship ID and overall status. It takes, just the tiniest fraction of a second to send.”
“You’re saying if they had that transmission, they could anticipate our exit point?”
“Easily, but there are several good reasons why they can’t, that code is so highly encrypted, no human knows the cypher. Even Fleet-Prime, the fleet’s computing center, would need several hours to crack one cypher, let alone a normal day’s worth of them. And… they’d need to be able to match the ship code to the one they’re tracking. Those codes change often too. Additionally, even if they could match the cypher sequencing, they’d still need a high-link communication system to receive the message.”
“Yeah, two of our most highly guarded technologies. How else could they do it?”
Anderson looked at him and shook her head slowly, “No other way fits the evidence.”
Ty glanced at the tactical plot and considered what had happened in light of Anderson’s conclusion. “I’m assuming there’s no way to disable that is there?”
A smile appeared on his face, “Junior doesn’t phone home.”
The realization struck Anderson too. “You’re right he doesn’t. But don’t think about ripping code out of the controllers. We did our work in an environment where we could start over if we screwed something up.”
“Yeah, and we did that a lot,” Ty answered.
“Then compromise. We use both. Telegraph our jump with the controller and do the real jump, somewhere else, with Junior.”
“Now, that’s a tactician speaking,” said Ty.
They spent an hour programming the new instructions into the controller. When they were done, the two Alliance groups were wide apart. When they finished, Tye said, “We’re going after the frigates first. Here’s how we’re going to do it,” he said.
An hour later, the Adventurer burned hard to match trajectories with the frigates. After letting the power cells recharge after the course change, the Adventurer jumped into the center of the sphere using the jump commanded by Junior. She pivoted, aimed and fired her main projector in a rapid sequence of pulses at one of the trailing frigates. Immediately after, she fired a volley of railgun slugs at the ship. As soon as the rail guns fired, she jumped out using the controller’s jump system to a position a light minute away from the formation. Their total time inside the formation was less than a second.
From their vantage point, Ty and Anderson watched the minute old light of the encounter. They saw the Adventurer appear in the center of the formation and pivot. The first couple of pulses hammered down the ship’s shield. They saw the shield generators’ energy dissipation busses explode in a ball of sparks and electric fire as they absorbed more energy than they could handle in such a short amount of time. A few seconds later, the volley of slugs ripped through the ship. A corona of sparks and flashes marked the entry points of the slugs where they slammed into the thin armor of the frigate. Several other larger, less energetic puffs on the far end of the ship showed where the slugs exited the ship. It’s drive flare winked out immediately. Clouds of vapor and mist began expanding away from it. The ship quickly fell out of formation and began to tumble end over end due to the thrust effect of the venting atmosphere.
As they watched, an alert sounded. “Incoming fire,” it said.
“Anderson, decelerate the ship. Let the weapons pass in front of us,” said Ty.
“Decelerating,” she answered. The generator thrummed as it pumped energy into the linear accelerator. “We’re pushing against Jupiter, level four deceleration.”
One of the technicians who was manning a sensor panel, called out. “Three stilettos sir. They just fired their terminal aiming motors.”
Without hesitation, Ty answered, “Immediate lateral acceleration on heading red two-seven-zero, four seconds at level two”.
The generator thrummed again as it provided the energy the drive needed to push them out of the way of the warheads. They missed.
“Which ship fired?” asked Ty.
“Looks like lead ship sir,” answered the technician. “Sir,”
“Yes?”
“Detecting multiple missile launches from all of the frigates now sir.”
Everyone in earshot of the man, stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
“At us?” Ty voiced the question everyone was thinking.
The technician shook his head. “No sir, at the convoy. Or at least in the general direction of it.”
“At this range?” asked Anderson. “Seems like a ‘Hail Mary shot’ to me.”
“It is, but those are stilettos. They’re pretty good at Hail Mary shots.” Ty stepped over to the panel the technician stood at. “Good job on detecting the launch. Show me the missile tracks.”
The man worked the panel’s controls for a moment. A wireframe representation of the frigates, the Adventurer and the missiles appeared. The frigates were red cubes. The Adventurer was a green cube. The missiles were red dots. Every object in the display had a small arrow sticking out of it showing its motion vector on the display. At the scale of the display, the motion of the missiles and ships was not visible.
“Zoom back out to show the convoy.”
In response the scale of the display changed. The symbols for the frigates, missiles and the Adventurer collapsed into a single mass of lines and shapes. A string of white dots appeared. They formed a line aimed at Jupiter.
“OK. Show the trajectory of the missiles.”
The technician worked the controls again. A single red dashed line appeared on the display angling up at the convoy.
“Now, show me the convoy’s trajectory.”
A dashed white line extended down towards the planet.
“Show me the closest approach for the two based on time. Zoom in.”
The screen zoomed in until two lines were all that displayed.
“Put a one-k scale on the display.”
A solid white line with two ticks on it appeared across the bottom of the screen. Ty shook his head. He knew the missiles would see the freighters and that if they weren’t stopped, they’d destroy every ship in the convoy.
He turned to the technician, “Tag these missiles. If they change coarse let me know. OK?”
“Yes, sir.”
Ty nodded and walked back to Anderson.
“They’ll take out the convoy if we don’t stop them. But while we’re here, we’re taking out the frigates.”
For the next hour, one by one, the Adventurer took on each frigate in the squadron. In the end, nothing remained but a formation of derelict ships headed on a one-way trajectory at ten percent of the speed of light, out of the system.
“That was easy enough,” said Anderson. “A lot easier than I thought it would be for sure.”
Ty nodded in agreement, “I’m not complaining. Now we need to take out those stiletto’s. That’ll be trickier. They can retarget themselves autonomously.”
He began programming in a course change maneuver to get the Adventurer behind the missiles. After several minutes he finished and stepped back from the wall console and stretched. He went through several contortions pulling his back and arms.
“We’re on a pursuit trajectory that’ll get us in firing range in half an hour. I’m going to sit for a few in the wardroom to figure out the safest way to destroy those missiles.”
“Fair enough. See you in a few.”
Ty turned and left the engineering space. After climbing two sets of ladders to get to the wardroom he found an empty lounge chair and dropped into it. He glanced at the comm-booth where he’d made the call, what seemed an eternity ago. Instead of the stilettos, he thought of his wife who was probably in the middle of her day now tending to his kids and cleaning up the house. He tried to imagine laying close to her for a minute. He recalled the fragrance of her and the softness of her skin. He yearned to be close to her.
An announcement over the PA disturbed his reverie. “Attention all hands.” It was Anderson. “We’re standing down from general quarters for the next thirty minutes. Watch chief’s rotate your positions. Give your people a chance to rest. We’re not out of this yet.”
Ty got back up. He knew he should be thinking of the missiles, but couldn’t get his head around them yet, so headed down the passageway to the fantail to get a feel of how the crew was doing. Adhering to an age old tradition, the Adventurer’s main deck was the longest deck running through the centerline of the ship. A passageway that ran from the engineering space to the fantail split the deck evenly in two, with a port and starboard side. At the aft end of the passageway, Ty could hear laughing coming from the Goat Locker. He paused at the entry way and smacked the outer wall with his palm of his hand.
“Request permission to enter,” asked Ty.
The laughing stopped immediately and a crewman answered, “Enter.”
Ty poked his head in the door. “As you were gentlemen,” he said with a smile.
One of the crewmen in the room answered almost hollering, “No gentlemen here, sir. Just a bunch of Alliance ass whippers. Sir!” He ended emphatically. Everyone in the room broke out laughing again.
Ty smiled and backed his head out saying, “Carry on,” as he did.
Everyone in the room cheered, then shouted, “YES SIR,” in reply.
He shook his head and palmed the control to the hatch at the end of the passageway. As the inner hatch slid into the wall, Ty stepped through the opening into the airlock that separated the fantail from the rest of the ship. He waited in the room while the inner hatch resealed itself. Once it did, the outer hatch slid into the wall allowing him entrance into the fantail.
It was the largest open space inside the ship. The space was large enough to hold two Dragon fighters, even though just one was assigned to the ship at the time. The fighter sat in its launch cradle. Several umbilical lines snaked from the ship to the fighter. The cockpit canopy was raised and an access ladder hung off of the canopy rail. Ty noticed a couple of technicians had taken an access panel off of one of the two large Plasma-Arc missiles that were attached to the fighter. In the other cradle was the load trainer this team had used to spoof the existence of the Dragon. It still had a full complement of missiles hung on it. The drive calibration stand and Jersey generator sat nearby.
The room was brightly lit from overhead and wall lights so there was little if any area of the space which had any significant shadows. It made the space appear smaller than it was. Vince noticed Ty as soon as he entered. Vince had been sprawled out in a beat up old sofa that had been smuggled onto the ship long before Ty joined the crew. He hopped up off the sofa and jogged over to Ty. He had to duck under the nose of the fighter.
“Hey, Ty, Welcome to our lair.”
“Hi, Vince, I had a few moments to get away from engineering to stir some blood.”
Vince nodded in understanding. “Nice work by the way handling those two LongBows and those Fresco’s.”
“It was easier than you think. The Alliance has figured out a way to intercept and decode our jump parameters.”
Vince blinked and shook his head at that.
Ty could tell he was angered at the fact. He continued, “I entered a fake jump coordinate in the main controller and then made the real jump using Junior. It’s worked every time so far.”
Vince harrumphed, “Serve’s ‘em right. Live by cheating, die by cheating. Have you gotten this intel back to Fleet?”
Ty shook his head. “Can’t. We’re being jammed pretty hard. Hey, by the way, what’s with the Plasma-arc there?”
“Oh, that?” Vince turned towards the technician working on the missile. “The missile’s launch initiator failed. We’ll need to pull it off and repair it before we can use it. Alvarez there is buttoning it up before him and his loaders pull the missile. We’ll be ready to go before you get back to engineering.”
“Ok, keep me posted. FYI, we’re chasing down a bunch of stilettos that got launched at the convoy. We engage them in about twenty minutes. I don’t think we’ll need the Dragon, but have her loaded for an anti-missile mission OK.”
“We’ll be ready. Just give the word.”
“Thanks, good luck.”
Ty headed back out of the room and waved behind him as he entered the airlock into the rest of the ship. As the hatch sealed, he could hear Vince giving orders to change the load out on the Dragon.
Back at the engineering section, he felt a little more refreshed. He noticed Anderson wasn’t in the space so he walked over to the panels displaying the sensor data. The two Aatrixx were just about to Jupiter. No additional Alliance ships had entered the system.
Command Center
IMPERIAL PALACE: T-MINUS 21 HOURS 30 MINUTES
There was stunned silence in the room as people glanced at the Emperor and at the now blank displays coming from the system. There’d been a moment of elation when the Republic ship just shut off in space and the command bubble on the top of the ship exploded when hit by the laser. There was some curiosity as to why the shot hadn’t completely destroyed the ship, but there were approving nodes and high-fives just the same as they viewed the data coming in from the test. They watched as the two LongBows began to match course with and approach the wounded ship.
There was some real debate whether they would be able to capture this ship too. The command was given to cease firing at the ship in the hopes that they could capture it.
The mood changed when the Republic ship vanished. Remora immediately reported that the ship had jumped nearly eleven million miles away. There had been a debate for a few minutes, as to what should be done. In the end, orders were given to dispatch a squadron of frigates to assist. When they analyzed the sensor returns from the ship after it jumped, they concluded ship was still disabled. The LongBows were ordered to approach and investigate. They were admonished to not fire on the ship unless it fired at them, in hopes that it could still be captured. The fact it still had a working jump drive was considered a great intelligence coup.
The curiosity turned to shock when communication with the two LongBows ceased without warning. The Emperor turned to the Admiral, “Bedring, what did we just see?”
“Your highness,” the admiral began, “we’d need data to confirm it.”
“Just give me your best guess,” the Emperor said with a soft voice that sent chills through the spines of everyone else in the room.
“The LongBows have been destroyed. I don’t know how. It’s possible the attached vehicle was launched when it jumped and they didn’t detect it. It’s got the weaponry to destroy a cruiser, not to mention a small ship like a LongBow.”
“Yet, didn’t the sensors indicate the attached vehicle was still inside the Adventurer?”
“True sire, but such things can be faked enough to convince the sensors of a warship from a long range, as these apparently were.”
The admiral was sweating by now. He chose not to mention that Republic ships were a lot stealthier than the Alliance ship’s sensor suites could usually handle.
“Do you think we could still capture that ship?” asked the Emperor.
Bedring thought a moment before answering, “I think it is still possible. But if the crew can, the crew of the Adventurer will destroy their own ship before they allow that to happen. That’s what our crews are trained to do at the least.”
The Emperor nodded and then spoke, “Capture it if you can.”
Bedring nodded and said, “Yes, your Highness.”
The Emperor went back to his chair. Bedring signaled to an aide who stood out of site in an alcove in the wall. This aide was one of the palace staff rather than a military aide. She was hired not for her brains but for her smile and figure. She was a brunette, pert smile, and dark eyes. Her hair was coiffed in a bun revealing a slender neck and a delicate chin line. She wore black tights and a fitted tunic.
She spoke softly with a lyrical voice, “Yes, sir? How can I serve you?” She couldn’t have been more than a teenager he figured. He had older daughters. She simply curtsied, smiled up at him, and waited.
“I need an encrypted comm circuit with Fleet operations.”
“Right away sir.” She curtsied again and left.
He wondered if she really knew what that meant. In a moment she returned carrying a small platter with a black handset on it.
“The duty officer at Fleet Ops sir,” she said as she extended the platter.
Bedring took the handset and waved her away. He walked over to an unoccupied alcove in the room. As he entered it, he could sense a privacy field come into place around him.
“This is Bedring. Who’s there?”
“Yes, sir, Duty officer Williams sir,” said a masculine voice.
“Very well. Send a message to Task Force twenty to deploy immediately two Aatrixx cruisers and the frigate squadron in support of Mission order one-one-zero Tango.”
The voice on the other end repeated back the order.
“That’s correct; by my authority.”
“Right away sir.”
Bedring held the handset in front of him and tapped the button to end the call. He waved it at one of the aides. This one came out immediately and took it away. He watched her walk away. She had a nice figure too. The perfume she wore sent a tingle through his system he hadn’t allowed himself to feel since his wife died several years ago. He noticed the uniforms the aides wore in here, while fully covering the aides, accentuated the figures of the women and the men. He shook his head.
“Too much cream cheese for this old horse,” he said to no one in particular.
There was stunned silence in the room as people glanced at the Emperor and at the now blank displays coming from the system. There’d been a moment of elation when the Republic ship just shut off in space and the command bubble on the top of the ship exploded when hit by the laser. There was some curiosity as to why the shot hadn’t completely destroyed the ship, but there were approving nodes and high-fives just the same as they viewed the data coming in from the test. They watched as the two LongBows began to match course with and approach the wounded ship.
There was some real debate whether they would be able to capture this ship too. The command was given to cease firing at the ship in the hopes that they could capture it.
The mood changed when the Republic ship vanished. Remora immediately reported that the ship had jumped nearly eleven million miles away. There had been a debate for a few minutes, as to what should be done. In the end, orders were given to dispatch a squadron of frigates to assist. When they analyzed the sensor returns from the ship after it jumped, they concluded ship was still disabled. The LongBows were ordered to approach and investigate. They were admonished to not fire on the ship unless it fired at them, in hopes that it could still be captured. The fact it still had a working jump drive was considered a great intelligence coup.
The curiosity turned to shock when communication with the two LongBows ceased without warning. The Emperor turned to the Admiral, “Bedring, what did we just see?”
“Your highness,” the admiral began, “we’d need data to confirm it.”
“Just give me your best guess,” the Emperor said with a soft voice that sent chills through the spines of everyone else in the room.
“The LongBows have been destroyed. I don’t know how. It’s possible the attached vehicle was launched when it jumped and they didn’t detect it. It’s got the weaponry to destroy a cruiser, not to mention a small ship like a LongBow.”
“Yet, didn’t the sensors indicate the attached vehicle was still inside the Adventurer?”
“True sire, but such things can be faked enough to convince the sensors of a warship from a long range, as these apparently were.”
The admiral was sweating by now. He chose not to mention that Republic ships were a lot stealthier than the Alliance ship’s sensor suites could usually handle.
“Do you think we could still capture that ship?” asked the Emperor.
Bedring thought a moment before answering, “I think it is still possible. But if the crew can, the crew of the Adventurer will destroy their own ship before they allow that to happen. That’s what our crews are trained to do at the least.”
The Emperor nodded and then spoke, “Capture it if you can.”
Bedring nodded and said, “Yes, your Highness.”
The Emperor went back to his chair. Bedring signaled to an aide who stood out of site in an alcove in the wall. This aide was one of the palace staff rather than a military aide. She was hired not for her brains but for her smile and figure. She was a brunette, pert smile, and dark eyes. Her hair was coiffed in a bun revealing a slender neck and a delicate chin line. She wore black tights and a fitted tunic.
She spoke softly with a lyrical voice, “Yes, sir? How can I serve you?” She couldn’t have been more than a teenager he figured. He had older daughters. She simply curtsied, smiled up at him, and waited.
“I need an encrypted comm circuit with Fleet operations.”
“Right away sir.” She curtsied again and left.
He wondered if she really knew what that meant. In a moment she returned carrying a small platter with a black handset on it.
“The duty officer at Fleet Ops sir,” she said as she extended the platter.
Bedring took the handset and waved her away. He walked over to an unoccupied alcove in the room. As he entered it, he could sense a privacy field come into place around him.
“This is Bedring. Who’s there?”
“Yes, sir, Duty officer Williams sir,” said a masculine voice.
“Very well. Send a message to Task Force twenty to deploy immediately two Aatrixx cruisers and the frigate squadron in support of Mission order one-one-zero Tango.”
The voice on the other end repeated back the order.
“That’s correct; by my authority.”
“Right away sir.”
Bedring held the handset in front of him and tapped the button to end the call. He waved it at one of the aides. This one came out immediately and took it away. He watched her walk away. She had a nice figure too. The perfume she wore sent a tingle through his system he hadn’t allowed himself to feel since his wife died several years ago. He noticed the uniforms the aides wore in here, while fully covering the aides, accentuated the figures of the women and the men. He shook his head.
“Too much cream cheese for this old horse,” he said to no one in particular.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
The Duel with the LongBows
ADVENTURER: T-MINUS 22 HOURS
Ty sat alone at a table in the Adventurer's wardroom pondering his fate and wondering how to tell his wife that he’d gone through with quitting.
The wardroom was empty. The rest of the ship's crew was standing at alert station. I should be with them, he thought. The Skipper, Commander Roper offered to bend rules a bit and let Ty watch the imminent engagement from the Adventurer's command center. But Ty had declined, not wanting the Skipper to get in any trouble on his account.
Roper readily agreed to Ty's counter request, to allow Ty's program, Junior to tap into the Adventurer's data-net. He grabbed his local desk and pulled it to him so he could use it. He tapped the power key, the screen came to life immediately.
“Launch junior,” he said to the machine's built in speaker.
The program launched, showing him a small duplicate of his duty station's tactical display. He was proud of this program. It represented the culmination of all of his spare time while on active duty in the Space Force. With a twinge of sadness he realized, with his new status, Junior belonged to the Space Force and that he would never get to actually use it after today.
The engagement was nearing its climax. The two ships, LongBows, had headed for Jupiter shortly after they’d transitioned into the system. With the jamming they were doing, there was no way for certain the ship could tell the fleet what was happening. The only indication of trouble would be when the Adventurer failed to check in on the hour as it transited the system. Drucker had chosen to go with a blink attack wherein the Adventurer would execute a short range jump behind the two LongBows then attack each simultaneously, jumping away before they could return fire to assess the results of the attack. Drucker had asked him for advice on how to engage the two ships. Ty was happy to help, but he had to bite his lip to make a recommendation that went counter to what Drucker was trying to do. So he spent most of the hours watching the two ships approach Jupiter from monitors in the wardroom. Drucker had programmed in the attack nearly an hour earlier and had spent the remainder of the time configuring the main weapon and aligning the ship for the fraction of a second that it would be in firing position behind the two ships.
Ty set the miniature tactical display to show what the sensors were showing Drucker. The Adventurer was still high above the systems ecliptic headed “down” toward the turning point for the Beta Hydri jump. The convoy was strung out behind them. The Adventurer was programmed to jump in a few seconds before the light from the convoy ship’s deceleration reached the two LongBows. Ty had started a stop watch on his computer to count down to the time the ship jumped. It was down to less than a minute. He watched as each second ticked away.
At ten-seconds, the commander announced over the intercom, “Jump to attack in ten-seconds.” He counted down to zero and the ship jumped.
Without warning, the lights in the wardroom went out and the gravity field shut off. An instant later a powerful unseen force slammed into the Adventurer from above. It threw him out of the chair he was sitting in and up into the overhead bulkhead. The shock-wave of the impact reverberated through the ship like a titanic thunderclap. He could feel, even see the ship begin rolling clockwise. He saw briefly before he slammed into the overhead, that his local desk was still on and floating in the air in front of him. It had bounced harmlessly off of the overhead and was now tumbling in midair. Seeing Junior frozen caused a momentary twinge of sadness, then horror as the reality of the situation registered, Adventurer's controller was off-line.
Ty knew that without it, the crew could do nothing to deal with this situation. He fended off the overhead without any trouble and pushed himself towards his tablet. He grabbed it and headed for the door.
Emergency glow panels were on now, giving enough illumination to see. Weaker blasts began hitting the Adventurer, accelerating the ship''s rolling tumble. The epicenter of the first blast had come from the direction of the ship's control center three decks above him. Ty headed for the engineering center down below.
In the semi-darkness he could hear the muffled shouts of crewmen calling out to each other through the air circulation conduits and trying to deal with powered doors that wouldn't open. Ty grabbed at his comm-card and pulled it out of his jump suit's right breast pocket. He glanced at it to see if it was still on. It was.
He checked the command circuit, it was dead silent. He switched to the damage control circuit. There was some traffic on it. Seconds passed, still no one came up on the command circuit.
Finally, he spoke into it, “All hands, this is Tactical One. We've had a main systems controller failure.”
Instinctively he'd used his old call sign. He berated himself for the lapse for a second before the repair teams began reporting in.
“Red Three team aye, sir.”
Ty knew from memory that the team was in the aft section of the ship near the Dragon Launch Bay. He recognized the voice. It belonged to Specialist Grover.
In all, five teams out of seven responded. The two nearest the command center hadn't responded. The five reported no internal damage to the Adventurer in their areas. Ty had to pause a moment to recall which damage control team, that had responded, was closest to the command center.
"Red Two Team, Tactical One."
"Yes, sir."
"Send two runners up to the command center. Report to me what they find."
"Right away. Red Two out.”
Ty kept working down towards the Engineering center. He had to hand pump the doors open. It was a slow process. All the while he could feel the Adventurer shudder from the hits she was taking. The intensity of the hits gave him the impression they were little more than small caliber cannon rounds. Just the same, he knew it was only a matter of time before the hits started blasting through her thin armor.
Finally, Ty got to the Engineering doors. They were locked shut. He switched his card to engineering's circuit.
"Engineering, Tactical One."
Senior Chief Anderson answered immediately, “About time you guys talked to me. What happened?"
“What?” Ty asked. “I don't know. I'm out side door three."
"Hang on, I’ll let you in.”
He could hear the door's locks disengage. The door slid open just wide enough for him to squeeze through. Anderson, a wiry wizened lady floated over to him.
"What happened?" she asked, raising her voice over the sound of the power generator.
It was running at combat output with nowhere to send the power it was generating. Ty noticed the engineers were trying to bring up dead consoles and opening up access panels to restore the control system. Even in here, the gravity was still out.
Ty shrugged his shoulders, "I don't know. I was down in the wardroom. The lights went out and then the gravity failed and then POW."
Anderson shook her head. Once Ty was inside, she pumped the door shut and they pushed off towards her station.
“That about describes what we experienced too. The controller dropped off line right before that first hit. I see you brought your computer. Is it working?"
Ty glanced down at his tablet before answering. "Yes, I was running Junior when this happened. I looked down and saw Junior had crashed hard. That's what clued me into the controller failure."
"We've got to get it up so command can get back in control," said Anderson.
Ty nodded.
She pointed to the alternate control center. "Let's go here. I got an idea."
He figured she might. She knew as much about Junior as he did, more in fact, on its inner workings.
She spoke as they floated to the area, "I want to connect your computer to the data-net and see if there's enough to Junior to help me run the Adventurer until we can get the controller back on line."
Ty immediately grasped what she wanted to do.
"I'll need to reboot Junior.”
His card beeped with an incoming message, "Just a sec..."
Anderson nodded.
A nervous voice came over the card. "Tactical, Red Two lead."
Anderson raised an eyebrow at the use of the call sign but kept quiet. "Go Red Two."
"Sir, all the pressure locks on B-deck from the two-ring in are closed. Safety valves are popped too."
Anderson's face blanched at the words. Ty's jaw muscles tightened. The voice continued. "We can't get any further into the center of the deck."
Ty cut him off, "Thanks Red Two. Standby." He turned to Anderson, "Command is gone. At the very least, they're not in any condition to fly the ship."
She nodded wordlessly. Her face stricken with grief and terror. She spoke softly but with increasing firmness, "Ty, you have more command time than me. I know the results of the board and technically you are just a passenger now. But, under the circumstances, I say we try to survive first and then work out the details of who's the boss later. As far as I'm concerned, you should be the commander."
Ty nodded and felt the heavy weight of responsibility settle on his shoulders. He paused briefly to consider the turn of events. What he'd always dreamt of having was now his, command of a warship in the Republic Fleet. He thought there might be some satisfaction, but all there was, was fear. Fear of what happened, what was happening and what was about to happen.
He commanded a ship, barely. Barely because the ship was barely alive and because he commanded on the barest of pretexts. Yet he knew the consequences of failure on his part meant certain death for him as well as everyone else on the ship just as surely as if he were the captain. It began to grip him with a paralyzing wave of nausea. And then, when he felt he would slide into the terror and oblivion, a feeling of sublime peace settled over him. Words from a song his mother had taught him years ago came to his mind.
"Just as above the darkest clouds, the sun shines in skies of blue.
"During your darkest hours, God is watching over you."
"You OK Ty?" Anderson stared at him intently.
As he focused in on her, he felt wrapped in a blanket of peace that almost detached him from the noise and confusion of the engineering room and the muffled booms of the hits the Adventurer was taking.
"Yeah, I"m fine. Let's get to work,” he said.
He smiled and lightly touched her shoulder. The blanket of peacefulness he felt evaporated, but an inner core of peace lingered within him. He felt an acute sense of awareness as if the world around him had shifted into slow motion. Everything was crystal clear to him, from the motes of dust dancing in the air to the minutest detail of the panels around him. They ran to the alternate command station.
"I'll start setting up the networking,” said Anderson. "You get your tablet rebooted."
He started the process. As he waited for her, he called out on his card, "All hands. Alternate command now has the ship, all communications need to be sent there on damage control circuits."
The damage control teams began reporting off, along with the stations throughout the ship. Only the command center failed to acknowledge the order.
Ty's notebook finished rebooting. It was ready by the time she got back. She pulled an access panel off of a comm station and put a small disk on one of the data conduits.
She turned to Ty, "That's a low-bandwidth sending unit we can use to bootstrap the rest of the system."
"Let me have the receiver?" Ty asked.
She handed the unit to him. He checked the connector and then plugged it into the local desk. He went to setup the controls of Junior. He set it to command and online. For an instant nothing happened. Ty wondered if it was going to fail, then the lights in the room blinked and came on. He felt himself sink into the floor. Gravity was back on. There were whoops of joy in the room.
Anderson went to her station and called out to him, “Your sensor routines have crashed, probably because it can't talk to the sensors. It means we don't have combat sensors. Plus, we don't have any data links with the command center."
Ty powered up the alternate control station displays. They worked. He studied the displays. They were still blind and tumbling and taking hits.
"Do we have enough power to jump?" he asked.
Anderson looked at him from her station and paused before answering. "Yes, but..."
"We can’t stay here. We'll die if we don't move and they can follow us anywhere if we don’t jump away."
"We'll die if we jump into a rock or run into something else,” Anderson answered.
"Yeah, well, we'd better not jump where there are a lot of rocks,” Ty said with a grin.
Anderson jogged to him from her station.
"Fine. You make the call,” she said. "But get us out of here. Our navigation sensors are off line too. So whether we jump into a rock or stay here, the result will be the same."
She ran back to her station. Ty programmed the jump.
"Jump engine is on line,” said Anderson.
Ty commanded the jump. There was a slight tremor through the ship as they jumped.
"What was that?" Anderson asked.
"Don't know. This isn't a full blown controller we're running on. But have you felt that happen before?"
"Not really, where did you put us?" Anderson asked.
Ty said, “I just commanded the second jump of the attack, about a light minute away.”
With the Adventurer damaged the way it was, Ty hoped to use the one Dragon fighter the Adventurer carried to evaluate the Adventurer’s condition and see what the LongBows were doing.
Ty called out to the console. "Dragon Ops, Alternate command.”
"Dragon Ops… What happened?" Ty's friend Vince answered.
Ty ignored the question. "Is the Dragon ready to launch?”
"You can't tell?" There was surprised pause in his voice. "Yes, she's ready and loaded with six Heli-arcs and one plasma-arc on the centerline."
Ty outlined his plan of action with Vince. A Dragon, looked like a barbell with two teardrop shaped weights on each end. The pointy ends of the teardrops pointed in the same direction. The pilot sat in the front barbell and the other housed the drive. Strung along the central cylinder were numerous attach points. Weapons, extra power cells and the like were hung on them. Dragons usually looked ungainly, but they were incredibly agile and fast. This one was loaded with seven missiles. A large missile capable of destroying a capital ship, and six anti-fighter missiles.
The Dragon launched immediately. Vince was driving it. He swung around to look at the Adventurer.
”Alternate. Dragon.”
"Go Dragon."
”Command center's completely gone. There's a crater where it was. I can see down to B-deck through the debris.”
For an instant Ty thought again of Commander Roper and the rest of the command team. Eight good friends had been killed in an instant.
“Copy that Dragon. How does the outer hull look away from the crater?"
There was a pause.
”A scattering of low-energy blast marks and some craters from small caliber cannon rounds pock the surface. Aside from the crater though, the hull looks OK.”
“Thanks for the report. Using just passive sensors, look back where we were. Can you see the LongBows?”
Ty imagined the Dragon pirouetting in space to turn towards their earlier location. While that was going on, he punched the intercom.
"Red Two and Red Four. Check the emergency bulkheads on Bravo deck. Clear out Charlie deck and set emergency barriers on Charlie deck in case the Bravo deck bulkheads fail."
He switched back to the command circuit, "All hands, command. All personnel implement pressure loss protocols immediately. Repeat, implement Code Blue.”
Everyone in the engineering center began donning emergency pressure suits. Dragon called in.
”Command, Dragon.”
"Go."
”The two LongBows are pursuing us. ETA is about twenty minutes. They're doing a level five acceleration. No drive plume though.”
A nagging thought bothered Ty about the report, but he couldn't put his finger on a specific reason to be alarmed. He thought about the report and turned to Anderson. She glanced back at him. Ty's eyebrows popped up.
"They're awfully confident,” he commented.
"Yeah, like they think they've got us?"
Ty nodded.
"Do they?" she asked.
"Depends on if we have weapons." Ty held up a hand. "Red Five, Command."
"Red Five."
"I need you to check the circuit and data-link bays from the forward sensors to the master interlink."
"We're on it."
"Red Seven, Command."
"Red Seven."
"Check the power conduits from the main projectors back to engineering. Be quick."
"Right away sir."
Ty turned to the Tactical display. He noticed as he did that the generator began dropping to a lower power output. Anderson lowered the generator's output to match the ship's current need.
“Anderson,” he called out.
She shouted back, "What?"
"How long can the generator run the way it was?"
“It can run forever that way, I just think it’s a waste to keep it up."
"Leave it up."
"What? Why?"
"Energy output is a good indicator of what the ship is doing. They saw it running at full power and it didn't phase them earlier. Bounce it back up like we lost control again. I want them to think we're still hurt."
"We are still hurt."
Before he could answer, Red Seven called in, "Sir, both power conduits are good to go. Each channel shows it can take a full power flow."
"Good, I want you to reposition to the fantail and replace Red Five's position."
"Red Seven, Aye."
"Dragon, Command."
"Dragon."
"I want you to go stealthy and move to two red one-twenty about seven or eight kay-clicks out. Then go silent, laser link only. Ping me every five minutes with a sensor feed. If I want more, I'll ping back."
The Dragon double-clicked his microphone in acknowledgment of the message.
"Dragon-Ops, Command."
"Dragon Ops."
"Can you make it look like the Dragon's still in the bay?"
"You want us to fake a Dragon sir?"
"Yeah, as real as you can make it. But be fast. You've got maybe five minutes before the LongBows can tell what's in the bay."
"We can do that."
Ty switched his display to check on the ship’s position in the Solar System. He noticed they were still tumbling. He fired a nose thruster just enough to accelerate the pitching the ship was doing. By now, she was pointing nose down. She'd be pointing back at the LongBows in a few minutes.
Red Five called, "Sir, the navigation conduits run through the depressurized portion of b-deck and are severed in there. But on both sides of the break they look good. We could run a wireless bridge to get them back."
"Can you get into the depressurized area to see if it can be fixed?"
"Yes, We've got a couple of porta-walls…"
Ty cut him off, "Good, do it."
Ty punched up a schematic of the ship only to have a gray screen appear. Junior didn't have the data. Ty let out an exasperated sigh. He glanced at the clock in the display. If the LongBows were still coming, they were ten minutes away. A flashing light caught his attention. He heard Anderson talking into her card.
"Dragon Ops, Engineering."
"Dragon Ops."
"You're depressurizing the bay?"
"Yes, chief, we’ve pulled the circuit breakers on the door and we're hand cranking it open."
Ty noticed the questioning look on her face. It dissolved into a grin and grinned himself as he listened in on the report.
"Ma'am, we pulled the loader mock up into the launch cradle and we have a Jersey generator giving it power. I've got Wally sittin' in the cockpit of the thing. And we're hangin' live ones on the rails and a plasma cannon on the center line. I’ve also pulled an engine calibration rig out and fired it up, so it's pumping gravitons like a real Mark Eight drive that's being readied for a launch."
"Good job Dragon Ops,” Anderson answered with a chuckle.
Ty shook his head in wonder.
"Kid deserves a medal," she said. "I'd be fooled and I know what to look for."
A sensor feed came in from the Dragon. Ty studied it. The LongBows were still coming. They were in a tighter formation, only a couple hundred clicks apart. No shields were up. No defensive jinks. They were approaching this like they were headed out to a range for target practice. Maybe they think they are, Ty mused to himself.
"Well, you keep coming that way," he said out-loud to himself.
He tweaked the pitch rate just enough to have the approaching ships in his main projector's aiming cone before they got close enough to really hurt the Adventurer with their cannons.
"Come to Daddy boys, I've got some good stuff waiting for you."
A couple of minutes later, Red Five called, "Sir, we've got the navigation signal conduits patched, spliced and degaussed. It was already depressurized so we didn't need to evacuate it."
Ty acknowledged, “Great work. Deploy to Charlie deck forward and assume a standby posture there."
"Rog."
Ty resisted the urge to power up the navigation system. He knew that would be a dead giveaway, that they weren't hurt as bad as they appeared. He stood away from the sensor panel for a moment and rubbed his eyes. Thoughts of his last conversation with Commander Roper came flooding back to him. He couldn't accept that he was dead now and that his old station on the command center had been vaporized along with Commander Roper. Yet, the inner peace was still there.
Another five minutes passed. Another sensor feed came in from the Dragon. The LongBows were within range of the Adventurer's main weapons, yet they still hadn't fired on the Adventurer nor were they taking any kind of evasive action.
"You're curious?” Ty asked himself outloud. "You want to know how we moved and yet appear so dead now. Well, better you than us."
They were decelerating to inspect his ship. He could tell that their sensors were all aimed at the Adventurer. They'd taken the bait of the Dragon decoy in the bay. Anderson came over to him so she could talk without shouting.
"We've checked the controller circuitry. I think we can reload the controller and use the real thing in a couple of minutes if you want."
Ty shook his head, "Not yet, I do need weapon control though. Can we load that and hook it into Junior?"
"It's possible, I'll see what I can do. What are the LongBows up to?"
"They're matching velocity with us. They'll be along side in about six minutes. They're a little further out than the Dragon right now at two-eighty red six. Our pitch rate will put them in the primary's cone of fire in forty-six seconds."
A wry smile crossed Anderson's face. "I can give you manual aiming using the calibration scopes on the main projectors,” she offered.
"Really? I didn't know you could manually aim a primary."
"Yeah, it's a technique used to calibrate the targeting mirrors and deflector. It's pretty effective at short ranges. Svenson over there on the power panel has popped ship-sized asteroids from two kay clicks with it."
"Get him over here."
“Her,” Anderson corrected.
"Whatever,” said Ty.
Anderson pushed off and floated across the room to the woman and spoke in her ear. A smile flickered across her face. Then the two of them pushed off from the panel and came floating over to Ty. Svenson began taking off her pressure suit as she floated across the room. Anderson introduced her to Ty.
She defended her actions simply, "I need my arms free to shoot, sir."
By the time Anderson had the calibration station up, Svenson had stripped off the top half of her jumpsuit. It flopped around her waist. She was wearing a white tee-shirt under it. She pulled up her sleeves so her arms were completely uncovered. Her yellow blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She had the petite features of a porcelain doll Ty thought. Yet her eyes were steely gray and as hard as ice at the moment.
She locked her boots into the foot locks on the deck and leaned into the console so she wouldn't drift around when she grasped the grip of the calibrator. The screen over the console lit up. A star field appeared with an aiming reticle superimposed over the image. Anderson worked a couple of knobs to bring into view two white dots. She zoomed in on them. The dots never resolved to anything more than white specs of light. Anderson glanced down at Svenson and gave a curt nod.
Svenson began moving the calibrator with deft nearly imperceptible movements. The aiming reticle began to move slowly across the screen until it rested on one of the dots. She had to constantly move the reticle to keep it on top of the dot as it slowly moved across the screen.
Without glancing up at Ty, she asked, "Those the LongBows?"
Ty glanced at the aiming coordinates on the screen and back at the tactical display. The LongBows were just a thousand clicks away now. Point blank range for the primaries.
"Yes, they're the LongBows."
"When do you want me to shoot?"
"When can you shoot?"
She glanced at him and gave him a pitying stare as if he were the most clueless person alive.
"Now, sir. How much power in the shot?” she asked deadpan.
Ty thought for a second as he considered the energy absorption capacity of the LongBow shields.
“Make it two hundred mega-joules condensed to a pico-second burst. Then fire."
She gave him a cheesy grin and looked back at the screen. He moved to watch the screen over her shoulder.
Without turning away from the screen, she said, "Would you mind, sir. Please,” as she dialed in the energy settings on the shot.
He backed away, "Sure."
Soon after, in quick succession, she pointed the aiming reticle on one dot and pulled the trigger on the calibrator. The Adventurer gave a slight shudder from the recoil of firing the energy at the ship.
“That's one," she said.
In a deft movement, she moved the reticle over the second dot in little more than a second and pulled the trigger again. The ship shuddered again.
“That's two,” she said as she watched the screen for a moment before backing away from it. "There you go, sir,” she said as she raised her head to face him before continuing, “Two powdered LongBows."
On the screen, the two dots had been replaced with two coin-sized disks of light that slowly expanded and faded to black.
"Command, Dragon." The transmission snapped them out of their revere.
"Command."
"Nice shots! Flashed them both. There's nothing out there but plasma. I didn't detect any emission from the second LongBow before it was flashed."
Ty let out a big breath. He felt the tension drain out of him.
"That was sure anti-climactic. Anderson, let's get this ship, ship-shape,” he said with a grin. "I relinquish command, to you."
She nodded, "All hands, command." She paused just a second as she heard her voice reverberate through the engineering space over the sound of the generator. "Engineering Specialist First Class Amber Svenson just destroyed two LongBows. The solar system is clear of Alliance forces. Command out."
Ty could hear whoops of joy over the intercom and in the engineering room as the generators dropped down to virtual silence. In a matter of minutes, they'd collected the Dragon, repaired the sensors and rebooted the controller. He turned to Anderson as they contemplated what happened.
Anderson nodded in approval. She paused a moment before speaking, “Ty. For the duration, I’m going to announce to the crew that you are acting commander. You’re actual status is between you and me. Ok?”
Ty nodded, “Fair enough.”
“So, Mr. Weiss,” Anderson said with a twinkle in her eye. “What do you want us do to?”
“I suggest we take up a picket position sunward of Jupiter. We should stay here till the convoy jumps away. We’re also going to need someone to run weapons, defense and sensors. We also need to recover and relaunch the Dragon. I don’t think we’re done with the Alliance yet.”
She nodded, “I think you’re right on that account.”
They continued their discussion as they sorted out who would do what on the ship.
Ty sat alone at a table in the Adventurer's wardroom pondering his fate and wondering how to tell his wife that he’d gone through with quitting.
The wardroom was empty. The rest of the ship's crew was standing at alert station. I should be with them, he thought. The Skipper, Commander Roper offered to bend rules a bit and let Ty watch the imminent engagement from the Adventurer's command center. But Ty had declined, not wanting the Skipper to get in any trouble on his account.
Roper readily agreed to Ty's counter request, to allow Ty's program, Junior to tap into the Adventurer's data-net. He grabbed his local desk and pulled it to him so he could use it. He tapped the power key, the screen came to life immediately.
“Launch junior,” he said to the machine's built in speaker.
The program launched, showing him a small duplicate of his duty station's tactical display. He was proud of this program. It represented the culmination of all of his spare time while on active duty in the Space Force. With a twinge of sadness he realized, with his new status, Junior belonged to the Space Force and that he would never get to actually use it after today.
The engagement was nearing its climax. The two ships, LongBows, had headed for Jupiter shortly after they’d transitioned into the system. With the jamming they were doing, there was no way for certain the ship could tell the fleet what was happening. The only indication of trouble would be when the Adventurer failed to check in on the hour as it transited the system. Drucker had chosen to go with a blink attack wherein the Adventurer would execute a short range jump behind the two LongBows then attack each simultaneously, jumping away before they could return fire to assess the results of the attack. Drucker had asked him for advice on how to engage the two ships. Ty was happy to help, but he had to bite his lip to make a recommendation that went counter to what Drucker was trying to do. So he spent most of the hours watching the two ships approach Jupiter from monitors in the wardroom. Drucker had programmed in the attack nearly an hour earlier and had spent the remainder of the time configuring the main weapon and aligning the ship for the fraction of a second that it would be in firing position behind the two ships.
Ty set the miniature tactical display to show what the sensors were showing Drucker. The Adventurer was still high above the systems ecliptic headed “down” toward the turning point for the Beta Hydri jump. The convoy was strung out behind them. The Adventurer was programmed to jump in a few seconds before the light from the convoy ship’s deceleration reached the two LongBows. Ty had started a stop watch on his computer to count down to the time the ship jumped. It was down to less than a minute. He watched as each second ticked away.
At ten-seconds, the commander announced over the intercom, “Jump to attack in ten-seconds.” He counted down to zero and the ship jumped.
Without warning, the lights in the wardroom went out and the gravity field shut off. An instant later a powerful unseen force slammed into the Adventurer from above. It threw him out of the chair he was sitting in and up into the overhead bulkhead. The shock-wave of the impact reverberated through the ship like a titanic thunderclap. He could feel, even see the ship begin rolling clockwise. He saw briefly before he slammed into the overhead, that his local desk was still on and floating in the air in front of him. It had bounced harmlessly off of the overhead and was now tumbling in midair. Seeing Junior frozen caused a momentary twinge of sadness, then horror as the reality of the situation registered, Adventurer's controller was off-line.
Ty knew that without it, the crew could do nothing to deal with this situation. He fended off the overhead without any trouble and pushed himself towards his tablet. He grabbed it and headed for the door.
Emergency glow panels were on now, giving enough illumination to see. Weaker blasts began hitting the Adventurer, accelerating the ship''s rolling tumble. The epicenter of the first blast had come from the direction of the ship's control center three decks above him. Ty headed for the engineering center down below.
In the semi-darkness he could hear the muffled shouts of crewmen calling out to each other through the air circulation conduits and trying to deal with powered doors that wouldn't open. Ty grabbed at his comm-card and pulled it out of his jump suit's right breast pocket. He glanced at it to see if it was still on. It was.
He checked the command circuit, it was dead silent. He switched to the damage control circuit. There was some traffic on it. Seconds passed, still no one came up on the command circuit.
Finally, he spoke into it, “All hands, this is Tactical One. We've had a main systems controller failure.”
Instinctively he'd used his old call sign. He berated himself for the lapse for a second before the repair teams began reporting in.
“Red Three team aye, sir.”
Ty knew from memory that the team was in the aft section of the ship near the Dragon Launch Bay. He recognized the voice. It belonged to Specialist Grover.
In all, five teams out of seven responded. The two nearest the command center hadn't responded. The five reported no internal damage to the Adventurer in their areas. Ty had to pause a moment to recall which damage control team, that had responded, was closest to the command center.
"Red Two Team, Tactical One."
"Yes, sir."
"Send two runners up to the command center. Report to me what they find."
"Right away. Red Two out.”
Ty kept working down towards the Engineering center. He had to hand pump the doors open. It was a slow process. All the while he could feel the Adventurer shudder from the hits she was taking. The intensity of the hits gave him the impression they were little more than small caliber cannon rounds. Just the same, he knew it was only a matter of time before the hits started blasting through her thin armor.
Finally, Ty got to the Engineering doors. They were locked shut. He switched his card to engineering's circuit.
"Engineering, Tactical One."
Senior Chief Anderson answered immediately, “About time you guys talked to me. What happened?"
“What?” Ty asked. “I don't know. I'm out side door three."
"Hang on, I’ll let you in.”
He could hear the door's locks disengage. The door slid open just wide enough for him to squeeze through. Anderson, a wiry wizened lady floated over to him.
"What happened?" she asked, raising her voice over the sound of the power generator.
It was running at combat output with nowhere to send the power it was generating. Ty noticed the engineers were trying to bring up dead consoles and opening up access panels to restore the control system. Even in here, the gravity was still out.
Ty shrugged his shoulders, "I don't know. I was down in the wardroom. The lights went out and then the gravity failed and then POW."
Anderson shook her head. Once Ty was inside, she pumped the door shut and they pushed off towards her station.
“That about describes what we experienced too. The controller dropped off line right before that first hit. I see you brought your computer. Is it working?"
Ty glanced down at his tablet before answering. "Yes, I was running Junior when this happened. I looked down and saw Junior had crashed hard. That's what clued me into the controller failure."
"We've got to get it up so command can get back in control," said Anderson.
Ty nodded.
She pointed to the alternate control center. "Let's go here. I got an idea."
He figured she might. She knew as much about Junior as he did, more in fact, on its inner workings.
She spoke as they floated to the area, "I want to connect your computer to the data-net and see if there's enough to Junior to help me run the Adventurer until we can get the controller back on line."
Ty immediately grasped what she wanted to do.
"I'll need to reboot Junior.”
His card beeped with an incoming message, "Just a sec..."
Anderson nodded.
A nervous voice came over the card. "Tactical, Red Two lead."
Anderson raised an eyebrow at the use of the call sign but kept quiet. "Go Red Two."
"Sir, all the pressure locks on B-deck from the two-ring in are closed. Safety valves are popped too."
Anderson's face blanched at the words. Ty's jaw muscles tightened. The voice continued. "We can't get any further into the center of the deck."
Ty cut him off, "Thanks Red Two. Standby." He turned to Anderson, "Command is gone. At the very least, they're not in any condition to fly the ship."
She nodded wordlessly. Her face stricken with grief and terror. She spoke softly but with increasing firmness, "Ty, you have more command time than me. I know the results of the board and technically you are just a passenger now. But, under the circumstances, I say we try to survive first and then work out the details of who's the boss later. As far as I'm concerned, you should be the commander."
Ty nodded and felt the heavy weight of responsibility settle on his shoulders. He paused briefly to consider the turn of events. What he'd always dreamt of having was now his, command of a warship in the Republic Fleet. He thought there might be some satisfaction, but all there was, was fear. Fear of what happened, what was happening and what was about to happen.
He commanded a ship, barely. Barely because the ship was barely alive and because he commanded on the barest of pretexts. Yet he knew the consequences of failure on his part meant certain death for him as well as everyone else on the ship just as surely as if he were the captain. It began to grip him with a paralyzing wave of nausea. And then, when he felt he would slide into the terror and oblivion, a feeling of sublime peace settled over him. Words from a song his mother had taught him years ago came to his mind.
"Just as above the darkest clouds, the sun shines in skies of blue.
"During your darkest hours, God is watching over you."
"You OK Ty?" Anderson stared at him intently.
As he focused in on her, he felt wrapped in a blanket of peace that almost detached him from the noise and confusion of the engineering room and the muffled booms of the hits the Adventurer was taking.
"Yeah, I"m fine. Let's get to work,” he said.
He smiled and lightly touched her shoulder. The blanket of peacefulness he felt evaporated, but an inner core of peace lingered within him. He felt an acute sense of awareness as if the world around him had shifted into slow motion. Everything was crystal clear to him, from the motes of dust dancing in the air to the minutest detail of the panels around him. They ran to the alternate command station.
"I'll start setting up the networking,” said Anderson. "You get your tablet rebooted."
He started the process. As he waited for her, he called out on his card, "All hands. Alternate command now has the ship, all communications need to be sent there on damage control circuits."
The damage control teams began reporting off, along with the stations throughout the ship. Only the command center failed to acknowledge the order.
Ty's notebook finished rebooting. It was ready by the time she got back. She pulled an access panel off of a comm station and put a small disk on one of the data conduits.
She turned to Ty, "That's a low-bandwidth sending unit we can use to bootstrap the rest of the system."
"Let me have the receiver?" Ty asked.
She handed the unit to him. He checked the connector and then plugged it into the local desk. He went to setup the controls of Junior. He set it to command and online. For an instant nothing happened. Ty wondered if it was going to fail, then the lights in the room blinked and came on. He felt himself sink into the floor. Gravity was back on. There were whoops of joy in the room.
Anderson went to her station and called out to him, “Your sensor routines have crashed, probably because it can't talk to the sensors. It means we don't have combat sensors. Plus, we don't have any data links with the command center."
Ty powered up the alternate control station displays. They worked. He studied the displays. They were still blind and tumbling and taking hits.
"Do we have enough power to jump?" he asked.
Anderson looked at him from her station and paused before answering. "Yes, but..."
"We can’t stay here. We'll die if we don't move and they can follow us anywhere if we don’t jump away."
"We'll die if we jump into a rock or run into something else,” Anderson answered.
"Yeah, well, we'd better not jump where there are a lot of rocks,” Ty said with a grin.
Anderson jogged to him from her station.
"Fine. You make the call,” she said. "But get us out of here. Our navigation sensors are off line too. So whether we jump into a rock or stay here, the result will be the same."
She ran back to her station. Ty programmed the jump.
"Jump engine is on line,” said Anderson.
Ty commanded the jump. There was a slight tremor through the ship as they jumped.
"What was that?" Anderson asked.
"Don't know. This isn't a full blown controller we're running on. But have you felt that happen before?"
"Not really, where did you put us?" Anderson asked.
Ty said, “I just commanded the second jump of the attack, about a light minute away.”
With the Adventurer damaged the way it was, Ty hoped to use the one Dragon fighter the Adventurer carried to evaluate the Adventurer’s condition and see what the LongBows were doing.
Ty called out to the console. "Dragon Ops, Alternate command.”
"Dragon Ops… What happened?" Ty's friend Vince answered.
Ty ignored the question. "Is the Dragon ready to launch?”
"You can't tell?" There was surprised pause in his voice. "Yes, she's ready and loaded with six Heli-arcs and one plasma-arc on the centerline."
Ty outlined his plan of action with Vince. A Dragon, looked like a barbell with two teardrop shaped weights on each end. The pointy ends of the teardrops pointed in the same direction. The pilot sat in the front barbell and the other housed the drive. Strung along the central cylinder were numerous attach points. Weapons, extra power cells and the like were hung on them. Dragons usually looked ungainly, but they were incredibly agile and fast. This one was loaded with seven missiles. A large missile capable of destroying a capital ship, and six anti-fighter missiles.
The Dragon launched immediately. Vince was driving it. He swung around to look at the Adventurer.
”Alternate. Dragon.”
"Go Dragon."
”Command center's completely gone. There's a crater where it was. I can see down to B-deck through the debris.”
For an instant Ty thought again of Commander Roper and the rest of the command team. Eight good friends had been killed in an instant.
“Copy that Dragon. How does the outer hull look away from the crater?"
There was a pause.
”A scattering of low-energy blast marks and some craters from small caliber cannon rounds pock the surface. Aside from the crater though, the hull looks OK.”
“Thanks for the report. Using just passive sensors, look back where we were. Can you see the LongBows?”
Ty imagined the Dragon pirouetting in space to turn towards their earlier location. While that was going on, he punched the intercom.
"Red Two and Red Four. Check the emergency bulkheads on Bravo deck. Clear out Charlie deck and set emergency barriers on Charlie deck in case the Bravo deck bulkheads fail."
He switched back to the command circuit, "All hands, command. All personnel implement pressure loss protocols immediately. Repeat, implement Code Blue.”
Everyone in the engineering center began donning emergency pressure suits. Dragon called in.
”Command, Dragon.”
"Go."
”The two LongBows are pursuing us. ETA is about twenty minutes. They're doing a level five acceleration. No drive plume though.”
A nagging thought bothered Ty about the report, but he couldn't put his finger on a specific reason to be alarmed. He thought about the report and turned to Anderson. She glanced back at him. Ty's eyebrows popped up.
"They're awfully confident,” he commented.
"Yeah, like they think they've got us?"
Ty nodded.
"Do they?" she asked.
"Depends on if we have weapons." Ty held up a hand. "Red Five, Command."
"Red Five."
"I need you to check the circuit and data-link bays from the forward sensors to the master interlink."
"We're on it."
"Red Seven, Command."
"Red Seven."
"Check the power conduits from the main projectors back to engineering. Be quick."
"Right away sir."
Ty turned to the Tactical display. He noticed as he did that the generator began dropping to a lower power output. Anderson lowered the generator's output to match the ship's current need.
“Anderson,” he called out.
She shouted back, "What?"
"How long can the generator run the way it was?"
“It can run forever that way, I just think it’s a waste to keep it up."
"Leave it up."
"What? Why?"
"Energy output is a good indicator of what the ship is doing. They saw it running at full power and it didn't phase them earlier. Bounce it back up like we lost control again. I want them to think we're still hurt."
"We are still hurt."
Before he could answer, Red Seven called in, "Sir, both power conduits are good to go. Each channel shows it can take a full power flow."
"Good, I want you to reposition to the fantail and replace Red Five's position."
"Red Seven, Aye."
"Dragon, Command."
"Dragon."
"I want you to go stealthy and move to two red one-twenty about seven or eight kay-clicks out. Then go silent, laser link only. Ping me every five minutes with a sensor feed. If I want more, I'll ping back."
The Dragon double-clicked his microphone in acknowledgment of the message.
"Dragon-Ops, Command."
"Dragon Ops."
"Can you make it look like the Dragon's still in the bay?"
"You want us to fake a Dragon sir?"
"Yeah, as real as you can make it. But be fast. You've got maybe five minutes before the LongBows can tell what's in the bay."
"We can do that."
Ty switched his display to check on the ship’s position in the Solar System. He noticed they were still tumbling. He fired a nose thruster just enough to accelerate the pitching the ship was doing. By now, she was pointing nose down. She'd be pointing back at the LongBows in a few minutes.
Red Five called, "Sir, the navigation conduits run through the depressurized portion of b-deck and are severed in there. But on both sides of the break they look good. We could run a wireless bridge to get them back."
"Can you get into the depressurized area to see if it can be fixed?"
"Yes, We've got a couple of porta-walls…"
Ty cut him off, "Good, do it."
Ty punched up a schematic of the ship only to have a gray screen appear. Junior didn't have the data. Ty let out an exasperated sigh. He glanced at the clock in the display. If the LongBows were still coming, they were ten minutes away. A flashing light caught his attention. He heard Anderson talking into her card.
"Dragon Ops, Engineering."
"Dragon Ops."
"You're depressurizing the bay?"
"Yes, chief, we’ve pulled the circuit breakers on the door and we're hand cranking it open."
Ty noticed the questioning look on her face. It dissolved into a grin and grinned himself as he listened in on the report.
"Ma'am, we pulled the loader mock up into the launch cradle and we have a Jersey generator giving it power. I've got Wally sittin' in the cockpit of the thing. And we're hangin' live ones on the rails and a plasma cannon on the center line. I’ve also pulled an engine calibration rig out and fired it up, so it's pumping gravitons like a real Mark Eight drive that's being readied for a launch."
"Good job Dragon Ops,” Anderson answered with a chuckle.
Ty shook his head in wonder.
"Kid deserves a medal," she said. "I'd be fooled and I know what to look for."
A sensor feed came in from the Dragon. Ty studied it. The LongBows were still coming. They were in a tighter formation, only a couple hundred clicks apart. No shields were up. No defensive jinks. They were approaching this like they were headed out to a range for target practice. Maybe they think they are, Ty mused to himself.
"Well, you keep coming that way," he said out-loud to himself.
He tweaked the pitch rate just enough to have the approaching ships in his main projector's aiming cone before they got close enough to really hurt the Adventurer with their cannons.
"Come to Daddy boys, I've got some good stuff waiting for you."
A couple of minutes later, Red Five called, "Sir, we've got the navigation signal conduits patched, spliced and degaussed. It was already depressurized so we didn't need to evacuate it."
Ty acknowledged, “Great work. Deploy to Charlie deck forward and assume a standby posture there."
"Rog."
Ty resisted the urge to power up the navigation system. He knew that would be a dead giveaway, that they weren't hurt as bad as they appeared. He stood away from the sensor panel for a moment and rubbed his eyes. Thoughts of his last conversation with Commander Roper came flooding back to him. He couldn't accept that he was dead now and that his old station on the command center had been vaporized along with Commander Roper. Yet, the inner peace was still there.
Another five minutes passed. Another sensor feed came in from the Dragon. The LongBows were within range of the Adventurer's main weapons, yet they still hadn't fired on the Adventurer nor were they taking any kind of evasive action.
"You're curious?” Ty asked himself outloud. "You want to know how we moved and yet appear so dead now. Well, better you than us."
They were decelerating to inspect his ship. He could tell that their sensors were all aimed at the Adventurer. They'd taken the bait of the Dragon decoy in the bay. Anderson came over to him so she could talk without shouting.
"We've checked the controller circuitry. I think we can reload the controller and use the real thing in a couple of minutes if you want."
Ty shook his head, "Not yet, I do need weapon control though. Can we load that and hook it into Junior?"
"It's possible, I'll see what I can do. What are the LongBows up to?"
"They're matching velocity with us. They'll be along side in about six minutes. They're a little further out than the Dragon right now at two-eighty red six. Our pitch rate will put them in the primary's cone of fire in forty-six seconds."
A wry smile crossed Anderson's face. "I can give you manual aiming using the calibration scopes on the main projectors,” she offered.
"Really? I didn't know you could manually aim a primary."
"Yeah, it's a technique used to calibrate the targeting mirrors and deflector. It's pretty effective at short ranges. Svenson over there on the power panel has popped ship-sized asteroids from two kay clicks with it."
"Get him over here."
“Her,” Anderson corrected.
"Whatever,” said Ty.
Anderson pushed off and floated across the room to the woman and spoke in her ear. A smile flickered across her face. Then the two of them pushed off from the panel and came floating over to Ty. Svenson began taking off her pressure suit as she floated across the room. Anderson introduced her to Ty.
She defended her actions simply, "I need my arms free to shoot, sir."
By the time Anderson had the calibration station up, Svenson had stripped off the top half of her jumpsuit. It flopped around her waist. She was wearing a white tee-shirt under it. She pulled up her sleeves so her arms were completely uncovered. Her yellow blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She had the petite features of a porcelain doll Ty thought. Yet her eyes were steely gray and as hard as ice at the moment.
She locked her boots into the foot locks on the deck and leaned into the console so she wouldn't drift around when she grasped the grip of the calibrator. The screen over the console lit up. A star field appeared with an aiming reticle superimposed over the image. Anderson worked a couple of knobs to bring into view two white dots. She zoomed in on them. The dots never resolved to anything more than white specs of light. Anderson glanced down at Svenson and gave a curt nod.
Svenson began moving the calibrator with deft nearly imperceptible movements. The aiming reticle began to move slowly across the screen until it rested on one of the dots. She had to constantly move the reticle to keep it on top of the dot as it slowly moved across the screen.
Without glancing up at Ty, she asked, "Those the LongBows?"
Ty glanced at the aiming coordinates on the screen and back at the tactical display. The LongBows were just a thousand clicks away now. Point blank range for the primaries.
"Yes, they're the LongBows."
"When do you want me to shoot?"
"When can you shoot?"
She glanced at him and gave him a pitying stare as if he were the most clueless person alive.
"Now, sir. How much power in the shot?” she asked deadpan.
Ty thought for a second as he considered the energy absorption capacity of the LongBow shields.
“Make it two hundred mega-joules condensed to a pico-second burst. Then fire."
She gave him a cheesy grin and looked back at the screen. He moved to watch the screen over her shoulder.
Without turning away from the screen, she said, "Would you mind, sir. Please,” as she dialed in the energy settings on the shot.
He backed away, "Sure."
Soon after, in quick succession, she pointed the aiming reticle on one dot and pulled the trigger on the calibrator. The Adventurer gave a slight shudder from the recoil of firing the energy at the ship.
“That's one," she said.
In a deft movement, she moved the reticle over the second dot in little more than a second and pulled the trigger again. The ship shuddered again.
“That's two,” she said as she watched the screen for a moment before backing away from it. "There you go, sir,” she said as she raised her head to face him before continuing, “Two powdered LongBows."
On the screen, the two dots had been replaced with two coin-sized disks of light that slowly expanded and faded to black.
"Command, Dragon." The transmission snapped them out of their revere.
"Command."
"Nice shots! Flashed them both. There's nothing out there but plasma. I didn't detect any emission from the second LongBow before it was flashed."
Ty let out a big breath. He felt the tension drain out of him.
"That was sure anti-climactic. Anderson, let's get this ship, ship-shape,” he said with a grin. "I relinquish command, to you."
She nodded, "All hands, command." She paused just a second as she heard her voice reverberate through the engineering space over the sound of the generator. "Engineering Specialist First Class Amber Svenson just destroyed two LongBows. The solar system is clear of Alliance forces. Command out."
Ty could hear whoops of joy over the intercom and in the engineering room as the generators dropped down to virtual silence. In a matter of minutes, they'd collected the Dragon, repaired the sensors and rebooted the controller. He turned to Anderson as they contemplated what happened.
Anderson nodded in approval. She paused a moment before speaking, “Ty. For the duration, I’m going to announce to the crew that you are acting commander. You’re actual status is between you and me. Ok?”
Ty nodded, “Fair enough.”
“So, Mr. Weiss,” Anderson said with a twinkle in her eye. “What do you want us do to?”
“I suggest we take up a picket position sunward of Jupiter. We should stay here till the convoy jumps away. We’re also going to need someone to run weapons, defense and sensors. We also need to recover and relaunch the Dragon. I don’t think we’re done with the Alliance yet.”
She nodded, “I think you’re right on that account.”
They continued their discussion as they sorted out who would do what on the ship.
Monday, January 20, 2014
The LongBow
ALLIANCE GUNBOAT “LONGBOW” CLASS: T-MINUS 29 HOURS
Sub-commander Merlin Marshall chaffed at the presence of all the imperial technicians that were aboard his ship. Like maggots burrowing through rotting bread, they’d burrowed into panels and sub-systems in his ship replacing components and apparently haphazardly adding things until it barely looked like the polished and spit-shine clean machine he strove to have. Now, like moldy bread, the consoles had data bundles running from behind loosely connected panels. Every section of the ship had been affected. They’d also removed his communication antenna array and replaced it with a hodgepodge collection of antennas and components he couldn’t identify.
That they’d made a mess of his ship bothered him. That much of what they’d done, he didn’t understand troubled him greatly. For the umpteenth time he called up the mission orders on his comm display and read the orders about this. He gritted his teeth and let the technicians continue to work on his ship.
“I can’t wait for them to be gone, either,” said his commander, Ha-Shin. The woman’s gravely voice caught him by surprise and he jerked around to look at her where she sat in her acceleration couch next to him. As commander, she sat in the left seat.
He nodded his head. “Must be reading my mind.”
She snickered. The brief smile split her lined and weathered fact into a million lines. The crows feet around her eyes made her jade green eyes sparkle.
“You young pups are too easy to read. Plus, you’re reading those tasking orders again.”
She reached across the console in front of him and tapped the display with her gloved hand. The orders vanished.
“Look, Marshall,” she paused to get his full attention.
He regarded her for an instant as she paused to continue. She was easily into her second century. While her face showed the years, her figure, even clad in a full pressure suit, as was required when combat was imminent, was as trim and athletic as his. Her hair which was just beginning to streak with strands of silver was flaming red. While she kept it cut short to fit in the skull cap their helmets required, there was always a curl of her bangs showing under the cap. No matter what she did, it was always there. It had gotten her, her call sign, ‘Curls’.
She continued softly, almost whispering, “These technicians come directly from the Imperium.”
That explains, he thought to himself, why the females among these technicians were the hottest things he’d ever seen in a jumpsuit and at the same time were totally oblivious to him.
“Marshall,” she rasped, “pay attention. Don’t let your gonads get in front of your thinking. I’m trying to tell you these people have access and visibility that you don’t want to mess with. This test has visibility you don’t want to mess with.”
“What do you mean, Ma’am?” he asked.
“While you were stewing in your juices, I got an update to our orders.”
“Oh?”
She turned away long enough to look around the cramped flight deck and through the open hatch that led to the rest of the ship’s interior where the other technicians were working. She turned back to him.
“Yeah, we and the Seven, move pretty soon.”
“Our sister ship?”
She nodded, “Yes, could leave any moment. When we do, the telemetry from the mission will be relayed via sub-link directly back to the Imperium itself.”
“You mean the Emperor himself will see this?”
She rolled her eyes and nodded.
“The Jackal too?”
She cut him off with a harsh shush, “Shush you fool! Yes, people disappear for less than what you just said!”
He gulped.
“Now, get your eyeballs caged and focused on our mission. Got it?”
“Yes, Mam,” he said as he turned back to his console to review the ship’s status and to go over the list of issues the technicians still wanted them to address.
As he did, she muttered softly, “Those ground pounders can’t roll like a real spacer anyway.”
The comment caught him off guard and he cringed as he thought of his commander in that activity. The next thing he felt was her slugging him in the arm.
“Get to work.”
He glanced back at her. There was a trace of a grin in her face as she ignored him and turned to her list of things to do.
One by one, they finished tasks. Finally the lead technician, an alabaster colored woman with the most amazing electric blue hair Marshall had ever seen, stepped to the back of the flight deck. Marshall had been too busy to see her come, but she wore a perfume that was like her personal signature. It strong but not overpowering and like nothing he’d ever smelled on anyone else. She tapped on the bulkhead.
“Lead Technician Alvarando, requesting permission to enter the flight deck, Ma’am.”
Marshall kept concentrating on his list of tasks. There had to be a pheromone in her perfume because as she got closer he could feel himself reacting to her proximity. He could feel a wave of desire wash over him.
Ha-Shin answered, “State your purpose? Is it urgent?”
“We have new requirements, commander. It is not otherwise urgent,” said the woman.
“I see…,” there was a pause before she continued, “Ms. Alvarando what perfume are you wearing?”
“Morning Fantasy, commander. Do you like it?”
“No, in fact, while you are on my ship you are to immediately shower and get that off of you.”
“Commander, it is authorized in the Imperium. Even desired,” she answered.
“Ms. Alvarando,” Ha-Shin’s speaking slowed.
At this point Marshall dared to turn and look to see what was happening. Ha-Shin was turning in her couch to face the other woman who still stood outside the flight deck. Alvarando was tall, nearly six feet. In her mid-twenties Marshall thought. She had dark aquamarine eyes that went well with her blue hair. She wore her hair pulled back in a braided pony-tail. Marshall could tell that undone, it would have covered her shoulders and dropped probably to her waist. Despite the bagginess of the flight suit, her figure along with the effects of the perfume were nearly overpowering.
Ha-Shin continued, “In the Imperium you’re welcome to wear whatever the regulations allow. But out here, in my ship, especially in a combat zone, the last thing my crew needs is some dim-witted technician walking around smelling like a two-bit whore who’s in heat. Plus, get your uniform in compliance with fleet regulations. Do you understand?”
Marshall wondered at that and then noticed that Alvarando’s flight suit, instead of being zipped to the top and snapped shut it was unsnapped and unzipped.
“And in case your fellow technicians haven’t gotten the word, they are to dress the same way,” she was almost roaring now.
Alvarando glared back at her, saluted and then left, stepping so heavily it was almost stomping.
Once the woman was gone, Ha-Shin continued softly, “That was way overdue.”
Marshall raised his eyebrows at the comment.
“We have work to do, sub-commander.”
Before he could respond, a comm chime sounded. It was an intercom call from the communications station beneath them.
“Flight deck, Comms,” the voice was that of Specialist Derling who acted as corpsman and communications officer.
Marshall answered, “Flight deck.”
“Tasking order from the fleet, sir, priority blue.”
“Read it.”
“Message begins: ‘Initiate mission by 0745 standard time. ROE is Victor-Bravo.’”
Marshall knew without looking at a clock that meant they had less than 10 minutes to get underway and make the transition to null-space. Alvarando’s shower would have to wait. He actually didn’t mind that.
Ha-Shin spoke, “Plot me a course to the nearest transition point we can reach with a five minute burn. I’ll coordinate with Seven.”
“Aye, sir,” he answered.
His ship, a LongBow class gunboat, number 305 or simply, “Five” in their squadron of four ships was directly orbiting Epsilon indi about fifty-million miles from the star. The nearest planet, a gas giant, was 20 million miles further out and directly ahead of them. The task force had been on station for several days waiting for this moment. After the planning had been done, the ships, Seven and Five began accelerating away from the fleet. Unlike the rest of the fleet which used electric drives, the two ships began moving as their drives began amplifying the gravitational attraction between the two ships, the star and the planet that lay actually some 86 million miles away.
Ha-Shin by now had donned her skull cap and helmet. The rest of the crew was fully suited. The technicians sat in the acceleration couches and waited for transition to occur. It took five minutes to accelerate to ten percent light, transition speed. Then, in the blink of an eye, the two ships simply disappeared from this universe as they transitioned into the null-time universe.
The transition effect onboard the ship was nothing more than a fleeting instant of vertigo.
“Ok, Marshall, how do we look?” asked Ha-Shin.
“Sir, we’re safely into null-time space. Ship status is nominal.”
“OK, I’ll run the post-transition checklist here. Get down to the stasis chambers and get everyone tucked away. We’re eleven point two light years from Sol, it’s going to be a 112 year trip.”
Marshall nodded as he released his harness and clambered out of the couch. He worked his way down to the stasis chamber where the rest of the crew and technicians were gathering.
Familiar with the process, the crew went about their business of changing out of their pressure suits and into stasis suits. The technicians huddled in a knot away from the crew waiting to be told what to do. The stasis suits looked like wet-suits used for sea diving, but they had additional wires and tubes attached to them.
Marshall walked over to the technicians. For the first time since they’d been on the ship, they weren’t as smug as they’d been earlier.
Marshall started speaking, “May I have your attention?”
There were nods and grunts from the group. He avoided eye contact with Alvarando. She still had the perfume on and the other two female technicians were also wearing perfumes that had a similar effect.
He focused on the men and continued, “These are standard fleet stasis tubes. You used them to get here. You’ll use them to get back to the Imperium. Everyone else in the fleet uses them, unless you want to hang around in the ship by yourself for more than a century. Unless you have any questions, you’ve heard the lecture before. Remember, wear no jewelry and no implants of any type. I’m assuming since you’re all here, none of you have an internal implant. Right?”
He let the question hang. No one answered.
“Fine. You can change here or in a dressing room over there.” He pointed at an open arch into a side room. “If you haven’t already, go to the bath room. You don’t want a mess on your hands when you wake up. Take your clothes off and put on the stasis suit. There’s a chamber for each of you. You’ll find your suit in your chamber. Once you are dressed in the suit, check with me and I’ll make certain you have it on correctly. Any questions?”
Again there were none.
“Then get going. Power lasts only another two hours before everything is shut down.”
He didn’t wait around, but went to get into his own suit. As he did, he noticed most of the men simply began to strip and change in the chamber as the rest of the crew had done. Two of the women went into the dressing room. Alvarando didn’t. He didn’t need the distraction so he turned away to concentrate on getting into his suit.
After several minutes, he turned back to face them. All of them were in the suits. A couple of the men, those who were standing closest to Alvarando, had problems with their suits. He guessed it was because they were too busy watching her change rather than pay attention to what they were doing. He fixed the issues fairly quickly, then took them one at a time to their chamber. He left Alvarando for last.
By the time he was ready to put her in her chamber, the rest of the crew were in their chambers. They appeared to be sleeping.
“So, ready to put me into bed?” she asked coyly.
He sighed, “Chamber, yes. Bed, no.”
Undeterred, she continued, “Is everything in place?” She shimmied sensuously in front of him.
He glanced at her figure, which was much more clearly revealed in the stasis suit than the jump suits. It was by force of will that he concentrated on the connections and placement of the tubes rather than the body beneath them.
He finally answered, “Yes, ma’am everything is in place. Now, take this pill.”
He handed her a small blue tablet in a plastic wrapper.
“Just swallow? I need a glass of water.”
“No ma’am, just put it under your tongue. It’ll dissolve in place.”
He held out the tablet again.
“You want to place it?” she cooed.
“I don’t have time for this, ma’am.”
“But we have more than a hundred years?”
“No, ma’am we don’t.”
She harrumphed and snatched the tablet from his hand. Ripped it out of the wrapper and placed it under her tongue in one fluid movement.
“Now, please get in the chamber and lay down on the pad.”
This she did, pouting at him all the while. Once she was down, the tabled took effect quickly and before he’d finished making the connections, she was sound asleep. In a couple of minutes, she was in the stasis state. He touched the controls at the head of the chamber that rotated the clear containment wall in place. When it finished, she was sleeping inside a clear glass cylinder. He stood up and patted the glass softly. He heard someone approach him from behind.
“She was a handful wasn’t she,” said Ha-Shin behind him. Marshall turned to face her. She was already in her stasis suit. Unlike everyone else’s suits which were grey colored crew suits, her’s like his, was a gold colored command suit. Unlike his, her’s had a white band around each sleeve indicating her status as ship commander.
“No kidding! What a tart! She didn’t stop.”
“You handled yourself well. I admire an officer who doesn’t go rutting around with anyone who makes a play like she did.”
Marshall looked down at the sleeping woman. He had to admit, even without the presence of the pheromone laden perfume, she was very attractive. The suits were so tight, there was nothing left to the imagination about the body inside. They also helped hold things in place. Even Ha-Shin’s figure looked pretty good in her suit. He looked back at Ha-Shin. She recognized the appraising look in his eyes.
Before she could say anything, a computerized male voice came over the PA. “Life support and ancillary systems now in cruise mode. Ship is in deep sleep mode. Oxygen levels in this room will not be replenished until pre-emergence sequence begins.”
“That’s our cue Marshall.”
He nodded and sat on his stasis chamber. Unlike the others, he could make the connections between his suit and the chamber while sitting. Once he did, he swung his legs up on the bed and popped the tablet in his mouth. As he laid his head on the bed, he was barely aware of the glass sliding quietly into place as he faded off to sleep.
A couple minutes later, the lights in the room faded to black as the commander too, sunk into a deep, coma-like sleep.
The ship continued on into the void. It was a 300 foot long, 70 foot diameter cylinder. Each end tapered to a point like an armor piercing bullet. Half-way between the ends of the cylinder, the hull bulged out another fifteen feet to enclose part of the gravity drive. After the transition, a long spike extended from the forward tip of the ship. It then expanded out, like a flower blooming to become a 100 foot diameter disk. Water was pumped from tanks inside the ship out through small openings in the disk which built up a layer of ice a foot thick. As collisions with dust in interstellar space, eroded the disk, more water would be pumped forward to fill and replace the lost ice. A thousand mile long filament spooled out behind the ship. As the ship travelled through the star’s and the galaxy’s magnetic fields, a small current of electricity was induced in the filament which would power the ship for the trip.
For one-hundred twelve years it coasted through the void towards the Sol system. A year before the cruise ended, the computers on board began the involved process of awakening the ship and crew. A week before the scheduled transition event, the stasis chambers for Marshall and Ha-Shin began awakening them.
The next thing, Marshall was aware of, the glass cylinder rotated away into the side of the chamber. When he opened his eyes, he saw Ha-Shin looking down at him.
“Get the rest of the crew awake first. Save the techie’s until we’re all awake.”
He nodded. They spent the week waking the rest of the crew and checking the ship to make certain it had made the trip without any problems. Once the ship was checked out, it was time to revive the technicians. Marshall revived Alvarando first since she was the lead technician. He walked up to the cylinder and looked in at her. She still had the same little pouting expression. He punched the revive button at the head of the chamber. With a quiet click, latches released and the glass rotated back into the chamber.
He indulged himself and allowed himself to watch her intently as she began to revive. It was regulation anyway. In a few moments she blinked her eyes. For a second there was panic in her face. She started to sit up.
“Whoa there,” Marshall said as he gently held her down with his right hand.
She laid back down and turned to face him. The pout disappeared from her face. “Wanted to wake me first is that it?” she winked and smiled.
The moment for him vanished. Her shoulder was warm though he noticed. He imagined what the softness of her lips and skin would be like, but he caught himself before those thoughts got any further. He was grateful the chemicals in the perfume hadn’t lasted the trip. She had the smell of a woman who’d been in a stasis chamber. It wasn’t exactly nice, it was more pungent like week old socks. He watched her face as she detected the scent.
“Oh, yuck, what is that smell?”
“You ma’am,”
She glared at him,“Really?”
He nodded.
“I need a shower.”
“Just remember, no more perfume.”
“Has it really been a hundred years? I fell asleep just a minute ago it seems.”
“Marvels of technology and the laws of chaotic relativity,” he answered. He continued when he saw the puzzled look in her face. “Think of the universe as a two dimensional thing. Then think of another universe like it but different and next to it.”
“Like two sheets of graphene?” she asked.
Marshall thought a moment about her answer, then nodded, “Yeah, that works really well. What do you know about graphene?”
“It’s used a lot in the molecular motors and components we use for actuators and the like. It’s a lattice of carbon atoms one atom thick with the atoms sharing electrons.”
He nodded and she smiled.
“Very good! These two universes, share a common structure, with stars forming the nodes of the lattice rather than carbon atoms.”
“Which is why we transition close to stars?”
Marshall nodded, “Yes, the closer we get to the star or the more massive it is, the easier it is for us to transition between universes.”
“But,” she continued, cutting him off, “because they are two different universes, they are not joined by time. So the time flow in one doesn’t affect time flow in the other.”
She got smarter and cuter as she went he concluded. “Yes, so when we re-enter our universe we do so at the same time we left it.”
“So how do objects in the two universes stay in the same relative position? If they’re not bound by time?”
“They’re bound by gravity. Beyond that, the math to explain chaotic relativity goes like this.”
He waved a hand over his head. She laughed. He thought it sounded like the tinkling of a wind chime. She was hot! He disconnected the tubing and sensor leads of her suit from the chamber.
“Now, I need to wake the rest of your team. Our mission briefing is in two hours.”
She smiled then got up off the bed and went to change. This time, he noted, she changed in the dressing room.
Two hours later the entire crew was assembled in the ship’s small wardroom. The commander stood at the commander’s table. Behind her was a display that filled the entire wall. On it was a map of the inner five planets of a star system. Marshall darkened the room’s lights as she began speaking. This time, the crew and technicians were all wearing pressure suits. Everyone already had their skull caps on to control their hair. Aside from the faces, the easiest way to tell them apart was the crew chatted amongst each other while the technicians were quiet and glanced around the room.
“This is the latest intel we have. A Republic convoy, consisting of about twenty freighters bound for Beta Hydri VI has jumped into the Sol system.”
A blinking light appeared on the far left edge of the screen. On the far right was a yellow circle indicating the star. The orbital paths of five planets and an asteroid belt was visible on the screen.
She continued, “It’s being guarded by one Adventurer class escort ship and an attached Dragon class interceptor. As near as we can tell, they jumped into the system here,” she pointed at the blinking light, “which is a point approximately one point five astronomical units above the system ecliptic. We will transition into the same system near Venus in about six hours.”
A green “x” appeared on the edge of the second orbital path.
”It will be 0745 standard time when we transition. Our mission is to lure the Adventurer in close enough for us to test a new system designed to disable Republic warships. Our role is to jam it’s ability to communicate with its headquarters, then disable it. Once disabled, our sister ship, ‘Seven’ will destroy the ship with an upgraded laser.”
“Our plan is to deploy out to where the convoy will turn around Jupiter here,” she pointed at the fifth planet’s orbital track. On the track was a smaller grey disk representing the planet.
“They will have to engage us. If they don’t we can and have been ordered to destroy the convoy. This mission is not without risk. If the test fails, we will certainly be engaged in a pitched fight with a capable opponent. The ‘Five’ has served the Alliance well in the past. We will again today. I wish to remind you that the Adventurer is every bit as capable a warship, even superior in some ways than our ship. Don’t be careless. Do your duty and we will prevail.”
“Now, a recorded message from the Emperor,” she said as she turned to Marshall who held a controller for a hidden projector.
The display of the star system faded to black. Then an image of the Emperor appeared. There were some whispers and comments as people recognized the time of the recording from a clock displayed behind the emperor. It was less than an hour old.
“To the gallant crews of the 'Five’ and ‘Seven’. This war between the freedom loving peoples of the Alliance and the power hungry rulers of the Republic of planets began decades ago to right the injustices perpetrated upon us centuries earlier when our two colonies were established and continue on to our day.”
The fleet’s anthem began to play quietly in the background behind the emperor’s voice.
The Emperor continued, “Through tireless hours of selfless effort, scientists of the Alliance have developed a weapon that will disable the warships of the Republic. This new weapon, once brought into full service in the fleet, will significantly weaken the warships of the Republic and bring to a quick conclusion, the end of this very costly war. Many of your countrymen’s lives will be saved by what you test today. It has already been tested extensively in our laboratories, but needs this final test in actual combat circumstances before we can deploy it widely throughout the fleet. I thank you for your courage and your gallantry.”
The image faded to a waving flag of the Alliance and the volume of the music increased. When the anthem ended, the lights came back up.
Ha-Shin walked to the center again and spoke, “You know your orders and your duties. We transition in less than six hours. Seven hours after that, we will engage the Adventurer. Good hunting.”
With that she left the room and everyone else returned to their duty station or bunks.
On time, the two ships transitioned into normal space near Venus. The planet was a rocky world buried under a thick atmosphere of Carbon monoxide. As soon as they did, “Five” began jamming the Republic fleet’s communication channels. The two ships immediately began cruising out towards the fifth planet. Forty-four minutes into their trip, they detected the dropping of the convoy into the system.
***
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Sub-commander Merlin Marshall chaffed at the presence of all the imperial technicians that were aboard his ship. Like maggots burrowing through rotting bread, they’d burrowed into panels and sub-systems in his ship replacing components and apparently haphazardly adding things until it barely looked like the polished and spit-shine clean machine he strove to have. Now, like moldy bread, the consoles had data bundles running from behind loosely connected panels. Every section of the ship had been affected. They’d also removed his communication antenna array and replaced it with a hodgepodge collection of antennas and components he couldn’t identify.
That they’d made a mess of his ship bothered him. That much of what they’d done, he didn’t understand troubled him greatly. For the umpteenth time he called up the mission orders on his comm display and read the orders about this. He gritted his teeth and let the technicians continue to work on his ship.
“I can’t wait for them to be gone, either,” said his commander, Ha-Shin. The woman’s gravely voice caught him by surprise and he jerked around to look at her where she sat in her acceleration couch next to him. As commander, she sat in the left seat.
He nodded his head. “Must be reading my mind.”
She snickered. The brief smile split her lined and weathered fact into a million lines. The crows feet around her eyes made her jade green eyes sparkle.
“You young pups are too easy to read. Plus, you’re reading those tasking orders again.”
She reached across the console in front of him and tapped the display with her gloved hand. The orders vanished.
“Look, Marshall,” she paused to get his full attention.
He regarded her for an instant as she paused to continue. She was easily into her second century. While her face showed the years, her figure, even clad in a full pressure suit, as was required when combat was imminent, was as trim and athletic as his. Her hair which was just beginning to streak with strands of silver was flaming red. While she kept it cut short to fit in the skull cap their helmets required, there was always a curl of her bangs showing under the cap. No matter what she did, it was always there. It had gotten her, her call sign, ‘Curls’.
She continued softly, almost whispering, “These technicians come directly from the Imperium.”
That explains, he thought to himself, why the females among these technicians were the hottest things he’d ever seen in a jumpsuit and at the same time were totally oblivious to him.
“Marshall,” she rasped, “pay attention. Don’t let your gonads get in front of your thinking. I’m trying to tell you these people have access and visibility that you don’t want to mess with. This test has visibility you don’t want to mess with.”
“What do you mean, Ma’am?” he asked.
“While you were stewing in your juices, I got an update to our orders.”
“Oh?”
She turned away long enough to look around the cramped flight deck and through the open hatch that led to the rest of the ship’s interior where the other technicians were working. She turned back to him.
“Yeah, we and the Seven, move pretty soon.”
“Our sister ship?”
She nodded, “Yes, could leave any moment. When we do, the telemetry from the mission will be relayed via sub-link directly back to the Imperium itself.”
“You mean the Emperor himself will see this?”
She rolled her eyes and nodded.
“The Jackal too?”
She cut him off with a harsh shush, “Shush you fool! Yes, people disappear for less than what you just said!”
He gulped.
“Now, get your eyeballs caged and focused on our mission. Got it?”
“Yes, Mam,” he said as he turned back to his console to review the ship’s status and to go over the list of issues the technicians still wanted them to address.
As he did, she muttered softly, “Those ground pounders can’t roll like a real spacer anyway.”
The comment caught him off guard and he cringed as he thought of his commander in that activity. The next thing he felt was her slugging him in the arm.
“Get to work.”
He glanced back at her. There was a trace of a grin in her face as she ignored him and turned to her list of things to do.
One by one, they finished tasks. Finally the lead technician, an alabaster colored woman with the most amazing electric blue hair Marshall had ever seen, stepped to the back of the flight deck. Marshall had been too busy to see her come, but she wore a perfume that was like her personal signature. It strong but not overpowering and like nothing he’d ever smelled on anyone else. She tapped on the bulkhead.
“Lead Technician Alvarando, requesting permission to enter the flight deck, Ma’am.”
Marshall kept concentrating on his list of tasks. There had to be a pheromone in her perfume because as she got closer he could feel himself reacting to her proximity. He could feel a wave of desire wash over him.
Ha-Shin answered, “State your purpose? Is it urgent?”
“We have new requirements, commander. It is not otherwise urgent,” said the woman.
“I see…,” there was a pause before she continued, “Ms. Alvarando what perfume are you wearing?”
“Morning Fantasy, commander. Do you like it?”
“No, in fact, while you are on my ship you are to immediately shower and get that off of you.”
“Commander, it is authorized in the Imperium. Even desired,” she answered.
“Ms. Alvarando,” Ha-Shin’s speaking slowed.
At this point Marshall dared to turn and look to see what was happening. Ha-Shin was turning in her couch to face the other woman who still stood outside the flight deck. Alvarando was tall, nearly six feet. In her mid-twenties Marshall thought. She had dark aquamarine eyes that went well with her blue hair. She wore her hair pulled back in a braided pony-tail. Marshall could tell that undone, it would have covered her shoulders and dropped probably to her waist. Despite the bagginess of the flight suit, her figure along with the effects of the perfume were nearly overpowering.
Ha-Shin continued, “In the Imperium you’re welcome to wear whatever the regulations allow. But out here, in my ship, especially in a combat zone, the last thing my crew needs is some dim-witted technician walking around smelling like a two-bit whore who’s in heat. Plus, get your uniform in compliance with fleet regulations. Do you understand?”
Marshall wondered at that and then noticed that Alvarando’s flight suit, instead of being zipped to the top and snapped shut it was unsnapped and unzipped.
“And in case your fellow technicians haven’t gotten the word, they are to dress the same way,” she was almost roaring now.
Alvarando glared back at her, saluted and then left, stepping so heavily it was almost stomping.
Once the woman was gone, Ha-Shin continued softly, “That was way overdue.”
Marshall raised his eyebrows at the comment.
“We have work to do, sub-commander.”
Before he could respond, a comm chime sounded. It was an intercom call from the communications station beneath them.
“Flight deck, Comms,” the voice was that of Specialist Derling who acted as corpsman and communications officer.
Marshall answered, “Flight deck.”
“Tasking order from the fleet, sir, priority blue.”
“Read it.”
“Message begins: ‘Initiate mission by 0745 standard time. ROE is Victor-Bravo.’”
Marshall knew without looking at a clock that meant they had less than 10 minutes to get underway and make the transition to null-space. Alvarando’s shower would have to wait. He actually didn’t mind that.
Ha-Shin spoke, “Plot me a course to the nearest transition point we can reach with a five minute burn. I’ll coordinate with Seven.”
“Aye, sir,” he answered.
His ship, a LongBow class gunboat, number 305 or simply, “Five” in their squadron of four ships was directly orbiting Epsilon indi about fifty-million miles from the star. The nearest planet, a gas giant, was 20 million miles further out and directly ahead of them. The task force had been on station for several days waiting for this moment. After the planning had been done, the ships, Seven and Five began accelerating away from the fleet. Unlike the rest of the fleet which used electric drives, the two ships began moving as their drives began amplifying the gravitational attraction between the two ships, the star and the planet that lay actually some 86 million miles away.
Ha-Shin by now had donned her skull cap and helmet. The rest of the crew was fully suited. The technicians sat in the acceleration couches and waited for transition to occur. It took five minutes to accelerate to ten percent light, transition speed. Then, in the blink of an eye, the two ships simply disappeared from this universe as they transitioned into the null-time universe.
The transition effect onboard the ship was nothing more than a fleeting instant of vertigo.
“Ok, Marshall, how do we look?” asked Ha-Shin.
“Sir, we’re safely into null-time space. Ship status is nominal.”
“OK, I’ll run the post-transition checklist here. Get down to the stasis chambers and get everyone tucked away. We’re eleven point two light years from Sol, it’s going to be a 112 year trip.”
Marshall nodded as he released his harness and clambered out of the couch. He worked his way down to the stasis chamber where the rest of the crew and technicians were gathering.
Familiar with the process, the crew went about their business of changing out of their pressure suits and into stasis suits. The technicians huddled in a knot away from the crew waiting to be told what to do. The stasis suits looked like wet-suits used for sea diving, but they had additional wires and tubes attached to them.
Marshall walked over to the technicians. For the first time since they’d been on the ship, they weren’t as smug as they’d been earlier.
Marshall started speaking, “May I have your attention?”
There were nods and grunts from the group. He avoided eye contact with Alvarando. She still had the perfume on and the other two female technicians were also wearing perfumes that had a similar effect.
He focused on the men and continued, “These are standard fleet stasis tubes. You used them to get here. You’ll use them to get back to the Imperium. Everyone else in the fleet uses them, unless you want to hang around in the ship by yourself for more than a century. Unless you have any questions, you’ve heard the lecture before. Remember, wear no jewelry and no implants of any type. I’m assuming since you’re all here, none of you have an internal implant. Right?”
He let the question hang. No one answered.
“Fine. You can change here or in a dressing room over there.” He pointed at an open arch into a side room. “If you haven’t already, go to the bath room. You don’t want a mess on your hands when you wake up. Take your clothes off and put on the stasis suit. There’s a chamber for each of you. You’ll find your suit in your chamber. Once you are dressed in the suit, check with me and I’ll make certain you have it on correctly. Any questions?”
Again there were none.
“Then get going. Power lasts only another two hours before everything is shut down.”
He didn’t wait around, but went to get into his own suit. As he did, he noticed most of the men simply began to strip and change in the chamber as the rest of the crew had done. Two of the women went into the dressing room. Alvarando didn’t. He didn’t need the distraction so he turned away to concentrate on getting into his suit.
After several minutes, he turned back to face them. All of them were in the suits. A couple of the men, those who were standing closest to Alvarando, had problems with their suits. He guessed it was because they were too busy watching her change rather than pay attention to what they were doing. He fixed the issues fairly quickly, then took them one at a time to their chamber. He left Alvarando for last.
By the time he was ready to put her in her chamber, the rest of the crew were in their chambers. They appeared to be sleeping.
“So, ready to put me into bed?” she asked coyly.
He sighed, “Chamber, yes. Bed, no.”
Undeterred, she continued, “Is everything in place?” She shimmied sensuously in front of him.
He glanced at her figure, which was much more clearly revealed in the stasis suit than the jump suits. It was by force of will that he concentrated on the connections and placement of the tubes rather than the body beneath them.
He finally answered, “Yes, ma’am everything is in place. Now, take this pill.”
He handed her a small blue tablet in a plastic wrapper.
“Just swallow? I need a glass of water.”
“No ma’am, just put it under your tongue. It’ll dissolve in place.”
He held out the tablet again.
“You want to place it?” she cooed.
“I don’t have time for this, ma’am.”
“But we have more than a hundred years?”
“No, ma’am we don’t.”
She harrumphed and snatched the tablet from his hand. Ripped it out of the wrapper and placed it under her tongue in one fluid movement.
“Now, please get in the chamber and lay down on the pad.”
This she did, pouting at him all the while. Once she was down, the tabled took effect quickly and before he’d finished making the connections, she was sound asleep. In a couple of minutes, she was in the stasis state. He touched the controls at the head of the chamber that rotated the clear containment wall in place. When it finished, she was sleeping inside a clear glass cylinder. He stood up and patted the glass softly. He heard someone approach him from behind.
“She was a handful wasn’t she,” said Ha-Shin behind him. Marshall turned to face her. She was already in her stasis suit. Unlike everyone else’s suits which were grey colored crew suits, her’s like his, was a gold colored command suit. Unlike his, her’s had a white band around each sleeve indicating her status as ship commander.
“No kidding! What a tart! She didn’t stop.”
“You handled yourself well. I admire an officer who doesn’t go rutting around with anyone who makes a play like she did.”
Marshall looked down at the sleeping woman. He had to admit, even without the presence of the pheromone laden perfume, she was very attractive. The suits were so tight, there was nothing left to the imagination about the body inside. They also helped hold things in place. Even Ha-Shin’s figure looked pretty good in her suit. He looked back at Ha-Shin. She recognized the appraising look in his eyes.
Before she could say anything, a computerized male voice came over the PA. “Life support and ancillary systems now in cruise mode. Ship is in deep sleep mode. Oxygen levels in this room will not be replenished until pre-emergence sequence begins.”
“That’s our cue Marshall.”
He nodded and sat on his stasis chamber. Unlike the others, he could make the connections between his suit and the chamber while sitting. Once he did, he swung his legs up on the bed and popped the tablet in his mouth. As he laid his head on the bed, he was barely aware of the glass sliding quietly into place as he faded off to sleep.
A couple minutes later, the lights in the room faded to black as the commander too, sunk into a deep, coma-like sleep.
The ship continued on into the void. It was a 300 foot long, 70 foot diameter cylinder. Each end tapered to a point like an armor piercing bullet. Half-way between the ends of the cylinder, the hull bulged out another fifteen feet to enclose part of the gravity drive. After the transition, a long spike extended from the forward tip of the ship. It then expanded out, like a flower blooming to become a 100 foot diameter disk. Water was pumped from tanks inside the ship out through small openings in the disk which built up a layer of ice a foot thick. As collisions with dust in interstellar space, eroded the disk, more water would be pumped forward to fill and replace the lost ice. A thousand mile long filament spooled out behind the ship. As the ship travelled through the star’s and the galaxy’s magnetic fields, a small current of electricity was induced in the filament which would power the ship for the trip.
For one-hundred twelve years it coasted through the void towards the Sol system. A year before the cruise ended, the computers on board began the involved process of awakening the ship and crew. A week before the scheduled transition event, the stasis chambers for Marshall and Ha-Shin began awakening them.
The next thing, Marshall was aware of, the glass cylinder rotated away into the side of the chamber. When he opened his eyes, he saw Ha-Shin looking down at him.
“Get the rest of the crew awake first. Save the techie’s until we’re all awake.”
He nodded. They spent the week waking the rest of the crew and checking the ship to make certain it had made the trip without any problems. Once the ship was checked out, it was time to revive the technicians. Marshall revived Alvarando first since she was the lead technician. He walked up to the cylinder and looked in at her. She still had the same little pouting expression. He punched the revive button at the head of the chamber. With a quiet click, latches released and the glass rotated back into the chamber.
He indulged himself and allowed himself to watch her intently as she began to revive. It was regulation anyway. In a few moments she blinked her eyes. For a second there was panic in her face. She started to sit up.
“Whoa there,” Marshall said as he gently held her down with his right hand.
She laid back down and turned to face him. The pout disappeared from her face. “Wanted to wake me first is that it?” she winked and smiled.
The moment for him vanished. Her shoulder was warm though he noticed. He imagined what the softness of her lips and skin would be like, but he caught himself before those thoughts got any further. He was grateful the chemicals in the perfume hadn’t lasted the trip. She had the smell of a woman who’d been in a stasis chamber. It wasn’t exactly nice, it was more pungent like week old socks. He watched her face as she detected the scent.
“Oh, yuck, what is that smell?”
“You ma’am,”
She glared at him,“Really?”
He nodded.
“I need a shower.”
“Just remember, no more perfume.”
“Has it really been a hundred years? I fell asleep just a minute ago it seems.”
“Marvels of technology and the laws of chaotic relativity,” he answered. He continued when he saw the puzzled look in her face. “Think of the universe as a two dimensional thing. Then think of another universe like it but different and next to it.”
“Like two sheets of graphene?” she asked.
Marshall thought a moment about her answer, then nodded, “Yeah, that works really well. What do you know about graphene?”
“It’s used a lot in the molecular motors and components we use for actuators and the like. It’s a lattice of carbon atoms one atom thick with the atoms sharing electrons.”
He nodded and she smiled.
“Very good! These two universes, share a common structure, with stars forming the nodes of the lattice rather than carbon atoms.”
“Which is why we transition close to stars?”
Marshall nodded, “Yes, the closer we get to the star or the more massive it is, the easier it is for us to transition between universes.”
“But,” she continued, cutting him off, “because they are two different universes, they are not joined by time. So the time flow in one doesn’t affect time flow in the other.”
She got smarter and cuter as she went he concluded. “Yes, so when we re-enter our universe we do so at the same time we left it.”
“So how do objects in the two universes stay in the same relative position? If they’re not bound by time?”
“They’re bound by gravity. Beyond that, the math to explain chaotic relativity goes like this.”
He waved a hand over his head. She laughed. He thought it sounded like the tinkling of a wind chime. She was hot! He disconnected the tubing and sensor leads of her suit from the chamber.
“Now, I need to wake the rest of your team. Our mission briefing is in two hours.”
She smiled then got up off the bed and went to change. This time, he noted, she changed in the dressing room.
Two hours later the entire crew was assembled in the ship’s small wardroom. The commander stood at the commander’s table. Behind her was a display that filled the entire wall. On it was a map of the inner five planets of a star system. Marshall darkened the room’s lights as she began speaking. This time, the crew and technicians were all wearing pressure suits. Everyone already had their skull caps on to control their hair. Aside from the faces, the easiest way to tell them apart was the crew chatted amongst each other while the technicians were quiet and glanced around the room.
“This is the latest intel we have. A Republic convoy, consisting of about twenty freighters bound for Beta Hydri VI has jumped into the Sol system.”
A blinking light appeared on the far left edge of the screen. On the far right was a yellow circle indicating the star. The orbital paths of five planets and an asteroid belt was visible on the screen.
She continued, “It’s being guarded by one Adventurer class escort ship and an attached Dragon class interceptor. As near as we can tell, they jumped into the system here,” she pointed at the blinking light, “which is a point approximately one point five astronomical units above the system ecliptic. We will transition into the same system near Venus in about six hours.”
A green “x” appeared on the edge of the second orbital path.
”It will be 0745 standard time when we transition. Our mission is to lure the Adventurer in close enough for us to test a new system designed to disable Republic warships. Our role is to jam it’s ability to communicate with its headquarters, then disable it. Once disabled, our sister ship, ‘Seven’ will destroy the ship with an upgraded laser.”
“Our plan is to deploy out to where the convoy will turn around Jupiter here,” she pointed at the fifth planet’s orbital track. On the track was a smaller grey disk representing the planet.
“They will have to engage us. If they don’t we can and have been ordered to destroy the convoy. This mission is not without risk. If the test fails, we will certainly be engaged in a pitched fight with a capable opponent. The ‘Five’ has served the Alliance well in the past. We will again today. I wish to remind you that the Adventurer is every bit as capable a warship, even superior in some ways than our ship. Don’t be careless. Do your duty and we will prevail.”
“Now, a recorded message from the Emperor,” she said as she turned to Marshall who held a controller for a hidden projector.
The display of the star system faded to black. Then an image of the Emperor appeared. There were some whispers and comments as people recognized the time of the recording from a clock displayed behind the emperor. It was less than an hour old.
“To the gallant crews of the 'Five’ and ‘Seven’. This war between the freedom loving peoples of the Alliance and the power hungry rulers of the Republic of planets began decades ago to right the injustices perpetrated upon us centuries earlier when our two colonies were established and continue on to our day.”
The fleet’s anthem began to play quietly in the background behind the emperor’s voice.
The Emperor continued, “Through tireless hours of selfless effort, scientists of the Alliance have developed a weapon that will disable the warships of the Republic. This new weapon, once brought into full service in the fleet, will significantly weaken the warships of the Republic and bring to a quick conclusion, the end of this very costly war. Many of your countrymen’s lives will be saved by what you test today. It has already been tested extensively in our laboratories, but needs this final test in actual combat circumstances before we can deploy it widely throughout the fleet. I thank you for your courage and your gallantry.”
The image faded to a waving flag of the Alliance and the volume of the music increased. When the anthem ended, the lights came back up.
Ha-Shin walked to the center again and spoke, “You know your orders and your duties. We transition in less than six hours. Seven hours after that, we will engage the Adventurer. Good hunting.”
With that she left the room and everyone else returned to their duty station or bunks.
On time, the two ships transitioned into normal space near Venus. The planet was a rocky world buried under a thick atmosphere of Carbon monoxide. As soon as they did, “Five” began jamming the Republic fleet’s communication channels. The two ships immediately began cruising out towards the fifth planet. Forty-four minutes into their trip, they detected the dropping of the convoy into the system.
***
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If you'd like to join our waiting list to be notified when the next episode is available in the Kindle store, click here.
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