"There hasn't been any central government since man left Earth. And to a large extent, until now there hasn’t been any reason for sectors to form a higher government. I'm not advocating one now, but I do believe the sectors need to begin to work together, in order we as a species survive what is coming."
"I fully expect to be laughed at and ridiculed. But as you do, think on this. I’d rather be wrong and be laughed at, than be right and not done all I could to prepare. Consider the galaxy we know. We have been limited to one isolated arm. We know only a fraction of what there is to know about our galaxy. We have encountered lethal environments, but know nothing of the void of space ahead of us as the universe expands. We have speculated for millennia on the existence of intelligent alien life, but found no evidence of them. But lack of evidence does not mean there are none. It simply means something has prevented contact, the most likely reason being the distance between us, and for lack of a better word, them. We know enough to be able to prepare for an external threat. We have had two warnings one is imminent. We can prepare and hope nothing happens. Or we wait and react without a plan to whatever comes. I for one, am planning for the worst, and hoping for the best. What will you do?"
"Thank you for your time."
Amy and I sat there for a long moment, before clapping came from the doorway. Jane was standing there, with the twins and Annabelle behind her.
"Nice," said Amanda.
"Just the right tone I thought," said Aleesha.
Meow, said Angel.
Nineteen
By dinner time we'd had responses to the vid. The surprising thing was the mainstream media had refused to release it. It had been passed on to governments and military leaders, and viewed by influential people all along the spine, but Joe Average never saw it. In some ways, this was probably a good thing. Completely baffling, but just as well.
HUNTER - PROPHET OF DOOM, which I’d been dreading to see, didn’t happen.
What did happen was also somewhat surprising, at least to me.
Marshal Bigglesworth issued a statement to the media that British space forces would be running various forms of training exercises over the next few months, designed to update plans for the defense of the British sector, covering everything from renewed pirate attacks, through external invasions, and system wide catastrophes.
General Patton issued a similar statement within the hour for the American Fleet, closely followed by General Harriman in the Australian sector, and General Price for the SFSF. Within another hour, the Canadian Fleet had also announced similar plans, and most unexpectedly, the Fourth Reich followed. Most of the other sectors responded with vague concerns, and more than a little skeptism.
I set Amy, Dick, and A-Jane with the task of trying to get a meeting of leaders at this end of the spine together, but not knowing how many days we would be here, made this difficult at best.
Dinner was somewhat subdued, given the nature of where we were heading next. Not knowing much more than it was lethal, didn’t help.
I hardly noticed what I was eating, and rushed back up to my Ready Room. Jane and I continued discussing how to go about the next jump.
We had a few options.
The first was to send in a Hive, have it record as much sensor information as possible, and jump it back to us. However, the safest option also had problems. We knew roughly where Prometheus was because of a probe sent in some fifty years after she disappeared. It had been programmed to cross the Pestilence system, jump, scan, jump back, and report to the explorer ship waiting there. However, it hadn't gone to plan. History recorded everyone on that expedition dying before the ship jumped itself back to War, and carried on a ballistic course away from the jump point. When it was found several months later by a rescue ship sent looking for it, the probe was found to have large chunks of its memory wiped. There was enough left to identify Prometheus as being there, but not much else. Which implied that lack of shielding on a small ship would result in the computer system being fried, and actually not tell us very much. The probe itself had mainly been hardwired circuitry, which we no longer had the skills to create. Modern computers had evolved too far now, to create something so basically simple. And anything not simple, would be vulnerable.
The second option was to send in one of the Guardians, and hope its shielding was sufficient. However, if this didn’t work, the loss of shielding might make the difference between protecting us, and not. It was the not part bothering me, as failing to get the ship back would mean we couldn’t risk going in there ourselves.
The third option was Unassailable, with the same argument.
When we arrived at the jump point a little after eight, we'd not made any course of action decision. However, the system being as big as it was, the Hives doing the system scan were still inbound, and I wasn’t going to do anything until they caught up with us.
The Bridge was quiet as we sat there, pointed at nothing space, the HUD showing us where the jump point actually was.
On the other side was the Death system.
The twins and I shuddered again, as if sharing the same thought.
"Will you stop doing that!" demanded Alana.
"Sorry," I mumbled. "Can't help it."
"The Gates of Death!" exclaimed Amanda suddenly.
"What?"
"This is what Kali meant, isn’t it? The jump points into the Death system could be called the 'Gates of Death'"
"I don’t know about you, but I assumed she meant actual death."
"I did too, but think about it. Kali knew we were coming here, and she told us we would, only not in a way we would understand at the time."
"She knew you wouldn’t want to come here," added Aleesha, "so she allowed us to mislead ourselves as to her meaning."
"You could be right," I said. "It would be like her, and this is the gateway to the Death system."
"Could she have meant it both ways?" asked BA.
"You had to say it, didn’t you," said Alana.
"Had to be said," added Dick.
"So," I said, "You think we shouldn’t go in there?"
No-one answered. But for the first time, I could see apprehension on faces where I'd never seen it before.
I made a decision to delay going in until the morning, and sent everyone off to do what they wanted. I stayed on the Bridge, continuing the discussion of options with Jane, Magnus, and some of her people she called up. But once again, I found the practicality of the scientists to be wanting. And for a moment, I wondered if they were all suicidal. Getting nowhere rapidly, I sent them off as well.
When the last of the Hives returned around ten, I had Jane launch them all, form them up into a single ship with merged shields, and Jane jumped it to the Death system.
Thirty very long seconds later, it jumped back again. Its shields were down to sixteen percent. Jane broke it up into individual ships, and started docking them. She had to send out every salvage droid we had.
She looked at me with a very serious expression.
"Did we get anything useful?"
"Seventy two percent of the computer systems were fried, and I'm trying to make a whole sensor scan from what's left."
"Take your time."
Meaning hurry up. Before I slept on the decision to be made, I was hoping for some concrete information to base it on.
It took her nearly half an hour, before she turned back to me.
"Oh shit!" she said.
"That bad?"
"Worse."
"Tell me."
"It’s a neutron star. A pulsar with a rotation in the milliseconds. It's emitting both gamma rays and x-rays. The crew of the Prometheus would have died rapidly after jumping in, as their shields and hull would have been about as effective in that environment as tissue paper. And I don’t think Dr. Magnus is going to gain much information from the computers. The electromagnetic effect is worse than the EMP of the biggest nuke ever made. The computer would have lasted only as long as the shielding stayed up."
"Is the ship salvageable?"
"Most likely."
"Even if it is, would the hull be too radioactive or something to be safe?"
"All hulls absorb radiation. It's one reason for having a thick hull. But most hulls are designed for background radiation, and occasionally getting a bit too close to a sun. Prometheus has been absorbing the concentrated output of a neutron star for centuries now. In theory, the outer hull could have exhausted its electrons and/or become something other than its original material. In practice though, we can only wait and see. Worst case is the ship broke up. If it's still intact, then removal from the system should stabilize what's left. And all it will need is a new outer hull over the top of what remains, or simply replace all the hull plates with new ones."
"It's never been tested before?"
"Not to this extreme."
"Did the Hives pick up any trace of the ship?"
"There is something down the bearing we were given. But it's too far away to know for certain what's there."
"Is it safe for us to jump in?"
"The sixty four million credit question, as they used to say." I didn't bother correcting her. "Let me run the numbers. I think I have enough data to map the radiation structure. Our shields should take care of a lot of it. The Hives simply didn’t have enough to protect complex circuits properly. The main problem is does the new emitters Dr. Magnus's people designed, work on the specific form of radiation here. If not, can I modify them to work effectively?"
"Can you?"
"Ask me in the morning."
"I will."
I headed for bed.
Twenty
The jump into the Death system was stressful, but uneventful. The shields held. The new emitters operating from Unassailable, gave us a secondary shield inside our normal shields.
To make sure we were safe, all the ships were linked up into one or the other shield. In addition, everyone was in full suit protection mode, connected into seat life support ports.
The sense of anti-climax was palpable. We didn’t die, the computers didn’t fail, Jane remained unaffected. Nothing out of the normal happened.
The one difference from being in a normal system was the sun. Normally at jump point distance, the sun was invisible. The HUD showed where it was, but it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.
Death was a regular blinking dot off to the side of the view ahead. There was something about it which bothered me, but I had other things more important to ask about.
"Any effect on our shields?" I asked Jane.
"Very slight. We have a definite time limit in the system, but we're talking something like twelve hours, give or take. It would be enough to make it to the other side where there is presumably another jump point, but I’d hate to have to search for it first."
"Get us moving along the line to Prometheus please."
"Confirmed."
"Do we need the suits?" asked BA.
"Give me time to make sure," said Jane.
"We'll do our own checks as well," said Magnus.
She and several of her people unplugged, rose and left the CCC. Everyone was in safe zones, and as far from the outer hull as possible.
For the first time ever, I tried reading my pad in full protection mode. It wasn’t the most successful way of reading, given the suit was picking up what the pad was displaying and relaying it to my PC, which was sending the image to my eyes. It worked, but it proved easier to simply send the image to my eyes direct from my PC. It still wasn’t very satisfactory though.
But the stress of where we were made concentrating on the mundane impossible.
I think everyone tried to do something, but in the end we all gave up, and sat there watching the various monitors, as BigMother rapidly crossed hostile space. At the back of our minds was the hope we would be cleared to go back to 'slinky red' before we needed a toilet. While the suits could open the appropriate hole to allow us to go, the whole thought of that part of the anatomy suddenly getting a dose of gamma radiation, tended to induce crossed legs syndrome.
Eventually, Jane put us out of our misery.
"You can rest easy," she said. "The shields are protecting us fully. The new emitters are cancelling out the gamma and x-rays effectively, and our normal shields are coping with everything else. There is a slight drain, but as I said before, we're talking twelve hours in-system without running into danger time."
As a group, we all shifted pretty much at the same time.
Angel was especially glad to not be in her suit any longer, and she sat on her pad and started in on a full bath. Nut was also in the CCC, on Grace's lap, and he'd been even more unhappy with the suit than Angel was. He jumped up next to Angel, and the bath became mutual.
Prometheus appeared on the HUD about four hours later. She appeared to be intact, but cold. The jump point from Pestilence not being aligned with the point for Famine, meant Prometheus hadn't been aimed at the sun when it down jumped into the system. So while it had drifted closer, it was still heading off to one side of the sun.
Sun diving a neutron star to salvage a ship was something I wouldn’t even try to attempt. And I was very glad I didn’t have to.
I ate finger food in the CCC, as we approached. Our main shields were noticeably down by now, but we still had plenty of time.
Jane slid us to a relative stop alongside, but well away. She looked identical to Enterprise, and seemed to be intact. While moving, she wasn’t going very fast, and Jane matched the minor speed.
During the night, Jane had rigged a set of station tugs with the new emitters, so each one now had a shield which protected the core components of the ship. The theory was, a set of tugs with the computers protected, should be able to tow Prometheus out of the system. The tugs might not last the journey though, so we had spares. The plan was to get the tugs there, get her moving, and then return to Pestilence as fast as we could. If necessary, we could make a second trip in to replace the tugs after our shields regenerated fully.
It was too much guess work for my liking, but there really wasn’t a better plan on offer. BigMother couldn’t drop a shield to slide out a grav sled, without exposing us to the system radiation. None of the smaller ships would do any real better than the tugs, and we needed them for our own shields.
All we could do was try.
I gave Jane the nod, and the twelve tugs launched from the Flight Deck. We'd worked out the best place to position each, and now we waited for them to signal Jane they were ready.
"All set," said Jane after a short while.
"Get her moving," I commanded.
"Confirmed."
As we watched, the tugs took up the load.
Prometheus exploded.
One moment she was a ship, then next she was debris going in all directions.
"Get us…"
Debris starting impacting on our shields and they started going down rapidly.
A particularly large chunk blew down the outer shield and impacted the inner one.
It fritzed for a moment.
Our suits shifted into full protection mode, but half the people around me were already falling.
"Jane!" I yelled.
Everything went black.
Twenty One
"What the fuck was that!" I yelled, as I bolted up in bed.
Angel jumped off the bed as fast as she could, and shot out. Aline yelped, and sat up beside me. She was reaching to hug me, when the twins ran in.
"What was that?" they said together.
I couldn’t speak. I disentangled myself from Aline, dodged the twins, and ran into the bathroom.
A haggard face greeted me in the mirror. You'd think I’d have been used to this by now. But no. Each new venture into nightmare land left me shaken and shaky. I splashed water over my face, and toweled off what was still mostly sweat.
The three girls peered in the doorway at me.
"You okay Jon?" asked Amanda.
"No. Not really."
"You need a hug?" asked Aline.
"Give me a moment."
"Out here when you're ready," said Aleesha, and the three of them vanished from the doorway.
"Jane?"
"Jon?"
"What's the time?"
"The clock says three."
"We need to rethink the tugs."
"Oh?"
"Bad oh."
"How bad oh?"
"Everyone dies bad oh."
"Oh."
There was a moment's silence.
"Cause?"
"Prometheus disintegrates as soon as the tugs take the load."
"I was afraid of that."
"Be afraid. Be very afraid."
"I will. Suggestions?"
"We need to test the hull before we try to attach tugs to it. And we need a plan B if the hull is so brittle it can't take a tow."
"Most obvious alternative is rigging the tugs to push from the rear only, and to ramp up the speed very slowly."
"Next best alternative?"
"We send over repair droids to try to get her engines going again."
"What's the likelihood they will simply explode?"
"No way of knowing."
"Anyway we can strengthen the hull?"
"I'll ponder it. There are some simulations I can run, based on my scans of Enterprise."
"Fine. We'll talk after breakfast."
"Confirmed."
I went out to a group hug with three naked girls. I hardly noticed them, such was my worry. I shooed the twins back to their own bed, and went out to find Angel. She was on the top of her tree, looking apprehensive. I gave her a good hug and pat, and told her to come back to bed. She stayed where she was.
Hunter Legacy 9: Hero at the Gates Page 11