Star Glory (Empire Series Book 1) Page 21

  “Tactical, what are the neutrino signatures from elsewhere in this system?” the captain called.

  “Sir, there are seventeen stationary neutrino signatures at the edge of the magnetosphere, in the area we arrived,” Chang said. “Four moving neutrino signatures appear to be ships in transit outward. They could be raider ships, commercial cargo ships, or both.”

  “Positions?”

  “Three outbound ships are passing through the inner asteroid belt. One ship has passed beyond the outer, third asteroid belt. It still has some ways to go before hitting the system’s Kuiper zone. Sir.”

  “Communications, any report of an Empire ship?”

  “None sir,” Wetstone said quickly, leaning over his control panel at the front of the Bridge. “No raider ship has detected any incoming graviton surges. Sir.”

  The captain, wearing his service khakis since we only donned vacsuits when Combat Ready status was declared, sat back in his seat and rested his arms on his armrests.

  “Astrogation, change course to put us on the edge of the magnetosphere that corresponds with the direction to Kepler 445.”

  “Sir, changing ship vector track,” Ibarra said sharply. “Distance to magnetosphere edge is 43 AU. Sir.”

  The captain’s head looked left. “Communications, open the All Ship vidcom for me.”

  The older warrant officer did as ordered, tapping his panel. “Captain, All Ship vidcom is now live.”

  Captain Skorzeny looked up. Which gave me a clear view of his clean-shaven, unemotional face. His brown eyes stared. Perhaps he was thinking of the ceiling videye that broadcast everything on the Bridge to the rest of the ship. I don’t know. I just saw how serious and focused he was.

  “Crew, I have chosen to head for Kepler 445. That is an M4 red dwarf star with three planets, two of them inside the star’s liquid water habitable zone. Our allies the Melanchon told me another refugee species whose home world had been destroyed was heading to this star, hoping to find a world beyond the reach of the Empire.” The captain looked down, tapped his right armrest and stared at a holo that took form in front of him. The holo also appeared as a third image in the bulkhead vidscreen. “Since this star lies 294 light years downarm from Sol, it is possible the Empire has not reached it. However, they did reach Kepler 37, which is just 215 light years from Earth. So maybe these refugee aliens have run into the Empire. Or maybe not. If they haven’t, they could be another member of our NATO of the Stars. Whatever the story, we are heading there. Then later, we will head home.”

  The captain paused, waiting for the cheers I heard coming over the All Ship to die down. Not far from me the three Spacers who worked for Gambuchino quieted. The chief and the PO had not said a word, instead focused on their workstations. As I was. But since the chief had not called for antimatter afterburner flow, I had time to look around. And wonder.

  “Anyway, it will be almost two days before we get to the magnetosphere edge and be able to make our Alcubierre jump. Which now allows us to cover 100 light years a day.” The captain’s face gave a half smile. “Since the distance from here to Kepler 445 is 1,108 light years, that means we will be in gray space for eleven days. I’m sure you all can find plenty of brightwork to polish, veggies to pick on Farm Deck, messes to clean up and rare booze to gamble over. But stay alert! While the raider ships are now our allies, Empire ships could appear at any time. Be ready for a declaration of General Quarters at any time. But if we are lucky, we will reach this system’s edge and have a mini-vacation in Alcubierre space-time. Captain out.”

  I looked up past my injector tubes. The thigh-thick tube that conveyed antimatter sideways to Bill’s antimatter beamer ran along the overhead. The rainbow shimmer colors were strong and stable, just like the shimmers on the nine vertical tubes that ran past me and down to our three thrusters. While no antimatter flowed down or sideways, the tubes were always powered up and their containment fields fully operational. The classes I’d taken at Great Lakes said the constant power on was intended to give a ship captain immediate thrust supplement. A prof had said the power needed to maintain the fields here, and around the antimatter doughnut on the deck above, were minimal, less than a terawatt. Unspoken had been the reality that switching the fields on and off frequently might, just might, cause one or more of them to fail. Which would lead to a third of Engineering disappearing if it was a single tube that went down, or the rear third of the ship if the antimatter doughnut above my head lost its containment field. The deadly nature of the antimatter doughnut and the miniature stars created in the exhaust funnel of each thruster were two reasons why very few crew from any other deck ever took the gravshaft down to our deck.

  “Engineering, activate the magfield drive,” called the captain.

  On the other side of the deck my boss slid his seat over to the new control panel for the magfield drive. Which was composed of a person-tall ball set atop a metal block. The bloc sat halfway between Gambuchino’s fusion reactor dome and the chief’s work station. Installing the magfield on this deck had reduced the open deck space. But since our end of the ship was forty meters across, there was plenty of room for the magfield block, the fusion reactor, the graviton generator of the Alcubierre stardrive pile, Gambuchino’s control station, my work station and the chief’s two control panels for the thrusters/Alcubierre drives and the magfield normal space drive.

  “Activating magfield drive,” Chief O’Connor said moments after tapping the unit’s control panel.

  I looked to my antimatter flow control panel. On one part of its touchscreen glowed a normal space speed indicator based on the red-shifting or purple-shifting of nearby planets, asteroids or comets. When we headed away from a distant star, its redshift factor increased. And the purple-shift increased for any star ahead of our transit vector. They were tiny changes, considering we were no way close to the speed of light. But tech geeks loved their gadgets and twenty years ago one of them had invented this basic normal space speedometer. At the moment, the glowing spot showed us moving at 10 percent of lightspeed thanks to our three fusion pulse thrusters. But now, with the addition of the magfield drive, that normally steady number was changing. Slowly it moved to 10.1, then 10.2, and moments later to 10.5.

  “Captain, ship is now moving at 15 psol,” my boss said over his station’s comlink.

  In the bulkhead vidscreen the captain looked down to his XO, saw her give a nod of agreement, then looked ahead at the wide vidscreen of the Bridge. “Well, that is nice. Interesting how there is a slight blurring of the starlight ahead. Chief O’Connor, add antimatter to our thrusters.”

  That woke me up. I reached out my hand and held it above my control touchscreen.

  “PO Stewart! Let her flow!”

  “Activating antimatter flow,” I said firmly, tapping the screen.

  Above me the magnetic field that blocked the flow of antimatter from the doughnut down through the nine injector tubes now vanished. Nine holes opened in the bottom portion of the doughnut. Antimatter flowed down those holes. I looked aside at another readout. It showed centiliters of AM flowing down each hole and through the vertical tubes that walled in my station. Nothing changed in the rainbow glow of the nine tubes. Than the Goddess! The rainbow shimmer that surrounded each tube stayed bright, sharp and stable. But my boots felt an increase in deck vibration.

  “Captain, antimatter is now joining with the fusion pulse plasmas in all three thrusters,” my boss said. “Afterburner is on!”

  My panel speedometer reflected what the chief said. The normal space speed of the Star Glory increased from 15 to 15.1 psol. Then 15.2. Seconds later we moved to 15.6. Then a minute after the flow began we were at 16 psol. I blinked. My ship was moving faster through the black void of space than it had ever moved. Faster than any human ship had moved. It felt good. Then a realization hit me. Our ship was moving faster than any Empire ship had moved when chasing us at Kepler 37. That was thanks to the addition of our antimatter afterburner to the normal thruster
exhaust and the new magfield drive pull on the magnetic field of the local star’s magnetosphere.

  “Thank you, Chief O’Connor,” the captain said, sounding almost casual. “My oh my. What a wonder 16 psol is.” The captain gave a thumbs-up to XO Kumisov. “Nice to know we can now outrun any pursuing Empire ship. Smooth Fur thought our antimatter afterburner use was primitive. Well, not when it allows us to outrun that bastard!”

  The captain’s use of profanity surprised me. I had never heard him cuss during any All Ship broadcast. Well, yes he did, my memory reminded me. He’d cussed when telling off Smooth Fur during that creature’s demand for humanity to surrender its freedom and become a Servant to the Empire.

  “Captain, totally agree with you,” my boss said. Then he looked over at me. His reddish-brown eyebrows rose in a questioning look.

  “Chief O’Connor, the containment field shimmers are bright, sharp and stable,” I said, guessing that was what his look needed knowing.

  The man nodded. “Good to hear. But monitor that big tube to the beamer. It’s new and I damn well want to be sure it is perfect in field stability before we feed any AM to PO Watson!”

  “I heard that,” came Bill’s voice over my armrest’s comlink speaker. “Wish there was a target I could practice on.”

  Over the comlink someone cleared their throat. “PO Watson, you will get your chance to fire that beamer once we reach the edge of the magnetosphere,” the captain said firmly. “That is the safest place to do a test firing. But getting there gives this ship the chance to test the new magfield drive. Which seems to be working perfectly. I like moving faster than any Empire or Earth ship.”

  “Sir, captain, I fully agree,” came Bill’s smart response. He then went silent.

  My friend well understood no enlisted person interrupts the captain when the ship is getting underway. And even then only in an emergency. Which was why I too was keeping quiet. While I appreciated the captain’s invite to speak up whenever I saw something that might help the survival of the ship, this trip outward was a normal event. No other ship was within several AU of us. No other ship was headed toward us on a constant beam that meant interception. And Chang at Tactical was keeping watch for graviton surges that might indicate the arrival of hidden stealth Empire ships. While the Bridge would listen for an alert from the picketing raider ships, Captain Skorzeny did not believe in leaving to others those things which his ship and people could do for themselves. Which I fully agreed with. It just left me wishing I could come up with some superstellar scheme for defeating the Empire. But I had learned that my instinct for anticipating problems and having ready a need solution did not happen in a vacuum. I needed the impact of imminent danger for that talent to awaken. I prayed we could get to the mag edge and enter Alcubierre space-time without me having to call on my talent. Which sometimes was hit or miss. But if I wanted to survive to again see my Mom in Colorado, I could not afford a miss.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Eight days into the grayness of our trip to Kepler 445 I sat at our lunch table and did my best to avoid the looks of my friends and girlfriend. I poked at a pile of spaghetti and meatballs with a tasty tomato sauce. The sauce had the extra bit of garlic that I really like in my saucy food. And the beef meatballs were delicious. Spearing a surviving meatball with my fork, I lifted it to my mouth. But to eat it I had to raise my head a bit. Me bad. Five pairs of eyeballs peered at me over the tomatoey red meatball. Enough.

  “What!”

  Eyeballs stared at me from left to front to right. Bill, Oksana, Evelyn, Warren and Cassandra all kept staring. I put down the meatball.

  “No. I told you guys yesterday there was no point in doing it. Why should I, anyway?”

  Evelyn’s expression was the worst. My lover’s freckled face held a mix of sympathy, caring and determination. I had learned from our times together that her determination was strong enough to push a starship, even with dead thrusters. She just sat there, six feet of determined woman seated across the table from me, her milky white arms resting on the table, her own plate of egg rolls and lasagna cooling. Like most everyone in the Mess Hall she wore a clean, ironed and very presentable Type III blue and gray set of camos. Even though she had no military rank, almost everyone on Science Deck had taken to wearing camos. It was their effort at showing support for the people on our ship who were on the frontlines of future combat. Even overlarge Bjorg now wore a set of camos, albeit with a wide leather belt to hold in his beer belly. Evelyn shook her long red curls.

  “You know why, Nathan.” I winced. When she calls me by my formal first name I know she is into her ‘the young man needs to learn a lesson’ mode. “It’s part of the healing you need to do. You recovered physically while we were still in system. But reality is reality. Especially when it comes to emotions.”

  I looked to the right to my buddy Warren. Then wished I hadn’t. As a Marine corporal he was involved directly in my issue. He shifted his weightlifter’s shoulders under his camo shirt. I saw the color of his double chevrons on his left sleeve. It reminded me what I owed to Osashi and the other Marines. Including my buddy. Who gave a nod of agreement with Evelyn.

  “Nate, she’s right. I don’t like it. No one here does. But doing this is for you, period. You know that, don’t you?”

  I blinked and looked down. Avoidance had not worked yesterday. Nor the days before. I looked left to Bill. Who I now regularly saw as he was assigned beamer duty during First Shift. He arrived concurrent with me, gave a wave to Gambuchino, her Spacers and to Chief O’Connor, then winked at me and headed for the hatch to his access tunnel. He would spend the next eight hours in the antimatter beamer block. There was no point to it since there were no targets in Alcubierre space-time. But his training, like mine, said Drill, Drill, Drill! You practiced your combat job regularly so when the grease hit the fire, you responded almost without thinking. I could not imagine what it was like going through practice combat simulations in the beamer block, with only Heidi to talk to. But Bill always came out at the end of the shift, tired looking but determined. Sometimes he even looked happy. Unlike now.

  “Nate, I’d do it for you, if I could. But only you can do this.”

  For a guy who often teased me in the past about the ease of herding cattle when he and his family got up before dawn to attach the milking units to the hundreds of Hereford heifers that were his family’s livelihood, this empathy was rare. But sincere. Which made it worse to hear. Desperately I looked left to Oksana then right to Cassandra. Both women had sympathetic, caring expressions on their faces. I looked back to our Intel brain. Oksana’s blue eyes bored into me. I had not realized until a week ago that she had set her heart on being my regular date at the ship socials. But I should have known, considering how often she spoke to me, asked about my work, sympathized with antimatter tech details she surely did not understand and in short was a woman who wanted quality time with a man. Me. She had understood my infatuation with Cassie. She had bided her time. Then I had been ambushed by Evelyn. And discovered I really cared for the other six footer at our table. Amazingly she had continued to treat Evelyn as a sister and fellow tablemate. Which made me feel guiltier than hell at disappointing her. Now, I was doing it a second time.

  “Hey, Okie, did your dance night with Warren go fine?”

  She half-smiled, then turned serious again. “Yes, Warren and I had a nice time. As did you and Evelyn. And Bill and Cassandra. Nate, stop avoiding the issue. Make a decision. Take action. You’ve always been good at taking action when needed.”

  I winced. I was outnumbered at this table. And the last thing I wished to hear was similar caring and sympathetic words from Cassie. Who while still focused on becoming dean of her Stanford department, had taken to occasional dates with Bill. Neither of the new couples were as deeply involved as me and Evelyn. But the fact my friends were having deeper emotional ties pleased me. I just wished they would stop reminding me of my own emotional needs.

  “Fine. Cassie, everyone
, I’ll do it. Maybe tomorrow’s lunch.”

  Warren laughed, loudly. “Nate, the gals are right. Stop putting it off. Do it today. Now. The Mess Hall cooks will give you a veggie meal platter. And no one will stop you from seeing him.”

  I pushed away the uneaten plate of spaghetti. I reached out, grabbed my mug of beer, drank half of it and set it down. Maybe doing it now was the right thing to do.

  “Fine. I’ll get a veggie platter and head up to Recycling Deck and the Brig. Wanna bet he throws it in my face?”

  Evelyn sighed. “Nate, it does not matter what Mehta Nehru does when you show up with his lunch platter. This is for you. You need to get past the wound of being targeted for death. You need to see him, offer the meal, let him see you alive and healthy, say the words, and then leave. No need to do anything more. He will face a General Court-Martial from the Star Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps,” she said. “But I can tell the fact of the attack still hurts you, inside. I need you back to the caring, sassy, whole guy that I fell in love with. Will you do it for me?”