Ethan shook his head, unable to process another crisis as it came at him.
“All hands prepare for more trouble,” Ammo barked, taking charge of the situation.
“Gravity pulses on the external sensors,” Marti announced, confirming the reality of what Qara had said. “No corresponding deck plating spikes.”
“No boarding parties?” she asked, shooting a side-eye in his direction.
“Negative,” it said.
Ethan managed a slight shrug. He was holding his breath and staring at the Sun.
“We’re still clear,” Quinn confirmed. “But we’re ready.”
Ethan heard it all like a distant conversation, his mind slid inward into a black hole as he counted seconds. He glared out the window as if sheer force of will could stop what spun inexorably toward the inevitable.
Come on Nuko, don’t be a hero, he begged. His eyes remained focused on the ship and the retreating cargo modules. They’d separated by several hundred klick already. That’s far enough. Get out of there.
She’s gone, Qara thought to him.
No! She can’t be.
Suddenly the viewscreen polarized and for a brief instant everything in front of him turned black. Then the flash erupted. Bright, but not blinding through the filtered window. As the explosion faded, only the brightest part of the hellish plasma remained biased out. A vivid wall of ionized gas expanded in a glowing sphere around where the Sun had been.
“Brace for impact.” Ammo’s voice echoed in his mind. Other voices too. Marti. Quinn. Others he didn’t recognize.
Too many thoughts tore at his consciousness.
The shock waves hit several seconds later, and Ethan still stared into the empty hole where the Elysium Sun… and Nuko… had been.
The hangar bay doors had never opened.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ethan sat at the command console with his fists balled into his eyes, trying not to scream in rage. Shock numbed the rage into a desire to just curl up and let it end.
He knew he had other things to do, but he just couldn’t deal with it.
They were facing another attack.
Breathe. Remember, but grieve later.
And the waves crashed over him again as he struggled to even draw in a breath.
Focus on the job, he thought, shaking his head and trying to pull his hands away from his face.
Sounds. Listen. Focus.
“Ethan, you need to get to MedBay.” It was Kaycee on the comm.
The other voices have fallen silent? Is the comm down?
“Stand by. We just lost the Elysium Sun. he’s processing,” Ammo said quietly.
“Copy. But he really needs to get down here. Bring him if you need to,” she said. Her tone was commanding, but there was something more to it.
“I can’t leave the ConDeck. We might need to—”
“Fine, I’ll send someone.” She clicked off the comm.
Blowing out a fast breath he straightened himself in his seat and cleared his throat. He was hollow but at least he was upright.
“What about her cargo? The passengers?”
“They’ve got no comm but I’m tracking the transponder on the DSL,” Ammo said. “We need to get to them. They’ve also got no life support in any of the containers.”
He nodded. “We didn’t…”
She shook her head. “No shuttle.”
He closed his eyes and struggled against the darkness. Letting out another blast of breath, he reset himself again. “Are we under attack?”
“It does not appear so,” Marti said. “I am detecting an ongoing series of floor plating surges that began immediately after the Sun… but there is no sensor current drain that would indicate open doorway activity.” Even the AA couldn’t bring itself to face the reality of what had happened.
Kai appeared at the door and she took him by the shoulder. He knew he should stay on the ConDeck, but he let her lead for the moment. “The ship’s yours,” he said to Ammo as Kai almost picked him up out of the seat.
“Do you know what happened?” she asked, as she walked him toward the lift.
He shook his head. “Their antimatter flow controls failed, and it took the reactors critical. They couldn’t jettison it.”
She nodded. “How many were still aboard?”
He swallowed hard. “At least Nuko. Probably others. Angel. Elias. Maybe some of your people.”
She shook her head. “They’re all in the cargo modules. Qara can hear them. Your crew got them all off the ship.”
He nodded, biting down hard enough on his lip that he tasted the coppery tang of blood. At what cost?
“She says the intruders have all retreated too. They withdrew when the other ship exploded.”
Where was Qara? He realized she wasn’t on the ConDeck when he left.
I’m here, she said in his mind.
I’m sorry I pushed you away, he thought.
He felt her smile. I was a distraction when you needed to be saving people.
His grief threatened to suck him down again, and he pushed it back.
Do not blame yourself. You are a hero. She picked up his thought even before he expressed it. But the words she meant to buoy him up, pushed him deeper into the black.
He nodded trying to draw a curtain around his mind as the lift gate opened. It looked like everyone was on the middeck.
Taking a deep breath, he squared his shoulders and pushed his way toward the MedBay. As he got closer, he realized there were several people covered in blood.
“What happened?” he whispered. “The fighting was confined to engineering. Wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Kai said. After more than ninety days, he knew most of the faces of her people. At least the ones on his ship. It wasn’t until he was outside the MedBay door and saw two of his handlers treating a wounded crewmember in a work coverall that he realized something was not right.
It was one of the handlers from the Sun?
Kaycee stood outside the MedBay looking down at the deck.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
She looked up, an unreadable expression on her face. “We don’t know exactly what happened.”
He pushed past her with a roll of his shoulder and stopped, collapsing against the door jamb.
Nuko and Angel were both standing there staring at him and looking as confused as he was. The rest of her crew was crowded into the MedBay with her.
He twisted around and saw Kaycee talking to Kai and nodding. Not sure he hadn’t just fallen completely out of reality, he reached out gingerly and touched Nuko’s face, more than half expecting her to disappear. When she didn’t vanish, he let out an overwhelmed laugh that sucked back in immediately to be replaced with something else. Almost a sob. He blinked back waves of conflicted emotional chaos and struggled to accept what he was seeing.
“This cannot be real,” he whispered.
She nodded, smiling as tears surged up in her eyes and rolled down her face.
“She said that, too,” Angel said, grinning as she scooped them both in her arms and squeezed them together until it hurt.
“What the frak happened?”
“I don’t know,” Nuko said, wiping at her cheek with the back of her hand. “One minute I was sitting on the ConDeck, and then next I was on my ass on the floor here staring up at Kaycee’s butt. Then everyone else fell through a hole in the ceiling and landed on me.”
“What?”
“It was raining people,” she said.
“I was in here when everyone started falling on us,” Kaycee said. She clenched her jaw and then shook her head. “Well, Elias didn’t make it. Everybody but him.”
Nuko nodded and looked down at the deck. “He was trying to get the core to dump and I don’t think he got out.”
“We also lost Sunny,” Marti said, pointing out that the AA could not have survived. As a registered artificial that counted as a lost crewmember, too.
“How did you get ou
t? I don’t understand,” he said.
“It was like an airlock door opened and I got sucked through it.” Angel explained. “I ended up in a room for almost a minute before it happened again, and I was bouncing off the side of the diagnostic bed. I landed on top of Nuko and think I might have broken her ribs from the way she screamed.”
“Not only did they stop fighting us when they realized you were about to lose your reactors, they rescued you too?” Ethan asked. “I’m missing something.”
“It makes no sense to me either.” Nuko shrugged and flinched. “They must not have intended to destroy my ship. We’d bypassed so many things to get the gun working that Elias said it was probably an accident. That was the last thing he reported before…”
She hauled in a ragged breath and squared her shoulders. “We’ve got a frak-ton of work to do. There are six containers of stranded people over there with no life support.”
Ethan stared at her for several seconds remembering how it felt when he’d lost crewmembers. She was a lot stronger than he was. It took him hours to get back in the saddle and even now, it would still stop him unexpectedly.
“They made it, didn’t they?” she asked, misinterpreting his silence.
He glanced at Kai who nodded. “Yah, you saved them.”
“The question I have is why did they rescue your people?”
“Because STI’s fight isn’t with us,” Kaycee said. “The only fatality was a plusser. They hit not one mundane on either ship with anything stronger than a class two stun round.”
“Elias wasn’t a plusser,” he said.
She nodded. “He was. He was registered, but he was an augment.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Ethan looked around at the faces of Nuko’s crew. He knew them all and with the exception of Angel they all wore the same expression of stunned shock.
“This is all of your crew,” he said, turning to face Nuko and raising an eyebrow.
“Except for Charleigh and Elias.” She nodded and then realized what he’d noticed. “Char is in the DSL, but I’d ordered you all to the cargo containers with the passengers.”
Nobody said anything. They all must have remained on the ship. All of them.
Ethan looked at Angel and she looked down. “I was trying to get to the ConDeck when she hit the pedal and smashed me into the wall. I wanted to make sure she got off the ship too.”
One of the other handlers cleared his throat. “I was trying to get Elias to stop and run, when I got caught in… whatever it was that brought me here.”
“You were with him when they snagged you?”
“I was standing two meters from him. He was swinging a hammer trying to beat the mountings loose. I couldn’t get close enough to grab him. I tried but he wouldn’t stop.” He stared down at the floor and shrugged, guilt tearing at him. “I tried. Honestly. I even tried to grab him as I felt myself getting sucked out of the room.”
“They left him behind on purpose,” Nuko said, anger flashing in her eyes as the realization burned its way to the pit of her stomach.
“Because he was a plusser,” Ethan snarled, rage driven resolve overpowering all the other things he felt.
He let out a slow breath. “I’m done letting them call the shots.” He pushed his way out of the MedBay dragging Nuko behind him. Angel followed them out to the middeck away from where everyone was standing. He lowered his voice and tapped into his collarcomm rather than talking over the open shipwide.
“Marti, do we still know where they are out there?”
“Yes, Captain. They are holding position just over four light hours behind us. Since we are not in cruise, our field is not causing interference and the background density of the local region of the nebula is sufficient to see the T-wave interference of their power core.”
“Is it still sitting directly aft?”
“Bearing is 180.7 by 181.1.”
“Close enough,” he said, smiling. “Rene, I know you’re up to your eyeballs, but have you had a chance to confirm Meshawn’s calculations?”
“Uhm, yah boss,” the engineer said, sounding confused and concerned in equal measure. “You aren’t thinking—”
“I am,” he confirmed, cutting him off. “Can we do it and survive?”
“Probably. Maybe. It depends on what we drop,” he said. “Enough mass and it will rip a hole in space permanently.”
Nuko and Angel both looked at him like he’d lost his mind. He winked. “That might be a bit much. Just enough to take them down, not unravel the multiverse.”
“I got that without being told,” Rene said.
“How long will it take to rig for it?”
“Minutes,” he said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Last question. Will four light hours be enough range for the cargo containers here to be safe?”
“Should be.”
“Then do it.”
He turned to face the handler. “Get your people to reinforce Quinn’s in engineering. I don’t want the black hats to jiggle Rene’s elbow while he’s working. If this goes as planned, we’re going to take it to them. But if it doesn’t work, they’ll come back at us with everything they’ve got.”
“Aye, boss,” Angel said, snapping off a quick salute before she spun and dashed back over to her people, barking orders. Obviously, the idea of punching back motivated her.
He turned to Nuko and smiled. “I want you to slip the DSL back to the lock off position on the last container and then slave the field to the primary coils. Once you’re in position, let me know.”
She stood there staring at him. She was struggling to piece together his plan and from her expression he could tell she wasn’t happy with the fragments she was seeing.
“I need you on it. NOW!” he said pointing toward the lift. “Just trust me. We’re doing this for Elias and Sunny. We lost the Sun because of them and they need to learn they aren’t above having their bag busted.”
She nodded and headed toward the DSL lock.
Giving Nuko enough time to get up to the dropship he headed for the lift. “Ammo bring us around and point us home,” he said as he waited for the platform to get back to the middeck.
“We’re giving up?” she asked.
“Just do it. I want us lined up straight back along our previous heading,” he said. “I’m on my way to the ConDeck and I’ll explain when I get there.”
“Marti tells me that everybody from the Sun ended up in MedBay?”
“Not everybody. Elias didn’t make it.” He said, swinging the lift gate closed.
“What about the ones they stuffed into the containers? We need to get them out of there before they run out of air.”
“They’re alright for now…” he said. He felt Qara confirm that his assumption was correct, and he smiled. It was easy to get used to this kind of instantaneous communication. He stepped out onto the command deck. “We should be done before they’re in trouble and if not, it won’t matter much, anyway.”
“I’m not sure that makes me fuzzy boss,” she said as he almost ran the rest of the way to the ConDeck.
He was burning off adrenaline and moving fast helped. Skidding through the door, he dropped into his seat. “Maybe not, but I’m done with their shit.”
“Alright,” she said, glancing up but keeping her attention on the screens in front of her. “So, what’s the plan?”
“As soon as Rene says we’re ready, we’re going to drop a wrench on them.”
“I’m in position and the coils are linked.” Nuko announced over his commlink.
“Rene, what’s the status on the package,” he asked.
“Marti’s carrying it back to the last container now,” he said. “It’s out of my hands now.”
“Marti?”
“Yah we didn’t have time to rig a launcher, so she volunteered to use her Gendyne to deliver it.”
“Copy,” he said. “All other systems are ready?”
“We’re in spec across the b
oard,” the engineer said.
“Alright then, stand by,” he cut the comm and pulled himself into position at his station.
“What are we doing?” she asked, this time turning to face him.
“We’re going to shoot something off the back edge of our inertial field, while we’re in cruise. Hopefully, if we time it right, it will hit normal space close enough to them that the black hole will take them out.”
Her mouth fell open, and she blinked once. It was obvious that she realized how insane his plan was. “And doesn’t take us with it.”
He grinned. “That’d be good too.”
“You intend to destroy them?”
He shook his head. “Popular opinion among the experts is that it’ll only knock them offline for a few days while they spin up their main power.”
“That would give us time to get far enough away they can’t find us,” she said. She was apparently more willing to believe dropping a singularity on them would only represent a temporary inconvenience than he was.
But after what they’d done, he didn’t think he’d lose much sleep if it hit them hard enough to make it permanent. He also wasn’t sure how he felt about that realization, but he knew he’d have time to sort it out later. Or not.
“I am in position, Captain,” Marti said. “I will need to control the ship and my automech simultaneously to optimize our chances of hitting the target. This must be coordinated to a tolerance that I do not believe a human pilot is capable of achieving.”
“Understood.”
“We will proceed at full power to the location of the enemy ship, drop to two-C for five nanoseconds, and then return to full cruise immediately before the projectile leaves our inertial field.”
“Why slow down?” he asked. “Is that to make them easier to hit?”
“Hardly,” Marti said, sounding insulted. “If we do not reduce speed, there is a possibility of collateral spacetime effects that would make our survival unlikely. At least in this universe.”
“Collateral spacetime effects?” Ammo asked.
“As per the Davis Mechanics, exception to relativistic physics, any mass existing above light velocity in normal space will radiate its excessive inertial charge as gravitational energy. The level of this gravitational discharge will determine if all the radiation can remain in our normal relativistic space or must, of necessity, radiate above or below our dimensional spacetime constraints.”
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 81