Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (19 page)

“This ship will be about as far from that as you can get and still be alive,” Ia said, ending one message and starting on the next. “But for the moment, we’re safe. Eyes to the boards, thoughts on your tasks.”

More minutes passed. The main bridge door finally opened, admitting Commander Harper. Judging from his tousled black locks and the mussed, slightly stained state of his grey coveralls, he had apparently been working personally on the engine upgrades and hadn’t bothered to change. Moving over to her side, he pulled himself to Attention and addressed her. “Captain Ia, the new programs are loaded, and have been test-simulated five more times. Everything’s green for go, sir.”

“Excellent work, Lieutenant Commander. Lieutenant Rico, stand down. I’ll take the command station now,” Ia stated. She tucked her pad into her shirt pocket, moving from the pilot’s station to the command chair. “Yeoman Fielle, I’ll be taking the helm from here. Both of you can stick around, or go take a break for the next hour. If you go, be back on duty at nine hundred.”

Rico narrowed his brown eyes, giving Ia a thoughtful look. Unbuckling his harness, he stood. “I think I’d like to stay, Captain.”

“Have a seat,” she directed, giving him room to step out from behind the curved workstation console. Nodding, Rico moved to one of the unoccupied seats, the backup station for communications. Harper took the backup station for operations on the other side.

Taking the abandoned chair, Ia sat down, strapped in, and logged in with her bracer. The chair, already programmed for her preferences, slid forward to accommodate her average height. Strapping her left hand into the flight controls, she
tapped the workstation controls, rearranging the status displays on her main, two secondary, and ten tertiary screens.

“Right, then. I’m ready for the transfer, Yeoman,” she said. “If you’re ready, helm to my control in ten.”

“Aye, sir. Helm to yours in ten,” Fielle agreed, free hand moving over his console.

“…I have the helm,” Ia stated a few seconds later. “Bringing engines back online.”

“Heading, sir?” Hulio asked, glancing up from the navigator’s post. It was the navigator’s job to coordinate with the navcomp for plotting a safe course into a selected star system, working on the macroscale to avoid all the large hazards that the FTL field couldn’t grease out of the way. It was the pilot’s job to avoid hazards on the microscale, usually while traveling at insystem speeds.

“Engines are now online, Captain,” Harper said, beating Private Dinyadah to it. She shut her mouth, glanced at him, and shrugged. Harper smiled in Ia’s direction.

“Right. Let’s bring the
Hellfire
up to insystem speeds. Forward to one-quarter Cee,” she warned the others, bringing the thrusters online. The faint
whoosh
that was the cycling systems for lifesupport grew a little louder, picking up a
thrummm
from the engines again. The stationary field of stars displayed in the various monitors around the bridge slowly shifted as Ia made a slight heading correction. “Just a few more minutes, and we’ll be up to half Cee, since we’re taking it easy.”

“And then what, sir?” Rico asked her. “Three-quarters lightspeed? I thought we were testing the FTL panels, not the insystem drives.”

Harper smiled, looking at Ia. “No, Lieutenant. When we hit half lightspeed, we open a rift and take ’er for a spin. Right, Captain?”

“Right, Commander.” Technically, he was a lieutenant commander, but since he outranked the other two on board—and the doctor wasn’t even in the chain of command, officially—it was acceptable to shorten his rank. That, and she knew he would eventually earn a promotion. “Navigation, pull up the star charts for System N-Tau 1158.”

“Aye, sir.” Hulio tapped his console, letting the advanced processors calculate their course. “N-Tau 1158 is…twenty-nine light-years from here, or a day and a quarter, deadheaded
FTL, sir. We don’t have much information on its insystem hazards, though. We also have the Kirkenn Nebula between here and there. It’s a new gas cloud, so it’s a significant navigation hazard. If you wanted to go there, you’d have to…wait…

“The Kirkenn Nebula is in the
Grey
Zone.” He looked up from his station. “Sir, why did you want to know about that star system? No one is allowed to go there, per treaty. It’s part of the buffer zone we won from them.”

“You know that, and I know that, but the Greys have conveniently forgotten about it, Private. Cycling the OTL hyperwarp in twenty seconds,” she warned everyone. It wasn’t much of a warning. Telltales turned amber as she gripped the trigger for the hyperspace generators. Panels opened on the nose of the ship, displayed on the second of her lower tertiary screens, the one to the middle left. The shallow camera view showed the relay nose cone lifting into position. The moment the lights switched to green, she pulsed the trigger.

A blue-white energy packet spat out from the cone, an elongated sphere crackling with warped physics. It shrunk down, collapsing in on itself, and punctured a hole in reality. That hole swirled open in a much larger, greyer version. It expanded and swallowed the ship just in time as they dove nose-first into the grey-streaked tunnel. Behind them, the aft view on her fourth tertiary screen showed the tunnel collapsing about two lengths behind them.

The
thrum
picked up from a quiet background noise to a palpable low rumble. Ia frowned at her shivering console. “Harper, I thought you said you implemented the new software. Why is my ship shaking?”

“So did
I
, Captain,” he muttered back, tapping in a string of queries on his workstation. “Tracing the relays now…Ah! Here it is. I forgot I left it on manual for the tests, which means we just have to switch it to fully automated and let the computer compensate for the two different systems instead of us absentminded engineers…which I have just done…now.”

The rumbling eased back with the last thump of his finger on the operations-station controls. It was now quieter, bearably so, though the new hum was stronger than the faint hum from before. Harper gave her an apologetic look.

“Sorry, sir. I’ll get the code for that patched in by shift’s
end, sir. I figured you’d need the manual programming for those instances where we’re beating the speed of the OTL-spark and need to wedge it open, or are still getting up to hyperrift speed. Or if anything happens to the engine comps, like damage in battle.”

“A good piece of foresight planning,” she praised. “Right. This transit will take just under an hour. Commander Harper, Private Hulio, double-check the navcomp’s link with the engine comps. I want to make sure this ship flies as smoothly as a courier does on straight OTL autopilot.”

“Sir…if we’re really flying through a hyperrift, why aren’t we getting spacesick?” Dinyadah asked, looking up at the grey streaks of the rift tunnel on her viewscreen.

“We’re immune because we’re wrapped in modified FTL physics, Private,” Harper answered her. “We are now moving at roughly two minutes to the light-year, slower than standard OTL, but considerably faster than FTL.”

“But I was always told that forcing an FTL ship through a hyperrift shook the ship to pieces,” Dinyadah said. She looked around the bridge, seeking support, or at least confirmation from the room. Several of the others nodded, including Ia, so she looked back at their chief engineer. “So why aren’t we having our teeth rattled out of our heads?”

“It’s a modified warp field, that’s why—don’t ask how it was modified,” he added, glancing at their captain for a moment. “The Captain is under orders not to divulge that particular information, and that means the rest of us are under orders, too.”

“Or to put it another way,” Lieutenant Rico stated, studying her, “if word of how we’re doing this gets off this ship, the Salik
will
find out and try to use it against us. Right, Captain?”

“Right, Lieutenant,” she agreed, her attention split between making sure the helm stayed on course in the rift and answering the unspoken questions. “Hyperwarp has far too many advantages for us not to use it, but far too many disadvantages to implement it across the fleet. The least of which is the fact that we’re still effectively communications-blind while in hyperrift transit.

“We Terrans are not living on an isolated clutch of planets on the backside of unexplored space this time around,” Ia said,
referencing Terran history. “The Salik know exactly where we are, they can find out where all of our shipyard facilities are, and they can bribe, coerce, or smash-and-grab the information if we offered it to the rest of the fleet. If we hadn’t been isolated and far from the war zones back at the start of the first Salik War, then they would’ve seized all our new, Terran-based tech offerings and done their best to defeat the Alliance.

“Sometimes you need a lump hammer to take out a problem, as we helped provide two centuries ago,” Ia said, quoting one of her distant descendants. Drawing in a deep breath, she steeled herself for this next bit of potential trust-bending, and revealed as calmly and matter-of-factly as she could, “Sometimes you need a laser scalpel. This ship is that laser scalpel…and I have just aimed it at one of the biggest, nearest, most dangerous cancerous growths in the galaxy. As far as the rest of the ship is to know, never mind the rest of the fleet, we never strayed from known Terran flight paths. And we
never
crossed into the Grey Zone.

“That is a direct order from not only your commanding officer, but from a high-ranking precognitive—and before anyone protests further, I’ll remind you I
am
fully authorized by the Command Staff to make this little visit. We’re going into the Grey Zone, and we are all going to keep our mouths shut about it. This particular little mission is labeled as Ultra Classified, which means you cannot even mention it to
my
superior without going first through me.

“This one is completely out of your pay grades at this point in time…and it is merely the first of far too many missions with that label stuck to it. Speaking of Ultra Classified, the Admiral-General authorized me to undertake this mission, yes, but you are
not
allowed to discuss it with her. If you did, you’d be accused of Fatalities Four, Five, Six, and Thirty-Five, and those are just the obvious ones,” Ia told her bridge crew. “They’ll dredge up every other Fatality rule they can throw at you, too. That’s what Ultra Classified means. That’s why I have that double-indemnity regarding corporal punishment on my back—because I am responsible for the rest of you keeping your mouths shut. Please do; you may consider this your first official test for such matters.”

That silenced her crew. Ia knew it was a grievous stretching
of her
carte-blanche
powers, but it was necessary. Though she had given Fielle and Rico permission to leave the bridge, neither moved. Fielle stayed put because she knew he wanted to learn the new drive’s flight mechanisms. Rico stayed put because he was busy watching her. Studying her. Analyzing her methods and motives.

It might’ve made more sense for the Command Staff to have made Helstead her onboard spy, but Oslo Rico was used to assessing tactical and strategic threats and knowing which parts of his information-gathering were troublesome enough to pass along. Helstead excelled at executing decisions based on what she found, but Rico’s job was to report
if
Ia stepped out of line. This would stretch his credulity limit, but she knew he wouldn’t report it precipitously.

She also knew there were other spies tapped among her crew. Her 1st Platoon lieutenant was the most important of them, since even spies had to report up through a chain of command; the Command Staff wanted to know only the important bits, rather than be pestered by petty half worries.

For now, they kept their mouths shut and their eyes on their workstation screens. All except for Yeoman Fielle, who had nothing to do. Seated at the pilot’s station, ahead and below her own post at the back of the room, Fielle fidgeted. He wasn’t quite as bad about it as Lieutenant Commander Helstead could be, but he did sigh and shift in his seat every now and again, visibly bored.

“Yeoman Fielle, would you like to warm up the feedbacks and see what hyperwarp flight feels like?” she finally offered.

“Sir, yes, sir!” he agreed quickly, sitting forward so he could reach for the controls.

She smiled. “If you learn quickly enough—not that there’s much more to learn—I’ll let you oversee most of the flight. I’ll be taking the helm back a few minutes before we emerge, though.”

“If we’re emerging inside Grey space, sir, you can
have
the helm at that point,” he muttered, strapping his hand into the control glove. “I don’t want that level of responsibility on my hands. In fact, I don’t even want to go there at all.”

“Relax, Yeoman; we’ll get out alive,” she promised.

Her 1st Platoon lieutenant wasn’t the only one to glance her
way at those words, but his eyes did linger. As did Harper’s, though his gaze was at least more trusting than dubious.

L-3 POINT, TAUS’EN IV
N-TAU 1158 SYSTEM

The
Hellfire
emerged from hyperspace without fanfare. Grey streaks blossomed into stark black filled with pinpoints of light. Warned that they were about to emerge, Private Hulio moved quickly to synch what little they knew of the system with the information coming their way. Considering they were still traveling fast, he worked with crisp urgency.

“Scanners are up and running, Captain. Gravity and lightwave data coming in…We’re just outside the fourth planet’s orbit, sir, at the third Lagrange point—
Madre de Dios
, there’s a space station at the L-3, sir!” he announced, looking up from his lower screens to the primary and back. “It’s huge! Five kilometers across. We’re not on a collision course, but we’ll pass within thirty thousand klicks. The hull configuration’s a bit strange, but scanners
are
matching the materials to known Grey technology, sir. We have light-seconds before they detect us.”

“Orders, Captain?” Rico asked in a deceptively mild voice.

“Private Hong,” Ia stated, her tone crisp but calm. “Power down all guns. I repeat, power down
all
guns. This includes all personal weapons here on the bridge as well as the hull. We’re about to be scanned, and we don’t want to alarm the locals by doing the wrong things.”