War of the Spheres Page 32

  “Quite possibly so, Colonel,” he said mildly, “but I’ll still be intact—as will my crew and my ship. Jessup out.”

  The channel broke, and Hughes released a growl of frustration. “I don’t believe this!”

  “Just do it anyway,” I told her.

  She locked eyes with me, and she nodded. “Fillmore, engage the device at maximum range according to pre-sets. Revert control to manual. We’re going to jump past the barrier immediately.”

  Everyone scrambled to lock their harnesses and cinch them tight. Fillmore worked his panel, reducing the timer that had been counting down on the screen to zero with a pinching motion of his fingers.

  We braced ourselves—but nothing happened.

  “The module is dead,” he said. “There’s no power.”

  “What?” Hughes demanded.

  “Did Jessup sabotage us?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t dare,” Hughes said.

  “No…” Gevan said, sighing and leaning back in his chair. “I’ve found the problem. He’s killed our outside power feed to the ship’s engines. We’ve got life support and communications, but that’s it.”

  Hughes scrambled up, ripping at her harness. I reached over and clicked it open for her. She was obviously in a rage.

  I stood up, and I rested a hand on the grip of my holstered sidearm. “Do you want me to try to fix this?” I asked.

  Her eyes flicked over me and my gun. She shook her head. “That’s a last-ditch move. I’ve got a better idea… Toby? Think you could lend us a hand, here?”

  Toby nodded and threw off his harness. I got the impression he’d never actually snapped the buckles into place.

  “I’ll need to use someone’s access screen,” he said, eager to perform. He gave me a shooing gesture, and I reluctantly got out of my seat.

  “No, no, take that spot,” Hughes told him, pointing to Dr. Fillmore’s seat.

  Dr. Fillmore looked startled. “What’s this?” he sputtered.

  “This young man is going to try something,” Hughes explained. “You’ve already done your calculations, you’re just along for the ride now.”

  Complaining, Fillmore climbed out of his seat.

  “Out, out,” Hughes urged, “before I have Gray cut away that harness. Toby, take his place. Find us some power.”

  “From where?” Toby asked.

  “Anywhere.”

  Toby jumped into the seat with an easy motion. He put his hands on the console and began working it.

  Hughes turned to me. “You might have wondered what Toby is doing on this project. Why he’s inside the nucleus at this critical moment. Well… he’s got specialized skills…”

  “You mean he’s a gifted hacker?” I asked. “Yes, I’d picked up on that.”

  Toby did his magic. Soon, we were inside the engineering screens that guided the power around Viper. He shunted three zones, then lit up our own main power line. It went green, then yellow, then a pulsing orange.

  “We’ve got all the juice we’re going to get. But I had to tap into an auxiliary line. You’d better use it now, Colonel. Any minute now, they’ll notice in engineering and try to counter.”

  “Or they’ll send troops to hammer on our hatch,” I added.

  Hughes licked her lips. Everyone was strapped in.

  “Toby…? Do it,” she said.

  Fillmore, standing next to his station, opened his mouth to object, but it was too late.

  Toby didn’t wait a single second. He engaged the drive, and we jumped through space again.

  Chapter 40

  My teeth were set, and I steeled myself for a gut-wrenching leap through inter-dimensional space.

  To my surprise, the nauseating sensations I’d experienced before were vastly reduced this time around. Jumping beyond the barrier wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected it to be.

  When we came out of it, no one had passed out, and no one had vomited, not even Dr. Fillmore.

  “Did we make it?” Dr. Gevan asked in a rasping voice. “Did we pass the barrier?”

  “It looks that way,” Toby said, studying the navigational data. “We’re free!”

  We all stared at the instruments, the screens—we were in shock.

  How could it have been that easy?

  The space we were in now didn’t feel different. I supposed that one region of icy cold void wasn’t terribly different from the next.

  It all made sense, in a way. Any form of natural mass or energy was allowed to pass through the barrier without difficulty. Something like a comet, for instance, had no difficulty. Only artificial objects like Viper were stopped. Therefore, it was logical that the void on the far side the Sphere was essentially identical to the cold vacuum we’d always known inside our vast prison.

  But emotionally, it felt different. It was a thrill. To know we were the first humans to have exited our prison—it was exhilarating.

  A cheer went up from Hughes and her crew. It was modest at first, but it grew in strength as people recovered their wits and settled their slightly queasy stomachs.

  Before I could do much more than smile, however, a tickle made my left eye twitch. A thought came into my mind then. An alien thought.

  “Work done, Gray-man,” Big Al’s words appeared in my mind, softer than before but impossible to ignore. “You’ve done what you must do.”

  Now, Al was sounding like the Watchers.

  A terrible thought made my guts clench, Who was I really working for? Was I even on a side? Normally, I wouldn’t have even considered such ideas, but meeting real aliens… it was a game-changer. My questions were impossible to answer, so I pushed them under the surface.

  Frowning and blinking, I reached up and touched the spot on my forehead where the patch had been adhered hours earlier. It was still gone. But there was a sticky residue…

  I recalled those tiny, twisting threads and shuddered. Were some of them still inside my skull? Could they somehow be stimulating my nerves with communications from afar?

  Wondering just where Big Al had gone, I made a mental note to look for the little bastard later on.

  “The numbers check out,” Dr. Fillmore said over and over. “These coordinates… they’re unreachable. No ship has ever been this far from our sun before.”

  “Even better,” I said. “I didn’t get sick.

  Colonel Hughes shook her head and rubbed at her neck. “You’re right, Gray. That part is a surprise. Could it be that going through the barrier made the drive less tumultuous to our insides?”

  “I’m the one you can thank,” Gevan said suddenly. “I’ve been working on nothing else other than smoother transitions into and out of PDM for the last week.”

  That made sense to me, as the last time we’d jumped he’d almost died.

  “If you want to go over my linearization of the power-up and power-down sequence, you’ll see how the drive’s new programming—”

  “Forget it,” Fillmore snapped. “Stop wasting time. We’re outside the barrier. Make the most of it!”

  Seeing the wisdom in his harshly delivered words, the group began working on gathering data from the local space. We pinpointed our position, measured out the range of the jump and…

  “Can this be right?” Toby exclaimed. “We’re too far out!”

  “My God…” Colonel Hughes breathed.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “We jumped…” she said, doing calculations, “something like a ten AU. That’s over a billion kilometers.”

  For a moment, we fell silent as the data sank in. The stunned silence didn’t last long.

  “Colonel Hughes?” Captain Jessup’s voice rolled over us like the voice of the Almighty. It boomed from every speaker in the cockpit. “You’re under arrest for mutiny. All of you. Come out of the module with your hands on your heads.”

  Eyes darted around as we looked into one another’s faces, seeking a solution—or at least a plan.


  “I thought he might take it badly…” I pointed out.

  “You!” Dr. Fillmore shouted, whirling on Dr. Gevan. “You messed with the software! All so you wouldn’t get sick the next time, right? Now, we’re half-way to the next star system and you’re to blame!”

  “We’re not even one percent of the way—” Dr. Gevan argued, but Colonel Hughes cut them off.

  “Shut up, both of you. I have to think.”

  She wasn’t given much time to do so. A hammering began on the hatch. Clearly, Jessup meant business.

  “Chief,” Hughes said to me. “I need some of your magic. What have you got for me?”

  “One moment,” I said calmly.

  Unbuckling my harness and standing up, I stepped to the hatch, and I threw it wide open. One of Jessup’s spacers went sprawling at my feet.

  I tried to help him up, but he brushed me away, snarling.

  Several gun muzzles targeted my face.

  “Gentlemen,” I said. “There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding.”

  “That’s right, Gray,” Jessup said from the back of the group. “And your squad of nerds are the ones who don’t get it. I’m Viper’s captain, I gave a legitimate order, and you people chose to flagrantly do the opposite! I’m charging you all with mutiny, and these men are here to escort all of you to a holding area in the bilge.”

  Having just come from the bilge, I had no desire to return there, but I thought the odds were slim that Jessup couldn’t be redirected.

  Standing at the door, I helped each of the module’s crew out of their seats to climb out of Fairweather’s exterior hatch. As ordered, they put their hands on their heads. I, however, did not.

  Operating as if I was one of the arresting crewmen, I got several strange looks from the spacers.

  Coming out of the module last, a spacer grabbed for the gun at my waist. I stopped him easily by placing a stronger hand over his. He struggled, but he couldn’t take my weapon.

  “Chief Gray!” Jessup shouted. “You will stand down, or you will be shot!”

  Looking up in mild surprise, I confronted the captain. “I don’t understand, Captain. You’ve arrested your mutineers.”

  “You’re one of them.”

  “By no means!” I declared. “I’m no scientist. I didn’t activate the drive, nor pilot the vehicle. In fact, I can’t even read these instruments. I’m no more a party to their actions than this weakling who’s tugging at my gun.”

  Angry now, the spacer elbowed me viciously in the ribs and backed away, panting. I slid my hand away from my sidearm and looked back at Jessup. My face portrayed none of the discomfort or worry I was feeling.

  “Hmm…” Jessup said. “You were in their cockpit when they pulled this treasonous stunt. If you’re loyal to me, then why didn’t you stop them?”

  I shrugged. “It was my understanding that we were supposed to perform a test near the borderline of the Sphere.”

  “That was changed, Gray. Maybe you didn’t know… All right, fine. I’ll give you a chance to prove yourself. But first, you must give up your weapon.”

  Agreeing, I handed over my gun butt-first to the spacer I’d abused earlier. He took it with poor grace.

  “Now Gray,” Jessup said, “come with me up to the bridge, we have to figure out how to get home.”

  “That would seem obvious, Captain,” I said. “All we have to do is jump back to our point of origin.”

  “No way,” Jessup growled. “There will be no more jumping anywhere today. If I let these crazies fire up their drive again, we’re liable to run into Neptune or something. No, we’ll fly back to the aperture on good old-fashioned fusion power.”

  Shrugging, I agreed to his terms. The scientists had been herded away, and soon I found myself on the bridge.

  Allie eyed me strangely once I walked in and stood quietly at the back. Clearly, she hadn’t expected to see me.

  She approached me when Jessup was working out a flight path with Cmdr. Collins.

  “How did you talk your way out of being shot?” she asked.

  “It can be hard to pin some men down.”

  “I’ll say. You’re not going to try to take over the ship or something, are you?”

  It was my turn to look startled. “Why would I do that? We’ve achieved my goals. We’re outside the Sphere.”

  “Yes… I guess that’s all you really wanted, wasn’t it?”

  I smiled. “I’ve got other things on my mind now.”

  The truth was, I was feeling quite relaxed. My mission had been clearly stated, and it had been achieved. I was now a free man. Looking at Allie, I suddenly saw her in a new way. She had wholesome beauty that couldn’t be manufactured.

  She flushed slightly and looked away, perhaps interpreting my frank gaze correctly.

  Jessup and Collins got the ship turned around and flying back toward home. It wasn’t any great feat of navigation. Essentially, we were accelerating back toward the Sun.

  An alarm sounded less than an hour later, however.

  “I’ve got an approaching bogey, Captain Jessup,” Lt. Fletcher said. She was all business again.

  Approaching her station, I looked at her screens. “Is that a ship?”

  “I think so,” she said, giving me a fearful glance. “An alien ship.”

  “It’s on an intercept course?” Jessup said. “I don’t understand… it’s directly between us and our goal.”

  “That’s right,” I said, studying the tactical situation. “The alien ship is coming at us head on.”

  “But that must mean…” Jessup said. He turned to study the colored dots. “They must have been out here already, past the barrier, waiting for us to come out.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “They must have been hanging around, quietly lurking in space. Perhaps they didn’t expect us to jump out so far.”

  Jessup looked at me, his face full of haunting worry. “What do they want, Gray?”

  “This ship, I would think,” I said. “Or more specifically, the jump-drive. They’ve wanted it all along.”

  “So… they haven’t been trying to destroy it as much as they’ve been trying to steal it?”

  “The evidence point’s that way. The teleporters never tried to damage the engine—and it seems like that would have been easy for them to do.”

  “But why didn’t they steal it earlier? Why not grab it and vanish?”

  I thought about my jaunt through the in-between. “I’ve been in limbo, the dimension they slip into in order to pass through walls unseen. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to drag a large object in that place.”

  His eyes narrowed. “So… they lured us out here. They wanted us to exit our Sphere physically, with the engine, so they could take it. I knew it! Your people were fools to bring us out here. We’ve played into their hands.”

  Unable to argue with his complaints, I stepped into the command pit. He didn’t object, and we studied the tactical situation together.

  “Sir?” Cmdr. Collins said, after giving me a dirty glance. I could tell he didn’t think I belonged on the bridge at all. “I’ve got those numbers now. The alien ship will be on top of us in less than an hour, given their acceleration curve and ours.”

  “Still pretty far out then,” Jessup said. “What class of ship are we dealing with, Collie?”

  “At this distance, we can’t tell much about them. Judging simply by their exhaust plume and their movement, I’ve worked out a mass of around twenty thousand metric tons.”

  “That’s way bigger than us, right?” I asked.

  “Yes…” Allie said, speaking up. “She’s a heavy cruiser at least. Maybe a light battleship. That’s bad. We can’t outfight them.”

  Jessup turned and glared at her. “I won’t have negative talk on my bridge, Lieutenant.”

  “No, sir. Of course not, sir.”

  Jessup began to pace. “We won’t have to fight them. If Gray is right, they’re here to steal the drive, not destroy it. They w
on’t damage our ship.”

  “That’s a pretty big assumption, Captain,” I said.

  “You just made the argument yourself!”

  “That’s true, but let me suggest a simpler, easier path to salvation.”

  Jessup put his fists on his hips. “All right. I’m all ears. Let’s hear it.”

  “Release the science crew. Order them to jump us back inside our Sphere, where we’ll be safe and sound.”

  Jessup bared his teeth. He turned and slammed the top of Collin’s station with his hand, making the man jump.

  “Cmdr. Collins,” Jessup said, “turn around again and run. Flank speed!”

  “What sir?”

  Jessup turned on him with a baleful stare, so Collins gave the orders, and the ship made a sickening, long, sliding turn. Afterward, we were actually still sliding backward due to inertia, but at least we were moving away from the battleship again.

  “Trying to outrun them, sir?” I asked. “That’s not a bad idea, but in order to get back to safety, we’ll have to use the drive.”

  He glowered at me. “I don’t trust Hughes and her crew, but you seem awfully eager.”

  “You’d rather trust the intentions of a battleship full of aliens?” I asked in a mild tone.

  Jessup’s eyes slid to me, then back to Cmdr. Collins. “Keep accelerating out into open space. Maybe we’re faster, and they’ll give up. Give me an update every five minutes. I’m going down to talk to Colonel Hughes.”

  Allowing myself a quiet smile, I turned back to flirt with Allie a bit more. Unfortunately, I could tell after a single glance that she was too stressed to engage in a light conversation.

  “Chief Gray!” boomed Jessup from the passageway. “Accompany me! Maybe you can talk sense into that nerd-herd of yours!”

  I trotted after the captain regretfully.

  Chapter 41

  Like every caged animal that escapes his prison for the first time, we were both wary and thrilled. We’d run around in circles for a bit—but then we’d sighted something big and scary.

  Now, we were racing back for the safety of the very enclosure we’d worked so hard to escape. The irony was thick, but none of us were in the mood to discuss it.