Capital Starship (Ixan Legacy Book 1)

by Scott Bartlett

  Husher narrowed his eyes. “What did he say?”

  “He kept mentioning how he knows you’re pushing for an increased Fleet presence in this region of the galaxy, and how that makes him skeptical of the negotiators’ actual commitment to an armistice. In my view, it had the effect of pushing the diplomats to offer more systems to Teth than they otherwise would have.”

  Ochrim rose from the floor, and he looked like he was about to lower himself onto the ladder when he seemed to notice the expression on Husher’s face. “Something I just told you bothers you.”

  “Did Chancey tell Teth that I’m pushing for a greater Fleet presence?”

  “I didn’t hear him say it.”

  “And were you there from the beginning of the transmission?”

  “Yes.”

  Shaking his head, Husher spoke slowly: “Only two people on this ship know that I was pushing for more warships to come out here. My Coms officer and Chancey.”

  “This makes you suspicious of Chancey.”

  “I guess it could just as easily have been Ensign Fry. But she hasn’t been working against me ever since this whole thing started. Chancey has.”

  “There’s another possibility: the mayor may have let it slip to someone else that you advocate for a greater presence—someone who’s the actual traitor, or who unknowingly passed it on to the traitor.”

  “Yeah. That’s possible, too.” Husher had already assumed that Teth would have superior intel, but the idea that it might have come from someone aboard his ship as opposed to an AI’s projections…it made him wonder what other sorts of treachery might be at play on the Vesta.

  It also made him fear for the battle group they’d left back in Concord.

  “Do you really think Teth can be trusted to abide by anything he agreed to during those negotiations, let alone an armistice?” he asked.

  “No,” Ochrim said. “But you’re the one who brought us to Concord to negotiate.”

  “I was following orders. I made very clear that I thought negotiating with Teth was worse than pointless.”

  Ochrim seemed to be studying his face intently. “Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking?”

  “I’m thinking I want to turn this ship around and get back to our battle group.”

  “Success in turning the Vesta around is unlikely, as I believe we both know. As for getting back to your battle group…follow me.” With that, Teth began descending the ladder toward his lab.

  The knot of excitement in the pit of his stomach made a return as Husher lowered himself to follow.

  When he reached the chamber below, he found Ochrim already leaning against the table. As Husher looked around the lab, nothing jumped out at him that looked like an obvious solution to their problem. “You conducted the experiment, then?”

  “I did.”

  Husher realized that Ochrim was wearing a wider smile than he’d ever seen from him—which, coming from an Ixan, was a bit unsettling. But his anticipation of what Ochrim might have found overrode that. “And? How did it go?”

  “I have no idea.” The smile broadened.

  “What do you mean, you have no idea, Ochrim? Why are we down here, then?”

  “I fitted a compact drone with a generator governed by an electromagnetic field restrictor so that it would produce a self-contained wormhole, spherical in form.”

  “Okay. So what happened?”

  “Again, I have no idea. All I can tell you is that the drone vanished from view and didn’t return. I didn’t have time to set up the experiment before we left Saffron, and so we were under warp drive at the time, meaning that wherever the drone ended up, it was still traveling at warp velocities. If, indeed, it ended up anywhere. But even supposing it did go somewhere meaningful to us, and supposing I’d had time to program it to return to realspace at the exact coordinates the Vesta would occupy, I didn’t have the resources to collect the drone from space. I wouldn’t have wanted to, anyway, since that could draw unwanted attention to my research, which is now officially illegal.”

  Husher was shaking his head. “How does this help us, Ochrim?”

  “Because I have a theory about where it ended up, which I consider fairly likely.”

  Husher sighed. He hated science. “What’s your theory?”

  “I think it went to another brane inside our universe. And I also believe that brane is a decoherence-free subspace, the attainment of which I consider the ultimate goal of my research. The applications of harnessing such a space are innumerable—within ten years, I could envision—”

  “What are the applications right now?” Husher yelled.

  The scientist blinked. “You said you wanted to rejoin your battle group.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I have two theories about the subspace’s spatial relationship to the brane we occupy. If one of them proves true, it should allow you to reach the Concord System in just a third of the time it takes to reach it under warp drive.”

  “What if the other holds true?”

  “Three times as long. It’s also possible that you won’t end up anywhere, or that the subspace’s physics won’t support the integrity of biological structures. That is, you’ll disintegrate.” Ochrim cleared his throat. “Our dilemma, of course, is that we do not enjoy an overabundance of time.”

  Husher nodded, pursing his lips as it dawned on him exactly what attempting this would require—namely, nosediving into the abyss and hoping for the best.

  But Teth and the other strange warships had to be going somewhere when they disappeared. At last, Husher said, “We’ll also need a craft to carry me there.”

  “Indeed. It will need to be quite small, since it turns out spherical wormholes require quite a lot of energy to generate. Frankly, I have no idea how Teth can create one large enough to encompass his destroyer, if indeed that is how he’s managing to vanish.”

  “Would a Condor be small enough? We still have a few, kicking around Hangar Bay Theta. No one goes down there, so we can do all the work we need right there in the hangar bay. And no one’s going to miss a rusted old fighter that’s been obsolete for a decade and a half.”

  “That will be perfect,” Ochrim said. “I’ve already begun work on a spherical wormhole generator for a craft large enough to hold a being, and with some modifications, it should accommodate a fighter the size of a Condor. Let us get to work.”

  Chapter 45

  Staring Back in Shock

  As Husher worked on the Condor he’d identified as closest to spaceworthy among those stored in Hangar Bay Theta, Ochrim set about modifying the wormhole generator he’d already been working on.

  Repairs on the Condor took up the entire first day—or rather, twenty-three hours, during which they both worked without sleep. Ochrim finished the generator seven hours in, which surprised Husher, until he considered that Ochrim had invented the wormhole generator he was replicating at a smaller scale. With the generator finished, the scientist began work on a warp drive modeled after the Vesta’s, but small enough for the Condor. Even assuming Ochrim’s subspace compressed distance the way he thought it might, Husher would still need to fly under warp in order to travel to Concord and back in time.

  Since the Vesta was already inside a warp bubble, it wouldn’t be possible to generate another one inside the hangar bay—you couldn’t generate a negative energy field inside a field that already had negative energy—but Husher would have to produce one the instant he left the supercarrier’s, otherwise his Condor would be torn apart.

  The fighter would also need to be able to attain the velocities necessary to enter warp—in order to return to the Vesta once he was finished in Concord, for example. That would require steady acceleration over a much longer distance than the Vesta required, since the Condor’s engines weren’t nearly as powerful. That said, the fighter still had the ability to use what was known as Ocharium boost, whereby it used the rare element to propel itself against ambient axions and achieve speeds that otherwis
e wouldn’t have been possible. That would help, though it made the use of the Condor also illegal. Of course, Husher and Ochrim were well past letting that bother them.

  At the end of the twenty-three hours, they retired to Ochrim’s living room with a couple of beers. Husher awoke the next morning to find that Ochrim had laid his partially finished beer on the carpet before stretching out on the couch, while Husher was still in a sitting position in Ochrim’s favorite chair, his miraculously unspilled beer nestled between his legs.

  “So, how will I know when it’s time to transition back to this brane?” Husher asked three hours into their second day of work. “How can I figure out what realspace coordinates correspond to a given subspace location?”

  Ochrim’s head jerked up from installing a rivet to fasten a distortion rod onto the Condor’s hull. He looked like a squirrel who’d just overheard a potential predator. “Oh. Right! I’ll need to include a universal positioning system that assumes a three-to-one realspace-to-subspace relationship in all directions. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Uh, yeah, my pleasure,” Husher said, sarcasm drenching his voice. Ochrim didn’t seem to notice.

  Fifteen hours later, the Condor was finally ready—either to transport him to subspace or to kill him in a really specific way.

  Either way, at least I’ll be a pioneer. For some reason, what he was about to do reminded him of the time he’d been the first to survive an emergency orbital insertion using a Darkstream reentry suit—the same model that had killed the only other person to attempt it. How do I get myself into these situations?

  “So…do we have to get the Condor to a flight deck? That could be tricky.”

  “No need,” Ochrim answered. “You should transition to subspace once you generate a spherical wormhole. I would recommend lifting the Condor off the hangar bay deck first, to avoid taking a chunk of it with you.”

  “So I won’t slam into the side of the wormhole and get torn apart?”

  “No, you’ll transport the moment you generate it. As for remaining at warp velocities as you enter subspace, don’t worry, I’ve connected the warp drive to the Condor’s sensors and programmed it to generate another bubble the moment you leave this one. From there, the drive will cycle down.”

  “Why don’t I feel confident about my safety right now, Ochrim?”

  “Because you have no reason to be.”

  “Right,” Husher said with a nod. “I’d forgotten, for a moment.”

  On the third day of their work—the fourth day of the Vesta’s warp transition—Ochrim finally finished installing the modified warp drive inside the fighter. With that, Husher told the Condor to open its cockpit, and he climbed up into it.

  The moment he was inside, he flashed back to sitting here on one of the Providence’s many flight decks, waiting for the go-ahead to launch. Husher missed those days…bantering with Fesky and the other pilots, coordinating ill-advised maneuvers, subjecting their bodies to far more Gs than they should have. His ascent through the ranks and getting his own command had taken him away from it. That was a funny thing about success—you spent your life obsessing over it, and the moment you got it, you started missing where you came from.

  As the cockpit closed around him, Ochrim’s voice came through his ear piece: “If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to leave the hangar bay. Unless you require a countdown, or something like that?”

  “That’s fine, Ochrim,” Husher said, not able to muster a chuckle through the anxiety that gripped his heart and quickened his breath. “Either this works or it doesn’t. There’s not much more to it than that.”

  “Good luck, Captain.”

  Husher opened his mouth to correct him, but then he realized the mistake had probably been intentional. It isn’t a mistake, anyway. I still have my rank, unless it’s been stripped from me for some reason, without my knowledge. No one had notified him of much of anything, during the past three days. He wasn’t certain they even knew where to find him.

  “Thank you, Ochrim.”

  He waited for the Ixan to leave the hangar bay and close the hatch. They both knew that being in another part of the ship likely wouldn’t make a difference if something catastrophic happened. That said, Husher probably would have left, too, if he didn’t need to be here.

  Once he was alone, he activated the wormhole generator. Abruptly, the Condor disappeared around him, replaced by an infinity of himself, countless versions of Husher stretching out in every direction, every one of them staring back at him in shock.

  Chapter 46

  Copper Taste

  The Condor’s cockpit reappeared, though Husher had no idea why it had vanished in the first place. He’d nearly fainted from shock as he’d gazed into the cosmic mirror, but it had only lasted a second, and now he found himself in a featureless, black void—at least, according to the fighter’s visual sensors.

  Also according to the sensors, in conjunction with the universal positioning system Ochrim had fitted the Condor with, he was moving at incredibly fast speeds. That made sense, given he was still flying under warp drive.

  Without warning, the drive cycled down, and the Condor exited the warp bubble. Transitioning to realspace—or in this case, subspace—meant an immediate and sharp drop in velocity, but that still left him with a lot of forward momentum to contend with.

  When Husher attempted to decelerate, the force of the gravity that crashed against his body like a tsunami made him cry out, and he stopped, panting as he continued to hurtle in the wrong direction.

  He’d always made an effort to keep himself in shape, especially as he got older, to combat the effects of aging. Even so, he was in nowhere near the shape he’d been during the peak of his Condor flying career. His body simply couldn’t handle G forces the way it once had.

  Gingerly, he tried applying the brakes again, only a little this time. He could handle the G forces in small doses, and the exercises from his pilot days started coming back to him as he worked his abs and limbs to facilitate blood flow and ensure he stayed conscious.

  I need to do this faster. If Ochrim was right about subspace’s relationship to realspace, then traveling at warp velocities would take him three times farther than they normally would.

  Gritting his teeth, he laid on more pressure.

  Soon, his body was coated in sweat, and his muscles were so sore it felt like he’d left the gym after the hardest workout of his life, turned around, and did the exact same exercises all over again.

  It seemed like hours later when he finally slowed to a stop. He wanted to take a long nap, but it wasn’t the time for that. Letting himself rest now would amount to a betrayal of his battle group captains.

  I need to start the warp transition toward Concord. Then I can rest.

  That meant enduring the exact same G pressures—from the opposite direction. It mean turning around and doing it all over again.

  With a sigh, he started laying on speed, until he reached a point past which only Ocharium boost could make him accelerate any faster. He activated it, and his body paid the price.

  An eternity later, the Condor’s accelerometer communicated to the warp drive that his velocity was sufficient to transition to warp. He did so, instructing it to inform him when he was approaching Concord, according to Ochrim’s theoretical reckoning.

  He felt sluggish, almost feverish from the exertion he’d just subjected himself to. The entire cockpit was slick with his sweat, and the copper taste of blood clung to the back of his throat from the effort merely getting oxygen into his lungs had required, toward the end.

  He was too tired even to feel anxious about whether Ochrim was right about subspace—about whether he’d end up at his destination or in the middle of nowhere. And yet, enduring the transition to warp did instill him with an incredible sense of accomplishment and pride as he tumbled into a deep sleep.

  A little over thirty-two hours later, the computer notified him that it was time to start decelerating, unless he wan
ted to blow past Concord.

  Before he began, he activated the wormhole generator. He was ready for the countless copies of himself, this time, and all the Hushers looked back at him with set jaws and eyes underscored by black lines.

  Maddeningly, even though he’d returned to his native dimension, he still had no idea where he was inside it. The Condor’s outdated sensors hadn’t been designed to make sense of the universe from inside a warp bubble, and visual sensors told him nothing. They only showed a mess of blue-shifted stars whipping by, with some red-shifted stars to either side of him and an empty void behind, since he was outpacing the light traveling from that direction.

  At last, Ochrim’s universal positioning system told Husher it was time to exit warp, and he did. Immediately, he expanded the Condor’s tactical overview so that it showed him a light year in every direction.

  Once the sensors had finished populating the display, and he saw what he was looking for, he raised two stiff arms and yelled in triumph.

  He was just outside the Concord System, screaming toward its great asteroid belt.

  His celebration didn’t last for long. As light began to reach him from the battle group’s last known location, it showed not the warships he’d been praying to find, but a wide field of debris that was slowly spreading along the system’s ecliptic plane.

  “No,” he rasped, double- and triple-checking the tactical display to make sure of what he was seeing.

  It was time to start decelerating again, and so he did, laying on as much as he could handle. Thankfully, it wasn’t necessary to come to a complete stop this time, so it was less intense than his initial deceleration in subspace.

  There was no sign of Teth’s ship—either it had withdrawn deeper into the system or left to launch another attack. So Husher pressed on toward the asteroid belt, desperate for answers.

  It soon became clear what a bad idea that was, as a Gok destroyer emerged from behind one of the asteroids and fired a volley of four missiles.