War of the Spheres

by B. V. Larson

  Perhaps realizing that my “nerd herd” was going to be in a bad mood, Jessup bailed out on me when I reached the hatchway on the lowest deck.

  “Get them back to work,” he said. “We’ll probably die if you don’t. And tell them this: no whining!”

  “I’ll make a point of it, sir,” I said.

  “Chief!” Col. Hughes called out when she caught sight of me a few moments later. “Get me out of this disgusting tank of filth!”

  The prisoners were, in fact, being released one at a time from the bilge. Apparently the procedure wasn’t progressing fast enough for Hughes.

  “I demand to be allowed a shower and fresh clothes!” she said loudly, berating a beefy spacer.

  The guy didn’t answer her. He just blinked and winced, as if he expected her to punch him or something.

  “Gray!” Fillmore sputtered. “There you are, you vagabond. Why are you looking so spiffy-clean? Oh yeah, because you sucked up to Jessup, that’s why! I’d nearly forgotten.”

  “Well, I haven’t,” Hughes sputtered.

  Fillmore was right behind her, elbowing his way to the front of the throng that was trying to get out of the bilge.

  “Colonel… Doctor… everyone…” I said, holding my hands high and imploring them to remain calm. “We don’t have time for showers or even clean clothes. We’ve got to get down to work.”

  I filled them in on the situation, and they looked even more glum afterward. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible, but this group managed it.

  “I’m supposed to man a station inside the module and work like this?” Fillmore demanded.

  “That’s right. I’ll have them send up clean gear for everyone. Now, if you’d be so kind—”

  “Extortion, pure and simple. I understand the nature of your one-sided offer perfectly. I’m to slave for Jessup in engineering, or he’ll heap more abuse—”

  “Nothing like that, Dr. Fillmore,” I said patiently. “This way, please.”

  I had to admit as I led the stinking, irritable team to the Fairweather module, they certainly weren’t a grateful group.

  When they heard that we were getting farther from our home Sphere with every passing minute, their mood shifted to disbelief and despair.

  “What’s this fresh insanity?” Dr. Gevan demanded. “We haven’t turned around? We’re still running farther out into space, farther from safety?”

  “That’s right,” I admitted. “Unfortunately, it looks like a big ship was lurking out here with her engines cold. Once she realized we’d jumped way out past her, she came barreling after us.”

  “That means she’s been lurking out here…” Hughes said thoughtfully. “Just squatting quietly in the dark of space. They were deliberately withholding their emissions, so we couldn’t detect them.”

  “It would seem so,” I admitted.

  “Lurking right here, at the aperture…” Hughes considered. “Waiting for us to jump outside. Now the enemy is at last springing their trap.”

  “Who’s doing this, Colonel?” Gevan asked.

  “Our alien friends,” she said, pointing at the screen. Her face was like stone. “Who else would be manning that sleek, deadly-looking ship?”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Hughes ignored him and turned to Dr. Fillmore. “Sean, to get to safety again, how long of a hop are we talking about?”

  “You want to move from here back inside the Sphere in a single jump?” he demanded, snorting. “Insane. We’re dealing with an almost untested algorithm, courtesy of Dr. Gevan, here, and you’re asking for wild guesses. Suicide, that’s what it is!”

  “Maybe we don’t have to do it all at once,” Dr. Gevan suggested. “What if we come about, face our pursuer, then do a controlled hop past him toward home?”

  Dr. Fillmore’s eyes narrowed even more than usual. “I’m assuming you mean with our old algorithm reloaded into the CPU?”

  “No way. We couldn’t jump that far with my fixes. We’d end up dead if we used the old software and tried that kind of a leap.”

  In my own opinion, Gevan was right. After all, he’d almost expired the last time we’d jumped a very short distance. However uncalibrated his new software was, it was obviously superior to the old code. Maybe that fact was the element that was sending Fillmore into a jealous fit.

  “You’re just grandstanding,” Fillmore said. “Seeking full credit for the final solution. You’ll risk all our lives to ensure your share of the credit in this discovery!”

  Gevan was about to start yelling back, but Col. Hughes stepped into the fray.

  “Both of you, shut up. In less than an hour, that massive alien ship is going to catch up to us. That’s right—and don’t give me those looks. Cmdr. Collins just reported the numbers while you were squabbling. The battleship is faster than this destroyer. We can’t outrun her—not without engaging the drive again.”

  Glowering and grumbling, they both finally came to their senses and made a show of mild cooperation. They worked with Gevan’s new algorithm, because using the old one was never going to jump us far enough without inflicting death upon the crew. Gevan had passed out and vomited after a short hop—a long one would be torment.

  “Hurry it up people,” Jessup’s voice rang over loudspeakers. “We have a very small window, and it’s closing fast.”

  “At least we’re close to a solution,” I said in an optimistic tone.

  Fillmore snorted in my face. “We don’t have a solution. We have a gutsy work-around.”

  “Just target the barrier and pop us back in that direction,” I suggested with a shrug. “With any luck, we’ll appear inside it and escape.”

  He shook his head, and began to yell at me again. “Ignorance is your best color, Gray.”

  “Let me explain,” Dr. Gevan said. “Fillmore is right: The algorithm moved us too far last time—much farther than I had predicted. That means we don’t understand it. Altering the parameters, such as length of time in the jump, etc., might have unknown effects.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If I had to guess,” Gevan explained, “I’d say the algorithm operates logarithmically. The progression is steep. More time spent in the transitional state means an increasing distance traveled per second. So if we do it wrong… we could end up inside our home star, or something.”

  “Yep,” Gevan said. “Even if all goes swimmingly, we’ll could move so far from home we’ll never get back.”

  “Seriously? I don’t quite understand why—?”

  “Look,” Fillmore interrupted. “I’ll try to make it simple enough for you, Gray. We’ve only run one test with this new algorithm. If we put in the exact same inputs as last time we’ll get the same results—with luck. But if we vary things, even fractionally, we can’t be sure how it will behave.”

  I nodded, thinking that over. “All right… I guess we can’t do it in one leap. We should turn and head back toward the Sun, but take smaller steps. We’ll give it a hop—probably two. With luck, we’ll get the same results as last time, and we’ll be back inside our home Sphere.”

  “Now you’ve got it,” Fillmore said. “Inform the bridge, Gray. I’m not wasting one more second talking to that ape Jessup.”

  Before I spoke to Jessup, I turned to Col. Hughes. She’d been following our conversation, and she’d never stopped frowning.

  Her arms were crossed tightly under her breasts, and her eyes were tight with worry.

  “Colonel?” I asked. “Do I have your permission to proceed?”

  She nodded. “Tell Jessup first. He’s got to turn the ship around and head back toward our home Sphere. I’ll make a final transmission to Earth. A data-dump giving them all our data.”

  This concerned me, as such things were normally done when a crew expected to die.

  “Now, sir?” I asked. “Are things that bad?”

  “They certainly are. We’re about to blind-jump again, and I don’t trust either of these fools. If I had better opt
ions, I’d shoot them both—but I don’t.”

  After she’d transmitted her final encrypted packet of data back toward Earth, I contacted Jessup.

  “About time you got a fix for this, Gray,” he said.

  “I’m not sure if it’s a perfect fix, sir… but we’ve got something worth trying.”

  “Well, it’s just in time. The missiles will intercept us in about four minutes. If you hadn’t called, I was going to engage the drive myself.”

  “Don’t do that, Captain!” I shouted.

  “Don’t crap yourself. I didn’t say I wanted to do it.”

  “Good… but, uh… what was that about missiles, sir? It doesn’t make sense that they’d want to destroy us now.”

  “Maybe they changed their minds, Gray. Who knows? Anyway… you now have my approval to jump again. That should make your geeks happy.”

  About thirty seconds after we got the approval the ship turned around, and we engaged the jump sequence. Fortunately, despite their bickering, Gevan and Fillmore had done all the prep-work.

  Having decided to stick with Gevan’s experimental code, they did nothing to update the software other than to aim in a different direction.

  “This is highly risky,” Dr. Fillmore kept saying.

  At first, I thought he was just complaining about using Gevan’s software out of a mistaken sense of stung pride—but then I realized Gevan himself wasn’t arguing.

  “Dr. Gevan?” I asked. “Is Fillmore right? Is it risky?”

  He glanced at me and nodded.

  “Explain,” Colonel Hughes demanded, “and be quick about it. There are missiles—or invasion modules—or something else unpleasant coming right at us at high speeds.”

  By now the visualizations of local space showed several contacts approaching. There were seven of them, in two staggered waves. The first spread was three wide, in a V-formation. The second was in a diamond pattern. Could that be some kind of technique designed to make the missiles harder to shoot down? I had no idea, but it really didn’t matter anyway. Viper had basic anti-ballistic technology, but I had the feeling these missiles might overwhelm our defense.

  “Yes,” Dr. Gevan admitted. “It’s highly risky. The algorithm didn’t perform as expected the first time—why should it work in an identical fashion on the return jump?”

  “What kind of variance are we looking at?” Hughes asked urgently.

  “Ten… fifteen percent at the worst.”

  They eyed one another, and Hughes looked like she was going to slap him. “For all the anger Fillmore generates in me on a daily basis, at least he never killed me and my crew with untested software!”

  Chastened, Gevan turned back to his boards. Col. Hughes got on the line with Jessup moments later.

  “Captain,” she said. “Is there any way you can shoot down those missiles?”

  “Unlikely. We’ve deployed decoys, reflective chaff, sand-fields in their path—so far, nothing has worked. Are you telling me we can’t jump again yet, Hughes? Are you telling me we’re as good as dead?”

  “No, Captain. I just wanted to know if we had any better options.”

  “Negatory. Engage your drive. If it blows up—well, I hope it will be quick.”

  Hughes licked her lips and reached for the console. Toby had been sent back to a simple jump seat now. His hack had given us full power to our module, and full control of Viper’s navigation as far as the jump-drive went.

  The missiles grew noticeably closer.

  “Col. Hughes?” I asked her. “Why are we hesitating?”

  “Jumping off a cliff always takes a moment of building up courage. This is one of those moments.”

  “Ninety seconds to impact, Hughes,” Jessup’s voice came in over the loud speaker. “Please engage the drive.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Hughes, leaning close. “What’s so bad about a ten percent variance?”

  She glanced at me. “On the way out, we only had to pass the barrier. We’re now moving at speed. If we hop back and screw this up, we might appear a hundred meters past the barrier, on the safe side, or a hundred meters away on the wrong side. In which case, we’d smash into it and die in cascade of flame.”

  “We could even appear in the middle of it,” Fillmore complained. “Although the odds of that are slim. Rather like flipping a coin and having it land on its edge.”

  Suddenly, Hughes’ odd behavior made sense. Her finger was hovering over the touchscreen, ready to activate the drive—but she was waiting. Logically, the longer we flew in the right direction, the better our odds would be of cleanly passing the barrier and reaching safety in a single hop.

  Still, it was nerve-wracking to watch the sleek, conical objects hurtle toward us. They had individual engines, spouting blue exhaust plumes behind each of them. As Jessup threw everything he had out into space to stop them, they were dodging and weaving in a seemingly random pattern.

  One of them blew up as we watched, then another vaporized moments later. A cheer went up all over the ship.

  “Thirty seconds until impact…” Jessup said in a tense, booming voice. “Please engage the drive now, Hughes.”

  Another of the incoming contacts vanished.

  “We might take them all out,” Hughes said, her hand still hesitating.

  She’d fully realized she was playing chicken with everyone’s life—but then she did it anyway.

  We jumped.

  Chapter 42

  A few moments later, we came back out of our transitional state. Fortunately, the navigational computer controlled the entry and exit into another dimension, and we didn’t have to spend time wandering, seeking an exit.

  Still, the in-between was familiar to me now. I’d spent quite a while here when I’d been cast adrift by Big Al. It was a sensation I didn’t want to revel in.

  When we came back into the universe of heat, light and solid objects again, we all winced and bared our teeth.

  Frantically, we checked our confused, self-updating instruments.

  “Reverse jets, engines on full!” Jessup shouted into our headsets.

  Were we about to crash into something?

  His command wasn’t directed at us. It was meant for his mundane engineering crew. The ship shuddered under us as we braked hard.

  “Where are we?” Colonel Hughes demanded. “Have we got a fix yet?”

  “We’re…” Fillmore said. “We’re not in the clear. We’re still on the wrong side of the barrier.”

  Hughes whirled on Gevan. “Give me a fix, damn you.”

  “Working on it… got it. We’re about an AU from the barrier. Quite safe.”

  “Over a hundred million kilometers short,” she said. “And you’re happy with that? It’s more than your stated variance factor of ten to fifteen—”

  “Incorrect,” Gevan replied, cutting her off. “We’re well within the stated zone. I’m calculating about a seven percent variance to the negative side, compared to our previous jump. We just came in a little, short, that’s all.”

  “We could have appeared five meters from the wall and smashed into it!”

  Gevan shrugged. “We could have… but we didn’t.”

  Hughes shook her head. “And that ship?”

  “It’s far, far behind us. By the time those bastards turn around and chase us, we’ll be able to nose up to the barrier and hop inside.”

  At last, Hughes seemed to relax for a moment. She let out a huge sigh.

  “A job well done, team,” Jessup said over the intercom. “You cut it kind of close, but I’m always willing to give credit where credit is due. Your techno trick pulled our asses out of the fire. Colonel Hughes: At the courts-martial proceedings when this is all over, I’ll make sure to bring this moment up—in your defense.”

  Getting out of my harness, I stretched luxuriously.

  “That’s very considerate of him,” I joked. Leaning, I placed one hand on top of Hughes console.

  She slapped my hands away, despite my
light mood.

  “Don’t touch my console again, Chief. I’m in charge down here, and it wouldn’t do to get a swollen sense of importance.”

  “Easy, sir,” I said. “We lived, didn’t we? If we hadn’t jumped, we might be dead right now. I think we should all take a leaf from Jessup’s book of forgiveness and pull together.”

  Hughes gave the smallest of nods in agreement, and then she looked down to busy herself with important things on her dash. She was feeling the weight of responsibility for all these people so far away from home, and I let her do it. It was her job.

  We watched our screens, and nothing new manifested during several long minutes. It seemed that we’d escaped for now. Everyone relaxed a few notches.

  We were still nervous, of course, as there might be a second ship lurking closer to the barrier, in our new neighborhood of space. Most importantly, we were still on the wrong side of the barrier. But so far, no other threats had materialized.

  “You know,” I said, “we really are like housecats that have escaped out into the world for the first time.”

  “Yes…” Hughes agreed. “And the first big dog that caught our scent nearly ate us.”

  I nodded.

  She sighed hugely. “Okay, I’m officially forgiving you for touching my console. But don’t do it again. You hear me?”

  “Loud and clear, sir,” I said, appreciating the gesture of peace.

  She looked me over with a certain degree of mistrust. “You got us out here, Chief. Now, you have to help us get back home.”

  “Agreed, Colonel. That too is part of my mission.”

  My confident responses seemed to placate her.

  For some reason, after we’d figured out it would take hours for the enemy ship to catch us again, we all felt like taking a nap. Some people actually did so.

  Not Fillmore and Gevan, however. They began reworking every line of code in Gevan’s unauthorized update. Toby looked over their shoulders, offering suggestions which they accepted irritably.

  As I was no longer needed and there wasn’t an obvious crisis exploding in our collective faces, I decided to head to the mess deck and get some refreshment.