by Andrew Beery
Harry was busy wiping icing off the front of his tunic. The explosive decompression had thrown him across the deck. The piece of birthday cake he had just secured had not survived the experience.
“I don’t understand how I could have missed that he was a replicant. We did a full Bioscan when we rendezvoused with him on Garden One. It’s standard procedure,” the Captain of the Recluse observed. Harry looked at Honey for confirmation.
“I’m sure you did,” Cat agreed. “But this wouldn’t be the first time the replicants have changed their modus operandi. The Yorktown would have scanned him as well. The explosives surgically embedded in his body should have been spotted unless…”
“Unless he had some type personal biometric cloaking field sending false reading to our systems,” Ken said. The Yorktown’s captain stepped past an arriving medic to approach the Admiral. “It would require some knowledge of our protocols but given that replicants infiltrated the GCP at the highest levels they certainly would have had access to any security overrides they would have needed.”
“We need to notify the Syndicate that we ran across a replicant Dragos… I’m sure the real one will not be especially happy,” Cat added.
“The real question is ‘Why now?’” Commander First added. “Were you the target Admiral?”
Cat looked at Ken Kirkland in alarm. The same uncomfortable thought had occurred to both of them at the same time.
“Bridge! Battle Stations!” Ken yelled into the air. He knew Yorky would instantly relay the command.
The only logical justification for this type of attack was to strew confusion and distract the Yorktown from what had to be a more serious threat. Cat knew the remnants of the various replicant infiltration teams would mount some type of counter offensive but neither Cat nor Ken had expected the attack to be a direct one. The replicants had been operating in stealth for years. There had been no reason to expect they would change now. In hindsight, Cat realized, that had been defective thinking on her part. The replicants were no longer under the direct command of the Ashtoreth. Of course, they would change tactics.
***
Commander Kason McMillian looked at his commanding officer. Senior fleet Admiral Imera’s aid was one of the few people onboard the ship that truly knew the stakes. Admiral Imera and he had been part of an Ashtoreth covert operation within the GCP. They were replicants – clones with enhanced bodies and modified memories that had infiltrated the GCP to covertly prepare it to fall under the thumb of the Ashtoreth Empire.
That operation was effectively dead now that the Yorktown’s Marine taskforce, the so-called Infinity Brigade, had forced the surrender of King Astarte, the Imperial leader of the Ashtoreth Empire. Unfortunately, that left the multitude of replicant agents still operating within the Galactic Coalition in a precarious position.
Surrender meant, at best, a lifetime of incarceration. On the other hand, the Yorktown taskforce was still presumed a renegade faction by the powers-that-be within the GCP. That meant there was a window of opportunity for the replicant contingent to salvage the situation and plot their own course through history. The Ashtoreth Empire may have been emasculated but that did not mean the instruments they had put in place had to roll over and die.
“De-cloak and ready main batteries,” Admiral Imera ordered.
On the main screen, the Yorktown floated like a glistening white jewel hanging against the deepest velvet black. Only her running lights and the distant glow of Talus, a Class K star slightly cooler than Earth’s sun, illuminated her.
That was all about to change as the Senior Fleet Admiral’s flagship, the newly build GCP Titan was about to bathe the Yorktown in a wash of dozens of Peta-joule class plasma beams and a like number of smart kinetics. These last weapons were a new innovation. They were railgun-fired kinetic rounds with hyperfield jammers built into their nose-cones. They effectively negated active shielding most GCP ships employed. With any luck, they would cut through the Yorktown’s shields like a hot knife through butter.
“Their shields are raising!” the weapons officer reported.
“It won’t matter,” Imera chuckled. “Fire a full spread. Everything we’ve got. I want that ship out of my sky.”
***
“Status!” Ken barked as he raced onto the Yorktown’s bridge. He knew the report would not be good. The ship was still shuddering from the first round of impacts. Whatever was hitting them was packing quite a punch.
“Their kinetics are cutting right through our shields. Our ablative armor is down to thirty percent in some sections,” Commander Martinescu yelled over the din of yet another round of impacts and the resulting alarms.
“Emergency jump!” Ken ordered with gritted teeth. An emergency jump was a dangerous maneuver because you could end up anywhere… including the inside of a sun. The real risk, however, was landing in the middle of a stellar void that made it impossible to determine a ship’s whereabouts… still, it was a risk they had to take.
Ken barely had time to grab the back of his command chair when the ship lurched violently. A blue nimbus filled the main viewscreen. At about the same time the world went black and Ken, as well as everybody else onboard the GCP Yorktown, collapsed - unconscious.
In that state, they did not see another ship suddenly appear. It was small and not of human manufacture. The tiny craft extended a powerful set of shields and protected the damaged Yorktown from the continuing enemy fire as they completed their emergency jump. Moments later the small ship disappeared in its own hyperfield conduit.
***
Somewhere a drum was beating. It was a loud drum. The sound hurt. It was impossible to think with the racket. The room was also completely dark.
“You alright Ken,” a familiar voice asked.
Ken Kirkland attempted to open his eyes. The light streaming in felt like daggers in his mind.
Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his thoughts he knew what had happened. The ship had executed a badly compensated hyperfield jump… necessitated by some emergency. Because the harmonics of the jump were wrong, there had been a fifth-dimensional perturbation that adversely affected sentient beings throughout the ship. Every living intelligent organic being, as well as sentient AI, would have been rendered unconscious for a brief period of time.
He felt a pressure against the side of his neck and the familiar sound of a hypospray. Immediately the pain subsided and his thinking processes cleared up.
“Wow. That was a rough jump,” He groaned as his eyes finally focused on the face of Admiral Cat Kimbridge.
“Feeling better?”
“A little worse for the wear but otherwise OK. Thank you, admiral. The ship? The crew?”
Cat looked around the bridge. Most of the command personnel were beginning to stir. “I suspect there will be a few miscellaneous bumps and bruises but I think we came out of the jump better than we had any right to expect… especially given the lack of prep time. That said… You made the right call. The jump probably saved the ship.”
Ken nodded his appreciation. “Yorky? You up and about again?”
“Affirmative Captain. I am operating at 58% capacity. I anticipate full restoration of cognitive capabilities within the hour.”
“Why the degradation and why delay?”
“Midshipman Willard was servicing a plasma conduit when he was overcome by the jump perturbations. A calibration tool was dropped and resulted in system short. As automated recovery systems were offline the disruption cascaded down the ventral side of the ship taking out a number of systems to include banks 4 and 16 of my data core. I’m currently restoring from backups while at the same time prioritizing repairs to critical environment and engineering systems. Shall I reorder priorities?”
“Negative Yorky,” Ken said. “58% will do fine for now. Let me know when you can calculate our position.”
“I’m afraid that will not be possible Captain.”
“Explain.”
“Our emergence appears to be w
ithin a dark nebula. There are no reference points from which to determine our position.”
“Can we reverse our original jump parameters and return to the Talus system?”
“That information was lost due to the damage to my primary databanks. There was no opportunity to establish a backup,” Yorky answered in an apologetic voice.
***
Cat looked over the stellar cartography charts spread across the surface of the smart table in her ready room. The Yorktown had been trapped in the dark nebula for the better part of a week. A dark nebula, sometimes called an absorption nebula was essentially an interstellar cloud, so dense it obscured the light from objects behind it.
The cloud itself was not itself dark but its density limited visibility to a few hundred light years in most of the detectable light spectrum. As vast as this distance was… when compared to interstellar distances often measured in the billions of lightyears… it was like a scuba diver trying to get his bearing while diving through an oil spill.
Normally a ship like the Yorktown would simply jump to a new location and try to reacquire optical reference points once they were outside of the nebula. Unfortunately, the local gravitational field dynamics, probably the same ones that formed the dark nebula, made forming a stable hyperfield conduit almost impossible. The field dynamics meant they could jump only a few lightyears at time. To make matters worse, there was so much dust in the surrounding space that hyperfield emergence caused a sharp spike in Cherenkov radiation.
Normally this type of radiation provided nothing more than a colorful light show. Not so in the nebula. Because the particle densities were so high, the effect was somewhat more pronounced and included the spontaneous generation of lethal amounts of hard x-rays. The Ship’s shield were up to the task of protecting the crew… but just barely.
Of greater concern was the damage to ship’s systems when dust particles traveling at near relativistic speeds suddenly appeared inside the ship as the Yorktown emerged from each short jump. The ship had attempted three such jumps. In the last one a fusion reactor had been damaged and two crewmen seriously injured due to the dust incursion. Cat had ordered a halt to movement until a better plan could be developed.
The door to her Ready Room on the flag deck swooshed open. She waved Captain Kirkland into the room. She had requested his presence when his duties permitted. As the Yorktown’s former CO, she knew all too well that, for a ship’s commander, time was always in short supply.
Chapter 3: Lost…
Milliseconds matter.
In the dead of space, where distances are measured in numbers too large for the human mind to imagine, time takes on a different meaning. On the one hand, eons seem like mere moments in the grand scheme of the cosmos. On the other hand, items with mass, few and far between in space, tend to move at incredible speeds relative to each other.
The forces working on what little mass there was floating about, be they the gentle push of a distant solar wind or interactions of more exotic forces like Higgs Boson harmonics… tended to accelerate interstellar dust to incredible relativistic velocities over the course of those eons.
For a ship like the GCP Yorktown, these near relativistic particles were of little concern… unless of course her shields were down for any period of time… even a few milliseconds. That was the problem Cat was wrestling with. The three best engineering minds onboard: Cat herself; former Chief Engineer and now Captain, Ken Kirkland; and the ship’s current Chief Engineer, Commander Thais Figarero; had been debating the best approach to deal with the situation for several days. They had gotten nowhere.
“Maybe we are looking at this the wrong way,” Cat said while scrolling through a simulation Yorky was providing. “We shouldn’t be looking for a way to get our shields up faster… or make them stronger. We should be looking to create an old-fashioned snow plow.”
“What do you mean, Admiral?” Ken asked from the other side of the smart table they were huddled over. He had been scanning the same numbers she had and was feeling the same sense of frustration. No combination of shield harmonics or power levels seemed to do the trick. There just did not seem to be a way to energize the shields fast enough to deal with particle flux in this region of space. And even if there was, it would not deal with the problem of materializing the ship around a preexisting near relativistic particle.
Rather than answering directly Cat turned to Thais. “What would be the effect of a ten-kiloton fusion explosion on the density distribution in this region of space?”
Thais ran the numbers quickly. “Not good enough Admiral. It would only clear a 0.002 light second path. The probability of a collision event would still be two orders of magnitude higher than what we would normally deem acceptable.”
Ken shook his head. “And we would still have the same problem with deployment. If we send a missile on a jump vector in front of us to clear a path, it runs the same chance of being disabled on emergence as we do.”
Cat smiled. “And if we switched to antimatter and upped the yield to 100 megatons?”
“That would do it,” Thais answered after a moment.
“The missile would still run the risk of being disabled,” Ken offered.
“And in the event the missile became disabled the containment field around the antimatter…”
“…would collapse and the bomb would go off anyway!” Ken finished for her with his own widening grin. “It would work. We would have to be extremely careful setting everything up. There is a reason why antimatter bombs are rarely used in the field.”
“Granted,” Cat agreed. “But in this instance, I think the risk is warranted.”
Ken turned to his Chief Engineer. “Is there any reason we can’t bleed the antimatter from the main reactor inside a secondary containment field and deploy directly from within that field? That way the danger to the ship is minimized.”
“I was thinking of a similar approach. There really is no reason to send the equipment generating the containment field through the hyperfield jump gate. All we need to do is send packets of protons and antiprotons to the same destination.”
***
Two hours later Cat sat in her Admiral’s chair on the bridge of the Yorktown. After nearly a week dead in space, the Yorktown was finally going to be on the move again.
Ken turned slightly in his command chair to look at her. “All systems report ready Admiral.”
She nodded. “Let’s get under way then Captain.”
Ken toggled the ship-wide intercom on his command chair.
“Attention crew. This is the Captain speaking. We are about to engage our jump drives. The last time we did this we took casualties and systems damage. We’ve taken a number of precautions to mitigate the risks but we cannot eliminate them completely. Be on the lookout for anomalous readings and failure. Report anything in your sectors to the First officer immediately. Do not delay for any reason. Kirkland out.”
Ken scanned the bridge one more time. The First Officer, Commander Andrew Martinescu, gave him a thumbs-up. All systems continued to report ready.
“Navigator, go ahead and give us a short hop. One light year. Let’s take it easy to begin with.”
“Aye sir, a hop skip and a jump it is,” Lieutenant Colson replied. “Engaging jump drives in three, two, one… jumping now.”
The jump appeared to proceed normally. The Yorktown’s AI controlled the deployment of the antimatter snowplow eleven milliseconds before the ship itself jumped. This allowed the antimatter time to interact with matter send along with it and clear the area in the jump zone of any fast-moving particles… giving the Yorktown the precious time it needed to establish its active shielding.
“Report!” Ken barked.
“All systems nominal,” Commander Martinescu answered a half second later. “It looks like we have a viable solution to our jump problem.”
Ken toggle comms to engineering. “Thais, things are looking good from up here. Any reason we can’t increase our jump distance
to the six point eight lightyear maximum dictated by the local field dynamics?”
“Não é um problema aqui, Capitão,” the Brazilian engineer responded. “In fact, the longer we can stretch our jumps the better for everyone concerned. Bleeding antimatter from the engines costs the same for a long or short hop… the biggest risk to the ship is during the transfer so the fewer transfers we have to do the better.”
“How much time to you need between jumps to check systems and harvest antimatter from the engines?”
“To be safe sir, you better give us about thirty minutes. The system checks will go faster but I don’t want to rush the shuffling of the antimatter. Rush jobs are when mistakes get made.”
“Acknowledged Engineering,” Ken responded. “Mister Colson, continue on course to the star system designated Beta-2 at best speed.”
“Aye Aye sir. On course for Beta-2. Estimating six jumps to target. We should get there in a little over three hours.”
***
Beta-2 was a G-type main-sequence star not too different from Sol. There were sixteen planets including two binary pairs reminiscent of the Earth-Moon system.
The Yorktown emerged from her last hyperfield jump unexpectedly close to the second of these binary pairs. The intent had been to emerge just inside the solar system’s heliosphere about 100 au from Beta-2. Some vagary of subspace had caused the jump emergence point to shift almost 90 au closer to the system’s primary.
Almost immediately the bridge was flooded with the sound of emergency klaxons.
“Give me a sensor status Mister Colson,” Ken barked.
“We have active sensor sweeps washing us from all sides. There are more ships out there then I can count! Captain… There are three… no four… no five missile locks. We are under attack! Three minutes to impact.”
“Shields up! Deploy counter-measures.”