Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1)

by Richard Fairbairn

  “Engine will fire up without the last three gyros,” Gumm said, “She’ll be about as quick as she were before, too. But we gonna have ta get those three gyros offline before we start the engine. Or they’ll come apart. Shred the whole lot.”

  The engine room was crowded and hot. Stamford had stayed in the control room – or the bridge, as he insisted on calling it. Apple stayed with him. The wide eyed Tom Woods was with Brooks in the engine room. He wasn’t much help. Stamford had asked the Lieutenant to leave his sidearm on the bridge. The Glasgow’s control room had suffered minor damage from the Justice Six’s attack. Even though the railgun sabot had passed right through the ship, the damage was largely superficial. The power conduits destroyed on the portside bulkhead were related to systems that hadn’t worked in over a decade anyway. Some of the systems fed by the now severed connections had been removed from the ship before it had changed hands.

  “You surprised me,” Brooks said as he worked, “I didn’t know how much she meant to you.”

  Vazquez’s chest, shoulders and her muscly biceps were stained with Jonas Jackson’s dried blood. Her mind was tattooed with his terrified, helpless expression. She had to shake her head to get free of the image just for a moment so she could answer Brooks.

  “Well, I don’t see you going anywhere,” she spoke bluntly, defensively, “You got this much invested in this hunk of rubbish too?”

  Brooks laughed. He dropped the used and damaged copper casing that he was holding. The big man – Gumm – caught it in his massive paw.

  “Careful. No scratches. Now, shift. Let me pull the bad ones out.”

  “I guess I’m invested in this, yeah,” Brooks said, “Hadn’t really thought about it – until all this happened.”

  “Yeah, all this,” Vazquez gave him her trademark lopsided grin, but her eyes were dull and distant, “All this – whatever the fuck this is.”

  Julian Barrett had disappeared onto the Rocket Rescue, almost unstoppable as he’d rushed through the airlock at the command of Lieutenant Commander Val Stamford. Jonas Jackson’s body was lying under the bench seat, still warm and covered in a thin black covering that did little to disguise what it was covering. Barrett did not enjoy the sensation of sitting alone in the back of the rescue ship. He’d also heard the commotion from the coupled SS Glasgow and had eavesdropped to learn that the crew were refusing to leave. It was his fear of dying alone coupled with a little bit of bravery and a notion that he might be able to help that powered him through the conduit back into the SS Glasgow. He was met by a brisk round of applause from a grinning Val Stamford and a grim thumbs up from Captain Vinn Apple.

  “Professor, nice to see you back,” Apple said, “We’re preparing to get underway. Anything you can do to help will be greatly appreciated.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do,” Barrett said honestly, “But I’ll try.”

  “Good man,” Apple said, “You know where engineering is? Get there and help Brooks finish up. We’re spinning up the drive in a few minutes. You can help with that?”

  Barrett was about to respond in the negative, but he realised that there wasn’t much else for him to offer. He nodded with a thin fraction of a bold smile, then ran off towards the engineering section. It wasn’t much of a run. Maybe eighteen metres. But he was out of breath as he got there. Vazquez stared through him, which made a cold shiver run down his spine. He turned his eyes quickly towards Brooks, who was fumbling with a thin piece of copper tubing that he didn’t recognise. Beside him, the massive Lieutenant Gumm was holding a black, spherical object in his hand.

  “Gyros,” Barrett said, “Bad gyros. This engine will run on twenty of them, if there are more like that one.”

  “Thanks,” Brooks said, “We’ve got new copper outers on the gyros that fused during our last manoeuvre. Gumm here is using his considerable strength to wrench the others out. So far, we got one. And we got about eight minutes left to get out of here.”

  “Until what? What happens in eight minutes?”

  “Man, the shit hits the fan is what,” Gumm said, suddenly emboldened “Now you gonna help us get out of here, man?”

  Barrett was keen to help. He listened carefully to the broad shouldered, deeply dark skinned New Yorker. Barrett had tinkered around with Am engines in his youth. His first car – a Dixon Aeromann – had been fitted with an AM drive. The gyro design was essentially the same, minus the replaceable copper outer rings. All of the hard work had already been done. Barrett just had to make sure no fragments of the badly damaged gyros came apart as the big man's hands wrestled them free. He did a good job of it. Gumm didn't have the time to be gentle with the jammed gyros. He wrenched them free with all his might, pulling apart half inch thick aluminium alloy connectors. They connectors broken in three pieces as Gumm jerked the first gyro out of its socket. Barrett managed to catch two of the thick fragments. The third narrowly avoided hitting his temple as it pinged out of the engine compartment. The second gyro released much more easily. The silvery couplings remained in place.

  “Four minutes,” Vazquez said, “Man, you are really strong.”

  “That's what my mamma always said,” Gumm used his rubber handled steel grips to prise out the couplings, “One more. Then we try to restart the engine. But if it don't start we gonna...”

  “It'll start,” Vazquez said.

  Gumm grunted solemnly, shaking his head gently. He put his hand around the final damaged gyro, but recoiled it quickly. Barrett saw steam coming from his sweating palm. There was a sudden, disgusting smell of burnt hair and skin.

  “Goddamn that thing's hot,” Gumm clenched and unclenched his fist, “I damned burned mah hand.”

  “Friction, is it? Interesting, sir. I'd have thought that by now the engine would have...”

  “Short circuit,” Vazquez interrupted, “Not friction. The gyro's shorting out against the power input coil. Looks like we might have a bigger problem than we first thought.”

  “That... that's right, ma-am,” Gumm looked at her shyly, avoiding eye contact, “Maybe the power regulator took a bash.”

  “Yeah, looks like it,” Vazquez pushed between Barrett and the big man, “See this? The input coil is shot. Stuck on. Or fused on. I don't know.. Hold on a minute,” she rushed to the intercom, “Vinn, we need to reboot the mainframe.”

  “Shelly, what?”

  “No time,” she said. “Get Frank to reboot the system.”

  “Ma'am” Gumm interrupted, “We don't wanna do that. We reboot the whole system and maybe she won't start back up. Maybe we won't even be able to detach from the rocket.”

  “It'll work,” Michelle licked her lips, “I know this engine. The feed going to that coil is housed right beneath the drive assembly. The only way to shut that coil down is to reboot the system. It’s impossible to... shit, we don't have time for this. Professor, go find a flashlight or something. Vinn, you got to get Frank to reboot the mainframe right now.”

  “Miss Vazquez,” the voice – maddeningly cheerful - belonged to Lieutenant Commander Val Stamford, “I think we've gone far enough with this now, don't you?”

  2195AD - USS Neil Armstrong.

  The Devastation was continuing to accelerate. The mile long warship's enormous nuclear pulse engine continued to fire, powering the ship towards the Armstrong. Devastation had outrun its own fighter escort hours ago, the twenty eight Dart fighters still far beyond the furthest reaches of the Armstrong's sensors. Now the battle hardened alien warship was minutes away from cutting off the Neil Armstrong's retreat to the Joan Gallsin wormhole.

  “No reply from Stamford,” Cutter reported, “Connick reports negative contact with the rescue team for eighteen minutes, sir. Nobody came back from the Glasgow and nobody's returning our calls.”

  “Keep trying to raise them,” O’Rourke ordered, “We're going to cut it pretty slim to get through Gallsin before the Devastation intercepts us.”

  Cutter knew that the Captain was aware of their tactical situation
. The facts were that the Enrilean warship would reach the wormhole two minutes before the Neil Armstrong. Nothing could prevent that now. Worse still was the fact that the alien ship seemed to be still accelerating. Sensor operations had confirmed, minutes ago, that the ship was powered by a nuclear pulse engine system of some kind. The technology had been used by NASA in the mid twenty first century. A handful of unmanned deep space exploration ships continued to blast into the oblivion, accelerating with every atomic blast fired behind the scorched and pitted pusher plates. These ships were much, much smaller than the Devastation. Devastation was about the size of a small city. And it was travelling faster than anything the human race had ever put into space.

  “They're going to be on us in about ninety seconds,” Cutter said, “They'll hit our starboard side. I've got the ammunition stores made inert. Crew quarters six through nine have been evacuated and sealed. Fuel stores have been moved... further into the ship.”

  “Weapons systems?”

  “Starboard railgun at maximum rotation and ready to fire. Point defence has been repaired and is fully operational. Missiles armed and ready. Engineering are standing by to shut down the fusion drive and reverse thrust on the AM drive. Might give us an edge. Devastation isn't going to be able to slow down as quickly as we can.”

  “They won't need to slow down,” O’Rourke said quietly, “They'll cut right through us as soon as they get within range.”

  Christopher Strange was standing next to Lieutenant Junior Grade Sylvean Harris. She was a beautiful, long necked English woman of Jamaican and Trinidadian ancestry. Her curly dark hair was tied up tight behind her dark, shiny forehead. Her cream coloured uniform hugged her delicate, petite figure. The short sleeves showed off her slender, almost thin forearms. The panel in front of her controlled the Armstrong's primary weapons systems. The heavy railguns, thermonuclear missiles and short range heavy Gatling guns were always less than a few millimetres away from the tips of her long fingers.

  “They're not going to do it without a fight, sir,” Harris spoke, “As soon as they get into range, we'll be smashing them with everything we've got.”

  Strange laughed inexplicably. A sudden, almost frightening sound that O’Rourke was used to but still startled some of the junior officers.

  “I like that,” Strange said, clapping her shoulder far too hard, “That's the spirit... that I like to see, Sylvean.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said drily.

  Deep inside the Armstrong, there were problems in the main engineering section. The fusion drive was working at ninety five percent, but there were problems with the cooling system. The temperature in the core was at its maximum limit. Nothing was going to cool the reactor down besides reducing the power levels. And that meant slowing the ship down. But Armstrong was already moving too slowly. The massive Devastation would intercept at least three minutes before they reached the wormhole. Even if the fusion reactor could be brought back to full power, it still wouldn't change anything.

  Connah and Vorderman had switched off all the safety measures on their damaged fighter's engine controls. The fusion reactor directly behind Vorderman's back was operating above one hundred and thirty percent maximum. At this rate the fighter's engines would be thoroughly burned out and useless within thirty minutes. But it was the only chance of escaping. The Predator was flying around the far, side of Relathon at a speed that rivalled even the high powered Enrilean Darts. Connah had crossed the terminator six minutes earlier, keeping the second planet between his fighter and the Enrileans. The little ship continued to blaze a faint trail of energy in its wake, but it had gone undetected by the poorly maintained Relathon defence satellites. The ship was too small for the antiquated ground defence bases to detect. Not that many of the bases were even manned anymore.

  “Twelve minutes until we reach Joan Gallsin,” Vorderman said, “I have to tell you that I've gotten a little optimistic about our chances.”

  A slight pause, then Connah replied. He was never an optimist. Never a pessimist. And his bedside manner could really, really suck at times. But there were moments when he just nailed it. This was not one of those moments.

  “I can't say I share your outlook.”

  Vorderman laughed. His silence told her that he did not understand why she was laughing. But she wasn't really sure either. She laughed almost hysterically for a few seconds, then collected herself.

  “We're setting a speed record for this Predator variant, you know.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Well, yeah. The speed record set in ninety three was a mark four too, but it was a specially modified variant. The fastest a stock mark four has ever gone was Mark...”

  “Mark ten point two four,” Connah interrupted, “One hundred and fifteen thousand miles per second.”

  “Well, we’re not far off that now.”

  “I’m not sure if we’ll qualify. We’ve used Relathon’s gravitational pull to increase our forward rate by at least twenty thousand miles per hour. Surely that will invalidate us.”

  She nodded to herself, smiling inside her thin plastic helmet. The reactor warning light continued to flash bright orange, lighting up the palm of her right hand as it hovered over the controls. The cooling system had all but failed and the thermal reading was off the end of the scale. Vorderman did not know what would happen if the reactor gave out. But it probably wouldn’t be something she was going to enjoy.

  “Sure,” She answered Connah absently, “You’re probably right. We’ll probably be disqualified. Assuming we survive.”

  She waited for him to say something, but he hadn’t picked up on the cynical edge her voice carried. He rarely did these days. There was something about Marcus she’d always admired, but her infatuation had waned in recent months. When things had gotten rough with her long-time boyfriend, Darrel, her feelings towards the cold hearted fighter pilot had begun to skew in an unplanned romantic direction. But it hadn’t lasted long. Connah had been oblivious to her occasionally not so subtle advances. After a few weeks of trying to shift his attentions she’d given up. She’d spent a little time wondering if he was gay, but her observations had led her to believe that it was something much more complex than that. Sometimes, she was certain that Marcus Connah didn’t have any feelings about anything.

  But she wasn’t right about that. He had feelings. They were buried under years of pain. His feelings were shallow and occasionally abstract, kaleidoscope fragments of a youthful passion for life. But Marcus Connah’s feelings existed, somewhere inside him. They were just a very dim reflection of what they had once been.

  Everything changed during Marcus’s ninth year. His sunny, loving childhood was destroyed by the sudden illness of his waif like mother. Her eventual death brought out an almost demonic brute in his father, who changed from being an occasional tourist in Marcus’s life to a constant inflictor of misery, criticism and resentment. All of the loathsome behaviour that Marcus and his brother had never known his mother to endure had suddenly and much less privately been focussed on the two children left behind. Jackie escaped to University the next year, but his studies suffered and he found it difficult to cope with leaving Marcus alone with the obese, alcoholic misery of their father. He held out for eighteen months, but a frat house brawl which saw him dislocate some balloon headed bully’s jaw spelt the end of Jackie’s time at the University. That, and the fact that their father had begun to completely lose control of his alcoholism and with that their meagre financial reserves. So Jackie returned to the decaying apartment complex beneath the rebuilt Bayonne Bridge in New Jersey and took some of the heat from Marcus whilst he finished school. By then eighteen years old, Jackie was old enough to stand up to his father. He earned various bruises doing so, but so did their father. But the abuse abated, as even the largest of bullies find their courage diminished by even the smallest sign of resistance. For a time there was peace in the little apartment. Their father seemed to be spending more and more time at the meat p
lant. Drinking less. Even starting to shave again and maybe smile once in a while. There were even occasional Sundays when he would bring home a massive slab of prime high quality chicken or beef, just like in the old days. And at the round, pine table in the small dim kitchen they’d all sit together eating. Sometimes in silence, sometimes talking. Sometimes they’d even laugh. They all missed Rosemary. Those precious times at the Sunday dinner table were the only moments that she came back to life with all her family, all at once. Shared memories, shared experiences. Shared love.

  “Getting sporadic telemetry from Armstrong,” Vorderman interrupted his thoughts, “Enemy fighters on the far side of the planet. Closing on Armstrong at Mark ten point three. Nothing coming our way. Looks like they don’t know we’re here.”

  “A reasonable assumption, Ameena.”

  The knock on the door had come and two o’clock in the morning. Marcus and his father will still awake, waiting for Jackie to come home. He’d been staying out later and later. Somehow, Marcus knew what it was before his father answered the door. That night, he and his father had sat morbid and quiet together. There had been a hint of death in the still, quiet night. The sharp rapping of knuckles brought it to the doorstep. In the morning, Marcus awoke to think and hope that it had all been the most terrible of dreams. But when he realised, within a second of wakefulness, that Jackie would really never be coming home he wanted to do nothing more than go back to sleep.