Earth Song: Etude to War (54 page)

Chapter 61

June 15
th
, 534 AE

Unknown Star System, Galactic Frontier

With agonizing slowness Minu felt her consciousness return. Panic hit her almost immediately as her senses screamed out that she was falling to her death. She tried to open her eyes, but only her left eye would open. The CIC was in near total darkness with only one dim green bulb providing barely enough light to discern shadows of other people floating, and globs of liquid.

“Oh no,” she gasped and shook her head to clear it. Fireworks exploded behind her eyes and she gasped, her hands going to cradle her throbbing skull. Her right hand felt matted hair and wetness. At least she knew whose blood that was floating around. But was it all hers?

Minu wasn’t wearing her normal combat kit, or she would have a number of bio-luminescent light sticks handy. But by feeling her thigh belt she found her tablet was still there. She removed it and thumbed the device to life. Its transparent body came alive with its low light reading illumination and cast the room into life.

She was the only one conscious, which was immediately apparent. She instantly found the slightly spinning form of her daughter floating nearby. Because of her own movement, it was impossible to tell if she were breathing. “Damn it,” Minu moaned and tried to reach her. The girl was just a half meter too far away.

Her mind made ridiculous suggestions like trying to swim through the air before she paused, closed her eyes, and cleared her thoughts. Then she calmly unbuckled her belt, and flipped it over to spin around Lilith’s leg, then gently pulled herself to her daughter. The lithe young girl’s chest was slowly rising and falling. Minu let herself breathe at last.

Minu took a quick assessment of the girl’s condition. Even pulse and respiration, pupils seemed responsive, and her limbs showed no signs of unusual angles or swelling. She had a nasty bruise on the right side of her face and her right shoulder looked worse for wear as well, but that was all Minu could see wrong with her. In fact while she was examining her she moaned and her eyes fluttered.

“Good girl,” she whispered and patted her cheek. She didn’t wake up, but Minu figured that would happen any time so she moved on to the others in the room.

A sound like sizzling bacon was coming from the far side of the CIC. Minu held up her tablet and saw Kal’at holding his left leg which was bent at an unnatural angle. The sounds weren’t turned into English by Minu’s translator so she surmised it must be simple sounds of pain.

“How badly are you hurt?” she asked across the half dozen meters between them.

“My leg is broke,” he hissed in reply, “and it feels like a couple ribs as well, but otherwise I am functional.”

“That is good news.” Aaron was only a meter from her Rasa friend. “Can you reach Aaron?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

Kal’at reached with a hand but couldn’t touch the man who’d fetched up against a padded wall. So he tucked into a ball, rotated in space and used his tail to flick out and catch Aaron then reel himself in. The tail wasn’t prehensile, but it was bendable enough for the task at hand. After a moments examining he made his pronouncement.

“He is well.”

Minu nodded gratefully.

“There are no obvious injuries and he is breathing.”

The Rangers were in another compartment, so that was everyone. She hoped they’d fared at least as well as those in the CIC, if not better. They’d been able to at least strap into couches prior to the departure from the power station, a precaution Lilith had insisted on for anyone not in the CIC. Still, they would probably be near panic by now. She activated her radio.

“Sergeant Selain,” she called on the radio.

“Good to hear you voice, Chosen.”

“And yours. What is your sit-rep?”

“We have two minor injuries from debris flying around during the incident. We were getting real curious down here.”

“I bet you were. The ship appears out of danger, so tend to your wounded.”

“Understood. Can you give us some details?”

“I can’t just now, my daughter is unconscious. I do know we were attacked by several warships just as we were leaving the power station. It looked bad for a while, then poof.”

She tried to remember what had happened, but after they were pinned to the wall like bugs, Lilith stopped using any kind of holographic displays.

Were they helpless and about to be boarded by hostile aliens? She only had a small combat knife on her belt. Their weapons were dozens of meters away, through zero gravity, in a ship that wasn’t really configured for moving around without assistance.

For that matter, how badly damaged was the ship? She bit down on her concerns for the moment.

“At this point, assume we’re still in hostile territory. Better arm yourselves and secure your wounded. We could be boarded at any time.”

“Yes ma’am!”

“Once that is taken care of, see if you can get to us in the CIC?”

“We’re on it.”

Minu nodded and turned off the radio. She held up the tablet for light and checked her daughter again. The dim light made her eyes move around behind her eyelids, which was a good sign. And sure enough, her eyes fluttered open.

“Mom?!” Her facial expression went from confusion to fear and near-panic in a split second.

“It’s okay,” Minu said soothingly and patted her daughter on the cheek gently.

She’d been holding the girl cross body to keep them from spinning. Despite this they had a gentle roll going on and were still more than a meter from the nearest wall.

“I was disconnected from the ship,” Lilith said in a hushed voice.

“We were hit and then something happened,” Minu told her daughter. “You're okay. I've got you, dear.”

And then Lilith did something she'd never done before, she grabbed her mother in a genuine need to be held. Minu, surprised for a moment, quickly recovered and held her close for several long minutes.

And then she got that distant look on her face, her eyes un-focusing like someone listening to the distant sound of a song, and Minu knew her daughter was back in touch with the ship. “The main computer has reset,” she informed her mother and disentangled herself. “I am restoring gravitic control.”

The room’s subtle lighting returned along with the forcefields that simulated a floor, and gravity controls that made it feel like there was an up and down. Despite the broken limb, Kal'at helped make sure that Aaron safely slid along the wall to the newly oriented floor. As he was landing he grunted, but didn't wake up.

“Interior communications are restored,” Lilith told them as her holographic displays returned and the walls once again became 'transparent' to show space outside. To everyone’s surprise, even Lilith, there was no sign of the three stars of the Dervish system.

“Sensors confirm, we are nowhere near our previous location,” Lilith told them.

“Then where are we?” Minu asked as she knelt next to her husband and examined the growing bruise on the side of his head.

“I am not sure. But I am more interested in how we got here.”

The door to the CIC slid open to show Sergeant Selain and two of his men, heavily armed and looking concerned.

“Stand down, Sergeant. Everything is under control.” He nodded to Minu and came in, noticing the injured right away. “Have your men form an injury detail and let’s get Kal'at and Chosen Aaron to the medical bay.”

“Yes ma'am.”

“How about you, Lilith?” Minu asked her daughter, looking again at the bruise on the side of her head. “Are you okay?”

“I am not seriously injured,” Lilith replied. She flexed her right arm and winced slightly, though was able to perform a full series of motions. The right side of her face was a massive growing blackness and her eye was in danger of swelling closed, but like she had said, it didn’t appear serious.

“Very well, I’m going down with your father to be sure he isn’t hurt too bad himself. I’ll check back in a few minutes.”

Lilith nodded and a minute later she was alone. Her holographic displays were alive with real-time damage reports, both from the ship’s internal sensors, and from a score of bots she’d sent out shortly after regaining consciousness. Some key systems were completely unresponsive and she was doing her best to ride down a growing sense of panic. It was like having an arm that you had no sense of feeling in and no way of looking to be sure it hadn’t been severed.

From out of special airlocks in the hull, the crystalline bots swarmed to examine the ship. They constructed a series of reports that filled in her missing data, though with agonizing slowness. By the time Minu reported in from the medical bay that Lilith’s father was going to recover, she also knew her ship would survive as well.

Two massive energy beams from the T’Chillen dreadnought had hit at the end of the battle. One was absorbed but had overloaded the shield capacitors to such an extent that it had blown out that bank of energy buffers.

The hull had fractured around the blowup, but this was actually within the design specs of the craft and easy enough to repair from stores. The feedback of the uncontrolled overload was what temporarily shut down the main computer, and rendered her unconscious.

The computer damage could be mitigated. Its central core was in the middle of the ship, and could not be damaged short of the complete destruction of the vessel. However, overloaded and shut down, there was no record of the second beam impact.

The bots showed her that it had struck the aft section of the ball superstructure, penetrating the hull and destroying and engineering space. The equipment there was redundant, so there was no real lasting damage. It had just missed one of the storage bays where the ship-sized EPCs were stored.

She felt a cold shiver run up her spine as she thought about what would have happened had one of them been hit. They were usually only transported in special craft because of the raw destructive power of the capacitors.

Lilith told her mother that the ship was okay and repairs would be completed in a few hours (at least sufficient to get back underway). When Minu asked her about their position and how they had gotten there, Lilith blew her off with the computer being damaged excuse, and went back to work.

First things first
, she thought,
where are we?

With the long-range sensors temporarily out of commission while the hull was being repaired, she resorted to a more primitive but still reliable method. Cameras on the exterior hull took images of the stars from all angles and fed them to her.

Using the restored computer and dozens of holographic screens, Lilith ran comparisons as fast as her augmented brain would allow. Had she known more about her storied ancestor, Mindy Harper, Lilith would have been amused at the irony of using just that method to locate their position in the galaxy.

First one image matched, then a second, and finally a third. With that third, she was able to use them to draw intersecting lines though the swirling galaxy and confirm their location. When she looked at the results, she just floated there in shock.

Chapter 62

June 16
th
, 534 AE

Unknown Star System, Galactic Frontier

“Welcome back, dear,” Minu smiled and patted her husband’s hand.

Aaron blinked bleary-eyed and tried to focus on his wife’s face. “Wa da fuk?” he mumbled.

“We had quite a battle,” Minu explained. “The ship is safe now, and you got a little banged up yourself.

He put a hand up that wasn’t quite responding properly to his commands and almost poked a finger in his eye. Minu caught it and gently put the hand back down.

“The medical intelligence says you have a second degree concussion. It’s given you some drugs to speed up your brains recovery.”

He gave a feeble nod and closed his eyes. Minu touched his hand once and moved down the line.

Six beds had been created by the medical intelligence at present to treat the injured. They ranged from her husband’s concussion and Kal’at’s broken leg to one of the Rangers who’d crashed into a metal protrusion and broken his neck. They were all to recover, according to the ship, even the man with the broken spine.

Minu spent a minute with each of them, talking to reassure them and be sure they were doing okay, before reaching the end of the bay where a little habitat held one tiny occupant. The Mok-Tok Hodo Bapal stood on his rear legs and regarded Minu with golden eyes, its fleshy flayed nose twitching as it instinctively tried to smell its adversary.

“You are going to have a great deal of difficulty ransoming me if I am blown to atoms during a space battle,” her translator rendered his alien language into English.

“You can lodge a complaint with your T’Chillen allies.”

The beings eyes gleamed and a squeaking snort came though untranslated. She assumed it was a laugh. “They are nothing if not persistent. It is in your best interest to see me though this alive, human.”

“No disrespect, war leader, but I value my own skin, and that of my fellow humans, considerably above your own.”

“And what about those scurrying little reptiles?” he asked and pointed with a claw.

Minu didn’t have to look to know the Mok-Tok had indicated Kal’at, who was having his leg mended.

“Funny a few-centimeter tall creature would disparage the size of another being more than a thousand times its size.”

“There is more to size than physical bulk, Minu Groves.”

Minu turned and left her captive to his solitude and returned to her husband’s side. He was awake again and watching one of the miniature medical bots wave an instrument over his head.

“These all the injured?” he asked as she approached.

“Yes,” she confirmed, “and none very seriously. Lilith is doing fine, she’s hurt a bit but too concerned about the ship to come down here yet.”

“How bad is the ship?” he asked, the drugs he’d been given quickly wearing off.

“Not sure, she wasn’t very forthcoming. The Rangers said there is a section aft that’s now sealed off, so we’ve got some hull breaches.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, never thought I’d see that. And we don’t know where we are?”

He gave her a confused look. “I know, stranger and stranger.”

Lilith’s voice materialized out of the air above them: “Mother, are you finished in the medical bay?”

“All the injured have been seen to, except you.”

“That can wait. Can you assist me?”

“Lilith, you need—”

“Later mother, please meet me in the tactical drive bay.”

Minu was about to insist when she realized she would be talking to herself and sighed.

“Sounds like she’s fine,” Aaron tried to chuckle and made an agonized face.

He spotted a water nipple just to the side of his head and took a tentative sip, his eyes lighting up with appreciation at what he’d tasted.

“Don’t know where she gets that stubborn streak from,” Minu said with a bemused look.

“Yeah, no clue,” Aaron said with a little smile.

Minu leaned over and kissed him gently on the head, he reached up and patted her cheek and she turned towards the door. Halfway out, inspiration hit her. She pointed to a medical bot that was perched on a counter.

“You, follow me.”

At the farther point of the ship, two corridors came together in a hatchway somewhat smaller than the others. Anyone could see the ship’s designers were using every ounce of space that was available, and this section was almost all the way out to the needle fine point of the Kaatan’s bow. As Minu approached, the door split into four sections that spun away into the wall to allow her entrance.

The interior was in subdued lighting of a green hue, one of the only sections of the ship still lit with the natural lighting that its designers, The People, preferred. At the far end of the cone shaped bay rested what looked like a typical Portal dais. Minu knew it was anything but typical. Lilith floated a meter away from the gently glowing milky white dais. She turned when Minu entered.

Minu saw right away that her daughter’s eye had indeed swelled completely closed. She glowered at the young girl who gave her a lopsided shrug, so Minu moved aside though the doorway and came closer before holding out the little crystalline medical bot. “If you won’t come to medical bay, medical bay will come to you.”

“I said it could wait.”

“I out rank you, Chosen, and I say it won’t wait.”

Lilith narrowed her eye and Minu prepared for a battle. But to her surprise the younger woman nodded and held out her hand. Minu put the machine on her and it instantly began skittering around the thin woman’s frame, its gossamer legs using built-in medical scanners to evaluate her condition quickly and efficiently. It slowed its work on her shoulder, and almost stopped as it probed her face.

The machine spoke in clear English: “Hyperextension of the shoulder ligaments, severe contusion on the right cheek and two hairline fractures. The patient should report to the medical intelligence for treatment immediately.”

Minu looked smug while her daughter looked annoyed.

“As soon as I discuss something with you.” Lilith worded it like a statement, but it also sounded like a request.

Minu nodded and her daughter sighed. Its job done, the bot hopped down and skittered out the door.

“Is this how we got away from Dervish?” Minu asked and hooked a thumb at the inert dais.

“It must be,” Lilith replied and glanced at the mechanism. “But it is also impossible.”

“Impossible? How?”

“You see, the tactical drive cannot be activated near a significant gravity well. This is the reason it’s always used in deep space. Anything more than a slight variance in gravity causes distortion to the fabric of space. Moving something as large as a starship through a portal is an unbelievably complicated action in and of itself, adding a gravity source is doubly so.”

“Dervish had three stars.”

“Yes, and all in close proximity.”

“So that’s why you say impossible,” Minu nodded.

“That is only one reason.” Lilith removed a tablet from her belt and let it float in her zero-gravity bubble, turning it to face her mother.

“We were here” – the galaxy came alive, an area of space identified with a tiny animated flashing reticle. “And this is where we are now.”

Another reticle flashed to life a surprising distance from the first one. A line connected the two and information appeared. ‘4,765 LY.’

“Nearly five thousand light-years?” Minu gasped.

“Yes,” Lilith confirmed. “Forty-seven times farther than the tactical drive is capable of taking us.”

“How long did it take?”

“After I completed the computer restart, I consulted the ship’s internal clock and confirmed that the elapsed time was less than five minutes.”

“So multiple jumps are out of the question as well?”

“Correct.”

Minu bit her lower lip and stared at the gently glowing dais. She knew from experience it took a few minutes for each one hundred light-year jump, minimum. And sometimes much more if there were nearby spacial disturbances.

The drive wasn’t really designed for long range travel, as Lilith had described it, but to quickly insert the ship within a star system for lightning attacks. Thus its name, ‘tactical drive’. It appeared just about every rule in the book had been broken here. Distance, time, and proximity to a gravity well.

“How did you get the drive to activate, then?”

“That is the final question,” Lilith told her “I never programmed the jump.”

“Could some aspect of the ship have done it itself?”

“The computer was overloaded and shut down before the tactical drive was ever activated. Besides, it takes a human operator to initiate a tactical jump.”

“So yet another impossibility.”

“That is why I asked you to come down, mother. You have held discussions with the Weavers before.”

“Go on.”

“I was hoping you could ask it what happened.”

Minu sighed. She’d been afraid her daughter was going to go there. Pip had taken over all relations with the extra-dimensional beings years ago. Not only was he the only one they would talk to, he also seemed to have more of a knack for it.

The Weavers didn’t talk with you, so much as at you. Lacking any sense of time, it was like carrying on a conversation with a textbook. And a poorly written one, at that.

“I can try, Lilith, but you have to understand that they are extremely difficult to speak to.”

“I know that, mom. But you do have a history with them.”

She nodded, as this much was true. Years ago in a desperate situation she’d somehow convinced them to help her with some ancient codes to unlock a special Portal. They had burned the information in her head, making her sort of a savant when it came to Lost codes and cyphers.

“What are you hoping for from them?”

“Answers. How did they do this special jump? Can they do it again? And who told them to do it?”

“Is it that important right now? Can’t we just get back home and worry about it later?”

“That is part of the problem. We were taken in exactly the opposite direction from Bellatrix. Even at top speed it would take us more than six months to get home. I could do it in four, but I’d have to transect right through the middle of two higher-order species’ territories.”

“And we know they all have starships now.”

“Correct,” Lilith nodded. “The battle almost exhausted my supply of sub-fusion ship-killer missiles and decoy drones. There exists the possibility of replenishment at a firebase somewhere, but none are in this quadrant of the galaxy.”

“I understand,” Minu said and turned to face the Portal. “I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

Minu floated in the swirling ethereal mist and waited for it to show up. After an unknown amount of time passed, it did. A strange crab-like being with eight complicated limbs, four with frightening pincers that seemed to go on dividing until her brain itched. It regarded her with eyes that she knew saw things she could only scream about in her worst nightmares.

“I have come to ask questions,” she spoke with more confidence than she felt. It had been years since she’d last faced one of the Weavers, and she felt no better for the time. She’d just as soon it be never again.

“You always have questions. We prefer the continuum where you are more knowledgeable.”

“Wait, continuum is a construct involving time. You understand our concepts of time?”

“The one known as Pip has helped us to work within your limited dimensional paradox by introducing the theory of a continuum of space, and how this section of continuum relates to your limited existence.”

Minu couldn’t help but think she’d somehow been put in her place, but she couldn’t decide how that had just happened. Perhaps Pip had succeeded in some way after all. It would redeem him in another way after he’d disastrously inserted himself as the negotiator between the universe and the Weavers for their control of the Portals.

She decided that telling them the truth was best, especially since they appeared all but omnipotent.

“Pip is dead now in this continuum.”

“One aspect of the being known as Pip no longer exists in that continuum.” Had it agreed with her? She couldn’t make up her mind. “His last offer of sustenance proved woefully inadequate. We wish to discuss that with him.”

“As I said, he is dead and I cannot help that.” Silence. “Will you answer my questions?”

“We will consider your questions.”

“Better than nothing, I guess.” She took a breath and soldiered on. “Who gave the order to initiate the tactical drive on this vessel?”

“Pip.”

Minu made a face. “Who made the calculations?”

“Pip.”

“But…” she decided not to try. “Okay, then how were you able to initiate the drive so close to the stars of the Dervish system?”