Hunter Legacy 9: Hero at the Gates (12 page)

By dinner time we'd had responses to the
vid. The surprising thing was the mainstream media had refused to release it.
It had been passed on to governments and military leaders, and viewed by
influential people all along the spine, but Joe Average never saw it. In some
ways, this was probably a good thing. Completely baffling, but just as well.

HUNTER - PROPHET OF DOOM, which I’d been
dreading to see, didn’t happen.

What did happen was also somewhat
surprising, at least to me.

Marshal Bigglesworth issued a statement to
the media that British space forces would be running various forms of training
exercises over the next few months, designed to update plans for the defense of
the British sector, covering everything from renewed pirate attacks, through
external invasions, and system wide catastrophes.

General Patton issued a similar statement
within the hour for the American Fleet, closely followed by General Harriman in
the Australian sector, and General Price for the SFSF. Within another hour, the
Canadian Fleet had also announced similar plans, and most unexpectedly, the
Fourth Reich followed. Most of the other sectors responded with vague concerns,
and more than a little skeptism.

I set Amy, Dick, and A-Jane with the task
of trying to get a meeting of leaders at this end of the spine together, but
not knowing how many days we would be here, made this difficult at best.

Dinner was somewhat subdued, given the
nature of where we were heading next. Not knowing much more than it was lethal,
didn’t help.

I hardly noticed what I was eating, and
rushed back up to my Ready Room. Jane and I continued discussing how to go
about the next jump.

We had a few options.

The first was to send in a Hive, have it
record as much sensor information as possible, and jump it back to us. However,
the safest option also had problems. We knew roughly where Prometheus was
because of a probe sent in some fifty years after she disappeared. It had been
programmed to cross the Pestilence system, jump, scan, jump back, and report to
the explorer ship waiting there. However, it hadn't gone to plan. History
recorded everyone on that expedition dying before the ship jumped itself back
to War, and carried on a ballistic course away from the jump point. When it was
found several months later by a rescue ship sent looking for it, the probe was
found to have large chunks of its memory wiped. There was enough left to
identify Prometheus as being there, but not much else. Which implied that lack
of shielding on a small ship would result in the computer system being fried,
and actually not tell us very much. The probe itself had mainly been hardwired circuitry,
which we no longer had the skills to create. Modern computers had evolved too
far now, to create something so basically simple. And anything not simple,
would be vulnerable.

The second option was to send in one of the
Guardians, and hope its shielding was sufficient. However, if this didn’t work,
the loss of shielding might make the difference between protecting us, and not.
It was the not part bothering me, as failing to get the ship back would mean we
couldn’t risk going in there ourselves.

The third option was Unassailable, with the
same argument.

When we arrived at the jump point a little
after eight, we'd not made any course of action decision. However, the system
being as big as it was, the Hives doing the system scan were still inbound, and
I wasn’t going to do anything until they caught up with us.

The Bridge was quiet as we sat there,
pointed at nothing space, the HUD showing us where the jump point actually was.

On the other side was the Death system.

The twins and I shuddered again, as if
sharing the same thought.

"Will you stop doing that!"
demanded Alana.

"Sorry," I mumbled. "Can't
help it."

"The Gates of Death!" exclaimed
Amanda suddenly.

"What?"

"This is what Kali meant, isn’t it?
The jump points into the Death system could be called the 'Gates of
Death'"

"I don’t know about you, but I assumed
she meant actual death."

"I did too, but think about it. Kali
knew we were coming here, and she told us we would, only not in a way we would
understand at the time."

"She knew you wouldn’t want to come
here," added Aleesha, "so she allowed us to mislead ourselves as to
her meaning."

"You could be right," I said. "It
would be like her, and this is the gateway to the Death system."

"Could she have meant it both
ways?" asked BA.

"You had to say it, didn’t you,"
said Alana.

"Had to be said," added Dick.

"So," I said, "You think we
shouldn’t go in there?"

No-one answered. But for the first time, I
could see apprehension on faces where I'd never seen it before.

I made a decision to delay going in until
the morning, and sent everyone off to do what they wanted. I stayed on the
Bridge, continuing the discussion of options with Jane, Magnus, and some of her
people she called up. But once again, I found the practicality of the
scientists to be wanting. And for a moment, I wondered if they were all
suicidal. Getting nowhere rapidly, I sent them off as well.

When the last of the Hives returned around
ten, I had Jane launch them all, form them up into a single ship with merged
shields, and Jane jumped it to the Death system.

Thirty very long seconds later, it jumped
back again. Its shields were down to sixteen percent. Jane broke it up into
individual ships, and started docking them. She had to send out every salvage
droid we had.

She looked at me with a very serious
expression.

"Did we get anything useful?"

"Seventy two percent of the computer
systems were fried, and I'm trying to make a whole sensor scan from what's
left."

"Take your time."

Meaning hurry up. Before I slept on the
decision to be made, I was hoping for some concrete information to base it on.

It took her nearly half an hour, before she
turned back to me.

"Oh shit!" she said.

"That bad?"

"Worse."

"Tell me."

"It’s a neutron star. A pulsar with a
rotation in the milliseconds. It's emitting both gamma rays and x-rays. The
crew of the Prometheus would have died rapidly after jumping in, as their
shields and hull would have been about as effective in that environment as
tissue paper. And I don’t think Dr. Magnus is going to gain much information
from the computers. The electromagnetic effect is worse than the EMP of the
biggest nuke ever made. The computer would have lasted only as long as the
shielding stayed up."

"Is the ship salvageable?"

"Most likely."

"Even if it is, would the hull be too
radioactive or something to be safe?"

"All hulls absorb radiation. It's one
reason for having a thick hull. But most hulls are designed for background
radiation, and occasionally getting a bit too close to a sun. Prometheus has
been absorbing the concentrated output of a neutron star for centuries now. In
theory, the outer hull could have exhausted its electrons and/or become something
other than its original material. In practice though, we can only wait and see.
Worst case is the ship broke up. If it's still intact, then removal from the
system should stabilize what's left. And all it will need is a new outer hull
over the top of what remains, or simply replace all the hull plates with new
ones."

"It's never been tested before?"

"Not to this extreme."

"Did the Hives pick up any trace of
the ship?"

"There is something down the bearing
we were given. But it's too far away to know for certain what's there."

"Is it safe for us to jump in?"

"The sixty four million credit
question, as they used to say." I didn't bother correcting her. "Let
me run the numbers. I think I have enough data to map the radiation structure.
Our shields should take care of a lot of it. The Hives simply didn’t have
enough to protect complex circuits properly. The main problem is does the new
emitters Dr. Magnus's people designed, work on the specific form of radiation
here. If not, can I modify them to work effectively?"

"Can you?"

"Ask me in the morning."

"I will."

I headed for bed.

The jump into the Death system was
stressful, but uneventful. The shields held. The new emitters operating from
Unassailable, gave us a secondary shield inside our normal shields.

To make sure we were safe, all the ships
were linked up into one or the other shield. In addition, everyone was in full
suit protection mode, connected into seat life support ports.

The sense of anti-climax was palpable. We
didn’t die, the computers didn’t fail, Jane remained unaffected. Nothing out of
the normal happened.

The one difference from being in a normal
system was the sun. Normally at jump point distance, the sun was invisible. The
HUD showed where it was, but it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.

Death was a regular blinking dot off to the
side of the view ahead. There was something about it which bothered me, but I
had other things more important to ask about.

"Any effect on our shields?" I
asked Jane.

"Very slight. We have a definite time
limit in the system, but we're talking something like twelve hours, give or take.
It would be enough to make it to the other side where there is presumably
another jump point, but I’d hate to have to search for it first."

"Get us moving along the line to
Prometheus please."

"Confirmed."

"Do we need the suits?" asked BA.

"Give me time to make sure," said
Jane.

"We'll do our own checks as
well," said Magnus.

She and several of her people unplugged,
rose and left the CCC. Everyone was in safe zones, and as far from the outer
hull as possible.

For the first time ever, I tried reading my
pad in full protection mode. It wasn’t the most successful way of reading,
given the suit was picking up what the pad was displaying and relaying it to my
PC, which was sending the image to my eyes. It worked, but it proved easier to
simply send the image to my eyes direct from my PC. It still wasn’t very
satisfactory though.

But the stress of where we were made
concentrating on the mundane impossible.

I think everyone tried to do something, but
in the end we all gave up, and sat there watching the various monitors, as
BigMother rapidly crossed hostile space. At the back of our minds was the hope
we would be cleared to go back to 'slinky red' before we needed a toilet. While
the suits could open the appropriate hole to allow us to go, the whole thought
of that part of the anatomy suddenly getting a dose of gamma radiation, tended
to induce crossed legs syndrome.

Eventually, Jane put us out of our misery.

"You can rest easy," she said.
"The shields are protecting us fully. The new emitters are cancelling out
the gamma and x-rays effectively, and our normal shields are coping with
everything else. There is a slight drain, but as I said before, we're talking
twelve hours in-system without running into danger time."

As a group, we all shifted pretty much at
the same time.

Angel was especially glad to not be in her
suit any longer, and she sat on her pad and started in on a full bath. Nut was
also in the CCC, on Grace's lap, and he'd been even more unhappy with the suit
than Angel was. He jumped up next to Angel, and the bath became mutual.

Prometheus appeared on the HUD about four
hours later. She appeared to be intact, but cold. The jump point from
Pestilence not being aligned with the point for Famine, meant Prometheus hadn't
been aimed at the sun when it down jumped into the system. So while it had drifted
closer, it was still heading off to one side of the sun.

Sun diving a neutron star to salvage a ship
was something I wouldn’t even try to attempt. And I was very glad I didn’t have
to.

I ate finger food in the CCC, as we
approached. Our main shields were noticeably down by now, but we still had
plenty of time.

Jane slid us to a relative stop alongside,
but well away. She looked identical to Enterprise, and seemed to be intact.
While moving, she wasn’t going very fast, and Jane matched the minor speed.

During the night, Jane had rigged a set of
station tugs with the new emitters, so each one now had a shield which
protected the core components of the ship. The theory was, a set of tugs with
the computers protected, should be able to tow Prometheus out of the system.
The tugs might not last the journey though, so we had spares. The plan was to
get the tugs there, get her moving, and then return to Pestilence as fast as we
could. If necessary, we could make a second trip in to replace the tugs after
our shields regenerated fully.

It was too much guess work for my liking,
but there really wasn’t a better plan on offer. BigMother couldn’t drop a
shield to slide out a grav sled, without exposing us to the system radiation.
None of the smaller ships would do any real better than the tugs, and we needed
them for our own shields.

All we could do was try.

I gave Jane the nod, and the twelve tugs
launched from the Flight Deck. We'd worked out the best place to position each,
and now we waited for them to signal Jane they were ready.

"All set," said Jane after a
short while.

"Get her moving," I commanded.

"Confirmed."

As we watched, the tugs took up the load.

Prometheus exploded.

One moment she was a ship, then next she
was debris going in all directions.

"Get us…"

Debris starting impacting on our shields
and they started going down rapidly.

A particularly large chunk blew down the
outer shield and impacted the inner one.

It fritzed for a moment.

Our suits shifted into full protection
mode, but half the people around me were already falling.

"Jane!" I yelled.

Everything went black.