“The wormhole is gone,” said Pointer. “There’s just empty space there now.”
At that exact moment, the modelling software updated its projection. The circle demarking the likely destination of the Gate Maker moved slightly across the star chart, until the furthest extent of the zone touched upon the location of the Helius Blackstar. The crew looked at each other.
“Why might they want to go to the location of an old wormhole?” asked Blake.
“An old wormhole which once connected to the middle of Estral territory, where the Vraxar fought their most extensive conflict,” said Hawkins.
“A place they might still have a sizeable quantity of ships stationed,” added Quinn.
“The Space Corps estimates the result of the Estral-Vraxar war become inevitable thirty-five years ago,” said Blake.
“The mopping up exercise for an empire spanning thousands of worlds might take decades,” said Hawkins.
“Or more,” noted Quinn.
“I can see where you’re going with this,” said Blake. “You think there’s a Vraxar warfleet parked up at the far end of the Helius Blackstar.”
“It’s a possibility,” said Hawkins. “It strikes me that the Vraxar can never stop moving, sir. Even while they’re fighting, they must have scouts spreading outwards, searching for the next target. They aren’t like any other species – the Vraxar don’t need a period of recovery after a war. In fact, an extended break in hostilities is unthinkable for them, since it might result in billions of their troops decaying and becoming useless.”
“That fleet at Cheops-A…you think it was a scouting party?” Blake tried to inject a note of scepticism into his tones. He wasn’t a good actor and he failed, not least of which because he was starting to believe Hawkins was onto something.
“It seemed like a lot of spaceships to us,” said Hawkins. “To the Vraxar?” She shrugged.
Blake chewed his lower lip. “If we run with your idea for a moment, the only possible way for the Vraxar to make this work is for them to reopen the Helius Blackstar. Which is impossible, because it got torn apart by the largest bomb ever made. There’s nothing there to open.”
“That may not be quite true,” said Quinn. “A wormhole forms because there’s a weakness in the fabric, for want of a better word. That’s the same fabric we go through in order to pretend physics don’t exist when we travel at lightspeed.”
“A spaceship only makes a little hole,” said Hawkins. “It soon closes up.”
“We think it closes up,” corrected Quinn. “It makes it easier to believe we aren’t damaging anything underlying the makeup of the universe. There are many schools of thought on the subject.”
“None of which are relevant to this current discussion,” said Blake sternly.
“Not necessarily,” Quinn continued. “A wormhole is a larger hole than anything made by a spaceship. A much, much larger hole, which current thinking believes is a result of an inherent weakness in the fabric. So, the wormhole is like a big tear in the universe that a few brave souls have exploited to travel incredible distances in precisely zero amount of time.”
“I should know this stuff,” said Blake, cursing himself for letting his interests tail off once he’d been promoted to captain a few years ago.
“Yes, you should,” said Pointer.
“Let’s not all wade in,” Blake replied. “I’ve just owned up to a weakness.”
Quinn was impatient to give his conclusion. “It seems to me that the Helius Blackstar is gone, but the weakness which allowed it to appear in the first place still remains. Tassin-Dak specifically called the spaceship a Gate Maker. He didn’t call it a Summoner, or a Mega Neutraliser or anything else that might define its purpose. The name gives it away. It’s going to do something at the Helius Blackstar and allow a load of Vraxar to come pouring through.”
Such was Quinn’s certainty, Blake felt the man’s conviction tugging at the threads of his disbelief. As if to drive it home, the next recalculation from the fission modelling software brought the site of the Helius Blackstar inside the possibility sphere.
“There you are,” said Quinn. “That’s where they’re going.”
Blake thought out loud. “The Vraxar can’t rely on there being a wormhole everywhere they go, surely?”
“That’s why they bring so many Neutralisers,” said Hawkins. “To shut down resistance and to make a temporary wormhole for others to come, once they’ve found their prey.”
It sounded logical. “The Vraxar must have learned about the Blackstar from Estral records,” Blake mused.
“And bully for them, it leads straight to a primitive little backwater of space occupied by the Confederation,” said Hawkins. “What’s even more fortuitous for our Vraxar friends is the fact that this Confederation is only a short hop away from the next species on their hitlist. There’s only one fly in the ointment for the poor, rotting Vraxar - we closed the door forty years ago.”
“Now they have the means to open it,” said Blake.
A soft beeping brought their attention to an alert from Quinn’s console.
“The fission modelling has finished early,” he said. “Come and look.”
“I don’t think I need to,” Blake replied. “It’s gone to the Helius Blackstar.”
“Exactly right, sir.”
“I’d like to get a message to Fleet Admiral Duggan. Do we have any Space Corps assets in the vicinity which can act as a relay?”
“No, sir,” said Pointer. “I can send a message if you like and he’ll get it in a few days.”
“Let’s not bother for the moment. How far away from the Helius Blackstar are we?”
“Nine hours, sir, assuming the failure rate of our engines stays as it is.”
“We’ll make one last entry into local space, dump all bar two hundred of our shock drones and then we’ll head straight for the wormhole.”
It took less than five minutes to accomplish this final attempt to confuse the pursuit of Ix-Gorghal. Then, the ES Abyss hurtled off on a new course, this one taking it directly towards a place where Blake was increasingly sure the Vraxar intended to reopen the Helius Blackstar wormhole. A damned wormhole! he thought, without even a grudging admiration for the remorseless, single-minded nature of the Vraxar.
The moment they’d started pursuit of the Gate Maker he’d known the mission was critical. Now it seemed somehow even more vital for them to reach the destination point and put a stop to the Vraxar’s plans. The thought of witnessing thousands of their spacecraft spilling into Confederation Space wasn’t a pleasant one and he mentally urged the damaged heavy cruiser to find an extra surge of power that would shave minutes or hours from the journey time.
The clock counted down slowly, taunting him for his fanciful thoughts.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was one of the worst journeys Blake could remember. He prided himself on his ability to let time glide around him while he remained staunch and unaffected by its passage. On this occasion, he felt as though he was caught in the turbulence of a great storm and it pushed him this way and that, scornful of his efforts to remain calm in the middle of it. Both he and the crew knew that the ES Abyss was far more vulnerable to attack with its energy shield gone. They built them tough, thought Blake, reflecting upon Fleet Admiral Duggan’s earlier words.
“Probably not tough enough for what lies ahead,” he muttered under his breath.
Blake spent a few minutes re-reading the databank records of the Helius Blackstar. The original location of the wormhole was an empty area of space approximately five days high lightspeed from New Earth. There were solar systems a few hours journey away, though nothing which could be described as being in the vicinity.
The Space Corps database contained a visual recording of the wormhole – it appeared as an area of utter darkness set against a sea of background stars. Blake found he could overlay a speckling of dots onto the image and these dots drifted slowly, inexorably towards the centre.
Watching it was both frightening and thrilling.
Other than trawl through records from the past, there was little to fill the time. The crew were lost in their own thoughts and they hardly spoke; even the usually irreverent Lieutenant Hawkins remained quiet. Occasionally, someone got up for a scheduled break and disappeared from the bridge for a short time, often returning with trays from one of the replicators. The odours of food would have been appetising at any other time. At this moment they didn’t appeal to Blake, even though his stomach occasionally rumbled angrily to remind him of his hunger.
“Maybe you should get some rest, sir,” said Lieutenant Quinn. “We’re due to arrive in three hours.”
Blake looked up in surprise and realised it was his turn for a break. “There’s no chance I’ll sleep,” he said.
“Want me to get the medic up here to give you something? We’ll need to be on top form.”
“Thank you for the concern, Lieutenant. I think I’ll go for a walk.
The bridge door opened silently and Blake strode through. He didn’t have a destination in mind and was only planning to stretch his legs for a few minutes. The passages of the ship were bathed in red instead of their usual blue-white, to signify the existence of a breach. Luckily, the Vraxar projectile hadn’t penetrated as far as the living quarters and the heavy cruiser’s interior remained sealed against the vacuum outside.
He walked, breathing in the cool air and flexing the knots from his muscles. It didn’t take long for him to realise he didn’t want to be anywhere apart from the bridge and he spun about halfway along a corridor and traced his route back. He stopped at a replicator from which he obtained an average coffee and several remarkably good doughnuts. He tried to eat a balanced diet in general and asked himself if placing a doughnut on each side of the scales would result in equilibrium.
Upon his return to the bridge, the sight of his plate drew forth several critical observations, which he gleefully ignored. For some reason he felt considerably more cheerful after his walk, as though he’d broken free from a thick covering of cobwebs which made everything appear grey. The crew caught this sudden optimism and the chatter started again. The bridge immediately felt alive, instead of being an enclosed room filled with people who expected to end up as Vraxar in the coming days.
Much of the remaining time before arrival was spent in discussion of what they were going to do about the Gate Maker.
“We don’t want to arrive too close,” said Hawkins. “Without our shield, we’re a much easier target and we might get picked off before we’ve recovered from the transition to local space.”
“I agree,” said Quinn. “The trouble is, we need to destroy the enemy ship before it can open a portal to Estral Space.”
“And before Ix-Gorghal gets there,” said Cruz.
“We’ll do a softly-softly approach and drop into local space at a million and a half klicks out,” said Blake. “Once we’ve got the lay of the land, we’ll perform an SRT to bring us where we need to be.”
“Back in the days of the Estral wars, the Space Corps positioned a number of monitoring devices in the vicinity of the wormhole,” said Pointer. “They were never decommissioned.”
“Does that mean we can get a comms channel to Fleet Admiral Duggan?” asked Blake.
“Maybe. These monitoring drones weren’t shut down, but I can’t find out if they’re still working and attached to the Space Corps comms network. If they’re operational, we should be able to speak to New Earth.”
“This is the type of situation where I’d value a second opinion,” said Blake.
“I can tell you exactly what the Fleet Admiral’s opinion will be, sir,” said Hawkins. “Blow the crap out of the Gate Maker and get yourselves home.”
“An accurate assessment, I’m sure,” Blake agreed. “I don’t suppose the Space Corps left any offensive hardware near the site of the wormhole?” he asked. “Such as Obsidiar bombs?”
“No. Monitoring gear only.”
“Shame.”
The conversation continued and the crew did their best to come up with a workable plan. There were times when information was so scant it was impossible to do anything other than guess and then assign a label of plan to the end product. This was one of those occasions. They had a good idea where they were going and a good idea of what was likely to be there. After that, the important details such as what were the capabilities of the Gate Maker, and how they would defeat it, were completely unknown.
“It seems reasonable to assume it can defend itself and that it possesses huge reserves of power,” said Blake, speaking the obvious.
“And here we are without backup Obsidiar power,” said Hawkins.
“The sensor scan we took when it came out of Ix-Gorghal’s hold doesn’t show any visible seam on its surface,” said Pointer. “That means no missiles, right?”
“But with the possibility of beam weapons,” said Hawkins.
“It’s a got a lot more volume than we have – there’s plenty of room for all sorts of unpleasant technology inside,” added Quinn.
Blake called a halt to proceedings. “I don’t think we’re going to conjure up anything of value by continuing with this. We’ll need to think on our feet and take whatever opportunities arise.”
“Ten minutes!” yelled Lieutenant Quinn suddenly.
The warning came as a shock. The first part of the journey had felt to Blake like he was wading in treacle, whilst the latter third had flown by so fast he felt cheated out of this tiny portion of his life. The others looked similarly dazed, though it didn’t stop them reacting properly and getting on with their final pre-arrival checks.
“Two minutes!”
With the screens of his console wrapped comfortingly around his seat, Blake got himself ready. A light appeared on his navigational screen and an alert bleeped. A few seconds later, the ES Abyss grumbled and shook as it emerged from lightspeed.
A well-oiled routine commenced.
“Activating stealth modules,” said Quinn.
“Commencing scans,” said Pointer. “Nears are clear.”
Blake used the control bars to get the heavy cruiser moving. The stealth modules sapped the already depleted engines and the warship responded sluggishly. After a few seconds it topped out at sixteen hundred kilometres per second – a relative crawl in comparison to its usual maximum.
“Lieutenant Cruz, how are you getting on with those monitoring drones?”
“I’m hunting for them, sir. They’re not on our network and I believe they may have been left on an old-generation network the Space Corps no longer uses.”
“Can you access it?”
“Yes. I need to dig through the archives for some access codes.”
“Keep on it. I want command and control to know where we are and why.”
“I’ve already sent a low-speed signal as agreed,” said Cruz.
“Good.”
It usually took Blake a few seconds to orient himself with the surrounding area when he arrived somewhere new. His head darted left and right across the navigational console and sensor feeds until he felt everything click into place. He changed course slightly, aiming the ES Abyss directly for the database coordinates which identified the former position of the Helius Blackstar.
“I need some updates,” he said.
“I’ve switched directly to the super-fars,” said Pointer. “I’m trying to get a focus on the target area.”
“Bring it up on the screen when you find it.”
“I’m still attempting to link to our monitoring drones,” said Cruz. “There were twenty in all and they’re definitely on an old version of our comms network. V99.12xw according to the records – that’s dated twenty years ago.”
“You can still reach them, can’t you?”
“Yes, it won’t be a problem.”
“Got it!” shouted Pointer.
Every pair of eyes on the bridge turned towards the main viewscreen. The distance was extreme and the image
wobbled with the infinitesimal movements of the sensor modules. Blake found himself squinting to try and make out extra details.
In the middle of the screen, the spherical shape of the Gate Maker sat motionless – indicators on the feed showed it was positioned exactly in the centre of the old wormhole, down to the millimetre. Great sparks of energy flashed out from the edges of the spaceship, jagging away in colours of green and blue. These bolts extended for thousands of kilometres in all directions and came with such frequency they made it difficult to see the Vraxar craft in the centre.
“I don’t think they’re finished,” said Blake.
Quinn had his mouth open in wonder. “They’ve definitely started.”
“Will any of that sensor data tell us how long until they’re done?”
“I wouldn’t like to guess, sir,” said Pointer. “There’s so much energy concentrated about the Gate Maker it’s difficult to understand what the hell is going on.”
“It’s strange…it feels like our sensor arrays are being pinned onto that spaceship,” said Cruz. “I’ve never seen this happen before.”
“We’re going to make a short-range transit – aim for a hundred thousand klicks from the Gate Maker. Then, we’re going to fire missiles at it until it blows up.”
“Ready when you are, sir,” said Quinn.
“Activate.”
The ES Abyss shot forwards, the double transition sending a much stronger vibration through the hull. The heavy cruiser emerged into local space at precisely the intended spot. Blake got his bearings and set them on a circular course which would take them around the Gate Maker whilst maintaining a constant distance.
“Get that sensor lock back up.”
“On it.”
“And reactivate the stealth modules.”
“They’re coming online right now, sir.”
“There’s our target,” said Pointer.
The ES Abyss was much closer than before, though the only sign of this was the added stability on the sensor feed. Where before the image had wavered, now it was rock-steady. The Gate Maker continued pouring energy into space, a huge dark spot in the centre of incredible chaos.
God Ship (Obsidiar Fleet Book 3) Page 21