Dreadnought (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 2) (30 page)

“Sparhawk, you’re reneging, aren’t you?” he demanded after a time.

“No,” I said, “but I am trying to figure out why you don’t want to wait until we exit this universe.”

“What? Are you trying to say I’m playing a trick? A helpless man in a cell? No… that’s not it, is it? What you’re up to is far more sinister.”

“Calculating the motives of a proven enemy is not sinister.”

“Nonsense. You’re trying to weasel out of our agreement. I got you out of that star system. I wanted my freedom in return. What do you call it when one man keeps his end of a bargain and the other immediately begins to hedge when it comes time to pay up?”

“I’m not—”

“Dishonesty, that’s what it is! Skullduggery. Bait-and-switch. Go ahead, confess your vile intentions. I’ve been tricked and played for a fool, haven’t I?”

Heaving a sigh, I decided he was right. There was no going back on the deal now. If I couldn’t keep a simple agreement with a Stroj—the first one ever made, to my knowledge between our two peoples—how could I expect them to ever trust us?

“All right,” I said. “Take the pinnace. Guards, take him there. Keep him chained. Free him remotely, only when he’s been ejected from the ship and our shields are back up.”

I turned away from Lorn and left. I hoped never to have to meet up with him again.

Less than an hour later, the pinnace puffed out into space. Shortly thereafter, the engines sparked, and it pulled away from us. It soon drifted in our wake, lurking near one of our probes.

“That creature is a monster,” Rumbold said when I returned to the command deck. “A ghoul without a soul.”

“True enough,” I agreed, “but I’m not. We struck a bargain, and he kept up his part of it.”

“Maybe, or maybe we’ll come out of this breach right into a supernova.”

“It could be, but why would the base commander of a Stroj outpost possess a code-key that leads to a deathtrap?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I still smell a rat, sir.”

“That’s rotting flesh,” I commented.

Rumbold shuddered and turned back to his duties.

We sailed on at a gentle pace for three more hours before anything happened. I was about to retire when a klaxon sounded.

Everyone turned toward Yamada, as the sensor-arrays had triggered the alarm.

“Do we have an exit point calculated?” I asked hopefully.

She shook her head slowly, her face bathed in blue light as she studied her instruments.

“I’m afraid not, sir. The computer is warning us that we’re being pursued.”

She reached for the screen activation, and she piped her data to the forward screens. I saw a speck, and red lettering appeared beside it, identifying the contact.

“Are you sure about this?”

“Yes, Captain. The enemy dreadnought has followed us somehow. It’s pretty far back still, but it never had to brake like we did when we first entered and discovered the tightness of this newly formed bridge. It’s moving at full velocity.”

“Helm,” I said, “increase power. Give us two Gs of acceleration.”

Almost immediately, I was staggered. My weight had dramatically increased. With great effort, I made it back to Yamada and sat heavily beside her, studying her raw data.

“Can we make it out of here before the dreadnought catches up?” I asked.

“Only if we find the exit very soon.”

Slowly, I turned my head back toward the forward screen. I nodded thoughtfully. This was why Lorn was so adamant about getting off my ship out into hyperspace. He hadn’t wanted to be around when his friends caught up to
Defiant
.

-47-

Studying the situation behind us with interest, I watched the dreadnought approach. It was overtaking us.

Periodically, I swung the optics to locate and study the pinnace I’d given Lorn. His situation was also of interest. He wasn’t heading for the dreadnought—in fact, he appeared to be running away from it. He was already lingering near the billowing walls of this hyperspace pocket, staying as far from us and the dreadnought as possible.

Yamada took note of what I was doing.

“That bastard looks like a fly on a curtain, doesn’t he?” she asked. “The dreadnought is pinging him in the clear. They know he’s there.”

“Any hint that they may pause to swat our pesky fly?” I asked.

“Negative, unfortunately. Why do you think he’s running from them, sir?”

“I recall that the base commander told Lorn his treachery would be broadcast far and wide. I can only assume the crew of this warship knows that patchwork traitor gave us a code-key to escape the system.”

“I see…” she said. “In that case, they’ll get him.”

“Unfortunately, it appears their priority is to run us down and swat us first.”

She nodded glumly and returned to her duties.

Moving to the nav table alongside Durris, I gave him a nod in greeting. He returned the gesture, but winced when he did so.

“Sir, we’re going to be overtaken. We’ll have to turn and fight.”

“We have options, Durris.”

He looked at the nav table with me, baffled. At last he shook his head. “All I can think of is to slow them down with missiles and mines, but we expended every warhead we had destroying the moon base. We don’t even have a pinnace anymore.”

I thought he might have let a twinge of accusation enter his voice at that point, but I chose not to respond to it.

Reaching over the table, I tapped time controls and spun the scene backward. Once it showed the walls of our fledgling wormhole at the first moment we entered, I used two hands to magnify the zone ahead of us.

“When we first entered hyperspace, this is what the region looked like,” I said. “Space narrowed at the far end of the hyperspace bridge. It’s since expanded outward, but the far end is still identifiable.”

I circled this region, which in the old vid files resembled a blunt tapered point in the distance.

“The breach must be here,” I said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Durris stared at the table, dumbfounded. “Aim for the blurry spot? Have you got any evidence to back up this theory?” he demanded.

“Only logic—and a careful analysis of our previous passage through an artificial bridge. Let’s review those files.”

After working with the table for a time, Durris displayed the first artificial breach we’d discovered. The pattern was again clear. There was a large region off to one end of the universe that was elongated. As time progressed in flickering motion on the displayed scene, the hyperspace expanded and billowed into a new configuration.

“I’ll be damned,” Durris said. “When the new bridge is formed, you really can tell where the way out must be. It’s a large area—but much smaller than our previous guesses have been.”

“Exactly. I propose that we increase our speed, locking down in our crash seats and pushing our luck. We’ll slam into the far end of this tiny existence—or shoot right through the breach and back into normal space.”

He stared at me thoughtfully. “We’ve got no chance to take out this monster on our trail, sir?”

“She displaces more mass than we do by two to one. Logically, she’ll out range us with the main cannons by at least fifty percent. That means we’ll have to absorb six to ten volleys before we can return one of our own.”

He looked over my equations grimly. “Battle in space is even more susceptible to mathematical realities than combat on a planetary surface. We can’t even hide behind a tree and jump out in ambush. I have to agree with your assessment, sir.”

“I’m glad you see it my way. Begin implementing our escape plan.”

He left the table and began making the rounds to the other stations. The helm, sensors, life support and crew safety officers were all informed. Alarmed, they took up battle stations and sounded alarms all over the ship. We were about to take a drastic risk.

Soon, the engines were thrumming deeply, the pitch rose steadily until it vibrated the teeth in my head.

“Ready, sir,” Durris said, casting me a reluctant glance.

I gave the order, and we were all pressed back into our seats even more firmly than before. The effect was a painful one, and it made the skin pull away from my skeleton as if it were elastic.

“Primary engine chamber overheating,” Zye said calmly. “Secondary chamber coming online.”

“Maintain course and speed,” I said, determined to ride it out.

Watching through blurred eyes, I saw the computer update our positions steadily. The increased speed was now projected to cause us to reach the exit point before the enemy dreadnought could catch us—provided that the exit was where I hoped it was. Where it
had
to be.

The following hours were both painful and stressful. We watched with bleary eyes as the end of the line approached. Only with the greatest effort could we rise to drag our bodies around the deck, exhausting ourselves quickly.

Few of us even spoke as the probable breach point loomed at last. We weren’t exultant, or relieved to know the ordeal would soon be over one way or another. We were too bone-weary for that. We just wanted the ride to end.

When at last we approached the proposed breach-point, I thought I could see it. They had a certain shimmer, an amorphous outline when you knew what to look for. But I couldn’t really be sure I was witnessing this with a clear mind.

“Captain,” I heard a faint, weary voice call to me. “Captain…”

“Rumbold? What is it?”

“Permission to nudge our course, sir.”

“Why?”

He stirred in his chair, but his head didn’t turn to face me. Perhaps he couldn’t manage it.

“The coordinates are off… I can see it. I can
feel
it.”

I stared at the forward screen. With an effort of will, I rotated my chair and saw that Yamada had slumped over her boards. She was out, either sleeping from exhaustion or unconscious due to the force being exerted on her body.

Our suits were built to inflate at the extremities, exerting pressure at the feet and stiffening over other vulnerable spots to prevent blood from pooling and soft tissue from tearing. Although helping to prevent death, there were still many unpleasant side-effects when we were under long term G-forces.

“Permission to ease down,” I said. “We’ve got a window of six minutes.”

Rumbold needed no more encouragement than that. He immediately eased off the thrust and everyone aboard sighed in relief. Within ninety seconds, Yamada was breathing easily again, and I saw her escorted off the deck to the medical bay.

Zye was the only one on the deck who seemed displeased with my decision. While I stood unsteadily over Rumbold, going over our projections, she stood behind me ominously.

“Zye, not now,” I said without looking over my shoulder.

“The Stroj are not to be taken lightly, Captain,” she said. “We should either run as hard as we can, or turn and fight to the death right now. There can be no middle ground with them.”

“Return to your post, Lieutenant.”

She did so, her usually stoic face betraying her disquiet.

“Now, Rumbold—can you breathe, man?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Can you tell me what you’re talking about?”

“No time, Captain. Either trust me, or overrule me. Decide now.”

Our eyes met. Rumbold and I had been serving together for a long time. There was a certain something I respected about this veteran spacer. He’d survived where hundreds of younger men had perished. Often, people took him for a fool. Some said I had a soft spot for a man in his declining years.

But I felt differently. “The helm is yours, helmsman. Don’t drive us into the rocks.”

He gave me a flickering smile. Reaching down, he took out a silver flask I didn’t know he had on him. He downed some kind of rotgut narcodrink that released a powerful vapor.

Putting his hands on the controls, he made a series of fine adjustments. He didn’t type in numbers, but rather he actually nudged the touch controls. I felt somewhat alarmed—but I’d given him permission and I didn’t want to reverse myself now.

At last, he sat back with a heavy sigh of satisfaction.

“Well,” he said, “if we die now at least we’ll know a man’s hand was on the tiller to the last.”

“Yes, well thank you, helmsman…” I took my seat again, and I tried to find comfort in his words. Somehow, I failed to do so.

I’d passed through several breaches over the preceding months, but this passage was the worst of them. Looking back, I realized that I’d never know whether Rumbold’s final adjustments saved us or nearly doomed us. There was simply no way to tell the truth.

We’d flown through the knife-edge, the rim of a breach. Each one was like a bull’s-eye in space, a relatively tiny hole in the vast fabric of the universe that was weaker than the rest. It was a pore between one state of existence and the next that a gnat-sized object like our ship could wriggle through.

The ship shivered and groaned, as if part of her had encountered an infinitesimal resistance to her passage. At these speeds any unevenly distributed force could easily be fatal—but we survived.

“By God,” Rumbold breathed, “we just about shaved our tails off that time!”

“Status, Yamada?” I asked.

She didn’t respond right away. Her face was glued to her scopes.

Frowning, I turned toward Durris. “First Officer—where are we?”

He turned slowly, giving me an odd look. He shook his head.

“I don’t understand it, sir,” he said.

“You don’t understand what?” I demanded, moving to join him next to the nav table.

“Look for yourself.”

I did, and the truth dawned on me slowly. We were in a system with eight planets quietly circling a single yellow-white class G star with a steady output. There was a significant Kuiper Belt, a swirling field of frozen debris beyond the eighth planet…

“This looks like the Solar System,” I said, staring.

“It
is
the Solar System,” he said simply.

Yamada turned away from her instruments at last. “It’s no mistake, Captain. We’re in home space.”