by B. V. Larson
A few hours later, we felt brave enough and confident enough to ignite the primary engine chambers. First, we had to stoke the core, which took guts in and of itself.
Squinting, despite the fact I knew it wouldn’t protect my eyes, I ordered Rumbold to begin the process.
“Are you sure, sir?” he asked worriedly.
“Just do it, Rumbold. We’ll die quickly if the chambers rupture.”
“That’s quite a comfort, sir!”
He finally applied his thumb to his board, then made a spinning motion around it, touching his index finger to the correct control.
Zye had read the instructions to figure out how to perform that particular maneuver. I took it that it wasn’t general knowledge, and that some Alpha designer of the past had wisely made the touch-sequence an awkward gesture that couldn’t be performed accidentally. It wouldn’t do to have someone sit on the console and fire up the core by simply leaning on it.
An intense rumbling rolled through the ship. We felt it in our bones. It was like an earthquake—but it was more of a deep vibration than a rolling or jolting. If I hadn’t been clenching my teeth, they might have clacked together.
“Status?” I said loudly.
“We’re good here,” Yamada answered.
“No breach shown,” Zye said.
“The panel is all green,” Rumbold said, “but that might mean we’re dead anyway.”
I gave him a silent “thank-you” and gazed at my supervisory panels. Apparently, a ship’s captain didn’t deserve the most detailed information feed in Beta systems design. What I saw was a diagram of the ship with vital systems blinking and interacting.
Most of the systems were still green, with a few yellow and red exceptions. Not everything on the ship had been repaired yet, such as the medical facilities. We’d focused on weapons first, then the engines. Frills could wait until we saw the blue-white sphere of Earth under us.
“Yamada, tell the crew to buckle up. We’re going to do this. I was planning to just warm the engines for a test-firing, but it’s my belief letting them go cold again while they’re damaged is more of a risk. We’ll press on and make our way back to Earth, starting now.”
Rumbold clapped his hands together and whooped. I smiled at him.
For the next few minutes, while the primary engine kept stoking itself up, we watched every instrument obsessively.
“Sir!” Rumbold shouted suddenly, making me jump. “I think—yes! We’re moving, Skipper!”
“Excellent, Chief,” I said, forcing my tensed muscles to relax. Rumbold had a way of generating excitement within himself and sharing it with anyone else who was listening.
“Confirmed,” Zye said. “We’re going to start feeling it soon. What thrust level do you wish to allow?”
I spun my chair slightly to look at her. “What’s the maximum?”
“Approximately thirty-Gs,” she said calmly. “But I wouldn’t recommend that kind of acceleration. My analysis of your cardiovascular structure indicates—”
“Cap it at two Gs for now, Zye,” I said, alarmed. Thirty Gs might be survivable for a Beta, but any Earth man would be crushed.
Before she eased off, I could feel myself getting heavy. The effects magnified until I was laboring to take a breath. Two Gs, after weeks of near weightlessness, felt like rib-crushing pressure. We were all gasping within five minutes.
“We’re two Gs,” Zye said calmly. “Are you sure you want to ease off on the acceleration?”
“Yes, please,” I said through gritted teeth. “We’re used to being pressed into our seats, but this flight is going to be a long one.”
Zye shrugged. “It will be even longer if we crawl along—but we’ve leveled off.”
Rumbold looked at me balefully. He was feeling it, I could tell. Longevity treatments didn’t completely erase the aches and pains that always accompany age.
-32-
The door to the bridge swished open ten minutes into the flight. Our acceleration level still stood at exactly two Gs. A struggling Lieutenant Morris gripped the doorway with his face twisted into a tormented mask.
“What’s going on up here?” he demanded.
“Sorry Lieutenant,” I said. “We sounded the klaxons and ordered everyone to their crash seats. Is someone injured?”
He shook his head. “They’re alive, but they’re bitching up a storm below decks. Are you crazy, Sparhawk? Who would apply this kind of thrust in a ship that’s barely operable?”
“These thrust levels are exceedingly low, Lieutenant,” Zye said. “I assure you, S-11 was designed to take far more.”
He looked at her suspiciously, then turned back to me. “You’re taking an alien’s advice on everything now?”
It was a stinging remark, and I shook my head slowly at him. “Zye isn’t an alien, she’s human. And yes, I’m taking her advice. No one else knows much about this vessel, Lieutenant. I’m glad to have her aboard to help us.”
Grumbling, Morris turned to go, but paused to ask a question over one hunched shoulder. “At least tell me where we’re going.”
“Earth, of course.”
Morris looked startled. “Is that wise, sir?”
“Where else would you have me go?
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I doubt there’s a safe harbor for this ship anywhere in the system.”
I looked after him as he staggered away, weighed down by the G-forces. The door closed behind him, and I was still frowning at it.
“Huh. That’s a long walk with two Gs on your shoulders,” Rumbold said. “He could have crawled, but he’s too proud for that, I’d wager. Even with that plastic leg of his.”
“Hmm?” I asked. “Ah yes, probably so… Rumbold, what do you think Earth’s reaction will be when we return home with our prize?”
He looked thoughtful. “They’ll panic, I’d bet. We need to talk to them before we park in orbit. We’ll look like an invasion force otherwise.”
It occurred to me that Rumbold was right. If we flew silently into orbit around Earth, well, it would look pretty scary from the ground. They might even fire missiles at us, and I wasn’t sure I could take them all out.
“All right,” I said, spinning to face Yamada. “Do we have long range communications working properly yet? We must get through to CENTCOM.”
“Negative, sir,” Yamada said. “We’re getting nothing through. For all I know, they’re beaming messages to us as well—but I’m not hearing a thing.”
“Helmsman, program a more circuitous route. If we can get out of line with whoever is jamming us, maybe we can get a message through.”
“Will do,” Rumbold said, “but this navigational software sucks.”
Zye spun around in her chair. “What’s the meaning of that term in this context?” she asked.
“What term…you mean ‘sucks?’” Rumbold asked. “It means something is substandard, garbage, irritating. Doesn’t make sense, I know, but that’s how Earthlings use the word.”
She gave him a hostile look. “It was programmed by two gifted Alphas,” she said. “There is no better design. It does not suck.”
“Yes it does,” Rumbold said, working the boards and grumbling.
I decided not to get between them. I took it as a good sign that Rumbold was now willing to injure Zye’s sensitivities without apology. It had always been his habit to do so with regular crewmen, and he was only demonstrating she was just one more member of the group to him.
Zye, on the other hand, was harder to read. Was she deeply upset by his words, or only mystified? It could have been either. She rarely showed much in the way of emotion on her face, and when she did, it was with a cold, predatory demeanor everyone else found disturbing. It was like teasing a large shark—you couldn’t tell if you were pissing it off or just making it hungry. An unfortunate scenario in either case.
When we were up to a full two Gs of thrust, we leveled off and maintained without any issue. After two full hours we were up to an i
mpressive cruising speed, and I had Zye reduce our acceleration levels to one G.
The crew sighed in relief. Everyone was sore and tired—except for Zye herself. She seemed utterly unperturbed by the experience. Even while the added force had been at its worst, she’d shown no signs of discomfort.
“What’s the standard gravity like on your home world, Zye?” I asked her.
“Slightly more than two Gs,” she said.
Nodding, I thought that over. “In that case, our recent acceleration was an easy vacation to you. Is that right?”
She frowned slightly and shook her head. “No, it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. I performed a regular routine of calisthenics in my cell at every eating period, but I still have atrophied significantly. A Beta native, fresh out of our gravity well, would break me easily on a sparring mat in my current condition.”
“Unless you tricked them, right?” I asked, smiling.
Zye eyed me for a moment, as if checking to see if she was being insulted again. Seeing my smile, she nodded confidently.
“I excel at unexpected tricks, it’s true. It’s nice to know someone who appreciates my gifts. I’ve lived my whole life hiding my greatest abilities.”
After giving her another reassuring nod, I stood up and stretched. My chair rolled away behind me, empty and spinning slowly. The whole deck was currently canted at about a twenty degree angle, as we were banking now, moving us off our initial course.
“Still no luck with the jamming?” I asked Yamada.
“I was just resending a message,” she said. “I’ll write a script to ping away at a list of relay satellites. I’m starting to see acknowledgements now and then—signals indicating we’ve gotten through the first layer of the handshaking protocol. But we’re still being jammed, I bet, because we can’t establish a working channel. They keep collapsing.”
“Keep working on it. Whatever is out there jamming us must have a range limit. We’ll escape them yet.”
Two days passed, during which we banked again, getting back onto course for Earth. Looking at the star charts, we hadn’t really managed to change the angle between Earth and our position that much. If the jamming source was close to Earth, we’d have to move halfway around to the other side of the Solar System to get an angle that would avoid this active jamming.
Accordingly, I’d ordered my crew to change course again, coming about and plotting a direct path to Earth—or at least to where Earth would be when we got there. We were traveling at such a tremendous speed now that we’d be there in less than a week.
We passed the rocks, then the orbit of Mars, before anything surprising happened. With about a hundred thousand kilometers to go, incoming contacts appeared on our boards.
I was sleeping when the klaxons went off, and I rolled out of bed onto the floor—or rather, I shot across the room. The ship was gliding now, with the big engines idling. The only gravity was the minimal pull the ship itself had due to its extreme mass.
Unused to the light gravity, instead of sliding out of bed I’d actually vaulted into the air and landed on the far wall. My elbow stung, but I was otherwise fine.
Muttering curses, I donned a fresh suit quickly and contacted the bridge.
“Rumbold? Yamada? Who set off the alarm?”
“It’s Zye here, Captain,” Zye’s calm voice came into my earpiece. “We’ve detected a group of ships on an intercept vector to our position.”
“How long do we have before they’re in weapons range?”
“About fifty minutes, sir, barring further course or speed adjustments on either side.”
“All right, you did well to sound the alarm,” I told her. “Contact Yamada and Rumbold, we need them on the bridge.”
“They’ve reported in and are on the way, Captain.”
I closed the connection and rushed to the bridge. I checked the time—it was three thirty in the morning on ship’s time. We hadn’t been maintaining round the clock watch-standers, as we were understaffed and not much had been happening for the last week of flight. The result was we’d all be bleary-eyed and fuzzy tonight.
When I reached the bridge, I was gratified to see I wasn’t the last man to get there. Rumbold followed me by a full minute. He looked like he’d been up all night drinking—which was entirely possible. His normally bloodshot eyes were like two red coals.
With a wordless grunt, he heaved himself into his seat and began slapping at the controls.
“Those aren’t attacking ships,” he said after examining the data. “They’re Star Guard ships. Don’t you know your own allies, Yamada?”
She cast him back a sour glance. “Zye sounded the alarm, not me.”
I spoke with crewmen who’d rushed to their battle stations here and there around the ship, telling them to maintain a ready stance. Then I turned to Rumbold.
“Earth ships?” I asked. “Size, configuration?”
“Destroyers, sir.”
“How many?”
“All of them, apparently. I’ve got five large contacts, and a dozen or so screening vessels. Pinnaces like old Cutlass.”
His explanation didn’t satisfy me. “Rumbold,” I said, “you’ve been in Star Guard for many more years than I have. When has CENTCOM ever put all their ships into one task force?”
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I was going to say during an exercise or a parade—but no. They’ve never done so, to the best of my knowledge.”
“That’s right. It’s against the Admiralty’s doctrine to do so. They’ve never wanted to put all their eggs into one basket, so to speak.”
Rubbing at my face for a moment, I tried to think. I needed a shower and breakfast—but I doubted I had time for either.
“What’s the status of our defensive systems?” I asked Yamada.
She looked at me in alarm. “You don’t think they’ll fire on us, do you?”
I made a waving gesture, suggesting she should answer my question.
“We don’t have much. We spent all our time getting the engines, helm and navigational systems working. Since then, I’ve focused the repair robots on improving sensors and communications.”
Turning to Zye, I looked at her. She returned my gaze with unblinking seriousness.
“We might be able to get some point-defense cannons operable in the next hour,” she said. “I’ve had a few robots working on armament since the beginning.”
“That was never approved by my station,” Yamada said.
“No,” I said, “but it appears to have been a smart play. Let’s inspect these systems.”
“They’re on the hull—forward and aft,” Zye said. “The robots could be ordered to focus solely on them, but—”
“Do it, Zye. Then you and I are going out there to have a look. I want to see the hull integrity for myself, and the state of our guns.”
I transferred the bridge to Rumbold’s capable hands, urging him not to make any sudden maneuvers without warning us. We’d be cast off into space if he did.
Zye followed me stoically to the airlock. “She doesn’t like me,” she said.
“What? You mean Yamada?”
“Of course. She never approves of any action I take. She assumes the worst intent on all my decisions.”
“Why do you think that’s the case?”
“I’m a threat to her.”
I thought about that for a moment. But then the airlock finished its cycle and opened up onto a scene of stars and planets.
The sun hung like a brilliant search beam over the prow. Our visors dimmed automatically to keep us from being blinded, and our radiation counters began to tick loudly. There must have been a small storm in the region.
What was most shocking was the near total lack of ice on our hull. It had almost all melted away now as we were much closer to the heat of the sun. Our engines had warmed up the hull as well, finishing the job.
The ship’s hull was starkly exposed. It had transformed into a vessel of stained metallic gold.
“Why do you think you’re a threat to Yamada?” I asked Zye.
“Because she likes to be the smartest person on the bridge. The one with all the answers. She fancies herself to be an Alpha.”
I smiled at that as I led the way across the hull. We had our magnetic boots activated, and each step clicked and clanked.
“She does pride herself on her technical competency,” I admitted. “But I hardly see how—”
“Not only that,” Zye said. “She sees me as a sexual rival as well.”
I took a misstep and almost pitched onto my face. Zye’s massive gauntlet reached out quickly, caught my elbow, and righted me.
“You should be careful,” she said. “There are many cables and pipes on the outer hull.”
“Right,” I said, “about your last comment…”
“Let’s forget about it. Isn’t that what Earthlings would say? Further discussion would only embarrass both of us.”
“Consider it forgotten, then,” I said.
Two hundred halting steps took us to the prow, where a cluster of guns stood aiming at nothing. They were arrayed on a bulbous pod, looking like a sea anemone that had lost most of its spines.
“Here we are,” I said, examining the pod. “They look operable, but there are only six cannons? That’s the whole forward cluster?”
“No,” Zye said. “There are four such pods. Another is opposite this one on the prow. Then there are two more on the fantail.”
“Let’s have a look.”
By the time our little inspection tour was done on the prow, I’d found the robot team. They were working like ants on the second forward pod. They had a chain going, carting materials and tools back and forth with furious intensity. Each of the multi-limbed bots seemed capable of welding, lifting and placing elements at the same time.
“Before the enemy ships are in range,” Zye said. “We should have both the forward pods working. That’s only fifty percent of our armament, but it will have to do.”
“Enemy?” I asked. “Those are Star Guard destroyers out there—Earth’s finest. They aren’t our enemies.”