“Sorry I asked,” she said.
Ethan winked at her and locked his seat in its forward position. Bracing himself against the edge of the console, he tapped into the shipwide comm. “All hands prepare for… a bumpy ride.”
“Marti, it’s your bubble,” he said. “Call it whenever you’re ready.”
A tactical overlay showing their position and the assumed location of the Tahrat Shan Che appeared on the viewscreen. The sensor readout showed the expanding rings of the distortion the Shan Takhu ship’s power supply made in the nebula.
“Initiating attack run now,” Marti said.
Then things got bumpy.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Everything happened so fast that no human could keep track of it. Ethan was only vaguely aware of what he might have seen. There was the flash of the collar as they jumped to cruise, and then a split second later something that resembled a photon boom washed over the forward screen. Another flash of space that twisted in a strange polychromatic band of color and then the normal collar of stars spun wildly around them.
Or more likely they tumbled wildly inside the field of their own coils.
Then the lights went out. The tactical overlay vanished, the forward viewscreen turned transparent, and the stars opened up into a normal starfield.
And then the gravity plating went out.
“What the frak happened,” Ethan gasped.
No answer. He looked over at where Ammo sat. He could just make out her silhouette against the stars to the side. No, not the stars, he realized. Outside, a glowing red and green backdrop undulated with wisps of other colors that rippled in slow waves outside the windows.
“Are you alright?” he asked, his own voice sounding thin and hollow in his ears.
“I think I shit myself,” she said.
“Marti, what’s going on?
Silence.
“Marti?”
“Space looks broken,” she whispered. “Is that the nebula?”
“I hope so. Otherwise we’re a lot farther from home than we were.”
“I’m seeing nothing out there but the glow,” she said.
Qara wanted to see the nebula. Hopefully, that’s all it is, but why is it visible?
Both their consoles were out, and there was no light anywhere on the ConDeck. As his eyes adjusted, he could tell they were still tumbling, or that the glow outside was swirling around them. Either possibility resulted in a nauseatingly disturbing view.
“Marti?” he asked again.
A single icon flickered in the middle of his panel.
Initializing.
He tapped into his collarcomm toggling it over to standard RF. “Anyone? Report.”
“Let’s not do that again,” Quinn replied.
“We’ve lost everything. No power on any system. I am trying to bring backups online. Give me a second to find the deck.” It was Rene.
“Marti’s offline,” Ethan said.
“It looks like everything’s offline,” the engineer said. “I don’t see an electron moving anywhere.”
“I’ve got a light on my control board,” he said. “It says initializing.”
“That’s a good sign, it means wherever we landed some of the laws of physics still apply.”
“Nojo, right?” Quinn said. “You are kidding, aren’t you?”
“Yah. The RF comms are still working,” Rene said. “I don’t think we could have blown through the universe sidewise. Well, maybe.”
“Somebody give me a hand, I’ve got people stuck to the overhead in here,” Kaycee said. “What the hell did you do Ethan?”
“Let me get back to you on that,” he said.
Ammo pulled out a thinpad and used the display to give them a bit of light. She shook her head. “I don’t see any damage in here, but what the actual fuck happened?”
“Vocal processing restored,” Marti announced, also over the com. Its voice sounded artificial and not at all like itself.
“I’m about to kick in the backups, all hands grab something in case the gravity comes back,” Rene said.
The lights flickered and came on. Gravity followed a second later.
“Cognitive processing online,” Marti said, far more normal sounding than before.
“Where are we?” the captain asked.
“Unknown. Navigational grid is not operational,” it answered. “Long range sensors are offline as well.”
“Are we still in our own universe?”
“I believe so.” The AA sounded disconcertingly uncertain.
“It doesn’t look like we’ve got much damage,” Rene said. “We should be able to restore main power in a few minutes. The coils will take a while to bring back up. They’re stone-dead.”
“We need sensors and helm control. We’re tumbling and can’t tell our ass from our ears up here.”
“One has two holes. The other smells bad,” Kaycee said. “Seriously Ethan, what the hell happened.”
“We got caught in some kind of shock wave maybe,” he said. He was guessing, but until they knew for sure, it was as good an idea as any.
“I’ve got ten plussers down here that looked like they were dead,” she said. “They’re still breathing and we’re tending to them now.”
“They’re all telepaths,” he said without understanding why he knew that.
A feeble thought gasped its way into his mind. We were linked when...
It was Qara, and he could feel her trembling in pain as she forced her way up toward consciousness. Is it over?
Good, she thought reading his subconscious thought. She eased back into the distance.
“We need to figure out why it hit us so hard,” Ethan said.
“I sure wasn’t expecting to see my breakfast go flying across the room.” Ammo nodded.
“I believe I may have an explanation, Captain,” Marti said. “I am unable to locate my Gendyne automech.”
“What happened to it?”
“When the initial shock wave from the payload hit, I believe it was tossed overboard.”
“You fell off the ship?” Ammo asked.
“It would be more accurate to say my body did. It may have left the inertial field.”
Ethan didn’t know the details of how the physics would have played out, but that couldn’t be good. He was sure the automech body was substantially more massive than whatever it was they’d planned to drop.
“It appears to have reentered the relativistic framework. To catastrophic effect.”
“Is it recoverable?”
“It is a singularity.”
“That would be a no I’m guessing,” Ammo said.
“The issue would be that the mass of my Gendyne body may have been enough to rise above the threshold of self-sustainability for a quantum scale singularity,” Marti explained. “This would depend on how far above relativistic limits we were traveling when it exited our inertial bubble.”
“We made a real black hole?”
The consoles lit up. “We’ve got helm control,” Ammo said, sliding her hands over the control and slowing their spin to a stop. “That’s better.”
“Sensors are coming online,” Rene announced.
The display flickered to life, and she put it over the forward window. Two bright red dots appeared, spinning around each other. “There it is… uhm… they are.”
“I thought it was supposed to be a transient effect,” Ethan said. “How long will those last?”
“There can be only one,” Marti said, conveying confusion in its voice.
“That sure looks like two co-orbiting masses,” she said.
“Agreed,” the AA said. “Based on the gravitational gradient, one of them does appear to be approximately the mass of my Gendyne automech, but the other one appears to be roughly the same mass. It cannot be our payload.”
“What is it then?” he asked.
“It’s the power core out of the Tahrat Shan Che,” Kai said.
“What?”
&nbs
p; “She may be correct, Captain,” Marti said. “If we dropped our relativistic charge close enough to the target, it is possible that it might have displaced the existing singularity in spacetime and it could have exited the ship. Interacting time dilation effects between mass and velocity are not well understood.”
“My brain has melted enough this week. Let’s skip the explanation for now,” he said. “Where is the Tahrat?”
“It will be hard to spot if it’s dead in space,” Ammo said.
“Do we know if it survived?”
It did, Qara thought to him. I can still feel the crew. They are more confused than we are.
“It did,” he said, translating her thought to voice.
No. I can’t tell where it is, but it isn’t far.
“Damn it, I want to see it. After all this, we’ve earned that right,” he growled.
Kai stepped up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Ethan, I understand how you feel, but we’ve got people running out of air in the containers we left behind. We need to get them and then keep moving.”
He nodded. “Keep scanning until the coils come up, but we’ll make feet as soon as that happens.”
Kai sank down on the step behind him. Pulling out her telepathic communicator, she closed her eyes.
“We don’t want to see if they need aid?” Marti asked.
Ethan thought about whether he could live with himself leaving a stranded crew in a disabled ship until an image of a black monster floating in the dark filled his mind.
He recoiled for a second until he realized what it was. The Tahrat Shan Che was less a ship than a demon spawn. It looked alive and like nothing he could have imagined as a ship.
He swallowed hard, and a shiver ran up his spine.
“Fuck them. They’re on their own.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The three days that they had been from their destination when they lost the Sun had stretched into eight. They’d debated whether they’d be better bringing everyone aboard and leaving the extra six containers behind so they could maintain a better speed, but in the end, Nuko had proposed using one of the two DSL to boost the field coil strength and the second one to increase the charge density toward the back end of the load.
It wasn’t a pretty idea, nor was it legal, but it worked. They got all twelve containers attached in a single train and it didn’t blow up when they jumped to cruise.
It did mean they were running at just a little over thirty percent of their previous fully loaded speed, but they could keep moving without leaving anything behind.
Oddly, 2000 times light speed felt excruciatingly slow. It meant they had more than a week of watching the sensors for what they all dreaded. The reappearance of the Tahrat Shan Che.
With both ships’ crews and all the plussers awake, and sucking down resources, it was a constant struggle to keep the life support operating, but it wasn’t air and water that caused the issues. The only ship system that had a problem keeping up was the solid waste recycler.
The strain on the conversion tanks was to the point where they had to jettison biscuits every ten hours, and Rene was up to his neck in literal shitwork trying to keep the hardware from exploding. Every time they had to dump a load, it meant they had to drop to sublight if they didn’t want to create what Quinn had called turd-singularities.
Ethan had laughed uncontrollably the first time he heard the handler call it that. Unfortunately, the name stuck, along with the mental image of dropping into a new universe surrounded by crappy black holes.
Despite the magnitude of that problem, it was the impossible crowding and the resultant pheromone fog that threatened to end their mission. The chaos had become overwhelming.
Ethan slept in his seat on the ConDeck for days, having handed over his room to the four new handlers from the Sun. Ammo had done something similar for a polyandry of plussers and slept at the engineering station on the ConDeck. Nuko lived in the copilot’s seat beside him and Qara slept on the floor in front of the jump seat she’d claimed as her station. They had people sleeping on the floor in the middeck and even in the two shuttles in the landing bay.
It was pure insanity, but they were pushing through it by sheer force of will.
“We’re here,” Qara said, sitting up and grinding the sleep out of her eyes with both hands.
Ethan pulled his seat into the upright position and locked it in place. Glancing at the nav screen he confirmed they were still more than a day from where they were supposed to drop out of cruise.
“We’re here,” she said again.
He glanced at Nuko who shrugged. She was reading their position the same way he was. “Not according to our sensors.”
His commlink chirped. “Ethan, we need to drop out of cruise.” It was Kai.
“Where not there,” he said, nodding to give Nuko the order to stop. If nothing else, it would give Rene a chance to unload some turd biscuits.
“We are,” she insisted. “I’m on my way up.”
“All hands prepare for normal space,” Nuko said over the shipwide comm. She slid her hands over the controls, and they dropped off cruise.
The cascade of photons leapt off the ship in a kaleidoscope of colors and as the screen cleared more than a dozen stars hung in the forward view.
“Where is here?” Nuko asked. She and Ammo both called up the local sensors on their consoles and scanned the system.
Ethan whistled. “Is this a small open cluster or a poly stellar group?”
“Sensors show a primary trinary system, with three distinct binary pair, and five L-class dwarf stars orbiting the inner group,” she said.
“Fourteen stars? The gravitational interactions would have to make that unstable.”
“It appears to be gravitationally cohesive,” Marti confirmed.
“I don’t detect any habitable planets,” Ammo said. “I’m not even seeing a gas giant that isn’t a Y-class dwarf.”
“Are you sure we’re in the right system?”
Qara nodded as Kai came through the door. Kaycee followed her, a step behind.
“This is it,” she said.
“Not according to the contract,” Ethan said, swiveling his seat to face her.
“I know,” she nodded. “We couldn’t risk being captured and having our location get out.”
“But there’s nothing here to call a landing.” Nuko shook her head. “There’s nothing in sensor range bigger than an asteroid or comet.”
“There is a debris field of captured objects that stretches almost all the way inward to the L-Dwarf stars,” Marti said. “It is extensive and abnormally chaotic.”
“That’s correct,” Kai said. “The orbits of the planetary bodies in the system were destabilized when the shock waves from the Cygnus Loop Supernova blew through almost 6,000 years ago.”
“Then why did we come here?”
“I’d prefer not to tell you,” she said quietly.
He shot her dead with an expression. After letting his intent linger long enough to make sure she caught his meaning, he asked “After everything we went through to get you here?”
She sighed. “Knowing anything more will put you in infinitely more danger.”
He blinked, raising an eyebrow. “We’ve lost a ship defending you and your cargo.”
“It could be worse, Ethan.”
“That’s hard to imagine.” He glanced at Ammo. She was nodding.
“It’s the truth.” She sat down on one of the jump seats and stared at him. “If you know what we’re doing, it makes you party to something that could cost you everything.”
He could feel her trying to get him to believe her, but he was a lot more resistive to her wiles than he had been when she first came aboard. He wasn’t buying in. “Suppose I say I won’t leave you here unless you tell me?”
“That’s a bluff and you know it. You couldn’t take us back to Coalition Space if you wanted. Your ship is critically over-taxed. Your life support is on the edge
of failing and you—”
“You owe me an answer,” he snarled, shaking his head and clenching his teeth until his jaw ached.
He glanced at Qara and her eyes shot open as she sensed the real magnitude of his anger. She made a little squeaking sound and nodded. She understood, even if she wouldn’t tell him anything.
“Where are we supposed to be unloading you and your people if there’s nothing here?” Nuko asked, reaching out and putting a hand on his arm.
He knew she was trying to remind him that they needed to finish the job and just turn loose of it.
She was right. It was just a job. A twisted, frakked up, mess of a job, but it was only that.
He let out a blast of air and nodded. Message received.
Kai reached into a pocket in her vest and pulled out a small object. She turned the device over several times. Deciding on a direction to hold it, she pressed her thumb down on the top and it disappeared into it. “It’s from the same place as your Urah Un,” she said.
Another piece of Shan Takhu based technology.
She looked at Nuko and nodded. “Head toward the ping.”
“What ping?” he asked
“Captain, we’ve just detected a gravity pulse,” Marti announced.
His heart skipped a beat and Nuko snapped her seat back to face her console. “Is it the Tahrat again?” He reached up to thumb his collarcomm.
“No, it’s a Tacra Un contact signal.” Nuko said.
“A Tacra Un? That means this is a protected system,” Kaycee said. She’d been leaning against the bulkhead being an observer, but she stood up straight and stepped forward to the front of the riser.
Kai shook her head. “It’s a dead system. It just happens to have a working Shan Takhu archive.”
“We’re receiving a set of coordinates,” Marti said. “It is very close to the barycenter of the trinary set of stars.”
“We’ll need to unload there.” Kai smiled. “Dutch told me he’d be ready for us.”
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 82