Starbound (12 page)

“Uncertain, sir,” I admitted. It would be close.

“That's the best you can do?” demanded the captain of Serosian and me. I checked my data one more time.

“Indeterminate outcome,” I finally said. There was a pause, then:

“Proceed with the plan, Mr. Cochrane.”

I did as ordered.

Thirty seconds later and I had the gravity projector locked on to the HuK, increasing her mass and steadily slowing her as she flashed
toward the jump space tunnel. My torpedoes launched as scheduled, but she was still too far away and going too fast for a likely intercept before she made the tunnel.

We all watched as the minutes clicked by, our gravity projector not slowing the HuK enough, our torpedoes lagging behind. She entered the jump space tunnel a good five minutes ahead of
Starboun
d
.

“Disengage the HD impeller drive,” ordered the captain to Duane Longer. Then he turned to me. “At the first sign she's spooling up for an HD jump, disconnect the gravity projector and bring up the Hoagland Field.”

“Aye, sir,” I said, then checked my board again. We were still out of torpedo range, but there was something else amiss. “Captain,” I said.

“I see it,” said Serosian through the com. “We're not closing on her anymore, captain. She's accelerating through the tunnel like a snow sled going downhill. She's pulling away from us, but we should be breaking contact with her at this range. The gravity projector—”

“It's locked,” I said. “We're locked in with her. I just checked her and she's blowing out neutrinos at an alarming rate, shedding her mass. The neutrinos are bonding with the gravitons in our beam. We're essentially bonded to her, like we're at either end of a frozen rope.”

“Will she jump and take us with her?” asked an anxious Maclintock.

“Negative, sir,” I said. “Unless she's found a way to completely cloak her HD drive, she's running cold.”

“She's not spooling up her HD drive, captain, she's breaking it down, shedding her mass by depleting her HD crystal and using the neutrinos to bond with our gravity beam. It's brilliant, and quite deadly,” said Serosian.

“What do you mean?” asked Maclintock, obviously concerned at this turn of events. The Historian sighed.

“Once we enter the tunnel, Captain, we will both be in jump space and our trajectory will accelerate.”

“Trajectory? To where?”

“The Jenarus star, Captain. The HuK has locked with us using our own gravity weapon as a kind of rope to attach to us. Her trajectory will take us through the tunnel and into the Jenarus sun, where she will burn up, and take us with her,” Serosian finished, his voice somber and resigned.

“Suicide mission,” I said aloud without really thinking.

“Exactly,” said Serosian. “Sophisticated and well planned. And deadly to us.”

And then the com line between all of us was silent, as we contemplated our impending deaths.

The command team spent the next few minutes exploring possibilities away from the rest of the crew in the briefing room. We stood in a circle freely exchanging ideas. There appeared to be no good ones. The Hoagland Field would be burned out by the gravity projector if we tried to fire it up. Similarly an attempt to jump without the field would place us in another dimension with no protective bubble of normal space around us, which Serosian assured us would mean our destruction. We had already entered the tunnel and had less than ten minutes before we exited, at the Jenarus star. I could think of only one other possibility.

“We could fire up the hybrid drive again, try to blow our way out of the tunnel,” I said.

“With all the neutrinos in the gravity stream, wouldn't that likely result in our destruction?” asked Dobrina. I nodded.

“It would be like throwing gasoline on a fire,” I acknowledged. “But the energy from it just might be enough to break us free.”

“With no shielding,” she said.

“With no shielding,” I admitted.

“How much damage would we incur?” asked Maclintock.

“It would be significant,” said Serosian. “But before we go there, there is one other possibility.”

Maclintock, Dobrina and I turned our attention toward him.

“We're listening,” said the captain.

“I could take out the yacht, separate it from
Starbound
to make it a separate entity, fire up its Hoagland Field and then project that field around the ship. That would allow you to use the hybrid drive and break free of the HuK,” he said.

“What about the gravity beam?” asked Dobrina. “If we can't use our own field how would the yacht's field be able to protect us?”

“
Starbound
's defensive field is designed to envelope the ship. The yacht uses a smaller field that can be customized to size. However, I wouldn't be able to protect the coil cannon arrays that we are using to project the gravity beam. They would be lost in any explosion caused by engaging the hybrid drive,” the Historian said. Maclintock thought about this for only a moment.

“I'm clearing you for this action, Mr. Serosian. But first, you need to answer me one more thing. What will happen to you?” he said.

“By projecting the field around
Starbound
, the yacht would be exposed to the explosive forces of the hybrid drive.”

“In other words, you'd be killed,” said Dobrina.

“Most likely.”

“Unacceptable,” said Maclintock. “There has to be another way.”

“We could jump,” I said, letting my intuition and impulsiveness get the better of me again.

“How would that help?” asked Dobrina. Serosian looked at me and nodded. I continued.

“Any interaction between our HD jump drives and the yacht's Hoagland Field would automatically expand and extend the field. This
expansion is minimal on a ship the size of
Starbound
, but expansion of the yacht's field by even a few meters could envelope it and protect Serosian. There's no guarantee that Serosian would survive the interdimensional shift unshielded in the few moments before the field expanded, but he
could
possibly survive it,” I said.

“That seems like a long shot,” said Dobrina. Maclintock looked to Serosian.

“Are you willing to risk it?” he asked.

Serosian nodded. “There is a higher probability of my survival, but not much more than for the hybrid drive scenario. I could set a ten-second delay and then try to get forward into the area of the field projector. We have conducted experiments of this type with inorganic materials, but never with an organism as complex as a human being. It's a possibility, though one that's never been tried before.”

Maclintock looked at the wall chronograph. “We have eight minutes before we exit the jump space tunnel into the corona of the Jenarus star. Is that enough time?” he said to Serosian.

“If I leave now.”

“Go,” said Maclintock.

Serosian went.

I was at my longscope monitors, piped in to the command com along with Maclintock and Dobrina, listening to Serosian's status updates. We now had three minutes before our ship exited the jump space tunnel and we were dragged into the Jenarus star by the suicidal HuK.

Serosian had the yacht in position for our maneuver, floating above
Starbound
at about one hundred meters. Jenny Hogan had the Hoagland hyperdimensional drive warm and spooled up for our attempted jump. She had set the initial jump for a nearby uninhabited star system, Skondar, one that had stable jump space that we could
move very quickly into, assess our damage, recover Serosian and the yacht, and then make our way home to Candle from there.

“Activating the Hoagland Field,” came Serosian's call on the com. I watched as the tiny but powerful yacht extended its protective field around us. As planned, he excluded our coil cannon arrays from the field, but the body of the ship, and the crew, would be safe. We'd lose our weapons pylons in the jump, but since we were locked to the HuK through the gravity projector that damage was unavoidable, and it could save us.

Serosian waited only a few seconds to act. “I've set the ten-second delay,” he said. “Be prepared to jump ten seconds from my mark.”

“Acknowledged,” said Maclintock, then turned to Jenny Hogan. “On my mark, Lieutenant,” she acknowledged back.

I could feel sweat on my forehead but I refused to take my eyes or hands away from my station. My friend's life was at stake.

“Now,” said Serosian. I watched as the field glowed purple, surrounding and protecting the ship, but not all of the yacht. I counted off into the command com. At two seconds, Maclintock gave the order to Jenny Hogan to jump the ship. I tried not to think about my friend scrambling to find any safety he could inside his small yacht, a ship that had saved my life not long ago.

The now familiar but still very disturbing sifting sensation engulfed me and I became disoriented for what seemed like both an eternity and a tiny fraction of time. When I recovered my senses my focus went immediately to my board.

The yacht was still with us.

We were in Skondar space as Jenny Hogan had said we would be. The Field was still active, projecting from the yacht to
Star
bound
. We were the worse for wear though, our weapons pylons sheared off in near seamless fashion. A few moments went by and the Field cycled off per Serosian's clock, leaving both ships floating free in space, now two independent bodies again. I tried to raise Serosian, but there was
no response on either the standard or longwave coms. I was about to say something as the yacht approached
Starbou
nd
to reattach itself per Serosian's preprogrammed flight plan, but Maclintock cut me off.

“Commander Kierkopf, secure the bridge. Mr. Cochrane, you're with me.” With that, I was out from under the hood of the longscope and on my way down to Serosian's quarters, to see if my friend was still
alive.

I
stood outside t
he Historian's quart
ers monitoring the i
nner environment fro
m a wall display. Th
e yacht had docked a
nd the inner rooms w
ere balancing their
environment with the
rest of the ship.

“Well?” said Maclintock to me. A team of three medical staff, a doctor and two nurses, stood behind us in the galleria hallway, emergency equipment at the ready. The last system on my display clicked over to green.

“She's docked,” I said.

“Put in the code to open her up,” Maclintock ordered. I was already doing that. Then the doors slipped apart with only the slightest wisp of air as the yacht and the galleria environments balanced. Maclintock was first in, followed by the medical team, and I trailed. We went through the upper deck—library, chapel, and sleeping quarters—looking for our friend, but with no luck. I opened the small stairwell down to the yacht's command deck and we went down in the same order as we came in.

Serosian was sprawled over his console, his breathing slow and shallow, but thankfully breathing. The medical team pulled him up off
the console and sat him back in the pilot's couch, reading his vital signs and administering therapeutic treatment while they evaluated him.

“Serosian, can you hear me?” asked Maclintock, leaning over his comrade. I stood back, concerned for his well-being.

He opened glassy eyes and turned to Maclintock, starting to speak quietly. “I'm here,” he said. The doctor gave him a shot in the upper arm and he grabbed at the spot where the injection went in.

“What happened?” asked the captain. Serosian gathered himself for moment, then:

“I couldn't make it to my lair. I ended up riding out the whole . . . event, from here,” he said. “There were fractions of a second between the jump and the field expansion, moments where I was both places, and neither . . .” he trailed off, then smiled at me.

“Peter . . .”

“I'm here,” I said. He looked at me, as if he couldn't focus on me, then said, quite without provocation:

“I lived an eternity in fractions of a second.” Maclintock and I exchanged glances and the captain nodded to me to continue the conversation with my friend.

“What was it like?” I prompted him. He looked at me oddly, then said:

“Like a lifetime in hell.” Then he broke into a coughing fit and the doctor quickly gave him another injection. He quieted and his breathing became low and heavy; his eyes closed as the orderlies moved him to a portable medical bed.

“I've sedated him,” said the doctor, a female commander named Farrington, to Maclintock. “I'm taking him to sickbay for monitoring and recuperation. He needs at least twenty-four hours of full rest, and that is not negotiable, Captain,” she said. Maclintock agreed with her and we both waited while the medical unit moved him out of the yacht. The captain and I stood together outside the Historian's quarters, watching him recede down the galleria toward sickbay.

“That is one brave man,” said Maclintock.

The next several hours were spent by most of the crew evaluating
Starbound
's condition. I however, got the task of sending HD probes back to Jenarus to assess the remaining threat there, if any. The probes tracked the HuK's death spiral by following its shedded neutrinos directly to the star. The whole process had taken only a few minutes after we had broken the lock between us by jumping out. I, for one, was glad the damnable thing was gone. I was learning to hate them. Ships that had men and women aboard tended to act with much more care as to the protection of their crews. Ships without crews, HuKs controlled only by AIs, ran solely on programming. Most were programmed with at least a minimal survival instinct, but these had behaved like they had virtually none. I wondered if the sacrifice of the Levant navy in our last encounter with an automated HuK had somehow entered in to the programming of these new HuKs. It was a question I was looking forward to discussing with Serosian once he had recovered.

After duty hours, Maclintock came by my cabin to discuss things aboard ship and just ahead. He sat across from me at my small desk.

“We've been ordered home for repairs. Candle says two weeks to replace our weapons mounts and make refit and repair. And of course there will be new marines. We also lost nine more crew in the HuK attack, mostly in the science labs,” he said.

“They took the hardest hit in the attack,” I acknowledged. Forty-two men and women out of a crew of 386 were heavy losses, no matter how you cut it. It made me feel sick inside. I leaned forward, staring down at my conference table. “These losses, do they affect you as much as they do me?” I asked.

“They always get to you,” Maclintock replied. “No getting around that.”

“I promise we'll have her back up and running ahead of schedule, sir,” I said bravely.

“Not your concern, Commander.” That took me by surprise. Maclintock leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “You'll be departing Candle for Quantar as soon as we arrive, along with Commander Kierkopf.
Starbound
will get along fine without you during the repairs.”

“But, sir, my duty is here,” I protested. He smiled, the first time I could remember him doing it in my presence.

“You also have other duties, Commander. Diplomatic ones. And as you may recall before all this started I said you would be going to Carinthia to attend the
Impulse
inquest.”

Truth was, it had slipped my mind.

“As part of those duties, Commander, Admiral Wesley wants you on your way as soon as possible once we dock. So while we refit and repair, you'll be doing your part as an interstellar ambassador, representing Quantar and the Union Navy, after a quick briefing at home,” he finished.

I didn't like this assignment, not at all, being paraded around as a show toy for the pleasure of the Admiralty. But I had no choice, I knew that much.

“If you say so, sir,” I said.

“Not my call, Commander. I'd much rather have you here. But as long as you're going, get Commander Kierkopf to show you the sights on Carinthia. I hear winter in New Vee is lovely.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I will enjoy myself. Sir.” Maclintock smiled again at my mocking tone and then stood to leave.

“We jump for Candle at 0800. Take the downtime to relax, Commander. You've been through a lot in a very short time. In fact, I'm ordering you on light duty for the duration of the traverse. Understood?”

“Understood, sir,” I said, standing myself. He reached out and shook my hand.

“Good job, Peter. Let's hope our next few missions are less . . . eventful.”

“I hope so, sir.”

And with that he was gone, and I sat back down and sighed. I
was
exhausted.

Dobrina and I managed only one evening together during the traverse. She was on full duty, not to mention pulling a little extra as she was picking up much of my work, but she seemed not to resent that. We would have plenty of time for recreation later, but we spent the last night of the journey home eating a sparse meal together and then getting straight down to business in bed. It had been a while and we both needed to release some stress, which we did, to our mutual enjoyment.

The next morning I was back to full duty, but Maclintock ordered me to stay off the bridge until 1000 hours. The drop back into Quantar space near Candle would be at 1230. I decided to use the extra time to visit my Historian friend in his quarters.

He had been released by ship's medical and was resting comfortably back in his quarters. I caught him reading in one of his library chairs when I came in.

“Spiritual, technical, or pleasurable?” I asked. He looked up from the leather-bound book as I sat down.

“
T
he Three Musketeers
, by Dumas,” he said, smiling. “So purely pleasurable.” He put the book down and took a sip of tea. “Would you like some?” he asked. I waved him off.

“I've already had my coffee and breakfast,” I said. “I just came here to check on you.”

“I'm fine,” he said. “The effects of the jump were unpleasant, but not in any permanent kind of way.”

“Can you talk about it?” I asked. He put down his teacup.

“You know that sifting feeling you always talk about?” he said. I nodded. “It was like that, but each of those ‘sifting' events was like a passage to a different reality. It was . . . very disconcerting. Without the field to protect me, it was like I experienced a lifetime in each one of many different dimensions. I felt like I was learning and forgetting all the knowledge of each place as I shifted, then was forcefully thrust back into my own space and time, but my mind was unprepared for my consciousness's return.” He stopped there for an uncomfortably long time, staring past me as if I weren't there. Then he refocused and said, “I hope I didn't scare you.”

“You gave me some cause for concern,” I admitted. He smiled but said nothing. I tried to keep the conversation going. “Perhaps this is something we should be exploring, these other dimensions?” Now he got an ashen look on his face, and his eyes went distant again.

“Have you read the Bible, Peter?” he asked abruptly. That stopped me.

“Some,” I replied. “As a child, mostly.” Serosian clasped his hands together in front of him, looking in my direction, but not at me.

“There is a story where the apostle Paul is taken up into ‘the third heaven' and he sees ‘inexpressible things, things that a man is not permitted to tell.' That is what it was like, Peter. And it should not be explored, as to see and experience the things I saw would drive a lesser mind mad.” I could see from his demeanor that he was deadly serious. I immediately dropped the conversation and tried to deflect to something else. I cleared my throat.

“Will you be back on duty today?” I asked. He shook himself out of his torpor and looked at me again.

“Not today,” he said. “Once we hit Candle I will be spending many of my days filing reports back to the Church. There is much to discuss.” Then his focus seemed to drift away from me again, and so I made my excuses and headed toward the bridge early.

I, for one, was glad this mission was over.