Atton let out a long breath and shook his head. “Captain, I appreciate what you’re trying to do, but there’s a reason I’m being sent alone rather than with a fleet to accompany me.”
“And what reason is that, Commander?”
“I can’t say.” Caldin sighed, but Atton held his ground. “I’m sorry, Captain.”
“Very well, you’re entitled to your—”
Suddenly the ship lurched and shuddered. The lights flickered overhead, and Atton heard a muffled screech of duranium rending, followed by an ominous groan. His eyes flew wide. “What was that?”
Caldin looked just as shocked, her face pale and her knuckles turning white where she had suddenly gripped the armrests of her chair. She reached up to her ear to answer an incoming comm call. “What in the nethers was that, Delayn . . . ?”
Atton waited while the ship’s chief engineer replied, and watched as concern flashed across the captain’s face. “I’ll be right there. Do not disengage our cloak!” she said, already rising from her seat at the head of the holo table.
“What’s wrong?” Atton asked, rising with her.
“We’ve been pulled out of SLS ten minutes ahead of schedule.”
“By what?” Atton asked, his mind racing to fill in the blanks. As far as anyone knew, Sythians didn’t have SLS disruptor tech. Then again, as far as anyone had known, they didn’t have disabler tech either and yet somehow they’d turned the Emissary’s reactor to slag.
“We’re not sure.” Caldin replied, hurrying to leave the operations center.
Atton followed her out with a frown. They reached the lift tubes in the corridor outside and rode one of them straight up to the bridge. Caldin stepped up to the bridge doors and opened them with a swish of her wrist across the scanner. As soon as the doors parted, Atton saw not stars and space as he was expecting, but a pure, unadulterated black. Space was so dark that the only way Atton could see the Intrepid’s bow, which the bridge overlooked, was by the faint light shining out from her external viewports. Yet even that light threatened to disappear in the void, obscured by a shadowy black mist.
“What the . . .” Atton shook his head, unable to decide what he was looking at.
Caldin strode down the gangway. “Report!” she called out.
Atton snapped out of it and hurried to catch up with her.
“We are approximately one and a quarter light years out from our SLS entry point, and point eight four light years short of our designated exit,” the gravidar officer announced.
“Do we know what pulled us out of SLS?” Caldin demanded as they reached the captain’s table.
“Hard to say, the strength of the gravitational field that pulled us out of SLS suggests there’s a super massive object nearby.”
“A black hole?” Caldin asked.
“Maybe, but electromagnetic radiation isn’t consistent with what we should find for that to be the case,” gravidar replied.
“But the field is naturally occurring?”
“It must be. No artificial gravity field could span such a large area of space, ma’am.”
Deck Commander Delayn rose from the engineering control station and hurried up the stairs to join them. “Captain,” he said, offering a quick salute.
“Would you care to explain what’s going on here, Commander?” Caldin asked.
“The short explanation is that we’re stuck.”
“Stuck?” Atton asked.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand either,” Caldin replied. “Why can’t we jump out?”
Delayn regarded them for a moment with his startlingly pale blue Worani eyes. “I can’t explain it.”
“Try,” Caldin demanded.
“SLS drives are built with fail-safes to avoid getting too close to gravitational forces which can tear spaceships apart while travelling in superluminal.”
“I know the mechanics of SLS drives, Delayn. I want to know why we’re stuck here.” Caldin gestured out the viewports to the murky black nebula they had landed in.
“That’s just it. We shouldn’t be stuck. The fail-safes should have prevented us from getting this close.”
“But . . .”
“The fail-safes didn’t work, and we’ve been pulled out of SLS in the middle of a strong gravitational field.”
“That’s not possible. We would have been ripped apart, as you just pointed out.”
“I can’t explain how we survived, or why the emergency fail-safes didn’t work.” Delayn sighed and ran a hand through his short gray hair. “At least they pulled us out of SLS before we could go any further.”
“But not before we ended up stuck smack in the middle of the deepest, darkest corner of the galaxy,” Caldin replied.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Atton insisted. “We made it this far, so why can’t we jump back out?”
“That’s like saying we survived jumping off a cliff so we should jump again,” Caldin replied. “If the fail-safes hadn’t pulled us out when they did, right now we’d just be another layer of interstellar krak floating through this filthy quagmire.”
Delayn added, “Gravitational force is maximal upon entry and exit from SLS. Our hull suffered stress fractures in a dozen different places when the fail-safes finally kicked in. If we deactivate them and try to jump out, we’ll be ripped apart.”
“How far do we have to go to get to a safe jump point?”
“By our calculations we are point six light years from the center of the field and point five light years from the closest point where we could safely jump out.”
Caldin’s eyes flew wide. “Half a light year?!” She pounded the captain’s table with a fist, and the star map projected above the table shuddered. She stood staring at the map for a long, silent moment.
“Ma’am . . .” Delayn began in a quiet voice, “What are your orders?”
Caldin shook her head. “We go back in real space.”
“Sythians could be following us.”
“Then we pick a slightly different trajectory!” she said, rounding on him. “If they manage to follow us this far in, then they’ll be just as frekked as we are.” Caldin turned to look out at the dark nebula where they’d ended up stranded. It was a dense cloud of interstellar dust far from any light source bright enough to pierce it, hence the classification—dark nebula.
Atton turned back to Delayn. “How long before we can get out of here?”
“There’s a lot to calculate, but if I had to guess . . . well, it would depend on the speed we can get up to. I’d say we can probably make one tenth the speed of light—but we’re going to drain a lot of fuel to keep our shields up under the barrage from all that dust.”
“Half a light year at one tenth the speed of light . . .” Atton ran the math quickly in his head. “We’re going to be stuck in this nebula for five years?”
“Keep your voice down,” Caldin growled.
“It will probably be less . . .” Delayn replied. “The nebula should begin to thin out the further we get from the gravitational force. At some point we’ll be able to speed up.”
Atton wasn’t ready to give up yet. “So, best case scenario, we make it out in four years.” He turned to the gravidar officer who’d reported the situation when they’d arrived on deck. “Gravidar—you said sensors show a strong gravitational field, but not the radiation we’d expect from a black hole.”
“That’s correct, sir.”
“So what if this really is an SLS disruption field?”
“No field generator ever constructed has a range of several light years, Commander,” Captain Caldin replied quietly.
“The captain is right,” gravidar replied. “It would take the energy of an entire sun to create a field that large.
“And then some,” Caldin said. “No,” she began, turning away from the viewports to address her bridge crew, “we only have ourselves to blame for this. We’re here because of an equipment malfunction, because someone on this ship didn’t do their job properly.
I’m going to conduct a formal inquiry into the matter. Whoever is to blame for the faulty fail-safes will be punished accordingly. Unfortunately, we’re all going to suffer for that person’s mistake. As of this moment, emergency rationing is in full effect. Crews will begin rotating in and out of stasis in order to preserve what supplies we have. This ship was equipped for extended range; we’re going to stretch the definition of the term. Helm—plot a course back the way we came with a positive five degree deviation with respect to the x-axis.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Better get comfortable, people,” Caldin went on. “We have a long, dark trip ahead of us.” Atton watched her turn to him. “Seems like you’ll have the time you need to repair your ship, Commander.”
Atton frowned. “Too much time.”
“Why don’t you go spend some of it with your squadron. They’ll need cooler heads around them when I give everyone a sitrep. This is going to be a bitter lesson for all of us.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Atton gave a swift salute and then turned on his heel and left the bridge. It took all his energy just to focus on putting one foot in front of the other and not collapse in the corridor along the way. He couldn’t believe it. Five frekking years!
The captain was no stranger to long-range missions. A few years ago she’d made the year-long round trip from the Adventa Galaxy to the neighboring Getties Cluster in order to gather Intel on the Sythians and the Gors. But this mission was five times as long as that. The Intrepid could probably make it with emergency rations and rotating crews, and if anyone could get them home, Caldin would, but Atton wasn’t sure there would be a home to go back to. Dark Space wasn’t going to get the reinforcements they needed, and something told him the Sythians weren’t going to wait five years to make a move.
As he waited outside the bridge for one of the lift tubes to arrive, Atton turned to look out a nearby viewport at the vile, inky blackness which had snared them.
Looks like the darkness finally found us . . . he thought, and it’s not letting go.
Chapter 15
By the time Atton entered the Spacer’s Rest, the officer’s lounge on deck 17, he was still in a daze, so shocked by what had happened that he was completely oblivious to his surroundings. He stumbled up to the bar counter and signaled to Kerk for a drink. The bartender nodded and headed his way. “Maverick,” he croaked.
“Sure.”
“Hoi, motherfrekker, over here!” Gina called to him from the other end of the bar.
Atton turned and shook his head. Not now Gina, he thought, and looked away. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with her. Not taking the hint, she made her way over to him and arrived just as Kerk sent a black maverick sailing down the counter into his open hand.
“You hear me?” Gina asked, tapping him roughly on the shoulder while taking an indecorous gulp from her own mug of beer.
“Put it on my tab,” Atton said to the bartender, determined to ignore his XO. She reeked of beer, which was no small feat, since she couldn’t have been in the lounge for more than twenty minutes. In that time only a third of the other pilots had made their way to the lounge. The others were likely catching up on sleep or grieving the dead in a less social way. Atton hadn’t even had a chance to check their casualties. He was afraid to look and find someone he’d actually started to like missing from the Guardians’ roster. At least Gina’s still around. But does she have to make that so painfully obvious?
Atton turned and left the bar, heading for the most isolated part of the lounge so he could be alone.
Gina didn’t let him get that far. She grabbed him by his shoulder and spun him to face her, forcing him to notice the fire burning in her amber eyes. He saw something else there, too, but he didn’t immediately recognize it. Then some of the fire in her eyes spilled to her cheeks, and he realized what it was.
“Frek you, Atton!” she spat, swiping angrily at her tears with the back of one hand. “You know a thank you would be nice.”
Atton shook his head, uncomprehending. “For what?”
Gina’s eyes flashed and she gave him a sudden shove which made him stumble backward a few steps. “For what?” she echoed.
Atton’s own ire began to build. He recovered his balance with a scowl and loomed suddenly close to her face. “Watch yourself, Lieutenant. Would you care to explain that outburst?”
“Sure,” she shrugged. “Why the frek not? You want to sit down for this, or take it standing up?”
“Just make it quick. I’m short on patience right now.”
Gina’s mouth curved in a bitter smile. “All right, let me summarize it for you. We’re halfway to the Intrepid when we get ordered back out there to cover your ass. We’re facing five to one odds, increasing by the second. Guardians lose Shafer and Tails on the first pass, but we manage to keep them off you. We give you your chance to get away so you can do whatever the frek it is you were doing out there. Then you go and get your ship disabled, and we’re ordered to keep those fighters off your six until the Intrepid can grav you back in.
“Ordinarily no one pilot would be worth that kind of risk, but I guess being the admiral’s stepson really does making you frekkin’ special, because we’re kept out there until the last frekking minute!”
“Gina, I . . .”
“I’m not done, Iceman! Not long after that, the Intrepid cloaks. They’re still gravving you in so you’ll be fine, but what about us? We can’t even see the hangar! Orders come through to follow you in. I pick up three Shells along the way, and my wingmate gets the bright idea to peel off and distract them. He pulls off the impossible and sends all three to the netherworld with a pair of Hailfires. Just as he’s coming back around to join the tail-end of our formation, hangar bay controllers pull the last Nova inside, leaving not even a trail of debris for him to follow. Then the Captain gives the order and we jump out, leaving him behind. Another few minutes and we would have been able to get him on board, too.”
Atton felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice over his head and now he was left shivering from the cold. He shook his head. “Saving one pilot wouldn’t be worth the risk of sticking around.”
“No? So why was saving your ass worth that risk? That man died for you. Because of you,” she said, stabbing his chest with a finger.
“I . . .”
“Gettin’ all choked up, are we, Iceman? No, your eyes are bone dry, aren’t they? Bet you don’t even have tear ducts.”
Atton swallowed. “Who was it?”
“Perkins,” she said with a brittle smile. A few more tears spilled to her cheeks and she shook her head. “It would just frekkin’ figure that the one man who’s actually better than he seems goes and gets himself killed for having such a big damn heart.”
It wasn’t lost on Atton that Gina and “Hawkeye” Perkins had been hooking up over the last week and that now Gina felt doubly bad—bad because he had meant something to her and now he was gone, and worse because of the mountain of guilt she felt over the fact that he’d saved her life only to be left for dead.
There was an even bigger mountain resting on Atton’s shoulders. Three pilots in Guardian Squadron alone had lost their lives to rescue him. And who knew how many other officers had died while the Intrepid had slugged it out with Sythian warships, waiting for him to be pulled back on board. He’d already noticed several decks grayed out on lift tube control panels.
“Gina . . . I’m sorry,” Atton managed in a thready whisper.
“You killed him.”
“Tuner!”
Atton saw Ceyla Corbin come up behind Gina. “Leave him alone,” she said.
“Why?” Gina asked, rounding on her. “Huh? What’s he to you?” She gave Ceyla a shove, followed by another one, and—
Atton stepped between them and pushed them apart before Gina could find an excuse to start throwing punches.
Ceyla made an irritated noise in the back of her throat. “He’s my commanding officer, and yours, too—or have you forgotten tha
t?”
“A good commander should die for his men!” Gina spat, trying to get around Atton. “Not sit by and watch them all die for him!”
“It wasn’t his fault. Captain’s orders, remember? He couldn’t even send comms, and he wasn’t in charge of the squadron—you were.”
“You frekkin’ little sclut . . . !”
Atton had to work hard to keep her away from Ceyla. “Hoi!” he yelled. “Cut it out Tuner! Frek it, Gina, I’m sorry, okay?” Atton said again, and he meant it. For some reason his eyes weren’t supporting his apology with tears. He wasn’t much of a crier, but that didn’t mean he was as cold-hearted as Gina seemed to think.
“Frek you, Iceman!” Gina replied. “Couldn’t have picked a better call sign for you if I’d asked your own mother to come up with it!”
Atton ignored her insults. “Look, if there’s anything I can do . . . when’s the memorial for . . . the people we lost?”
“You don’t even remember their names, do you?”
Atton was ashamed to admit that was true. He did know his squad mates by name, but right now he couldn’t remember which ones Gina had told him they’d lost. He’d had too many shocks in the last half hour to take it all in.
Gina took his silence for her answer. “That’s what I thought!” she said, nodding slowly. “You know what, that’s it! You want to make up for it? Let’s see you put your own ass on the line. I’ll be waiting in the ring, just in case you figure out what those ornaments dangling between your legs are for.”
Atton watched, slack-jawed and wide-eyed as Gina turned and stalked away, heading for the ring on the other side of the bar. There in the distance, lay a square with high walls of red flexi-bars. Two miniature assault mechs stood awaiting activation in opposite corners of the ring, each of them almost as tall as a man, green status lights blinking on their chests in readiness. Those mechs were the avatars which officers typically used to settle their quarrels, but Gina had no intention of letting him hide behind a bot.
“She’s just hurting, Commander,” Ceyla said slowly. “Don’t let it get to . . .” Atton strode by her, hot on Gina’s heels.
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