by Jacen Aster
The ground shook as the air-bus hammered into the side of an outbuilding five hundred meters away and its carefully destabilized generator exploded. Fire spewed over the energy hungry plants nearby, drawing all of them towards the wreckage. Two minutes of running later, all three of them came to a gasping halt in front of the courier ship. Sleek and modern, it was obviously a high-end, high-speed ship, but equally obvious were the panels pulled off and the access ports open. Henry was already at the sealed airlock and before they could even properly catch their breath he had it opened. Sam decided not to ask how he had hacked its security so quickly. She probably didn't want to know. Lore just took it for granted that Henry was that good.
Henry turned to them. “Sam, in the ship. Get it powered up. No preflight. Lore, with me. We need to decouple it from the dock. Blow the emergency takeoff strips.” Lore nodded and ran the opposite direction as Henry. He angled for the refueling gear, she for the maintenance hardlines.
Twin muffled whooshes of highly compressed gas cut the ship free just in time for it to whine to life. Both of them scrambled into the ship, the airlock cycling them in. Henry waved her forward to take the controls with Sam as he plunged aft to the small service area. Tapping the hardwired comm on the bulkhead as he entered, he asked the cockpit, “How's it look?”
Sam's voice came back, crisp and professional, if still a bit breathless. “Mostly good. She'll never make space, but if you can get the front maneuvering thrusters online, we can at least get airborne. Hopefully. No promises on how long we can stay there.”
Henry grunted and plunged his hands into the guts of the ship’s systems. A minute passed, then two.
“Henry, we have company! Viney-planty company.”
“Just a second! Just a second!”
“Henry!”
“There. You've got thrusters, but only half power.”
His answer was a hard ascent that slammed his head into the housing he was shoulder deep in. He swore, then cursed a second time as sparks flew and singed his face. Wrenching himself out of the panel, he muttered, “Great. No inertial compensation. Figures.”
A few tense moments passed and Lore's voice came over the comm. “We're clear. The vines almost grabbed us though. It was close. Now where are we going?”
Henry grunted and eyed the rest of the systems. “Doesn't matter. Nearest place with no nerolia plants. Make it quick. There are a lot more red lights down here than I'm comfortable with.”
“Here too,” Lore said grimly. “Sam's barely keeping her in the air. There's a hill twenty klicks from here that was free and clear last I saw the data. Hold on to something. It's going to be a rough landing.”
Rough was an understatement. Henry was ripped free from his hold on an emergency grab bar and tossed across the small compartment, slamming his head against an emitter housing. His vision went dark purple at the edges as he struggled to remain conscious. He had no concept of time as he forced back the sea of black, and when he managed to focus on the room again Lore was already there, pulling him to his feet and asking if he was okay. At least he was pretty sure that's what she was saying. The ringing in his ears and the alarms going off made it difficult to tell.
Giving an “okay” hand sign to the disbelieving Lore, Henry staggered to the main panel. Most of the already uncomfortably outnumbered green and yellow lights had turned red or winked out entirely, and Henry realized with horror that the engine was racing towards detonation. Lore cut the alarms and was suddenly next to him.
“Lore!” Henry grimaced and pushed past the pain shouting had caused. “Emergency shut down on the main engine. It's going critical!”
She paled and pushed past him to the emergency cutoffs. All but ripping off the protective shield, she wrenched the mechanical safety lever and stabbed the button that would inject inert suppression fluid straight into the main core. It was a last resort action almost never used as it totally destroyed the engine beyond any hope of repair.
Henry swiped blood, running from somewhere, away from his eyes as he tried the secondaries, he cursed when they flickered, and preformed emergency percussive maintenance with a firm kick of his boot. The secondaries stabilized and he switched the ship's systems over mere heartbeats before the main core crashed from Lore's actions. Half the noise in the ship stopped, but the number of green lights actually increased.
Lore disappeared past him, but Henry struggled on for a few minutes longer, stabilizing what systems he could before she returned. She reached out and forced him to face her, but he couldn't understand what she was saying. The movement had made the ringing worse and his vision was fuzzing. He flinched when she jabbed his arm with a microinjector and a warm flush of chemicals entered his bloodstream. Seconds later, he knew no more.
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Afterwards, Lore told me she couldn't believe I was actually conscious, let alone on my feet and able to make repairs. I had a deep gash in my forehead, a nasty concussion, and a cracked skull. To be honest, to this very day, I can't really tell you what repairs I made, only that whatever I was doing turned several lights from red to green. Reflex born of a lifetime, I suppose.
I didn’t regain consciousness until operation “Ambush the Plant Monster” was already over and the atmospheric barrier had been reinitialized over the core colony. (The name was Sam's doing. Odd sense of humor at times, that one.) Having been deprived of central control for nearly an hour, the ambush teams had suffered somewhat, but managed to hold it together well enough. Once Lore and Sam reestablished command, they managed to bring the entire plan to a successful conclusion.
Once I was back on my feet, I spent nearly a month helping repair the damage done to the colony. I regret to say that Sam got her revenge for my “action hero” stunt by writing all over my face with pink indelible marker that took nearly three weeks to completely remove. Thankfully, my aura of manliness was preserved by the footage, captured by satellite, of our daring spaceport maneuver, in which I did in fact somehow manage to look like a proper badass action hero. As for Lore, I simply got a swift kick to the shin that resulted in several seconds of hopping on the other foot and howling in agony. That girl is way stronger than she looks.
As for the Colony of Shien, it now uses “tame” nerolia plants, much improved over our original crude attempts, as a massive solar collector that fuels most of the colony's power needs with near zero pollution. That it, not incidentally, also protects the colony from wild nerolia plants, is obvious. The research outpost is, as far as I know, still operational and was expanded to include research into the local plant and wildlife, in addition to the advanced Jump Rings and navigational systems it was originally created to develop. And that is, as they say, that.
Chapter 6 – The Gate to Everywhere
Since I first began these chronicles, and even back when I was merely telling a few of my tales for the entertainment of my fellows on long voyages, I have routinely been asked the same pair of questions. Namely, what is the most important thing, or the strangest thing, that I have ever been involved with. While I cannot truly answer to the former, I can perhaps answer for the latter. It might not be the strangest per se, but it is surely the most incredible, in the truest sense of being unbelievable. I have long desired to tell this tale, even before the frequent repetition of those questions. However, a great deal of red tape and classified information has made the waters of its telling treacherous. It has only been in very recent days that I finally received permission from the last involved party to release the, admittedly somewhat edited, account that follows below.
It all started when I was recruited for an experimental Jump Ring project, intended to harness the awesome power of a stellar rift to create a Ring that could jump anywhere. Perhaps, some thought, even anywhen. While I was hardly famous, by that point in my career I had developed a certain reputation for excellence in such exceptional endeavors. At least in certain circles. Thus I found myself short listed and invit
ed to work on, The Gate to Everywhere.
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Henry winced as the thermal coupler he had just pried free fell from his grasping fingers. His wince turned to an outright cringe as he heard it bounce off a half dozen bulkheads and conduits on its way to the lower levels. He cringed further still when he heard surprised curses coming up from below.
“Sorry!” he yelled into the yawning abyss that was the interior of the Stellar Gate. Honestly, a half dozen bangs was probably a minor miracle. The giant gate, kilometers in diameter, was large enough and had its gravity arranged in such a way, that “down” effectively didn't end. He supposed it would be too much to ask for the coupler to have returned to him, coming from the other direction. Though come to think of it, the speed it would have picked up in doing so might have made that even worse.
The sound of grumbling worked its way towards him from below. After a few moments, a man's head popped up over the top of the nearest access ladder. The face was unknown to Henry, not a surprise given that he wasn't actually assigned to this section. The man looked, puzzled, between the thermal coupler that had likely almost hit him and Henry, before his eyes widened noticeably in apparent recognition.
“Wait! Is this the thermal coupler from GX-5C? The bloody thing was fused. We've been trying to get it off for three days.”
Henry grinned and held his hand out to accept the coupler. “Yeah, I know, that's why Kim practically begged me to come take a look. Didn't think I'd be able to do much, but it turned out to be similar to an issue I’ve seen before, out in the Kelfer Void. I passed through the region a few years back and some of the stations out there had problems with components fusing in almost the same way.”
The man shook his head in wonder. “Well, shit. We figured we were going to have to rip out the whole power box. You probably just saved us two weeks of hard labor.”
“If you don't punch me for almost dropping a thermal coupler on your head, we'll call it even.”
“Punch you? Hell, I'll buy you a drink. Just as soon as we clean up.” He finally came fully over the edge and began eagerly helping Henry put the area back to rights.
“What, now? Your shift isn't over yet, is it?”
“Ha! You just single-handedly put us two weeks ahead of the last schedule we reported. No one is going to complain that I bailed out a few minutes, or a few hours, early to buy you a drink.”
Henry gave the man a dubious look then shrugged. “Well, if you say so. No skin off my nose, and I know better than to turn down a free drink.”
His new friend chuckled. “Good man!”
♦♦♦♦♦♦♦
Henry wandered away from his new drinking buddy, Eric he thought his name was, to settle in at a battered table in the far corner of the bar. The younger mechanics and engineers, including his new friend, had all taken to some drinking game he didn’t recognize. Inevitably, it would lead to bragging and reminiscing about their conquests, scars, and feats of chest pounding masculinity that seemed the same across every species. Though he supposed, to be fair, it wasn't always the men.
Henry supposed it was a sign he was becoming one of the old timers, that he wasn't interested. Instead, nestled away in his dark corner, he pulled out a portable and began skimming over the problem Alvedia had set him to. The simple, for him at least, repairs to Kim's thermal coupler had been an attempt to get his mind off the aggravating dilemma. Namely, how to eke out enough power from their current systems to run the new sensor arrays that someone had decided, months after the build had started, simply must be included in their section for best results. The power draw was massive, far more than their section's margin for error had accounted for. A difficult problem for even Henry to chew on.
It was some considerable time later, though Henry knew not how long, only that Eric and the others had long left, when someone sat down across from him at the shady little corner table. Startled out of a moment of breakthrough, he only barely suppressed his irritation as he looked up at the newcomer. A human male, the pale skin of a spacer that couldn't be bothered with artificial tans, with jet black hair and vivid blue eyes, perhaps a few years younger than Henry's thirty-seven, stared back at him. He was clean cut but clad in a typical engineer’s outfit. As in, made up mostly of pockets and possessing the washed out colors that resulted from cleaning up one too many chemicals of unknown origin. Most importantly, however, he was no one Henry knew, and therefore it was a puzzle as to why he was interrupting.
“Can I help you?”
The man chuckled. “That was going to be my line, actually. You've barely moved in hours, just stared at that portable and occasionally tapped something into it. I'm not even sure you noticed when they replaced your drinks.”
Henry blinked owlishly and eyed his mug. “Of course I noticed. That was the seventh, I believe, which probably means I've been here about three hours, come to think of it.”
His companion grinned. “Ah, able to judge the passage of time from the bottom of a beer mug. A man after my own heart. What has you so focused anyway? Problems?”
Henry, seeing it wasn't going to be easy to get rid of the man, stretched out the kinks in his muscles and dismissively stated, “Yeah, some bigwig wanted a new array installed in our section and I've been working out the power complications. Almost had it when you sat down, actually.” He allowed himself to look a bit miffed at that.
The man had the grace to look chagrined. “Sorry about that. Maybe I can help?” Before Henry could answer, the man leaned forward and craned his neck a bit to read the portable. It took a moment for him to process what he was seeing, then his jaw went slack for several moments, followed by a low whistle. “Wow, that's seriously complex! That's a pretty insane mix-match of stuff there.”
A few moments of pause, then the man actually reached over and, seemingly unconsciously, pulled the portable over to his side of the small table. Curious at the man’s apparent trance, Henry let him.
“Let's see...that bit is clearly Arabuli, and human there, a bit of Aoreli trickery there, very good, but what's this? Rashanta maybe? Eterloi? And I don't even recognize this bit over here, though if those numbers are accurate....”
Henry allowed his amusement to overcome his irritation and chuckled. “The power break and filter mechanism? It's Kelparie actually.”
The man started, possibly having completely forgotten Henry's presence. Then what Henry said registered. “Kelparie? Are you serious? That race is so insular that virtually none of their tech makes it off world!”
Henry nodded and casually stole his portable back, tapping a few bits to make sure the man hadn't changed anything. You could never be too careful. “Yep. Managed to befriend a couple of them when they hired a few dozen off-world engineers to look over some of their tech for possible improvements. It was a pretty radical idea at the time and I think it may have been the only time they actually tried it. Anyway, they showed me a few tricks after I saved one of 'em from an overly amorous Brillian that got a whiff of some local flower and went a little...off.”
The man looked completely incredulous. “A Brillian? The galaxy’s biggest stick in the muds? Being overly amorous with a pair of Kelparie?”
Henry smirked. “It was one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen. The Brillian was, of course, so mortified that he barely showed his face until the contract was over. Not that the Kelparie minded that, of course. They didn't really like him even before the incident.”
A shake of the head answered him. “If that,” he waved at the portable, “didn't look like nothing I'd ever seen, I'd think you were pulling my leg.” He gave another disbelieving head shake before changing the topic. “At any rate, that's some seriously complex work, though the amount of power it gives you would solve your problem. Only it seems incomplete. Your math shows that it won't work.”
Henry sighed. “There is a good reason why very few people ever use, or even consider, integration of different spec
ies tech on this level. Each and every one of them has a different design philosophy. Which is what makes the process useful, obviously, but that carries with it everything from different energy frequencies for the same tasks, to completely different size standards for ports and such, not to mention software issues. I've avoided most of that here by simply using human or Arabuli parts to execute the methods of each species. However, some things only work because of the differing output ranges or what have you. I've been trying to come up with an adapter for one of the systems for the last hour. Almost had it when you sat down.”
The man grinned. Bringing his hands together, he arched his back and cracked his knuckles. “Well, then, it just so happens I can make it up to you.” He snatched the portable with startling speed and immediately began inputting data.
“Hey! Don't mess with that.” Henry tried to snatch the portable back, but the man showed remarkable dexterity, keeping it away from Henry while still tapping away. Just as Henry was about to take a swing at him, he abruptly handed it back, looking smugly satisfied. “There you go. Problem solved.”
Henry snatched the device, glaring at his unwanted guest...and was quickly forced to reassess when he glanced at the screen. “What?” Furiously tapping through the changes, it took a good five minutes for Henry to triple confirm that, yes, the man had created a superb adapter on the fly. All while defending the portable from Henry.
Setting down the portable, he addressed the man curiously. “Thanks, I think, but...just who are you?”
“The name’s Walter. And you're Henry Harper, are you not?”
“How did you…?”
Walter laughed. “I assure you, your reputation proceeds you. Well...that and that young fellow. Eric? Yes, Eric, I think, was telling everyone who would listen how you cut two weeks off their timetable by fixing a fused thermal coupler. Or something like that. He was more than a bit sloshed by the time he got to me.”