The Alpha Protocol: Alpha Protocol Book 1

by Duncan M. Hamilton

  If he didn’t have a pressing need for Kushnir, Samson reckoned there was little harm in leaving him to stew in his juices for a while too. Dealing with them both when he’d had the chance to let his anger cool off was no bad thing either.

  He returned to the bridge and checked the power plant’s status. Satisfied there was enough to get them underway at as fast a pace as he was willing to risk, he entered a heading for the Nexus portal, and throttled up gently. He enjoyed the fleeting sensation of thrust that the Bounty’s long-dead inertial dampeners failed to eliminate. The ship reached target velocity, and the feeling disappeared. He was still breathing, and the ship was still intact. So far, so good. He’d had more than enough excitement for one day.

  10

  Any unexpected sound represented a source of momentary anxiety for Samson on the journey across the system toward the Nexus portal. It took him a moment to process the fact that the klaxon sounding on the bridge was to indicate that they’d reached their destination. He felt as though he should breathe a sigh of relief that they had made it there without any further deterioration of the reaction matter, but they weren’t out of danger yet. The agitator remained below charge, as he hadn’t dared run the power plant hard enough to provide power to both it and the propulsion system, so they had to heave to for several hours to complete the required charge.

  That meant more hours on the power plant, and more opportunity for the reaction matter to decide to completely disintegrate. All the while, there would be little for him to do other than sit and wonder if the bombardment of energy on the ship while in the Nexus Current would cause the reaction matter to go into cascade, or if the Bounty would be able to hold together long enough to make their transit to Capsilan.

  He had never heard of anyone trying to eject reaction matter while in the Current, but he couldn’t imagine the results would be good. If the Nexus Current could destroy a warship that remained within it for too long, he reckoned reaction matter would instantly detonate on contact, finishing the Bounty and ending their struggle for survival in the blink of an eye.

  Samson looked out of one of the viewports to where the nav computer indicated the Nexus portal was, and stared out into the inky black of space. There was nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the void. He always expected something to be there—something, anything—but like the rest of open space, it was nothing more than nothing.

  What made that unremarkable spot special was a discovery in physics a few hundred years earlier that had identified an anomaly in Earth’s solar system. Up to that point, physics had told humanity that travel between the stars would take too long to ever be practical. The Nexus changed all of that. In one fell swoop, the key to the galaxy had been handed over.

  Despite humanity having had access to the Nexus for centuries, only the tiniest fraction of the galaxy had been explored, an even smaller portion colonised. The universe beyond remained the great unknown. Even now, the scale of the universe awed Samson. At a time when a journey to the next planet was measured in years rather than minutes, it must have been unfathomable.

  Shortly after the discovery of the anomalous and invisible aggregation of energy at a seemingly random spot in the solar system, the quest to understand it began. In an incident still celebrated by a holiday called ‘Leap Day’, playing on the words of Neil Armstrong, the age of space exploration truly began. A science vessel conducting tests on the anomaly disappeared in a swirl of energy. Everyone thought it was a tragedy, but the ship reappeared in the same spot a month later, with an incredible tale to tell.

  Since then, humanity had learned that the Nexus was everywhere, a subatomic energy current flowing beneath the fabric of space-time in infinite directions. It was called the ‘subway of the stars’, existing as it did beneath ordinary space-time. It had been argued on many occasions that the Nexus could not be a natural phenomenon, that it must have been created by a highly advanced race of beings, but the seeming absence of any higher life in the galaxy gave the opponents of that theory more than enough ammunition to shoot it down.

  In a nod to the ocean currents that had been exploited by the ancient mariners on Earth, humanity stamped the name ‘Nexus Current’ on the phenomenon, and started using it to spread through the galaxy.

  Every star system humanity had explored contained an anomaly point, now known as Nexus portals, but rarely more than one. As best as anyone could tell, the Nexus could only be entered at these points, by agitating them with a high energy discharge. Objects with mass could then enter into the Nexus and be driven along at limitless speed by the energy flow toward an exit point of their choice.

  Although the Current could only be entered at those specific spots, it could be exited anywhere. Nexus navigation was a science, and a good Nexus navigator—with the help of some serious computing power—could drop a ship out of the Current within hours of their ultimate destination. A bad one? Weeks.

  Energy, such as communications transmissions, could be injected into the Current from any place, allowing for near-instantaneous cross-galactic communication, although a ship within the Current, cocooned in its agitator-created shield, could neither send nor receive messages for the duration of its transit. This speed of communication, even more than the fast travel provided by the Nexus portals, had kept humanity’s ever-expanding empire a cohesive entity rather than a scattered, disconnected diaspora.

  As wonderful as it seemed, the Nexus carried with it a limitation. The Nexus preferred energy to matter, and did its best to convert things to suit itself. Anything solid that went into the Nexus was bombarded at the atomic level, as the Nexus did its magic in an effort to convert matter to energy. Ships needed enough shielding and structural integrity to allow them to survive within the Current long enough to make transits of useful length. Bigger, more powerful ships could make transits across several star systems, while a vessel like the Bounty might struggle to make the transit between two. Only a very poor ship’s master didn’t know exactly how long their vessel could remain within the Nexus before things would start to go wrong—the situation Samson now found himself in.

  In addition to the danger the Nexus posed in trying to turn ships into streams of energy, there was the navigational danger. Every naval officer was trained in Nexus navigation, but he was far from an expert, and the Bounty lacked the computer processing power to make up for his shortcomings. Getting his transit calculations wrong was a serious concern. In the past, more than one space explorer had ended up somewhere other than their intended destination as a result of bad calculations. Many had spent too long in the Current, and were never seen again, the energy trace that had once been them and their ship speeding its way across the universe for eternity. Samson had no desire to meet that fate.

  The Nexus computer was intended to take care of the difficult calculations, all but guaranteeing him of his exit location. Samson still recalled the day his instructor at the Academy had used that language: ‘It’s all but guaranteed.’ Margin of error was a wonderful thing, and across the vast distances of space, it became pretty substantial very quickly. Samson had never seen a Nexus computer as old as the Bounty’s. While the underlying technology had not changed that much in over a century, the reliability and accuracy had. Giving the order to discharge the agitator on the Bounty felt like rolling a die—a die with a billion potential numbers, but only one that was correct.

  When the agitator charge indicator finally reached the desired level, no matter how many misgivings he might have, there was nothing to be gained by delaying.

  ‘Mister Vachon, discharge the agitator,’ Samson said.

  ‘Aye,’ came back Vachon’s voice on the intercom.

  There was an audible whine as the agitator spooled up—another thing you would never expect to hear from the bridge on a better-appointed ship. He had to admit there was something pleasing about the more visceral experience of operating a basic ship. It was as though the distance between him and the endless void of space that he sought to n
avigate was lessened.

  The viewport flashed brilliantly bright, then dimmed as instantly, leaving a swirling ball of purple energy that grew and enveloped the ship. The stars blinked out as the Nexus swallowed the Bounty whole. Samson checked the Nexus computer to make sure it was processing the myriad calculations needed to make sure they ended up where they wanted to. In this instance, their target was a sphere of hopefully empty space in the Capsilan system, approximately one and a half million kilometres in diameter—the best accuracy the Bounty’s computer could manage. They could end up dropping out anywhere within that sphere, all being well. The far edge would put them less than a day from Holmwood and the depot, while the near edge would mean a voyage of almost a week through the Capsilan system to get there—cutting things far finer than he would have liked.

  That done, Samson sat back down to enjoy watching the mysterious, psychedelic swirl of the Nexus. It didn’t take long for other thoughts to intrude on Samson’s momentary sense of calm. There was a ship out there somewhere with the potential to destroy a naval vessel almost instantly. If that wasn’t worrying enough, the fact that it had done exactly that was terrifying. If it could disintegrate the Sidewinder, the Bounty wouldn’t stand a chance. He didn’t have the headspace to allow himself to dwell on the possibility that it might be alien.

  Then there was the fact that part of his crew had just mutinied. Vachon was cooperating, but he couldn’t forget Harper and Kushnir still languishing in their cabins.

  To top it all off, there were the artefacts they had found. What the hell were they? It was a great deal to take in, and there were moments when Samson feared it might overwhelm him. Every instinct he had screamed the word ‘alien’. That thought unnerved him most of all, leaving him with a nauseated sensation in his gut.

  ‘Mister Vachon, how’s the reaction matter holding up?’ It was one of those questions that reminded him of the saying ‘Never ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to.’

  ‘So far, so good, sir,’ Vachon said. His voice was crackly over the intercom, but interference and small system glitches were the norm in the Nexus, and not a cause for concern. Of course, on a ship like the Bounty, the potential for a large system glitch was substantially higher, but he had enough problems to deal with as it was.

  ‘Keep a close watch. We won’t be in the Nexus for long, so hopefully it’ll hold up.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  Samson looked back down at the nav computer, counting off the minutes until they would drop out of the Nexus. The shielding the agitator provided looked like it was stable. It was a simple technology that had been in use for almost as long as the Nexus had been accessible, and he didn’t expect it to let him down. It was essentially a Faraday Cage, without the cage. They did what they stated on their installation plates—Nexus protection up to however long it was rated for. Go past what it stated, and you were a fool. Usually, a dead fool. Unfortunately, someone had removed the Bounty’s plate, so Samson was flying on the assumption that if Arlen had made this journey from time to time, the ship was up to it. Nevertheless, even if he had known the shield’s competence down to the second, he had never been able to relax whilst in the Nexus, even on a capital ship, and reckoned he never would.

  11

  Dropping out of the Nexus was far less interesting—and potentially dangerous—then getting into it. There was no massive discharge of energy to go awry, nor the potential for a system to fail under the bombardment of Nexus energy. One moment there was the purple swirl, then nothing but inky, enveloping blackness. It took a little while for the stars to reappear—for reasons an astrophysicist could explain but Samson could not—and it was only then that the nav computer could start triangulating their position to give a definitive answer as to where they had ended up.

  Of course, there was always the chance that the Nexus computer had made an error, and miscalculated a planet’s position. The only good thing about dropping out of the Current into the centre of a planet was that you’d never know it had happened. You’d be dead. But the Bounty’s computer had done its job this time, and they had dropped out in the open void as intended.

  The location triangulation would take a moment, so Samson stood and went to the viewport. He didn’t know the system well enough to recognise any of the stars, not that he would have been able to estimate their location from them if he had. The era of navigation by the stars alone was long past. Now it required powerful computing to triangulate between stars, then calculate planetary orbits so they knew where they had to go—far too much number crunching for any person to manage alone. It was certainly a less romantic process than looking out at the stars with a sextant, but was easily made up for by how compelling the unknowns of space were.

  He turned and looked back over the bridge, empty but for himself. The beige housings and panelling had, Samson suspected, once been white, but years of grime had stained them into the bland and unwelcoming shade they were today. He felt a pang of loneliness as he stood there. There was no one who could make his decisions for him, and he had a crew that might turn on him again as soon as he put a foot wrong. Perhaps he might even lose the support of Price and the Marines. The thought felt like a burden on his shoulders, and the only relief he could find was the thought that he would not have to bear it for long.

  They would soon reach the Capsilan Orbital Depot. Once there, he would be able to send word to the Admiralty, and help would be on its way. All that would be left for him to do was idle around on the station until he was relieved—if, of course, the reaction matter cooperated. Still, the list of problems he had to deal with finally seemed to be getting shorter, rather than longer. With that in mind, he returned to the command chair, and hit the intercom button to check on his recalcitrant power plant and engineer.

  Satisfied that the reaction matter wasn’t going to end them all in the blink of eye—at least not anytime soon—Samson finally allowed himself to relax a little. Getting back to Capsilan felt like a welcome homecoming, even though he had not spent much time in the system. It had long been the unofficial capital of that region of Frontier space, for no reason other than that the Navy had established a resupply depot there when first covering the area with the umbrella of their supervision. That had given the system an air of legitimacy, and it had quickly become the most populous one in the region. It was the closest thing there was to civilisation in this Frontier sector, and the depot contained everything they needed, and more, to keep them going until relief arrived. They weren’t out of danger yet, but the light at the end of the tunnel seemed considerably brighter than it had before the Nexus transit.

  Samson had not visited the surface of Holmwood—or Capsilan 2-C, as it was still officially known—but he had heard stories aplenty. People on the Frontier tended to have different mindsets to those in the Core Systems; they sought adventure, riches, and a life not so constrained by rules—or simply somewhere they could disappear. Holmwood Landing provided those people with everything they wanted, and had a reputation as a lawless spot where people lived hard, fast, and often violently.

  He had looked forward to seeing it for himself—there were few places as exciting and dangerous—but that experience would have to wait. He felt an almost uncontainable urge to feed the data they had collected into the depot’s computer and see what it turned up, but as with everything else on the Bounty, its short range communications system wasn’t up to the task of sending the information.

  The prospect of making his report to command filled Samson with far less enthusiasm. How could he phrase it in a way that wouldn’t make him sound like a lunatic? The sensor data was the key. If he confined himself to whatever facts they presented, he could allow the Admiralty to draw their own conclusions. They would be the same—he couldn’t come up with any other way to view it—but at least they would be getting there themselves, without having to question his sanity first.

  The journey from where they dropped out of the Nexus in Capsilan to the depot in o
rbit over Holmwood would take longer than the trip between systems, and Samson had to remind himself to be thankful that they had arrived in the right system at all. Nevertheless, he could feel his impatience grow as he watched the distance to their destination slowly count down. The temptation was to increase thrust and then decelerate harder, but that would put more strain on the reaction matter, not to mention the ship itself, and it wasn’t something he was willing to do.

  All that remained was to sit and watch the distance tick down, and inevitably let his mind wander to places he’d have preferred it not go. Was it the same for every young officer in their first command? Second-guessing every decision, seeing danger and terrible consequences behind every corner?

  Whatever his own worries, he knew an idle crew was dangerous. All the more so when considering what had already happened. He had faith in Price, but the intimidating Marine sergeant was only one man.

  Samson shook his head. He was letting himself get paranoid. It was one of the pitfalls of deep-space assignment, and one the Navy worked hard to combat. However, the Bounty had no therapists, nor any of the distractions and recreational activities even a corvette as small as the Sidewinder had been able to offer. He was on his own with this, and that was how he would have to get through it—on his own.

  He tried to think of the positives. They’d safely made their Nexus transit, so Samson reckoned he had to be in a stronger position. If worse came to worst now, and he had to eject the reaction matter, they were far more likely to be rescued in the higher-traffic Capsilan system. He’d shown everyone his judgement was sound, so the mutineers would have to be questioning the logic of their choice.