The Alpha Protocol: Alpha Protocol Book 1

by Duncan M. Hamilton

  ‘Who do you think did it?’ Corporal Féng said.

  ‘We don’t know yet, but questions and answers can be dealt with once we’re moving. Mister Vachon, I want you back in the engine room squeezing every joule out of that power plant. I need the agitator ready to fire the moment we get to the Nexus portal. Understood?’

  ‘Aye, Lieutenant. She’s been used recently enough, so I’m not expecting any problems.’

  ‘Rating Kushnir, help Lieutenant Harper with whatever she needs,’ Samson said. ‘Price, you and Corporals Féng and Smit finish your search of the ship. I want eyes on every nook and cranny. Until I have reason to believe otherwise, there may be objects on this ship that present a danger to us.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Price said. ‘We don’t have much more of the ship to cover. There’s not that much of her.’

  ‘Good. Harper, any sign of the orb or the piece of metal in the debris?’

  ‘No, sir. I uploaded the details to the ship’s computer from my personal scanner, and there’s no trace of them.’

  ‘Well, either they were destroyed, or that’s what the mystery ship came to take. For some reason, I suspect the latter. Otherwise, it’s all just a big coincidence, and as a Navy lawyer recently told me, there’s no such thing. Now we just need to know why, and who the hell they are.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to get anything else, sir,’ Harper said. ‘These scanners just aren’t powerful enough. We can leave whenever you want and can try to piece together the data we have on the move.’

  ‘Excellent, thank you, Lieutenant. All hands, prepare to sail.’

  With the Bounty’s navigation computer running, albeit at far from an optimal level, he was able to locate the nearest Nexus portal in the system, and set the computer to calculate a course. Gorged on more power than it had received in some time, it processed the complex calculations at a respectable rate. He waited for it to complete, then, satisfied that everything was in order, he executed the navigation solution and fired the engines. The sensation of thrust pushing him back into his seat came as a relief. The sooner they were clear of the danger area, the better.

  He looked around at everyone carrying out his orders, and felt like he’d conned them into believing he was a real bridge officer. It was too surreal to accept that he was dealing with this. As bizarre as it felt, he knew the danger was still very real, and it was up to him to lead them out of it. With no weapons and a paper-thin hull, they would be a sitting duck if the attacker came back. He couldn’t even hope they were fast enough to get away if whatever destroyed the Sidewinder gave chase.

  With the ship’s computers taking care of the trip to the Nexus portal, there was nothing to do but sit back and try to make sense of everything that had happened. And worry.

  6

  Samson could feel his temples throb as he tried to comprehend what had happened. The destruction of the Sidewinder. The discovery of strange artefacts—artefacts that Samson couldn’t help but feel looked like they’d been made by a civilisation that was not human. He couldn’t quite bring himself to use the word ‘alien’. Despite all that had happened, that simply felt like too much of a stretch. Now there was a mystery ship to consider too. Even with all the questions buzzing around in his mind, there was one thing dominating his thoughts. Aliens. Might they really have stumbled onto evidence of their existence? Might the ship have been the aliens coming to collect their property?

  He didn’t know why he’d moved to thinking of the mystery ship as an alien one, but he couldn’t envisage a human vessel with the power to so completely destroy the Sidewinder out in this part of space. A technologically superior race that was happy to solve its problems with weapons was about as bad a scenario as could be imagined.

  Samson couldn’t dismiss Harper’s suggestion of corporates. Considering the alternative, it was the preferable explanation. As she had said, it wouldn’t be the first time one had tried to use force to get what they wanted, and there were always rumours that one of them was trying to set up their own independent star system. An alien technology was certainly a big enough reward to risk facing down the Navy, and he could think of nearly a dozen companies that rivalled the Navy for resources.

  He wondered where Arlen had found those things, and when. Might they have been his first discovery, or had he been smuggling objects like these for a while? It was an intriguing thought, and was entirely possible considering that Harper had said Arlen had put in quite a bit of mileage in the Bounty.

  It had always struck Samson as arrogant that mankind had concluded they were alone in the universe. With over a septillion stars, it seemed unlikely to him that the only life to occur had been on Earth. Numbers with that many zeroes—twenty-four in total—made Samson dizzy. However, considering the vast distances involved—the universe extended for forty-seven billion light years in every direction, probably more—even with the convenience of the Nexus, it was unlikely that different races would ever encounter one another even if the universe were teeming with life.

  Now, however, it seemed likely that humans had finally expanded into space that was inhabited by something else, or at least had been at some point in the past. It was exciting to think he was one of the first people to know about it; terrifying to think that lives had been lost in relation to it already.

  He wondered how his superiors would react. He hadn’t been out on the Frontier long enough for his mind to have cracked, but he supposed they might see it as a ruse to ingratiate his way back to a decent posting in a Core System. His word wasn’t going to count for a whole lot, and now the only evidence he had was some scanner logs.

  The potential discovery of an alien civilisation aside, there was more to consider. Who else might know enough about the artefacts to risk destroying a naval vessel to acquire them, if indeed that was the reason for Sidewinder’s destruction? If Arlen had been smuggling the artefacts, then someone was buying them. Where were they going? If there was a buyer, then they might lead to answers. Then again, perhaps this had been Arlen’s first, and failed, attempt at artefact smuggling.

  He took a deep breath and realised he was overthinking things. The questions he was asking were well above his pay grade, and were problems that were far down his list of priorities. His only responsibility was to get the sailors under his command to safety and make his report to his senior officers. As soon as he did, the rest would be taken out of his hands. Still, there wasn’t much else to do while they were en route to the Nexus portal, and raking over it was as interesting a way to pass the time as any. Certainly better than cleaning up the Bounty.

  He wondered if Harper was having any more luck than he was. ‘Have you been able to come up with anything else, Lieutenant?’

  She hesitated. ‘Nothing concrete so far, sir. The sensors didn’t pick up enough for the computers to extrapolate anything else. I might be able to discern more with the computers at the depot, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.’

  ‘You sound like you’re holding something back.’

  ‘No—well, maybe. I don’t have enough to be sure, but something seems odd about the attacker’s exhaust signature. The harmonics are… I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining it. I have data on it. Maybe more processing power will turn something up. I’d rather not elaborate until I have more to go on.’

  ‘Understood,’ Samson said, wondering if that might confirm his suspicion that the ship was an alien one. ‘You can stand down for a while. Relax and get some rest.’

  She visibly deflated at the order, and started to sob.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I was aboard the Sidewinder for three years. They were family.’

  Samson had never been good at dealing with crying people. A pat on the back and a suggestion they’d get over it never seemed to be greeted in the way it was intended. Compassion was not one of his strong suits. ‘Take some time to yourself. Find somewhere quiet. Preferably not too dirty.’

  She let out a laugh between sobs. ‘Thank you, sir.’
/>
  ‘I’ve got things covered here, at least until we reach the portal. I’ll call you if I need anything.’

  One of the greatest challenges of stellar space travel was boredom. Travel between systems was comparatively fast with the aid of the Nexus Current. It allowed a ship to traverse the swath of space between star systems in only hours, while moving between planets within a system using conventional drives took days, sometimes even weeks. In the Navy, that wasn’t so much of a problem. One of its basic tenets of discipline was to keep everyone as busy as they could. Every hour of every day was accounted for, and after a few years in the service, boredom became a concept you’d heard of but couldn’t quite remember. That was not the case on the Bounty.

  Her nav computer wasn’t going to make life easier for them, either. The general approach to space travel was to get to a Nexus Point, fire the agitator—a large energy discharge from the device, which was essentially a capacitor with aiming ability—to open the Nexus, enter it, and then try to drop out of it as close to your intended destination as you could, not just somewhere in the target system. It took a huge amount of processor power to make the calculations needed to do it with any accuracy. A basic nav computer would get you to your intended system, but not much more. Ships of the line, with massive banks of computing power, had been known to drop out of the Nexus almost in the orbit of their target planet. With the Bounty’s computer, Samson would be delighted with appearing within a few days of Holmwood in Capsilan. Just arriving in the Capsilan system would do, though.

  The agitator also had a second function as a shield generator. The Nexus Current was hard on objects entering into it. A ship could only spend a limited amount of time in the Current, something that was determined by its structural strength, its size, and whatever amount of shielding the agitator generated after it was fired—the combination of which made up a ship’s Nexus Integrity Rating. Samson knew the Bounty’s superstructure was nothing to boast about, so they’d be relying on whatever shielding the agitator could provide. That meant topping it up with power as high as they dared, rather than the minimum amount needed to open a portal, increasing the risk of catastrophic failure along with every extra joule.

  Risk explosion from overpowering the agitator, or disintegration in the Current. Why couldn’t the decisions ever be easy? He supposed if he had been looking for easy, he should have chosen another career.

  It was a common problem, and one he’d had to consider theoretically a number of times before. It was curious how being in the situation for real focused the mind. Ships had to leapfrog through systems for longer trips, their time in the Current dictated by their Nexus Integrity. The overall journey was prolonged by the amount of time the ship needed to recharge the agitator and travel through the system to the next Nexus portal—the only places where the Current could be entered. The strategy of Current navigation was a major component of the curriculum at the Academy, even for those who weren’t on the astronavigation track. Each ship had to compute its own course, charge its own agitator, and consider its time in the Current according to its own capabilities.

  All of this made moving a fleet of ships complicated, all the more so when each vessel could spend a different amount of time in the Current. Deploying a fleet directly into combat was one of the most high-stress jobs in the Navy, although Samson felt his predicament was inching close. He had no idea what the Bounty’s Nexus Integrity Rating was, so assuming even a five-minute transit in the Nexus was safe would be an act of guesswork based on virtually nothing. Of course, five minutes would get them nowhere. The time he had in mind was more like five hours. The Sidewinder had been capable of ten. A large capital ship might manage as much as thirty-six before starting to take damage. Could he take the chance that the Bounty might be safe for a measly five hours?

  If Arlen had been involved in inter-system smuggling within that sector, it made sense that his ship would be capable of making the shortest of transits between systems. Samson tried to be content with that, but it was easier said than done.

  The agitator, into which every joule of their spare power was being poured, could fail in any number of ways, both spectacular and unremarkable. It might fail to hold the charge past a certain point, releasing all that it had in an explosion that would destroy the Bounty. It might not be able to direct enough energy into the Nexus portal to open it, meaning they were stranded. It might fail at a critical point and flood the ship with all the excess energy, frying every system, likely killing everyone on board and leaving the Bounty a hulk drifting through Frontier space until it eventually got pulled into a gravity well. He was sure he could come up with more scenarios, but forced himself to stop.

  The simple fact was, the ship wasn’t fit to sustain seven people for very long, and in that part of space, rescue would come too late, if at all. Waiting for help was a death sentence. The agitator and Holmwood were their best options. Trying to make it back to Dobson, the system’s only inhabited planet, in the hope of waiting there until a supply ship stopped by or the Navy came looking for them would have been possible with a smaller crew. He’d run the numbers, and they had no chance of making it as they were—the atmospheric control wouldn’t be able to keep up, there wasn’t enough food or water, and the longer they ran the ship, the more chance there was of her failing completely. That was assuming whoever had destroyed Sidewinder didn’t get to them first. Then there was his duty to get word back to the Admiralty of what had happened, and he could only do that from the depot. In his mind, there was only one choice.

  With the Bounty being their home until a naval relief force arrived in the sector, Samson reckoned it was time to apply naval principles and set the crew to work. There was plenty of cleaning and maintenance to be done, and after so terrible an event he didn’t want to give them too much time to mull over the loss of crewmates and friends. He certainly knew he could do with some activity to take his mind off everything. There would be time for grieving later. They had a duty to report what had happened to the Admiralty, and he had a duty to keep them all alive while they worked toward that objective.

  The first leg of their journey was the day it would take them to get to where the navigational scanner indicated the nearest Nexus portal was. In a well-maintained naval vessel, they would accelerate hard for as long as they could, before putting the engines on full reverse to decelerate as aggressively as they could get away with. Samson reckoned that type of treatment would snap the Bounty in two. He needed to be careful with her until he had a better idea of what she could handle. But that had to be balanced against the threat posed by the unidentified vessel. If they were caught and destroyed, the Navy might never discover what had happened to them, the Sidewinder, and her crew. Whatever threat lay out there would go unchallenged, until it was too late.

  Once again, the balance between being killed by the unknown or his own decisions raised its ugly head. Command really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The uniforms were a bit nicer, but was it really worth it?

  He programmed the Nexus portal as the navigation waypoint in the computer, set a conservative thrust level, and felt the gentle pressure from the engine’s response push him back into the chair in a way no modern ship’s inertial dampeners would allow.

  He could hear the dull rumble of the thrusters far behind him, and wondered if there was anything he had forgotten to check. How much fuel was left in the reaction chamber, for instance. Surely Engineer’s Mate Vachon would have mentioned it if there was only a fragment of reaction matter left? There were thousands of other details he knew he could worry about if he allowed himself to, but there was nothing to be gained by it. There was nothing he could do about the situation they were in but try to make the best of it. If something went wrong, he could deal with it when it happened. Until then, he had to sit and wait, monitoring the systems while allowing his mind to dwell on things he’d rather it didn’t dwell on. He envied the others the cleaning and maintenance duty he was about to assign them.

/>   7

  Samson had allowed his eyes to close. His mind drifted through the chaos of half-sleep—the jumbled thoughts that took on a life and form of their own, preying on the worries and anxieties that had occupied it while it was still fully awake. He recalled sitting in his quarters on Terran Union Naval Base Arcturus, where he had been confined after the mutiny was broken up, waiting for the knock on his door that he knew was coming. Waiting for the consequences which he knew would follow. He heard the knock, and jolted awake.

  The bridge was quiet, the lights dimmed. He looked at his command console, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. He was tense from the abrupt way he had woken, and took a deep breath to relax. The ship lurched as he did, throwing him forward in his seat. He gripped the armrest with one hand and scrolled through the displays on the console with the other. There were no alarms showing, but a ship didn’t behave like that unless there was something wrong.

  ‘Mister Vachon, anything to report?’

  ‘On my way to the engine bay, sir. Will update once I’m there.’

  Samson waited, and tried not to let his imagination run away from him.

  ‘I think you better come down here, sir,’ Vachon said a few moments later.

  Samson considered asking for the bad news anyway, but reckoned perhaps it was better to find out first, before the rest of the crew did. He checked everything else was in order, then called for Harper to attend on the bridge. As soon as she arrived a moment later—one of the benefits of being on so small a ship—he set off to find out what had happened.

  Vachon was standing by the power plant’s reaction chamber when Samson went into the engine bay.

  ‘What’s the problem, Mister Vachon?’

  ‘Dirty reaction matter,’ Vachon said. ‘It explains the power surge.’

  Samson went cold. ‘How dirty?’