Storm Between the Stars: Book 1 in the Fall of the Censor

by Karl K Gallagher

  The cheerful ones still had some worries. Roger and Soon ran simulated evasive maneuvers to prepare for a hostile welcome. Marcus and Alys rigged disposable coveralls for the spacesuits to prevent any contaminated dirt coming on board.

  The first mate found the captain reinventorying the cargo. No crew were there to see so she slipped an arm around his waist and leaned into him. “Talk to me?”

  “The condiments are our best bet. Exotic and a novelty. The other foods will just be novelties. The rest are iffy. The tractor parts we as might as well drop out the hatch when we get to normal space.”

  “Don’t throw away anything if you don’t have to. We could sell the parts to historians.”

  That brought a chuckle out of her husband.

  “Now come to bed. You’re not working, you’re brooding.”

  He didn’t move, other than looking around to see if any of the crew had snuck in. “I’d rather brood over trading possibilities than whether we’re headed into a war or a graveyard or some realm where they’ve learned to make ships disappear by saying a magic word.”

  “So you’ve thought through each of those and made a plan?”

  “More or less.”

  “Then let’s go write those plans down.”

  An hour in their oversized cabin left them with a series of flowcharts. Most branches ended in ‘run like hell’ or ‘beg for mercy.’ A few went to ‘make a deal.’ They were the likeliest branches.

  “There,” said Lane Landry. “Feel more in control of the situation?”

  “No. More in control of me.”

  “That’s enough. Roll onto your belly, Niko.”

  A back rub soon put the captain to sleep.

  The first mate checked with the bridge before turning in herself. Roger reported hyperspace was still empty.

  “Okay. Wake us if anything happens,” she said.

  ***

  Roger's voice crackled on the PA. “Captain to the bridge. Captain to the bridge.”

  Landry dropped his fork on the galley table and raced through the hatch. The first mate followed more slowly. Marcus had been enjoying dinner with his parents. He rummaged in the cabinets to find two covers to put over their plates.

  “What happened?” demanded Landry as he burst through the bridge hatch. They were in open interstellar space. There shouldn't be anything happening.

  Roger stood up from the command chair and pointed out one of the wide viewports. “We saw something, sir. Can’t figure out what the heck it is.”

  His finger indicated a glowing, swirling mass which hadn’t been there during Landry’s last shift. It changed as the captain watched. Puffs of yellow disappeared under purple which was replaced by green. His wife let out a low whistle as she came up next to him.

  “It has a radar signature,” said Soon. Her display bore a blurry black-and-grey version of the sight. “A weak one. It’s not a shoal.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s a storm. Congratulations. You two are the first Fierans to see a hyperspace storm since . . . well, ever. We can’t have storms in the Bubble. Not enough room for one to develop.”

  Landry only recognized it because he’d taken classes beyond what was needed for his Master’s Warrant to command a ship. He unpacked rusty memories to explain the sight to his bridge crew.

  Hyperspace was not a vacuum. It was filled with aether, part liquid, part gas, and part nightmare of physicists. Azure Tarn could coast through normal space, but in hyperspace she needed to keep thrusting or drag would bring her to a stop. The ship’s maximum speed was governed by the strength of her hull to stand up to the aether pressure.

  Even in the Fieran Bubble there were “waves” in hyperspace as the aether was pushed by stellar flares or shifting shoals. The pressure difference wasn’t enough to damage a ship, as long as it wasn’t moving at its top speed.

  In the wide open galaxy supernovas or fast moving black holes would smash the aether like an explosion. The waves would bend around shoals and stars, dispersed in some directions and concentrated in others. This storm looked like a wave had been focused straight toward them.

  “Can it hurt us?” asked Roger.

  “Probably,” said Landry. “There’s records of storms that crushed ships to dust. We’ll transition back to normal space as soon as we feel a shiver.”

  Both spacers looked relieved. He felt indignant at that. How crazy did they think he was? Landry looked back at his first mate, leaning on the back of the command chair, for reassurance. Her smirk wasn’t reassuring.

  “Watch our heading more closely. The bow wave of this might push us off course. And track its position. If we’re lucky it’ll miss us.”

  Nine hours later it was clear they would not be missed. The storm filled half the sky. Pressure sensors on the hull reported increasing force on the port side. Landry readied the ship for transition.

  He visited the engine room to check on Gander’s preparations. The hyperspace twister was shining. He hoped it was in as good shape on the inside.

  “We’re all set, Captain,” said Gander.

  “Thanks, Chief. My real worry is when we go back to hyperspace. If we come out too close to the storm, how fast can you turn around the twister to get us back to normal?”

  Military ships could do an in-and-out in less than five minutes—but Azure Tarn didn't have the fancy gear they did. Nor was Gander certified to military standards.

  “Mmmm.” The chief engineer twisted a polishing rag in his hands as he thought. “Could do it in ten minutes from when you give the word. But that’s going to put some wear on it.”

  “We can live with that. Prep for a switch back as soon as we go through, just in case.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  A whistle sounded around them. Tets looked up from the bearing he was cleaning. “What’s that noise?”

  Gander chuckled. “It’s the storm, lad. And it’ll get louder until we drop out.”

  Back at the bridge the first mate reported, “I took us down to half ahead thrust. The density keeps going up.”

  “Right.” Landry put his hand against the bulkhead. There was just a faint shiver as the storm beat at the ship. They didn’t need to jump yet . . . but if they were slowing down there wasn’t much point to staying in hyperspace. “Take us back to normal space.”

  “Aye-aye.” Lane Landry turned back to the bridge crew. A few commands brought the ship through the stomach-twisting transition to normal space.

  Once everyone recovered Landry ordered, “Sensors, let’s get a scan for junk around here.”

  A few minutes later Betty reported, “Nothing. Not even dust.”

  Well, they were many light-years from the nearest star. This would be as empty as space got.

  The next twenty four hours were boring. The off-duty crew rotated through a continuous card game in the galley. When it was time to go back to hyperspace everyone was in place early.

  “Initiate transition,” ordered Landry. He’d have to eyeball the conditions before deciding whether to stay in hyperspace.

  The “twister” created a bubble in hyperspace which the ship fell into. Once transition was complete the hyperspace generator dropped its field. In a normal transition someone with a sensitive microphone pressed to the hull could pick up the slap of the surrounding aether collapsing the vacuum of the bubble.

  Everyone heard the slap this time. Bright light shone through the viewports on the bridge. Roger lifted his hand to shield his eyes. Then he grabbed his console with both hands as the ship rolled to starboard.

  Captain Landry held to his chair with his hands and the footrest with both feet. The ship followed the roll with a nose-down pitch that nearly tossed him out of the chair. With his usual post-transition vertigo he could barely tell what was the ship and what was his unhappy brain.

  Someone was throwing up. A light flashed outside the viewport, leaving purple spots in Landry's vision. Someone screamed. The bridge lights and half the displays went dark. A whiff of smoke cut acr
oss the smell of vomit. The roar was too loud to be an air leak—he'd feel the breeze. Must be aether on the hull.

  He looked up. There was a crack in the viewport. Not enough for a leak—that’d be a high pitched hiss and there wasn’t any of that in the noise on the bridge.

  His fingers groped for the intercom buttons. “Gander, transition back!”

  No response.

  “Gander, transition back, acknowledge!”

  The first mate stood up from the comm console. “Intercom’s down. Circuit breaker. Most of them tripped after that lightning strike. I’ll go tell him.”

  She staggered across the bridge, catching herself on the hatch coaming as the ship lurched again. Then she went through.

  Her husband reached a hand toward her, wanting to do that himself—but they couldn’t both leave the bridge.

  The captain turned back to the bow. “Roger, apply thrust, take us down and starboard. Let’s try to get in this current, see if that makes the ride easier.”

  “Aye-aye,” gasped the helmsman, barely audible over the roar of aether outside.

  Lane Landry didn’t have much trouble passing through the corridor. With both arms outstretched she could have one on each bulkhead. That let her brace against each surge and lurch. She kept her feet all the way to the galley.

  In the hatchway she hesitated. Going around the outer wall would take longer, and only help against surges from one direction. The middle was asking to be thrown across the compartment. But there was the table to hold on to . . . and it would be faster. The first mate lunged for the table.

  She reached it before the next lurch, nearly losing her grip as the ship pitched down. Then there was a rattle louder than the roar of aether outside and a chair bounced off the table straight at her head. They were made to hook into the deck in case of free-fall. Someone had been careless last meal.

  Lane ducked almost fast enough. One chair leg scraped over the top of her head, annoying but not as painful as her hands after absorbing a surge. She started moving along the table, pulling herself forward with the table edge and locked-down chairs, hoping she could make it out of the galley before that chair came flying back.

  Then she was through the hatch and could brace herself in the narrow corridor again. The engine room hatch was open. She could hear voices and see a moving light.

  “Hold the damned light steady, the jumper needs to plug into the capacitor just right.”

  That was Gander yelling at his apprentice again, just as if they were doing routine maintenance.

  “There, the juice is flowing now. Check the brushes. They lose some wires every cycle.”

  The first mate slammed against the coaming of the engine room hatch with a grunt. A roll came at exactly the wrong moment. The noise made both chief and apprentice look up at her.

  “Ma’am, you’re bleeding!” cried apprentice Tets.

  A swipe of her hand proved the moisture dribbling from her scalp was blood, not sweat. “It’s not urgent. Orders from the bridge, transition to normal as soon as you can.”

  Gander grunted. “That’s what we’re working on. If you were coming to tell me to not jump, I’d have words.”

  The first mate didn’t answer. Now that she’d delivered the message she had attention to spare for her head. Poking at the tear stung like hell, but she didn’t think she had a concussion.

  A deep moan cut through the aether roar. “What’s that?” demanded Tets. Lane wondered the same.

  “Hull ribs are starting to bend,” said Gander. “We’ve turned to put the wind at our after quarter. The bitch isn’t designed for that. Wants pressure on her nose.”

  The pitching and rolling subsided. The moans of the structure came and went.

  “Topped off at last!” Gander shoved a lever home and the transition generator started whirring.

  Then it froze as the energy was dumped into the generator field. Blessed silence and stillness fell on the ship. Lane heard ringing bells, but knew that was just the transition.

  “Thank you, Chief,” said Lane. She’d thank Tets for his part later, where Gander wouldn’t hear.

  The cut on the first mate’s head was the worst injury. Everyone had at least some bruises. Inspections showed no major damage, though some electronics needed new components. Morale held up. As Marcus put it, “Now it really feels like we’re on an adventure.”

  The captain waited forty-eight hours before trying hyperspace again. This time they were in the big empty. The storm was receding on the starboard bow, far enough away they could spot all the navigation markers they needed to resume their course.

  ***

  Three days later they arrived at the shoals surrounding the star. Bright stripes in the cloud resolved into rifts allowing passage into the center. They picked one free of wisps and headed in, all crew on duty again.

  “This is pretty,” remarked Soon.

  Landry agreed. The shoals on each side were layered in blue and pink. The starward shoal glowed brighter. The outer one reflected lights shining from around the curve of the rift.

  With no charts Roger steered for the brightest light. Betty and Soon worked together to make a record of where they’d passed.

  The navigator reported, “It looks like this rift follows a nautilus curve. Two loops should get us close enough to find a planet.”

  “If the rift doesn’t pinch closed,” muttered Betty.

  It was only one and a half times around the sun when Welly pointed out the window. “Is that a gravity swirl?”

  A patch of the inner wall twisted under the strain of some normal space object’s gravitational pull.

  “Good eye,” said Soon. “It’s not very wide. Rocky planet. Probable location off the port bow. Want to take a look, Skipper?”

  “Yes, but not from this close,” said Captain Landry. “Keep going another ten minutes so we’re clear of any junk around it.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  Landry felt the tension on the bridge rise. In a few minutes they might contact the rest of the human race.

  Soon watched the chronometer. “Ten minutes, sir.”

  “All stop.”

  “All stop, aye,” said Roger.

  The pastel clouds sliding by the viewport slowed as the aetheric resistance of hyperspace stole the ship’s momentum. When they stopped Landry pressed the engine room intercom switch.

  “Chief, are we ready to jump back to normal space?”

  “Ready, aye. Capacitor fully charged, twister oiled and inspected.” Gander sounded mildly irritated over having his readiness questioned. For him that was cheerful.

  “We’ll recharge the capacitor before going anywhere in normal. Stand ready.”

  “Aye-aye.”

  Landry switched to the PA. “All hands. We are returning to normal space. Jump in three, two, one, jump.”

  Gander hit his cue. The twister took a sphere of space into another universe. The glowing clouds blurred and became infinite black, spangled with bright points.

  Landry held tight to the arms of his chair as his inner ear insisted gravity had gone sideways. When the urge to throw himself to the deck passed he said, “Report.”

  “Fine.” “Okay.” “Fine,” said each of the bridge crew. Soon put her bag away.

  The transition affected everyone differently. Landry knew one spacer who swore he could tell where they’d arrived by what he smelled during the jump.

  “All hands report,” Landry said over the PA.

  “Engine room. All crew fine,” said Gander.

  Marcus’ voice was next. “Cargo hold. Both crew fine.”

  “Sensors, do a short-range check.” They’d come out clear of any star or planet, the signs of hyperspace hadn’t lied to them. But any place in normal space could have a bit of gravel traveling fast enough to breach their hull.

  “Nothing nearby, sir,” reported Betty.

  Landry began to relax. “Good. We’ll charge up the capacitor then turn the radar loose on that planet. We’re
probably too far from the primary for it to have anything interesting. But we’ll check.”

  The younger crew looked at the image of the world on the ship’s camera and speculated what might be under the ice.

  The first mate, sitting at the Comm station, began typing excitedly. “I’m picking up a radio signal. Digital code. Standard navigation message format. It’s partially in English. ‘Mining station Fwynwr Ystaen’ and coordinates.”

  The message was forwarded to the other bridge consoles.

  “The coordinates match the origin of the signal,” declared Soon. “It’s about two thirds of the way around the primary.”

  She worked with two displays, one showing the solar system they were in and the other an extrapolation of the hyperspace rift they’d been travelling through.

  “We can get there twenty percent faster in normal space,” she concluded.

  “Good,” said the captain. “But we’ll go through hyper. I want to keep an escape route open.”

  The correspondence between normal and hyper varied enough that they couldn’t follow the course of the rift in normal without a good recent survey. If they went through a volume matching a shoal and tried to enter hyperspace the ship would become a burst of metal fragments.

  Once the ship was cruising between glowing clouds again Roger burst out, “They’re alive!”

  Nods went around the bridge.

  “Don’t be too excited,” said Lane Landry. “It could be automatic.”

  “Automatics need maintenance. So there were people here at least a century ago.” Roger kept steering Azure Tarn down the middle of the rift, but his gaze seemed to be past the clouds.

  Soon continued updating her chart with the actual dimensions of the rift. “Okay, I don’t see a swirl, but I think this is as close as we can get.”

  “Very good,” said Captain Landry. He ran the crew through the ritual of transition again. This time Soon did throw up. Her stomach hadn’t recovered from the previous two so close together.

  “I have the mining station beacon again,” said Lane, after she’d recovered from hallucinatory ringing bells.

  “Hail them,” said the captain.