Star Carrier (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 3)

by B. V. Larson

  Durris locked eyes with me. He was afraid but resigned. “It’s your call, Captain.”

  My call. Those two words clearly stated the difficulty in commanding a starship. It was always my call, and consequently everything that went wrong was my fault. In this case, my entire ship and crew were likely to pay a gruesome price if I chose unwisely.

  There were fifteen seconds left now. Rumbold had his hands on the helm, fingers poised and quivering, ready to direct the ship into a slewing turn if I were to give the order.

  I had to think, but there was no time to do so. Was Okto bluffing, hoping that we’d take her bait and veer away, allowing her ships to close and destroy us? Or was she in earnest, like all her kind seemed to be, and merely enjoying herself?

  “Steady on,” I said in a voice I thought was remarkably calm.

  My heart pounded in my head, and my eyes stared unblinking as the breach loomed, shimmering and colorful. It was an unusual breach, I could tell that.

  What was on the far side of it? Instant death? Or an agonizing finish full of radiation, screaming and the hopeless sounds of my dying ship?

  My mind tried to conjure possibilities. Black holes, blue giants, even something as simple as space dust, too condensed and slammed into at too high a speed.

  Before my brain could complete the list we hit the breach, and we broke through it.

  -39-

  When Defiant first returned to normal space, there was always a transitional period of adjustment. This span lasted from several seconds to over one minute.

  We weren’t fully aware of it, but the transition period had been documented carefully. There was a brief sensation of dreaming. A sense of falling asleep, then waking up again.

  How much of that time was spent in transit, “appearing” in the new star system? How much of it was due to our instruments settling down, reacting to the radical shift in measurable inputs?

  It was a mix of the two, I suspected. Our computers added another delay as they were programmed to balk before relaying faulty input to the crew. No designer wanted a crew to become confused. A surprised helmsman might send the ship into a deadly maneuver to avoid a phantom. The computers probed with their sensors, requiring more than purely passive input before they painted a confirmed picture of our surroundings.

  In this particular case, the wait was excruciating for all involved. Even though it lasted no more than half a minute, such a length of time can feel very long indeed when one’s life is in the balance.

  When we did start to function again, we found ourselves in a new place. Like every other time I’d ventured into an unknown star system, the experience never failed to be a thrill.

  My heart was in my mouth. I swallowed dryly, over and over again. My eyes roved over the instruments trying to monitor everything at once.

  “Sir…” Yamada said, working her sensor arrays. “I think we’re okay. The system isn’t all that unusual. It’s a tri-star arrangement with two close red dwarfs and a third brown one circling widely in a distant orbit.”

  Rumbold released a breath explosively.

  “No final moments of hopeless terror and death?” he asked, his eyes swiveling from Yamada to myself and back again.

  “No…” she said. “At least, I don’t detect any immediate threat here.”

  “Okto!” Rumbold raged, his face instantly transforming. “That witch!”

  He slapped his palms on his console and jumped up, performing a strutting circular dance around his chair. “You know, it’s just this sort of bullshit that might convince an old man it’s time to retire.” His agitation amused many of the staffers who twittered from the edges of the command deck.

  I smiled. The tension had been broken, and I was glad for Rumbold’s display. I didn’t correct him, but he eventually climbed back into his seat and began to mutter to himself.

  “She tried to rook us, Captain,” he said loudly. “Just for spite.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  “I agree,” Durris said. “She did attempt to bluff us but not because she wanted to cause us emotional pain. She wanted us to turn away from this breach.”

  Yamada nodded slowly. “That sounds right to me, too. If we’d missed the breach, her ships would have caught up and destroyed us. It was either that, or she knew there wasn’t room for us to turn around. She wanted us to die by slamming into the barrier surrounding that patch of hyperspace.”

  “The question is,” Durris said, “will she follow us?”

  “Have we got a new course yet?” I asked him.

  Durris looked startled and turned back to his instruments. His planning table lit up, and he decorated it with thin green arcs.

  “Are we exploring or running?” he asked me.

  “A little of both. I want to put distance between the breach point and our stern, but we need to scan this unknown system at the same time.”

  Durris nodded. “We should head toward the inner planets then. There’s a ring of seven that circle the twin suns at the center of the system. Our next destination is in their midst. It’s the last coordinate listed on Perez’s map.”

  “Finalize the course and pass it to the helm.”

  Durris and Rumbold spent the next few minutes sorting out our new direction, and we were soon gently veering to our port side. It felt good to have a destination again even if it was a vague one.

  Once the course was laid and set, Durris moved to my side.

  “Sir,” he said, “I’ve got a tactical recommendation.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “We should lay out a barrage of missiles,” he said. “We’ll deploy them in our wake directing them to fly to the breach we just passed through. Our newest units are smart. They’ll sit there and watch space at the exit point. When the Beta cruisers come through, I’ll set them up to concentrate on the lead ship. With luck, a score of hits will take out one of the three.”

  “No,” I said simply.

  He blinked at me. “No? You mean you don’t think it will work? You must recall our disorientation when we first arrived here… The enemy crew will experience that same incoherence. That’s when our missiles will plunge in and strike. You know, this possibility might even be why Okto didn’t want us to go through. Maybe she foresaw this kind of tactic, and—”

  “No,” I repeated. “No attack. No missiles. No mines. We’ll slip away, and that’s all.”

  He stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. It was a mixed blessing, but I was used to that sort of thing. His lack of confidence didn’t rattle me.

  “I’m not budging XO,” I explained. “We’re simply taking the course that will get us closer to those planets.”

  “You’re still holding out hope they’ll help us in some way. All right, Captain. It’s your call. It’s my duty to give you my opinion and—”

  “And you’ve done so,” I said, cutting him off. “Thank you, Commander.”

  He returned to his post sullenly.

  Over the following hour, we flew quietly toward the inner planets of the unknown system. As we did so, we picked up more and more data.

  “Sir…” Durris said. “There’s a lot of evidence of space traffic out here. A lot of radioactive clouds and debris as well.”

  “Meaning?”

  “There has almost certainly been a major fleet action in this system. I’m not seeing much here now, fortunately. The system appears to be dead.”

  My heart sank as we went over the data. We quickly found a world that was likely to have once held life. It was lifeless now, scorched by radioactive clouds. Dust obscured the surface, and storms raged with five hundred kilometer an hour winds blowing deadly particles everywhere.

  “Do you think it was a colony once?” Yamada asked me as we examined the world.

  “Yes,” I said. “Rather recently, in fact, if I don’t miss my guess. The variant fleet must have passed through here and destroyed them all.”

  After we’d been in the system for several h
ours, a trio of ships appeared at the breach point behind us. They were moving relatively slowly. They’d obviously been braking since we’d last seen them in hyperspace.

  “Okto has arrived,” Yamada said.

  “Damn,” Rumbold said. “I’d hoped that tricky woman had turned around and gone home.”

  “She slowed down out of fear,” I said. “She was worried we were laying an ambush for her. The enemy’s caution is our gain. We’re well ahead of them now.”

  My upbeat comments failed to brighten anyone’s mood. The cruisers were more distant, but they were still behind us, still following doggedly.

  “Where’s the next breach point?” I asked, turning to Durris.

  He shook his head. “I’m not seeing it,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I demanded, rushing to his side.

  “Just that—there’s nothing out here, sir. This planet, the burnt out one we’re passing by, is very close to the coordinates. The location is very unusual. I’m not sure there can be a bridge this near a paired star.”

  Frowning, I looked over his data hoping he’d made some kind of mistake. Naturally, there was no error.

  “A dead end?” I asked.

  “Well, if the last coordinate was the location of a breach, then yes.”

  “What else could it be?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe Perez wanted us to come here to help defend this broken planet. Maybe when he scrawled these notes there was a fierce battle going on right here. But now… everything’s dead, Captain.”

  Durris’ words were damning. Everything about this voyage now seemed like a farce. We were the joke of the galaxy, chasing ghosts at the whim of a dead Stroj agent.

  “Carry on,” I said, “decrease speed. We’re not doing a quick fly-by. Take us to the exact coordinates, so we can at least prove we reached the spot. Record everything carefully, and begin plotting an escape route.”

  Durris began swiftly working on a set of calculations. I glanced at them, and I realized they had nothing to do with my orders.

  “What are you up to, XO?” I asked.

  “I’m plotting the Beta ships likely actions—to see how much time we have.”

  “Is this in order to formulate an argument against my orders?”

  He looked up, startled. “Not at all, Captain. I just wanted to know how much time we’d have at the location specified before we have to move on. I mean, it could be a small item we’re looking for. Something like a time capsule, a satellite…”

  The odds of such things seemed extremely remote to me, but Durris was nothing if he wasn’t a man of details. I nodded to him, and he went back to his calculations.

  Soon thereafter, Defiant shuddered and decelerated.

  “It’s looking like we’ll have approximately an hour on station,” Durris told me. “Maybe two, tops, before we have to run.”

  “That should be good enough,” I said. “We’ll prove or disprove the premise of our mission long before that.”

  I found out soon afterward my confident words were quite wrong, but I had no way of knowing that at the time.

  -40-

  “So that’s what’s at the end of this rainbow,” Rumbold said to no one in particular.

  The sight of what we’d found filled all of us with unease. There, at a stationary La Grange point above the dead world we’d passed by, was a Stroj construct.

  The machine could only be one thing. It was an artificial bridge projector. I’d actually encountered one of these structures on a previous voyage.

  Bridge projectors had only been theoretical until I’d found one a year ago. The machine looked like a conical web-work of struts. It was a basket-shaped structure decorated with auto-cannons. It had the power—if this unit still operated—to create temporary artificial bridges between star systems.

  “If we get too close, it will fire on us,” I admonished. “Bring us around in a slow pass, Rumbold. Keep dropping our speed.”

  He glanced at me shaking his head, but he followed orders.

  “How’s the match on the coordinates he gave us, Durris?” I asked.

  “Perfect, sir,” he said. “It can’t be a coincidence. Perez wanted us to find this projector. This machine must be what the map was leading us to find.”

  “Yes…” I said thoughtfully. “It fits. Admiral Perez—whatever his real name was—we know he was a Stroj agent. Only the Stroj have this tech. But why did he give us a map directing us to this point?”

  No one answered me immediately. The structure slid off to one side of Defiant as we circled it, scanning it from every angle. As far as we could tell, it was identical in every respect to the first one we’d found so long ago.

  “Let’s go over what we do know,” Durris suggested.

  I nodded for him to continue.

  “First, this is a Stroj system,” he said. “That planet is in the liquid-water zone, and by all indications it once held a colony. There had to be Stroj living down there, or people who the Stroj had previously conquered.”

  “I would suggest they were the former,” I said. “I doubt the Stroj would have fought a serious battle for this system if it had been populated by normal human colonists. I also doubt they’d place one of their projectors in a system that wasn’t fully under their control.”

  “Agreed,” Durris said. “Now then, as to why the hell we’re here in the first place—”

  “You mean, why Perez wanted to get us to come here?”

  “Yes… How he could possibly think we could save this colony?”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t his plan,” I said.

  He frowned at me. “You don’t think Perez sent us out here to stop this destruction?”

  “No, not at all. Think of the timeline. Even if he knew this system was in trouble in real time, he couldn’t have expected us to get here fast enough to change the outcome. Our voyage took over a month’s time. We were sure to arrive late and discover only ruins.”

  “Hmm…” Durris said thoughtfully. “I hadn’t considered that, but you’re right of course, Captain. Then why did he send us here?”

  I stepped toward the image of the web-work structure which hung in the air over his tactical table. My hand grazed the image, making it waver and spin.

  “There’s only one logical answer,” I said. “He wanted us to operate this machine.”

  Durris looked alarmed and fascinated at the same time.

  Rumbold, who’d been listening in while pretending not to, swallowed hard and suffered an immediate coughing fit.

  “But sir…” Durris said. “We don’t know how to operate that thing.”

  “Last time we managed it,” I said. “We simply flew into it bearing a key given to us by the Stroj.”

  “Right… but we don’t have one now.”

  “Obviously not.”

  Durris stared at the image again. He stood beside me, and his mouth fell open a fraction.

  “You aren’t suggesting we should go aboard that thing’s control module to explore it?”

  “How else can we operate it? There’s no one else here.”

  “But sir… the Beta ships are closing in.”

  “Then we’d better get a move on, don’t you think? You didn’t seriously think I’d come all the way out here and not even check out the end of the trail, did you?”

  “No Captain,” he said in defeat. “I’d dared to hope, but I can see how that wouldn’t look good in our reports.”

  We got moving after that. In a surprisingly short amount of time, I found myself boarding an assault shuttle packed with marines. Durris and several of his best back-up officers manned Defiant’s command deck.

  Aboard the shuttle, besides Lieutenant Morris and myself, was a disgruntled Director Vogel and a single variant.

  “I don’t understand why I’m on this mission,” Vogel complained.

  “Because you’ve got the best engineering mind on my ship,” I said simply.

  “And K-19?”
>
  “He’s coming along to do any repair work we might encounter,” I said. “We can’t wait around for a human crew to do it. By the time they suit up and select the right smart-wrench, the Beta cruisers will be all over us.”

  Vogel looked like he smelled something unpleasant. Possibly he did, as we were all sealed up tightly in our spacesuits.

  “What if this structure’s automated defenses destroy us?” he demanded.

  I shrugged. “Then we die, I suppose.”

  He seemed to find this answer unsatisfactory, but I was done talking to him.

  The shuttle launched, and Vogel splayed out his hands in alarm. It was the gesture of someone who thought they were falling.

  A sudden whip-like arm shot out of the rear chamber of the shuttle and touched Vogel’s chest. For an instant, I thought the man had been struck dead. I reached for my sword, and beside me, Morris drew his pistol.

  “That thing hit him, Captain!” Morris shouted.

  My hand came up in a flat, stopping gesture. “Stand down, Morris. He’s all right.”

  To demonstrate my point, K-19’s arm retreated with a clicking noise, almost as fast as it had appeared. Vogel sat firmly in his seat where the variant had left him.

  “It’s okay,” gasped the Director. “I’m fine. K-19 was merely concerned for my safety. Remember, I’m old enough to be your great, great grandfather, Sparhawk.”

  “So what?” Morris demanded.

  Vogel gave him a stern glance. “So, my bones are thin. They will break like ice if I take a fall.”

  Morris leaned back, nostrils flaring in disgust. “Sick little glass man. What a way to live.”

  Vogel chuckled. “We’ll see what you say when your body starts to age. You’ll be hooked on Rejuv before you hit fifty.”

  Morris glared at the ceiling. He didn’t answer the older man. Perhaps that was because we all knew Vogel was right. Who could withstand the siren’s call of extended life?

  “Director,” I said, “what’s our plan upon arrival?”

  He looked at me in wonderment. “I thought this expedition was your idea.”

  “It was. I’m in overall command. But you are in command of the scientific details. You have one hour to get this station—if it is a station—up and running. One hour. Use your time wisely.”