by David Gunner
“Can I be of some assistance, LC.” Callows approached the scene warily, his left hand cupping his right wrist with the bright red dot of the sighting laser trained on Stavener’s chest.
Canthouse panted as he drew a shirt sleeve across his sweating face. The exertion had aggravated his glass peppered left cheek so sweat mingled with the beading blood and it stung like hell.
“Place Mr Stavener under arrest for the assault of operations officer Guimar, and place further charges for resisting arrest and assaulting the ships commanding officer.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Stavener wore the clown like grin of a person perpetually amused by troubling incidents as he glanced between the two men.
“I suggest you secure his hands as he appears quite adept at avoiding detention,” Canthouse said.
Callows took a cautious step forward, “OK, son, let’s not have any problems now. Just turn around, drop to your knees and clasp your hands behind your back.”
Stavener took a step back, his hands lowering and grin eroding as he realised the gravity of the situation. He glanced at Canthouse, “You’re serious? We’re blind with twenty ships trying to kill us and you want to arrest me for restoring the sensors?”
“It’s not what you did, it’s how you did it.”
“But that stupid bitch was going to get us killed! And so are you if you don’t let me finish restoring the data link.”
“Mr Callows remove this man from the bridge. now!” Canthouse cried without breaking eye contact with Stavener.
Callows’ short wiry frame adopted a lowered stance, his countenance one of stone cold severity as he gazed directly along his arm to the tip of the weapon where an amber light flashed. “Don’t let’s piss about now boy. This thing’ll drop you like a sack of sand. On your knees!”
“Look, just let me press those two buttons and I’ll go with you,” Stavener gestured to the console with his left hand.
“Don’t you touch a bloody thing!” Canthouse snarled.
Stavener’s stopped his slow backward step to stand with his feet slightly apart, his hands flared at waste level and frame stiff, defensive. His grin returned as he side glanced at Canthouse, “You’re just pissed that I kicked your arse.”
“Mr Callows!”
Callows finger found the trigger.
Har-oo, ha-roo, ha-roo.
“What the hell is it now!” The first officer cried glancing toward the blank main screen.
“That’ll be the twenty ships that are trying to kill us,” said Stavener.
“You mean we have sensors?”
“Yes.”
“But the displays are blank!” The first officer said looking over the nav and tactical consoles.
“That’s because you won’t let me finish configuring the data feed.” Stavener tilted his head ironically.
“Well, what are you waiting for man!” Canthouse jabbed a finger at the operations console. He then shook his head at Callows who holstered his weapon as he drew back.
Stavener worked the console in a flurry of action with the tactical display returning to the main screen. “Done!”
“I have navigational control,” O’Dean cried.
“Same here, tactical is back,” Honus said.
“Oh, Christ!” Canthouse cried on evaluating the tactical display.
The brigand armada he feared to be within spitting distance was nowhere near. Instead the enemy ships were scattered about the area with those that were able showing a power spike as their magnetic augers chewed at the local space fabric in a desperate attempt to flee the area as quickly as possible. Two of the four frigates towing the Queen Victoria were gone, with the two having provided power now attempting to cut their umbilicals and initiate their gate engines as they too tried to escape. One of the frigates severed the tow line in a blaze of rear weapons fire, with its power output spiking as it manoeuvred away from the dreadnaught to simply disappear through a burning red oval. Its sister ship struggled to gain main power and attempted to break the tow line by brute force, accelerating away only for the umbilical to stop it dead like a dog finding the limit of its chain. After several failed attempts the ship suddenly lost all power and was swatted aside by the advancing dreadnaught, to be dragged behind like a rat with its tail caught between the teeth of an alligator.
Ships were fleeing all over with those unable to gate out bleeding their fuel tanks dry as they ran as fast their conventional engines would take them. The seemingly desperate flight confused Canthouse, who could only presume some anomaly with the Queen Victoria presented a danger so universal even the furthest vessel overdrove its engines as they sought to escape the area. It wasn’t until the Bristol had advanced a little more that the real problem presented itself. A fluttering brilliance he believed to be a local star obscured by the exhaust haze of the Bristol, slowly resolved into the Chinese FTL drive that flared and blazed like a Roman candle knocked to the ground.
Hewton’s explanation on detonating the FTL drive had kept more to instruction than result, but he did make one thing clear: Once the sparks came the clock had stopped and they really needed to be somewhere else.
The bandits too had known what would happen if the FTL drive was set to charge without being fired, and had made disabling it a priority on their return. Unfortunately, the Queen Victoria had been a pig to drag to the area, which delayed their arrival, and even though they had destroyed the reactors at the first opportunity they were too late.
The first signs of runaway reaction had occurred mere minutes after cutting the power, with the initial emissions being little more than the flint spark from a spluttering firework, but it soon accelerated to become a retina searing fountain that jetted more than its own length as the thorium core accelerated toward its inevitable conclusion.
***
Despite his years of training, Canthouse experienced the fleeting paralysis of immediate and unexpected danger, the soul draining moment experienced on hearing the click of a gun behind you: of a squatting camper hearing the electric buzz of an unseen rattlesnake. He considered this burning thing would be the most powerful man made eruption in history, but he was wrong. The single most intense releasing of energy caused by man would occur moments after the core exploded and it would have direct influence on his future. Even so, the core detonation would buckle space time, atomise anything within ten thousand kilometres, drop any living thing within a lunar orbit and kill hardened systems at four times that, so what the hell was he doing just staring at it!
A glance at the cycling tactical display broke his shock induced dawdling, and in less than a second the first officer had formed a plan. He reasoned the enemy posed no immediate threat, thus they no longer needed the weapons, that they should remove the caps on the sub-light engines, engage the chemical engines, cut power to all nonessential systems and route as much energy to the shields as possible.
“Stavener: confirm what I’m looking at.”
The operations officer who was deep in a three way conversation with the con and tactical officers looked up at him, “Confirm what? Confirm that we’re looking at the end of times? We need to leave, now! Right now. Must leave now!”
“How long have we got?”
“We should be dead already.”
“Distance to gate point?”
The navigator looked ecstatic when he turned to face the first officer with a smile so wide the gaps from his missing molars were visible. “Sir! Gate point at eleven hundred kliks and looking stable.”
Canthouse gave him a curious look, “Eleven hundred. Why so close?”
“It’s the FTL drive, LC. When it stopped charging the local flux cleared up. There’s still some contamination, but we can leave!”
“Let’s see if we can get there first. Has engineering removed the caps?”
“No, sir, not yet.”
“Set a course and engage the chemical engines. Give her everything, Mr Dean. I want the old girl lifting her petty coats.”
&n
bsp; Canthouse moved to the command chair and pressed the comm link. “Engineering.” The unfortunate delay and conversation from the last time he contacted engineering weighed on his mind, and he was dreading a repeat event when –
“Engineering, Penton.”
“Penton, we’ve got an atomic the size of Formidable about to swallow us and I need all the speed you can give us. I’ve ordered the chemicals engaged and need the sub-light caps removed immediately.”
“Aye, sir. But removing the caps will do nothing as the sub-light motives are cooked and we’re just boiling copper, so I’ll need to take them off line. But if I overdrive the feed pumps to the chemical motors, that should give us a bit more go, but her fuel consumption’ll be for shit.”
“Do anything you can to make us go faster. All damages acceptable. What about shields?”
Penton huffed as he considered, “The mains are still offline, but if we shut everything down and redirect the support turbine and chemical alternators, I can give you one, maybe two banding generators. But that won’t even cover engineering.”
“Something is better than nothing, so do it. Take power from anywhere you need, including life support.”
“Aye.”
***
Aboard the stricken frigate, a bandit engineer stepped over the twined mass of hastily reconfigured cables to close a heavy knife switch in a desperate attempt at jump starting their reactors from the Victoria’s batteries. The dreadnaught’s AI sensed the energy drain as an attack on finite resources and immediately closed the power tap. With the frigate’s data feed reduced to white noise by the closed tap and with no ability of its own to scan local space, the relic defaulted to- defend at all costs: kill what can be killed. The AI revaluated its last telemetry as it searched for one last solution in which to commit its remaining might, but decided it needed more information. It reopened the power tap and connected directly to the frigate’s sensor feeds to learn all it could of its fleeing enemy.
Never having conceived of the AI reversing the connection, the bandits watched helplessly as the Victoria locked them out of every system as it scanned their data banks for anything there was on her one known enemy. Once it had learnt all it could, the AI reversed the power flow to bleed the frigate of every kilowatt before severing the connection to leave it an impudent hulk dragging alongside.
In less than a millisecond, the Victoria had used this new information to run hundreds of scenarios before selecting the one possible solution that might kill via primary contact, but would certainly damage via collateral affect. With no ability to train her guns the solution was a long shot in every sense of the meaning, but if the enemy continued on its curving course then the possibility existed.
Deep within her number one turret rams pushed, gears turned and heavy chains snatched into motion as a hoist raised its two tonne cargo from below. The flickering blue glow of an electric arc appeared within her one functional barrel, with the orphaned spark quickly growing to become a blazing cyclone of electrical energy as the AI committed many a broadside’s worth of power into this one final act.
***
The Bristol’s the over-driven auxiliary engines flared, with the rose tinted exhaust punching through the last of the six pearlescent shield bands and stretching half her length as she accelerated toward the gate point. The gunship’s structure groaned from the undamped forces that shook the hull, with the darkened bridge alive from the rattling and chattering of floor grates and loose equipment as the unrelieved stress of rocket acceleration urged her forward.
With the gravity rotors slowing, the g-forces made themselves evident and Canthouse gripped the command chair as he swayed from the reduced gravity and acceleration. The bridge shook and rattled around him as he watched the shrinking distance to the gate point on the tactical display. “C’mon, c’mon,” he cried as he thumped the arm of the chair to urge the struggling gunboat ever forward,
Stavener stared intently at his display as he counted down the chemical fuel reserves, “Eighty seven; eighty five; eighty one. Jesus, LC, she’s chewing through the fuel.”
“How far?”
“Four fifty, four hundred, three fifty ...
O’Dean palmed the manual throttle against its limiter in an attempt to coax more from the straining engines.
“Set destination as Trent station and begin the gate sequence now. I want the engines spooled when we get there.”
ding ding
The first officer side glanced to Stavener, “What is i –“
“Oh, Christ!” Stavener cried, his eyes wide with fear. “The Victoria -she’s firing!”
***
Somewhere on the Victoria a final code sequence executed and a relay closed. The projectile and turret atomised in an instant with the dreadnought’s entire hull collapsing as if sucked inward by a black hole. Where the Queen Victoria had been the fabric of space dipped and then heaved to wrench open like a deific eye, which briefly stared into this universe before the retina expanded into a magma filled blister as what lay behind attempted to burst through to this side. Yet the local fabric prevailed with the eye snapping shut in a titanic release of energy that compressed the FTL drive to a quarter of its original volume, and triggering instant fusion, The two events compounded into a single cataclysmic detonation that rent a great boiling portal in the fabric of space, with trillions of tonnes of red hot material ejected into this universe from the next. The portal lasted but the briefest of instants before staggering local forces crushed it like an air pocket, with a shattering energy release equal to hundreds of supernovas buckling the local fabric and sterilising space for billions of kilometres in every direction.
What few atoms of the Victoria’s projectile that did survive the initial collapse were shot gunned toward the fleeing gunship at relativistic speeds, with two of the atoms entering the gate portal as it folded behind the Bristol to send her out of the frying pan and into the fire.
***
No sooner had the gate closed behind them than Canthouse had collapsed into the command chair, his hands clasped to his face as he released a long weary moan. Four weeks he had anticipated for them to reach Trent station. Four weeks in which they could repair, restock and reevaluate their situation. The new gate portal chime sounded six seconds later.
Chapter 17
Three days later.
“The medic did tell me, but where was he again?”
“In the forward magazine.” Hewton stood with his thick arms folded across his barrel chest as he watched the patient. “He was wrapped in a blanket; asleep atop a shelf of class twos’. Everything’s automated down there and they couldn’t activate the lifts without crushing him, so they had to use a fire hose to wake him. When they did, he just climbed down right as rain.”
The doctor huffed. “Of all the places, there is no stranger than anywhere else.”
Hewton nodded as he and the doctor looked toward a towel draped Avery who sat hangdog on the edge of a stretcher. He chatted with the medic who alternately shone a pencil torch into each pupil.
“How is he?”
“Physically he’s fine. Nothing amiss there. He could do with a shave and a shower, a real shower,” Hewton grinned, “but apart from that …no, he’s good to go.”
“And the …err …the other, thing!” The weapons chief whistled as he made a vague cork screwy motion near his temple.
The doctor grinned at Hewton’s eloquence, “He has no memory of what transpired in engineering, or what came after. But as for the episode itself, there’s no sign. I gave him the quick shot as I don’t have time for the full test. But there were no precursors to indicate the requirement for the full BPRS, so I’d say …ah! Based on conjunct evidence of course, that the episode has passed. He will still need to undergo the re-evaluations on Trent, but apart from that he is as he was.”
“Sooooo….”
The doctor picked up on the look in Hewton’s eye, “No. No, no. I never said he was fit for duty, just fit to be
released from medical supervision. Which is just as well as we have no one to monitor him. My two full times are run ragged about the ship fixing squashed thumbs and strained backs.”
“I’m just saying, doctor, we really could use another command officer. I’m helping where I can, but Malcolm is out of his mind from lack of anyone with disaster experience.”
The doctor grimaced, “I can understand the desperation of the situation, Tom. But if he wigs out in the middle of a command decision, who knows what the consequences may be, and who’ll be held accountable?”
There was no arguing with the doctor’s logic, even if the reasoning was partly selfish, “I suppose you’re right. And as much as I think the world of young Avery, he’s a right fine command officer, but –“ Hewton swallowed hard during a considering pause and struggled on in a sullen monotone, “I think there’s something a little strange, maybe even convenient about this whole going loco thing. Going mad then recovering all sudden, like, it’s ….” He watched through the dividing screen as Avery pushed himself off the stretcher, removed the towel, brushed his uniform and locked eyes with him through the glass. He smiled and nodded his thanks to Tom Hewton, who returned the gesture. “It’s right strange, and I think someone needs to keep an eye on him.”
Canthouse rubbed the fatigue from his eyes as he listened to the tired voice on the hand held communicator. “And you can’t do anymore?”
“No, sir. The respite may have given us a little time to get a few things done, but main power is all but tapped out keeping the shields as is. And I may even have to take some of the lesser systems off line again. A 65% reduction is the best we can do at the moment, as the shields just weren’t designed to operate in such an environment. I’m working on a few new algorithms, but I’m not confident they’ll do any better.”