Hunter Legacy 8: Hero to the Rescue

by Timothy Ellis

  "Spit it out Jon," said Annabelle eventually.

  "We have some more information about the mystery we'd come across with Homer. I'll summarize. Homer was declared missing ten years ago, yet she was in the Sirius system for only two. She didn’t detect us when we rescued the medical shuttle, and we didn’t detect them, even though there is no way either could have missed the other. The conclusion is we were never here at the same time, but this contradicts what we each know. Add to that, on our way out of the system, we found our comnavsats on each side of the jump point were missing. No debris, so they weren't destroyed. Also, and here's where it gets really weird, the primaries in the Sirius system had moved significantly from when we entered the system, and the planet Enterprise was not where we expected it to be."

  "How can that be?" asked Abigail.

  "Oh," said Grace, and we locked eyes.

  "Yes," I said, before looking away.

  "Yes what?" said Jack.

  "Okay, some of you are not going to believe this."

  Most of them I thought.

  "Believe what?" demanded Amanda.

  "We've all come forward in time."

  "Like in Who?" asked Aline.

  "Sort of."

  "How far in time?" asked George.

  "Fifty two years."

  Twenty

  The silence went on for a long time, before it was finally broken precisely how I expected it to be.

  "Bullshit!"

  Jack of course.

  "Bullshit, sir," muttered someone at the back, and the tension broke.

  "Makes sense," said Jackman. "Jack, do the math. It explains how we can be missing for ten years, but only experience two years of elapsed time."

  "Sam, you do the math. It's what I keep you around for."

  He smiled at her to take the edge off it.

  "Trust it then. I'll check the simulations for you. I'll do the math, but it fits so far, as way out as it seems."

  "Way out is right," said BA.

  There were a lot of nods. And more silence.

  "How do we get back?" asked Grace, the only one game to ask the obvious question.

  I looked at Jane.

  "I only have speculation at this point."

  "Let's hear it."

  "We thought the Sirius primaries rotated around each other. What if that wasn’t true after all, and the null point was actually a fifth dimensional node, which the two stars are rotating around, as well as each other?"

  "Fifth dimensional?" asked Carter.

  "Fourth dimension is space," answered Grace. "Fifth is time."

  "So the null spot is some kind of time portal?" I asked Jane.

  "Could be. To enter it is to exit linear time. The stress lines around it could be ruptures in the space time continuum, or they could be time being compressed. Either way, crossing them as you go in moves you forward in time. Homer took longer to travel the distance, so she travelled further into the future."

  "How do we go back?" asked Grace again.

  "Wait one."

  Jane went blank. We waited in silence.

  "Both ships entered the same way, although Homer did it at an angle, where we did it up the path of least resistance. We were heading in the same direction though, in the general direction the system itself is travelling though space. So in theory, heading the same way as the system, especially out the other side, moves you into the future. If so, doing it in reverse should move you to the past."

  "So why aren't we heading back there already?" asked Jack.

  "Because," I said, "we have another mystery."

  "Of course we do," muttered Dick.

  "In the fifty two years since we passed through the Enterprise system, the system has either been abandoned, or destroyed."

  "What?" said a number of people.

  "Enterprise is gone. There is no sign of her in the system or on the planet. The settlement there is also gone. There is no human life down there, and every sign of human occupation is gone."

  Silence did a couple of laps around the room.

  "Ragnarok?" said Jackman, at the same time Amanda and Aleesha both said "The Darkness?"

  "It's possible," said Jane.

  "What's possible?" demanded BA.

  "That prophesy has been and gone, and we missed it."

  "We can't leap to that conclusion," said Dick. "One system wiped clean isn’t evidence. The settlement there was barely viable. It could easily have been dismantled and moved somewhere else."

  "True," I said. "So the question for this moment is, do we go and check further to find out if this is a one of, or something entirely more unsettling, or do we head back and try to get back to our own time?"

  "We head back," said Jack.

  There were a lot of nods to support him.

  "We can't go back," said Jane. "At least not yet."

  "Here it comes," said someone at the back.

  "The matter stream between the two Sirius primaries is active. Our shields simply couldn’t take trying to go through it. I think the only reason we survived it as we entered this time was the fact time was in flux for us as we entered and left the matter stream, and by the time we were back in normal time, we were well beyond the matter stream."

  "How long before its safe?" I asked quickly, to head off other questions.

  "Month or so, I'd need to run the numbers. I'll also see what can be done about boosting our shields."

  "Does that make any difference to when we finally go back to?" asked Alison.

  "It shouldn’t. I'd need to calculate how long we stay in the time flow to get us back to when we entered it. In theory, we should be able to arrive back just after we left. In practice, there could be a give or take to the equation."

  "Fine," I said hurriedly to stop further discussion. "Let's consider ourselves stuck here for the time being. We can use the time to see what's happened elsewhere, if anything."

  "You're the boss, boss," said BA.

  There were nods from those who knew me best.

  "Jane, take us to Toulon. Normal cruising speed."

  "Confirmed."

  BigMother turned away from the planet, and began to pick up speed.

  "Drop comnavsats?" asked Jane.

  "No, nothing here to worry about checking on. Let's see if there is one on the other side of the next jump point."

  "And if there isn't?"

  "It would be a bad sign. Let's not go there until we have to."

  "Confirmed."

  I looked around the Bridge.

  "Nothing else we can do here tonight, unless someone has questions?"

  "I think we all have questions Jon," said Annabelle. "But perhaps we should get some sleep now, and get our ducks in a row tomorrow."

  I nodded.

  "Dismissed everyone. See you at training as usual."

  There was a series of goodnights, and everyone left, leaving just me and Jane.

  "Do you really think we can get back like that?" I asked her.

  "I have no idea, but it seemed like the right thing to say at the time."

  "Do the math."

  "Confirmed."

  I found Aline waiting for me in my bedroom, and after a quick stress reliever, Angel joined us on the bed, and I let sleep take me.

  Twenty One

  I was back on the bridge by five, not long before we made orbit around Toulon. Jane filled me in on our comnavsats on both sides of the jump point being missing again, and we still didn’t have any com traffic. We had to assume the comnavsats were missing at the Marseille jump point as well.

  Until we came into range of a working comnavsat, or a normal comsat, we couldn’t receive any email, or see traffic on the nav map. Of course, worst case was, there were no comnavsats or comsats anywhere, no ships to see moving, and no people to be sending emails. I tried very hard not to go there.

  Toulon was like Enterprise. There was no station in orbit, in fact, nothing at all in orbit. There was no animal life on the planet at all. And no sign
people had ever lived there.

  Jane put us on course for the next jump point. There was no point in lingering here. I was starting to feel the urge to go to maximum speed so we could find out the worst as fast as we could get to it. But this made no sense. Spaceships can't be run on max for too long without breaking down. And a few extra hours were not going to make any difference at all.

  I went back to bed, with orders left to not disturb me unless really necessary. Aline was still asleep, as was Angel, so I crawled in under the sheet without waking them. Jane would let Aline know not to disturb me when she woke.

  I slept through training and breakfast, and had to shower alone when I did wake. There was no-one on the Bridge when I walked in, save Jane in her usual place.

  She shook her head at me. So still no comnavsats or comsats.

  I sat in my chair, took out my pad, and continued catching up on emails. A lot of this stuff was notifications which I no longer paid any attention to. It was continually filed away, against the time when I caught up to it. I had now. In half an hour, I'd run out of pad work.

  I switched back to my book instead.

  I was interrupted by Jack, as he clumped past me, to sit in the XO's chair.

  "You missed training," he said deadpan.

  Not much of an opening conversational gambit.

  "I was up here at five."

  "I was jogging your Cargo Deck at five."

  "I was never a marine."

  "Touché."

  "What's on your mind Colonel?"

  "I've never seen a ship before which didn’t have a Bridge crew twenty four seven. It’s a bit unnerving."

  "I started in a custom built Privateer. Never had a need for a Bridge crew. Or any crew for that matter."

  "Yet now you have your own private army?"

  "Yeah. I wonder how that happened."

  We both chuckled.

  "I can't believe how fast this ship is. Or how heavily it's armed. And apparently all your doing?"

  "Guilty as charged. The one thing I can't stand is people telling me it can't be done. It can always be done, if you're prepared to pay the price for it. It helps though if you have a genius ship designer on hand who loves a challenge. At least early on anyway. Jane does most of the designing these days."

  "Ah, yes, Jane. They tell me she's an AI? And that’s why you don’t have a ship crew."

  "All true."

  "And you managed to convince the American military to embrace AI's"

  "That was harder. But I had several of their officers with me for a time during the war, and they convinced their superiors. Given their casualties, they had to do something to modernize."

  "Modernize? Their ships were modern, even if it was ten years ago I last saw them."

  "Not so much how old the ships were, but the mindset behind their design. They were continuing on from the designs of the last war, for a new sector war between dueling capital ships. Midgard then hit them with two hundred missile salvos, which they were completely incapable of dealing with. At the same time, they saw my custom designed Corvette was able to survive, and much of it was about Point Defense and a good AI firing it. Later in the war the AI became essential, as the number of missiles fired was way beyond what people could cope with. Things have changed, but the sectors hadn't. The enemy at the moment is pirates, and the biggest threat out there is not their Battleships, but the squadrons of Privateers. The ship-of-the-line, as they stood before the Midgard war, was vulnerable to the Privateer, but no-one wanted to admit it."

  "I saw you captured several Battleships. What do you plan to do with them?"

  "Evolving them I hope. I sent them back to my shipyard with a set of requirements. The AI there is a clone of Jane. I'm hoping what comes out meets my expectations."

  "Which are?"

  "A closely guarded secret at the moment."

  He laughed.

  "Of course they are."

  "Too many of my secrets are out there now. As I can, I keep pushing the development work forward."

  "Like your Rescue Mole?"

  "Rescue? I'm not in the rescue business Jack."

  "Then what was that we did yesterday?"

  "Test drive of new equipment. Successful test I might add."

  We both laughed this time.

  "If you say so."

  "I do. Now what's the real reason you came up here?"

  "I had a couple. My ship crew are not used to having time off. They'll go stir-crazy soon, if I don’t find them something to do. The only thing which kept my crew sane over the last two years was the daily routine, simulations and training. I was wondering…"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "No, they are not going to do Bridge watches up here."

  "Fine. It's not going to be pretty though."

  "They have plenty of options. You can retrain some of them, or give them additional training. There are the assault and training courses for marine work. The Pilot's Mess has an excellent simulator, which includes the ships from just about every space based computer game made. The Marine Mess has a version of Warcraft running. We have an extensive library of entertainment of all sorts, and a theatre to view a lot of it in. If I was you, especially after two years of boredom, I’d tell them to take a vacation while they have the chance. There is stuff in our library which goes back centuries. My head of security is currently reading six hundred year old detective stories. And my crew are watching twentieth and twenty first century flat screens each evening. If they don’t want to be sociable, they can access from just about anywhere. If they go stir-crazy, we have a perfectly adequate medical center, with bored medicos eagerly wanting someone to practice on. And if they really flip out, the brig is pretty big."

  I grinned at him.

  "I will pass that on," he said deadpan. But his eyes twinkled.

  "Next?"

  "I understand you have a number of Cruiser hulls." I nodded. "Have you given thought to turning one into an Assault Cruiser?"

  "I have. Was thinking about it yesterday in fact, given we're pushing the limits of what Custer can handle."

  "What would you do?"

  I told him.

  "About to orbit Marseille," interrupted Jane some time later.

  I noticed we had a few extras on the Bridge, and more were streaming on now. Jane must have passed the word. Annabelle walked up to her chair, and stood there, pointedly looking at it. Jack laughed, jumped up, and took a seat further back. Annabelle regally sat in hers, while the twins laughed. Point nicely made, I thought. He might have outranked her once, but on this ship, the XO was a one star.

  I dragged my thoughts back to the planet, and my eyes to Jane.

  "The same. Nothing in orbit. No sign of people ever being on the planet. No animals."

  Silence was getting a lot of exercise lately.

  "Suggestions?" I asked eventually.

  "What are the options?" asked Amanda.

  "Jane?"

  "I think we all want to know if this goes all the way to Earth. Yes?" There was general agreement. "But we really should also check Cannes and Nice, which are off on a dead end from here. Just in case they were bypassed."

  "Bypassed?" asked BA.

  "Well if we assume we're dealing with something using the jump points, then it's possible they didn’t find them all."

  "And if it was something that wasn’t using the jump points?" asked Alana.

  "Like what?" demanded BA.

  "I don’t know," bit back Alana defensively.

  "Could have been some sort of celestial event," offered Jane. "We know very little about the void of space, both between the stars, and between the galaxies. Everything is moving, even if we can't actually detect this ourselves. Its possible areas of space are hostile to animal based life, and as this part of the galaxy passed through it, all animal life just ceased."

  "Doesn’t explain how the evidence of civilization is gone as well," I said.

  "Maybe," said Grace quietly, "all li
fe and any complex molecule was affected, leaving only dirt and water. If it's been fifty years, the planets may be regenerating fast, but only for plants."

  "That’s odd," interrupted Jane. "There's evidence of a very recent ice age here. And now I see it, it was also present on Enterprise and Toulon, although harder to see."

  "Is that a cause, or a consequence?" asked Jackman.

  "Good question," I said.

  "No idea," admitted Jane.

  "Major," I said to Jackman. "Care to set up a study group? Jane will feed you the information on each planet as we visit them. Use anyone interested enough to join you. Do anything you want with the data."

  She thought for a moment, glanced at her husband, received a nod, and smiled a nod to me.

  "Good. There are offices on Deck One. Conference room is available as well. Use what you need. Ask Jane for anything you want."

  I looked around at the people sitting and standing here.

  "Anyone interested, please see the Major." I turned back to Jane. "Jane, Cannes and Nice please. Make orbit only for long enough to get the scans we need, pass the data to the Major, and then push us on to Earth, checking each planet on the way. In Wolf 359, we need to know if any of the jump points still have a comnavsat."

  "I can verify that the fastest," said Melissa.

  "Let me think about it. For now, I'm not inclined to having people wondering around by themselves. It might not be safe." I paused, but she didn’t challenge it. "Jane, scans, and move us along."

  "Confirmed".

  "Who's for lunch?" I asked.

  Twenty Two

  We arrived at the Wolf 359 jump point two days later.

  Cannes, Nice, France, and Paris, were all the same. No animal life, no signs of humans ever being there, evidence of a recent ice age. Nothing in orbit, nothing at jump points.

  The Bridge was full again, even though it was most unlikely anything would happen.