“We have to get the hell out of here!” Floyd shouted over the confusion once the bridge fire was out. The attack had come out of nowhere, they still couldn’t say for certain where the initial volley of missiles had come from. Julian suspected a cloaked satellite in orbit of the gas giant. Zeta Leporis was a remote system, was chosen for the return route for being completely uninhabited, but not today. After the first explosions the ships broke formation and veered away from the direction of fire, only to find two Federation Excalibur Class carriers and a dozen escorts closing rapidly on them.
“Run,” was the command to the wing and run they did. Each ship raced for the edges of the solar system at best acceleration. It was time to take “The Flying Fuck” as it was known among spacers. Hyper-shunting without precisely calculated coordinates was wildly reckless, doing it within the Barycenter of a star system compounded the risk greatly but the fighters swarmed from the carriers like a great cloud of angry wasps, more then two hundred of them at least, and there was very little choice.
“Override the fucking decompression sequence!” Julian shouted as a panel blew out of the ceiling and more fire alarms sounded. Quick helm-work and Nefratiti’s deft use of the Queen’s phalanx guns saved them from outright destruction in the missile attack. Only one of the nukes managed to detonate but there was a wealth of damage to go around. The Spartacus suffered major systems failures and a hull breach. Billy reported that their inertial grid was holding and Angus was already down there welding a patch. Julian looked over the damage schismatic on his monitor and felt sick. One more good smack and Spartacus was done for, but he had his own ship to save and if any captain could rescue Spartacus it was brother Billy.
“Guy,” Julian called down to engineering on the intercom, “I need a damage report!”
“We’re a bloody fucking mess,” came the response. “The starboard battery room is burning out of control and we can’t access the controls to decompress her manually. We have power loss and electrical fires on every deck. I have at least six dead and that many more on their way to the infirmary.”
“Leave your injured ‘till we’ve jumped,” Julian said after a pause, “If we lose the ship we’re all dead.” He then turned to his first officer, “Floyd, where are we with the manual?”
“Decompressing now,” Floyd confirmed, “Falling twenty kPa per second.”
“Increase the flow through the afterburners,” Julian told the helm.
“We’re at a hundred and fifty percent recommended maximum already,” Master Navigator Clem Camino was another new recruit from the Fringe Worlds. A smuggler who had been pressed into service with a rogue merc group, he signed on when The Bastards took control of their operations, looking to earn enough to buy his own ship again. He was gifted with the controls even though he had never piloted anything as large as the Queen.
“Then give me an even two-hundred,” Julian instructed, “if those fighters close on us we’re finished.”
“Yarr,” Clem said with resignation. A moment later an explosion sent a shockwave through the Queen’s spine, everyone on the bridge was violently jarred and it took a moment for people to reorient themselves.
“Was it the drives?” Julian asked with alarm.
“Negative,” Floyd responded looking over the damage schematic, “It happened inside the boom, looks like the starboard battery room went up. No hull breach.”
“Fuck me,” Julian muttered, “The inertial grid?”
“Stable,” Floyd confirmed to widespread relief. “Mostly,” he added when a sharp tremor passed through the vessel. Everyone held their breath as one, feeling the shock of it in their bones. If a ship moving at their current thirty-nine G’s lost inertial containment, the entire craft would be crushed like an empty can in an instant, turning everyone on board into messy protoplasmic pancakes.
Julian’s normally focused mind drifted in a haze just then. Everything seemed to grow dark, quiet. Slowed down. He thoughts turned to Natasha who gave him a shudder nearly as disturbing at the party they held before leaving Havana Town for home. She was three months along now and starting to show. Doc Shapiro in the infirmary, “Bonesaw” to his friends and shipmates, said the baby was a girl and would weigh-in at nearly five kilos come “fight night.” Natasha slapped Julian in the face upon hearing this last piece of information. She insisted on remaining at the con aboard the Norwegian Blue over Julian’s strong objections but at least they were almost home. They would get out of this and then he could settle down and have a nice heart attack.
“P’bet tolerance,” Clem said with a tense relief in his voice.
“Punch it!” Julian shouted, coming right back with the words he’d damn near prayed for.
“Shit,” Billy said. There was no avoiding the graviton streamer that seemed to form on top of them as the Spartacus went hyper-light. At once the ship’s already straining inertial grid started to buckle. Sparks and equipment flew freely about the bridge, a fifty-kilo battery pack striking his helmsman in the visor which instantly shattered. Fortunately he seemed to be dead or unconscious when Billy freed him from his restraint and took the helm. Hypoxia was a notoriously unpleasant death.
Gravity, long thought to be a relatively weak force, was in fact nothing of the sort. Moving freely through higher dimensional space simply dilutes its true power. However, at higher dimensional levels, like say in hyperspace travel, there can be bottlenecks. It was now widely believed these strands helped hold galaxies together in a vast web, anchored at the most massive objects. In any event, it was no place to be.
He didn’t need to shout at his first officer for Kiku to hear him, the bedlam that raged around them was mute in the vacuum, but the chaos brought voices to an instinctive shout. “We have to fight our way out of the slipstream or we’ll be torn to pieces!”
“There’s almost no power to maneuver,” She yelled back, “Angus is pumping everything through the grid to hold us together! We’re like an egg in a fucking blender here!”
“Get down to Angus and have him manually reset the fuel valves! We’ll need a massive burn to force our way through the streamer wall!” Billy was well beyond frustrated the intercom had been rendered inoperative, along with just about every other system on the ship. How it was holding together at all given the forces being exerted on her combined with the horrific damage sustained when the nuke exploded so close to her, was nothing short of miraculous. A shame I’ll never get to compliment Guy for the bracing modifications he suggested, Billy thought to himself. He cursed his realistic nature and resolved to go down fighting it if need be.
“The hull will be crushed if we try that!” Kiku shouted.
“This streamer is making a line for the nearest black hole or neutron star,” Billy yelled back, “either of which will do a number on the paint job! I want the afterburner and all the maneuvering thrusters to be able to hit five-hundred percent!”
“They’ll burn out!” she argued.
“NOW!” he roared and shoved her toward the gangway. He fought the controls with the strength of a wild animal though they threatened to break his arms. Flying under these conditions with no real computer assistance was just this side of utterly futile but he was still determined to not let something like that cloud his purpose. A hand touched his shoulder suddenly, when he turned to see who it was he found it to be the dead helmsman who was still floating about the cabin. He shoved the body away but was hooked around the neck by a leg as it spun.
“Mother-Fucker!” he yelled in rage, trying to keep the Spartacus clear of the deadly pulsing walls of the terrible hyperspace cyclone. He could scarcely read an instrument which was just as well since it turned out almost none of them were working. Those that remained on-line were giving nonsensical information mostly as the invisible graviton particles coursed through the ship in waves. The radiation they had already absorbed would almost certainly kill them all within a few years but Billy would take what time he could get.
Kiku returned to the bridge, “We’re all set! I really hope this works.”
“Me too,” Billy said, more cheer in his voice then heart.
He began increasing power rapidly. The shaking became ever more violent as the red bar grew on the acceleration gauge. As the ship began pulling forward, the corkscrew of the streamer seemed to tighten around them like a hungry python. They were topping out at forty G’s and everything was a blur, his limbs felt numb under the strain of battling the helm and the vibrations which increased with each moment. He had to bring Spartacus into contact with the streamer wall at as shallow an angle as possible and then force her through quickly. The stresses, once under the full force of the tunnel’s shell, would be incredible but there was nothing else that could be done. He had never heard of a ship surviving such a phenomenon. Not so much as a wild drunken boast. But only until someone does it, he told himself.
“Here we go,” he said to no one as he approached the barrier. It was a good smooth approach but as soon as they came into contact with the densest part of the streamer the violent tremors became overwhelming. It was as though they were inside a can being shaken in anger. The emergency lights which were still functioning flashed like strobes and strange sensory distortions could be noticed. Everything seemed to stretch, Billy noticed a feeling of lightheadedness and ever-narrowing tunnel vision. He was going to vomit. Instinctively, he reached up and threw the latch at his chin just as the protean spill began. He felt a horrible cold as the air escaped rapidly from his helmet with the bulk of the waste. With his other hand he pushed-in on his eyes to help keep them from dislodging. He was somewhat successful but he choked and gagged on a volume of the foul bile that stayed in his throat when he snapped his visor back shut. His ears had popped but he wasn’t deaf, so far so good. Things began to spin and they were cast back into the eye of the cyclone, bouncing off the far wall before he was able to regain some control. She lurched back and forth, the inertial grid ready to give-out at any second under the strain.
The acceleration gauge was pinned at one-hundred G’s, it had to be malfunctioning. Might have one more shot at this, Billy thought and maneuvered for the perimeter again. He focused intensely, the approach was as perfect as could be expected, if not more so. The impact was even more disastrous then the last, they were again thrown back to the center. Now, however the streamer seemed to become completely strait and less violent. The controls were now utterly dead. Billy and Kiku began ripping into the console with the tool kit in the floor hatch next to it, hoping it was something obvious and easy to fix. There was a good deal of obvious damage but not enough to account for the complete failure. He sent Kiku back to the engine room to consult with Angus but she was back in just a few moments, strapping herself into the seat next to him sitting there quietly.
“The entire drive section’s been sheared away,” she finally said and Billy relaxed as well. “Round of drinks says we reach the singularity before the grid gives-out,” he said.
“You’re on,” she agreed. |
Submission Name: Iceni Queen 9--A Leap Of Faith
