by T. R. Harris
Long-range sensors showed the transit zone for LP-5 to be less populated than the TZ’s the team was used to. Their only other experience came from LP-6 and the jumps between galaxies. These staging areas were always packed with either invading warships or those returning home after a tour of duty. There were barely nine ships waiting at the LP-5 transit zone.
Even if this side of the gravity tunnel looked innocuous enough, they knew it wouldn’t be the same at the other end. That was where the trap would be sprung, and Adam was sure the Nuoreans had enough firepower on hand to overwhelm his small ship while its engines were down.
As they moved slowly through the outer reaches of the Nuorean system, Jym noticed a new cluster of grav-sigs lining up behind them. The jig was up, and that’s when Adam realized this was the Nuoreans plan all along—to trap the Najmah Fayd between two fleets of alien warships, one in front, the other from behind.
The re-routing of the chemical engine control thrusters was complete, allowing the powerful exhaust to be channeled through a makeshift conduit and nozzle strapped to the starboard side of the ship. The stream could be toggled between the aft jets and the exhaust tube. Once shifted, the ship would make an abrupt left turn—and hopefully stay in one piece.
Copernicus was set to launch two quick barrages of Hades IV missiles ahead of their flight path, fourteen rockets in total. He set them to spread out, covering a radius of one hundred twenty degrees. With the detection of the ships behind them, he set another fourteen to cover their tail. All-in-all, the stage was set for an extremely dangerous environment for any metal-hulled vessels within the transit zones, the Najmah Fayd included.
As per Coop’s recommendation, all the crew dressed spacesuits and the atmosphere throughout the ship was evacuated, eliminating the possibility of pressure explosions from within.
Adam watched the clock as the time to the transit drew closer—as did the ships behind them. The Nuoreans apparently had the same idea: to accelerate into the TZ the moment it activated. They would have fifteen seconds to make it into the TZ before the portal closed.
The Najmah Fayd was four thousand miles from the edge of the transit zone when gravity readings began to go haywire. The portal was opening.
Coop released the missiles—both front and rear—as Adam waited an excruciating-long five additional seconds more before gunning the chemical engines, currently channeled out the tail of the ship. He couldn’t use a gravity-well because that would eat up the screen of Hades IV missiles shooting out in front of the ship. Once on the other side, he would switch to the jets to the starboard side nozzle for the turn to port.
Even before they made the transit, enemy warships were exploding in the rearview mirror.
The journey to the LP-5 end zone was half the distance they’d traveled getting to Andromeda, so only a second went by before they burst into the space of the opposite TZ. The threat board exploded with contacts, with several of the Nuorean ships already underway after only a couple of seconds’ delay. They were definitely waiting for them, and extremely quick at the controls.
“Hold on!” Adam yelled as he diverted the chemical exhaust stream and turned ship.
It was strange what happened next.
With no air in the ship to carry sound waves, rivets popped and welds snapped in absolute silence. A thin crack opened up along the portside bulkhead of the bridge, and one of the ship’s stubby wings broke off.
The crew screamed in their helmets as the g-force tried to tear their bodies apart—as it was doing to the ship—while pressure from the chair restraints threatened to rip open the fabric of their suits.
Just then, something small and unseen pierced the forward bulkhead and passed through the bridge, creating another small, round hole in the aft wall. Adam caught sight of Riyad. They shared a look, knowing that the metal projectile would continue to rip through multiple walls and bulkheads until it exited the ship—hopefully without hitting anything critical.
Adam returned his attention to his course board. They were turning, making a severely arching track to port and out the transit zone. Another five seconds passed before he cut the engines.
The effect was immediate and welcoming—to the crew and the ship. The pressure ended and they could breathe again.
The bridge was dark, except for the fluorescent glow from the still-active monitoring screens and the red flashing light of the emergency alarm. They couldn’t hear the alarm, not through the vacuum within the ship. Internal gravity was off as well.
Jym was feverishly working the nav sensors, looking for any ships in the vicinity that could pose a threat. There were plenty around, even after making the turn; however, the momentum of the Najmah Fayd was moving them away from the deadly cloud of invisible hull-shredders spreading ever-wider within the TZ. The plan had worked—to a point. Now all they had to do was repair the extensive damage to the ship.
That’s when Adam noticed something strange about the alignment of the alien warships. They had all changed course and where now heading away from the transit zone at flank speed. It took him only a moment to realize what they were doing: matching the direction and velocity of the metal ball bearings. It was masterful, not only for the simplicity of the strategy, but also for the speed at which the entire fleet had adopted it. Most the forty-odd ships were now ahead of the cloud and again changing course, this time heading in the direction of the Najmah Fayd.
“We got trouble,” Adam called out. He unbuckled his restraints and floated into the center of the room. “The Nuoreans are on their way. We have to do damage control and get the TD drive back up pronto. Coop, Kaylor…you’re with me. Riyad…see if we still have weapons control. Sherri, Jym…start patching holes.”
Adam led his workers to the aft engine room, where both the gravity generators and trans-dimensional drive were located. The monitoring screen to the TD drive was dark—which wasn’t good. Kaylor hurried to the console and fastened small anchor lines to his suit so he wouldn’t float away as he worked. He booted up a backup diagnostic screen and began to run the program. Moments later he began to bark orders.
“Panel four, seventh circuit—replace it.”
Copernicus was at the box first.
“Adam, go to the auxiliary power generator. We need to prime the system.”
At the base of the twin grav-generators was a smaller, oval shaped unit resting on a pair of metal legs bolted to the deck. There were two large switches on top. Adam planted his magnetic boots to the deck and began to flick the switches back and forth several times before leaving them in the on position. Although he still couldn’t hear the hum of generator being spun up, he could feel the vibration through his boots.
The lights came on in the room, and the main screen for the TD drive lit up. Kaylor shifted his position and began typing at the console. The vibration on the deck grew stronger, and a moment later Adam felt his stomach turn. He looked at Kaylor with a frown.
“Did you just jump the ship?”
“Yes, but only half-a-light from our last position. I used what was left in the storage batteries and the aux. They are drained again, so we have at least another ten minutes before we can jump again.”
“Half-a-light isn’t very far,” Coop said. “The Nuoreans can be here in about six minutes.”
“How about the grav-gens?” Adam asked Kaylor. “Can we get anything out of them?”
“Possibly. The problem is the stress that the gravity drive places on the hull. We have numerous cracks and broken seals already. We could literally fall apart if we activate the drive.”
“Sherri, how are the patches coming?” Adam asked through the suit comms.
“Okay. We’re using chemical welding panels. They work great. Just slap one over a crack and they go to work melding with the bulkhead. It’s like it never even happened. The problem is we have five more cracks to seal and about a dozen small puncture holes before we can restore atmosphere. I heard what Kaylor said. I wouldn’t risk engaging the drive unti
l we have more of the cracks repaired.”
“Heads up everyone,” Riyad’s voice echoed in their helmets. “We may not have a choice. The bad guys are coming fast…and our weapons are down. Our only option is to run.”
Adam looked at Kaylor and nodded. “Take is easy…and we may catch a break seeing that there’s no atmosphere in the ship creating internal pressure on the hull.”
“That is a very good point, Adam. But still, I will go easy. Get ready…I’m activating the gravity drive.”
If Adam thought the vibrations through the deck had been bad before, he hadn’t seen anything yet. Something was off-balance in one of the huge generators spinning up in the room, and if the pull of the singularities from the grav-drive wasn’t enough to tear the ship apart, the violent shaking was only moments away from doing the deed itself.
Kaylor cut the drive and the shaking cycled down.
“Another light-year was all I could do, Adam. I couldn’t risk running it any longer.”
“That’s fine, buddy. Riyad, where are the Nuoreans?”
“Coming about and tenacious as ever. We’re going to need the TD drive if we expect to survive.”
Adam unhooked his magnetic boots from the metal deck and floated over to Kaylor. He scanned the data on the diagnostic screen, surprised he could understand the readings with relative ease. Once again, he thanked the mutant tumor in his head.
“We need to tap directly into the gravity generators—at least the one that isn’t out of balance. But we can’t channel the power in directly, it has to be filtered through the batteries.”
“They’ll explode,” Kaylor said.
“We need an inverter—the ship’s power module!”
“It is too weak, Adam.”
Adam began to tap on the keyboard of the control console. “Capacitors…I’ll stream it through the matrix. Hold on everyone. This should work.”
Twenty seconds later, a new and steady vibration was felt through the deck as the working gravity generator spun up. After a moment, a power bar on the screen for the TD drive began to fill in, climbing higher up the scale.
“Ten seconds. We’re set for a fifty light-year jump out into the void. Hopefully that will give us breathing room to make the repairs before the Nuoreans show up.”
The ship jumped.
“Threat board quiet, Captain Cain,” Riyad reported a moment later. “Looks like we’ll live to fight another day.”
“That’s always the objective, Mister Tarazi,” Adam sighed. He looked through his helmet lens at the relieved faces of Kaylor and Copernicus. “Okay, let’s get the repairs going. There’s still a lot of work to be done before we can go home.”
Sherri’s voice came through the speakers. “I’m glad you added that last part. I was afraid you’d tossed that option out the window a while ago.”
“Believe me, sweetheart, suicide is the last thing on my mind. Besides, we’re just at the point where our true mission begins.”
A chorus of moans was heard through the speakers. Adam figured his constant string of mission resets didn’t sell any longer, not with this crew anyway.
106
Morlon was in the main control room of the LP-6 space station, surveying the progress of the specialists realigning the massive gravity generators, when a Third Cadre messenger rushed into the room
“Commander, the alien warcraft has breached the LP-5 transit zone.”
Morlon stared at the young officer, questions exploding in his mind. “It survived? How?”
The messenger handed a databox to his superior. He spoke as Morlon read. “The aliens flooded the landing area with tiny metal ballistics. The waiting ships had to deviate course to avoid damage.”
“It says here the Human ship shifted course dramatically once entering the zone. How was this possible? Their engines were offline.”
“Chemical reaction jets, Commander. The turn was sharp and unexpected. By the time our ships were able to resume the pursuit the enemy ship had vanished.”
Morlon paced the room, not out of anger or fear, but from excitement. Adam Cain was indeed a worthy opponent, and the only regret Morlon had was that the two of them would never meet in the arena. But now he had to play the game, calculate the odds, create a new strategy. The Humans were coming to LP-6, that was a given. That gave Morlon the place. And the time was soon.
“Alert the station’s security forces. Prepare for outside intrusion. And set a screen of defenders around the generators and venting complex. Pull all ships from the transit zone to assist.” He glanced at the huge clock on the wall that was constantly counting down the time to the next transit. Sixteen hours. Adam Cain would move within that time if he hoped to catch the return pulse through LP-5. Yet what would be his strategy? Morlon needed time to think.
He dismissed the Cadre messenger before barking out additional orders to the station commanders. There were fourteen hundred Nuoreans onboard, plus another six hundred scattered over the huge generator complex. Cain had a single ship with a crew estimated to be less than eight. Surely the complex was not in danger.
But that’s just the type of thinking Morlon dismissed. He couldn’t afford the luxury of assumptions.
He retired to his assigned stateroom—the largest and most-luxurious aboard—to think. Previously, his only concern was how Cain would make it to LP-6. Now that he was here, Morlon had to put himself in the Human’s place and determine how he planned to destroy the station. Only when enemy plans were deciphered could truly effective deterrents be put in place. Morlon had to think like a Human if he expected to defeat a Human—a Human named Adam Cain.
“We’re screwed,” Copernicus said to Adam. They were in the engine room staring at the thick iron shell of one of the gravity-drive generators. “An internal fan blade broke off and shredded a couple around it. We can’t replace them and we can’t run the generator the way it is.”
All the breaches in the hull had been repaired and atmosphere restored to the ship. The two men wore jeans and t-shirts, after spending almost three hours in the spacesuits.
“The other generator still runs,” Adam pointed out.
“Yeah, but it takes an incredible amount of energy to feed the dynamos that create the singularities. We can get maneuvering wells out of the one still operational, but nothing above light speed.”
The TD drive was smaller—yet infinitely more complex. It had been designed by the immortal mutant genius Panur and consisted of a bank of modules anchored to the aft bulkhead of the engine room. The drive didn’t require generator power to constantly feed the unit, only a store of electricity from a series of batteries set in the inner wall lining and deck plates of the spine corridor. All the drive had to do was open a portal to another universe and then another back into theirs. There was no real propulsion taking place—just a manipulation of time and space. The drive was an amazing piece of technology, and one the scientists back on Earth had yet to fully comprehend. They could duplicate the effect, but only through the application of prodigious amounts of energy. Panur’s device did it with only twelve ordinary fuel cells linked together.
The TD drive was fully functional now, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was they couldn’t go around jumping everywhere. At some point they needed to use conventional gravity propulsion—even chem drive—for precise movements and maneuvers. The chem drive only had twenty percent of its fuel reserves left, and the grav-drive could only achieve sub-light speeds. And to make things worse, the missiles they carried were launched through a rail-gun apparatus, which also required a considerable amount of electricity—electricity normally pulled from the grav-generators. With only one unit operational, it was either run the engines or fire the missiles. You couldn’t do both at the same time.
With all these limitations and considerations, Adam’s mutant-enhanced mind was working overtime on workarounds.
He shook his head at the disassembled gravity generator. “It is what it is,” he said to Coop. He accessed
the ship’s comm system with his ATD and made an announcement. “Okay team, let’s meet in the common room. We’re pretty much set for the run on LP-6. We just need to figure out what we’re going to do when we get there.”
Morlon lay on his bed, an arm resting across his forehead and staring wide-eyed and unblinking at the ceiling. He was attempting to recall everything he knew about Humans—and Adam Cain in particular. The Third Cadre was tasked with studying the thousands of alien races the Nuoreans encountered, be they innocuous or Jundac. The Humans had been classified Jundac several months ago—with some of his kind suspecting they were so even before the invasion of the Kac. As a result, the species was the most-studied and analyzed of all the races in the alien galaxy. Morlon was privy to all this data. In fact, he was the ranking officer charged with this information, making him the foremost expert on the Human race.
Over the past thirteen days, all his superior knowledge had done him no good. Cain still succeeded against every obstacle Morlon set before him. Yet in most cases, the Cadre officer had been merely reacting to events, and when he sought to control them, artificial timelines were placed on him that gave the appearance of failure on his part. The only true setback Morlon felt responsible for was the failure of his ships to destroy or capture the Human starship when it appeared at LP-5. That round he awarded to Adam Cain. But the contest was far from over. In fact, it was just beginning.
Morlon’s first step in predicting the actions of Adam Cain was to determine the ideal outcome for the alien’s plan. He and his fellow saboteurs would want to destroy the midpoint generators…yet not before they could travel back to the Suponac and catch the last pulse through LP-6 to their home galaxy. That meant the ordinance would have to be time-delayed and impervious to disarming. Next, they would have to know the location of the LP-6 transit zone and have the time to reach it before the next launch. Following the best-case scenario, Cain would expect the zone to be located somewhere along the rim of the galaxy—as were all the others—probably within a thousand light-cycles or so of Nuor, a destination easily reachable using his teleportation drive.