by B. V. Larson
“Guardsmen,” I said, engaging the ship’s public address system. “This is your captain speaking. We’re about to embark on a dangerous mission. No one from Earth has activated an ER bridge in a hundred and fifty long years. It’s time that changed.”
All over the ship, people stopped what they were doing and listened. I couldn’t blame them. It might be one of the last things they ever heard.
Defiant thrummed under our feet and hands. We could feel her power. Thus far, she’d flown with eagerness, never seeming to reach a speed she could not surpass. She was a fine ship, and I was glad to be her captain.
“We’re about to enter an ER bridge into the unknown,” I continued. “Throughout time, humans have sought to push their limits, to explore new places no one has ever seen before. This opportunity awaits us today. With luck, we’ll find a friendly colony on the far side of this bridge and establish a positive relationship with them. It’s time to cross your fingers as we have only minutes left.”
“Sir,” Zye said suddenly. “I have a security alert on my boards.”
I spun my chair around and faced her. “Explain.”
“There’s someone in the aft hold. The entrance is unauthorized.”
My mind raced. The aft hold? That was hardly a critical portion of the ship. Why would anyone…?
“Lieutenant Morris,” I said, contacting him on a private channel. “We have a situation in the aft hold. Investigate and report.”
“I’m on it, sir,” he said. “We got the alert, too. We’re already scrambling and on our way. I have to admit though, I didn’t expect this.”
“Didn’t expect what?” I asked. “What do you think this breach is about?”
“The lifeboats, sir. Has to be. There’s nothing else down there but foodstuffs and extra gear.”
Life boats? I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“What do you think they want to do with our lifeboats?” I asked.
“Disable them, probably,” he said, grunting and blowing his labored breath over the microphone. I could tell he was running through the ship ahead of his squad.
“Sabotage? Now?”
“When else? If you want to destroy a ship that’s attempting to cross a bridge, what better time is there than to do it when she’s screaming toward departure point and can’t stop?”
“When else indeed…” I said.
After a few seconds thought, I made a decision. “Morris, if you sense the ship is in danger don’t hesitate to use deadly force.”
He chuckled. “You read my mind, Captain. For the record, don’t feel bad if things get messy. I’d already decided to play it that way. Morris out.”
“Captain,” Zye called to me. “Permission to join the security team?”
“No,” I said. “I need you on the command deck, Lieutenant.”
Disappointed, she went back to her duties.
“Give me a visual on Morris and his team, please,” I told Yamada. “Split the screen with the aft hold.”
“Can’t show the hold, sir. Whoever is down there has disabled the cameras.”
With a growing sense of concern, I watched as the main forward screen lit up. Instead of displaying Jupiter sliding by, it now showed Morris and his team from the point of view of their helmet cameras. A trio of troops appeared. They were wearing black body-shell armor with heavy weapons mounted on their chest plates.
This impressed me. It took time to get into a body-shell unit, and this emergency had only been detected a minute or two ago. That meant Morris was really on the ball—or that he was paranoid.
Knowing him well, I suspected the latter. He’d prepared ahead of time, assuming something would go wrong and require heavy armor just as Defiant plunged into the breach. As was often the case, his instincts had proven correct.
Morris waved his lead marine ahead. I wondered briefly why there were only three of them in action. The ship had a complement of sixteen marines. Perhaps he’d only suited up a few of them and placed the rest in other strategic gear and positions. Whatever the case, the first marine applied explosives to the hatch after it failed to open. She kicked it in after the hinges were blown, and…
I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t what happened next. The three were sucked into the chamber with a sudden gush of air.
“Is the hold depressurized?” I demanded.
“It must be, sir,” Yamada said.
“Why didn’t the computer show that? There’s nothing on the boards. It’s all green.”
“I don’t know, sir,” she said helplessly.
“The saboteurs must have fooled with the system,” Zye said. “They’ve hacked the ship’s monitoring system.”
I took direct control of the screen input. I double-tapped on Morris’ camera. He was spinning, falling in a black pit that an hour ago had been my aft hold. It was hard to tell what was going on, but from the flailing limbs and cursing, I gathered the troops were at least still alive.
Rumbold spun around at that point. He looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. “Sir, I recommend we abort entry into hyperspace.”
I looked at Yamada. “If we divert, can we turn around and make a second run at this departure point?”
She shook her head. “We’re going too fast. We’ll overshoot. It will take about ten hours to get back into position—the departure point we were ordered to utilize may have shifted by then.”
Baring my teeth, I slammed a fist on the console.
“Dammit! Who’s working so hard to stop this mission?”
No one answered my question.
“Morris!” I shouted. “Can you hear me? What’s your status?”
Nothing came back for several seconds.
“We’ve only got six minutes left before we’re committed, sir,” Yamada said.
I waved her off, trying to get a scratchy message from Morris.
“There’s some kind of interference in here,” he said. “We’re alive, but they sure scared the—”
The system spat static for several seconds.
“Morris?” I called. “Lieutenant?”
“—no way they should have been able to do this without someone noticing. It’s amazing how far—.”
The signal faded away.
“Morris,” I said, “I’m not getting everything you’re saying. Are you in danger?”
“Danger? No sir, the danger has left the ship, I’d say.”
Yamada waved for my attention. “Captain, if we’re going to abort, we have to do it now. The departure point is directly ahead. We have to—”
I wheeled to Rumbold. “Helm, steer us fractionally off-center. I want to be in a position to either hit the edge of the departure point—or veer more and miss it entirely. Buy me some time to decide.”
Rumbold looked scared. Maybe he was regretting whatever manipulations he’d performed to get himself back into the pilot’s chair for this historic occasion. His eyes boggled and he lifted his hands toward the controls hesitantly.
“That’s a tall order, Captain… but I’ll try.”
“Just do it. Morris, get out of that hold. Report when you’re in the clear. You have seconds—”
I saw something then, something coming from the screens. Muzzle flashes began. Silent firing of heavy, chest-mounted guns. My marines were in action.
“Get out of there, Morris. Pull back to the hatch. And tell me what you’re shooting at!”
“—can’t get—”
More buzzing. I got up from my chair. Zye stood with me. I swung my eyes toward the timer. Five minutes? There was no time to armor-up myself.
“Deploy the reserves to support Morris,” I commanded the rest of the security team.
“Are we going down there, sir?” Zye asked.
I could tell from her demeanor that she was spoiling for a fight. On screen, more flashes flared brilliantly in the dark hold. Silent yellow fire spit across the screen—but what the hell could they be shooting at?
Sitting back down w
ith a force of will, I gestured for Zye to join me. She did so reluctantly.
“I’ve sent in reserve troops. We have to let them do their jobs. Morris, can you hear me?”
“Yes sir,” he answered at last. I could hear him panting. I also heard heavy equipment moving.
Activating his helmet camera again, I frowned at the scene. He was dragging a corpse. The body-shell armor was still intact, but the head was missing. It was the woman he’d sent in first.
“They ambushed us,” Morris said in between gulps of air. “Both sides. Someone must have set them up for—I don’t get it, sir.”
“Who ambushed you?” I demanded as calmly as I could.
“Not who, what. They were repair robots. Three of them. They came in with welding torches and pinchers. We shot them—but they’re pretty tough bastards. They’d been reprogrammed to kill anyone who came into the hold.”
I spun toward Zye. “Who’s authorized to do that? To reprogram those robots?”
“We can’t alter their base programming,” she said. “Only the Stroj can do that.”
Suddenly, I understood the situation. It was as if an explosion had gone off in my brain.
“Yamada locate the three engineering personnel that requested transfers off this vessel. Where are they right now?”
“You mean O’Donnell’s team? Checking… They’re all three in the aft hold, sir.”
I moved to her station and stared at the data. “Morris? Is it possible anyone else is alive down there?”
“I doubt it, sir. The chamber was depressurized. It was hard vacuum. Oh, one other thing, one of the lifeboats was missing.”
Yamada checked her boards closely. She shook her head. “The hold doesn’t show that. But then again, it shows it’s warm and pressurized, too. Someone has hacked everything down there.”
“Who could do it? Besides O’Donnell?”
“Maybe me, Zye, or some of Rumbold’s people. But I doubt it.”
“It was the engineering team,” I said with growing certainty. “That’s why they wanted off the ship. Looks like they finally got their way.”
“Sir,” Rumbold said. He was sweating and stressing over the controls. “I’ve done what I can, but if we’re going to miss this departure point, we have to veer off right now. What’s your decision?”
I looked up at the forward screen. A faint luminescence lit up a large circular area in the center of it. Could that be the entry?
Taking a full second, I considered my options. Abort and retry, or sail into the unknown? The engineers had almost certainly sabotaged more than the aft hold. To fly now could be suicide.
But then again, for some reason an enemy very much wanted me not to take this particular path at this particular time.
Call it Sparhawk stubbornness, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn away now.
“Steady as she goes, Rumbold,” I said, climbing back into my harness. “Alert the crew. We’re hitting the barrier in less than one minute.”
Rumbold veered gently back on course, targeting the very center of the anomaly ahead.
When we hit it at last, I felt it. Everyone aboard sensed our passage from one form of existence to another. It made my skin crawl, and it seemed to tug at every hair on my head individually for a moment. It was like walking into a resistance, a field, an invisible barrier that pressed against the flesh and the mind, but which had no effect on the hardware around us.
And then we broke through it, entering into another state of the universe.
-6-
When mankind found the first ER bridge between the stars, we’d sent in robotic probes. The probes had never returned.
Finally, a human-run expedition dared annihilation and breached the entry point. What they’d found were a half-dozen wandering machines, unable to navigate as they had no point of reference.
Hyperspace was unlike normal space in that it was really a state of being—arguably a state of nonexistence. The robotic systems had been built on the premise that they would enter the bridge and exit the far side after a short interval simply by following their original course.
This turned out not to be the case. The twisted nature of hyperspace required course alterations to find the exit. Unfortunately, navigational systems found themselves without reference points as there were no stars or other objects to detect. Basic Newtonian physics still applied, allowing vessels to travel along the bridge under power, but which way was the correct direction? How fast was your ship going? Where, exactly, was the exit to be found?
Without points of reference, these things were unclear. The robotic ships hadn’t been programmed with AI that was intellectual enough to solve the problem.
Fortunately, the brave science team who’d dared to face what seemed like certain death were capable of independent, creative thought. They started off by creating what they referred to later as a “bread crumb” path. A large number of small transponders were dropped in sequence. By placing them at regular intervals, a ship’s crew could determine both their relative speed of motion and their direction of flight.
It was soon discovered that hyperspace was inconsistent by nature. Going in a supposedly straight line left a curving set of transponders in the ship’s wake. After much careful work and nonlinear mathematics the engineers aboard were able to come up with an equation that described the curve created by the sequence of dropped points. Using this complex polynomial, it was then possible to predict the location of the exit.
“Unload the first tracking device,” I ordered.
Yamada tapped at her screen and we watched tensely. All of us had viewed historical accounts, and we’d been trained in this process. But actually doing it was another thing entirely in my opinion.
The first transponder was dropped in our wake, and it seemed to curve off to starboard.
“We’ve got a gentle curve so far,” she said, “about thirteen degrees over the next hour, judging from very limited data.”
“Is there any reason not to follow our mission parameters?” I asked.
“No sir. I’ll drop them at regular intervals. With luck, we’ll pick up the pattern. If it’s simple enough, we’ll find the way out.”
I dared to smile. “Good. Proceed.”
Hearing the hatch dissolve open behind me, I spun my chair and saw Lady Grantholm approaching the center of the command deck again. She frowned at the blank screens and quiet instruments.
“We’ve stopped?” she asked. “Sparhawk, have you gone mad? Why have you stopped this ship? Why are we drifting?”
“We’re actually moving at great speed, madam,” I said. “At least in relative terms. We’re in hyperspace. It’s quite calm here in most cases.”
Her face underwent a transformation. She moved across the command deck to stand directly between me and the forward screen. It was a breach of etiquette and regulations to block the captain’s view, but I let it slide.
She stood tall and stared at the blank nothingness. Now and then, a spot seemed to shimmer, going from pure black to a deep umber, then back again.
“This is it?” she asked, her voice hushed.
I stood up and moved to join her. “A perfect nothingness. By comparison, normal space is crowded with gasses, dust and debris.”
“It’s oppressive,” she said, “I don’t like it. How long must we stay in this limbo?”
“Until we find the way out.”
She turned to look at me in alarm. “You don’t know where we’re going?”
“No madam, not in any traditional sense. We don’t yet know where the exit to this maze is located. Nor do I know what we’ll encounter when we leave this quiet eye of the storm and reenter normal space once again.”
“Insanity,” she muttered. “Why would anyone place themselves in such jeopardy?”
I chuckled. “I might ask you that question. I’m a member of Star Guard. I go where I must. I’ve been ordered to explore this bridge, and I’m determined to do it. Why did you volunteer to come a
long as our emissary?”
She cast me a dark glance. “We’ll talk about that later. Will you treat me to dinner?”
“Consider yourself invited to the Captain’s table, Lady,” I said.
“Thank you, William. At least you’re not a typical ruffian Guardsman. I only hope your navigational skills are as good as your manners.”
She shook her head and began to walk away. Now that the G-forces were normal, she was no longer hunched by the weight of her own slight body. She stood tall and proud as she swept by me.
Staring after her for a moment, I turned to Yamada. “Commander, how long do you expect this to take?”
She shook her head and fooled with calculations. “I’ve got very little to go on, sir. We’ve only dropped two points of reference. They’re deviating, but only by a fairly typical amount according to our historical records. I’ll go out on a limb and call this bridge ‘average’ just for the sake of argument.”
“Which gives us about eighty hours to figure out the equation.”
“Right—if this bridge works the way they did in the past. We really don’t know.”
“All right then, you have the watch. I’m going to check on the rest of the ship.”
I’d barely taken two steps when Zye stood and began to follow me.
I glanced over my shoulder, frowning. “I didn’t relieve you yet from your duties on the command deck, Zye.”
“No sir.”
“Do you have a special reason for following me?” I prompted. I naturally knew the answer before I asked the question. Zye had been rattled by the attempts on my life. She was determined not to let me get ambushed when I was out of her sight—not even aboard my own ship in hyperspace.
“I think it would be for the best, sir,” she said. “I’ve got nothing to do on the deck as far as tactical ops go, in any case.”
She had me there. No targets or potential targets were on any screen.
“Very well,” I said, “please accompany me. We’ll see for ourselves what happened in the aft hold.”
Before we’d made it halfway down the main passageway, Zye stepped ahead of me and opened the door to the armory. “Don’t you think we should stop here first, sir?”