by Medron Pryde
Malcolm frowned, a feeling of almost recognition filling him, as the display returned to the standard rendering of nearby space. He’d never heard a voice like that sound so harsh, but an echo of warmth tickled the back of his memories. He glanced at Dawn, a question in his eyes. She crossed her arms and smiled back with determination. Then he turned to see the eyes of the bridge crew on him. Now wasn’t the time to wonder why that woman over there felt familiar. Now was the time for action.
“We’re leaving,” he announced in a determined tone without rising from his chair. Beside him, Dawn nodded in agreement. “And I think she’s gonna follow. If you’ve got reservations about running from something like that, I understand.”
The bridge crew returned his look, recognizing the offer behind his words, and then turned to their captain. She smiled and he saw the haunted look in her eyes again. But he saw determination, too, and she nodded at him. “Lieutenant Jones,” she began, her voice clear and strong. “Please inform Wolfenheim she can initiate acceleration now.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Jones answered without hesitation and began whispering into her microphone.
“Lieutenant Lopez,” Olivia continued, her voice that of a woman born to command a starship. “Maintain formation with Wolfenheim, if you please.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” the helmsman answered and ran his hands across the controls. He finally finished and leaned back in his chair, a pleased look on his face. A few seconds later, the massive colony ship’s engines glowed to life and she began to pull away from the Peloran yard complex. Normandy’s main engines rumbled in time with the larger ship, and Malcolm watched every ship of his squadron accelerate away from the complex in perfect synchronization. Not one of them was holding back. Except Hastings, of course.
“Malcolm,” Dawn whispered and he turned to look at her again. She glanced down and he followed her gaze to a small holodisplay floating in the air before him. It showed their small fleet accelerating away from the station and the incoming squadron. Projected courses of each fleet showed their routes through the sphere of space controlled by the Peloran yard’s gravitic interference. The Red Line marked the gravitic jamming field that forced all ships to keep their distance from the yard when diving or rising in and out of hyperspace. The display twitched, showing an escape pod accelerating away from Hastings.
“That’s Mary,” Dawn reported with approval. “She flashed the primary computers before evacuating.”
Malcolm smiled. “Good.” If they couldn’t have Hastings, leaving the ship brain-dead was one way to make certain it couldn’t be used to chase them down. The display showed the escape pod accelerating away from the ship until a passing shuttle snagged her with a tractor beam. Malcolm frowned and glanced at Dawn. “Is that good or bad?”
She chuckled. “Very good.” A gaggle of shuttles joined the first on the display, each accelerating away from the yard at what had to be maximum acceleration. “It seems somebody was thinking ahead,” Dawn whispered with a look towards Olivia. “She already had the crew assembled in the station hangar bays.”
“Good.” Malcolm hated leaving people behind. “Those shuttles can catch us, right?”
“They can catch Wolfenheim if they need to,” she answered, not quite correcting him. “They could never meet the rest of us if she wasn’t slowing us down, though.”
“Got it,” Malcolm whispered, back to scanning the display for any clue he could find.
“Aspect change on Bogey One,” Lieutenant Lee announced as Malcolm saw the display begin to shift. “Acceleration and course change. They’re turning our way.”
“Can they intercept us short of The Red Line?” Olivia asked.
“Still calculating, Ma’am,” Lee answered as the displayed course continued to change towards them. The man turned to her with a frown. “But one thing I can say is that these ships have absolutely modern drives, and the emissions we’re getting are right off the last refit package. I think they sent their Alpha Team to get us.”
“That’s good,” Olivia responded with an approving smile. The bridge crew seemed to waver at her demeanor, and she sighed. “Just think what it will do for morale when we pick up our skirts and dance away from the very best,” she added with a look towards Malcolm.
He met her gaze, and for the first time he truly saw the woman Charles had recommended to him. The captain who had extricated a cruiser from the slaughter of Epsilon Reticuli stood in the center of the bridge, bereft of the doubts she’d tried to hide all the time he’d known her. Even the strongest individuals would have to wonder if there was some grain of truth to the kind of charges she’d lived through after that battle. But the Captain Olivia Wyatt that turned back to her crew showed none of those doubts, and he could almost see the tendrils of her command presence reach out and take control of the bridge like never before.
“Bogey One has sent another transmission,” Jones reported from her station, then leaned into her ear. “It’s a repeat.” After another pause, she looked up. “But there’s a companion signal addressed to Alan.”
Captain Wyatt turned to her, eyes bright with interest, and Malcolm expected her to order it displayed again. “Summarize it,” she said instead.
Jones’ lips pressed together in worry, but then she twitched again and brought a hand to her ear. She looked up with a smile after that, her eyes bright. “They demand that Alan stop us from leaving, using all necessary force.” Everyone on the bridge tensed for a split second. Alan’s Peloran shipyard had more than enough firepower at his command to do exactly that, but Jones kept on talking. “But Alan just said he can’t. Seems his targeting grid is down due to scheduled maintenance,” she reported in a melancholy tone. Scattered laughter broke the tension and Malcolm smiled at Dawn. He’d been right about the man. Dawn returned his smile, a very slight shoulder twitch suggesting she’d never doubted the other cyber, as Jones continued her report. “He’s most apologetic, of course, and promises to hurry the reboot along. But he’s very much afraid it’ll take at least five minutes. Maybe longer.”
Captain Wyatt cleared her throat in something that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. “Keep that recording,” she ordered in a light tone. “I’m going to want to watch it later.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Jones returned, and one hand flashed across her console. “Sent to your personal storage.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Wyatt said, gave Malcolm a sidelong glance with amused eyes, and turned back to the forward display. “Now let’s see how she likes them apples.”
It would take at least a minute for Alan’s transmission to speed across space to Murphy’s squadron, and for her response to come back. And that entire minute they would spend accelerating away from Alan’s shipyard, getting one minute closer to escape. There were times when Malcolm appreciated that science fiction’s faster-than-light communications were still science fiction. It allowed for some purely amusing ways of giving someone the digitus maximus. It was almost enough to make him giggle. Almost.
“Give Alan my thanks,” Malcolm whispered for only Dawn’s ears.
“He accepts them,” she answered after a short pause. “He just has one request.”
Malcolm turned to meet her gaze and said, “Anything,” without hesitation. At her look of surprise, he raised an eyebrow. “Alan’s not the kind of man to ask for something I’d object to,” he noted with a shrug.
Her eyes softened at the explanation, and she nodded slowly. “He wants you to say hello to his family when we reach the other side.”
“Done,” Malcolm said in the tone of a man giving a solemn oath, and turned back to watch the fun.
It took twenty minutes to reach the edge of the gravitic distortion field the Peloran yard generated, and they spent the entire time listening to Jones relaying increasingly annoyed transmissions between Alan and Murphy. Wyatt stopped asking for copies after the third set of transmissions, but only because Jones preempted her with what had to have been an actual giggle. The tension that ha
d filled the bridge evaporated as reports of recovering the shuttles carrying Hastings’ crew arrived, and even the grey-coveralled yard dogs joined in the banter that took over. Not a single one of them stood up to leave, telling everyone where they stood without a single word. Or in this case, where they crawled under consoles still in need of work.
“All ships confirm crossing The Red Line, Ma’am,” Jones finally reported, and all eyes turned to Captain Wyatt.
“Lieutenant Lee?” Captain Wyatt asked, her voice somehow mixing strength with amusement, hovering over an inner core of iron.
“Sensors confirm, Ma’am,” the officer manning the sensors returned. “All ships are safe to dive.”
The Captain glanced at her first officer.
Commander Hill met her gaze and nodded. “All stations report ready to dive.”
“Very well, then,” The Captain said and turned to her helm officer. “Lieutenant Lopez. Commence diving operations immediately.”
“Diving now, Ma’am,” Lopez answered, hands running over his controls. Then the ship twisted around them, and Malcolm’s stomach took a hard turn to the left while the rest of his body went right. At least that is what it felt like. He’d never cared for going in and out of hyperspace, especially at the kinds of speeds that twenty minutes of hard acceleration could generate. He held on to his breakfast through force of will. It had been a very good breakfast, after all, and he didn’t want to remember it splashed all over the deck.
And then his eyes registered the sight all around them. Rivers of light made of every color of the rainbow flowed around Normandy and the other ships of the fleet. Gravity itself shivered and bent as their powerful gravitic fields smashed the rivers before their prows, and wakes of disturbed gravity radiated away from the fresh intruders into its domain.
“Lieutenant Lopez. Set course for the New Earth–Sunnydale Run and take us to maximum depth.”
“New Earth–Sunnydale Run, aye Ma’am,” Lopez responded and Normandy began accelerating again. “Maximum depth, aye Ma’am,” the helm officer added, and the brightly colored gravitic waves became muted as they dove away from the wall between hyperspace and normalspace.
Malcolm watched the fleet pick up their skirts and dance away from their pursuers. The Captain turned her chair and their eyes met. He saw Olivia in them again, softer now than the persona she’d used to hold the bridge crew to her command. And he saw something new over the haunted look that still resided back there. Now he saw pleasure in a job well done, and confidence that she hadn’t lost her touch. There were still doubts there, worries that perhaps some of the charges against her were right. But in the first test of her mettle since the court martial that ended her career as a Captain in the United States Navy, she’d risen to the challenge.
Malcolm smiled. They’d all made it out of Alpha Centauri. And whatever the future held, he had a feeling they would all remember that until the day they died. Whenever that day came for them.
Hyperspace is a strange place. I grew up with it. I spent my youth traveling to most of the Core Worlds. I thought I understood it. But then The War came for us all, and I learned that I knew very little about hyperspace at all. It is an alien universe, literally, and we travel its paths with great care. We must learn more about it, if we are to ever break out of our tiny corner of the galaxy.
IV
When mankind first discovered hyperspace, they found a panoramic view of multicolored rivers of gravity flowing beneath the surface of the normal Einsteinian universe everyone was born in. Humanity soon discovered that those rivers ran from star to star, linking the galaxy from edge to edge. And those early explorers learned a secret that brought the stars within reach. The gravitic currents, and any ship that sailed them, traveled faster than the speed of light itself. But the rivers were treacherous.
The first ships to Alpha Centauri rode a slow, calm river away from Earth, moving perhaps two or three times the speed of light as those in normalspace measured their progress. But as they approached the Alpha Centauri trinary star system, the river rushed in at speeds approaching ten times the speed of light. The ships followed a dangerous series of twists and turns as the currents shot past Proxima Centauri like an ancient slingshot and then fell into the whirlpool of the binary star system at the heart of Alpha Centauri. There they found multiple worlds, brimming with life and waiting for us to colonize them.
And they learned why the river between home and Alpha Centauri was so much stronger than any other. Early scientists assumed it was simply because Alpha Centauri was closer. But Alpha Centauri’s three suns twisted the gravitic currents of hyperspace more than mankind’s home star, spraying out torrents of gravity far more powerful, and far faster, than any other. For a hundred years, every ship from Earth sailed to Alpha Centauri first, and only then did they go to the stars.
And then the Peloran made Contact. They brought faster and more powerful hyperdrives that could break out of the tiny streams connecting stars, and forge their own paths through the true depths of hyperspace. Normandy and the other starships of the Wolfenheim Project used the best Peloran hyperdrives, built into them by Peloran shipyards and powered by Peloran reactors. After months of being ripped apart and put back together by Peloran hands, they were Peloran starships in every way that mattered, built to spend a lifetime in hyperspace.
They’d spent the last thirty-four days traveling across the ninety-four lightyears between New Earth and Sunnydale at a thousand times the speed of light, as the outside world measured time and space. Aboard Normandy, a mere seventeen days passed by, and none of her sisters ever accelerated past a hundred measly kilometers per second by their measurements. Now Normandy rose up through the multicolored currents of gravity like a shark, watching for enemies. The giant whale of Wolfenheim’s bulk crested another current nearby far less gracefully. The colony ship was slow and clumsy compared to the tiny piranhas that surrounded her, ready to kill anything that threatened her as they searched for their destination.
The New Earth–Sunnydale Run had been mapped out for decades, with survey ships scanning every conceivable current in the area. It was updated every month, as new ships arrived to add their navigational information to the database. But it was always changing.
And the only way to be sure where you were on the Run was to obtain a solid read on a nearby star. Most stars could be detected in hyperspace at least a few lighthours away. Giants could be detected significantly farther out, while main sequence stars like our Sun could be detected ten or twenty lighthours away.
The F1V star named Sunnydale was one of the brightest stars that mankind had colonized, and it had a more energetic interaction with hyperspace than most stars. It could be detected a full two lightdays away, making it an effective beacon star for long-range travel. A ship on the New Earth–Sunnydale Run followed the mapped gravitic currents for seventeen days subjective, across nearly a hundred lightyears, and then spent several hours moving “up” towards the wall in hopes that they could detect the gravitic fingerprint of a single star’s effect on hyperspace. If they didn’t get thrown off course by a current that wasn’t there the last time a ship came through, and if they calculated the right time-dilation factor, they just might find that they arrived in the vicinity of their target.
It was like throwing a dart across the yard, during a windstorm, and trying to hit a dime attached to the fence. Very few humans had ever shown the natural aptitude it required to do that. Modern navigational computers usually hit their targets. Usually.
Malcolm sat at the rear of the bridge, watching as Normandy and her little fleet snuck up into the shallows of hyperspace, scanning for threats as they followed Sunnydale’s scent. His squadron should be the first arrivals from New Earth since the confrontation with Commodore Murphy. Through some highly serendipitous events that couldn’t possibly be tracked to him, no couriers had been available at New Earth to warn anyone at Sunnydale of their imminent arrival. And he had reason to believe that Murphy would “
just happen” to receive an old hyperspace map when she asked for a cartography update.
But if, despite all the preparations he could swear up and down he had nothing to do with, Murphy’s squadron had managed to make better time than Normandy, they could be lying in wait. And Olivia was a very careful captain. She hated surprises, and so they very carefully rose towards the hyperspace wall.
“Contact!” The single word shot through the bridge and Malcolm turned to look at Lieutenant Anton Lee as even more words tumbled out of the man’s lips. “Contact! Single ship, directly above at six five zero zero meters. Designating Bogey One.”
“Does she see us?” Olivia asked, her voice hardening into her captain’s alter ego as she spoke. On one display, Malcolm glimpsed an on-duty recon fighter already accelerating towards the target.
“Bogey One moving.” The report came quick, words short and clipped as the officer communicated as rapidly as possible. Displays flashed on the man’s stations and he tensed. “Identified Shang scout! Running.”
“Firing solution?” Wyatt demanded as even Malcolm’s untrained eyes caught the scout ship beginning to pull away.
“Bravo,” Lee answered without hesitation.
Wyatt hadn’t waited for his word though, having already turned to her tactical officer. “Guns?” she asked, the moment Lee’s mouth closed.
Malcolm nodded in approval. It was amazing to see them react so quickly and professionally. He could see in their training the instincts that must have brought them out of Epsilon Reticuli alive. But a proper cybernetic intelligence on the other side would have killed them already in the seconds it was taking to respond. He glanced at Dawn as Lieutenant Thompson confirmed Fire Plan Bravo, and saw the grim smile as she met his eyes. Yes, she could have fired already.
“Fire,” Wyatt ordered without any hesitation.
Thompson hit the button and missiles poured out of Normandy’s forward bow to streak out after the fleeing scout at the equivalent of point-blank range. Seven more waves of missiles from the other ships of the fleet converged on the scout at the same time, within a second of launching. It was like tanks firing at ten paces, and the Shang crew had no time to even realize they were under attack. Only the Shang computers saw the missiles coming in time to react, and if they weren’t cybernetic minds their artificial intelligence was perfectly suited to operating point-defense batteries in an emergency. The scout’s laser clusters came to life without waiting for orders that would never come from the crew, strobing on and off faster than most eyes could register.