Alien Games (The Human Chronicles Saga Book 17)

by T. R. Harris

  The security door to the pilothouse began to slide shut. With Nuorean gravity being similar to Juirean standard, Adam had some extra muscle power to use as he kicked off the deck and jumped for the closing door. Bridge portals were a little wider than normal openings on Nuorean ships, allowing more bodies to gain ingress or egress to the most important room on the ship, and Adam nearly made it through before the door closed on him.

  Fortunately, it closed on the heavy metal of his boot. It didn’t hurt his foot, but he was caught, lying on the deck, looking into the pilothouse, unable to break free.

  There was one crewmember in the room. He sat at the pilot’s station working controls. When he heard the door controls whine, fighting against the blockage to close, he turned to see what was happening—and took a level-two flash bolt to the face.

  Adam pulled but still couldn’t free his leg.

  “Riyad, splash three. How are you doing?”

  “Got a sneaky little one back here. He was in the engine room, but now he’s somewhere in the landing—” There was a grunt and then the sound of heavy breathing.

  Adam gave him a few seconds. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, but lucky I don’t have to wear this suit back to the D-4. Damn mother-of-a-goat nearly impaled me with a length of welding metal.”

  “Get up to the bridge. I need a little help.”

  ********

  “Let me get a picture of this first,” Riyad said before reaching through the gap in the door and releasing the safety controls. But before he did, he actually did snap a digital picture using the suit’s built-in helmet cam.

  “Better not post that on Facebook.”

  “I would, if Facebook still existed. But there’s always YouTube.”

  Adam climbed to his feet. “Check and see if any alerts went out while I install Panur’s magic box. We have no idea how long we’re going to be here before the next link. Let’s make sure we can stay incognito for all that time.”

  ********

  An hour later Adam contacted Panur through the suit’s comm system. He’d lifted the visor and was breathing fresh Nuorean air. “All right, the gizmo’s installed and we have control of the ship.”

  “Excellent. Any problems?”

  “Nothing to speak of. You know, the Nuoreans must have some kind of check-in routine for their sentry ships. How long do you think we’ll be here before the galaxies link up again?”

  “J’nae and I have been calculating that. Considering the size of the singularities that must be created, plus the stretching effect, along with the size and number of the generators required and their distance to the—”

  “How long?”

  “It should be anytime now.”

  True to his word, the Nuorean ship began to vibrate. Riyad was in the back; now he raced to the bridge.

  “Ready the drive!” Adam yelled.

  The roiling motion continued, not only in the ship but in their bodies as well. They hadn’t been this close to the event the first time; now they were getting the full effect.

  “Are you set to go on your end?” Adam yelled into his helmet comm.

  “Yes. The device will send out a blast signal that identifies the control codes for each of the ships in the area. J’nae and I will then manually access each ship and issue the order to activate the drive.”

  “Manually? You have to contact over three hundred ships manually?”

  “It will take us eight-point-six seconds for the task. We work fast around here.”

  “Not bad.”

  “Well, we don’t get paid to sit around looking pretty.”

  “Touché. Wholly crap, there goes the big suck!”

  The Nuoreans had placed a small flotilla of ships at the apex of the void this time; shift rotations and data carriers undoubtedly. Now the ships elongated and disappeared into the huge black disk a light-year away. From their close-in vantage point, the disk was huge, filling the entire sky. Without the countering gravity-well, Adam and Riyad would be on their way to Andromeda—just as Sherri and Copernicus had done.

  The effect died down and the other ships around them cut their drives. Any second now and the Nuorean fleet would appear out of the blackness.

  The ship jerked violently just as the generators cycled. The back-well was firing up.

  “Panur!” Adam yelled through his comm.

  “I know…sorry. We had to isolate your code first.”

  The well dissolved, but not before the Nuorean ship was already hurdling toward the mass of warship that had just appeared in the void. Riyad activated the forward well and their momentum stopped, but not soon enough to avoid an exploding starship on the port side. Internal inertia compensators were overloaded, allowing Adam and Riyad to be sent slamming into the left side bulkhead. They fell to the deck and were pressed into place by the rapid acceleration. The ship was blown away from the blast, with sections of the hull torn off in sheets. Alarms sounded and lights flashed.

  A strong countering force came next, the result of another nearby explosion to starboard. This time the emergency pressure door to the bridge slid shut and locked down, preserving the atmosphere in the small room, even as the rest the ship suffered near-catastrophic failure.

  The two Humans fought to climb into chairs and fasten safety harnesses across their bodies. With the damage to the ship, the compensators weren’t only overloaded, they were inoperable. The ship tumbled and rolled, the only thing saving their lives being the wide leather straps that cut into raw skin even through the spacesuits.

  More buffering occurred until the turmoil outside began to subside. Fortunately, the forward viewport was still intact, and through it Adam and Riyad witnessed a terrible, yet wondrous site. There were flashes of light popping up all around as chain reactions of collisions and explosions rippled throughout the Nuorean fleet. As was the habit of the invaders, their behemoths were at the head of the fleet, designed to create a grand entrance, if even for the waiting sentry ships. These vessels took the brunt of the nearly two hundred smaller ships that plowed into them on full back-wells.

  Panur’s plan had worked…almost too well.

  ********

  By the time their screens cleared from the transit flash, half the fleet was in ruins. Some of the vessels on the edge of the cluster managed to bolt away at oblique angles. Some survived, some didn’t. Yet it was the smaller ships toward the rear of the formation that suffered the least. At least that was the case for some of them.

  There were fallen stanchions strewn across the deck and hanging from the overhead. Electrical lines popped and cracked, sending hot sparks to the deck. A moment later internal gravity was lost.

  Sherri welcomed the surge in her stomach and throat, which was not unlike the sensation of mounting the summit of a roller coaster and heading down the other side. After the brief period of nausea, she found some relief for the pain she felt in her left leg. Through a red haze of blood entering her eyes, she searched the shattered room for Copernicus. Only a few emergency lights survived, along with the occasional spark from electrical wires and flashes coming through the forward viewport—which by some miracle was still airtight.

  “Coop!” she cried out. Silence. “Copernicus!”

  “Yeah…I’m over here.”

  “I’m stuck, and I think my leg is broken. You’ll have to come to me, if you can.”

  “Give me a minute. There’s a lot of live wires all over the place.”

  He floated next to her, taking hold of her hand while wiping the blood from her face. “Is it just your leg, or more?”

  “I think just the leg.”

  Copernicus studied the fallen beam and how it was braced between the ceiling and the deck. Securing himself, he pushed against the ten-foot-long bulkhead brace. The zero gravity allowed it to move, and with a free arm, he pulled Sherri into the air.

  Her leg was bleeding and the pant leg torn, but he didn’t see any odd angles or penetrating bone. Those were good signs. He took off his shirt
and wrapped it around her leg. She cried out in pain.

  After taking several deep breaths, Sherri relaxed. “What happened?”

  “Hell if I know. It felt like something hit us, an explosion or another ship.”

  They were in the pilothouse of the small supply ship, and when they turned their attention to the exterior viewport, they were shocked to find the space outside filled with tiny flashes for as far as they could see. The frequency of the explosions was tapering off, but it was obvious something big had just happened.

  “Are we back?”

  “I think so,” Copernicus replied.

  He floated to the pressure door of the pilothouse and looked through the tiny viewport. The entire back end of the ship was open to space. Safnos and the rest of the Juireans had been back there. Next, he looked over the flight control panels. They were in ruin.

  “I saw the fleet in front of us stretch out and disappear…and then the flash. I’m pretty sure we’re back in the Milky Way.” he said.

  “If we’re back, then that means—Adam!”

  “Yeah, looks like something he would do, with the help of his mutant sidekick.”

  “They couldn’t have known we were with them. We have to let them know. How can we send a signal?”

  “I don’t know. We’re pretty broken up.”

  “You’re the mechanic—fix it.”

  “Spoken like most of the women I’ve known.”

  “Well….”

  “I’ll call Triple-A for a tow.”

  Sherri grimaced when she tried to smile, discovering a deep cut on her lips. “Well…if we have to die, at least we’ll do it in our galaxy.”

  ********

  “That damn mutant!” Adam yelled once the ship stabilized.

  “The comm’s still open,” came Panur’s voice within his helmet.

  “Then I repeat: That damn mutant!”

  “I take it you had a little trouble?”

  “Who activated the damn drive?”

  “That was me,” said J’nae. “I’m not as proficient as Panur and realized too late your command code had been triggered. It was only for a second or two.”

  “When it comes to gravity drives, that was long enough.”

  “What’s your status?” Panur asked.

  “Unknown at this point. We just came out of a spin and the systems are erratic. We still have gravity and some of the screens are active. Give us a minute to do an assessment.”

  ********

  Riyad and Adam unfastened their safety harnesses, discovering that even through their spacesuits, they had suffered bruises and burns from the severe buffeting they’d taken. Helmets had protected their heads when they slammed into the portside bulkhead, and other that a few other cuts and strains, they appeared to be okay.

  The ship turned out to be halfway functional. Only one generator was working, and at sixty-percent capacity. They’d lost atmosphere to most of the ship, but wearing their suits allowed them to do an adequate survey of the damage. Tapping into one of the rear internal gravity generators would help get the ship up to traveling mode, using only maneuvering wells instead of the deeper light-speed variety.

  Adam contacted Panur again.

  “Good,” said the mutant when learning the ship could steer its way out of the mess they’d made. “The effect was better than expected.”

  “How so?”

  “We launched three hundred eighteen ships and two hundred four made it to the fleet. By our estimates, over seventeen hundred Nuorean ships were destroyed out of two thousand ten. The ones that survived are the smaller ones toward the rear of the column.”

  “That should get their attention. Can you help us out? Navigation is down and our proximity sensors are offline. We’d be eyeballing if we head out of the debris field on our own.”

  “Let me do a scan and find the easiest route. It should be toward the rear of the column, where there’s less debris.”

  A moment later he came back on the line. “Okay, steer one-one-five, up six from your location. Go slow. I’ll be feeding you constant updates to avoid debris.”

  The battered Nuorean spaceship began to move. As Panur fed Adam directions, Riyad stood at the viewport with a viewing magnifier he’d found on the bridge, and able to survey the path ahead at a thousand times magnification. His mouth hung slack as he took in the incredible damage the telescope brought into focus.

  They slipped past five huge warships, busted and sporting gaping holes filled with jagged metal, wires and beams, along with a few frozen bodies orbiting nearby. The operation had been a success, if only for this one time. When the debris field showed up back in the Andromeda galaxy, the Nuoreans would surely suspend future transits, at least until they figured out what happened. Then they would probably shift entry points. But that would take time, hopefully time enough for the allies to build Panur’s suppressor beam platforms.

  There were still a few explosions still taking place, but mainly on the periphery of their route. The space ahead had a few derelicts, as all the space-worthy vessels had scattered to places unknown. That was why the flashes Riyad noticed along their path seemed so…odd. They weren’t sporadic, but pulsed with a pattern that repeated. He tried to think what would cause such a system of timed pulses on a damaged or destroyed warship, but was at a loss.

  Unless they were artificial….

  “Do you know Morse Code?” he asked Adam.

  “Back in my SEAL days, which was like a couple of centuries ago it seems.”

  “Well I think someone is trying to send us a signal.”

  Adam was at the window a second later, taking the magnifier from Riyad and following his directions to the source of the flashing lights. A moment later he pulled the telescope away from his eyes and smiled.

  “I have no idea what the signal means in Nuorean, but on Earth it means S.O.S.”

  Epilogue

  Hell, they’d only been gone for three days, but the greeting Sherri and Copernicus received from Adam and Riyad was epic. There was far too much crying taking place for a room filled with three manly men and one irascible woman. But no one seemed to care. Adam truly believed he’d never see Sherri again, and although he knew the odds of what just happened were far beyond that of the largest Powerball drawing of all time, even with that, someone usually won. This time it was the four people on the bridge of Adam’s barely running Nuorean spaceship.

  They made it back to the D-4, where J’nae and Panur proved their credentials with Human medical procedures. Sherri’s leg was cast posthaste, and all their other injuries scrubbed and bandaged as if by professionals.

  Then with the new jump drive operational, the D-4 headed off for the galaxy end of the Radis Spur. The trip would take six days, even with the modified star drive, but Panur didn’t wait until they reached friendly territory before working on the plans for his suppressor beam platforms. Using all the computing power aboard the Belsonian starship, he completed the plans in two days, and then sent all thirty-seven hundred pages of drawings, specifications and instructions to Admiral Olsen.

  Two days later, Olsen was back on the line with a half a dozen engineers in a conference link, firing a million questions at the mutant. Panur grew impatient, saying it was all right there if they would just follow the directions. What followed were five more conference calls before the engineers began to grasp the concept. It was still going to be a long and difficult road before the platforms were up and running.

  The allied lines were no longer at the beginning of the Radis Spur. They had been moved back until they were forty light-years from Formil. This was where the Expansion—along with the first Union reinforcements—would make a stand. Formil was the premier manufacturing center for the Expansion—the planet and the nine others the Formilians controlled nearby. If these fell into Nuoreans hands, it would be a major blow to the war effort.

  As the days passed, and the D-4 neared Formil, Admiral Olsen finally reported some good news.

  “A
fter each new alien fleet entered the galaxy, we noticed a huge uptick in their activities. Since your party at the entry point, new activity has dropped to zero. They’re maintaining what they have, but not pushing for more. You seemed to have made an impression.”

  “That is good news, Admiral,” Adam said. “But what we have to lookout for now is them showing up in different sectors, and in large numbers.”

  “A realignment?”

  “Yessir. If I were them I wouldn’t risk sending another fleet through to the same spot. They’ll probably shift focus and then send in units to scout around. A few of the survivors from the last attack probably got pulled back to Andromeda along with the debris field, so they might have some idea what happened, but not the whole picture. They’ll want more information before committing full fleets again.”

  “Giving us time to complete the platforms.”

  “How’s that coming? We’ll be at Formil in six days; I guess we’ll see firsthand when we get there.”

  “To be honest, it’s going slow. Panur may consider his plans child’s play, but our scientists and engineers are having a hell of a time with them. We could sure use his help.”

  Adam had already told Olsen about the mutant’s plan to leave and go find Lila, rather than stay and help with the platforms.

  “Panur’s still set on leaving. We’ll get there just in time for him to recover the Pegasus and head out.”

  “We can keep the ship from him,” Olsen threatened.

  “You really think you can? Besides, that would be shitty. He’s done yeoman’s work to this point.”

  “It would be for the common good, Captain.”

  “You’ll just have to do the best you can, sir,” Adam said. “You can stay in touch with us through CW links.”