by Bobby Adair
He turns and glares at me.
I take that as a yes.
“Give me—”
“I know what you want,” he snaps. “Let me configure everything. I’ll take requests when I’m done.”
The rest of us on the bridge share a look.
While waiting on Tarlow to simmer down, I give Jablonsky my attention.
He answers before I ask. “Broadcasting every hour, now. In case Jill shows up.”
I give him a satisfied nod.
Over a private comm, Penny asks, “You still think there’s a chance?”
I shrug. “We don’t know what happened.”
Chapter 42
On our perch, hiding in plain sight, we sit four days, watching and learning about our enemy before we cram onto the bridge for our planning meeting.
“Let’s start with the elephants,” I suggest.
A few laugh.
Tarlow isn’t in any better mood than he’s been in since we first came into the 61 Cygni system. And though I’ve tried to talk to him and get to the bottom of it, my efforts have gone nowhere. He’s content to torture everyone around him with his mood.
He responds to my suggestion first. “You mean those freighters?”
"The tanker ships," I confirm. We’re a small crew and don’t have any secrets, at least not concerning our situation. Still, I want to make sure we’re all reading from the same playbook. "Phil and Nicky have analyzed the grav signatures—"
“Recognized is a better word,” Phil interjects.
“Let’s talk about resupply times first,” says Brice. “Do we have a count on which ships are ready to go?”
“Three of the six docked when we arrived,” I say, “have disengaged and have been replaced by three others. In four days, we haven’t seen a complete resupply cycle. So, at least four days.”
Brice is satisfied.
“The elephant?” Tarlow reminds me.
Glancing around at my audience, I say, “They’re the same four tankers. They disappear for thirty hours or so, and then they return and dock at the base. They stay roughly five hours, and then they disappear again.”
“And we’re sure there are only the four?” asks Lenox.
I shake my head. “We’re only sure that we’ve seen four—the same four going and coming. If there are more, they haven’t made a stop by the depot while we’ve been here.”
“And these are hydrogen tankers?” she asks.
"As near as we can tell.” I pause, then go on to correct myself. "It’s a guess they’re tanking hydrogen, though they could be grabbing methane or ethane and stripping the hydrogen out the molecules in a refinery located underground at the depot. We can only speculate on that part of the process, but it’s irrelevant."
No one argues with me on that point.
“What we know,” I tell them, “is that after the tankers offload, they fly seven or eight thousand miles away from the protoplanet, always on the same heading, and they bubble jump.”
“Down what heading?” asks Peterson.
“A gas giant orbiting 16 Cygni B.” I point. With the ship’s grav systems down, I can see all the major masses in the Cygni system. “It’s a monster of a planet, with rings just like Saturn, and who knows how many moons. We can make out a few from here but—”
“The moons are irrelevant,” Phil tells me.
I shrug. He’s right. “What we suspect, is if this gas giant is similar to Saturn in more than just its rings, it may have an atmosphere containing mostly hydrogen. We think the tankers are going there and skimming through the atmosphere, filling up and flying back.”
“How do we know they aren’t hauling something away from the protoplanet to the gas giant?” Lenox asks.
I glance at Phil.
“The mass of the ships,” he answers for me. “Nicky and I working together can accurately sense the mass of the freighters. They come in full and they leave empty.”
“That explains a lot, then,” says Brice. “They have specialized ships for harvesting hydrogen out of the gas giants. That’s how they keep their fleets fueled. Why haven’t we seen these kinds of ships back in earth’s system?”
“I think they’re there,” I answer, “but the war has been going so badly for us, we haven’t had the scout ships to go out looking for them. I’ll bet they have these same ships doing the same thing in earth’s system, ferrying H from Saturn to their bases, so whenever a cruiser shows up, they’re ready to top off the tanks when they’re reloading the hold with railgun slugs.”
“So,” argues Brice, “if we’d only had the good sense to find and destroy their tankers back in our solar system, we could have cut off their supply of fuel and probably won this war a long time ago.”
“We can talk about that when we get back to earth.” I look around, and see enough agreement on that point. “For that exact reason, Brice, we need to blast these tankers out of the sky, or destroying the supply depot will be a wasted effort.”
“So the tankers, and the base?” asks Brice. “They’re all our objective now?”
I nod. “Absolutely. All we need to do is decide which to kill first.”
Chapter 43
Using minimal grav thrust, Penny slides the Rusty Turd off its rocky perch and lets it fall slowly into the crater behind, sinking farther and farther from peeping Gray eyes, putting more and more asteroid rock between us and them. We skim over the bottom of the crater and pop up over the opposite rim in a maneuver that feels like a roller coaster ride race toward the backside of the hulking asteroid.
Everybody is excited. We’re finally going to war.
Once we reach the backside, Penny accelerates hard, having the asteroid eclipsing our view from anything looking this way from the supply depot. As soon as Phil and Nicky deem it safe, Penny juices the grav plates with a full dose of fusion-powered electrons, and we bubble jump fifty million miles out. It takes nearly five minutes.
Penny turns the ship and lines it up on 16 Cygni B. Phil, and Nicky provide the fine-tuning on our heading to point us right at the gas giant we suspect is the target for the Trog tankers. Penny punches it again.
“Because of the angle we flew out of the Lagrange zone,” says Phil, “our travel time on this jump will run just over eleven minutes.”
I ask, “How close will we be to Cygni Saturn when we arrive?”
“Cygni Saturn?” Penny asks. “You named it?”
“Why not?”
“Do we have a name for the supply depot?”
I can’t think why we didn’t give it a name already. Maybe because during the five-month trip here, we thought of this whole binary system of stars, planets, protoplanets, asteroids, comets, moons, dust, and particles as just one thing—61 Cygni. I glance around the bridge. “Any suggestions?”
Brice doesn’t miss a beat. “Hiroshima.”
Tarlow laughs. It’s the first thing he’s found funny since we arrived in system.
Penny is mortified. “You can’t be serious.”
Brice smiles in a way that tells you just how twisted his humor is. Maybe Nagasaki is his second choice, but he doesn’t say it out loud.
"Trinity," I suggest, following Brice’s line of thought back to the name of the site in Nevada where the USA tested its nuclear bombs before deploying them against Japan.
“Is the name important?” asks Phil.
"Maybe not to you," says Penny. "You and Nicky don’t use words with your direct connection of images and emotions. Us primitive beings still think words are useful.”
Brice laughs. Tarlow joins for that one, too.
“Why are we having this conversation?” asks Lenox, from where she sits on the padded bench in the back of the bridge, bathed in the living blue glow of our bubble field.
She’s right, mostly. We don’t need to debate this. I tell them, “Trinity Base. That’s the Trog supply depot. We’re going to nuke the hell out of it. It fits. Anybody have a
problem with the name Cygni Saturn?”
Chapter 44
The best-laid schemes go awry, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Isn’t that what the old Scottish poet went on about? Isn’t it a lesson that should be hammered into the brain of any soldier who’s carried a weapon or rode a ship into war?
Yeah.
We come out of bubble above Cygni Saturn’s rings. We’re nearly two hundred thousand miles out from the planet, nearly as far as the moon is from the earth, so no problems with our arrival being too close.
As the afterimage of the blue jump bubble has faded from my eyes, I peek through Penny’s monitors, I see an expanding circle, like in a pond, perturbing the ring from our position out.
“How close are we to the ring?” I ask.
“Twenty clicks,” answers Phil, awe in his voice. He sees the rings, too. They’re massive. Thousands of concentric circles of varying widths, in colors of red, blue, and orange with every shade in-between. All perfectly flat, at least they seem so from where we float, and they spread off toward forever, looking to simply fade in the distance.
Out toward the edge of the rings, clouds—if you could call them that given that they’re made up rocks and ice crystals as small as a grain of sand or as big as train engines—pile up on themselves like mountains rising from the flat plain, soaring to rugged heights of a hundred or two hundred kilometers, standing all the way around the curve, hiding the outermost rings from our view.
I catch myself gawking when Phil hollers at me—I think. Maybe it was just in my head, but I see it immediately, now that I’m looking. It’s half-in, half-out of the rings, right at the base of the mountains. “A cruiser! Trogs!”
Penny jerks.
The crew not already in their place on the bridge rushes to their stations.
I shout, “Slam it, Penny!” letting emotion run away with my orders as I piece the situation together.
“They know we’re here,” says Phil.
Taking every syllable of instructional ambiguity and converting it into kinetic reality, Penny maxes the grav to our drive array.
“Powering the grav lens to fire,” Phil informs us.
Over the ship comm, I announce, “Strap in, kids. It’s going to get bumpy!”
Jablonsky is informing everyone of the details.
Penny brings the ship around in a hard turn.
Phil tells us, "The cruiser is powering up its deflection fields and coming about."
The strength of the field coming off the grav lens is fogging my view out front, and I have to depend on the visual images on the bridge video monitors. Cygni Saturn’s rings spread out deceptively in front of us, their scale lost, except for the speck of blue grav glow coming off the kilometer-long Trog cruiser running across their face.
Several guns along the cruiser’s dorsal spine fire at us, red-hot railguns slugs tearing through the vacuum, growing large and ominous, as they close the distance.
“Phil?” I ask, making sure he’s aware of the incoming rounds.
The grav lens is already pulsing brighter. “I have them,” he tells me.
Penny swings the ship to starboard anyway, getting out of their path, and then angles down on the cruiser, riding a new vector.
More guns come online.
“They’re having to wake their crew up,” says Brice. “They weren’t expecting anyone to show up.”
Doh!
I don’t say that, of course. How could any cruiser’s crew doing guard duty out here, a trillion miles from nowhere, ever expect to be unwaveringly at the ready? Not possible.
“If we kill them quick,” Brice goes on to explain, “it’ll be easy. Things will be harder once they’re all awake.”
“Zero in,” I tell Penny. “And do it. They can’t know what we are or what we can do. Word hasn’t gotten this far out, yet.”
More and more of the cruiser’s guns are coming alive, and it’s rolling as it brings them up broadside so that two rows of its gun spines can shoot at us.
“Can we take all that?” I ask Phil.
“Yes,” he answers calmly. “Because of the shape and power of our grav lens—”
“Can it?” I tell him. “Penny, keep evading, just in case. Don’t give them a shot at our flank.”
Chapter 45
The attack comes together fast, though the adrenaline-laced seconds seem to stretch into minutes.
The distance is ungodly enormous, though we chew it up under 20 g’s of acceleration, as all the cruiser’s guns finally come online, and it looks like we’re flying into a red, pelting rain.
“They’re afraid we’re going to ram them,” says Phil. “They’re veering into the dust towers.”
“They’ve never seen anything as fast as us,” I tell him. “They don’t know what we’ll do.” I turn to Penny. “Fire!”
I feel the rounds rip through our axial gun and spray out our bow in plasma traveling at speeds those Trogs and Grays will never have imagined.
Penny rips another stream, and another.
“The cruiser is—” Phil stops, and then calmly says, “Hit it.”
Penny shoots again.
“They’re pushing the grav hard,” Phil tells us.
We’re in close. The sky is alive with red-hot slugs, heavy blue grav fields, and a white-hot stream of our plasma rounds tearing through everything.
The cruiser’s drive array blasts into pieces that careen in every direction on gouts of vacuous fire as it slips off its course and suddenly turns down, passing through the ring to get on the other side.
“Veer left,” Phil tells Penny, knowing the cruiser is suddenly invisible to her, but seeing the gravity of its mass hiding behind the orbiting debris disk as easily as if it was in plain sight.
Penny does, and fires again as the ring debris explodes in lightning flashes as stone vaporizes.
“It’s going for the deep clouds below,” Phil tells us.
The cruiser’s guns are still firing, some of its rounds getting through, the rest blowing the ring into a dense cloud of fast-moving particles that dissipate the plasma as it rips through.
But, like the first cruiser we tore open over Arizona that first day of fighting, the bridge crew on this one didn’t react fast enough. Whatever it thought it was going to do about us, it all became moot pretty early into the engagement. Physics can only be teased to your liking by degrees.
Penny keeps the nose pointed at our prey as she rips out another stream of plasma rounds, and she pulls back on the trigger for a last, long volley as we rake the cruiser’s hull. As we blast through the rings, she spins the ship backward in a trick we learned over Iapetus—to keep the grav lens pointed at the enemy.
We all sway as the ship’s internal field tries to compensate for the maneuver.
I keep my eyes on the screen and see the Trog cruiser’s hull crack. Gas blasts into the vacuum. Its grav fields scintillate over the hull and flicker.
Penny is firing again.
“You got at least one of the reactors,” Phil tells Penny.
She’s pouring power into the drive array, trying to reverse the ship’s momentum. Bulkheads rumble under the strain as our inertial bubble bends and pulses.
I hold onto my seat, trying to keep myself still, as groans sound over the comm. The intense grav hurts.
Penny doesn’t let up.
“It’s not dead,” Phil unnecessarily tells us, “but the main power systems are spotty. The drive array is down. They’ve lost vacuum in their central bay. They can’t shoot at us.”
The cruiser is rolling and trying to keep control as it slides sideways through the mountainous towers of gas and rock, standing tall below the rings as they stood on the other side.
“Aim for the bridge,” I tell Penny. “I want all those Grays dead.”
“Aye.” She’s focused. She has the ship moving forward again, back toward the cruiser.
Its hull plates are flashing
brightly as the bridge crew tries to use them to drive the great dying beast in an evasion maneuver. Hull plates over-grav and pop all through the ship’s aft quarter.
And it’s already too late.
Penny is lining our nose up on the bridge, coming in slower this time, as not a single railgun is shooting.
“Don’t go too slow,” Phil warns. “They shouldn’t have any guns active with the vacuum in the hold, but with a full complement of Trog soldiers in the rear with suits, they can man them again pretty quickly.”
“Reactors,” I tell Penny. “Take out the reactors first. Once the ship is dead, we can finish off the Grays on the bridge without danger.”
The ship shifts under me as Penny realigns and starts us on an arc to bring us in close, not on a direct path, but on a heading run up the length of the cruiser from stern to bow.
No sooner do I see what she’s doing than I feel the axial gun rip through another dozen rounds, and then another sixty or seventy, obliterating the enemy’s hull, right up the length of the ship, and through the three reactors suspended in the hold down its centerline.
“It’s dead,” Phil tells us as Penny bursts through the rings again, sending thousands of hunks of debris splashing out ahead of us.
“Bring us back around,” I instruct. “Let’s finish off the bridge crew and be done with this thing before the tankers arrive.
Chapter 46
The clock is running.
We know the distance from Trinity Base to Cygni Saturn. We know when the tankers left. Us beating them to the destination was a foregone conclusion. We’re riding the fastest damn thing Trogs or humans have ever seen. What’s important is learning at how many multiples of light speed those tankers can cruise.
“If the first one doesn’t get here in the next ten minutes,” says Tarlow, checking the time logged on his computer, “they won’t even be making light speed.”
“We saw them bubble jump,” Penny argues. She turns to Phil. “Can you bubble jump at sub-light speed?”