by Mark Wandrey
Minu turned to go, and then stopped. She remembered the Rasa and where they’d begun with that former enemy, then turned back. A safety release inside the suit made the chest access release with a hiss, and pivoted open. The Leesa looked at her impassively as she took a portal control rod from the storage compartment next to her right arm and activated it.
The PCR was a complex interface designed to operate the myriad of portals throughout the galaxy. They could be programmed to only allow one individual to work them, or groups, and also what worlds they could travel to. They also contained various amounts of memory for which worlds they’d traveled to and how to access those portals.
Minu accessed the first level code group and holographic script popped into existence above the rod. The Leesa looked on in increased interest, having never seen a PCR do this before. Using swift hand motions and the area of her brain where the codes existed, she reprogrammed the rod and purged its memory. Then she tossed it to the stunned alien.
“Get your people off this world. It will be destroyed in forty minutes.” And she resealed the suit.
“Why do you do this?” the Leesa asked as she turned to head for the shuttle.
“Because it is the right thing to do. You are a defeated enemy, and deserve compassion.”
“You are right that you are not a higher order species. They would never have done this thing. We would be left to die.”
“Farewell,” Minu said and moved quickly towards the shuttle. A camera in the rear of the suit saw the Leesa watch her for a second more before turning as well and skittering towards its troops’ hiding place. She had no idea how many of them would make it through the few remaining portals nearby, only that they now had a chance.
Aaron stood in the doorway with a trio of Rangers who all held their shock rifles with calm confidence. She knew that had the Leesa shown the slightest aggression or if any armed enemy appeared, they would have died instantly.
Her husband watched with his own outward image of calm, even though she knew he was anything but. “Can we go now?” he asked and waved her towards the ramp.
“That would be a good idea,” she agreed and walked inside. The shuttle was crammed full of personnel and equipment.
She hoped Aaron could get them off the ground and almost told them to throw all the equipment overboard. Aaron surveyed the space with a critical eye before nodding his head and slapping the door control. The personnel door slid closed and the cargo ramp retracted.
“Time to go,” he told the passengers. “Everyone buckle in or grab onto something.” There weren’t enough seats so Minu stayed in her suit, using its powerful arms to clamp onto a stanchion. “This could be a bumpy ride.”
* * *
Aaron hadn’t been exaggerating; the ride to orbit was hair-raising in the extreme. The ionizing radiation from the exploding star was creating high altitude disturbances in the planet’s ionosphere that made the worst storms on Bellatrix seem like a gentle spring shower.
Twice he was forced to alter course, steering the Phoenix shuttle’s nose into the worst of it, all the time continuing to climb as rapidly as the ion powered thrusters would allow.
The power management system continued to complain that levels were below twenty percent. Multiple trips back and forth to orbit, and the space battle, had nearly drained the crafts reserves. He ignored the warnings. This would be the last trip from Planet K. In thirty minutes, it would be gone forever.
After ten frightening minutes, they climbed through the last of the upper atmospheric turbulence and the flight became as smooth as glass, the hull gently vibrating as the powerful engines thrummed.
He’d always admired the gravitic drives the Concordian technology favored, however the ion propulsion his company was fostering had its own advantages. Mostly it was a much faster trip up out of a gravity well.
As you climbed there was less and less to push against with a gravitic drive, and it was unsafe to project a gravity source in front of your ship such as is done on the much larger supra-luminal drives in starships. The result was a fast takeoff followed by a gradually slower ascent. The ion drive gave a relatively robust liftoff with a continued acceleration the higher you got.
“We’re in orbit,” he let those back in the passenger compartment know. “Another ten minutes until we dock.”
Moments later the companionway to the rear opened and his wife was there, sans the combat suit, which would never have fit in the corridor anyway. He turned and glanced at her.
She looked like she’d been working out in a sauna for hours. Her long red hair was plastered against the light skin on her face, the workout one-piece she’d worn instead of the Chosen field armored jumpsuit. In a less stressful time he might take a moment to admire the way her outfit clung to her lithe form, accentuating her breasts and hips.
The dark circles under her eyes and bruises on arms were just another indication of what eight hours of continuous combat in the suit must have been like.
“How much time left?” she asked after leaning over and giving him a kiss on the cheek.
“Eighteen minutes.”
“Cutting it close.” He nodded. “You did an awesome job rescuing Pip up there.”
“It was my job.”
“Still, you scared the hell out of me.”
He chuckled and checked the holographic displays, clicking off a couple controls to trim their approach to the Ibeen. It was still several hundred kilometers away and already visible through the moliplas windshield.
“I scared the hell out of myself. But you know what? Those Mok-Tok fighters were not nearly as good as I suspected they would be.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’ve never flown a fighter in combat, but this shuttle is easily four times their size and much less sophisticated. You’d think I’d be an easy target. They couldn’t seem to handle me, though. I only got hit on the shields a few times and was never really in any danger. And then the damned star exploded.”
Minu considered his words for a moment, filing away the information for later consideration as she always did. Her brain was full of details here and there of Concordian military tactics and facts. Unfortunately the section of space combat and capabilities was woefully small. Lilith was beginning to be able to fill in some details, but only slowly.
“Any ideas on how that star suddenly went nova?”
“Wish I knew. I’m no stellar physicist, but if you ask me that was impossible.”
“My thoughts exactly. We can go over it in more detail after we dock on the Kaatan.”
“Lilith has me landing on the Ibeen.”
“What? Why, we don’t have time to shuffle people between the two ships.”
“You better ask her yourself. Look.”
Aaron pointed and she looked up out the windshield. They were within fifty kilometers now and the Ibeen was growing big, already about a meter across. The outline of the ball pierced by a needle shape of the Kaatan was clearly visible, nestled against one of the much larger clusters of balls making up the Ibeen.
It was the first time she’d seen the big transport after the space battle. She hissed through her teeth as long black gashes and rents were visible on several of the balls.
The Phoenix angled in towards the Ibeen and prepared to land.
Chapter 49
May 9th, 534 AE
Planet K Star System, Contested Territory, Galactic Frontier
Lilith was floating in her own CIC again safely within the cocoon of her beloved Kaatan, completely unaware of the outside world as her mind conversed with the various systems of the starship. Dozens of small autonomous computer programs ran the ships functions, using her mind as a command and coordinator.
Lacking a true combat intelligence, the powerful AI program that should have run the Kaatan, Lilith served that purpose. It was why she had been saved from the operating table by the medical intelligence.
With the computers installed in her brain as a fetus she
could perform thousands of operations at the same time, dividing and subdividing her attention as the situation called. As she used a fraction of her mind linked with the Ibeen to guide the docking of her parents’ shuttle aboard that ship a much larger part was analyzing supra-luminal travel capabilities.
It was a complicated and frustrating series of calculations. The gravitic drives were designed to move the ships through faster than light travel through projection of intense gravity waves, thus warping space itself. The drive projectors were carefully crafted to warp space closely around the ship. This served the dual effect of maximizing power economy to produce as small a field as possible while at the same time reducing exposure to the chaotic fields surrounding a supra-luminal travel.
Lilith knew about the effects of those time-twisting fields just outside the hull of a ship traveling at thousands of times the speed of light. By carefully placing a shuttle into those fields the Kaatan's medical intelligence took her from a fetus to near adulthood.
“Have you an answer?” Pip's voice was an unwanted intrusion into her calculations; she was tempted to ignore it.
“The calculations are daunting.”
“So let me help you with them.”
Frustration bubbled to the surface. “This would be unnecessary if you would merely plug back in and fly the Ibeen.”
“No.”
“The enemy ships have fled. Be reasonable.”
“No.”
“You unreasonable… fucker.”
“Why Lilith!” Pip laughed in her ear, making Lilith's cheeks burn even though she was alone. “That might be the most like your mother you have ever sounded.”
She chewed her bottom lip for a moment, floating in the near dark of her CIC and fuming, then sent the data. “Please double check my calculations.”
“Lilith, we're aboard!” Minu called to her from the docking bay on the Ibeen through their link. “Just over two thousand Rangers and equipment are safe.”
“Noted, we're about to get under way.”
“What is the plan?”
“Unfortunately, mother, I don't have time to explain. Please see to the soldiers that they are prepared to maneuver.”
“Only nine minutes—”
Lilith cut her off, something she didn't do often since she'd grown older and more mature. It wasn't anger or diffidence, it was simple expedience. A tiny countdown timer in her brain made her deadly aware of just how little time remained.
She spent thirty seconds running final checks before sounding the acceleration alarms throughout both ships. The calculations were not complete, but it was not possible to jump to supra-luminal within a hundred diameters of a planetary gravity well. If they didn't leave now, they wouldn't make it. Eight minutes remained as the cumbersome Ibeen began climbing away with the much smaller Kaatan moored to its side.
* * *
Minu only paused a second when she realized Lilith had cut her off. She knew the girl must have a good reason, she only hoped it wasn't panic. With thousands of Rangers on board, many of them wounded, the stakes had never been higher.
“Lilith not talking?” Aaron asked as he helped a wounded Chosen scout down the Phoenix's ramp and into the spacious Ibeen landing bay. The man's eyes were glazed over from the drugs keeping him from feeling the remnants of an arm burned off nearly to the elbow by a beamcaster.
“No, she's in spaceship brain mode.” Aaron nodded, understanding their daughter as well as she did. “She said to get everyone ready to move.”
Together they handed off the wounded to the Ranger corpsmen who'd set up a makeshift surgical bay nearby, then headed for the Ibeen's CIC just as the acceleration alarm sounded. And much to their surprise, they felt a hint of movement.
“That's not good,” Aaron said, and the two exchanged wide eyed glances. The accelerations experienced in a starship were often in the hundreds or even thousands of Gs. Complex and delicate gravitic planers controlled the gravity inside so the occupants felt none of those maneuvers. As Pip explained years ago, should those fail, the humans would be reduced to strawberry jam.
“She's pushing it hard,” Minu said as they struggled against a suddenly slanted deck.
They didn't have far to go to reach the improvised CIC. Every hallway they moved through was choked with men and equipment, the men struggling to secure the gear and get situated. Even though the ship was designed as a transport, it had not been configured to the role they were pressing it into. It took more than a minute to reach their destination.
Pip floated in the improvised CIC, slowly rotating on three axes and surrounded by dozens of small three dimensional data panes scrolling incredibly complex calculations. He appeared catatonic except as he drifted around they could see his eyes following one pane or another for a second.
His eyes were shrunken and his cheeks hollow. There was the dried residue of blood under his nose smeared across his face and something about the look he gave her sent a shiver up Minu's spine. The deck where they stood seemed to angle slightly under their feet.
“Is Lilith in over her head?” she asked him.
“Possibly.” His answer was just above a whisper.
“What is she trying to do?” Aaron asked.
“The Kaatan is docked and will stay that way. She's going to fly both ships together at faster than light.”
“Is that possible?”
“She thinks so.”
“Thinks so?” Minu barked. “Why aren't you flying this ship?”
“I won't ever link with another ship again.”
That same look, and now she understood it. Fear. It was the second time someone else's fear let her down in one day, and she didn't like the feeling at all.
“Damn you, Pip,” she snarled, “there are thousands of men and women who've been fighting and dying for days on end aboard this ship depending on you—”
“I didn't ask them to depend on me!” he snapped, turning to glare at her. She stared right back and he looked away after a moment, unable to look her in the eye any longer. “You don't know how horrible it was.”
“You really don't want to compare battle scars, Pip. You really don't!”
“Leave him be, mother.” The voice whispered into her mind.
“Five minutes,” Aaron said besides her, recognizing the look of his wife speaking to their daughter from the gem-like implant in her head.
“Lilith, can you do this?”
“I am accelerating from the planet at maximum impulse drive right now.”
“That's only a fraction of light speed, and we felt you pull out of orbit. The gravity fields aren't balanced.”
“Which is why I want you to leave Pip alone so he can finish checking my calculations. There must be an error.”
“You made an error?”
It was quiet for a long moment and Minu feared she'd offended her daughter. Then she finally came back. “Yes, I must have. The parameters are extensive.”
Minu nodded, relieved she hadn't made the young woman mad at the wrong moment, and turned to Pip. “Lilith explained the situation, how are the calculations coming?”
“Finished,” he announced and pointed to a larger display filled with the complex geometric calculations of a gravity field. “She missed a single decimal place on the third refractory harmonic of—”
“Pip, I won't understand if you spend a week, and we have about four minutes.”
“Right,” he said and they watched the screen indicate the data was transmitted.
The response only took a few seconds. “I see the mistake.” Another short pause.
Minu knew it wasn't easy for her daughter, she expected perfection from others and especially from herself.
“I'm inputting the new parameters.” Acceleration warnings sounded again. “We are past the safe distance; I am preparing to push to supra-luminal speeds.”
Minu glanced at her chronometer at the same time as her husband. Two minutes. On displays within the CIC Pip enhanced several screens to
fill half the space. The brown and green globe of Planet K was retreating noticeably as the Ibeen struggled away from the gravity well of the planet. The shields were flashing with waves of neutrons and other heavy radiation as the edge of the particle wave from the star began to arrive.
“Oh shit,” Aaron breathed. The wave hit the world and began to tear at it, vaporizing atmosphere and flash boiling the water, killing all life on the world.
* * *
Inside the Kaatan, Lilith examined the reactions of the two ships’ gravitic planer drives one final time as power built. Space was beginning to distort and pull the ship past what her human learning referred to as Newtonian space. All the thousands of instruments throughout both ships registered only an ever so slight twitch as the ship leaped ahead and past the light speed barrier.
“We are supra-luminal,” she told her mother, and then allowed herself to relax slightly. She stretched the speed, two, four, six, to eight times the speed of light.
The destructive particle shockwave fell into their wake, and with it the danger. Their speed topped out at just below two hundred times light speed; a fraction of the Kaatan’s top velocity, but better than the alternative. Behind the ships Planet K was pummeled by the death of its star.
Finally safe, Lilith began to file away the after action report of the battle. It was the first time she'd faced Mok-Tok in combat. Their tactics were considerably more advanced than those of the T'Chillen. The snakes preferred direct frontal attacks by large powerful ships. The Mok-Tok used combined fleet tactics with fighters and capital ships. They were better able to deal with the nimble yet powerful Kaatan than the T'Chillen.
The computer assisted her in reconstructing minute details of the enemy ships she'd faced then began comparing them to historical records in her the ship's memory. Immediately dissimilarities began to appear. Subtle yet unmistakable changes from those older ships the People fought against. Yet these were supposed to be those same ships, built untold thousands of years earlier.