The Expansion Box Set, page 26
part #1 of The Expansion Series
This man had wanted his job, had wanted command of the entire fleet after missing out of the captaincy of the recon mission, but he had bowed to Dassiova’s appointment with some grace. The two had agreed to accept each other’s position without malice or agenda. In truth, Wright recognized that they needed a warrior’s mentality in overall command, but he hoped that Dassiova in turn recognized his experience and natural ability to command multiple ships in deep space.
“Admiral,” he responded in an equable tone. He seemed to also be in his private quarters, judging by the surroundings Dassiova could see behind the man’s head. “Are you ready to proceed with the jump?”
“We are,” he said. “Captain, you have command of the fleet until such time as we are reunited. I will send orders via subspace relay when we arrive at our jump point for our escort ships to follow.”
“Understood,” Wright answered with a solemn pride. “Safe journey.”
Dassiova killed the call, rising from his desk and returning to the bridge.
The relief flight officer stood from the command chair without ceremony. There was no announcement of Dassiova’s presence. He had put a stop to all of that. He didn’t need his ego massaged; it got in the way of efficiency as far as he was concerned. He preferred his crew to be watching their allocated stations rather than kissing his ass. He took his seat, confirmed that general quarters had been reported complete, and checked again with the engineering team working on the Fold Drive.
“Confirm we have a green light on all adjustments?” he said into the comm.
He received an emphatic affirmative from the other end. The admiral nodded to himself.
Now or never.
Protocol dictated that he should have ordered one of the frigates to jump first and test the last calibrations, but since every ship had to be individually tweaked the risks were equal to all of them. He would be endangering the lives of all six thousand men and women on the Venture regardless of whether he let someone else go first. He was not the kind of man to let someone else take a risk just because he was higher up the food chain.
“Helm: our course is plotted?” he barked with an edge of excited anticipation touching his words.
“Yes, sir.”
“Stand by for thirty-second activation of the drive on my mark,” Dassiova said, managing to hide the stress in his voice. He paused. “Initiate.”
From the bridge of the Cortez on the viewscreen at high magnification, the larger profile of the Venture seemed to wobble. The lines of it became obscured by extreme vibration. With a small and almost anti-climactic dull pop of light it disappeared. The ship simply wasn’t there any longer.
Captain Wright stood and watched the admiral’s ship vanish. He counted off the thirty seconds silently behind his neutral expression and covered his worry when he reached thirty-nine and still nobody had spoken. Just as he took in a breath to release the tension growing inside him, the comm officer nearly jumped clean out of their chair.
“Captain, subspace communication incoming. It’s the Venture, sir.”
Wright relaxed in relief and called for the transmission to be put on-screen. Dassiova’s face replaced the blank wall ahead of them and even the stone-cold admiral couldn’t hide his smile.
“Captain Wright,” he said, “transmitting our current co-ordinates to you now…”
Wright looked down at a display, watching the numbers be translated onto a three-dimensional star chart of their solar system. His eyes went wide. The Venture had halved the distance between themselves and Mars in under a minute. Dassiova spoke again, his voice serious as he gave the orders that would break them away from their pre-set course.
“Captain, plot course for rendezvous point Echo. Signal the Hammer and the Norton to jump in turn and we’ll meet you there. Send the agreed signal to Earth when you go. Venture out.”
Captain Wright relayed the orders to his comm officers, sending first the Norton and then the Hammer to their agreed meeting place. Both ships soon reported back that they had arrived safely and that they had sensors detecting the Venture arriving roughly eight thousand kilometers away from them. Wright turned and ordered his comm officer to record a message. The bridge went quiet and Wright cleared his throat.
“Earth Control, this is Captain Wright of the UNS Cortez with the Ninth Fleet. We are at…” he paused, looking down for their precise co-ordinates before relaying them, “…and we are experiencing a number of engine and electrical failures. Be advised our estimated time of arrival to Mars is currently plus-twenty-one days unless we can affect repairs in transit. No requirement for assistance to be sent from either Earth or Mars at this time. Cortez out.”
He nodded, and the recording was cut. By the time that message arrived at Earth, they would have to wait over a month for any signal to reach their home planet from the Mars base regarding the fleet’s overdue arrival. That gave the fleet a little over four weeks to get to Proxima and back to Mars before anyone in their own system would ever know that they hadn’t been limping along on their slow Red Run.
Wright smiled, trying not to show excitement. He felt too much emotion was unbecoming of a captain, but he could barely contain himself.
“Plot a course,” he said.
“Ready for your order, sir,” his flight officer said.
Wright took his seat, leaning to one side as a smirk tickled one corner of his mouth. “Initiate jump.”
The Fold Drive of the Cortez activated, bending time and space through the manipulation of electromagnetic waves to shorten the distance between two distantly separated parts of the galaxy. Wright sensed a jolt, a fraction of a second when he felt as though he was falling, and a wave of nausea until he steadied himself on the arms of his chair. A hum of noiseless echo filled the bridge. It seemed almost like the absence of noise; there was none of the usual buzz of a large ship existing like a massive, metal organism. They called this passage subspace, as though this was a physical place and not a state of non-existence apart from the universe they had inhabited only moments before. After the pre-determined time spent in that state—what they were calling Fold Space—the power to the drive was cut and they reappeared in normal space.
Immediately, loud klaxons and warning sirens shrieked at them as the tactical officer yelled a collision warning.
“Forty kilometers, dead ahead!” he screamed. “Evasive maneuvers!”
The man at the helm required no confirmation or repetition of those orders. Crashing a ninety-five-thousand-ton spaceship into a one-hundred-forty-thousand-ton spaceship was never a good idea in anyone’s world.
The Cortez had dropped back into real space directly side-on to the flank of the Venture. Luckily their bridge crew was just as alert as the Cortez’s, because the two ships engaged engines and maneuvering thrusters fired at full to push and pull their behemoth vessels away from the impending collision. The Venture went directly upward in their own evasion as the Cortez slammed everything she had into reverse and pointed her nose down to dive below them.
“Cut shields,” Wright barked as he looked directly at the tactical officer, who simply stared back in horror as his fingers fluttered uncertainly at the controls. “Do it now!”
He had no time to explain. A collision of that epic proportion, even with the forward shields at maximum, would crush both ships and cause huge, probably fatal damage. Their unexposed hulls would do the same amount of catastrophic damage to one another. But the sudden absence of a shield removed a near quarter of a kilometer that the shield array extended away from their hull, and allowed for a greater distance from their target.
Unluckily for them, nobody onboard the Venture had that thought in time. The furthest projection of their ship smashed into the shields and buckled, crumpling the long spike of the Fold Drive emitter. The impact sheered off the destroyed array, which usually protruded ahead of their shields to allow them to fold the space ahead of them. Everyone onboard the Cortez held their breath as the collision warning sirens blared ship-wide. The helmsman could do no more; he had turned their big vessel into a steep nosedive and activated every engine and thruster they had to push them away from their big sister.
Agonizing seconds ticked by until the sirens stopped shrieking as suddenly as they had started.
“Clear, sir,” the tactical officer called out, his voice cracking as he spoke.
Wright looked at the helmsman, seeing the beads of sweat on his bald dome as he looked up nervously.
“Well done, helmsman,” Wright said carefully, forcing the shake out of his words. He looked at the man’s name on his flight uniform. “Moon?”
“Yes, sir?” helmsman Moon answered.
“Very good job,” Wright told him with a reassuring hand on his shoulder as he walked back towards his chair. “Damage report?”
“Sir, engineering reports that the Fold Drive emitter is offline. No way of knowing how bad until they do an EVA and check it out.”
“Sir, Admiral Dassiova on comm,” one of the other bridge crewmembers said to Wright.
“I’ll take it in my quarters,” Wright said. He walked stiffly toward the door that hissed open to admit him to the captain’s staterooms. As soon as the door hissed shut behind him, his knees went weak and threatened to pitch him to the deck. He let out the breath he had been holding and panted hard for a few seconds as his chest heaved and he fought down the urge to vomit. He stood, getting a hold of himself. He unashamedly took a long pour from a bottle of Japanese whiskey before drinking it down in two gulps.
The liquor steadied him; he had never had a problem with it, but at times like this it was good to celebrate still being alive. He restored the glass to its place beside the bottle and sat at his desk. The screen blinked to life at his touch to reveal an ashen-faced admiral.
“What the hell just happened, Wright?” Dassiova said anxiously.
“That,” Wright said wistfully, “was a bloody close call.”
“You’re telling me. We need to change protocols because we can’t be jumping into one another like that; it’s too damned risky. Any damage?”
“Our Fold Drive emitter took the hit against your shields,” he said, unwittingly allowing a hint of accusation taint his words. He spoke quickly, shifting his tone. “I’m sure it can be fixed up soon enough.”
Dassiova swore and chewed at his lip, no doubt deciding whether to leave them behind until they could affect repairs.
“Okay, report to me when you have an estimate, and, Captain?” Wright looked directly at him. “Thanks. Your crew did well not to hit us.”
“As did yours, Admiral,” Wright said. He left out the fact that if anyone on the admiral’s bridge had thought to drop their shields, then they wouldn’t be faced with the situation they currently in. “Cortez out.”
The damage was, on the balance of what could’ve been, pretty minor. The Cortez had lost the forward eight meters of their Fold Drive spike that housed the emitter, but they had over a dozen replacement parts among the rest of the fleet.
Engineering reported an eighteen-hour minimum turnaround to refit the part. In response, the captain gave them ten hours and a reassurance that he knew they were the best engineers in the entire UN and would get it done. He reported the time delay to the admiral who, understandably, was unhappy at losing any time.
“Sir, if I may?” Wright asked. Dassiova nodded his assent for the man to speak freely. “We’re only three jumps at maximum safe distance away from the objective from this location; perhaps you could send a frigate and follow them, if we were to be afforded the remaining escort and meet you there?”
Dassiova seemed to mull the suggestion over, promising to take the idea into consideration and get back to him. “Don’t waste any time, Captain; get those repairs underway immediately.”
“Already in hand, sir.”
Dassiova, with his senior flight officer beside him, placed the call through the subspace array in his cabins. The call went through straightaway and showed a buzz of activity going on behind the uniformed officer who answered.
“Admiral,” she said in greeting.
Dassiova didn’t know the woman but addressed her by the insignia on her shoulder. “Commander, I have a sitrep which is a cause for some concern, if the senior officers are available?”
“Sorry, Admiral,” she said back in clipped, professional tones. “Currently they are engaged on an urgent matter and I’m waiting on authorization to bring you into that particular loop. Go with your sitrep, sir.”
Dassiova ignored all of the information she gave that he couldn’t affect, registering it and filing it all away for later. He proceeded to give his report.
“We have successfully jumped the fleet beyond the Oort cloud,” he said, “and our last transmission to Earth gives us a little over forty-one days until our absence from the system will prompt questions from other territories. We did, however, experience an issue when the Cortez jumped into the RV and we narrowly avoided a collision with them. That caused damage to the Fold Drive emitter of the Cortez, which will take eighteen hours to repair. The Hammer, the Norton and the Venture are undamaged.” He paused before offering the solution to the problems he had just laid on the messenger. “I propose that we jump the Hammer ahead to be followed by the Venture, leaving the Norton behind to protect the Cortez until she can join us.”
“All noted, Admiral,” the commander said in a flat tone. “Re-establish communications in one hour. Earth out.”
The screen went black before Dassiova could respond, prompting a surge of anger to rise up inside him. He took a breath and allowed it to dissipate before he did or said something immature and not becoming of a fleet admiral.
“Cold-ass bitch,” he muttered, gaining a stifled snigger from his flight officer, Suranne Massey. He turned to her, making the laugh dissolve instantly. Instead of remonstrating with her, he asked her opinion on what they should do.
“Well, sir,” Massey said, “unless Earth has any more intel that makes the urgency of getting to Proxima a priority, my thoughts would be to keep the fleet as one. It’s not exactly bad out here, is it?” She smiled, unveiling herself as a human being with a playful side instead of the cold, calculating executive officer he needed to keep a ship of that size running smoothly. It was a small city, by all accounts, much like the ancient floating cities that housed the old earth planes from generations ago. Back then they floated on the water and were powered by nuclear reactors, which had long been jettisoned off into deep space.
He looked out of the wide viewport in his office, which formed the first of the plush cabins that comprised his private quarters. This first room was for senior officer meetings and communications, but further inside were the cabins where none of the crew bar the service personnel had been.
“Yeah,” Dassiova said as he stared out at the empty blackness of space. “Almost every shiny dot you see out there is already dead. Gone. Extinguished long before you or I were even born. It’s…. it’s humbling.”
“It is that, sir,” his flight officer answered. “But it’s also pretty goddamned cool. Think about it; we’re the first humans to go beyond our solar system, apart from the recon ship, so we’re the first ones to actually see these stars before they burn out to nothing. Think of the possibilities.” She stepped nearer his shoulder and leaned in so close that he could smell her hair. “You see that one?” she asked him, leaning over more and pointing a slender arm past his face so that he could follow the line of her forearm extending to her index finger.
He caught a wave of her scent and tried to ignore how it made him feel.
“Yes…”
“That’s where we’re going,” she said wistfully, “past the dull red one to see if we can find a place that life exists. So we can mine precious minerals and bring back the resources to Earth and maybe one day create another place there where we can live. Perhaps our grandchildren will be born there? Or else their children? Maybe we will have statues erected for us, on the new world or the old one, for the intrepid discoverers that found another planet for humanity to expand and conquer the galaxy.”
Dassiova’s face dropped.
“Perhaps those planets are already occupied. Perhaps we will jump into a new system and spark a war that ends humanity. Perhaps we invite a war on Earth that ruins civilizations hundreds—thousands—of years old and we just threw all that away because we had an engine that could take us somewhere we weren’t supposed to be.”
“You think that’s right?” Massey snapped, pulling away from him slightly. “You think humanity was supposed to be confined to one single planet? You think we should have stayed as stupid monkeys eating bananas and not invented tools, or the wheel, or steam power? You think there should have been no industrial revolution? No discovery of fossil fuels and the massive leaps in technology that followed? You think we shouldn’t have discovered how to split an atom and use nuclear power when it exists in the universe ready to be so exploited? You think that we shouldn’t have discovered the singularity tech and not used it to get to the moon and create domes to live under? Same for Mars—you think we shouldn’t be there mining for the rich ores we can’t even get on Earth? Sir, forgive me being so forward, but if you believe that, then why the hell are you commanding this mission?”
Dassiova turned and regarded the passionate woman just as coldly as he had been addressed from Earth.
“You think that just because I worry that we shouldn’t be pushing so far beyond our natural capabilities that I believe less in this mission than you do?” he asked in a cold voice that chilled her through to the core. “You think that just because I have moral and existential doubts about what we’re doing out here, that I am too weak to command?”
She quailed under his quiet onslaught. “No, sir.” She took a half step back and put her head down slightly. “It’s just that I believe, with all my heart, that we need to push the boundaries of exploration as far as we can to give humanity the best chance of survival. It’s our duty.”
