Transference Station

TRANSFERENCE STATION

Book 2 in the Sliding Void series.

First published in 2011 by Green Nebula Press

Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Hunt

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 – A starship captain is a very fine thing to be.

Chapter 2 – Top cats.

Chapter 3 – Android eyes.

Chapter 4 – One for each stalk.

Chapter 5 – Someday a real supernova’s going to come.

CHAPTER 1

— A starship captain is a very fine thing to be —

Lana Fiveworlds wasn’t used to feeling so useless in the face of death. As the skipper and owner of a starship of the size of the
Gravity Rose
, she was accustomed to barking commands and having them obeyed by her crew. Unfortunately for Lana, the wave of ship killer missiles closing in on her vessel weren’t under her authority. The bridge shuddered again, armoured-up in anticipation of the coming impact, close-defence guns outside throwing a kinetic wall of shells forward of her ship.
It won’t work
, Lana grimaced to herself.
The warheads have fragmented into their sub-ammunition components. Too damn many of them closing too damn fast
. Her vessel had to be lucky against sub-missile every arrowing in on her hull. Their mystery assailant out there on the edges of deep space taking pot shots at them only had to be lucky once. The
Gravity Rose
had a few tricks hidden away under her hull, but at the end of the day, Lana’s vessel was only an independent freighter, not an alliance carrier.
How much punishment can we absorb
? Not enough, she realized. Not nearly enough. Only seconds away from a hyperspace jump, but which was to come first. Jump or missile impact? The answer was squawked in Lana’s direction by her navigator, Polter.

‘I’ve lost a clean lock on the jump out.’

‘How the hell did that happen?’ demanded Lana.

‘It’s the enemy ship. They’re using their hyperspace vanes to disrupt local space, throwing my jump calculations off balance. They know we’re trying to jump out and they’re seeking to trap us here.’

Oh shit
. Lana cursed the bulky survival pod that had hardened into existence around her bridge chair. Trying to control the ship from inside the pod was like trying to tread water wearing a suit of armour. ‘Come on, Polter,’ she cried towards her navigator. ‘Get us the fuck out of here. Dive for hyperspace.’

‘But we’re too far outside safety margins,’ moaned Polter. Lana briefly regretted pushing her overly sensitive crewman. Well, not so much a man, more a sentient crab. He was attempting the impossible, here, for her. Polter had created twin wormholes to tunnel through to hyperspace. One a super-sized singularity – a frothing wild giant to draw the incoming missiles’ attention. Its tiny twin was far too small for any sane skipper to want to fly down to escape this cursed system. Taming a black hole was a pretty insane act in itself; taming two was double the trouble; attempting the act under heavy fire was as bad as it got. And damned if Lana didn’t need a stable wormhole to pull off their hyperspace jump and live to boast about it.

The other crewman in their troika on the bridge, Skrat raz Skeratt, yelled from his crew chair, not bothering to hide the desperation in his voice. ‘This is no time for caution!’

‘Jump us!’ ordered Lana. Her chair display flashed up the telemetry of warheads being chewed up against their wall of flack, her guns targeting missiles twisting and turning past their last line of defence. ‘We’re dead if we stay. Better a chance of jumping out alive, even if it’s a damn slim one.’ Lana bit hard on her lip. This was a game of chance and she was doubling down on Polter’s talents. Nobody could navigate a hyperspace translation as fast and efficiently as her navigator. That’s what she told every client who wanted cargo transporting across the stars. And Lana’s boast wasn’t just an idle sales pitch.

‘Tidal eye locked,’ said Polter, his voice hesitant as he reluctantly obeyed Lana’s order. ‘We’re going in dirty!’

Lana tried to ignore the shaking as the
Gravity Rose
dipped in towards the raging singularity, thrusters at the rear of the ship powering them forward.

‘Transit is unsafe,’ announced Granny Rose, the ship’s computer core; her voice clear and reasonable inside Lana’s helmet, unaffected by anything so common as hormones, stress or fear. Lana wished she could feel as calm as her ship’s artificial intelligence. Lana’s chair was pumping her body full of chemicals, allowing her mind to work at the same swift speed as the ship’s systems. She might regret the dosing later, but only if she lived to be so lucky. ‘Command override, granny. There are no safety margins for this ride.’

‘Command override accepted. Good luck, Lana.’

Lana checked the overlay of weapons data floating in front of her, the skipper’s chair layering it directly against her pupils with a laser. The
Gravity Rose
’s sudden potentially suicidal dive into the unstable black hole had thrown off the artificial minds lurking inside the incoming warheads.
That’s it, you bastards. You weren’t expecting that, were you?
Of course, the main reason the missiles weren’t expecting it was because what she was doing was madness.
The desperate and the foolhardy, my speciality
. The
Gravity Rose
’s hunters only carried a limited supply of reaction mass; the first wave of the missiles’ engines started to flutter out, turning off and left closing in uncontrolled, unable to outmanoeuvre the freighter’s rapidly chattering point defences. From the way the missiles’ mother ship was turning, Lana guessed the enemy vessel had spotted the third ship in this deadly duel of theirs. Rex Matobo, curse him. Lana’s ex-crewman’s pleas for help had brought her to this system, and as usual, it was one of his dishonest schemes that were about to get them all killed. The chances were good that Rex’s ship was the attacking vessel’s real target, with the
Gravity Rose
only counting as collateral damage. Guilt by association. At least, Lana couldn’t remember pissing anyone off recently to the extent that they would be willing to dispatch a fleet-class warship after her.
I’d certainly remember annoying someone that badly, wouldn’t I?

Lana’s display divided into two in front of her eyes. Half devoted to the weapons systems, the remainder showing the dark rotating whirlpool of the wormhole twisting outside. Their hyperspace vanes had created this beast, now they would have to ride out its fury. Fingers of frothing space-time reached towards the
Gravity Rose
, the vessel shaking violently as she speeded up towards its impossibly small tidal eye. A tiny winking tunnel of safety that they would need to precisely collide with to survive hyperspace translation. There was no more conversation across the bridge. Skrat’s attention was on the weapons board, Lana’s first mate desperately gaming against the battle computers inside the surviving warheads. Polter’s attention was fully focused on the mathematics needed to model the artificial black hole and safely translate them through its raging heart. Lana had to work hard to hold down the contents of her stomach. They were beginning to change the state of their matter, every molecule of the
Gravity Rose
and every living thing on board in a state of flux as they converted to the exotic physics of hyperspace. Tachyons riding faster than light, far beyond the grasp of the mortal universe. Polter’s race, the kaggens, believed they were transiting the lower realms of heaven by travelling through hyperspace. If his species was correct, then breaching the walls of heaven sure hurt like a mother.

‘I believe!’ called Polter in an almost joyous agony, the rapture of joining with his jump mathematics overwhelming him.

I wish the hell I did.
Lana yelled as the ripples of her altering state swelled and coursed through her body. Skrat was cursing like a trooper, too. Lana remained just cognisant enough to focus on her flickering weapons display, the pursuing warheads crushed by the gravitational stress plane, missiles exploding in smeared streams of exotic particles. The bridge’s survival pod systems started to die around her, temporarily unable to adjust to existence in this unfamiliar plane of existence, half inside the real universe, half inside the higher realms of hyperspace.
We’ve never dived as tight as this before. Have I just killed us all?
Matter was changing, time was changing, physics were changing, but the deep shit they were in… that just stayed the same old, same old.

Lana woke up in hyperspace just like she always did. Her body aching from the chemical soup of accelerants left swilling around her bloodstream, a migraine from the chair’s injection arousing her from unconsciousness. Also as usual, Polter was awake before her. In all likelihood, the navigator hadn’t even passed out. Kaggens were tough little buggers, organic tanks under that tattooed, armoured carapace of theirs. The perfect navigator, really. Lana’s chair had shifted down from battle mode, returning to being the bridge’s command chair again; all its armour hardening and environment pod systems absorbed back into the ship’s mass.

Lana coughed to clear her throat. ‘We’re alive, then?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Polter. ‘But only, I believe, due to you commanding the creation of the second wormhole, revered captain. Its unnatural size meant that the enemy ship couldn’t fully destabilise our transit wormhole. The unstable singularity acted as a shield against more than just their missiles.’

‘I might have ordered it, but damned if it was my idea.’ Lana wished she could take credit for the notion, but the idea for a decoy wormhole had come from the latest addition to her crew. Calder Dirk. And in his case, she suspected, disrupting the enemy ship’s attempt to trap the
Gravity Rose
inside the system was an unexpected side effect of the decoy. ‘Beginner’s luck.’

‘Calder might come from a far more primitive culture,’ said Polter, ‘but you must not underestimate his intelligence. His people have survived for a thousand years on an icy perdition of a planet where you and I would be hard-pressed to prosper.’

‘Only because his ancestors were dumb and desperate enough to try to colonise that shit-hole of a world in the first place,’ said Lana. ‘And hell, taking his barbarian ass into exile with us was the favour Matobo was calling in, in the first place. If it weren’t for Matobo and his tame barbarian prince, we wouldn’t have just had that mystery war ship trying to detonate a nuke off our hull. It was only fair for Calder to come up with the plan to jump us to safety, wouldn’t you say?’