by Andrew Beery
“How long my friend? How long do you intent to wait?” She closed the door to the stasis chamber. Like she had every year, she would be back next year.
***
“That’s it,” Ben announced. “The last one was a hit as well. All three rocks are coasting. Two are no hits on Earth… one is too close to call.”
Admiral Cat Kimbridge was beyond tired. It had been a long two days. “How long before impact if it does hit?” Cat asked.
Yorky replied in a quiet voice. “Eight point four hours Admiral.”
Cat looked around the bridge. “Captain, stand your senior staff down. Everyone except Ben is to take a nap. Four hours minimum. Get a bite to eat and report back to the bridge in six hours.”
Cat looked at Ben. “I need you and Yorky to continue to run the numbers. The moment the numbers move off of maybe to something more definite – I need to know. Understood?”
“Understood Admiral,” Ben answered.
***
Sandy-Claw was not an astronaut. He did not like spacesuits and he certainly did not like being outside of a ship while wearing one. Well, he supposed, if he was going to be outside of a ship, while in space he preferred being in a spacesuit… but he didn’t like it all the same.
The platform the GCP had built was impressive. There seemed to be thirty-two very powerful hyperfield emitters configured in a manner he had never witnessed before. Captain Nicked-Tail had him working on reconfiguring those emitters. The formulas that the Captain had provided him were almost beyond his ability to understand. Apparently they had been implanted directly in the Captain’s memory by the Uruk. They resembled the ones used for inter-dimensional jumps but there was a harmonic component he did not quite recognize.
Given the number of nodes that he had to reconfigure and the fact that he was basically unfamiliar with Coalition system, it took him a while to complete the work. According to the Captain the Uruk promised the reconfigured system would open a temporal conduit that would allow the remaining Syndicate to travel back to their own time. The knowledge that he was going home was a strong motivation to complete the work as well as he could. Finally however he was done.
He signaled Captain Nicked-Tail who was tying down control cables the two had run to their shuttle. The Captain used his jet pack to float over to the engineer. Sandy-Claw knew the Captain did not share his disdain for spacesuits.
“Are we done?” The Captain asked.
“I believe so. All one needs to do is bypass this one control feed by flicking this switch and the systems on the shuttle take over control.”
“And the nodes, they have all been reconfigured and double checked.”
“Absolutely Sir. I tripled checked everything. We won’t want to arrive home too early or too late!”
“No we would not” Nicked-Tail said with a grin. “You have done a good job and I am going to miss you.”
“Am I going somewhere?” Sandy-Claw said somewhat confused.
“In a manner of speaking,” Nicked-Tail confirmed while puncturing the seal on the engineer’s helmet with a cutting blade.
Sandy-Claw heard the air escaping until the atmosphere in his suit was too thin to transmit sound. He really hated spacesuits.
***
“ADMIRAL TO THE BRIDGE”
Cat woke with a start. If you had asked her she would have sworn she hadn’t even gone to sleep but the chronometer on her desk didn’t lie. She had been asleep for just over three hours. It wasn’t enough but it would have to be. If she was being called to the bridge it must mean the fate of the final asteroid had been determined.
As she stepped onto the bridge she saw that the Captain had been summoned as well.
“Report,” Ken said as he sat in his command chair.
Ben looked at both the Captain and the Admiral. His expression was grim. “We have confirmed the final numbers. Bogy three will miss the smaller of the two moons by less than a kilometer and then graze Earth. Yorky believes the result will boil off both the atmosphere and the ocean. Earth will end up looking like a larger version of Mars in our time.”
“And this will happen in what… four hours?” Ken asked.
“Closer to three and a half.”
Cat pulled the projected course plot up on Captain Kirkland’s holographic display. She quickly rotated the display and magnified the course plot near the smaller of the two moons.
Ken watched her. He had seen this intensity in her before and knew that her magical mind was even now coming up with a way to beat the odds.
“Ben,” Cat said. “How much do we miss the moon by?”
“Less than a thousand meters…,” her friend began to answer.
“HOW MUCH LESS”
Ben checked with Yorky. “We miss by about six hundred meters give or take fifty… Why?”
In her excitement Cat ignored his question. “Ken, if we strip the wings off a fighter, will it fit in a rail gun tube?”
“Sure but it will rattle around so much it will tear the tube up before it even gets a chance to exit at the terminus.”
“What if we put it inside a sheath that was the right size?”
“That could work.”
“How long would it take to make the sheath?”
“It’s already done Admiral,” Ben interjected. “We have dozens prefabricated so we can load them up with iron ore from asteroids.”
Ken looked at Cat. “Admiral, a fighter is not going to carry anything like the wallop of a solid iron-nickel slug.”
Cat smiled. “It doesn’t have to. If I’m right we will kiss the first moon which will deflect the bogy out of the path of Earth. The two moons will collide and form a single body. A portion of the lunar mass will impact Earth while the balance will move into space. The resulting binary system will have five percent less mass than it currently has and will slip into a slightly wider orbit around the sun as a result.”
Ken turned to his First Officer. “Get a team on that modified fighter-slug. Tell them to make it happen yesterday and let me know when it’s ready.”
Ken turned back towards Cat. “Admiral, I pretty much accept that you are always going to be the smartest person in the room… but even Yorky… linked with all his buddies couldn’t have calculated the numbers on the scenario you just laid out. How can you be sure you’re right?”
She patted him on the shoulder. “Because it’s already happened. Everything that has occurred since we got here has helped to create a solar system that looks more and more like ours. Our Earth-Moon system has five percent less mass. Less mass means a wider orbit if we are going to conserve angular momentum.”
“And of course we are going to conserve angular momentum,” Ken said.
***
Nicked-Tail watched as the last of the asteroids slammed into one of Earth’s moons. He had expected much more. The moon in question was shattered with some pieces moving into space and others hitting the planet below. Regrettably the vast majority formed a ring around the planet that the larger remaining moon slowly would consume over the next few decades. The impact certainly represented a major extinction event for the planet but it was hardly enough to sterilize it. The biosphere remained viable which meant the Modos had lost the war.
Deep seated programming that Nicked-Tail was not even aware he possessed took over. His Uruk masters could not bear the thought of a universe where they were not the masters. Better the universe die than that be allowed to happen.
He reached forward and pressed the switch. Thirty-two powerful hyperfield generators started to build up an inter-dimensional oscillation that would slowly rupture the fabric of space-time between the alpha and betaverse. When that happened the very laws of physics would collapse and all that was, all that ever would be… would cease to exist. It was the last thought Nicked-Tail had as every atom in his body was torn apart.
Chapter Seventeen – New Beginnings
The crews of the Relentless and Mador worked through the next few days rescuing the remain
ing Venusian colonists. Shortly after the asteroid strike in near-Earth space, the hyperfield dampening had abated allowing them to microjump into close orbit.
Meanwhile the Exeter kept a careful watch on the remaining Modos capital ships. Fortunately none of them seemed inclined to make trouble. This meant the Yorktown was free to return to the asteroid belt. The Ceres platform had performed perfectly up until a few days ago but now there were signs something was going seriously wrong.
“What in the world is that?” Ken asked as he looked out the forward viewscreen.
On the screen a violent pulsating purple vortex was swirling.
“That,” Cat said, “is the biggest problem we have faced to date. Yorky please confirm we are looking at an inter-dimensional hyperfield conduit.”
The ship’s AI responded after a few seconds. “Your assessment is essentially accurate. However it appears to be closing and reopening every few seconds.”
“Can you tell anything else in your observations?”
“Affirmative. The hyperfield waveform appears to be locked in a constructive interference loop that is causing it to become stronger over time.”
“And what is the ultimate outcome?” Cat asked as she walked closer to the view screen.
“If the Suhtian physicists we have conferred with in the past are correct – and we have every reason to believe they are – then the brane barrier between the alpha and betaverse will rupture. The two universes will merge and the physical constants that allow each to survive in perfect balance will be changed. In all likelihood, the combined mega-verse will be unstable and dissolve into surrounding dimensions.”
“It seems like we need to find a way to shut this thing down,” Ben said.
“The question is ‘how?’” Ken added. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to access the Ceres platform.”
Cat walked around the bridge. Her body was on the Yorktown but her mind was elsewhere. What was it that Head Archivist Sna’st had said before?
‘Suffice it to say… the key to this message is the key to your ultimate success’
“Somehow the Agur were trying to tell us about this. The key to this message is the key to success,” Cat said aloud.
“John 3:16,” Ken repeated. “A passage that talks about ultimate self-sacrifice.”
“Somehow the key to beating this thing is going to come down to making a sacrifice.”
“Which is?” Ben asked.
“Life, liberty, peanut butter… it could be any number of things,” Ken said in frustration.
“The universe,” Cat said quietly.
“Admiral?”
“The universe,” Cat repeated. “We hold the universe most dearly. Everything we have done is to protect it. Maybe what the Agur were telling us was to save the universe… we need to be willing to lose it.”
The two men said nothing as they stared at her in disbelief. Destroying the universe had not been on any of their ‘To Do’ lists that morning.
Cat laughed. “Don’t you see? We can’t stop this hyperfield cascade. The universes are going to merge one way or another at this point. What we can do… however… What we must do… is to create a stable waveform that makes it energetically difficult – if not impossible –for the contents of these two universes to merge.”
Ken nodded his head. He was at heart an engineer and his mind appreciated the simplicity of what she was suggesting. The same laws that allowed a piano to be tuned could theoretically be used to stabilize the brane barrier between the universes. Nothing would ever be the same. Hyperfield jumping might not even be possible except in very localized spaces where the branes met… but that was a small price to pay for the survival of two universes.
“In simple terms… how do we stabilize this beast then?” Ben asked.
Ken looked at Cat and then Ben. “We are going to have to take the Yorktown in there at precisely the right moment and with exactly the right resonance on our hyperfield emitters. If we are off even a little bit, all we’ll do is destroy ourselves.”
Ben looked at Cat as if to confirm what his captain was saying. She smiled.
“You can’t be serious? Surely there is another way?”
“Think of it this way Ben. A tuning fork vibrates at a very specific frequency. If you hit it against a table it absorbs energy and begins to vibrate. If you hit it a second time it gets louder but the frequency doesn’t change. No matter how much energy you add the frequency stays the same. The frequency is stable.”
“And this helps us how?”
“Tuning forks work because they are bounded systems. The size of the fork determines the frequency. If you add energy to a bounded system only the amplitude changes. What we need to do is create a secondary standing wave that serves to bound and thus stabilize these destructive hyperfield oscillations. The beauty is – it becomes a self-stabilizing system once we set it up. It would be like dropping a marble in a bowl… the marble stays in the bowl because the sides are too high to allow it to escape.”
Ben shook his head and headed for the turbolift door.
“Where are you going?” Ken asked.
“If we are going to destroy the universe, I’m going to need a cup of hot chocolate!”
***This Ends Book Five of the Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles ***
Look for Cat’s adventure to continue soon in a bold new universe!
PREVIEW:
The Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles #6,
New Worlds
Coming out early 2015
Personal Log: 2486 was the first year of my new life. The GCP Yorktown taskforce which included the GCP Mador, the GCP Exeter and the GCP Relentless had traveled 3.5 billion years into the past in order to save the universe. The world we returned to however was barely recognizable. The Galactic Coalition still existed but for the first time I began to question whether I could remain loyal to it.
Sam Eddington had a problem. It was not the type of problem he could share with his wife. It was not the type of problem he could share with his son. That left only one person – Rhino, the owner and barkeep of one of Asimov’s rougher establishments, the Midway Bar and Grill. It was still early enough in the day so that the bar would not be too full. Rhino was the last person most people would visit if they had a problem but Rhino and Sam had a special relationship.
“Sammy my boy! How’s life been treating ya?” Rhino was about as big a man as they came. He weighed well over 200 kilograms and yet there was not an ounce of fat on him. He was a mountain of meat with a bi-polar disposition that could flip like a light switch from pleasant to positively dangerous. That said, he and Sam had always managed to work together.
“My life is getting complicated big guy,” Sam said in an excessively depressed voice.
Rhino placed a bitter beer on the counter. “Here drink this… a moist throat always helps a bad day.”
Sam downed the beer in a series of rapid gulps. Rhino raised a shaggy eyebrow.
“Sammy my boy, these complications… would they be the type that might require some less-than-completely-legal fire power?”
“That they would,” Sam agreed. “Can I assume a trip to the back room might be in order?”
Rhino looked around the bar. The various patrons were engaged in private conversations or reading the daily news rags on their personal tablets. A few were catching up on the weekend’s football game. None were paying attention to them. Rhino waved Sandy over to the bar. She was Rhino’s wife and partner in the bar as well as their secondary businesses.
“Babe I need ya to watch the front for a few minutes.”
Sandy nodded silently as she picked up a glass off the shelf and polished it with a cloth she was carrying. Rhino tapped Sam’s arm and motioned him to follow him into the back room. The bar was dark near the rear which suited their purposes just fine.
A small man with an exceptionally thin face and a hooked nose sat unnoticed in a dim booth in one corner of the bar. He appeared to be reading newies on a tablet b
ut in fact he was watching everybody and everything. He had seen Sam enter and had immediately flagged his superiors at the Bureau of Commerce Investigation. BCI was the Senate’s tax evasion watch dogs.
He watched the target and the bartender head into a storeroom. He waited patiently. He was probably the only one not surprised when twenty black booted BCI shock troops came crashing through the front door.
***
Admiral Cat Kimbridge wiped the sweat from her brow. The trip through the temporal vortex had been far quicker but far rougher than the first time they had traveled it. None of the ships in her taskforce had been lost although it would take several weeks in a space dock to fix some of the holes the Modos Syndicate had managed punch their armor.
Captain Ken Kirkland looked every bit as relieved as Cat to have successfully exited the vortex. The careful balancing act the Yorktown and other ships had engaged in to stabilize oscillating the transdimensional hyperfield conduit had taken every ounce of stamina he and his crew had been able to muster.
“Ziggy… launch three probes towards the other ships. Let’s reestablish our FTL links. Even if we can’t talk to the GCP yet, at least we’ll be able to talk to one another.”
Cat stood up and walked from her Admiral’s chair to Ken. “It might be a good idea to have astrometrics confirm where ‘here and now’ is.”
Ken nodded.
Before he could say anything a proximity alarm began to blare. In the forward viewscreen a single small alien ship materialized. Cat recognized it immediately. A holographic image floated in the center of the Yorktown’s bridge.
“Greetings Blessed of the Creator”
Cat smiled. “Hello Yarin… how are the Heshe these days?”
---- This ends the preview of book 6 ----