James wittenbach world.., p.1
James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 05, page 1
Worlds Apart Book Five:
Aurora
The Sky’s Ablaze With Ladies’ Legs
Copyright © 2006 James G. Wittenbach
www.worlds-apart.net
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wittenbach, James
Worlds Apart Book 05 Aurora
I. Title
ISBN 0-0-9763384-0-8
.
C H A P T E R 0 1
207 days have passed since the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus left the Winter system 14 001
Horologium.
Pegasus Main Bridge/Primary Command-1
“Forward Shields down to fifteen per cent!” Tactical Lieutenant Alkema shouted, as Pegasus’s command center rocked from another in a series of non-stop explosions. The forward view showed a barrage of copper-colored energy pulses coming at the ship from something they could not see, something that was also pulling them inexorably into the line of fire.
Alkema held hard to one of the safety rails (“Oh Shit handles”) as another pulse connected, transmitting enough energy to shake the ship’s superstructure. He struggled his way toward the command seat. “Captain, if we can’t shake this… or shut it down… the shields will fail four minutes.”
“And then…?” asked Prime Commander Keeler.
“Those bolts will blow our ship apart piece by piece … beginning with the Command Tower.”
“Hmmmmm,” said Keeler, looking around the parabola-shaped bridge. Shayne American… married. Kayliegh Driver … married. Eliza Jane Change … iceberg. David Alkema… male. Goneril Lear… harridan. Apparently, he was not going to be able to use these last four minutes to die a happy man.
Not that Keeler was indifferent to the fate of his ship and crew, he simply knew that there was nothing he could do about it. On his bridge were the finest navigators, helmsmen, tacticians, and problem solvers his society could provide. He was only good at leading, and until one of his brilliant crew solved the problem, he had nothing to lead with.
It had taken seven months… seven months … in hyperspace to reach this point, dead center in the middle of nowhere in space. There had been only three brief breaks, once to re-supply at an automated way-station, and twice to explore star systems that proved to have no inhabitable planets. The coordinates to this spot had been provided by a 4,000-year-old General of the former Commonwealth, who seemed slightly less insane than most of the other inhabitants of the planet Winter.
When they emerged from hyperspace, they had had just enough time to confirm these coordinates when something started firing massive, deadly weapons at them that easily outclassed anything in what the crew had previously considered an impressive ship’s arsenal.
“Weapons?” Keeler requested.
His Tactical Chief, Tactical Commander Redfire, a tall, lean artist with fingerless leather gloves, reported back. “Nothing to target on, Captain.”
“Those energy blasts must be coming from somewhere,” Keeler thundered over the explosions.
“They are, sir” Redfire answered. “They’re coming from all around us.” A particularly strong blast grazed the underside of the ship and exploded, throwing Pegasus violently upward, knocking every person on the bridge to the ground. Alkema pulled himself up by the “oh-shit” handle and pulled himself to the helm station, where a helmsman by the name of Justinian Atlantic, a Republicker with an amazing mop of curly blond hair.
Atlantic had been a kid when they left the homeworlds, boarding the ship in the family of one of the engineers. He had joined Pegasus crew during the hyperspace transit when he reached sixteen, the age of adulthood.
“Full reverse?” Alkema asked, repeating Keeler’s last order.
Atlantic turned to him. “Reverse engines at 10% over maximum safe limit. No effect.” Alkema nodded understandingly. “Make it twenty.”
Atlantic did not look raise some protest about overtaxing the engines or overstressing the ship’s design limits. Getting the hell out of there was the imperative. He reached out with his right hand, which sported a torsion-blue interface along his index finger, like a technological skin condition. This was his interface with the ship’s systems, and when he reached for the virtual thrust controls, this interface made them real. The projections around his station warned him of the danger, then flashed out briefly as another blast connected with the ship.
“Alkema!” Redfire ordered. “Get back to your post and tell me what shield strength is?” Alkema lurched back, but Specialist Shayne American, a thin, all-business Republicker with close-cropped platinum hair and chocolate brown skin, accessed shield data through her monitoring of ship’s operations. “Forward shields at 11%.”
“Aft shields?” Alkema queried, reaching his station. The read-out showed 78%. “Use thrusters to re-orient the ship,” he suggested, loudly, to Keeler. “it will at least buy us a few more minutes if the rear shields take the brunt of the attack.” Keeler tapped his Thean walking stick against the deck. “Go to.” Redfire asked the next practical question. “If we’re taking hits from all sides, but the front shields are taking the bulk of it… Tactical… give me a dispersion chart of every pulse that’s been fired at us.”
Alkema brought up the display. There were hits all over the ship, but most of them were over the forward quadrant. This meant the forward part was closer to the action than the rear.
Atlantic worked the thrusters and turned the ship around, simultaneously reconfiguring the propulsion fields to push the ship forward, away from the … no one guessed what it was called yet … “extremely dangerous thing” would do for the time being.
Several more blasts of pure anti-proton battered the shields just forward of the Command Tower. “They’re still targeting our bow,” Alkema said incredulously. “How can they do that?”
“How long until the shields fail?” Keeler asked, with preternatural calm.
“One minute, seventy seconds,” Alkema answered.
Keeler looked to the outer bridge. Specialist Brainiacsdaughter … buxom, lithe, and unconscious. You’re a sick, sick man, he thought to himself. But then, maybe Ziang was a sick old fart as well, perhaps sick enough to direct his ship to the location of some ancient doom machine. Ziang did not like the Commonwealth, certainly had a vested interest in not seeing it reconstituted.
Then Keeler remembered. The crystal that Ziang had given them had contained two data sets; one was a set of coordinates, the other was a series of musical tones. “Lieutenant Alkema, General Ziang’s data crystal is in my Study. Would you be good enough to retrieve it?”
“Za,” Alkema began making his way across the shuddering bridge.
A new alarm sounded. A hologram of the ship appeared in the middle of the bridge, with a gaping hole in the shields directly behind Pegasus’s missile hatcheries and forward defense arrays.
“Shield Failure! Shield Failure! Shield Grid 18Alpha has failed,” said the voice of the ship as those very words appeared below the hologram.
“Extend shield grids 17 and 19 Alpha to cover the hole,” Tactical Commander Redfire ordered.
“Re-orient the ship to protect the vulnerable spot,” Executive Commander Lear ordered.
American at tactical and Atlantic at helm carried out the order. The hologram displayed fourteen other shield areas that were near critical or failure. In a very few seconds, there would be no way for Pegasus to turn or cover herself.
“If the shields fail completely,” Keeler asked. “How long can the ship survive?”
“Long enough for one anti-proton burst to hit the Command Tower,” Redfire answered.
“Grim,” said Keeler.
“Shall I order an evacuation?” Lear asked.
“Abandon ship?” Keeler asked. “Even if we had a place to abandon ship to, do you really think Aves or lifepods would last fifty seconds against that barrage?” He looked back to Brainiacsdaughter. On the other hand, there was a lot you could do in fifty seconds.
“One minute to complete failure of the forward shield grid,” American announced.
Alkema came out of Keeler’s Study holding the hand-sized piece of black crystal they had gotten from General Ziang. Just as he entered the bridge, another shield collapsed, and a burst of energy bucked the deck. He flipped over the Outer Bridge and went sprawling, but still held onto the crystal. He pushed himself up off the floor, and brought the crystal to Prime Commander Keeler. There was a cut on his chin.
Keeler handed the crystal off to American. “There’s a musical code somehow embedded in this crystal. Retrieve it, and broadcast it out to whoever is shooting at us.” American placed the crystal carefully on her data transfer node. “I could have pulled it out of memory,” she informed Keeler for future reference.
“Neg,” said Keeler. “Transmit it directly from the crystal.”
“Transmitting now…”
“Fifty seconds to shield failure,” said Lear.
Above the thunder, the strange music wafted over the bridge, a simple arrangement of notes played with deep tonal range and complexity, like orchestral door chimes.
As soon as it played, the bombardment stopped. In fact, several incoming rounds, surel
A terrifying silence ensued, followed by pounding bass notes that set the Bridge throbbing. “What is that?” Keeler yelled above the din.
American, shielding her ears against the onslaught answered. “It’s an incoming transmission… source unknown.”
But I can guess, Keeler thought. Just as it stopped, the crystal chirped up again, filling the silence with cybernetic birdsong. When the crystal finished, the hammering loud notes of the other transmission returned. It continued for another twenty seconds before it ceased. The black crystal then answered with another brief song. The transmission returned almost the second the crystal stopped, and then the two of them began to perform together, the outer transmission providing a pounding baseline which the crystal complemented with a complex melody.
“Oh my God,” Keeler whispered. “They’re jamming.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, they stopped.
“We’re still being pulled into something,” said Helmsman Atlantic.
It was true, the barrage had stopped, but Pegasus was still being pulled in toward the blasts.
“External hull stress increasing rapidly,” said American. “I am detecting an intense gravity well nearby.” She displayed its energy signature.
Alkema was still catching his breath from the fall, otherwise he would have gasped.
“Sir, that’s a space-time singularity. What the ancients used to call a ‘Black Hole.’
“It will pull us apart,” Alkema added, just in case he had not figured this out. “There’ll be no escape once we cross the event horizon,” said the helmsman.
“Well, at least we were safe for two seconds,” sighed Keeler. “Is there any way to turn it off?”
“Neg,” answered Alkema, American, Driver, and Redfire in four-part consensus.
“Full thrust,” Keeler ordered. “Pull us out of here, Mr. Atlantic.”
“We’re still at full thrust plus twenty,” Atlantic answered. “No effect… we’re still falling toward the singularity.”
“Well, I’m out of ideas,” said Keeler. “somebody wake up Specialist Brainiacsdaughter” Kayliegh Driver stood. “Permission to try something, captain? I don’t have time to explain.”
“You bet,” Keeler answered.
Driver slid over to the helmstation, showing the full ripe swell of her pregnancy. She pointed to Atlantic’s helm controls. “Change the geometry of our propulsion field, bring it up to the absolute maximum and reverse course.”
Atlantic looked at her like she was insane. “You’re insane,” he said.
“Think about it,” she told him, beginning to lay in the commands he would have to execute. “What powers our ship? Anti-gravity. What powers a singularity? Gravity.” Atlantic got it. “Laying in new course,” he turned to her. “This better work.” She shrugged. “If it doesn’t, we’ll die too fast to realize our mistake.” Atlantic nodded. When this mission had launched, gallows humor would have been both out of place and out of character for the bright-eyed optimistic crew that had set out from Sapphire and Republic, four years ago. Since then, they had been attacked, fired upon, betrayed, and nearly destroyed so often that a new threat of annihilation was but a variation on a theme.
“10 seconds to event horizon…” American announced.
Pegasus hit the event horizon, skipped, and bounced back into space. The ship shuddered one last time, shaking loose bits of hull plating and other bits of herself that swirled off toward the black hole, but she had broken free.
“Full thrusters!” Driver shouted. Atlantic was already on it. He hit the propulsion system hard and Pegasus leaped away from the gravity well.
Prime Commander Keeler looked around his bridge. Not even when the Aurelians had attacked them with a full battle force at the Bodicea system had it looked so torn up. Some of the ceiling plates had shaken loose and were hanging, several stations were scorched from the eruption of overstressed power conduits. Some of his bridge crew were injured and all of them were shaken. “What happened?” he asked.
Kayliegh Driver answered. “The time-space singularity was pulling us in with its intense gravitational field. I knew we could never reach escape velocity, but I knew that its gravitational field was limited by the lensing effect of the Event Horizon.”
“I see,” Keeler said. “Meaning what exactly?”
“Pegasus uses anti-gravity for propulsion. I used our propulsion field to bounce us off the gravitational field of the singularity.”
Alkema slapped his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?” he exclaimed. It was his job to think of that kind of thing, after all. Then, he said, “Ow!” because his forehead had been scraped rather badly when he fell on the deck earlier.
“Damage report,” Goneril Lear requested.
“Reports coming in,” American came back. “Minor to Moderate reported at fifty-five locations and systems. Nothing life-threatening, so far.”
“Sensors coming on-line,” Kayliegh Driver reported.
Above the External Sensor and Tactical station, a three-dimensional construct began to emerge, piece by piece. First, it was a line. Then, the view zoomed out and the line became a shallow curve. The view had to zoom out again. More details were projected as the shallow curve became a crescent. The view went out again, and the size of the projection enlarged.
The crescent became a semi-circle, and surface detail was lost against the sheer enormity of its shape. Finally, it became a ring. In the projection, its structure was filiment thin, and Pegasus was a speck next to it.
“It’s phucking huge!” Redfire burst out. No wonder they could not isolate a firing solution.
“It’s 1,600.6 kilometers in diameter,” Driver reported. “The distance describes the event horizon of the singularity in the center.”
“I recommend moving the ship to at least 100 million kilometers out,” said Executive Commander Lear.
Keeler agreed. “Helm, move us away.” He studied the schematics the sensors were displaying about the object. Its outer surface had look of rough metal, and was layered and graduated all around. The sensors could not yet image the inside of the ring. The design aesthetic struck him as human. “Ziang knew about this, it must be some kind of Commonwealth artifact,” he muttered out loud. “Mr. Redfire, is there anything on the surface that looks like a docking port.”
“Hard to tell on forty seconds worth of sensor readings,” Redfire said. “Are you proposing… going over to it, sir?”
“We’ve come a long, long way just to be shot at,” Keeler answered. “Can you tell me, at least, if there is a habitable environment within the ring?”
“Neg, I can not,” Redfire answered. “Our scans can’t penetrate the surface.
“Launch a probe,” suggested Executive Commander Lear, as usual, in a tone more commanding than suggesting.
“Good idea,” Keeler said.
The specialist who would have launched the probe was being tended to by Medical Technical Jersey Partridge, who had been the first to arrive when the Medical call went out.
American switched over probe configuration and launch controls to her own station.
“Preparing Alpha class probe for launch. Configuring sensors. Course?” Alkema suggested, “follow the outer-ring of the structure. It should keep the probe from being pulled in. Launch a second probe to map the interior of the ring and take gravitational measurements.”
Fourteen minutes later, the first probe had confirmed that there were docking bays, and the second probe had provided and intriguing glimpse to the inside rim of the ring, catching a brief image that suggested cities and structures, before both probes were pulled inside by tractor beams and all telemetry was lost. “Well, now what?” Keeler asked.
“I think we all know what comes next,” said Redfire.
“Right, prepare an Aves,” Keeler ordered. “Commander Redfire, prepare your suicide squad… I mean, away team.”
“I volunteer,” said Alkema.
Keeler looked at his young protégé in surprise. “I would have thought having a new wife would have curbed your enthusiasm for conspicuous acts of valor.”
“Pieta knew who she was marrying,” Alkema answered. The ship’s youngest officer, with curly dark hair, ruddy complexion, and a slim, athletic build, had recently married a girl who was almost as pretty he was. “Besides, if the shooting starts up again, I’m probably safer over there than here.”
