Recker's Chance

by Anthony James

  Even Telar feels it. Maybe Admiral Ivinstol does too. Something’s about to happen.

  “We’ll be with you in a few minutes,” said Recker.

  The final door in the Ixidar’s armour opened and the shuttle entered the overcast light of Terrani’s early morning. Travelling between planets, each with their own day lengths, in conjunction with sensors which could turn night into day, made it hard for Recker to keep track of where in the HPA’s standardised twenty-four-hour day he was. Evidently, they’d arrived before the planet’s dawn and only now was it becoming light.

  Recker didn’t dwell. He adjusted the shuttle’s sensors with one hand, while the other controlled the flight.

  “The Daklan are making progress,” Eastwood observed. “Good progress.”

  A few thousand metres below, twenty lifter shuttles hovered in perfect order above a line of thick, near-black cable which had already been laid on the ground between the Ixidar and the Gorgadar. Countless ground vehicles were in evidence, and dozens of cranes adjusted the position of the cable, while bright flashes from floating, cylindrical robots indicated the places where the joins were still being made.

  “It’s no wonder we were losing to the Daklan,” said Eastwood. “Even the teams on Lancer or Adamantine couldn’t match this for efficiency.”

  Recker had no intention of arguing. It wasn’t as if the human construction teams were lazy or inefficient, and this was a job where physical strength was irrelevant. Yet, somehow, the Daklan were better than the HPA at putting things together. Maybe one day, Fleet Admiral Telar would have the chance to send his senior officers here to learn a few lessons about construction.

  “There’s our docking bay,” said Recker, switching his attention from the activity below.

  He fed in extra power and the shuttle sped across the intervening space between the two huge vessels.

  “We’re coming in fast,” said Eastwood.

  “You told me this is an emergency situation, Lieutenant,” said Recker with forced lightness.

  He slowed at the last minute, rotated the shuttle and then guided it rear-first into its original docking tunnel. The transported made a gentle impact with the airlock and a blue light appeared on Recker’s console.

  “We’re docked,” he said, already two paces towards the exit.

  Mentally, he retraced his route through the Gorgadar in preparation for a sprint to the bridge. The airlock didn’t need to cycle and he dashed straight through, waving impatiently for Eastwood to keep up.

  “Don’t worry about me, sir. I can still beat you in a sprint.”

  “Let’s find out,” said Recker, lengthening his stride.

  They hastened along gloomy corridors, stepping over the corpses of long-dead Lavorix which still littered the floors. Recker’s breathing deepened, but not so much that he couldn’t hear the beat of the warship’s propulsion, the steadiness of which indicated the Gorgadar was still at Hakarul.

  When he arrived at the bridge steps, Recker took them two at a time and the effort made his leg muscles burn with righteous pain. The blast door opened and he rushed inside, to find his crew at their stations, and fifteen or twenty Daklan technicians armed with diagnostic tablets. As one, they turned at his arrival.

  “Don’t mind them, sir,” said Burner. “They’re friendly when you get to know them.”

  “Anything to report?” asked Recker.

  “Nothing you need worry about, sir,” said Aston. “The ground teams have finished joining the cable and they’re about to turn on the taps.”

  “My apologies, sir,” said Eastwood. “I thought that…”

  “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant,” said Recker. He made his way to the command seat, which Aston was in the process of vacating. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “What doesn’t feel right?” said Aston.

  “We’re working on the assumption we have fifteen days,” said Recker. “I think the Lavorix changed their plans.”

  “Because they realised they sent their exploration route to the Ixidar?”

  “It could be that,” said Recker. “Or it could just be that the Lavorix are slippery bastards. They’ve been at war for centuries and evidence suggests they’re pretty good at it. I don’t want to make assumptions that we’ve got a whole fifteen days before trouble shows up.”

  “There’s no trouble at the moment, sir,” said Larson, back at her comms station.

  Now that he was at his console and everything seemed in good order, Recker wondered if he’d allowed himself to be carried along by Eastwood’s claims that he was a statistical anomaly. Certainly the HPA had studied various people who could apparently beat the odds far more than the extremes of chance would dictate, but as far as Recker knew, nothing much had come from those studies.

  “Captain Recker, we will begin the energy transfer.”

  Recker turned at the voice – it was another female Daklan. He’d been told that the males did the fighting, while the females had a greater aptitude for science, so it wasn’t a surprise to find most of the techs fell into the latter category.

  The technician smiled and again, Recker got the impression she was asking herself if he’d taste better off the barbecue or straight out of the frying pan. “My name is Olos-Tir,” she said.

  “Is there anything my crew or I can do?” he asked. “And are there any risks I should know about?”

  “There are always risks, human. The time has come for us to accept them.”

  It was a viewpoint Recker could accept. “Please,” he said. “Go ahead with the transfer.”

  Olos-Tir lifted her diagnostic tablet. “It has already begun.”

  “The Daklan don’t hang around,” said Eastwood with a short laugh.

  Recker called up the monitoring tools for the Gorgadar’s Extractor batteries. The readout was at zero percent.

  “Nothing yet,” he said.

  “Watch,” said Olos-Tir.

  Having fought with Shadar and the other Daklan in his squad, Recker had learned to recognize their different moods, and from that, he knew Olos-Tir was excited. He looked again at the battery readout and it had climbed to one percent.

  “It’s working!” he said.

  “We will monitor for a time and then we will increase the flow rate,” said Olos-Tir.

  “How long will you monitor?” asked Recker.

  “Such impatience, Captain Recker.”

  “You’re damn right I’m impatient,” he said, without irritation. “Two percent.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on the decay pulse and the destabiliser,” said Aston. “I’m sure they require power from the superstressed engines as well as the batteries.” She considered it further. “Maybe they’ll even deplete some tenixite from our storage bay, but I could be wrong.”

  “If they need all three power sources, they’re going to be dangerous,” said Burner. “Hopefully only for the Lavorix.”

  A lot was riding on those two weapons, and Recker loaded the monitoring software onto his own screen as well. The battery charge level advanced to three percent and the activation lights on the weapons remained unlit.

  The Daklan lacked the HPA’s obsession with safety – which was probably one of the reasons they could build warships so quickly, because they didn’t spent hours filling in safety observation cards, require a full safety audit before someone climbed three rungs up a ladder, or require a safety spotter to accompany every technician who was simply off to take a leak or eat a sandwich containing potential allergens - and Recker was interested to find out how long the aliens would hold out before they turned the taps from a trickle to a flood. He didn’t have to wait long for his answer.

  “We will increase the flow,” said Olos-Tir, five seconds after Recker had completed his internal tirade.

  “Four percent!” said Recker as the readout nudged upwards. “Five!”

  “The second Extractor green light came online!” said Aston. “If we put the engines into superstress, we should b
e able to fire it.”

  “It won’t fire without the life energy of the people it’s killed?” asked Eastwood. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “The Gorgadar is different to the other Laws of Ancidium, Lieutenant,” said Aston. “The Extractor is tied in to the decay pulse and the destabiliser and I don’t know the reason. Those two are still offline as well.”

  “Access to the Extractor is an improvement,” said Recker. “Though I’d prefer it if we didn’t have to switch the propulsion into superstress again.” He remembered how one of the ternium modules had only reluctantly returned to its normal state and he also remembered Lieutenant Eastwood’s warning about the potential for harm if a superstressed module went irretrievably critical.

  “We are at the maximum flow rate supported by our cable,” said Olos-Tir. “Any more and the heat build-up will have an adverse effect on the transfer.”

  “Six percent,” said Recker.

  The charge level was rising much faster now, though it wasn’t exactly racing towards a hundred percent.

  “Sir, I have an inbound comm from Fleet Admiral Telar,” said Burner. “He says it’s urgent.”

  “Bring him through,” said Recker, preparing for the worst.

  “Carl, we’ve had some bad news,” said Telar at once. “One of our deep space probes out in Zavind-N detected the Ancidium’s arrival.”

  “I recognize the name of the solar system, but I don’t know where it appears in the expected sequence of planets, sir.”

  “It’s out of sequence, that’s the problem. Well out of sequence.”

  Recker closed his eyes and swore. “The Lavorix have altered their plans,” he said.

  “I’ve had my data analysis teams examining the locations, times and distances on the plans that the Ancidium sent to the Ixidar and they believe the enemy have skipped forward several steps, rather than altering their plans entirely.”

  “How sure are the analysts?” asked Recker.

  “This isn’t the time to go over the data, Carl. My teams believe the discovery of Earth has moved significantly closer and in the absence of anything to contradict their findings, I have to base my decisions on their conclusions.”

  “How significantly closer?”

  “The analysts are predicting a 68% likelihood that the Ancidium will arrive in Earth’s solar system anywhere between four and twenty-four hours from now. My personnel had to make educated guesses on how long the enemy will remain at the final three destinations on their route to Earth, plus uncertainty around whether one particular transit will be done by Gateway or at an unknown lightspeed multiplier.”

  “What’s the 95% outcome?”

  “If the analysis is accurate – and I know your feelings on the matter – there’s a 95% chance the Ancidium will arrive at Earth between one hour and forty-eight hours from now.”

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  “I’ve agreed with Admiral Ivinstol that the Gorgadar should leave Terrani immediately and the Ixidar should follow the moment it’s brought back online.”

  “Is Earth our destination?”

  “Negative – a confrontation in our home solar system is unthinkable. We will meet the Lavorix at their expected destination one prior to Earth.”

  “What is the name of that place, sir?”

  “The Evia system.”

  It was a name Recker hadn’t heard before, just like a trillion others. If it was to be Evia, then that’s where it would be. He moved on to the next issue. “We don’t have enough personnel to crew both Laws of Ancidium at anything like maximum effectiveness.”

  “I know and this is where I need your opinion, Captain Recker. If the Daklan send some of their best officers onto the Ixidar and Gorgadar, will it help or be a hindrance?”

  “In a few hours, I could have them trained in the basics, sir.”

  “We don’t have a few hours to spare.” Telar went quiet, thinking.

  “Sir!” yelled Burner from his station. “The Terrani deep space monitors have detected an inbound particle wave. It’s not the Ancidium, but it’s going to be bigger than the Gorgadar or the Ixidar.”

  “Distance?”

  “Ten million klicks from the planet, sir. The local fleet is on its way.”

  “Fleet Admiral, can you hear this?” asked Recker.

  When Telar responded, he sounded almost like a beaten man. There again, he’d just had his fifteen days of preparation knocked down to one day, give or take. “I hear it, Carl. Do what you must and, if you make it through, speak to me again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Telar closed the channel and Recker’s eyes moved to the Gorgadar’s battery readout.

  “Fifteen percent,” he said.

  “Nothing on the decay pulse or the destabiliser, sir,” said Aston. “They’re both still offline.”

  Recker desperately wanted to wait for one or other of these weapons to become available, but he could only guess how much charge would be required in the batteries. Maybe the hardware had failed anyway, and by the time he discovered the fact, it would be too late for the billions of Daklan living on Terrani.

  “Some of the Daklan ground batteries have launched, sir,” said Larson. “The only thing that’ll target from this range is lightspeed missiles.”

  “Olos-Tir – order the ground crews to sever the cable,” said Recker.

  “I have done, so,” said the Daklan a moment later. “It will require a few seconds.”

  Recker scanned the console in front of him, reassuring himself that the onboard systems were ready for flight.

  “Sixteen percent on the batteries,” he said.

  “The cable is severed,” said Olos-Tir, appearing at Recker’s side.

  He took a deep breath and rested his hands on the controls.

  “I’ve obtained a link to the local battle network,” said Burner. “It’s running through a security filter and it’s a second behind.”

  A sprinkling of green on the tactical was joined by a single red dot. Recker knew instinctively this was the warship he’d glimpsed as the Ixidar escaped from the Ancidium’s bay. Right now, lots of clear space separated the two sides and the Daklan fleet had no way of covering the distance without warming up their ternium drives. He doubted they’d be in a hurry to do so, in case the enemy warships went past them at mode 3 and wrecked the planet.

  “That warship is called Ruklior, sir,” said Larson. “Our battle computer is aware of it, but only by name, not capability.”

  “We screwed up,” said Recker, his heart sinking. “They followed the Ixidar out of the Ancidium and kept themselves away from sensor sight until we left DEKA-L.”

  “And then they followed us,” said Eastwood. “Through a damned Gateway.”

  “Terrani was on the list of 170 planets – the enemy must have linked the lightspeed tunnel to this planet and realised there was a reason for us coming here.” Recker swore bitterly. “After that, the Lavorix changed their other plans and soon they’ll reach Earth.”

  Most of this was speculation, but Recker was sure it contained more than a grain of truth. By trying to do the right thing, his actions had jeopardised the home worlds of both the HPA and the Daklan. Once, Recker would have blamed himself. Not this time. This time, he recognized that he wasn’t responsible for unforeseen consequences. All he could do was handle whatever came his way.

  Recker gave a smile that promised death to the Lavorix.

  “Let’s do this,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Gorgadar’s engine note deepened and the warship lifted from the ground as if it weighed nothing. Without needing to be told, the Daklan technicians retreated to the rear bulkhead and kept quiet. Recker forgot about them at once.

  Careful that waves of sonic energy didn’t sweep aside the ground crews, he accelerated steadily at first, and, once the low-lying rainclouds were far below, with increased urgency. Still the propulsion gauge showed hardly any utilisation and it wasn’t until
the skies turned into the blackness of space that Recker requested maximum output from the engines. A howling of technology accompanied the Gorgadar’s overstressed rush towards this new opponent.

  “The Ruklior took a mode 3 jump, sir,” said Burner. “They went fifty million klicks from their previous position.”

  A glance at the tactical told Recker where the Ruklior had emerged from its transit, and he altered course towards it. “They’re fifty-eight million klicks from here. That’s a good spot, Lieutenant.”

  “I’d like to claim the credit, sir, but the enemy re-entered local space within the scanning arc of a Daklan monitor.”

  “The Lavorix travelled away from Terrani,” said Aston. “Are they testing the range of the lightspeed missiles?”

  “Usually the enemy just drop into high orbit and start firing their Extractor, Commander. They must be holding back because they know the Ixidar and the Gorgadar are here.”

  “The Lavorix wouldn’t have sent the Ruklior if they didn’t think it had a chance of success against us,” said Aston.

  “I’ve got a sensor lock on the Ruklior,” said Larson.

  The enemy warship appeared on the central bulkhead feeds and it was a fifty-thousand metre alloy colossus with a cuboid shape and a row of what appeared to be superfluous spines running along its top section. Larson enhanced the feed, but most details were swallowed up by the distance, except for the pinprick specks of plasma heat from the ground-launched lightspeed missiles.

  “It’s travelling at low velocity, sir, and on an erratic course,” said Burner.

  “That doesn’t look so much like a warship as it does a transport,” said Recker.

  As he spoke, several smaller red dots appeared on the tactical and, on the sensor feed, Recker saw those newly emerged warships accelerating away from the Ruklior.

  “A warship carrier,” said Eastwood. “Able to carry a fleet in its hold.”

  “How big a fleet?” asked Recker. “The Ixidar is our best tool for such an engagement and it’s out of action.”