Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles 2: Redemption (6 page)

Ken barked an order "Quiet on the Bridge!  Ziggy open a channel."

"Go ahead
, Sir."

"This is Commander Ken Kirkland of the Galactic Coalition of Planets Starship
Yorktown
. We are on a rescue mission. We mean you no harm."

"
You exist,
" came an emotionless voice from the comm system. "
That existence represents a threat.
"

Ken looked at his bridge crew before responding. "All living creatures have the potential to harm one another. But we have found that working in harmony with others is far more rewarding."

"
We are in harmony. You are... disharmony.
"

"Sir
," Commander Trifa interrupted.

Ken signaled Ziggy to cut the channel. "What is it Commander?"

"Sir, someone or something is hacking our computer net. They are pulling the system schematics for every major subsystem on this ship."

"Block their access
."

"I'm trying
Sir, but they are overriding everything I try," the Hupenstanii said. "Sir, they are pulling the schematics of our jump drive."

"Helm
, emergency jump... Get us out of here now!"

Seventeen decks below in the main hangar an alien drone received a signal.
In 3.6 milliseconds the signal was analyzed and authenticated. Safety systems that were intended to protect a now dead pilot were overwritten.  Powerful ceramic superconductors compressed a mixture of deuterium and helium-3 until fusion occurred which produced helium-4 and an abundance of high-energy protons. Governors controlling the fuel flow were disabled and an energy cascade was allowed to occur until the magnetic containment field was breached. The crude result, 8TJ, was an explosion fully one tenth the power of the first atomic bombs used by humanity.

At the very moment
the
Yorktown
was enveloped in hyper-folded space and transitioning in space-time, she was rocked by a powerful explosion that threw most of the bridge crew to the deck. The Heshe AI responded in a fraction of a nanosecond by opening the hangar doors and allowing most of the energy released to vent directly into space, but the damage was never-the-less considerable. Emergency klaxons sounded and multiple panels overloaded, showering the people on the bridge with a cascade of sparks.

Seventeen decks below the bridge the damage was much worse. A plasma ball vaporized ten and a half metric tons of deck plating and hull supports. The plasma was what remained of a
Hymenopteran fighter drone – after its fusion core was remotely detonated.

Superheated gasses exploded through corridors and reinforced bulkheads
, destroying and killing everything in its path until the ship's AI took emergency action to vent the gasses out of the ship and shield the surviving crew.

Crippled and without power, the once mighty
Yorktown
hung dead in space, 2.6 parsecs from Kepler-47 and the Away Team that was depending on them.

***

The hive mother shuddered. She could sense what the hive mind was doing but she was powerless to stop it. Every time she would muster her strength and begin to focus to take control of the super-mind, she would find her pleasure centers flooded with addictive endorphins which destroyed her ability to concentrate as her body writhed in ecstasy.

The hive mind digested the technical information it had obtained from the ship it had just destroyed. The concept of hyper-folding space was startlingly
simple. It surprised the collective hive intelligence that such a concept had not occurred to it before.

The human's design was based on what their records referred to as an
Alcubierrewarp drive. Initially the design involved an ellipsoid shaped spacecraft attached to a large hyperfield generator ring. This ring, made of a form of exotic matter called by the humans a Bos
e–
Einstein condensate, would cause space-time to warp around the starship, creating a region of contracted space in front of it and expanded space behind.

If the shape of the ring
were modulated in such a way so as to introduce constructive oscillations within the resulting hyperfield, the size of the resulting fold in space-time could be exactly tuned.

The hive did not yet have the technology to produce such a drive
, but the hive mind was patient. It began the task of producing the required infrastructure.

***

Rasta-Tckner approached the last door on the corridor. He was confused. Each room was exactly the same. No door led to other areas of the ship. Even more concerning, there appeared to be no way out. The only anomalous reading was the Oxygen level in each room. As he approached the far end of the corridor the O
2
level increased. In this room the level was 20 percent. That placed it at a comfortable level for his people.

As before, the door to the room opened and closed automatically as he approached or retreated from it.

He released the latch on his encounter suit helmet. He supposed this might have been the purpose of this entire exercise. If there was no direct way to communicate between species, then little self-directing experiments might well be the only way to establish physiological requirements.

He sniffed the air. It was drier than he would have liked but other than that it was perfectly acceptable. He placed the helmet on a shelf and began to explore the surfaces of the wall with his
glossa, a tongue-like appendage that his race used for detailed tactile sensing, tasting, and feeding.  At the same timehe used the encounter sui
t’
s polarized torch to illuminate the wall in front of him. His compound eyes could detect the polarization of light and this allowed him to see minute flaws in the surface.

The lighting in this ship seemed to use some type of field-induced polymer electroluminescent technology. It was ultra-efficient, lasted for decades and could be fashioned into virtually any shape. More to the point, Rasta-Tckner knew this type of lighting was tunable. It was a little more yellow than he was used to.
He suspected the people who built this ship must have evolved on a planet with a larger, and therefore yellow, sun.

He saw nothing of interest until a motion to his left caused him to swivel an eyestalk. Incredibly, his encounter suit's helmet dissolved into the table top as an undulating silver sheen enveloped it! He quickly (and regrettably) brushed a manipulator appendage across the surface where the helmet had disappeared.

Immediately the silver sheen reappeared and travelled up the exterior of his encounter suit. To his utter horror the suit began to dissolve and slough off of his chitinous exoskeleton. If he was concerned before, he was in a full panic now. In mere seconds he was completely stripped of his technology. The remnants of his suit soon dissolved into the floor much like his helmet had into the surface of the shelf.  At the same time the single door to the room swished open.

***

Cat carefully checked each of the shuttles' crew again. Their forced crash into the top of a mountain ridge on 47b had brought their rescue mission to an abrupt end. Once the shuttle was down and disabled; the several hundred drones that had latched on and forced the ship down disconnected from the hull plating they had latched onto and departed into the swirling mist.

Only a few dozen of the small craf
t
– those that had been crushed by the cras
h
– remained to show that the
Honey Dipper
had even been attacked. Cat had checked each one as she exited the wrecked shuttle. None had survived. It was clear they were dealing with some type of intelligent insectoid race.

Cat's concern was for more than the crew of the shuttle. They had been in communication with the
Yorktown
when suddenly the transmission was cut off. Her internal quantum link with the ship's AI was intact so she knew the ship survived, but Cal indicated a large portion of the ship had been damaged by a low yield thermonuclear explosion. She knew Ken would be capable of handling the situation at least as well as she could, but this was of little comfort when she was stranded half a dozen light years away.

Out of concern for her current situation, and the need to focus on their own survival, she kept the full news of the
Yorktown's
current status from the rest of the crew. Ken had the situation in control and that was enough for the moment.

The shuttle's owner and captain, Ricky Valen
, had suffered a bit of bruising and a mild concussion by the force of the 'landing.' His civilian encounter suit was not as robust as the military grade hardware most of her crew wore. Not that that had made a difference for Ensign Matthews. The security officer had fallen off a cliff shortly after they had exited the shuttle. The thick atmosphere was almost impossible to see through and had prompted Ricky to nickname the planet 'Mud Soup.' In point of fact, Cat's Heshe enhanced vision meant she was the only one able to see clearly in the dense atmosphere. This is why she was now doing the reconnaissance.

"
OK, I make us about four kilometers from the smaller of the two
Heidman
crash sites." she reported to the others. "In this gravity four kilometers might as well be four hundred. There is no way we are going to walk that half blind, on unknown terrain, and in this gravity. I need suggestions."

Ricky raised his hand. "If I may, Madame Commodore?"

Cat smiled despite herself. Ricky always called her 'Cat' when they were in a group of friends, but in a command setting she was 'Madame Commodore.' He was not military and enjoyed the casual freedom it represented.

"Go ahead
, Captain."

"On Uranus we would typically fly from site to site."

Doctor Riley stood up and moved to check the bandaged pilot. His head injury might be worse than he anticipated. "Ve are not mit a verking ship Herr Captain... Yes? Das makes de flying difficult."

"True
," Ricky said while batting the docto
r’
s hands away from his bandaged head. "But floating in a dense atmosphere is surprisingly easy. If we can find or make a suitably rigid balloon and control ballast we can make this trip as easy as sitting in a bath tub."

Cat shook her head. Ricky had a habit of using nonsensical metaphors. She supposed it was a part of his charm.  "I'm not sure I fully understand the reference
but I'm game to try," she said. "My nanite systems should be able to fabricate what we need. I'll start them making a geodesic framework sized to displace a six ton load. That should allow us to transport the medical and engineering supplies as well as crew," Cat said.

Lt
. Scott, the other security officer, spoke up.
“
How do we control the direction we travel while floating?"

Ricky grunted what might have been a laugh. "Sand bags and ropes
son, sand bags and ropes."

"How..."
the Lieutenant began.

The shuttle's captain interrupted before he could finish the question. "
Ya tie a rope to each of two weights. Then you toss one in the direction you want to travel. As long as the rope is long enough to reach the ground..."

"
…
you can use the two ropes to walk along the surface!" Cat finished.

The prospector stood and walked the three short steps to the side of his shuttle. The
servo-motors in his suit made a deep whirling noise that carried surprisingly well in the thick atmosphere. "I hate to leave my girl. She's treated me well over the years." Ricky said, while placing a heavily gloved but loving hand on the shuttles' exterior hatch.

"I have a plan for that
," Cat said with a smile, "but it will take some time." The form-fitting metallic shell that covered her entire body was expressive enough that even this simple gesture was clearly visible to the others locked away inside their far more bulky high pressure encounter suits. 

She began to pull at some of the scattered wreckage
, much of it from the nearby disabled drones. She formed the metal scraps into a small pile and placed her hand on the pile.  Cat sent a mental command to her Heshe nanites. The pile was shortly enveloped in a shimmering silver mass. This mass split and moved like quicksilver. One amorphous blob moved towards the shuttle while the other started to form geodesic shapes.

Embedded within Cat's
abdomen was a small, spherical, Heshe-designed encounter unit. It was little more than a handheld calculator to the Heshe but for humanityit represented the pinnacle of supercomputer development. Ca
t’
s encounter unit controlled her Heshe nanite systems. She instructed the device to clone itself. The new unit would be left on the
Honey Dipper
and, along with a small number of self-replicating nanites, would begin the repair process. Ironically the destroyed drones would be salvaged for raw materials to start the work. It would take several days to complete, but once done the
Honey Dipper
would be better than new with a self-repair mechanism that could be rivaled by few ships in the fleet.