"That was outrageous!" I said.
"Wasn’t it just. But it solves our problem at the other sites."
"How so?"
"We define the area we want to excavate, tell the sword how far to go down, and have it cut out the entire area, after which a salvage droid simply plucks the entire healing temple and engine room out of the ground, and deposits it somewhere, yet to be determined."
"Why not determined?"
"We don’t have an airlock big enough to allow that sized an object in. From the specs, it looks like the whole thing will occupy the space of about four containers. That is, lay two containers next to each other, lay two more on top, and join them together to make a solid. The shortest diameter will be a minimum of two containers wide, and the airlocks are designed for one. And it could be more, depending on how we have to cut. They would fit on several of the Cargo Decks, but we don’t have an opening big enough to get them in."
"Where do you think is best to put them?"
"Unassailable. The Battleship has the biggest Cargo Deck in terms of dimensional volume, and unused space."
"Get going on making a bigger airlock then. Just make sure it will still dock with conventional ones."
"Confirmed."
"Now what?"
We continued cutting until we had a set of rough stairs going down one side. At the bottom, Jane had me cut a good sized square into the inside wall. When the salvage droid had plucked out the segment, we peered inside. The bird dropped down beside us, and I leaned back to give it room to enter. It went up to the ceiling, and changed its light so it wasn’t too powerful for the small enclosed space. Jane and I jumped down inside.
For the first time in more than twenty five thousand years, a man walked the floor of this Atlantean healing temple.
I was intensely disappointed. Nothing had survived but crystal and rock. In the middle of the room was a stone bed. Crystals of all kinds lined the walls and ceiling. It was spectacular, but. I wasn’t sure I could articulate the but. But there was a but.
Jane led the way to a corner, and a door slid open. The bird came down and entered first, and we went down after it.
Again there was a feeling of disappointment. The center of the room contained a massively huge multi-geode crystal, as if giant geodes of different colours had been fused together to form a specific shape. It looked made, while at the same time, it looked grown.
Power rolled off the crystal.
Around the walls were more crystals of varying sizes and colours.
Our suits changed to full protection mode suddenly, as the central crystal pulsed, and an arc of lightning shot from the center crystal to one on a wall. Jane immediately moved the bird out, so it wouldn’t be fried by another such discharge.
I looked at the base of the crystal, going on instinct I didn't know I had, and from a cluster of small crystals, I extracted the central red one, and laid it down. The power died. Our suits changed back to 'slinky red'.
"Off switch," I said to Jane.
She looked at me, as if trying to suppress asking how I’d known. I tapped my finger against my nose, and smiled at her.
"So," she said, "what do you want to do?"
"Get some cargo droids down here. I want the power crystal excavated, and moved to BigMother, hush hush. See what can be removed from the walls without breaking. I’d like to see if we can recreate a working power source from this room. Be careful how far down this crystal goes too. Besides not wanting to break it, knowing how far down it goes will tell us how deep we need to go with the other three."
"You won't be cutting a way into them?"
"No, that’s why I came here first. I wanted to open one up and see the inside first. The other three, we cut out of the ground like we did the top-soil here, and take them as one big solid chunk of Earth. Once on a Cargo Deck, we can cut a surgical hole in, so we can check the state of the internal crystals without damaging anything. For the time being, we will need to turn them off as well. Before we try to do anything with the three, we see if we can use this one. If we can't, we still take the others as a long term project. I don’t know why, but we may need them down the track sometime. It's why we were brought here. So let's get this one topside."
"Confirmed."
Jane and I returned to BigMother, passing Gunbus coming the other way, with another avatar on board, and droids and salvage droids to do the excavation.
Twenty Seven
The week passed.
The archeology team reported back, finding that any site which might have been visible once the ocean retreated, was gone. But they did find several sites in Egypt where it was always suspected there were burial chambers, but they had never been found. With modern sensors, they were quite easy to find, and it gave the bulldozers something to practice on. After confirming they had never been opened, they were sealed back up, and buried again.
The grave digger teams reported finding no signs of either grave stones, or human remains. Anywhere. The list had included grave sites for major cities, and the locations of sacred grounds dotted around the globe. While it had been centuries, there should have been something. The USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii was gone. No ship, no remains. The teams expanded their search for other ships with known positions. While after all this time, not a lot was expected to be recognizable as a ship, there should at least have been metallic residues. Nothing. With no success on land, the sea was scoured for wrecks still under water. More nothing. It was like all processed metal across the planet had been wiped away.
The medical team reported back on finding some startling differences. The air was perfect for our sort of life, but many of the trees and plants making the air were now poisonous to us. They had tested water all around the planet, and found it perfectly safe to drink. However, the colour varied a lot, depending on the plant life nearby. They could not explain why this was so. But it seemed perfectly obvious to me. Evolution had started down a new path. All the higher species were gone, nature was starting again with something new.
The botany team couldn’t explain anything either. They had been disappointed to find no regrowth of species known to have gone extinct before the planet ceased to be habitable for humans. They had found a great deal of completely new species, including some spectacular orchids. They had very carefully extracted samples, and had for the time being, transplanted them to BigMother's arboretum.
Jane had outfitted Excalibur with a much better sensor and recording package, and had taken it on a recording run around the entire planet a number of times, recording everything she could. One of the interesting things she found was the faces missing from Mount Rushmore. She looked for evidence of volcanic activity which may have caused a new ice age, but found none. The Yellowstone caldera was as it had last been reported centuries before. And no other volcano had significantly erupted. The whole ice age thing remained a mystery.
The three Bermuda triangle sites were excavated by Jane and myself. The sight of a battleship hovering a thousand feet up from the beach you're standing on, was awesome. It was also a problem for Jane, who had to keep taking it back into space after each 'pickup', as it was not really built to just hover in a gravity field. Turning off the crystal engines had proved very easy to do. I used the sword to cut a very small hole, and Jane sent in a cleaning bot to pull the red crystal.
In between reports and field trips, Jane and I had pondered the shield issue. We were going nowhere unless we could come up with something to let us survive passing through the matter stream between the primaries. In a sense, we needed enough shielding to put up with the heat of the outer surface of the sun itself. The question was, how?
At one point I idly asked Jane how many shield generators we actually had. She started with BigMother, then added in Unassailable and the four Guardians, and Custer. They were all linked through the docking collars designed to hold them in place, and supplied the combined ship with a set of six shields at the combined strength of all the generators and thei
r power plants. The six protected a part of the ship, and together formed a full shield, responsive to events.
"But it's not just a matter of shield generators," she ended. "It's a matter of how much power you feed a set of shield emitters. The emitters are fed from independent power generators, which means we have shields even if the power generators for the engines die. So each ship has one or more shield power generators, linked to a set of emitters. What I did with the capital ships, was channel all the power from all the generators into BigMother's emitters. When they separate, the power goes back to each ship's own emitters."
I blinked at her.
"What about Gunbus?" I asked.
"What about her?"
"Could she be joined in too?"
"In theory, but she wouldn’t add in very much compared with the big ships."
"What about the Hives? And the fighters?"
"What about them?"
"They all have shield generators, even the shuttles, Dropships, and Lightning's. There's the freighters too, and Camel, as well as Excalibur, Gorilla, and all the Privateers in the external slots."
"You want to link them all up?"
"Would that give us enough?"
"It might. I’d have to run the numbers. But it would mean we'd be unable to launch anything at all until they'd been uncoupled and recalibrated. And even if it did, there's a very real chance that much power would blow BigMother's emitters, and leave us without a shield at all."
"What's the likelihood we emerge back in our own time to find a hostile fleet waiting for us?"
"Normally, very unlikely. With your luck, almost guaranteed."
"Ha-ha."
But she didn’t look like she was joking.
"Beside from that, running without shields in a system this dangerous, is asking to be hit by something deadly."
I pondered that for a minute.
"Do the calculations, and figure out how to do the connections. If it'll work, get on with doing the preparations. We'll do the actual joining up once we start back for Sirius."
"Confirmed."
Now, with only a day left before the Lightning's returned, the six teams had formed a combat suited army, and were practicing advancing across a battlefield with fighter support. I had donned my combat suit and joined in, Jane controlling a dozen of hers, both of us submitting to orders given by the twins as our team leader, and Jack as the officer in command on the ground. Annabelle was seated comfortably in Gunbus above the battleground, throwing curve balls at both Jack and Brown, the latter who was in Camel, and orchestrating both ground support and a high guard.
After dinner that night, she admitted to being very satisfied with the way Jack had handled the ever changing scenarios she had thrown at him. The teams had performed like the professionals they were. The giant suits had remained with the alpha team, and proved to be both useful and a hindrance. There was nothing stealthy about them for a start. They were too fast for normal combat suits to keep up, and while more heavily armoured, if cut off alone without support, might be found to be vulnerable to heavy fire or capital ship missiles. On the other hand, their giant Meson Blasters carved huge chunks out of the earth when fired, blasted down whole trees with a single shot, and made instant fox holes for the regular combat suits to hide in. While Brown quickly showed the limits of his expertise, Squadron Leader being about as high as he could go in the ranks, he still did quite well with what Annabelle threw at him.
Homer's combat suits had proved to be well out of date, but in superb condition. The fabricator was still making replacements for them.
"So," I said to Annabelle when she finished summarizing. "Do we want to keep Homer's Heroes?"
"Yes please. They are as good as their reputation said they were. And Jack is a superb field commander."
"Good. I'll let you convince him he wants to stay with us. If he needs a carrot, I'm more than willing to refit Homer into an Assault Cruiser. But don’t tell him I've some extra special ideas as well."
She grinned at me, and I grinned back.
On the last day, I let everyone have another day off below. Jane began the task of linking up the shield generators of every ship we had. I was surprised to find she was doing a permanent job. Permanent in terms of the connections being done in such a way as we could rapidly link up shields at any time in the future if we needed to. It also made sense it being done right, as the last thing we needed was a short which dropped our shields in the middle of the matter stream.
The Lightning's returned late in the day. The four of them all looked depressed and haunted.
"Nothing boss," said Melissa. "Every single system is wiped clean, every planet is the same as the others."
"Ditto," said Lacey.
They showed me where they'd been able to get.
Between them, they'd covered an area the size of the length of the Earth sector. I did the math, and found they'd gone a good deal further than I’d expected. I gave Lacey the eye, and he nodded. My orders had been ignored, even though they arrived back at the correct time. What they'd done was continually recalculate how fast they would get back on the shortest route possible, without visiting planets, and where necessary, skimming a bit close to suns. It allowed them to go outward for more than the five days I’d allotted, knowing they would take less time coming back. I wasn’t going to press it. They got the job done.
Now we knew it wasn’t just a local thing. And we knew it went both ways along the spine. It didn’t tell us where it began though, which would have been useful.
I sent the four of them down to sit on a beach and watch a sunset, before we left.
With most of the crew down on a beach somewhere, I sat on the Bridge, watching the image of the whole planet moving below us.
Eventually I turned to Jane, sitting in her normal position.
"Have you figured out how to reverse the time field?"
"It's still just a theory. We go in where we came out last time, and back through the null zone against the direction the system is travelling. We exit where we first entered. If I'm right, most of the time distortion is in the exit phase. Which is why the matter stream is so dangerous to us now, and wasn’t when we came through the first time."
"And this should return us to the same time we left?"
"In theory, as I said. We might get lucky. But we might overshoot, or undershoot. And frankly, I think if we hit the right year, it will be a miracle."
I looked at her with my mouth open. After a few minutes like that, I pushed my jaw closed.
"You can't be more precise?"
"No. There are too many variables. This is a crapshoot, nothing more, nothing less."
"Well, do the best you can. We'll deal with the result."
"Confirmed."
Twenty Eight
"How we doing Jane?"
"Cooking nicely."
We were only using sensors, since the heat and glare of the sun was too much to look at, even dulled down. The France sun was hotter than Earth's, and we were sitting well within the corona.
We'd left the morning following the Lightning's return, and it had taken us a day to get here. BigMother had been inside the sun now for just on an hour. I figured doing the test, and making the passage, were best done during the morning.
"Be serious."
"The new shield configuration is holding."
Jane had reconfigured our shields, using the shield power generators of every ship we had.
The first problem she had to overcome was connecting all the ships. This proved a matter of adding an extra power conduit to the docking clamps of the larger ships; which already contained power, water, and sewage connections; and the same smaller connections used in the Launch Bays, and Maintenance Bays.
But the connections proved to be the easy bit, since it was a matter of altering specifications, and turning all the repair droids loose on faulty systems.
Simulations showed very clearly what happened when all of them were connected at once. Po
of, no shields. The emitters simply couldn’t handle that much power.
Jane started scaling back, by removing all the ships smaller than a Corvette. No problems. She added in all the Hives, and poof. She removed the Hives, and added in the Privateers, and the shields held. But the diagnostics for the emitters suggested the power level was border-lining the red zone.
I'd asked if she could re-route the Hives and smaller ships to the emitters on Unassailable, and set them up as a secondary shield within the main one.
Jane looked at me for two long minutes without moving, before grinning widely.
She'd finished the modifications only minutes before we'd arrived here.
"How long could we stay here before they drained enough to kill us?"
"Around the twelve hour mark for the primary shields, and another hour for the secondary. Give or take."
This was good news.
"Fine, let's be on our way then."
Jane spun us around, and we headed back out. One more day to the Sirius system.
* * *
"Everyone buckle up," I said into ship coms. "If you remember the last time we did this, expect it to be worse this time."
I nodded to Jane.
For the first time ever, I saw her hesitate.
The view was terrifying.
Last time we were here, the space between the two primary suns was clear. Now a river of the corona of Sirius A was flowing across space to be sucked in by B. At the center of it, was the null zone we had to travel through. When I say center, I mean the center. The matter stream quite literally flowed around the zone, leaving the null zone in the middle. Our sensors could detect it as being there, but we couldn’t see it.
Amanda slapped Jane on the shoulder, grinning wildly. Jane looked at her for a moment, and we began to move. We'd already made the journey out in front of the system advance, and arrived at the point where we needed to turn into the gap between the primaries.
Hunter Legacy 8: Hero to the Rescue Page 17