Deep Space - Hidden Terror (The Stasis Stories #6) Read online

  The worst possibility he’d contemplated was that the solians had some kind of machine aboard that could send the ship back to hit Kranex even after all the solians aboard were dead. This was hard to countenance on two counts: first, because machines should also catastrophically fail in the face of the forces produced by an atomic explosion; second, that anyone could design a machine that could perform the kind of complex calculations required. Such a computing machine would have to be massive! Diddiq thought. Then his eyes lost focus a moment, Wait. Perhaps, the ship has no surviving crew and no astonishing machine. Perhaps it’s receiving tight-beamed transmissions from some solian biological computer that feeds it the trajectory calculations. He turned eyes and antennae to the comms section, saying, “Comms, see if you can detect reflections of any kind of tight-beamed messages arriving at the solian ship. Perhaps they’re getting their directions from elsewhere. We could drown it with noise if we know the frequency.”

  While he waited, Diddiq idly studied the screen displaying the solian ship and its bizarre dish. The first shuttle should hit it momentarily. Suddenly he saw sparkles appear at the junction between the cylindrical hull of the ship and the dish. “What were those?” he asked.

  No one answered.

  Before Diddiq could ask if anyone else had seen the sparkles, a lieutenant in the comms section said, “We’ve lost contact with the shuttle.”

  For a moment Diddiq felt relieved since they should’ve lost contact when the bomb went off.

  Then the shuttle splattered against the dish-shaped part of the solian ship. This imparted a rotation to the solian ship that started it turning end for end. Studying this, it took a second for Diddiq to realize the A-bomb hadn’t gone off.

  When he realized it, his third heart started thumping agitatedly again. What now?! Diddiq wondered. Then he realized that the solian ship wasn’t correcting its alignment. And, even better, the big rocket engine at the back of the ship had stopped firing. They must be dead! Or, at least in bad shape.

  Diddiq started shouting orders: First, he demanded that someone check the video to see when the solian ship’s drive had gone off. Second, to contact Kranex to make sure they noticed the solian ship was derelict and to tell them to be sure to move out of its path.

  Diddiq closed his eyes a moment, thinking, We’ve done it!

  When he opened them, he noticed the solian ship seemed to have slowed its rotation.

  A sinking feeling in his gut, Diddiq kept his eyes on it long enough to confirm it’d stopped rotating and begun turning slowly back to face Kranex.

  Disheartened, but trying not to show it, Diddiq said, “It’s recovering. Kranex should have its second shuttle attack the solians… Oh, and they should get a third shuttle ready.”

  ***

  When the official bridge clock passed the time they should’ve gone through stasis, Lee asked Massey, “Did we staze?”

  Massey nodded, “Maui’s pivoted 116 degrees so something hit us. However, we weren’t driven back like before, so we didn’t get blasted by a nuclear weapon. I think something from one of your cannons damaged the shuttle or the weapon enough that it didn’t go off. Probably the shuttle’s what hit us and imparted the rotation.” She clicked the comm switch again and spoke to the crew. “Strap in. We’re about to start thruster maneuvers, then we’ll be accelerating again.”

  Lee could feel the ship pivoting in response to the thrusters, then a minute or so later she felt a push down into her seat as the proton-boron rocket cranked up.

  Massey said, “I’m aiming just in front of the stern. I don’t want to miss our aim point a little to the rear and wind up sailing past the back end of that baby.”

  Ray sighed, “Their second shuttle’s cranking up its engines. I’m taking bets about whether it’s coming after us or not.”

  Lee snorted, “No one’s gonna take that bet.”

  ~~~

  As expected, the shuttle came after them at about the same acceleration as the last one, probably a shuttle’s maximum.

  This time coming out of stasis was immediately obvious because suddenly the ship was swinging around hard enough to press Carol suddenly into her seat. The cannons didn’t work and they got us with another A-bomb! she thought agitatedly, thinking about all the time they’d have to spend accelerating back for another attack. This’s gonna give the aliens enough time to deploy a whole line of A-bomb packing shuttles, she thought. Are we gonna have to do this over and over until they run out of either bombs or shuttles?

  “Ah, crap!” Captain Massey shouted. “The thrusters are maxed out but we’re still gonna be at a 20-degree angle when we hit the aliens’ big ship!”

  Carol realized it was the thrusters that were pushing her sideways in her seat.

  Calmly, Lee said, “That’s not a problem, as long as we hit it. Are we still on track for that?”

  “Yeah,” Massey grunted. “They’ve been trying to move, but our thrusters move us faster than they can move that behemoth.” She hit the all-hands switch, “We’re gonna be stazing in another minute, people! Get in your seats!”

  Realizing they couldn’t have been thrown back much, Carol’s last thought was, Must not have been an A-bomb.

  ***

  Diddiq watched in horror as the solian ship, still careening through space at an angle from the shuttle strike, hit Kranex’s stern, carrying away its engines.

  This left eighty percent of the ship apparently intact. A magnified view showed atmosphere and wreckage streaming out of Kranex’s broken posterior hull. Diddiq knew hundreds if not thousands of dying haliq were amid that debris. And, he thought, the rest of the haliq on board are doomed by the loss of power supplied by the engines. Any surviving life support systems will quickly fail. He shook himself, Forget about them, they’re doomed no matter what. Focus on saving Busux!

  Dragging his attention back to how they might yet defeat the solians, Diddiq asked himself Why aren’t the nuclear weapons working? Not having any ideas regarding the answer to the question, he sent for the nuclear engineers aboard Busux and started asking them.

  They had no ideas. Atomic explosives were an old and reliable technology. Failures were extremely rare. Kranex should’ve been using weapons that weren’t able to receive external communication, so the solians shouldn’t have been able to defraud their simple mechanical computers.

  Diddiq was still haranguing them when one—who’d been over studying video recordings of the shuttle attacks—said, “The solians fired some kind of projectile weapons at the shuttles.”

  Diddiq suddenly remembered the sparks he’d noticed just before the first shuttle failed in its attack. “You mean atomic bombs can be destroyed by bullets?” he asked incredulously.

  The engineer shrugged his antennae, “Not bullets from a handgun, no. But larger, high-velocity projectiles. A nuclear weapon has tight tolerances that must be met for it to achieve its chain reaction. If a projectile punctures it, disrupting the arrangement of the plutonium, or causing failure of the explosive elements intended to implode the critical mass, there’s a high likelihood it won’t go off. Of course, even small projectiles could damage the rather fragile proximity detector or the shuttle’s pilots.”

  “So,” Diddiq asked, “when the solians come after us on Busux, could we armor the shuttles to protect them from such projectiles?”

  “Easier to armor the cockpit and the bombs themselves. You’d have to leave an opening for the small radar system the proximity detector uses to measure distances. Of course, there’s a chance the solians will luck into hitting that opening, but the chances of that are much lower than the chance of them hitting the bomb itself which is a much larger target.”

  One of the other engineers said, “I think this problem’s just solved itself.”

  When Diddiq looked over, the engineer was indicating a screen with a high-powered view of the tumbling, crushed stern of Kranex. For a moment Diddiq didn’t know what the engineer was trying to say, but then as the stern rev
olved, he recognized part of the solian ship protruding from it. Ah, he thought, Kranex’s engines and their mounts consisted of much stronger alloys. Rather than just blowing through the stern of Kranex, as it did through the body of Nesex, the solian ship has impaled Kranex’s stout stern with its cylindrical body and caught much of the engine mounting structure in its big dish, carrying it away.

  Better yet, the impact had folded Kranex’s stern around the solian ship’s dish in a fashion that made it look as if it would be impossible for the solians to get free. Well, Diddiq thought, of course, they could get loose, if they could spend a few weeks in a dock getting the frame of Kranex’s engines cut away.

  ***

  On SC Maui, Carol was seeing the same issue from a different viewpoint. Several of the bow cameras had deployed first, showing them an enormous mass of twisted and crushed metal from the stern of the alien ship, impaled on the narrow tube of Maui’s body. When she’d first seen that view, she’d thought of it as similar to, if of a much greater magnitude than, the material from the first alien ship that had caught in Maui’s dish.

  She’d assumed that all they’d have to do was to fire their reverse thrusters and back out of all that stuff like they had the first time.

  But, when Captain Massey had attempted such a maneuver she’d had no success.

  Now they’d deployed cameras from back toward Maui’s stern. They showed that a great deal of the alien ship’s material had folded around and over the edge of the dish, effectively capturing the dish in the grip of massive girders that had wrapped around the lip of the dish like giant fingers.

  We don’t have any metal cutting equipment on board, Carol thought despairingly. She thought momentarily of the lasers in their tiny workshop for a moment, At least nothing that would cut through one of those girders in less than a couple of weeks. There’s no way we’re getting free of that mess.

  An inability to get free not only meant they couldn’t get loose to continue going after the aliens, but it meant they could be stuck here in stasis, waiting for someone to rescue them. This prospect raised Carol’s anxiety levels again as she imagined the aliens’ bioweapon devastating the human race and leaving nobody alive to rescue her.

  Before her anxiety could spiral, Lee said, “Carol, can you help me and John go out to assess the situation in the dish?”

  You mean assess it more than to say, “We’re screwed?” Carol wondered, though she again found herself inspired by Lee’s tone that seemed to say it was just another problem to deal with. Aloud she said, “Sure.” She started pulling herself after Lee and toward the elevator that ran the length of the ship. Though they didn’t need the elevator in weightless conditions, the convention was to use it rather than the tube next to it in case of an unexpected acceleration that might send them plunging.

  They climbed into the car and let it carry them forward to the base of the big dish again. After climbing into their suits, they got in the airlock and started lowering the pressure. Their smart systems checked suit integrity as the pressure descended. Getting the all-clear from their suits, they snapped on safety lines and exited the lock into the base of the dish.

  It was a lot easier to get around this time because, in weightless conditions, they could use their mechanical hands to pull themselves along the mass of wreckage rather than having to use thrusters and deploy extra safety cables to pull on. Of course, the difficulty of threading around and through the jumbled debris offset that advantage.

  “So,” Lee asked, “you think we can blow this stuff off Maui with some of the Semtex?”

  Carol blinked, Why didn’t I think of that? she wondered.

  John said, “Depends on whether you want to have any plastic explosive left for the cannons when we go after the third alien ship.”

  “Ach… Good point,” Lee said. “Let’s all look around for a likely spot to try Semtex. Then we’ll go back in and try to decide how much Semtex we can spare.” She turned in place as if to get a look at it all. “I suppose if we have to, we could go after the third alien ship with all this crap still attached to us, but it’d sure slow us down and I’m worried we might use up too much fuel.”

  ***

  Diddiq was controlling his third heart’s rate better but having more trouble with the roiling in his gut. He had the engineers working on armoring the bombs. They’d brought more shuttle pilots out of hibernation. The pilots were being hypno-indoctrinated to engage in suicide missions. The hangar deck was busy preparing the reserve shuttles.

  Though he’d stayed ahead of the carnage so far, jumping successfully from ship to ship, now there was no place else to go. He’d called a flight engineer up to the bridge so he could ask if there was any way for a shuttle to make the jump back to Epsilon Eridani, couching it as a way to get a message back to their homeworld. However, the engineer he’d asked seemed astonished by the very idea.

  She’d laughed, “Most of the shuttles use chemical rockets, but even the nuclear ones can’t carry much reaction mass and they can’t scoop a gas giant. It’d take it more than a decade just to reach the edge of the stellar system at the speeds they can achieve. Even in constant hibernation, everyone on board would starve. Then, when it got to an area of low enough gravitational distortion, it wouldn’t have jump engines to take it across the stars.” Her antennae quivered a moment—perhaps amusement, perhaps distress—then she said, “If you want to get home, you’re going to have to figure out how to defeat the solians first.”

  Irritated at the implication that he would run—even though that was exactly what he was trying to figure out how to do—Diddiq sarcastically asked, “How would you suggest we do that?”

  Proving how fast news spread on the giant ship, she said, “Well, from what I heard, the ship that’s been attacking us has already defeated itself. Maybe we’ve already won, unless more invincible ships come out from the planet and attack us the same way.” She lowered her antennae in negation, “But it seems highly unlikely that we’ve seen the only two ships they’ve got.”

  One of the junior officers said, “There’s been an explosion up ahead where the solian ship is stuck into the stern fragment of Kranex.”

  For a moment Diddiq was confused that the solians were “up ahead,” then he realized that Busux was still decelerating and the solian-ship/Kranex wreck was proceeding onward in free fall. “Play me back the video,” Diddiq ordered, hoping to see some solian vulnerability. He told the irritating but apparently competent engineer to stay and watch it with him.

  The explosion, when it came on the recording, was to a great degree hidden by the fragments of Kranex. Diddiq thought it seemed to be coming from somewhere in the odd dish on the solian ship.

  It seemed the engineer thought the same. She said, “They’re trying to remove Kranex from their vessel with explosives.”

  Though he had a sinking feeling she was right, Diddiq asked, “How do you know?”

  She shrugged her antennae, “It was set off between Kranex and that odd dish.”

  “What do you think the dish is for?” Diddiq asked.

  This time all she did was shrug her antennae. “Maybe it has something to do with the way they can accelerate so fast?”

  After a moment, Diddiq said, “It doesn’t look like the explosion cleared any of the wreckage from their ship.”

  “No,” the engineer said. “It wasn’t big enough. It’d take something huge to rip those massive girders loose.”

  “Do you think they’ll risk an even bigger charge?”

  She laughed, “They can use as big a charge as they’ve got. Even atomic weapons don’t damage their ships.”

  Diddiq said, “Thank the first haliq they don’t have nuclear weapons of their own.”

  The engineer eyed him, “What makes you think they don’t?”

  Diddiq gave her a disbelieving look. “If they did, they’d be using them as weapons rather than bashing our ships with their own.”

  She looked back at the screen and spoke musingly
, “At the speeds they’re hitting us, they’re delivering plenty of kinetic energy to do the job. Admittedly, most of the energy’s wasted because their ship just blows through ours rather than delivering all of it, but...”

  Diddiq said, “Even though their ships are built of an astonishing material that’ll stand up to a nuclear explosion, they’re technologically behind us in most ways.”

  Her eyes rotated to stare at him. “Why do you say that?”

  Despite some irritation that she wasn’t showing the same deference he got from most of the other expedition members, Diddiq had developed enough respect for her intellect that he started to answer. “First of all, they don’t have jump technology—”

  She interrupted in a puzzled tone, “How do you know that?”

  “Their ships are too small! Scout ships are the smallest jump-capable craft and the solians’ ships are ten to twenty percent smaller yet.”

  She waggled her antennae doubtfully. “Just because we can’t jump a ship smaller than a scoutship doesn’t mean they can’t.”

  Diddiq frowned, “I thought there was some fundamental reason they couldn’t be smaller.”

  She shrugged her antennae, “Yes, we need a nuclear reactor of a certain size, but they’re using fusion. There’s an excellent chance they can produce more power with a smaller plant.”

  “Why haven’t they visited Epsilon Eridani then?”

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know. Perhaps they don’t have jump technology, but we don’t know that.”

  “Okay, granted, but it seems unlikely. Halaniq has had jump tech for thousands of years so it seems old hat, but it’s my understanding the original discovery was highly serendipitous. It would seem that if they haven’t left their home system, they must not have just discovered it until quite recently. The chance of their discovering it just before we arrived has to be remote.” He had a sudden thought, “Besides, we haven’t seen or heard any interplanetary jump flashes in this system.”