Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “A comatose human still has a functioning nervous system. That doesn’t mean it has the higher brain functions that give it the ability to interact with the world around it.”

  “If we can figure out how to kick it hard enough to wake up, maybe it’ll be enough to jump start the process?”

  “You don’t kick a person in a coma to wake them up,” Kaycee said, turning to glare at him.

  “I know that,” he said. “I was speaking figuratively. My thought is if we can get it to respond somehow, from there we might be able to figure out what to do to get the rest of the power on.”

  “I don’t know if we can do that. It’s a giant creature and we’re rather insignificant in comparison,” Ammo said.

  Marti walked up, and looking at the screen, moved her hand to grab his. She wrapped her fingers around and touched his Urah Un. The link reestablished instantly. I do know how to get the primary singularity core activated if I can access the control center.

  You do? The connection surprised Ethan.

  Marti’s projected face nodded. During my exposure to the Dutch Awareness, I received information for emergency use. I have access protocols to operate systems in the Tacra Un control center.

  Wait, why did Dutch give you that? Kaycee asked. She had joined them and was staring at the screen from behind the automech. Her hand rested on its shoulder. Did it know we’d be doing this?

  Not specifically, Marti said. I believe it was making sure we were prepared for any eventuality.

  Then getting you into the control room must be the priority, Ethan thought.

  Switching back to speaking he said, “We might be a mosquito, but perhaps we can figure out how to piss it off enough to open one eye and see who’s poking at it.

  “That’s a possibility,” Ammo said. She held her hand up and scratched her palm with a finger, smiling like she’d been listening in.

  “Then you and Rene focus on how we can be the most annoying, and Kaycee and I will figure out where it’s ticklish,” he said. “We’ve got less than forty-eight hours to work this out.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Rene sat in front of his main engineering console, staring at the screen. When Ammo walked in behind him, he didn’t react. He almost looked like he was asleep. Or dead. But apparently, he knew she was there. “How far do you think we should go to get inside?” he asked, without turning to face her.

  “Marti said if we can get her in, we’ve got a shot at getting it turned on,” she said, leaning against his workstation and crossing her arms. “Do you think you can do it?”

  “I don’t really, but I have an idea of something we can try. If we get extremely lucky, maybe it will work.”

  “And if not?”

  “Then we’ll have killed the Dawn,” he said. “Trying at all, will toast the coils and probably burn out the reactors as well as everything else. That’s the minimum we can expect, whether it works or not.”

  “Are you talking about trying to cut our way in?”

  He turned to face her and smirked. “I’m sure they’ve tried that. It’s too obvious.”

  “Then what are you talking about doing?”

  “Let me show you.” He called up the sensor logs from their encounters with the Tahrat Shan Che out in the Veil Nebula. “I wish I had real memories of this because it would make me feel a lot more confident.”

  “What are we looking at?” she asked, turning back around to watch the screen.

  “This is the gravity frequency readings you took when you were tracking the cloaked ship,” he said.

  She nodded. “I recognize that.”

  “I’m surprised you found anything considering this sits where it does. T-wave frequencies in the lower third of the terahertz gap are hard to detect in ideal conditions.”

  “You and Elias figured it out. I just twisted the settings until we could see it,” she said.

  “If you say so,” he said, sighing. “I decided to go over the sensor logs to check if there’s anything useful we missed. There’s a lot here we didn’t catch.”

  “If we’d known how long it would have been between attacks we might have, but we were maintaining watch and not trying to do science,” she said, feeling defensive. She swallowed it before it pushed her sidewise.

  “I know we had to have been busy trying to protect the ships, so we didn’t spend much time analyzing what we had in the heat of the situation.” He scrolled the sensor data forward and stopped it. “This is the 8.516 terahertz wave pattern of the Shan Takhu ship, right?”

  “Yah,” she said, shrugging. She’d seen the traces before.

  “What do you see there?”

  “Ultra-high frequency T-waves.”

  “Right. But they’re not sine-wave oscillations like we’d expect.” He loaded an enhancement algorithm and cranked the resolution up to isolate a single waveform.

  “I’ll be frakked,” she said, leaning around him and studying the screen. “They’re sawtooth.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. They’re back-sloped asymmetric waves with femtosecond downslope times. That puts the transition speed of the wave signal right at the graviton velocity threshold.”

  “Right,” she said. “I’m not sure why that’s relevant though?”

  He tapped the screen to move it forward and isolated another wave form. The wave sloped in the opposite direction.

  “What the hell?” she said.

  “That’s the beginning of the gravity spike we recorded every time they opened a doorway,” he said. “Because a sawtooth wave is a splice of two different frequencies, the rise time is what the sensors were detecting. That means when it switched slope, the apparent signal went several orders of magnitude higher than what we could differentiate, and the system interpreted it as a single long duration pulse. Technically though, it’s still the same frequency with a reverse bias.”

  “You just went way past me,” she admitted.

  “Wave shaping at that frequency is unbelievably sophisticated, but there’s more to it than that.”

  Tweaking the algorithm again he zoomed the waveform resolution further in and the trace became blurry as it recalculated the data. “I think this is the information signal that actually opens the door.” As the system muscled through the calculations, the blurred edge became sharp. There was a set of repeating spikes on the trace.

  “That looks to me like a command code,” he said.

  “Holy frak. How’s that possible?” she asked. She knew enough to realize that had to be four of five orders of magnitude higher frequency than was possible in any variation of gravity mechanics she’d ever heard of.

  He shrugged. “It’s not. But there it is. Somehow opening the door is pumping gravitons faster than they can propagate.”

  “What the hell is up there?”

  “Spacetime itself.”

  “You’re saying that the ship was literally bending space to open the door,” she asked.

  “I think that’s possible,” he shrugged. “That would imply the doorway’s a functioning spacetime bridge.”

  “What does that mean in a practical sense?” she asked stepping over to stare down at the reactor core and shaking her head. “Are you talking about building our own doorway?”

  “What I was getting at here isn’t how to build one. We don’t have the power even if I had the engineering chits to do it. What I am suggesting though, is to create that pulse code with enough amplitude to turn the lock and then get the Tacra Un to activate one of the doors from the other side. If I can splice the output frequencies of our coils, and run them through a narrowly tuned waveguide, I might be able to create a harmonic at a high enough frequency to trigger it.”

  “You said it would burn the ship up doing it?”

  “That’s the downside. It will take several nanoseconds of the pulse sequence at almost 200% of our reactor output. But if we get lucky, the door will open and then sustain from the other side long enough to get through it. But it will only work once,
and at the very least we’ll have killed the Dawn to do it.”

  “At the very least?”

  He turned to face her, so she understood he was serious. “If I miscalculate the signal modulation, it could feedback raw antiprotons and overload the reactor. We’d scatter ourselves across half a parsec.”

  “But it would be over quick, either way.”

  He nodded.

  “Have you talked to Nuko and Ethan about this yet?” she asked.

  “Nope, only you and Marti.”

  “Let’s get the boss in on this.”

  “I’d like to work on it a bit more before we do,” he said. “I mean, even I think it’s frakking insane, and I came up with the damned idea myself.”

  “How long do you think it would take to rig it if he says yes?”

  “A day or two. Minimum.”

  “We’ve got twenty-eight hours left,” she said. “I don’t think we can afford to wait for you to feel fuzzy. We should get it into his lap and let him make the call.”

  He nodded. “That’s what Marti said too.”

  “Marti can you get us a secure link to the boss?” she asked. “Bring Nuko in on this too if you can.”

  “Stand by,” Marti said. “The captain is not physically in the same lab section as I am. He is working to determine the function of the Shan Takhu technology they have in storage.”

  Rene settled back to his almost dead outward affect while they waited.

  “Go ahead,” Ethan said after several seconds. His voice, even though it was a subvocalized mental projection through the link, sounded tired.

  “Rene’s got an idea that might get us in,” she said.

  “Problem is, it will take a frak-ton of power and it will have to be delivered at an impossibly high frequency,” the engineer said.

  “He says there’s a lot of risk to it,” she confirmed.

  “What kind of risk,” Nuko asked. She was probably on the ConDeck and her face appeared on the screen to confirm it.

  “It’s probable that it will take out the coils on the ship and the two dropships,” he said.

  She whistled.

  “Probably the whole power grid too,” Ammo added.

  “And the reactor, too,” he finished.

  “Nojo?” Ethan asked.

  “I think I’ve isolated what might be the command code to open the doors,” he said. “Once it’s opened, the door should hopefully pull power from the other side and we should be able to get through it before it closes. The problem is, it’s a one-way trip if we can’t get the system up and running from the inside.”

  “Is there any way to test it first?”

  “Not unless you have a spare ship to destroy,” he said.

  There was a long pause before Ethan said anything. “Do you think you can do it?”

  “Theoretically,” Rene said. He didn’t sound convinced, but she could tell that he knew they had no choice. “But you need to think about the fact that if it does work, whoever goes in has no hope of getting out unless they can get the Tacra Un to open a door back out. We don’t know if it has the power for it, or if it will even cooperate.”

  “I’ll go,” Ammo said. “I can interface with the technology.”

  “Not necessarily,” Kaycee said. She’d joined the link too. “You have to be able to speak the language.”

  “I’ve got a better chance than anybody else on the ship,” she said. “And I’d wager we won’t be able to open a door for you two down there. Not from up here.”

  “And I have to go since I know how to operate the control center,” Marti said.

  “How long will it take to get set up?” Ethan asked.

  “Twenty-four hours. If everything works right,” the engineer said.

  “We’ve got twenty-eight.”

  “If I screw up because I rush, there won’t be anything left alive from here to hell,” he said.

  “It is also important that we plan for the fact that it will take us some time to get any of the systems operational once we get inside,” Marti said. “Even if we assume the minimum time to complete the preparations, our current deadline only leaves us four hours to find and activate some system that will qualify as proof that we have succeeded.”

  “Aright. Best prudent speed,” Ethan said. “We’ll buy as much time as we can.”

  Chapter Forty

  Ethan stood, leaning forward with his hands on the table in the lab’s conference room. He’d brought most of the Shan Takhu technology out of the lockers in the back. It sat piled it on the table and a row of carts they’d shoved against the wall. He’d been working his way through the artifacts trying to determine if any of them was a key to opening a backdoor into the Tacra Un.

  Within the first few hours it had become apparent that Kaycee could only activate the small portion of the pieces that she recognized. That left the brunt of the heavy lifting to him since the rewiring of his brain seemed to bypass a need to know the name of every object. Turning every one of them on, and then trying to figure out what it did, had only amplified his raging brainache.

  More than once, the process of activating them had nearly knocked him unconscious. Kaycee sat at a console in the conference room and was ready with her med kit. She kept a constant eye on his condition as he chewed through the piles.

  Exhaustion, and the continuous pain in his head, left him in no mood to be dealing with anyone. Especially not Jetaar and the impending arrival of several of his pirate council.

  “Two days isn’t enough time. Ten days might not be enough time,” he snarled.

  “It’s all I can give you,” Jetaar said. “I’ve provided everything you need to do the job. You just have to make it happen.”

  “For frak sake, you’ve been working on this for a decade, and other than digging a pit to expose the outside of one of the spheres you’ve gotten nowhere. You want us to solve it for you in two damn days,” he said.

  “Walker, you and your doctor have skills we don’t have,” he said, sitting down at the table and leaning back. “You know how this technology works. It takes someone with the right mental wiring to get any of it to turn on.”

  “Yah, and you know that this Tacra Un has been damaged,” Kaycee said. “There’s no front door here anymore.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I know there’s another way, and it leads to the proxy chamber vault where they do the Investiture of new Fellows. That one is still here.”

  Kaycee shot off a questioning expression in Ethan’s direction. He hadn’t told her about Jetaar’s history.

  He nodded. “He’d know that.”

  She blinked several times. “Even so, I don’t know if it opens from the outside.”

  “I’m betting that it does,” he said. “And I’m wagering that you’ll figure it out.”

  “Especially since it’s your lives that are on the table.” A thick and powerful wall of flesh appeared at the door. He was as wide as he was tall and wore his dark hair and beard loose. A scar split his face from above one eyebrow down to his jawline and focused attention on a luminous red prosthetic eye that glared unblinking at the world. He carried some kind of long sidearm in a holster strapped to a leg.

  For all that Jetaar could look intimidating when he tried, this man was terrifying. He was black, on black, on black, and surrounded by a cloud of darkness.

  Ethan fired off a level glare, and the man’s only response was to rumble out a laugh. “So Jetaar, this is the captain who handed you your ass,” he asked, ignoring Ethan and shaking his head. “He and his girlfriend both whine like a waste of air to me.”

  “Ethan Walker, this is Captain Xavier Augustus Constantine of the Shadowhawk. Captain X runs the Eastern Alliance of the Commonwealth.”

  The man dropped into the seat at the far end of the table and regarded the pile of gear. Several other captains followed him into the room and stood off to the sides until he nodded for them to sit. He obviously led the entourage by brute intimidation since none of them chose to si
t within arm’s distance of Captain X.

  “Tell me why you decided to give this vacuum pump pretending to be a captain two days to finish his task. Didn’t you tell me he was genetically engineered to interface with the Shan Takhu technology?”

  “He is,” Jetaar said. “But he’s been trying to work around a problem with the damaged part of the facility.”

  “You’re making excuses for him now?” So far Constantine hadn’t looked at either Ethan or Kaycee other than to locate them in the room when he came in. Instead his attention, and contempt, seemed to focus on Jetaar.

  “It’s not an excuse,” Kaycee said. “It’s a fact.”

  “When I want to talk to you, I will address my comments to you,” he said, rolling his good eye in her direction.

  “If you want this done, you will talk to me,” Ethan said, straightening up and crossing his arms in front of his chest. “There isn’t anybody else in this room who can get the Tacra Un working.”

  Jetaar shot him a glare that clearly questioned his sanity. Captain X intimidated him, too.

  “And there’s no way you leave this room alive but through me,” Constantine said. “You get the job done and we can revisit this discussion.”

  “Fine, let me explain this to you. And I will use small words, so you understand me,” Ethan said, ignoring the collective gasp of the other captains.

  “Watch your mouth, Walker,” Jetaar snarled.

  Ethan waved his hand dismissively and kept his attention on the seething bully in the room. “The Tacra Un’s door is locked. We’re searching through this pile of shit looking for a key. I have to activate every piece of this stuff and see if it turns the lock. If it doesn’t, then I move to the next. All the intimidation you want to hurl in my direction doesn’t make it go any faster.”

  “Get someone in here to help him,” he growled at Jetaar.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Ethan said, leaning forward and picking up a piece from the table. It lit up in his hand and he blinked. It was another mapping tool. This time he didn’t end up inside a planet or star, so he didn’t fall over. He held it for several seconds before he pitched it to one of the captains along the side of the table. It died about halfway through the air. “You try to turn it on.”