by Andrew Beery
My father-in-law would have insisted the fleet move on by now. The question was… move on to where?
That was the bad news. The good news was that there wasn’t a doubt in my military mind but that both Captains Tilly and Kimbridge would have found a creative way to leave us a few clues.
It would be Shelby’s job to track down those clues. Her role on the Gilboa II was changing. I had promoted her to captain. In point of fact, I was merely recognizing the growth I had seen in the young commander over the course of our service together.
Before my away team left for our little foray into the bowels of our enemy, I would be placing her in permanent command of the Gilboa II.
If everything went perfectly, Doctor Merab and I would gather the intel we needed to take down Eshbaal; while at the same time, the Gilboa II would gather the resources we needed to make that take-down happen.
If everything went perfectly. Here’s the thing. The universe is not, and has never been, a perfect place… especially not my little corner of it.
***
Two days later the Gilboa II had carefully moved under heavy cloak to a position about a third of an AU from Beta Mutara Prime. This was as close as we could safely get to the Defiler homeworld without undue risk of discovery.
OK, for those of you doing the math, a third of an astronomical unit is just a tad over three light minutes away… meaning it would take a three light minutes for any observer on Beta Mutara Prime looking in our direction to actually see us. This was roughly the distance between our sun and Mercury.
That is an impossibly large distance. On the surface, it stretched the bounds of credulity to think that we should not have be able to get any closer to our target. Unfortunately, there is perception, and there is reality… and reality, it seems, has a nasty habit of encroaching on our preferred flights of hopeful fantasy.
In this case, the encroachment took the form of a heretofore unknown (and quite frankly massive) QCR node farm. A QCR node farm or, more formally, a Quantum Communication Router node network was an essential component of the Ancestor FTL communication technology.
According to Mitty, the FTL system used by the Ancestors involved quantum entangled photons. The transmitter and receiver each had a sizeable collection of these closely-knit subatomic particle pairs.
These entangled pairs are the secret sauce that made the faster-than-light magic happen. Changing the spin state of one of the particles instantly changed the spin state of its mate… no matter how far away each of the particles were from the other. The overall system was nearly instantaneous.
And by ‘nearly instantaneous, I mean the interactions between the entangled pairs were not constrained by such antiquated and quaint notions such as the speed of light. According to Mitty, the entanglement occurred in a higher dimensional plane allowing the interaction between entangled pairs to bypass the laws of physics that encumbered our plane of existence.
The QCR nodal farm was critical to making the system work. The reason for this was simple. Entanglement operated in pairs. This means that while ‘A’ could talk to ‘B’… ‘A’ would never be able talk to ‘D.’
The only way you could get information from A to D was to first do the instantaneous data transfer AB and then slow-boat the data from B to C using sublight methods… say a fiberoptic cable or radio waves.
Once the information had been transported over to C… then and only then could the instantaneous data transfer CD occur.
The overall transmission speed would still be faster than light, but there would be a minor unavoidable latency introduced by the QCR nodal array.
The QCR nodes controlled the sublight routing functions of the entire FTL network. Without them, the flexibility and utility of FTL communications would be greatly constrained.
Now, up until this point, the only FTL network we had encountered was the Ancestor one controlled by the Tas. The location of their QCR node farm was a closely guarded secret. The QCR nodes were the most vulnerable part of the FTL system. Accordingly, they required a high degree of protection. There were two ways to accomplish this.
First, you could hide the nodal farm in the vastness of space. Since the location of the QCR did not impact its function… you could literally put them anywhere. Alternately, you could place these node farms in a heavily fortified location.
Truth be known, there were good arguments to be made for either approach.
The salient issue, however, was the fact that this system had QCR nodes. That essentially equated to a massive FTL sensor net. Combined with the large number of ships patrolling the binary star system and you had a recipe for discovery. Ergo our cautious position about four AU from Beta Mutara Prime. You said it was a third of an AU earlier
Captain Shelby had parked the Gilboa II in an orbit around the sun that kept, at least temporarily, a dense cloud of asteroid rubble between us and the planet. At some later point in time, perhaps tens of millions of years down the road enough rubble would have gathered in this spot to begin to coalesce into some type of proto-planet. For the moment, however, it was just an abnormally dense collection of asteroids.
In silent-running mode and with our cloak in place, we looked like just another rock floating in space. There was, however, another reason we parked in this particular orbit.
I was hoping to catch a ride.
2100.1289.8855 Galactic Normalized Time
Newly promoted Captain Elena Shelby settled back in her command chair. ‘Her command chair!’ She liked the sound of that. Her own command had been a long time coming, but the wait had been worth it. Never had she dreamed of skippering the fleet’s flagship.
On the forward viewscreen, she watched the away team led by Admiral Riker settle in for their long wait. Satisfied that they were properly bedded down, she nodded to her helmsman, Lieutenant Commander Heinz. It was time to get this show on the road.
Chapter 18: Dog Sled…
If you ever get the chance to EVA and float free among the stars, I would highly recommend you take it.
Given the needs of a previous posting as the Commodore in charge of a spaceship boneyard, I had more EVAs under my belt then I could count, but I never tired of the sight. The black of space was absolute. Stars were crisp and sharp. Their individual colors were easier to see when there was no atmospheric induced flickering. The arms of the Milky Way were expansive and almost indescribable in their grandeur.
It was said there were no atheists in foxholes. I would argue there are no atheists in space. You cannot help but feel a connection with the Divine when confronted with such all-encompassing splendor and beauty.
There were six of us on the away team. It was not the number I had been expecting. My plan had called for only two of us to make our way covertly to the Defiler homeworld. I was overruled by the only person on the Gilboa II with the power to issues me orders: My wife, Lori.
I should have known something was up. Although she publicly supported my plans during our last staff meeting, she had been strangely aloof after the briefing. Rather than spending our last night together saying ‘goodbye’ as only husband and wife can… she kept herself busy in sickbay.
With option one torpedoed, I thought perhaps I would spend the early evening hours shooting pool and having a beer with Mike Morrison, but the Marine Commander was likewise unavailable. So much for option two.
In the end, I settled for a replicated ham and cheese sandwich and watched an ancient black and white 2D detective drama on the vid. It starred a guy named Charlie Chan. It was so poorly crafted that it actually became entertaining… for all the wrong reasons. Not at all unlike the original Doctor Who series circa 1960. I fell asleep about three-quarters of the way through the movie… a response not at all unlike what I had to those original Doctor Who’s.
When Lori finally made her way to our quarters, her movements woke me up. She looked exhausted, but at the same time, she had a mischievous smile on her face. I wouldn’t know the reason for that mischievou
s grin until the next morning.
We had been eating breakfast when I got the shock of my life. Four neander-thugs were making their way quickly to the table Lori, Merab, and I were sitting at. I started to get up while at the same time, reaching for my comm-link to call security. Just before my fingers touched the button on my sleeve, I noticed something peculiar. I was the only one at the table surprised to see the Defiler henchmen.
“Did you want to call security?” The voice was that of Mike Morrison. However, it came from the throat of what looked to be a Neanderthal hybrid dressed in a black jumpsuit that looked like the uniforms worn by neander-thugs I had tangled with in the past. It was obvious he and the others had undergone a little cosmetic surgery. It would certainly explain why my wife was so tired last night.
“You didn’t seriously think I would let you go into the belly of the beast without sending along some muscle, did you?” Lori said with a raised eyebrow and just a hint of a smile.
That was my long-winded way of saying Merab, and I now had four cosmetically altered Marines with us. Since there were tens of thousands of breeding and therefore genetically diverse Neanderthal hybrids roaming around Defiler facilities, there was no reason to suspect a handful more would be noticed.
My HUD flashed for my attention. The Gilboa II was about to begin their diversion. This would be one of the most dangerous parts of my plan. The Gilboa II would deliberately simulate a cloaking failure.
The bad guys, if they were on the ball, would spot the ship they had spent weeks looking for and move to intercept. The idea was for the Gilboa II to make a noisy escape and in the process knock a whole bunch of these rocks out of their nice, pretty, and somewhat stable orbits.
We would be on one of those rocks. A rock carefully nudged like a billiard ball on a course that would take it near but not directly into Beta Mutara Prime.
***
As per our plan, the Gilboa II had made a flashy exit some four days earlier. By flashy, I mean… twenty ships to one odds… let’s lob some antimatter and neutronium-tipped missiles at each other… type of flashy. You know what I mean. The type of flashy that dumps copious amounts of hard radiation into the general vicinity.
As crazy as it sounds, I was counting on those hard rads to give us an advantage. That is if we could avoid becoming a crispy-fried recon team. Fortunately, as my dear, departed father used to teach me… a problem anticipated is a problem avoided.
We had several things going for us. First, our HALO encounter suits had been modified to offer us some additional protection from the radiation. Second, the Gilboa II was a full ten thousand kilometers away from us when they kicked off the festivities. Third, the background noise from the short dustup served to increase the effectiveness of our cloak. After about five minutes of knockdown, drag-out fighting, the Gilboa II turned tail and entered Skip Space.
Unbeknownst to the bad guys, we were on our way to pay them a visit. It was a bit dicey at first. When our rock got knocked out of orbit, one of Mike’s men, Corporal James, lost his hold on his tether. This meant that while he was generally heading in the same direction as us, he was drifting ever so slightly away. In essence, he was off doing his own thing. It also meant we couldn’t use the portable Higgs Field Generator we had brought along to tweak our course without the wayward marine continuing to do his own thing… in this case plunge headfirst into the densest part of Beta Mutara Prime’s atmosphere.
The HALOs were not designed to survive an atmosphere entry at that speed and at that angle.
Now I know what some of you are thinking. Don’t HALO suits have some type of steering system built into them? The short answer is yes, they do. The longer answer involves computer-controlled flaps built into the arms and legs of the suits. They required atmospheric pressure in order to work. Atmospheric pressure was hard to come by in the vacuum of space.
Mike and I were debating how to handle this situation when the young Corporal solved it on his own. I have to give the kid credit for thinking outside the box.
He pulled a tube of nano-patch from his utility pouch and with his trusty MK3 MOD 12 survival knife nicked the tip of his left-hand glove’s index finger. The finger essentially became a steerable reaction mass thruster. When he judged he was on course to our hunk of rock, he sealed the breach in his suit with the aforementioned nano-patch. As I said, I liked this kid. He would go far if he could avoid killing himself.
Having sorted that out, we had settled in for our long ride.
Let me take a moment and state for the record, days on end, lashed to a big moving rock… with nothing to do but contemplate the nature and abundance of lint in your bellybutton can be – in a word – boring.
I learned more about Colonel Mike Morrison’s favorite bulldog Chesty Puller than any sane man would ever want to know… including the fact that all it took was a simple ‘Good night Chesty’ to cause the dog to drop in place and snore as only a bulldog can.
It turns out Corporal Rodrigues had an aversion to chicken liver, no doubt brought about by a stepmother who forced him to eat it as a toddler.
My new best buddy Corporal James was an adrenaline junky – who’d of thunk it?
The best was Sergeant Narval. The big woman fancied herself an opera singer. She spent hours entertaining us with various selections from Phantom of the Opera. Let me state for the record, there was a reason she was a Marine and not wowing the crowds at the Palais Garnier in Paris.
It was only when the Colonel threatened her with friendly fire that she gave our ears a much-needed respite.
The trip onboard the Dog-Sled, as the marines had taken to calling our rock, was expected to take just a tad over four days. Given that we had been on that rock for about that… meant that the hours upon hours in inactivity that we had been enduring was about to be replaced with an extended period of wet-your-pants hyper-activity. Is it strange that this excited me?
“Coming up on our debarkation point,” Mike said over our short-range comms. “Five minutes until we drop.”
I looked over at Doctor Merab. The Saulite physician’s face looked green through the endura-glass window of her HALO suit.
I knew from our extended conversations over the past several days that she was not a fan of heights and suffered from a mild case of agoraphobia. Given that her people were, or rather had been, the preeminent soldiers of the Galactic Order… it seemed somewhat odd that this would be the case.
The good doctor had confided in me that the agoraphobia or fear of open spaces was a large part of why she had chosen the medical profession. I was too polite to ask how that worked out for her… especially as we were essentially in as big and open a place as could be imagined.
“You ready for this, Doctor?” I asked.
“If I said no, would it make a difference?” was her snarky reply.
I smiled. “Probably not.”
The slow rotation of our rock brought the blue orb of Beta Mutara Prime into view. Not for the first time, I wished it could have been Lori anchored next to me on the dog sled. This was the type of beauty that demanded to be shared with the ones we love most.
Merab was quiet for a few minutes. I thought that might be the end of our conversation. She surprised me with a softly spoken question about a minute and a half before we separated from the Dog Sled and used the gravity of one of Beta Mutara Prime’s smaller moons to gently loop the six of us into an insertion trajectory.
The Saulite turned her helmet so as to look me straight in the eye. It wasn’t fear that I was seeing. To be honest, I’m not sure what it was that I was seeing. Doubt? Trepidation? Some combination?
“Do we even know what we are looking for?” she whispered.
I shook my head; I had a few ideas but nothing concrete. “We’ll know when we find it. We can’t win this war through strength of arms.
I turned to gaze at the beautiful, water-filled world we were approaching. “Somewhere down there are the answers we need. We just need to find them.”
Now it was my turn to pause.
“I know because we have no other choice. I know because I have faith that the divine creator has more in mind for us than this. I know because I need to believe it is so.”
2100.1289.8856 Galactic Normalized Time
Admiral Spratt was on the bridge of the UES Ticonderoga when the sensors detected a Skip portal open. The fleet moved to a defensive posture immediately. As a single massive vessel finally emerged, the Admiral breathed a sigh of relief. It was the Gilboa II. Somehow, he had always known his son-in-law was too stubborn to die. Not when he had a galaxy to save.
Chapter 19: Hot Dog…
“Here we go,” Mike said with maniacal glee that was, in my mind at least, wholly inappropriate for our situation.
I and five of my newest best buddies, each clad in Marine HALO armor, stood on a launch sled. The sled used puffs of compressed CO2 to gently lift off of the surface of our three-ton asteroid as it swung around the backside of the small moon we were flying by.
The timing of our burn was such that the moon shielded our maneuver from any prying eyes on the planet’s surface as well as the network of communications satellites positioned in evenly spaced, geosynchronous orbits about the planet.
Our short burn looped us closer to the moon than the rock we had been riding. The result was we got a bit of a gravity assist and well as gravitationally induced course change. We were now on collision course with the outer fringes of the planet’s atmosphere. The sled was discarded and we now each floated free.
The angle of attack was such that had we actually been a meteor we would likely have skipped off the surface of the atmosphere like stones skipped across smooth pond. Of course, we weren’t your average meteor.