Solfleet above and beyon.., p.67
Solfleet: Above and Beyond, page 67
“It’s from an episode of the original Star Trek series,” she told him. “Whom Gods Destroy. Captain Kirk had to visit a mental institution, so before he beamed down, he and First Officer Spock arranged to use a special challenge and response to authenticate their communications. The challenge that Spock on the Enterprise would issue was ‘Queen to queen’s level three’ and the proper response that Kirk had to return was ‘Queen to king’s level one.’”
“I remember,” he said. “The episode with Captain Garth.”
“That’s the one,” she confirmed. Then she asked, “Feel like another game?”
“Sure,” he replied. Then he stood up. “I’m going to get some water,” he told her while she started setting up the boards for their next game. “Want some?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
As he stepped over to the galley, he noticed that his undershirt was already damp with sweat down the center of his torso and around his armpits, so he finally surrendered to those inner voices that had been hounding him and peeled it off, saying, as he balled it up and then used it to wipe his armpits dry, “I could swear it’s getting even hotter in here.”
“The temperature’s been holding steady for going on forty-three hours now,” she pointed out to him. “Don’t jinx it.”
“I know,” he replied as he tossed his undershirt to the deck at the base of his room’s door. Then he took a pair of tall metal cups down out of the cabinet and started filling them with ice-cold water from the dispenser in the refrigerator door, “But it feels like it’s getting hotter. Must just be getting to me.” He finished filling the first cup, then the second, and then carried one in each hand—the cold metal felt good—as he stepped over to the environmental status display to steal a quick glance at it on his way back to the table, being careful not to kick the toolbox that Kenzie had left sitting on the deck against the bulkhead directly below it with his bare foot—he certainly didn’t want to make matters worse for himself by breaking a toe. “Because it is,” he stated with urgency. He looked over at Kenzie and told her, “This display is showing ninety-eight degrees.”
“What?” she asked him with that same urgency in her voice, looking over at him. “Ninety-eight degrees? Are you sure?”
“That’s what it’s showing,” he assured her. He looked back at the display again and read off exactly what it showed. “Ninety-eight point three degrees and eighty-nine percent humidity. Correction. It shows ninety-eight point four now.”
“Shit!” she bellowed.
She put down the chess pieces that she’d been holding, got up, and marched over to join him at the display. She took a quick look at it for herself, then went down on her right knee and pulled the access panel off of the bulkhead, forcing Dylan to take a step back, out of the way. She leaned it up against the bulkhead off to one side, and then opened her toolbox. That she was kneeling right beside him and angled slightly toward him, giving him a real good view down the front of her top, wasn’t lost on him, and he allowed himself one quick look. Then he averted his eyes and decided to keep them glued to the display while she worked. After all, her head was more or less level with his groin. The last thing that he wanted was for her to look and see him standing there with an erection.
She took out a hand-held scanner and some kind of a tool that Dylan didn’t recognize and went to work, apparently scanning the circuitry inside the bulkhead. “What’s it showing now?” she asked him a few seconds after she started. Had she even done anything yet?
“Still showing ninety-eight point four degrees,” he advised her. “Humidity is holding at eighty-eight percent.”
She set her scanner aside, passed the tool over from her left hand to her right, and then sank her right arm elbow deep into the bulkhead. She did something with the tool—he heard it humming for a few seconds—then asked him again, “What about now? What’s it showing?”
“The same.”
She muttered something under her breath that Dylan couldn’t make out-no doubt some kind of curse, in Gaelic, perhaps.
He stood by and waited patiently and quietly while she continued to work for the next few minutes, stealing the occasional gaze down the front of her tank top, despite having decided earlier that he wasn’t going to do that, but when he noticed that the temperature had increased again, he spoke up. “It’s showing ninety-eight point five degrees now. Still eighty-eight percent.”
She huffed, but kept on working...and Dylan kept on stealing glances down the front of her top. While Kenzie had been E.V.A. the other day, he’d wondered what was wrong with him—why he was becoming so preoccupied with thoughts of women and sex, but at the moment, standing there watching the temperature while Kenzie worked—okay, so he was staring down at her now as much as he was watching the temperature—he had to ask himself if there was really any harm in it. After all, it wasn’t actually interfering with his ability to do anything...except maybe to win chess games. It wasn’t affecting his appetite or keeping him awake at night. He hadn’t been with a woman since that night aboard the Star Eagle with Stacy—actually, ‘girl’ was a more accurate description for her, as she’d only been seventeen years old—which, for him, had been...what? Ten or eleven weeks ago? Twelve? It was difficult to keep track. At any rate, they’d barely begun the act when her sister woke up and interrupted them. Maybe the preoccupation that was beginning to concern him so much was really nothing more than the result of a healthy libido.
About twenty minutes later, he was gazing down inside her top again when she suddenly glanced up and locked eyes him. He wondered, had she caught him? Then she sighed and asked him impatiently, “Would you please just watch the temperature and stop staring at my tits?”
He had his answer. He was busted. Apparently, that wasn’t the first time that she’d noticed him looking. He knew that to deny the accusation would be a waste of his breath, so instead he said, “Sorry, Kenzie, but that tank top is practically an invitation to stare.”
“So what?” she inquired. “You want me to withdraw the invitation by taking it off?”
He couldn’t help but to grin. Now there was a good idea. “Hey, it’s your ship. You can do what you want.”
She sniggered... “Yeah, you wish.” ...then went back to work.
Only slightly embarrassed, he decided, Dylan turned his gaze back to the status display...just as the temperature went up another tenth of a degree. “Ninety-eight point six,” he told her.
She muttered another Gaelic curse, or perhaps the same one.
Another twenty minutes later, more or less, the temperature rose by another one-tenth of a degree to 98.7°, and roughly twenty minutes after that, yet another tenth to 98.8°. From then on, that rate remained fairly constant, give or take a few minutes, so by a few minutes after 1300, when Dylan took a break from watching the display and stepped into the galley to prepare some lunch—a lunch consisting of cold sandwiches, chips, and water—the temperature had hit 99.1°. Nothing that Kenzie had tried had seemed to have any effect, but kneeling there on the deck with both arms buried elbow-deep in the bulkhead as she was, it was obvious that she wasn’t ready to give up yet.
She sat down on the deck, leaned back against the bulkhead, and stretched her legs, right there where she was working, long enough to inhale her sandwich and chips and guzzle her water, then thanked Dylan for the lunch and got right back up on one knee and back to work. 99.2°. 99.3°. 99.4°. Another hour had passed without results, and Kenzie was beginning to curse a little louder and a lot more often. Then, at 1425 hours, about a minute after the temperature rose to 99.5°, the lights flickered once and that small rectangular red light centered over the door to the flight deck started flashing in time to that soft, distinctive pinging noise again. The rate of the pinging and the flashing was faster this time, however, closer to once every half-second.
Kenzie glanced up at the lights overhead, then looked forward and whined, “Aw, what the fuck now?”
“What’s going on?” Dylan asked her as she climbed to her feet.” He offered her a hand up, but she ignored it.
“That’s a systems failure warning,” she replied as she hurried toward the flight deck. “Something else is malfunctioning.”
He followed her onto the flight deck and stood by while she sat down in her pilot’s chair and ran checks on the ship’s systems. Then, when she sat back in her chair and rested her head in her hands with a sigh, he asked her, dreading a variety of possible answers, “So, what’s the verdict? What are we facing?”
She didn’t respond or react in any way, and Dylan began to think that maybe she hadn’t heard him. But then, when he was just about to ask her again, the lights flickered once more and she raised her head and said, “What are we facing? Well, in addition to this sweltering heat and humidity that’s starting to make the deserts of Earth’s Middle East seem like prime vacation destinations by comparison, and an apparent malfunction of the electrical system, the long-range scanners are out, the long-range sensors appear about ready to fail at any moment, both short-range systems are showing glitches, and the defenses are all as good as dead. There’s only partial power available to the hull plating and nothing to weapons.”
“All that?” he said, surprised at the extent of their problems. “What the hell just happened?”
“I don’t fucking know what the hell just happened, Eric,” she replied crossly, glaring at him. “What I do know is that ever since those damn aliens fired on us, we’ve been having problems.” The lights flickered again, dimmed for a couple of seconds, went out, and then came back on at their normal intensity. “The only good news is, I just replaced all dozen emergency backup batteries in both banks with brand new ones a month ago. If we happen to lose main power, which right now appears to be a distinct possibility, the E-B-B banks should kick right in.”
“If that happens, how long will they last?” he asked her.
“Three months if we take steps to conserve power, and that’s only if I can’t restore main power in the meantime, so that’s not much of a concern right now.” She looked out at the colorful ring of stars ahead of them. “Right now, I’m more worried about losing the sensors and scanners. Without them, we’ll have no way of knowing if something crosses into our flight path.”
“In jumpspace?” he inquired. “Is that even possible?”
“For something natural, like a stray asteroid or something, I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t think so. But for another ship in jumpspace, yes. Two ships in jumpspace can collide just as easily as they can in normal space, but the result is said to be a lot more devastating, on par with the mutual annihilation that occurs when matter is combined with anti-matter.”
“Is said to be? So it’s only a theory?”
She looked over at him again. “A working theory, extrapolated from several incidents of jumpspace E-V-A’s that didn’t end well, yes,” she explained. “If it’s ever actually happened before, no one has survived to tell the story.”
Great. Another thought occurred to him. A moment ago, she’d said that they had been having problems ever since the aliens fired on them. ‘Problems,’ plural. He was well aware of the environmental situation, of course, but to what other problems might she have been referring? Had she been keeping things from him, perhaps believing that she was protecting him, her client, from worry—from the frightening truth? “What about our air?” he asked her.
“It’s fucking hot!” she shouted, glaring at him again.
“I mean the mixture,” he clarified, keeping calm, not wanting to shout back at her and plunge them into an argument. “Our oxygen supply.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry, Eric. I’m just...frustrated. Our oxygen supply isn’t a problem,” she assured him, “but with cascading systems failures...” She checked her instrument. “Right now, the O-two level is slightly low, but it’s still within the green, about what it is on Earth at about ten or twelve thousand feet above sea level. If we exert ourselves too much, we’ll definitely feel it, but if we relax and don’t move around too much, we’ll be fine.”
“Assuming, of course, that the level remains steady and doesn’t continue to drop like the temperature is continuing to rise,” he pointed out.
“Right,” she agreed. “Assuming that.”
The lights flickered again, worse than before, and something else changed as well. At least, Dylan thought that it had, but only for a moment so brief that he couldn’t be sure that he’d really heard anything. Yes, heard. It had been something audible. At least, that was what it felt like. Something audible—something about the sound of the ship, or more precisely, it’s drive systems—something about the way it had been humming quietly in the background ever since they went through the jump ring—a sound that he’d grown so used to over the last couple of days that he hadn’t even been hearing it anymore. At least, not on a conscious level.
“Oh no,” Kenzie muttered in little more than a whisper as she leaned forward and started checking her instruments again. “Oh shit.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear that?”
“Yeah, I thought I heard...something...I think. What was it?”
“The nacelles blinked,” she told him while she played her instruments again.
“Blinked?”
“Power to the jump nacelles was cut for about half a second,” she explained. “If we lose those...” She didn’t finish.
If they lost the nacelles, they would fall out of jumpspace somewhere in deep space, between star systems, nowhere near a jumpstation, or any other facility, for that matter. They would find themselves dozens, perhaps hundreds of years from anything or anyone.
The lights flickered again and the nacelles blinked twice again. “Oh no,” Kenzie muttered worriedly. She started playing her various instruments as though she were playing a high-speed game of Whack-a-Mole. “No, no, no!”
The nacelles blinked one more time, then suddenly shut down. Dylan had to grab hold of the back of the co-pilot’s chair to keep from falling forward, while outside, the distant ring of stars suddenly exploded and the billions of tiny points of light that had made it up fell back into their proper places.
“Son-of-a-bitch!” Kenzie cried. She gazed out into space, then slammed her fist down on the button to activate the distress signal, for all the good that it would do. Then she sat back in her chair and slapped its arms. “Fuck!”
As Dylan had feared, they’d fallen out of jumpspace, at best several decades away from anything. The distress signal might give them an outside shot at being rescued...eventually...he hoped...but chances were that he and Kenzie were going to live out the rest of their lives together aboard the Martius and never see another human soul. How long ‘the rest of their lives’ would be, of course, would depend upon how much hotter it might get and how far they could make their food and water supplies last.
As for his mission to prevent the destruction of the Excalibur, he could only hope that other-Dylan might have better luck.
CHAPTER 51
Mars Orbital Shipyards
In all the weeks that he’d been living and working undercover at the Mars Orbital Shipyards, Dylan hadn’t yet paid a visit to Little Green Manny’s. He’d heard a lot about the place, of course, from Danny and a few of the other security policemen and women with whom he’d worked, but he’d never had any real reason to go there himself...until now. He’d never been much for going out to bars or clubs—he’d never been much of a partygoer at all, even as a child—and he wasn’t expecting to enjoy an evening at Manny’s any more than he’d ever enjoyed any other bar or club, but he did need to meet with Doctor Royer, and he’d been hearing so many good things about Manny’s lately, especially about the food, that he’d decided it was about time that he finally check the place out for himself, so he’d arranged for them to meet there at 1930 hours. Yes, the place was usually only patronized by military personnel, yes, he’d had to get the doctor a special pass to be allowed entry as his guest, and yes, the doctor would likely stand out in the crowd and be noticed, but that was all right. He was a government contractor, and government contractors were occasionally invited out to Manny’s by their friends and coworkers in the military, so while his presence would be noticed, it shouldn’t draw any but the most superficial scrutiny. With any luck, there would be a sizeable crowd of people there and he and the good doctor would be able to fade quietly into the shadows, at least for a little while.
It took him a while—rather than taking one of the lifts, he’d walked the entire way from his quarters—but he eventually found himself walking down the long corridor, approaching Little Green Manny’s. A pair of friendly little women about his age, or perhaps a few years younger, both of them painted green and wearing red wigs and silly costumes right out of a 1950’s science-fiction B-movie, were posted outside the large padded red doors. They smiled at him, flashing their incredibly bright white teeth, and greeted him as one with voices that could have belonged to a pair of lady munchkins in the Land of Oz.
“Good evening to you, sir,” they said, almost singing, bowing their heads to make the springy antennas that they were wearing on their heads wave back and forth and swing wildly around in circles, “and welcome to Little Green Manny’s. Please, go right in.” They opened the doors ahead of him and waved him through.
“Thank you,” he said as he passed between them.
“You’re very welcome, sir,” they replied in unison.
He stopped briefly just inside the doors and looked over to the side at what he immediately recognized from Danny’s description to be Manny Junior—the dummy Martian used in the filming of the 1950’s War of the Worlds movie. Then, forgetting exactly what the longtime tradition that Danny had told him about involved, he moved on into the club’s large dining area and discovered that if there had been a large dinner crowd there at all, it was already beginning to thin out. Roughly a quarter to a third of the tables and booths were empty, though most of them hadn’t yet been cleaned since they were last occupied.
