To say we’re in deep crap, and exhausted. He thought. We’re actually in pretty good spirits!
Part of the reason, he suspected, lay in simply the fact that they were doing something at last, rather than stuck waiting for events to catch them up. Being in control of your own fate, even if that fate seemed bleak indeed, gave you courage and enthusiasm.
The engineering area was probably the largest room on the Morebaeus. However, it was so full of engineering that little space actually remained for the humans aboard to fit in. Hamilton quickly located the panels behind which the loosened control boards resided. It was the work of a few minutes to find and re-seat everything properly. After that he moved to the main engineering console and triggered the internal comms.
“Lewis. I’m ready to start the core. As soon as you have power, get that umbilical away.”
“I’m ready.” She snapped. “Just get on with it!”
Here goes nothing. He thought.
It surprised him how easy it was. Switch on all the sub-systems, fuel feed, magnetic containment, pumps and so on. The order was ingrained in his head from his Corp days. Everyone did basic fight and basic engineering as part of their training. Corp team members were expected to be able to perform any task on a ship to a basic standard. Some went on to specialize as pilot, navigators or engineers, but most made do with the basic training they received at the start. Any specialties were likely to be things associated with their surveying – biology, analysis, planetology and so on. In the Corp, getting there was taken as read. You had to be useful once you had arrived more so than during the journey.
With a flip of a switch, the fuel began feeding into the core; the familiar whine of a core starting up began to pervade the engineering area. Hamilton watched the progress on the simplistic gauges that lined the room. There was a modern, if fifty years out of date, console with a display screen he could have monitored the progress from, but he’d always appreciated the way the gauges and lights around an engineering area seemed to come to life as a core was powered up. It was as if a sleeping giant was slowly stirring itself.
“I’m getting power up here.” Lewis told him. “Disengaging the umbilical now.”
There was a clunk from somewhere else as the umbilical detached. A brief feeling of motion as Lewis used the starboard thrusters to push the big freighter away from the docking arm.
Hamilton tore open the food bar and munched on it contentedly. Rames’ techies had done a good job on the ship. Everything seemed to be in the green. Walking over to the main console he adjusted the settings and ramped the core up to full power steadily.
Another procedure that violates regulations! He thought cheerfully. A ship was supposed to keep its core at low power until it was well clear of its berthing point, in case of mishaps with containment fields.
“Hold on to something.” Johnson called, obviously back on the bridge. “Lewis says she’s about to go full thrust!”
Hamilton muttered and wedged himself in the angle between the console and the wall. Seconds later the ship lurched violently and Hamilton was pressed back against the console heavily. He gritted his teeth.
Old though she might be, the Morebaeus had three huge engines. She sailed away from her mooring as if she didn’t have the three massive cargo modules in tow at all.
“Hamilton!” Johnson’s voice was a little alarmed. “I think Lewis has passed out!”
“Great! Pull the throttles back to half way and I’ll be up in a moment. They’ll probably be the levers she has a death-grip on!” He advised her.
There was silence, then the tremendous acceleration eased considerably.
Hamilton looked over the console once more to assure himself that the core, and the engines themselves, had dealt with the sudden acceleration, then put the console into automatic mode and staggered back along to the bridge.
Lewis was sat in the pilot’s seat, unconscious. The acceleration had finally done what all the psi testing and maltreatment she had received could not do. It had shut her up. One hand still rested on the throttles, the other clutched a half-eaten snack bar.
“She just fainted.” Johnson explained.
“Best thing for her.” Hamilton noted, not unkindly. He grabbed her by the armpits and dragged her free of the seat, laying her down in the corridor behind them. Then he took her place in the pilot’s chair.
Lewis had thrust them well clear of the Tantalus Station. She had passed out before putting them on course for the jump point, however, so Hamilton did a rough calculation in his head and adjusted the ship’s vector to head them that way.
“How are we looking with that jump calculation? Did it come up all green?” He asked.
Johnson glanced at the nav console to her side. “I think so. Lewis seemed happy with it, but I don’t really know how to tell.”
“Let’s have a quick look.” He said and leaned across her to examine the console’s readout.
Everything looked fine with the jump coordinates but it wasn’t until he had assured himself of that fact that he realized he had completely invaded her personal space by leaning across as he had. The tension in her bearing was palpable.
“Sorry.” He muttered. “That was a bit rude of me.”
She smiled as he sat back in the pilot’s seat. “Not rude.” She disagreed. “Just unexpected. Rude was when you pinched my ass and made me yelp!”
He frowned. “I don’t recall it being your ass I pinched and you are never going to let me forget that, are you?”
She shook her head. “Not for as long as I have the damn bruise, anyway!”
He chuckled. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
She looked away, ostensibly to check on the comms panel, but in reality to hide her smile.
“Shall we get out of here?” He said, putting his hand on the throttles.
She turned back and nodded, still smiling. “Absolutely!”
Hamilton pushed the levers forward and the Morebaeus leapt ahead with renewed vigor.
*****
On the Ulysses it seemed like everyone was shouting at everyone else. The captain was shouting at Veltin. Puckett was shouting at Veltin. Grimes was shouting at his captain. Jones and Klane were shouting at all of them to stop shouting.
The only person not engaged in yelling was Veltin himself. He sat, bathed in sweat in the pilot’s chair, hands gripping the waldos lightly. Despite the tension on the ship, and in their situation, he had a slight smile on his face. He had long since tuned out the shouting.
The Ulysses had slowed dramatically since he had turned the vessel and applied reverse thrust. As a result, the Assault craft had gained on the customs vessel hugely, making up all the ground they had lost in Veltin’s slingshot orbital maneuver. The inbound torpedoes, however, were taking longer to reach the ship than anticipated. There was no question that both would reach their target. The question was when and where.
How do they not see what I’m doing? Veltin wondered. To him, his maneuver was obvious. He had seen it as the only possible solution the moment he had heard the torpedoes had been launched. The sensors echoed basic data to his own console. Positions, velocity, acceleration. He really didn’t need any more than that. Nature had gifted him with a uniquely visual way of perceiving all things related to movement. In the instant the torpedoes had appeared on his screen, along with their data, he had seen the only way out. It was this immediate ability to grasp anything to do with complex motions that had marked him out as an extraordinary pilot at the Imperial Flight College.
That, however, had not made him immune from errors. His first, and only real error, had cost people lives. It had also cost him his shining and promising career path. There had been nothing wrong with his mental thought processes that day, but he was still blamed for the accident that had cost a dozen people their lives. There had been something wrong with the training shuttle. It had not responded as it should have. The crash taught him one thing. Know your equipment as well as you know your fl
ying. Since then, he had always kept up with developments in engineering. Materials, technology, techniques. He always studied them all.
Ahead of them now, the Assault craft at last saw what he was intending, or at least a part of it, and veered away. A couple of them continued on anyway, insanely. Behind, the torps were almost within trigger range.
Almost there……almost there. He thought. The Ulysses was, for a spaceship, almost at a complete stop. A touch of the thrusters had her pointing back out into space again.
The bridge fell silent as he flipped the two protective covers off the Skip Drive activator buttons, one attached to each waldo.
“Don’t do it!” Puckett was wide-eyed next to him.
Twenty-five percent. He thought. If they changed the tolerance margin in the last five years, they were all dead. His mental mathematics evaluated the gravitational flux the planet generated against his velocity and the Ulysses own mass and came up with a figure of twenty one percent over nominal and dropping.
Good enough. Now we just need those torps to…
The EMP torpedoes reached the edge of their proximity detonation range and blew. Or rather, the one slightly ahead of the rest detonated, its energy pulse immediately rendering the other three nothing more than inert lumps of metal.
Veltin pressed the two buttons to activate the Skip drive almost simultaneously, just fractions before detonation.
The Ulysses lurched, the star-field in the viewer vanishing into a grey nothingness as the ship began to transition to hyperspace.
Fractionally later, the EM pulse struck the Ulysses entry point, collapsing the hyper-space field milliseconds after the Skip Drive had created it and the ship had entered it.
The result was that the Ulysses, for the tiniest fragment of time, used the Skip Drive before it was artificially shut off by the pulse from the torpedo. In that moment, the Ulysses Skipped over a million kilometers away towards its jump point.
Strident warning alarms hooted from nearly everyone’s console. Systems had overloaded at the strain of jumping within a gravity well. Some had shut down automatically. Others had valiantly tried to carry on and failed, usually in a shower of sparks or a small fire.
People ran about, trying to extinguish the flames, though there was no real need. The fire suppression systems were already sucking away any smoke and non-conductive firefoam was spraying into any blaze via the automatic nozzles in every bulkhead and console.
“Situation report!” Rames bellowed.
“We’ve skipped at least a million klicks from our previous position!” LeGault called.
“A lot of the Assault craft were caught in the EMP blast.” Klane yelled. “The rest were close enough to suffer malfunctions and temporary shutdowns as a result.”
“The Triton and Shiva?” Rames demanded.
Klane glared at her console. “Triton is beginning to turn towards us, but she was going at a fair clip in the opposite direction. It’ll be a minute or so before she can turn sufficiently to bring us into her Skip arc. Shiva is still barreling towards us, but she’s so far back she’ll never be a problem.”
Veltin adjusted some settings on his console. The Skip Drive appeared unharmed, though a raft of red alerts regarding temperatures and containment fields still plagued his screen. He commanded them to reset themselves and observed with smugness as the reds turned to amber.
“Mr. Veltin!” Rames demanded. “Explain that maneuver!”
Veltin spun his seat. Until the Skip Drive reset for the next jump, there was little for him to do and no reason for him to ignore the captain.
“Simple.” He told Rames. “Skip Drives have a twenty-five percent power overkill built into them. Basically, that extra power is used to overcome things like gravity fluctuations and the ship’s increased mass due to velocity. By killing the ship’s velocity and therefore, effective mass, I managed to get the gravitational distortion of the planet down sufficiently to allow the Skip Drive to operate. The torpedo detonation artificially disrupted the hyper field before it was fully stable, thereby causing a shutdown of the Skip Drive almost as soon as I triggered it. As a result, we skipped clear of the EM pulse, leaving the Assault craft to take the brunt of the blast. Because of the early shutdown, the Skip Drive wasn’t damaged, just stressed.”
Rames looked stunned, as did most of the others.
“You mean to say you planned for the torpedo detonation to collapse the field?” Puckett was incredulous.
Veltin frowned. “Not really. I was just leaving it to the last minute to trigger the Skip. As it happened, the EM pulse probably ended our little hop quicker than I could have done manually. I still think I could have done it fast enough to avoid damage to the drive, but even whilst I was pressing the appropriate button the drive was already shutting down.”
“Couldn’t you have just…” Rames shook his head, unable to frame a question.
“Either way.” Klane pointed out from the side-lines. “We’re alive. That’s the whole point of this. How long until we can Skip again? The Triton is nearly turned around.”
Veltin spun back to his console. Most of the tell-tales were green, with the odd amber warning still being stubborn about it.
“We’re good to go anytime.” He told them. “However, I won’t Skip us until the Triton does so first. There’s a slight turnaround on Skip jumps. A delay between Skips under normal circumstances. When they Skip, so do we. By the time they’re ready to Skip again, we’ll be doing a proper hyperspace jump. Then we’re home free.”
Klane scrutinized her console. “The Triton is coming to bear on us. She’ll Skip any… ah!”
Silently the Triton seemed to materialize a few hundred kilometers from the cutter, immediately beginning to fall away from the cutter as her earlier spatial momentum was restored.
“Launch detection!” LeGault called. “Incoming warheads!”
It was a spread of torps, Klane saw on her console. “Looks like they fired all sorts at us this time. Veltin, you’ve got a few seconds to do something or we’re dead!”
“Relax.” Veltin muttered, slipping his hands back into the waldos. A few deft presses and the starfield turned gray once more. This time, it stayed gray for nearly a minute.
When the stars reappeared, there was no sign of the Triton, or the weapons it had launched.
LeGault let out a sigh of relief.
“How long until we jump?” Rames growled.
“Just a few moments more.” Puckett answered. Since he’d been relegated to the navigation console, the main hyperjump was his responsibility.
“Captain?” Grimes called.
Rames looked around at his exo. “What is it?”
“I’m getting some confusing comms traffic from Tantalus Station. It seems like another ship has left the berthing ring without permission. Tantalus seems to think it’s been stolen and is demanding the Shiva return and pursue it. They’re referring to it as a bulk freighter…”
“The Morebaeus?” Rames exchanged glances with Grimes and Klane.
“Told you he could take care of himself.” Klane muttered, the hint of a smile on her face.
“It sounds like it.” Grimes agreed. “Apparently they’re at full thrust and quote ‘they are outrunning the PDC’s!’”
“Sounds like the Morebaeus then.” Rames snorted. “That thing has huge engines.”
“Is there anything we can do to help them?” Jones asked.
Rames shook his head. “Not now. Not so close to our own jump.”
“We’ve already helped them anyway.” Klane pointed out. “We drew off the heat.”
“Okay everyone. Here we go!” Puckett announced. “Five, four, three, two, one. Jump!”
The stars vanished yet again.
*****
Hamilton watched the sensor console with a considerable amount of surprise. The PDC’s that Tantalus Station had launched after them had initially started to catch them. Once he had thrown the throttles wide open, however, it had been
a different story.
The Morebaeus had steadily increased the range between itself and the pursuers. Eventually, one after another, the PDC’s had given up the hopeless chase and returned to the station.
Tantalus Station’s Port authority continued to rage at them to return to the berthing ring, threatening dire consequences if they did not.
For once, it appeared as if luck had been with them. Tantalus had asked for military assistance in bringing the freighter to heel. The only two vessels capable of doing anything had already been dispatched to deal with a “rogue customs vessel” and were currently unavailable for “civilian” assistance.
Even as this was being chattered about over the comms, the Morebaeus sensors detected a hyperspace jump activation from across the system. It corresponded to the jump point they had preselected for the Ulysses if they needed to make a fast getaway.
Hamilton read between the lines. The military had chased the customs vessel because it was part of the fleet, one of their own. From the comms traffic they could pick up, that had not gone as well as they had planned and both the Triton and Shiva were now involved in “recovery” operations somewhere on the other side of the planet. Tantalus had told them the second stolen vessel was a freighter. As far as they were concerned it was not important. A civilian vessel. Nobody knew who had stolen it, or why.
Even so, whatever had happened to result in “recovery operations” had to have been pretty embarrassing for both warships to want to tidy things up so quickly. The Ulysses, Hamilton suspected, must have made fools of the pair. They were reluctant to get involved again and compound their foolishness over what amounted to a civilian vessel being stolen.
The captains of the two ships would no doubt face some awkward questions over what had happened. The fact that they were also ignoring a request for assistance from Tantalus Station was also not likely to do any of them any favors.
But none of that was their concern. The Morebaeus was homing in on its own jump point. That was all that mattered. In another few minutes, they’d be out of the system and on their way to the rendezvous site.
A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) Page 12