Tethered Worlds: Unwelcome Star

by Gregory Faccone

  "Three coming in starboard high," Jordahk said, highlighting the trio. He kept his voice calm.

  "I see them," Cranium said. "I need that smelting ring."

  The Monte Crest's grav weaves were old and of poor quality. The task of overriding all the inertial forces being created was beyond them. Glick held onto consoles and railings as she pushed across the bridge to reach the incoherent engineer.

  "Chaetan!" the captain yelled.

  "Oh, I planned for this," Chaetan said. His head was bobbing strangely. "Don't worry, captain, I know we can't trust the AI systems with that old man on board."

  Glick grabbed his shoulder. "What've you done to the auto routing systems? Why isn't that ring—"

  The engineer twisted in his chair, bringing his arm around with considerable force. It caught Glick in the abdomen. Her suit absorbed the blow, but she staggered back.

  "The captain wants shields." The engineer's eyes were wide with a crazed gleam. He pulled a panel off his console and started working hardware.

  Jordahk could feel activity in his AIs.

  "I think Wixom has locked the engineer out of the shield systems," Max said. "But I don't like the looks of what he's doing."

  The Monte Crest nosed down relative to its vector as Cranium tried to compensate with the ship's other rings. The new triangular formation was nearly upon them. "Ah, guys..."

  A flash and a loud cracking sound were followed by a tremendous rush of air. Their helmets folded closed automatically. The strange hit caused every internal system carrying current in the front of the bridge to pop with an explosion of sparks.

  Glick was about to forcibly remove Chaetan when his helmet folded closed. Without warning, the ship became covered in sparkles. It was intercepted debris. The noise of the escaping air stopped along with the constant impact din.

  Cranium looked around. "The shields?"

  "But I locked out his controls," Jordahk said.

  One of Glick's combat sticks grew in her hand. She clubbed Chaetan's helmet hard. It made little difference to his already rattled brain.

  "They're on now, captain," Chaetan said in a stupor, "and they're staying on."

  Glick saw the engineer's handiwork in the console. "He's hardwired some direct mod."

  The captain sat in clenched motionlessness. He was slipping into shock and in no place to order the shields lowered. It was a moot point anyway, because no way to quickly undo the engineer's modification was forthcoming.

  "I can't get a read on any automated systems he's using," Max said.

  Two more "attack" asteroids grew quickly in the main view. The usually comforting shields now portended only dread. The flash came. The ship vibrated as if it were a giant gong. A loud hum oscillated, accelerating in frequency as the shot's effect grew in ever faster laps through the plasma.

  Jordahk felt it through the deck and even his suit. The pitch continued higher until space was lit from an explosion on the Monte Crest's hull. The ship jerked violently to the side, pressing him hard against his auto restraints.

  Something dark was thrown across his vision. It was Glick.

  Before their daredevil entry, they knew the first of the haunted layers would be easiest Back during the planning, as they wracked their brains on ways to get through the second layer, Jordahk put Max to calculating trajectories.

  Above the table in the stone gym, VADs of information kindled before them. Six and then a dozen yellow lines snaked through the asteroid-busy second layer. Each petered out before making it all the way through.

  "Second layer's a mess," Max said. "Way too tight for this tub."

  Jordahk glanced at the siblings to see if either took offense. Neither had. The Monte Crest's pros and cons were, thankfully, in the open. The second layer was problematic. They all were, but one at a time. Jordahk sported a wry grin, wondering just how much coin his next suggestion would cost.

  "Oh no," Glick said, "I see where you're going. No way. The Roulette is sub-worthy with shields." She stepped back.

  Cranium leaned in. "Jordahk, that'd be a one-way trip. The Roulette is truly civilian, with no granix outside of what is structurally necessary to hold the wreck together."

  "The bridge can't take a single non-shielded hit," Glick said.

  "Run it with Ralston, Max," Jordahk ordered. "Could the Roulette make it through the second layer?"

  A dozen new projections snaked through the second layer, each stopping short of the end. Finally, after 20 seconds, one snaked all the way through.

  "Even that successful run took numerous hits," Max said.

  "You've got enough matériel aboard," Jordahk said to Cranium. "We could build a small granix chamber amidships on the Roulette and ride it out."

  He expected an immediate explosion of objections to the crazy and expensive idea. Glick chewed her lip silently. When she noticed Jordahk watching her, she hid the expression and exploded.

  "That takes the biscuit!" she said. "Congratulations. Your most radiated scheme yet." Cranium nodded. "And who's going to fly it?" she continued.

  "Uh, Max. Could you do it?"

  "No way, kid. Not with your life on the line. Not when I'm one in twenty."

  Jordahk felt crestfallen while the siblings displayed relief. Then a series of purple lines snaked through the second layer. He sensed the almost alien activity, seven run-throughs and four successes.

  "I can do it," the resonant voice said.

  The gym was quiet. They all watched the seven projections repeat through the second layer. Truth be told, even the misses nearly made it.

  Cranium gestured to Jordahk's wrist. "You don't even trust that thing!"

  Glick moved to his side of the table. She stood close but kept her eyes on the projections, not meeting his gaze. "Jordahk, let's find another way."

  "Look, Max is in there too," Jordahk said defensively. "Max, can you verify?"

  "The calculations are beyond me, but the solutions ring true."

  "I can't believe I'm even considering this," Cranium said, "but even if we do make it, there's the third layer. Even if your grandfather arrives with a couple javelins, no warship captain's going to plow to us shieldless."

  Jordahk had expended every trick just theoretically getting them past the first two layers. They all knew it and stared at the projections with resignation. Observational lightspeed data kept coming in. New icons popped into the mix. One was just past the second layer not far from Wixom's course projections.

  "What's that?" Jordahk asked.

  "Ralston's not sure," Cranium said. He opened a separate VAD picturing a blurry image of the distant object. "A wrecked ship of some sort."

  "This system has seen every imaginable kind working these fields at some point," Glick said. She sub-whispered commands. "Here's a database I, uh, obtained on the station. Certain parts dealers like to keep track of what's out here, just in case opportunity for salvage ever arises."

  "Looking now," Max said. "I like her, Jordahk. She's resourceful." Jordahk felt a little embarrassed before Max continued. "There. An ex-military fleet tug. Bought as surplus and used to lug rocks. Lost eight years ago."

  Jordahk smiled. "Look at that hull thickness."

  Glick and Cranium exchanged pained glances, as if their stomachs were suddenly upset.

  Contrasting greatly with the crazy, haunted layers were the placid safe zones sandwiched in between. But the relative quiet was fleeting. The maelstrom loomed like an approaching storm. There was no way back, only forward. A sturdy hull the only protection against the withering onslaught.

  The granix bulkheads of a long abandoned tug didn't inspire confidence. What was once its engine room was now a hollowed out chamber filled with maintenance bots and three suited individuals. Broken bits of engine housing floated in the airless environment.

  Glick put a gloved hand to her near-immobilized shoulder, no doubt whispering blood micro commands to adjust for more pain suppression. The busted up joint, caused by her unscheduled flight ac
ross the bridge, qualified as minimally functional. Ugly temporary repairs were being done to keep it so. Glick needed real surgery, but quirky Torious was still hours away.

  The damaged Monte Crest was nearly done in. Blown shield controllers and ruptured conduits riddled its midsection where the last disastrous hit occurred. The center thrust ring was useless. If the engineer had come unglued earlier in the first haunted layer, another hit or two with shields hot would have ended it. Chaetan was microed into a stupor and confined to quarters. The Monte Crest had no chance of limping away. Even Capt. Luck, who eventually got hold of himself, knew this.

  The ship's detensor picked up incoming vessels. They received a real-time fusebox transmission from Aristahl, fixing his arrival hour. A fusebox was a large and expensive piece of equipment. The Monte Crest's was old and secondhand, but receiving was relatively easy.

  Transmission required modulating a super collided flow of plasma. That created narrow band spatial distortions readable by the specialized detensor of another fusebox. It was low bandwidth even when it worked. Unfortunately the transmission capability of the Monte Crest's fusebox was hopelessly trashed. At least Jordahk knew when his grandfather would arrive before he took the infra-capable Roulette on its last voyage.

  He could not wait. The chaotic fields, the entire system, was changing constantly. The haunted layers were moving, and the so-called "safe zones" weren't going to be safe much longer. The three of them, along with nearly every maintenance bot on the Monte Crest had piled into the makeshift granix chamber built into the center of the Roulette. Wixom, although still refusing most interaction, piloted the heap through the second layer. The AI had its own agenda, but also was out to prove something.

  From within the tug's engine chamber, Jordahk watched four jet-packed maintenance bots fit the only remaining intact engine from the Roulette. It eclipsed the twisted hulk of the old launch. Wixom had indeed gotten them through, and near the wreck of the old tug. Now the Roulette's paltry remains weren't enough to pique a salvager's interest.

  Wixom's ruthless supercomputing, and a willingness to strategically sacrifice the Roulette piece by piece, was effective and emotionless. It wasn't a ride meant to be experienced. Jordahk wished he'd known less about what was happening outside their reinforced granix chamber. A few tense moments, as the Roulette came apart around them, he preferred not to recall. Glick moving closer during the onslaught wasn't one of them. Also worth recalling was relief when he reached her side after she was hurled across the bridge at the end of the first layer penetration. A broken shoulder and concussed brain were manageable.

  Now she gesticulated with one arm to bots as they performed the engine transfer. Before that she saw personally to the destruction of interfering bulkheads within the tug chamber. Breaking things was one of her strengths. Her brother was attempting to link plasma conduits from their engine to at least one of the tug's thrust rings. Without being able to steer, they weren't going to get far.

  "If your shoulder's bothering you," Jordahk said to Glick, "I've got pharma painkiller."

  She laughed it off, but he heard the forced levity even through the suit transmission.

  "No pharma, I can make do with micros." She gestured outward. "I'll keep you alive long enough to pay me." Her smile was daring.

  Maybe the no-suit's grav weaves were glitched, because Jordahk felt a flutter in his abdomen. He couldn't deny that spending time with Glick was becoming easy, even preferable. What was he letting happen?

  Their eyes met through helmet crystal amidst this most unlikely situation. In the back of a wrecked tug, in the middle of a chaotic field, surrounded by a dying system twisting in the grip of an ugly nebula, they faced each other, and everything else became background. It was like a cineVAD. But after an all too brief few seconds they both snapped out of it, abashed like green long adolescents the day after emergence fever.

  Jordahk cleared his throat. "Yes, your pay. I don't know how much coin my grandfather has." The wrecked Roulette was lost from sight as its last engine was seated into the tug hulk. "If I know him, he's negotiated part ownership of these fields. It'll be doubly in our interest if we sort things out."

  "Yeah, about that last part. We're talking about a crazed Sojourner. I'd sooner turn my back on a Hektor."

  "I know it's asking you to believe, but my grandfather has been right up to now. He wouldn't send me into this mess if he didn't—"

  Without warning, the old tug lurched 90 degrees. The bulkhead raced to meet them. They jetted away instinctively, lessening the impact, although it still knocked them for a loop.

  Cranium was like a conductor trying to regain control of his orchestra. Maintenance bots regained orientation awkwardly on their retrofitted jet packs. The data rider motioned frantically behind the airless environment VADs that surrounded him. Called "misters," they required a spar along one edge to maintain a rectangle of gas. The data rider's claims included achieving the impossible, but only when everything could be displayed before him at once.

  "Seventeen!" he shouted unnecessarily over suit comm. "You said those starboard conduits were clear." In response, flashes of new data crossed the VADs. It was going too fast for Jordahk to make out. "You two." Cranium pointed to a pair of bots. "Pull those radiated modules! Clear those valves."

  The data rider noted his fellow humans and shrugged. His suit concealed some of the gesture, but it was still clear from his sheepish grin.

  "Sorry," Cranium said. "The engine's heating up too fast, and I don't know what Chaetan's done to these bots. Picked a fine time to melt down." Data flashed on the VADs, and he stared at all three with trance-like focus.

  Jordahk switched to private comm. "Is he going to gain access to a ring?" he asked Glick. "This isn't hacking as much as mimicking a long gone command system."

  "He'll see a pattern." Her brother was lit by strobe-like VAD flickers as they displayed years of information. "Looks like he's already taking this tub back to its launch. He'll see what he needs to. I'm more concerned about our hardware."

  The engine was getting frantic attention from three bots. Something was definitely wrong.

  "It's heating up." The data rider shook his head. "Drakking emergency vents!" he shouted to a pair of bots sliding something large out of the engine's side.

  "What's wrong?" Glick asked.

  "We're lucky this engine fires at all," Cranium said distractedly.

  Jordahk didn't like the sound of that. He may not be an expert on system access like the data rider, but his intuition told him the situation was reeling out of control. "The tug's ring sys isn't ready yet?"

  "Yeah, but the engine is." Cranium froze the VADs and stared Jordahk in the eye. "It's firing up now and will keep going until it burns itself out. I can stop it, but if I do, it'll never run again."

  A nuclear rocket wasn't an overly complicated piece of machinery. It wasn't a thruster like those aboard warships or even the Monte Crest. It basically just superheated thrust water, turning it into plasma. Its core was relatively safe teslanium fission. Simplicity made nuke rockets optimal for shipboard use. So Jordahk knew if it was broken, it was broken. All the hacking in space wasn't going to fix broken hardware.

  A chronometer projected onto the crystal pane in his helmet seemed an arm's length away. Fifty-three minutes until his grandfather reached the first layer. He jetted close to the data rider and peered at the misters. "Projections with time?"

  Cranium highlighted a region. In 53 minutes the engine would be in its final superheated throes. "It'll go sooner if I try to hold it down, or I can shut it. You gotta make the call."

  "Max, can we get through to the center before that engine's done?"

  "There's no way to tell for sure," the AI's experienced voice answered. "This isn't like what we did with the Roulette. The third layer's tight, close range weaving. Depending on how much, it could be as quick as thirty minutes, but I suspect it'll take close to an hour without help from Aristahl."

  Max
displayed the three layers and how their shape was changing in the chaotic field. In a couple of hours, the tug would be engulfed anyway, and not long after the Monte Crest would be estimating vectors to keep ahead of the threat. Jordahk chuckled defiantly, and his shoulders shook. The siblings exchanged a worried glance.

  "I'm not cracking," he said, smiling at them both. "We knew this wasn't going to be a lazy orbit." Something came over him, and he accepted it. Why were they looking at him so earnestly? He still felt much the inexperienced kid. Cranium's hand hovered over virtual controls. He watched Jordahk like a sprinter on the starting line. Glick's pseudo-cynical expression melted into something softer. It was accepting. She was going to back him up, and it humbled him.

  Jordahk believed the plan could still work. Little else could be done but to keep on. His grandfather would find a way, somehow. "Onward."

  "Veritas, adam!" Cranium exclaimed, stabbing the "go" control.

  Commissioner Feliz Navidad was no stranger to a javelin's bridge. The ship class was as responsible for keeping Gr'jot on the map as the platinum group fields. Their staryard for many years was the premier destination for javelin upgrades. The idea to specialize began way before his time but had been a boon since. Many Asterfraeo starmadas thought it worth the trip to send their javelins to distant Gr'jot.

  That was before prospecting deeper into the fields ended inexplicably in "haunted" encounters. Whether a crazed Sojourner, pirates, or the radiated ghost of Christmas past, it brought mining to a halt. Low-cost local material used so well by their staryard dried up, and importing was a hopelessly expensive endeavor. With fields no longer producing, and the staryard no longer accepting contracts, the inhospitable system no longer needed occupation.

  The small squadron of javelins serving as their navy took years to accumulate from fleets needing to sell or unable to pay. The sturdy, powerful ships did well rebuffing pirates and Consortium opportunists. But their specialized design, lacking T-beams and other well-rounding elements, was vulnerable without fleet support. Fortunately, the Perigeum Starmada never came near Gr'jot. Neither did any independent hostile starmada. The javelin's biggest battles involved intercepting chunks sent on dangerous courses by assorted phenomena.