Erebus (33 page)

“Captain, I’ve seen the horrible things people do to one another. My job—all our jobs,” I said quietly as I gestured at the remainder of the investigators and Phillips, “is to do something about it. But you, as you say, are an explorer. We’re supposed to keep this kind of thing away from you to keep you doing what you should be doing, making the universe a better place. We’ve failed in that duty. I’m sorry that you, Dana, and the rest of your crew were dragged into this. Yes, we need to stop Frain, but we can’t just take the easy route here. We need to bring him in alive if possible; we can’t just kill everyone on that ship for revenge against one man.”

“Dammit!” Vasily nearly shouted. He went silent for a few moments, squeezing the bridge of his nose. Finally he looked over at the crewman at the navigation station and then said more quietly, “We will do it your way. Prepare a solution to intercept
Erebus
. Make sure we don’t wipe them out, though.”

“Thank you, Captain,” I said. It would have been so easy to succumb to the desire for revenge. After all, the chain of events Frain had started was responsible for my partner’s death. It would have been easy—but wrong. He needed to have his arse hauled before the tribunal. Only there could justice be meted out for Dev’s family.

“There is another consideration,” Vasily said after a pause. “I need to get you all home, too. I will drop a lander with crew to see if they can get that stargate working again.”

Yes, that would be nice. The torn-up wreckage of this star system was not where I wanted to spend my retirement.

“I’m guessing its operative. The probe Red Star sent through managed to get back home,” Frampton added. “And the servitor robots attached to the probe were only uploaded with the specifications of the Io artifact. That suggests it should be the same command and control system.”

“It will be a miracle if anything is easy on this damn mission,” Vance muttered.

I had learned lots of things when I’d downloaded the idiot’s guide to A-drives into my implants. One of those was that it only had a limited ability to match speeds. At the velocities we had been playing around with, even those of planetary bodies, it wasn’t an issue. However,
Erebus
had been accelerating hard for the last two days.

Our plan was to speed up enough for the A-drive to be able to match our velocities. I understood the general principle. The A-drive stretched out space behind us and contracted it in front. By controlling how much we relaxed that stretch, we would control our velocity when we came out of the Alcubierre bubble. The problem was that if we tried to exit at too high a speed in comparison to how fast we entered, we would be torn in two by the space-time stress. I was really beginning to long for the days of just running after thieves and shoplifters down Islington Upper Street. Instead, here I was in a starship, racing toward the most destructive force in the universe at full burn, chasing down a cybernetically enhanced killing machine while worrying about whether the laws of physics would rip me to shreds.

So now we were accelerating even harder after
Erebus
. We were up to one-and-a-half-g, and that made moving around extremely tiring. Oddly,
Erebus
wasn’t accelerating as hard as she could. I was thankful for that, but it did puzzle us.

“Could the antimatter Frain siphoned off for the bomb account for
Erebus’s
loss of acceleration?” Sihota asked.

“She has around a kilogram’s worth aboard.” Frampton squinted with effort. I could sympathize; I was getting a neck ache trying to hold my head up and maintain eye contact during any kind of conversation. “If he’s cut his acceleration by that much, he would have had to draw a lot more than the gram or so he used for the bomb.”

“How does that limit his acceleration?” Vance asked.

“It doesn’t necessarily,” Frampton shrugged. “But if he’s drawn a substantial amount of it for other purposes, then he’s only got a limited amount left for fuel, and he’ll need to be as efficient as possible with it.”

“Let’s quit mincing words. You think he’s made a shitload more antimatter bombs, don’t you?” I asked.

“Well, that’s definitely one possibility,” Frampton replied.

Great. Add a load of some of the most lethal weapons that humans could possibly devise to our long list of troubles.

“That will make things…interesting.” Sihota was, at times, the master of understatement.

“The question is, what will he do with them?” I asked, not really even wanting to think about the possibilities.

“My money is on his having loaded them into the tips of a bunch of kinetic impactors to vaporize us with,” Phillips said. She wasn’t even bothered by the g-force she was being subjected to. She was still wandering around while the rest of us had resigned ourselves to sitting at every opportunity in the mess, now reconfigured for high-g burn with the seats moved to the former wall.

“I don’t think so,” Sihota said.

“Oh?” she raised an eyebrow.

“A kinetic impactor will destroy—or at least heavily damage—the ship whether it’s loaded with antimatter or cotton wool,” Sihota said. “No, if he’s weaponized his antimatter stocks, he’s done it for another reason.”

I grunted. “I’ll just add it to our long list of questions to ask him.”

“I would just rather those questions weren’t answered by an antimatter KI,” Phillips replied.

***

“Have you realized that every one of them has been around a gas giant?”

I was lying back at a forty-five degree angle in my chair, trying to catch some rest. We had another day before we matched speed with
Erebus
, but Frampton evidently wasn’t interested in sleep, and this wasn’t the first question he’d tossed my way. Lifting one heavy eyelid, I gave up trying to doze and looked at Frampton. While he sometimes left me behind, this time I kept up. “You’re referring to the alien gateways.”

“Yeah. Io is…was in close orbit around Jupiter, Iwa orbited Akarga, and this gateway circles…whatever we’re going to call it. There must be some kind of link.”

I yawned and stretched my leaden arms. “It would make sense that it is somehow important…hold on.” I struggled up straight as a thought occurred to me—something I had seen. Where was it now? In all the confusion and events of the last few weeks, things were blurring into one big mess.

“I was thinking that they powered the gateway the same way that the Jupiter Alliance was using Io for power generation, by tapping into the flux lines. But then the Akarga-Iwa relationship is different—no flux lines.”

“Uh huh,” I murmured. I had given up trying to remember and was now rewinding my HUD on superfast. I saw us going backward through the alien gateway with a flash of light, back into orbit of Iwa. From there, I retreated into the shuttlepod and landed on the rocky surface. I escaped back into the station and streaked through the corridors of the old station. Finally I found myself in the control gallery on Iwa. There it was—the image of Akarga with a blinking light at the center that had appeared only after I’d activated the gateway.

“Here, does this mean anything to you?” I linked the image over to Frampton.

“Hmmm,” Frampton hummed to himself, processing what he was seeing. “It suggests that when the Iwa machine activated, some kind of activity occurred inside Akarga.”

“Okay, but what kind of activity?” The g-force was so heavy that it was even hard to talk, and I was slurring my words.

Frampton tried to shrug, giving an odd jerky motion. “I don’t know. Without going to look, who can say?”

“You said Red Star had only found half the components a gateway needed to actually work in the Io artifact. Maybe the rest is sunk deep inside Jupiter.”

“That is a ridiculous…” Frampton started to reply. “But, maybe you have something there. Something’s obviously going on in the bowels of the gas giants—something that seems to be connected to the FTL gate.”

“Does that give you any clue as to what makes the FTL gate work?” Sihota called from across the room where he was keeping as comfortable as possible while we were under thrust.

“No, but whatever it is must solve the decoherence problem. After all, FTL per se—”

“Isn’t the issue,” Sihota interrupted, finishing for him. “Making sense of the information at the other end of the gateway is.”

“Exactly.” Frampton gave a smile. “Whatever the aliens’ means of rectification are, it can either make sense of the scrambled information on receipt of it or send it already rectified.”

“The fact that the activity is at the sending end”—I knew I was making up my own terms here, but hopefully they made sense to these two highly intelligent people—“suggests that they’re rectifying it at source.”

“Good point,” Frampton nodded. “I think when we get home, somehow someone’s going to have to go down into Jupiter to take a look.”

“Sign me on as a volunteer for that one,” Sihota’s deep voice responded.

“It’d be a hell of a mission,” Frampton smiled. “Crushing pressures, horrendous weather conditions. Count me in, too.”

I rolled my eyes. And here I was thinking I’d grown as a person. Frampton had gone from being a timid geek to an intrepid explorer of an environment that would make Io seem like a holiday resort. The two of them chatted away about their hypothetical mission into the heart of Jupiter. I closed my eyes and reclined again. For now, I just wanted to try and get some rest before we had to face our nemesis.

“All hands, standby to go to A-drive,” Captain Vasily called out over the com, his voice hungry with anticipation. This was it. We were shooting after
Erebus
at a ridiculous velocity. The gap was still growing—she had been accelerating for longer than us after all—but now we were close enough to her speed to be able to match it when we dropped out of A-drive.

Our course gave me an uneasy feeling in my stomach;
Gagarin
was pointed directly at the black spot at the heart of the golden accretion disk. We would always have the ability to turn around and go to A-drive, but if
Erebus
, with her damaged A-drive, didn’t slow down soon, she would be committed to slamming into the event horizon of the black hole—and from that, there was no coming back. Whatever the hell Frain was up to, I suspected it would be revealed soon.

“Are you okay, Layton?” Phillips asked on a private link.

I was seated in the dark passenger bay of the Hawk. We weren’t going to make the same mistake this time as we made at Iwa. As soon as we dropped out of the Alcubierre bubble, the Hawk would launch, and we would try our damnedest to board
Erebus
.

“Sure.” I looked up the bay toward the back of her seat, smiling to myself. I felt the same anticipation as when I was a young police officer enjoying the thrill of the chase. “Never been better.”

“You don’t have to come. We’ll be moving fast and hard. This won’t be like Concorde. If any of my guys get to Frain, we’re going to take him down.”

“I know, Ava.” I believed her. These troops were a different breed than Cheng. Sure, from what I had seen of him, he was lethal, but then his enhancements were mostly about intelligence gathering and self-defense. These men and women were soldiers. Their bodies had been stripped down and rebuilt with one purpose: to fight and win. “There’s a lot more to this than we know. I want the chance to talk Frain, and Drayton, too, down, or at least to figure out why he’s smashed through everything in his way to get here.”

“I’ll try to give you that chance, Layton, but I’m not going to mess around, and I’m not going to risk my soldiers. If we get the chance to take him out, we will.”

“And if I get the chance to stop anyone else getting hurt? I will, too,” I said.

“Ha.” Phillips gave a low chuckle. “You bleeding-heart liberals.”

“You know me; I’m very right on.” I began to feel somewhat ballsy, the anticipation of combat causing adrenaline and testosterone to flood my system. “You know, if you don’t have anyone back home…”

“Layton, don’t go there. I would destroy you. Go find yourself a nice girl, one that couldn’t crush you when she’s having a bad day.”

Well, that told me.

“We are go. Brace for hard maneuvering,” Vasily’s voice cut through.

***

We slammed out of A-drive less than a minute later. It was far rougher than normal, the stress of matching velocities jarring me hard. I heard the shuttle groaning as horrendous forces tortured it.

Gagarin
fired her engine at full burn, and I saw the black hole and accretion disk sluing to one side. My tactical feed showed
Erebus
high and to our left (or port, as the nautical types would say), her plume of blue-hot plasma creating a trail thousands of kilometers long. We began a zigzagging evasive pattern; no sense giving Frain an easy target.

“Xander Frain, cut your acceleration and prepare for boarding or we will open fire.” Vasily’s voice was a snarl. He was itching to get his pound of flesh.

“
Gagarin
.” I almost started at the sound of Frain responding. For some reason, I hadn’t expected Frain to want to talk. To hear his calm voice again was shocking. “You shouldn’t have followed us.”

“After you murdered one of my crew and all those people on Io? You seriously thought we would just give up?” Vasily gave a scoffing laugh. “Heave to and prepare to be boarded.”

A loud thump reverberated through the hull of the Hawk, and it dropped away from the docking port. The pilot maneuvered to keep
Gagarin
between us and
Erebus
, ready to spring out when needed.

“No, I guess not.” His voice was so calm it was frightening. “Abandon ship,
Gagarin
. I will recover all your crew. I promise.”

“You have got to be fucking joking,” Vasily barked.

I could see
Gagarin
had turned again, the plume from her antimatter drive creating a corkscrew of blue hot plasma thousands of kilometers long. I knew the plan; we were fighting for the blind spot, away from the majority of
Erebus’s
laser mounts and kinetic rails. We couldn’t clear them all, they studded the hull, but we could get into a position where we could train more of ours on her than she could on us.