“And what will you be doing, sir?”
“I’m going to crack my pod and see what’s up firsthand.”
“Whoa there, Cap’n Kirk. You need to let somebody else boldly go first. There’s no telling if we’re open to space, irradiated, or hip deep in nano-machines, not to mention this wicked spin we’ve got going on at the moment. All you can say right now is that your pod is safe, so that’s where you should stay.”
“Negative, COB. I wish this spin was gone too, but—”
<discontinuity>
whiteness pervaded
shining in incandescence
nathan moved his arms freely
no longer encumbered
no longer restrained
<discontinuity>
Nathan started and jerked, but now was held fast by the pod’s gel once more. The momentary bright glow was gone as well. After images filled his vision, negatives of whatever the source of light had been, as if he had looked into a bank of spotlights or the sun.
A mike clicked in his ears and Edwards’ voice spoke. “What … the hell … was that?”
Nathan shook his head. “I haven’t got a clue, but we don’t have time to keep arguing about it. Our visitors are still out there, doing whatever they want with us. Get started on contacting everyone. I’m leaving the pod to figure out what’s going on.”
“Aye aye, sir. Do you feel it, though?”
“Feel what?”
“The spin. It’s gone. The Deltans steadied us up somehow during that weird … moment. Right after you wished for it.”
Nathan grunted. “I doubt my wishes had anything to do with it. They probably steadied us up to examine us, if we’re lucky.”
Edwards finished his thought. “Or they steadied us up in order to flay us more precisely, if we’re unlucky.”
“Yep. I’m out.” Nathan cut off the circuit and reached methodically through the force-dampening gel to the pod’s emergency release. He pulled the lever and the whole pod vibrated. The gel cleared away, sucked back into its own reservoirs. The VR screen over his faceplate pulled away and the shell opened. His chair slid up and forward, returning to its usual position in the bridge. A thin layer of the alcohol-based gel that had clung to him boiled away in the near vacuum of the compartment.
Other than the lack of air, and the absence of the other acceleration couches, everything looked normal on the bridge. No aliens lay in wait for them. He reached over and drew his screens and control panels toward him. Unlike the ones they duplicated in the battle VR, these worked.
Every system was offline. Power was gone and both the screens and the space’s lights ran on battery back-ups only. Along with the aft half of the ship, the reactor and propulsion were cut off. The weapon system and auxiliary propulsion capacitor banks were fully charged, though. Without the reactor, they were the only sources of power the mission hull had once the battery back-ups ran out in a few hours. Nathan considered the situation. If he shut down the systems they usually powered and isolated the banks, they could conceivably keep life support and the auxiliary systems running for a few days.
Nathan shook his head in dismay. A few days. There was little point to stretching their survival time to a few days when it would take years for the alien formation to reach Earth, but perhaps in that time, they might learn something about the Deltans, something they could still transmit back home.
He shut down the missile sub-systems, the railgun, and diode laser banks, then did the same for the photonic reaction thruster pylons, conserving their precious energy, Finally, he tripped the breakers to the banks themselves. To re-route the power, they would have to cut out some main bus diodes and reverse some connections. It was a task Kris would relish.
Or one she would have relished.
Nathan stopped himself from thinking down that path, and refocused on the tasks at hand. All sensors and comms were down as well, but while the radar needed a level of power that he did not have, and could not have afforded to waste anyway, he did have backup power on the passive sensor systems. He reset the hull cameras and took a look around.
The tactical computer was still offline, so his view lacked the smooth, easy sweep of their combined picture, as well as the false color vector data that usually helped make sense of the vastness around them, but he could see a few things. They drifted over the drive-star, with the Control Ship just visible above the star’s horizon, pretty much where she had been during the final moments of the battle. Had they been just a bit fleeter, just slightly quicker, they could have escaped.
He shook his head and switched cameras. Many of the small, hull-mounted sensors were broken or still offline, but others were blocked. By what, he could not tell, but as he switched from camera to camera he finally found the engineering hull.
Tattered pieces of the radiator spine remained, fitfully spraying clouds of vapor and coolant from shorn lines and shafts. The reactor and the drive itself looked battle scarred but intact.
Nathan breathed a sigh of relief.
Kris’s broken half of the ship drifted steadily several miles from the mission hull, its spin also halted. Bracketing the aft hull was a silvery cage or framework that had presumably been put together by the Deltans, perhaps sent out from the Control Ship or even constructed in place by the nano-machines fired by the silvery beam Kris had overcome. He had no idea what its purpose was, but a similar cage was probably what blocked several of his own cameras.
He reached for a communications icon, to try and call the aft hull or the re-trans pod when—
<discontinuity>
bright flash again
all is lost in a haze of white
sense of motion
nathan flails
<discontinuity>
His arms swung wildly and he smacked his forearm painfully on one of his screens. “Damn it!” he complained, cradling his forearm in sharp self-reproach. He took a look at the camera view again. The aft hull was gone.
Nathan frantically searched through the cameras until he found it again. It had jumped, now directly behind them and close. In addition, the Control Ship lay immediately in front of them, big enough and near enough to fill the views of several cameras at once. Whether it had moved or they had moved in that brief moment of bright nothingness, he could not say.
He considered putting the weapons back online, but the alien ship was so massive relative to their remaining firepower that it would do little good. However, as he watched in mounting horror, the overlapping plates of the lobster-like Control Ship began to slide apart and open up, revealing a dark interior, an interior into which they were undoubtedly about to be drawn.
Nathan reached for the lasers—
<discontinuity>
bright white again
nathan’s fingers blindly grope
skitter across the panel
nothing happens
<discontinuity>
The Bridge returned to dim normality. Nathan struggled to understand. The glow that filled his vision during those terrifying moments of nothingness was not source-less. The glow’s brightest spots were analogous to the actual recessed lights on the bridge. It was as if all their light became thousands of times more powerful, as if the photons had become physical things themselves, drifting around him like a fog of light.
That was significant somehow, but he had no idea what it meant. Nathan shook his head, and scrolled through the cameras. The scene had changed again. The aft hull was nowhere to be seen, and the mission hull was surrounded on all sides, locked into place by brackets, spars, and webs of material.