Opening Moves

by James Traynor

  “First thing I heard,” Grunt muttered.

  “That's because you are a moron!” Kowalski snorted.

  “ – and five or six pairs of eyes will get the job done quicker than just four, right? So, ditch that gear and head for airlock seven. We'll have suits ready for two of ya.”

  * * * * * * *

  Airlocks in the entertainment feeds and those found in real life had little in common. Those found in the vids often had elaborate opening mechanisms and small windows to see through for dramatic effect. JOHNSTON's – and every other ship Private Samantha Lee had ever traveled on – airlocks were plain, solid slabs of metal a foot and a half thick operated either by simple touch pads or old fashioned levers. They had no windows. Windows on a starship throwing around megaton range weapons were a structural weakness nobody could afford.

  “You two are good to go,” Carmachio's voice echoed hollowly through Sammy's helmet as Grunt Kayser stumbled into the airlock with her, being his usual clingy self. Despite Samantha's open homosexuality and her being in a solid marriage, Grunt somehow had gotten it in his mind that he had to 'conquer' her. Granted, that had been years ago, and despite the originally rather creepy vibe, they had become good buddies, but sometimes he just had some problems with the concept of 'personal space'. “Keep your hands on the handrails all the time, and do what I do!” the petty officer warned the two of them and stepped out of the airlock, swinging left.

  With a start Sammy realized there was no gravity inside the airlock and awkwardly tried to emulate the technician's moves. She felt as clumsy as a fat child, stumbling outside. A hand grabbed her arm and pulled her aside.

  “Take it easy,” Carmachio said gruffly. “I don't want to be the one to have to go after you if you float out of here. You can't see or feel it, but we're doing five and a half thousand times the speed of light right now. If you fly off and out of the warp field it's the final curtain call for you, Lee. That counts for you, too, longshanks!” he called out to Kayser and pulled a cord as thin as razor wire from a sunken small hatch next to him and fastened it to his belt. “There's one of these nodes every fifty meters. You're always connected to one, understood? Never notch one before you haven't connected to the next one!”

  “Copy that,” Sammy breathed, relieved to feel a solid surface beneath her feet again.

  “Good. Control, send out the bots.”

  The Silverstone-Cray Mk. 25 Semi-Autonomous Repair Robots were the good folk of the navy. Resembling stout-legged dogs the size of a mastiff they labored in environments where even humans in protective suits reached their limits. They were the ever-present helping hands of the ship's technicians and damage control crews: welding, diagnosing, repairing, replacing parts, networking for more complex tasks –- the Mk. 25 did it. Erupting from a two hatches a dozen of the thigh-high machines spread out across the JOHNSTON's hull and began looking for irregularities.

  “Hey, how come they don't need the damn cable?” Grunt protested.

  Carmachio snorted and pulled himself farther away from the airlock. “For one, they are connected to the cables. They do that automatically and a wee bit quicker than us meat bags. Unlike us, they also got thrusters to cling to the hull. And they're a lot easier to replace than a living, breathing crew member. Much less paperwork.”

  Sammy pulled herself after the petty officer, her feet swaying.

  Grunt cursed. “Effin' hell! I thought this was the future! Why can't my boots stick to the damn hull with magnets or something?”

  Carmachio slowly walked on along the guidance cord, his steps as secure as if he wasn't in a zero gravity environment. “Son, how 'bout you take a look down at yer feet and tell me what you see.” He didn't wait for an actual response and continued. “Ceramic plates. The upper thirty centimeters of our armor are thermo-conductive ceramic plates. Do some good against lasers, but primarily they do keep our own IR profile down. It's the deluxe version of dinnerware, and last I checked dinnerware wasn't magnetic.”

  Sammy chuckled. “Magnetic? You're lucky the stuff on Grunt's plates isn't alive.”

  “Oi, I keep a clean kitchen!” Grunt Kayser protested.

  “Yeah, right. There're bioweapons programs out there that could learn a thing or two from the bacterial cultures you cultivate.”

  “Too much information. Try to put both your feet firmly against the hull, then take slow, light steps. That should help. If you put too much muscle into it you'll fly all over the place.”

  “Copy that,” Sammy sighed and followed the petty officer's example. She was surprised to realize that after the first few cautious steps walking in zero gravity turned out to be a lot less problematic than she had thought. Grunt behind her was less lucky, but at least he didn't float into outer space when he stumbled.

  These first few moments of silence gave her a chance to take in the unfamiliar environment. It wasn't the diamond speckled blackness of space. She stared into an ocean of whirling grays, like a dark fog in which a thousand lights pulsated, some stronger, some weaker. Some of the brighter spots glowed with a fiery red. Like blue-white flashes, shifting bands, their surface more pronounced and rough, crisscrossed the mist seemingly at random.

  Despite the prevalence of gray it was a strangely colorful and somewhat nauseating vista. She could almost feel the growing headache as she tried to concentrate on one spot in the moving sea in the distance. For it was just the distance. Sammy knew that what she saw was actually just the outer edge of the foldspace corridor JOHNSTON traversed. The space in between it was literally empty.

  Carmachio gave both of them a skeptical look. “I hope neither of you chooses to throw up. I'm not stopping this spacewalk just because you can't keep your lunch inside of you.” He sighed. “Don't try to focus too much. In my experience that helps a bit.”

  Sammy winced, then began to walk again, remembering that they weren't out here just for show. Behind her Grunt coughed.

  “You know, aren't we awfully close to that... stuff?” he pointed at the whirling mist.

  “Not really,” the petty officer snickered. “We are closer to that side of the corridor than we'd ordinarily be, all right, but we're still, oh, five or six light hours away from the real danger zone. Distances can be deceiving in the fold.”

  “I hate all this hyperspace shit already,” Grunt muttered.

  “Foldspace,” Carmachio corrected him with a smile. “Hyperspace is a scifi term for another dimension where you'll just go in any direction you want. I know you dirt humpers don't take those terms too seriously, but you don't have to show everybody that you've got no idea at all about how space travel works.”

  “Since I've got the feeling you'll explain it anyway, how about you give us the easy version?” Sammy stalled him laconically. “That way we've all got something out of this.” She shot Grunt a glance to keep his mouth shut and for once the lanky soldier did as he was told.

  “Do I look as if I studied quantum physics?” Carmachio cackled. “You were never going to get anything but the easy version. Hyperspace means you're in a fully formed dimension where you travel from A to B on a point by point basis correlating to positions in realspace. Foldspace, on the other hand, is more like a subway network. It's pockets of space folded around gravity wells. Hence the name. You guys still with me? Mind your steps, we'll move to the left here.” He swiftly linked himself into a different safety cord which ran along the whole height of the cruiser. “Gotta check some of the superstructure. Careful!” he rounded on Grunt. “Never link out of a cord before your harness' been attached to the next! You slip away here and nobody will ever find you again. You need just a few hundred meters away from the ship and your suit's comm systems would do jack against the electromagnetic disturbances raging out there. Damn it, boy, you'd be screaming your lungs out and nobody would even notice it until it'd be too late for you. Look at that!” Carmachio pointed at the vast, milky-gray void. “Hell, you'd be lucky if you just drifted off and got whacked by a grav shear. At least it'd
be over for you then. But what if not? What if you'd float through the nothingness, your suit stocked with water and air and food for days, maybe even weeks. Alone. Lost. Damned, with nothing to accompany you but the creeping madness and the knowledge of your certain demise. That's something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy,” he turned back around, muttering.

  Grunt looked as if he was to give the petty officer a piece of his mind but Sammy grabbed his arm and gave him a silent stare and a shake of her head. “We'll be careful,” she promised more meekly than she had wanted to sound. With a pause, Grunt added a 'Yeah' to it.

  Carmachio gave no indication of whether he had even heard them as he slowly made his way up the rounded fifty meter slope to the top side of JOHNSTON's long hull. Going single file they followed him past the protruding spires of sensors and the black, eerily irregularly shaped domes of defensive laser clusters, each packing ten or more single emitters on a space barely a meter in diameter. In contrast to them, the forward upper portside railgun turret loomed over them like a house, its two one hundred and twenty millimeter barrels waiting in rest position. While housed in the same turret, each barrel could be targeted and fired independently, and as two white rings crossed the right one and only one on the left barrel, it was evident that these had been. After they were halfway up the hull the petty officer began to talk again.

  “So, where was I? Ah, yes, pockets of space around gravity wells.” He clicked his tongue. “Stars, planets, moons; hell, even large asteroids can produce a foldspace pocket. But that still doesn't allow us to get from A to B, right?” he huffed and went right on. “That's where the Mannheimer Effect comes into play. For one, foldspace pockets act like magnets towards one another. If they have enough mass and lie close enough to one another they form corridors like the one we're traveling through right now. I'm not sure if good ol' Lady Mannheimer really fully understood just how that works, for I sure don't. Heard they're still going through her notes today, three hundred years after her death. But at least she nicely described it. Corridors, even the largest and most stable ones, are basically like two arm wrestlers constantly fighting each other, bulging muscles and contractions and all of it,” he harrumphed. “You see that thing over there, the one that looks like lightning?” Carmachio's gloved hand pointed 'up', his arm moving slowly in the zero gravity environment. “That's a representation of the gravitic friction the corridor's exposed to every single second of its existence. That thing over there must contain more energy than all human worlds together could produce in a hundred years. That's why getting too close to a corridor's edge is such a stupid idea. Things are always in motion there, and while the disturbances might completely mask your presence even the ship with the most powerful compensators will be smashed like a toy if they get hit by a distortion there.”

  “Wait, didn't you say earlier that we're closer to the edge than usual?”

  “Yeah, I did. Normally the easiest way to travel a corridor is to stay smack in a zone in the middle. A corridor within the corridor. The eye of the storm, if you want. Though I've heard that some of the newest generation of grav detectors can actually sniff out something like a current in all that mess, bit like a stream winding itself through a riverbed and...,” he stopped and waved them off. “Ah, I'm babbling too much. And,” he added more quietly as he topped the hull, “whoever tells you he truly understands the fold is a damn bloody liar.”

  Samantha followed him up –- and gasped.

  JOHNSTON's upper superstructure threw long, flickering, dark shadows across the cruiser's hull, the afterimages of its large sensor domes and innumerable antennas shifting and roiling like claws and tentacles against the constantly shifting light out here. But it wasn't the spiraling eighty meters of the superstructure that had stopped her in her tracks. It was the sight that opened up before her.

  Where the other side of the corridor should have been, a crack ran through reality, its edges jagged and glowing. And behind it...

  “The Gates of Hades,” the petty officer intoned quietly, staring at a foggy maelstrom the color of molten metal that flowed into what looked like a massive, pulsing white pillar.

  “I've never even heard of something like this!” Sammy's voice was a mere whisper. She felt like she had to hold on to something. “What is that?”

  The shoulders of Carmachio's suit moved up and down. “Nobody knows. The foldspace equivalent to a black hole? A wormhole, maybe?” He shrugged again. “But whenever I look at it it's as if my blood freezes in my veins. Makes me realize how little we know, how small we are. There's not a man in space who hasn't seen something inexplicable in his years between the stars,” he said quietly, as if the words were meant only for himself. “Sometimes the universe spits out things long lost and forgotten. And sometimes it just mocks us.”

  “There's nothing worse than the night before a battle. Its silence is the silence of the grave, and the dawn that ends it is colored in the crimson of the blood of the fallen.”

  - Tavolan Fingaelf, 246th Rasenni Emperor, 1711 C.E.

  C H A P T E R 1 1

  Akvô, Home world of the Érenni Republics.

  August, 2797 C.E.

  Four Republican cruisers broke away from the home defenses, a squadron of ten frigates joining them as they passed the outer boundaries of the vast mine field and entered open space. They moved swiftly towards the site of the Ashani incursion and primed their weapons.

  “Any further incursions?” Captain Natara asked quickly, keeping her eyes fixed on the sensor blips representing the Dominion scout force.

  “A few more,” Commander Torok Sen, her XO, reported, her head and legs still bound and bandaged from injuries taken at Senfina. Like the rest of the crew she had refused to leave the ship which, after a few patches to its hull, was considered combat worthy again despite the losses her crew had suffered in that last brutal battle. “Other units are also moving to engage. Our targets are the only ships in this sector.”

  A Dominion cruiser of the Sunchaser-class was conducting a rapid survey of the defenses, its sensors pinging wildly without any care about giving away the ship's position. The ship was reasonably well armed, looking like a shrunken copy of the larger and vastly more dangerous Dawnhunter-class dreadnoughts, but aside from the general lack of experience on the side of the Érenni crews their Melin-class cruisers could match the Dominion ships in performance and firepower. Escorted by a pair of laser-heavy destroyers whose blocky design looked decidedly at odds with the usual predatory grace of Ashani vessels, and surrounded by a screen of Swiftpaw fighters, it was a standard recon-in-force mission.

  The forces the Érenni defenders were sending to intercept should be enough. Republican high command had given the Tuathaan ambassador Gwythyr a role in the handling of the planet's – and system's – defense and the old warrior had extolled the virtues of an aggressive defense-by-offense, and part of that was destroying the Ashani scouting parties. The hope was that by doing so at least the picture the Dominion's own planners had would be muddied somewhat. It wasn't much. The general setup of Akvô's defenses by now would be well known.

  “Entering weapon's range,” weapons officer Batal, a Komerco hired for the job, reported. “Fighters moving our way.”

  “Detach our escorts, send the fighters to intercept and stay on the primary target,” Natara commanded, focusing solely on her mission to remove the enemy ships and not be distracted by the Ashani counter moves. “All forward batteries, open fire!”

  Her own fighters outnumbered the Ashani Swiftpaws, and even the skill of their trained pilots wasn't going to earn victory against so many Érenni. Even so, they attacked without reservation, driving headlong into the Republican formation, swinging around to entangle them in a frantic dogfight, forcing the cruisers to carefully select their fire as to not shoot down their own birds. Their vicious tactics caught the Érenni by surprise. A dozen green blips representing Republican fighters vanished from Natara's tactical holoplot, but her own forces' numerical superior
ity just as quickly began to weigh in, and within a minute the Dominion had lost most of its fighters. Still, like religious fanatics, the few survivors tried to do as much damage as possible before her own fighters and laser clusters reduced them to debris and expanding clouds of vapor.

  “Picking up extensive high frequency transmissions, captain,” Torok Sen reported. “Emissions match profiles for long-range tachyon communications.” She shot her captain a worried glance.

  Natara's face darkened. As much as superluminal communication was part of their civilization only the largest ships usually were able to hold the facilities for an interstellar tachyon emitter, let alone the means to generate the necessary power. If they had managed to cram the necessary facilities into a cruiser's hull without limiting the ship's other capabilities...

  “Comm, make sure all data we pick up is relayed to central command,” she quickly commanded. “Can we jam them?”

  The communications officer shrugged. “We can try.” She didn't wait for an order and went straight to work.

  Natara concentrated on the enemy ships ahead of her. “Time to firing range?”

  “Twenty seconds at current speed. Targeting systems ready, weapons armed,” Batal stated. They could have fired from farther away, but at longer ranges the lasers were less coherent and the time lag between firing and striking the target was greater, making their accuracy questionable. And the Érenni cruisers were light on missiles.

  The Ashani were too deep inside the star system's gravity well to escape – and they knew it. The cruiser and its destroyer escorts changed course, superheated plasma erupting from their engines.

  “They're charging right into our fire, skipper!” Sen called out.

  Missiles leaped from the Sunchaser's tubes and greenish laser beams filled the void between the two flotillas as the Ashani ships opened up. They were still too far away to do much damage, but they did score hits. Alarms howled through PERISAI and helmets snapped shut across the bridge.