Warpath (42 page)

“You’re going to
have to start bench pressing railgun shells to stay in that kind of
shape,” Minh-Chu replied. “Or running with a gravity enhancement
pack.”

“Not a bad idea,”
Jake replied. “But I think this morning run is a good way to catch
up before the day starts.”

“Let’s invite all
the department heads,” Minh-Chu said. “Better than sitting down
for a morning briefing with bad coffee and a tray full of forma
pastries.”

“Good idea.”

“For now, let’s do
one more lap, then I need coffee,” Minh-Chu said.

They started running,
Jake enjoyed a look through the last fifty metres of transparent hull
as an army of skitters started moving boxes and major components for
the aft launch bay under the direction of several crewmembers. Alone,
a skitter was only a small shiny dome of metal, a smaller brain, and
a bunch of tiny but strong arms that they used to walk, carry objects
or interchange for tools. As a group, the skitters were strong, could
pile up on top each other, and make repairs quickly. He made a mental
note to order more from the Triton manufacturing bay.

“All brace for test
firing,” announced Frost over the public addressing system.

“Someone’s pushing
his crew this morning,” Minh-Chu said, running to the wall and
leaning. “Must be punishment for last night.”

“I get the feeling
it’s going to be worse for them than it will be for him,” Jake
said. “At least we’re out of wormhole transit on time.”

The ship rumbled and
shuddered as several thuds echoed from above. “I counted nine,”
Minh-Chu said.

“Same here,” Jake
added. “Where’s the other-“ he was cut off as three more of the
main railgun turrets fired. “Are they not firing the last three?”
The last three fired. Jake checked his command and control unit and
found his fears justified. “That was supposed to be our first
simultaneous load and fire.”

“Those were all
supposed to go off at the same time?” Minh-Chu asked. “Frost has
some work to do.”

“You know it, at
least the ship is handling the stress well,” Jake said.

“If that’s what it
felt like down here, then I’d hate to be one deck below,”
Minh-Chu said.

“All clear, all
clear,” said Chief Frost over the communications system. “Next
test in ten minutes.”

“Oh, that’s going
on all morning,” Minh-Chu said.

“Fine by me,” Jake
replied. “I told him to get his gun crew in shape, that’s what
he’s doing.” He ran up a ramp then through a tall pair of secure
doors. They opened for he and Minh-Chu as officers, and they came
face to face with the dimension drive, sitting in the middle of a
space surrounded by three levels of catwalks. Jake stopped and looked
at the strange machine.

“So, first test on
that today too?” Minh-Chu asked.

“Aye,” Jake
replied. “We’re going to make it to the nebula by noon.”

“Can I wait outside
in a fighter, just in case?”

“If you wait outside,
then I’ll have to let everyone wait outside,” Jake said.

“Going to be a busy
day,” Minh-Chu said.

“May as well get to
it.”

After dealing with
crewmembers who broke regulations for over two hours, while Frost’s
gunnery team practiced firing their giant rail gun turrets all
morning, Jake was ready for some quiet experimentation. He sat in the
Captain’s seat with a view of the bridge in front of him, and a
view of the Flight Operations Centre above and in front. The floor
was transparent, and they were connected through an independent
communications system so he could speak to his Executive Officer
whenever he needed to.

Stephanie sat in front
of her pedestal style console in a high seat with the Flight
Operations Team in front of her. The bridge and the Flight Operations
Centre were reversed and miniature versions of the same thing on the
Triton, made to direct everything that went on inside and outside the
Revenge. Stephanie had her staff sorted out, and the consoles ready,
they no longer needed help from the Triton to track and control
launched fighters or other craft.

“We are ready, Sir,”
Stephanie said through their communications link. “Triton reports
ready as well.”

“All departments
report ready?” Jake asked his bridge staff.

“All departments
ready,” Agameg replied. “I’m excited.”

“Activate dimension
drive,” Jake ordered. He watched the status of the drive and the
energy fields around his ship, ready to cancel the test at the first
sign of trouble. A flash of light signalled the opening of a rift in
space ahead of them.

“Reading normal
radiation, there is an energy tunnel with directionality pulling at
our ship, but we are holding,” Kadri, the new Science and Sensor
officer reported.

“Triton is launching
their drone,” announced Stephanie.

“Launch ours as soon
as theirs is through,” Jake ordered. He watched as the first drone
disappeared into a rift in space that was invisible to the naked
human eye.

“Our drone is away,
approaching the rift at high speed,” Stephanie said.

Their drone disappeared
seconds later. Jake silently admitted that he was just happy to see
one of their autonomous ship launchers work, none of them had seen
practical testing.

“Rift is closed,”
Kadri reported. “Minimal residual radiation, most of what I’m
seeing isn’t exotic at all, anyone scanning would think it was
energy and particles left over in the wake of a large ship. Almost
exactly the same as our current hyperspace technology.”

“Now we wait for a
signal from our drone,” Stephanie said. “We should see something
in about thirty seconds.”

“What about our
drive?” Jake said. His console told him it was properly powered
down to standby mode. “Anything in the details that could be
trouble?”

“No power build ups,
no anomalies at all,” Finn said. “Everything is working as
expected.”

“Good.”

“Our drone has made
it across, and is signalling using a micro-wormhole through normal
space,” Stephanie said. “Data is coming in, the drone is
undamaged. It had to make constant course corrections so it didn’t
collide with the Triton’s drone.”

“What about their
drone?” Jake asked.

“The same, they
report that their drone suffered no damage, even when it tried to
break through the wall of the energy tunnel. The tunnel moved with
the drone, but the containment did get weaker. The drones were being
squeezed together though, and it took most of their thruster power to
keep from colliding.”

“Okay, so far we’re
learning a lot,” Jake said. “Get ready for the next test.”

“This is fast, Jake,”
Minh-Chu said. He looked excited. “That’s a light year every
twenty minutes. No deceleration or acceleration time, just really
fast through dimensional space, then full stop.”

Jake couldn’t help
but wonder what kind of foe the Edxi would be, if they had mastered
dimension drive technology. It created many tactical problems, and he
was already starting to rethink his decision to skip adding cloaking
systems to the Revenge. “That is much faster than what anyone has
right now,” Jake replied. “Let’s finish testing so we know we
won’t kill ourselves trying to use this thing.”

Four hours and five
tests later, the Revenge had expended a quarter of its drones, and
all the results coming from the Triton and their own systems were
telling them that it was safe technology. They’d tested both drives
as well, and the results told them the same things. The only issue
with the dimension drive was that bodies travelling together would be
attracted to each other, making any kind of journey taken with
multiple ships a dangerous proposition.

“It’s our turn,”
Jake said. “All hands, we are going to attempt to use the dimension
drive to travel with the Revenge. This will be a one-minute long
trip.”

“Dimension drive is
charged,” Finn said. “Ready.”

“Helm is ready, Sir,”
Ashley said.

“Open the door,
navigation,” Jake said.

“Hey, that’s not
bad,” Minh-Chu whispered.

“Dimension drive
activated, rift open,” Agameg announced.

“There is a viable
corridor,” Kadri said.

“We’re going in,”
Ashley reported.

At first there was no
difference in what they were seeing with the naked eye, the view was
the same. Jake’s console told them that they were entering a funnel
like energy doorway that led to a slightly curved energy tunnel, or
corridor as Kadri put it. A brief creaking sound filled the cabin and
suddenly none of the readings he saw past ten metres away from the
hull made sense. Inside the transit corridor, it looked like normal
space with an energy much like gravity pulling them forward at great
speed, but outside it was nonsense.

The view inside the
bridge displayed on the walls was of a blue-white expanse of twisting
energy. Glowing bodies of shadow drifted between eddies of light.
“We’ve got to learn how to scan this space,” Jake said.

“First we have to
find out what we’re seeing,” Kadri replied.

They exited through
another tear in space and Jake immediately saw their drones on his
tactical display. “Predictable, stable, easy to manoeuvre,”

“And fast!”
Minh-Chu said. “No difference in speed between us and the drones.”

“How’s our hull?”
Jake asked.

“Sensors aren’t
picking up any cracks or other damage,” Finn said. “Sending our
army of skitters out to perform a close scan, it should take about
half an hour.”

“All right, move us
out, we want to be well clear when the Triton arrives,” Jake said.

“Getting out of the
way,” Ashley said, firing the main thrusters and accelerating away
from their arrival point.

“The Triton is
signalling that it is about to enter its own rift,” Liara
announced.

The Revenge moved well
out of the way and decelerated, and the crew waited. Seconds later,
the Triton arrived, as though coming out of nowhere and stopping
instantly after moving at a great speed.

“Captain,” Kadri
said. “I’m scanning the Triton’s hull and can’t find any
flaws. It matches our previous scans perfectly. Their scan data of us
is the same. I’ll admit I don’t understand everything about this
technology, but I’m going to clear it for longer distances.”

“Captain Anderson is
hailing us from the Triton, Sir,” Liara announced.

“Put her through,”
Jake replied. The image of the Triton Command area of the Bridge,
with Oz sitting in the middle seat and Ayan sitting beside him,
appeared on the front wall of the Revenge’s bridge. “This
technology works,” Ayan said. “The information and schematics
that Lorander provided got us over the hump, and it’s working
reliably. Not only that, I understand why it works. We’ve always
had theories that there are infinite dimensions, but this proves it
and takes advantage of our most advanced science in that field.”

“So you think it’s
safe to use it for travel?” Jake replied.

“Considering what
these drives do for us, yes,” Ayan replied. “The energy corridor
does not appear as a natural phenomenon, it’s completely the result
of a subsystem inside the drive, I can pinpoint all the subsystems
and tell you what they do, I’m sending the document to your
engineering team now so they can start performing component by
component checks.”

“Congratulations,”
Jake said. “You may be one of the first humans to understand this
technology.”

“Thank you,” Ayan
said, distracted by the work she was doing on her console. “I think
it’s time for us to go to the Iron Head Nebula,” Ayan said. “The
technology is ready, and once your people look at this information,
they’ll be ready to use it safely.”

“We weren’t ready
to use it safely before we went through the dimensional tunnel?”
Minh-Chu muttered under his breath. “I really am going to go
outside in a shuttle next time you test new toys.”

“All right, so we
recall our drones, finish our integrity scans and the rest of our
good scientific practices, then we get moving?” Jake asked.

“Sounds like a plan
to me,” Oz replied. “Don’t forget to send your crew’s email
packet through a wormhole pointed at Haven Shore before we go, it
might be the last mail call we get for a while.”

Captain Valent was
actually glad to be summoned to the infirmary by their new lead
medical technician, Ensign Levine. The distraction was welcome. Even
though he was about the business of running a ship, which was a
sixteen hour a day job where he was always on call, he still found
himself thinking about the strange space they were moving through. If
one thing went wrong, they could be flung into an unpredictable
maelstrom of strange energies and objects. When he managed to bury
those anxieties, and he happened upon a quiet moment, he remembered
the people who he missed most.

He already wished he
could have brought Alice along, and wished he could check on her,
even using Crewcast. What made matters much worse was that he knew
that Governor Anderson, the last research doctor he knew and the only
one he trusted, had inherited everything from the Fallen Star and was
busy relocating it. He was also doing an intense study of Doctor
Messana’s research into curing Alice, and was optimistic. Whether
he could use the ill-gotten methods if they were effective was
another question, one which Jake trusted Governor Anderson with.

He wished he could
speak to someone about his daughter back home, and the developments
there, but Ayan didn’t transfer from the Triton before they entered
the dimensional rift. She had too much research to finish there, and
it was the best thing for the fleet. Jake understood, and felt
childish for missing her already, but there it was. So, he endlessly
read reports – no matter how boring or trivial – checked systems,
and ran efficiency simulations while sitting in the Captain’s
chair. That was, until the Ensign called him down to the infirmary.