Gloria swallowed hard, eyes darting briefly to the section of her control screen where she could override all safety measures in the fusion core, and turn this ship into a fireball that would briefly shine brighter than the Sun. How many before her had resorted to that? Plenty. Dozens. A graveyard of wreckage adrift in the cold vacuum well beyond Skara Brae and even tiny Hatra at the system’s edge. Is that what Sutter would do now? What Dawson had done, before?
She’d spent many evenings in half-drunken conversations with Xavi about the suicide pact. The handshake agreement every captain of a fold-capable ship made with the OEA. Gloria felt it the most important promise in the universe, and rebuffed every unlikely scenario Xavi tried to concoct where she’d have to ignore it. Easy enough to say such things when you weren’t in command, but for her part Gloria appreciated the point of view. The contrast in perspective was one of the things she loved about his place in the crew. Not that she’d ever tell him.
On her long-range screen the diversion fleet continued to race away from the Swarm at top speed, though the gap had already started to shrink noticeably. The Swarm Blockade had visibly bowed outward, like a bubble forming. But the pattern had changed. Some had started to move in, on trajectories that would bring them to intercept the Wildflower. Still hours away, sure, but the little bastards were fast. She reviewed what she knew of the enemy Swarm. The little spherical ships had a single pilot, so integrated with the vessel that it was difficult to tell where one stopped and the other began. Creatures that were bred or perhaps simply engineered to live out their lives inside their ship. Advantaged so, they could accelerate far more quickly than the Wildflower.
The rearview display flashed, then remained perfectly white.
For a second Gloria thought it had died, but then came the radiation alarms and a strange, thin vibration that ran through everything. Not just the ship, but a sharp buzz Gloria felt in her body. “What the—”
“The Zephyr just winked out!” Xavi blurted out, stunned. “Shit, boss, oh fuck, they just went nuclear! Self-destruct. Has to be.”
“We’re in the shadow,” Gloria muttered to herself. Sutter had waited until the Wildflower was occluded by the Scipio cargo ship, then turned his own vessel into a weapon.
“The enemy is falling back,” Xavi said. “Their engines are down, maybe for good.”
Thank you, Sutter, she thought.
Xavi’s tone notched up even higher. She’d never heard him so amped. “Detecting heat on the surface of that barge!” he shouted. “Building fast! Core breach maybe, I don’t know. Oh shit!”
Gloria’s gaze shifted there. The hauler had begun to fall back, no longer able to pursue the Earth vessel’s growing velocity. But Xavi was right. Along one flank, a patch of her hull had begun to glow in infrared. Nowhere near its core, though. “Brace yourselves!” she shouted.
A shuddering boom ripped through the craft. The force of it threw the ship into a sideways, rolling tumble. Gloria lost consciousness. When she came around the displays in front of her were a throbbing mess of red and orange flashing icons punctuated with alarms from all over the ship. She heard the staccato pops of the maneuvering thrusters as they worked in vain to negate the motion. “What—” she started, then paused as a wave of dizziness and nausea ran its course. “What happened? Status, Xavi!”
No reply came.
She called again, her words cut off by a racking cough. Sparks erupted from several cable conduits behind her screens. “Talk to me, damn you!”
“Here!” It was Beth, sounding far away, her voice oddly calm. “I’m okay. Vitals are offline, I can’t check Xavi.”
“Understood. Stay put until we’re righted,” Gloria replied. “Xavi! Come on, Xav, I need you!”
A moan came back in response. Then, “Fuck. What the hell was that?”
“Beam weapon of some sort.”
“Not fair. Supposed to be unarmed, the pricks.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Feel like a ’roo kicked me in the balls if you really want to know.”
His words were followed by a perfectly timed and targeted blast from a fire suppression nozzle mounted on a track in the ceiling. A pie-sized disk of white foam flew across the cockpit and slapped against the wall where a panel had opened to reveal a small, yellow gout of flame. The goop smothered the fire, and already the nozzle was zipping away to deal with the next.
Gloria blinked. Fires in the cabin meant imminent danger to the supply of air. She toyed with giving the order for helmets-on, but quickly ditched the idea. There was no time. “Xavi, tell me true, can you handle your station?”
“Yeah. Yes. I’m up to it.”
“Beth?”
The engineer replied after a few seconds’ delay. “Engines are—”
“Engines can wait. Crew first. Are you hurt?”
“Shaken up, otherwise fine.”
Good enough. Gloria let out a breath and shifted her focus to the Wildflower itself. “Okay, then. The engines, our return imploder. Tell me.”
“That was a surgical hit to the last imploder. I’m sending a roach in to check but it doesn’t…Captain, it took a direct hit. It can’t have survived.”
“Acknowledged.”
Beth added, “We’re stuck here. There’s no way the imploder will work after that.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
“We’re not jumping anywhere. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Gloria bit back the desire to dress down the newcomer. This wasn’t the time. “I fully understand what you mean, Miss Lee. Now send that roach and let me know what the hard facts are.”
“I…sorry. You’re right. It’s already crawling out there,” she said. “If we can kill thrust I’ll send a wasp, too.”
Roaches—tiny robots the size of a thumb—crawled throughout the ship to observe damage firsthand. They could get places the human crew could not, and absorb immense amounts of radiation. Wasps were similar, only made to view the ship from outside. However, they had little in the way of propulsion, and thus could not be used when the ship was under thrust.
“If anything we need to speed up, Beth, so hold off on that for now.”
“Okay,” she breathed. Then, more calm: “Okay.”
Gloria felt a powerful headache pushing through her adrenaline high. Direct hit or not, she had to get herself under control. A menu on one of her screens allowed her to inject painkillers. Her finger hovered there, then pulled away. Not now, not yet, she told herself. The last thing she needed was the fog of medication. “Xavi, we need to get as far from that ship as we can. Out of range. Punch it.”
“She’s as punched as she’s going to get, boss.”
“It’s not enough.”
“Don’t know what to tell you.”
Gloria bit her lip. If by some miracle the imploder could be fixed, they still couldn’t use it without substantial distance from any significant source of mass. At least, not without massive risk. But pure distance wasn’t the biggest issue. Another shot like that last and they’d be totally disabled. It wasn’t distance she needed between the Wildflower and the Scipio ship, it was an obstacle. “Beth?”
“The roach is up on feed four. Significant damage to—”
“I need to know now. Can it be fixed?”
A pause. “It’s impossible, Captain. Not out here, with no parts. Maybe not ever. I’m sorry.”
The words brought silence to the ship, their meaning clear and devastating. They would not be folding home. And yet they could not remain here, a little bundle of tech and Earth-knowledge ripe for the Scipio plucking.
With an effort, Gloria stilled herself. She put as much calm and confidence into her voice as she could. “Listen to me. I’m going to jettison the imploder and its launcher.”
“Hold on—” Beth blurted. She’d been right about the imploder, but not prepared to deal with what it meant, evidently.
Gloria went on, calm. “We won’t survive another hit li
ke that. We need chaff to buy time. There’s no other way.”
“Buy time for what? Captain, please. If you mean to scuttle—”
“If it comes to that,” Gloria said. “That is our obligation to everyone back home. But perhaps we have some cards to play still.”
The words quieted the engineer.
Gloria went on. “Keep it and we’ll be crippled and adrift when the next lance hits us. Lose it and maybe, just maybe, we shed enough mass to get out of range. We make for the diversion fleet. Transfer to one of them.”
“Captain’s right.” Xavi’s voice. “And, mates, the debate is pointless. The damaged core is heating up. Runaway reaction. It has to go or we all cook. I say jettison now, boss.”
Gloria needed no more excuse than that. An imploder in full meltdown was nothing she wanted to be anywhere near, and simultaneously just about the best obstacle she could put in the Wildflower’s wake. She punched in the commands and let a retinal scan confirm her order. With virtually no fanfare, the missile detached from the ship and began to fall back. “Get around that, you bastards,” she said.
“Boss?” Xavi asked.
“Go ahead.”
“Maneuvering thrusters on the missile’s hull still work.”
“Okay, and?”
“If it’s about to go critical, maybe we should fly the fucking thing toward our friend back there?”
She grinned, despite herself. “Such ruthlessness normally makes me weep for your soul, Xavi, but right now I want to hug you. Do it.”
“No disrespect, but I’m way ahead of you.”
The giant chunk of mangled gear began to push backward. The core of the imploder had begun to glow already. Xavi nudged them, first negating the terrible out-of-control tumble, then a second adjustment that pushed Gloria hard into the right side of her chair.
“Hid our little gift in the ’Flower’s exhaust,” Xavi said. “With any luck they won’t see it until it’s too late.”
Gloria silently thanked the Universe for Xavi. For his competence as a pilot, and his unflappable nature. Foulmouthed testosterone bundle or not, he had his perks.
Her focus shifted then to the bigger problem of getting home. The awful truth was that they were inside the Swarm Blockade. They had to get to the fleet, had to link up with one of them and transfer the crew across before the Swarm closed in. Once emptied, the Wildflower could be self-destructed while Gloria and her crew were safely carried away.
The question was, how? The Swarm may have been distracted, but it was that distraction Gloria now needed to rendezvous with. She chewed her lip, drummed her fingers on the armrest.
Icons all across her long range began to flash red. The diversionary fleet. “Oh God,” Gloria whispered, one hand coming up to cover her mouth.
One by one the other vessels from Earth began to vanish in clouds of superheated gas and debris.
Their plan to create a diversion, to draw the Swarm away, had worked. What no one anticipated, though, was that the Swarm would attack at range. Swarm ships always pursued and attempted to board. That behavior had been consistent from the moment they realized the prize an Earth ship would be. Yet here, now, their tactic changed. Perhaps because they already had a prize, the Wildflower, so far inside the net, practically gift wrapped. Or, Gloria thought with growing dread, it was because they already had Dawson’s ship, the Lonesome, in custody. Maybe that’s why they’d fired on the Wildflower.
After the first few explosions the others began to execute unplanned folds. Suicide by any other name, for such an action set aside everything an imploder required to actually work. Insufficient velocity. Poor timing. No precisely calculated aim. All of that added up to zero hope of a clean arrival at the other end. They’d be twisted and wrenched, spat out who-knows-where, a mangled mockery of the ship that folded in. A horrible way to go.
What little grip Gloria still had on calm melted away. She wept. All those souls. Captains she’d explored with, shared meals with, and fought beside. Engineers and scientists and medical officers. People who, despite living with the dangers of riding the fold, had families back home.
The crushing sense of helplessness began to replace her fear. This was a total catastrophe. No other way to slice it. The decade-old game of snooping about in Kepler-22’s oort cloud, trying to catch some glimpse of what the Scipios were up to, knowing they would not dare fire on a ship from Earth that might contain a priceless working example of a fold missile, was over.
Hunting season had begun, and the Wildflower was a rabbit surrounded by wolves.
When only one ship remained the shooting mercifully stopped. The scouts had their prey now, it seemed, having thinned the herd. They began to close the noose on that last remnant of the diversion fleet, a ship called the Sporting Chance.
A coded transmission flittered across Gloria’s main display. A brief note from the Sporting’s captain, Gardiner, a woman Gloria knew well.
HEAD FOR US AT MAX BURN
AND CLOSE YOUR EYES
GODSPEED
“Xavi?” Gloria asked, her voice wavering, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“What a nightmare.”
“Gardiner’s message.”
“I see it,” he replied.
“Do as she asks.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay, boss.”
A second later the Wildflower shifted course.
Two things happened almost simultaneously. Now far behind, the damaged imploder core finally went critical. The fireball stretched out in a sphere a thousand kilometers in diameter, swallowing the pursuing Scipio hauler in a nuclear inferno.
Much, much farther away, the Sporting Chance vanished in a similar blast, only much more intense, as her self-destruct countdown reached zero. A vast swath of space briefly glowed as bright as a star. The encroaching Scipio Swarm ships were consumed in the blast. Ancillary explosions flickered out near the edges of the temporary sun, and then it all began to cool. Left behind was a gigantic hole in the Swarm Blockade, with the Wildflower aimed right at the center of it, building speed with every passing second.
Gloria Tsandi let the tears fall. She did nothing to stop them. Dozens of ships, their hundreds of crew, had just sacrificed everything to give the Wildflower a chance at escape. They could not have known it was all pointless. That she could not fold space. All they’d done is bought her a little time. A chance to make peace.
She reached out and touched the screen where the fireballs still cooled. “Thank you,” she whispered, to the group of strangers who’d just given their lives in a failed attempt to save hers.
The Wildflower
4.AUG.3911 (Earth Actual)
GLORIA TSANDI WIPED the tears from her eyes, gripped the armrests of her chair and squeezed until her fingertips burned. She could not—would not—waste their gift.
“Push us harder, Xavi,” she said through gritted teeth.
Below, her navigator grunted in surprise. “We’re already pushing four g’s, Captain.”
“And if we don’t run that gap we’re going to end up just like our friends out there.”
The tone of the engines changed. Gloria felt her weight increase, now five times Earth normal. The edges of her vision grew dark. She slammed her eyes shut against it but found no refuge there. Red and yellow dots began to swim across the inside of her eyelids. Her suit began to squeeze her body to combat the effect. The ship rattled from a dozen different places, things that would have been pronounced utterly secure before a normal flight. Shaken loose on their botched arrival, or when they’d been struck by the Scipio vessel.
An anguished moan rose from below. Beth, unused to such a high-g maneuver. “Are you okay down there?” Gloria asked. Give the engineer something to talk about, something to take her mind off the agony of sustained full acceleration.
“I—” Beth started, the extraordinary strain making her voice almost unrecognizable. “I’ve been better.”
“I’d say we’re almost out of the woods, Beth, but th
at’d be a lie. Stim if you need to, I’ll rouse you when the time comes.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
She must have been waiting, hoping, to hear just that, because a second later Gloria’s status monitor indicated the injection request, and ten seconds after that Beth’s vitals became those of a lazy summer nap.
Good for her. Most of Gloria’s regular crew allowed a minor injection the moment their ship passed the three-gravities mark, and that was okay. Gloria understood and encouraged the practice, but opted not to do it to herself. To stim was to trade comfort now for one hell of a hangover later, not to mention slowed reflexes and a lack of focus. Gloria couldn’t afford it. As captain she had to be ready, always. So she gripped her armrests even harder, and felt her body squeezed by the force of their flight. She focused on the face of her friend, Gardiner, holding on to the woman’s sacrifice like a talisman.
The burn went on and on. Relative to the distant star, the Wildflower’s velocity surpassed four hundred kilometers per second and kept on climbing. “Xavi?”
“Yeah, boss?” he replied.
“Once we hit five hundred kps relative, execute a confusion maneuver.”
“Jesus. You sure?”
“Nothing but open space ahead. They’ve probably already fired on our likely trajectory, and even if they haven’t they’ll be heading to where we’ll be. No point in making it easy for them.”
“Making this awfully hard on us, though.”
“I can handle it if you can.”
“It’s our friend back there I’m worried about.”
“She’s stimmed, and let’s be honest, without a functional imploder her usefulness is…reduced. She knows the engines a bit, and a lot of ancient history, but that’s about it.”
Xavi grunted an acknowledgment that said he wasn’t happy.
“That gap won’t help us if we get obliterated on the way, yes? So execute the maneuver,” she said, “and I’ll take care of the signature masking.”
Injection Burn Page 4