by B. V. Larson
“Have we alerted Command yet?”
“Yes,” Lieutenant Chang answered me, “but the round trip for a blip of light at this point is about ten minutes between the planets. We haven’t gotten a response yet.”
“We can wait another five minutes. They must be reviewing the same information we are.”
Commander Hagen cleared his throat.
“Something to say, XO?” I asked him. “Speak up.”
“If we want to make the choice ourselves, we have to do it now.”
“Right… Dr. Abrams? Can you prep the star drive for a short hop? I think it would be good to know if we’re a starship or a new kind of bomb.”
He looked a little green at the suggestion, but he nodded and quickly left the bridge without word. I had the feeling we’d finally called his bluff.
Commander Hagen sidled closer after he’d gone. “Are you going to do it, sir?” he asked. “Are we jumping?”
“I’m waiting for Command to make that call. It did me good to see Abrams get sick over it, though. He always oversells his gizmos.”
Hagen laughed uncertainly. He was new to my distinct brand of leadership.
Those among the bridge crew who were veterans on my bridge weren’t laughing. They could remember the hard times—the days when they’d wished they’d never signed up with this newborn space navy.
I looked around at the bridge people, frowning. “Commander, except for Chang, I don’t know anyone on your shift.”
“Yes sir… sorry sir. I picked them from my own associations.”
“Right, well, no offense, but if we’re about to go into combat in an untested ship, I don’t want to do it with a green crew. Get my people up here. I want Samson, Dalton and Mia.”
Hagen didn’t sputter or argue. I liked that. I simply began walking from station to station, contacting the replacement crewmen and tapping those who were being mothballed on the shoulders. They got up and left without so much as an angrily muttered curse.
“Very professional crewmen,” I said. “I’ll give them their shot the next time we fly this ship into battle—if there is a next time.”
Hagen looked mollified. He greeted each newcomer from my old bridge crew and seated them personally. He made sure they knew how to operate their consoles—and he soon found that they did.
“Somehow I knew I’d end up dying on this bridge the moment I saw it,” Dalton said cheerily. “Thanks for proving me right, Captain.”
“My pleasure. Where’s Samson?”
“He’s probably lost himself in a bag of hammers somewhere.”
About then Samson showed up. He looked wide-eyed at the consoles and the central depiction of our tactical position.
“How many of them are out there, Captain?” he asked.
“Just one ship so far. Looks like a carrier. We’re still at long range, and Earth’s sensor network isn’t as good as we’re used to in the Rebel Fleet.”
“A carrier… we’re not big enough.”
“We’re not going to attack alone, fool,” Dalton told him. “The captain has a flotilla of phase-ships to back us up. Right, Captain?”
I eyed them both for second. “We’ll see.”
“Oh… it’s like that, is it?” Dalton asked, shaking his head. “Is that a wet spot on your trousers, Samson? Already?”
Smiling, I shook my head at the two of them. It was hard to understand how they could remain friends. Samson took a daily ration of shit from Dalton whenever they served together, but he rarely got seriously mad about it. Now and then, he lost his mind with the smaller man’s jabs, but I could hardly blame him for that. I tried to turn away whenever it happened and let them sort it out. They’d made a good, if non-traditional, team for years.
Mia arrived next. Her eyes were inhumanly big. That happened whenever she got excited. Most of the time, I think, she was bored with Earth. She’d seen little action since arriving. I’d gathered that on her homeworld of Ral, things were much more lively. Her people tended to get into physical fights and displayed emotional outbursts on a daily basis.
“This is fantastic,” she told me. “How do I kill things?”
“Strap in, Ensign. You’ve been trained on these consoles, right?”
“Yes, of course. Extremely dull. All a simulated blasting of pixels—I want to kill something real. Something with blood inside.”
“Right… well, you might get your chance today.”
Mia took her spot and began testing her guns. She didn’t fire them, but she swiveled the main batteries on manual control.
“Hold on,” Commander Hagen protested in alarm. “Those are automatic. Gunners just choose targets on this ship.”
“There’s a manual override right here,” Mia said. “I’ve selected it.”
“Uh… I can see that. Captain, can you explain?”
“Mia, this isn’t a fighter. These guns don’t swing completely around.”
“Why not?”
“The shock of the recoil would throw us off course. We have to fire along the centerline of the ship for the most part.”
“That’s no fun.”
“If you hit something, you’ll be happy,” I told her. “Let the computer do the targeting. You select hit location priority, and range to fire. The numbers will move fast, giving you hit probabilities.”
“I don’t aim the guns?”
“Usually not,” I admitted. “We’ll be too far from the enemy. You won’t be able to even see them. But, you won’t fire unless I’ve given the all-clear anyway. At that point, select and wait for the guns to line up. See these crosshairs? The reticle will light up when—”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “I went through the training… sir.”
“Good.”
I caught Commander Hagen shaking his head. I was sure he thought by now that his crew was a thousand times more disciplined and qualified to man these stations than my people were. Possibly, he was right.
But to my mind experience really counted out here in space. Things rarely went down in an orderly fashion. When the shit really hit the fan—well, that’s when my ragtag group would show their true worth.
=15=
Command answered our queries eleven minutes after we’d transmitted everything we knew about this crisis to Earth. I was impressed by their promptness. They’d managed to formulate a plan in about ninety seconds, if my estimates were correct.
“Vega’s people are on the ball,” I said, skimming over a wall of text.
As we all reviewed the orders, however, I began to squint. Then Dalton produced a dirty chuckle.
“It’s all on you, Captain!” he said. “Those cowards…”
I took in a deep breath. “As you can see, our orders are to deal with this emergency in deep space—on our own. We’re not to allow any hostile force within ten million kilometers of Earth.”
“Pretty big territorial waters,” Commander Hagen muttered.
“Yes… well then, I’m taking this as good news.”
Dalton, Mia and Samson craned their necks around from their seats to look at me. Their expressions ranged from confused on Samson’s part to suspicion from Mia and outright mirth from Dalton.
“Good news? How so, Captain?” Hagen asked in confusion.
“If Earth Command thought this was a serious threat, they’d send in everything they had. Instead, they’re only sending us. That’s because—”
“Because we’re expendable,” Dalton complained. “Because they’re holding our phase-ships in Earth orbit as a final line of defense.”
Hagen blinked at him, then turned to me. “Do your crewmen often talk so disrespectfully, sir?”
“Not on this ship. Shut up, Dalton.”
“Yes sir. Zipping my mouth tighter than Samson’s balls.”
“See that you keep it that way. This isn’t a heavy fighter with a crew of five. We’ve got five hundred people aboard. Order will be maintained, or you’ll be dismissed from the bridge.”
He knew
I meant it, so he clammed up. Hagen nodded to me approvingly.
“Helm,” I said, “go to full burn following the intercept course we’ve laid out—and Hagen, send someone below to jolt Dr. Abrams out of his lair. I want him to double-check the AI’s numbers by hand.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Within a few minutes, we felt the thrusters push us back in our seats. It wasn’t oppressive, no more than half a G of force. But that was only because our inertial dampeners were operating. We didn’t have a full anti-grav system working on this larger vessel, it would have consumed too much power. Even so, the stress that powerful engines could exert upon the human body was reduced. Our actual acceleration was several Gs, but we felt only a fraction of it.
A slow, tense fifteen minutes went by. At last, Hagen returned with Abrams in tow. I got the feeling that the old buzzard wasn’t happy.
“Preposterous!” he complained. “I’m doing critical work, and this interruption is going to cost everyone aboard! There will be breakage, mark my words!”
I had no idea what he was carrying on about, but I assumed a patient expression.
“Good of you to return to the bridge, Doc,” I said. “What do you think of the AI’s numbers?”
He rudely grabbed the tablet from my hand and peered for a few moments.
He snorted. “They’re perfect, of course.”
“Well then—”
“—perfectly wrong.”
“What is the source of the error?” the ship’s computer voice asked. She sounded a trifle annoyed to me, but I might have been humanizing the AI.
“The course projection fails to take into account an intelligent response on the part of the enemy vessel,” Abrams said. “Once they see our plume and spot our ship, they’ll apply more thrust. That will throw off these projections and bring them to Earth before we can intercept.”
“Why would they do that?” Commander Hagen asked.
“Why wouldn’t they?” Abrams asked. “If they’re nothing but innocent diplomats, they’ll want to slide past whatever band of pirates we might be. If, on the other hand, they intend to bomb Earth, they won’t want to fight with us first. In short, I can’t envision a situation where this ship will simply glide along without varying their—”
“Captain,” Chang interrupted. “I’m getting new sensor data. The unknown ship is accelerating.”
“There!” Abrams barked in triumph. “You see? Child’s-play. You should take that new AI and jettison it for the good of us all. Its only value is to provide a false sense of safety.”
The AI took this abuse without comment. My eyes slid from Hagen to Chang and back again. Both men were frowning and working numbers on their computers.
I looked back at Dr. Abrams, uncertain. The AI was one of the major elements of the ship’s systems that he had not developed himself. That made him scornful of its operation, due to his twisted personality. But now I wasn’t sure who to trust.
“What’s the verdict?” I asked Chang and Hagen. “Is he right?”
“Yes…” Chang said first. “The invading ship’s acceleration arc is clear. They’ll reach Earth long before we can intercept them.”
“How long?”
“We now have… twenty-nine hours.”
I nodded. The game was heating up. I didn’t even know who the other player was—I doubted it was Fex, as only one ship had arrived and it wasn’t of any known Kwok configuration. But their moves so far seemed hostile. They also weren’t communicating with us, ignoring all Earth’s transmissions.
Even more ominous, they were racing us to see who could get to our planet first.
“Okay…” I said. “It’s time for plan B. You’re the heart of that plan, Abrams.”
“Me? I’m washing my hands of this debacle. We can’t reach them in time. We should—”
“We can intercept them… if we jump. We have to open a rift in local space. Use Sol as a beacon. It shouldn’t break your mind or the AI’s to do the math.”
“It isn’t that simple, Blake. This ship wasn’t designed for short-range jumps.”
I snorted. “What’s the difference?”
“For one thing, the error rate will be doubled. We’re sure to scatter. Possibly, we’ll end up farther from this invader than we were when we started.”
“I don’t get that.”
“You didn’t get an A in theoretical physics, did you Captain?”
My mouth took on an angry twist. I didn’t feel like telling him I’d never had that class in college. He was already insufferable enough.
“Just spit it out, Abrams, before I space you.”
Samson raised his hand enthusiastically, clearly volunteering for the task.
Abrams took on the voice of an exasperated professor lecturing a marginal student. “Jumps are usually done relative to a beacon star, using the star’s large gravity-well as an anchor. In this case, we’ll have to use the same star for both ends of the wormhole. That means if we get any of the data wrong once…”
“Hmm,” I said. “I see. A bad measurement will have double the effect.”
“Exactly. Add to that the reality that Sol isn’t really a good candidate as a beacon star, and you have a grim situation.”
“I thought short jumps were safer than long ones.”
He put up a single finger and wagged it at me. “In general, that’s true. But not when we’re attempting to jump across a single star system.”
Right then, I came to a fateful decision. I had my orders. We were to intercept this ship at all costs.
“Very well then,” I said. “We’re going to do this another way.”
“What, pray tell, is that?”
“We’re jumping to Alpha Centauri—farther if you like. Then, we’ll turn around and jump back. We’ll place ourselves directly in their path.”
Abrams sputtered. “That’s madness!”
“Can it be done?”
He thought about it for a moment or two. “We’d have to wait on the far side for the initial rift to close naturally. Then, we’d have to charge our engine long enough to safely open another…”
“Yes, but we have twenty-nine hours. Can it be done, Doctor?”
A startled look came over his features. “Yes…” he said wonderingly. “I do believe it can be, Captain. But we may not survive any errors. We’re close to large masses here—and the drive is not thoroughly tested.”
“Then don’t make any,” I told him.
I could tell he was worried. I didn’t blame him, as I knew he’d only used simulations and the like to test the drive. Fortunately, the rest of the crew was in the dark about that.
“It can be done…” he said, as if speaking to himself. He wasn’t even looking at me, I suspected his eyes were focused on some far-off conceptual twist of mathematics.
“You have less than an hour to arrange the first jump,” I told him. “It hardly matters if we scatter a little. The trick will be to return here close enough to intercept them.”
Abrams shook his head, staring off into space. There was a slight glitter of madness in his eyes as he contemplated the whole thing.
“The return will be the hardest part…” he mused, “but we’ll learn from the first jump. I can recalibrate—assuming we survive the first leg of the journey, of course.”
“Get us out there and back, Abrams,” I told him. “Make it happen. That’s an order.”
He wandered off below decks. I could tell he wasn’t really hearing me. He was muttering to himself about calculations and probabilities.
When he’d left the bridge, Hagen came up to my station and stared after him.
“Do we really have to trust our lives to that mad hatter?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I said. “On the bright side, we’ve been doing it for weeks already. He designed most of this ship, you know.”
“Why’s he so strange?”
I glanced at my XO. “Aristotle said thousands of years ago that no great mind has ever e
xisted without a touch of madness.”
Commander Hagen laughed. “There goes your proof, sir.”
“Exactly…”
My own mind was whirling. Could Abrams pull it off? Was this sort of situation the very reason he was tolerated by Space Command?
I hoped the answer to both questions was “yes”.
=16=
The hours crawled by. There wasn’t much we could do other than eat, pray and triple-check every system aboard. The drama was all being played out inside Dr. Abrams’ elastic mind. He had support, of course: the ground work of the navigational teams, and the AI’s number-crunching—but really, it was all up to him.
For the rest of us, the wait was excruciating. In more typical cases I’d been able to sleep through days like this one—but the stakes were too high now. I felt singled out at the top of a newer, larger pyramid. Just having a large ship with five hundred souls relying on me was stressful enough. To top that off, I’d handed over their fate to the whimsy of Abrams and his machines.
It was nearly sixteen hours later when we finally made the first jump. I’d been complaining steadily by then for six hours. Earth Command had been riding my ass, wanting to know how I was going to pull off this amazing intercept. They could see the situation. They could do the math.
But I hadn’t told them anything. Not even in code. I’d assured them we were taking appropriate action and insisted they allow me to continue.
We all knew our systems were compromised. The Nomads, the Imperials, Fex and his gang—anyone might be listening to our transmissions in space. Sure, you could use a focused, narrow beam from ship to satellite. You could also encode it all. But there was always a lingering doubt about the effectiveness of such measures. Godwin, for example, had ignored them many times.
For that reason, I believed, Earth never ordered me to reveal my plans. They were going crazy wanting to know what I was up to, but they accepted that I needed an element of surprise to pull it off. Admiral Vega, I imagined, had to be tearing up his desk down there in Colorado.
Finally, at the end of the sixth hour, Abrams came to me. His eyes were shot with red and they glistened with insanity.