The telescope quickly slewed again, back to Yenne. The thing at that world had already abandoned its world and was well on its way straight towards us. George could detect no emissions from either thing indicating a conventional propulsion system. The gravity detectors no longer picked up gravity waves from them, so they weren't using some sort of inertialess gravity drive. They were just… swimming. And accelerating at an incredible rate. “Sure, swimming through the vacuum of space,” I said. “Why the hell not. Of course they would, wouldn’t they…” Strangely, I broke free of the grip of those things before even George did. I grabbed the controls and put us ass-end towards the closer of the two, the one from Yenne, and poured the coals into the sublight drive. Didn’t care where we were going, just away from them. This seemed to snap everyone else out of it. Loff chucked into a barf bag.
“Please tell me we can go to hyperdrive,” Sarah said. It was not phrased like a request, but an order.
“Negative,” George replied. “There’s a new issue. Look at the stars.”
So, we looked. Looking through the canopy, they looked fine to me; said so. Then he put a telescopic view of the stars ahead on screen. They weren’t steady. They seemed to jump back and forth a little bit, some more than others. The brighter ones seemed to jump furthest. There was no pattern in the direction, just random. “The stars are not fixed. I cannot get a navigational lock.”
“What the hell is this bullshit?” I asked. Stars aren’t supposed to jump back and forth. That’s just rude.
George said that he was uncertain as to the cause, but that it appeared to be happening everywhere he looked. He speculated that we were seeing the stars as they would be seen from that position in space, but at two different points in history, separated by many years. As to why that might be, he had no idea. This would, of course, have been a fascinating phenomenon at any other time, but at that moment we really had other concerns on our minds.
“Another issue has arisen,” George announced. I was getting mighty sick of that. He reversed the view on the screen, looking back towards the thing chasing us from Yenne. It was visibly closer, but it was also not alone. A cloud of tiny particles was accompanying it. The view zoomed in… the particles were tiny replicas of the things. The bodies measured out to about ten meters long, with tentacles several hundred meters long. They, too, were apparently swimming towards us, the tentacles blurred. They were making better time, and were rapidly overtaking us.
“How long till they catch us?” Sarah asked. The answer: about twelve minutes.
“How long until the hyperdrive is functional?” The answer: eleven minutes and change. Of course, with the stars flickering between time zones, getting the hyperdrive to function would be questionable at best.
We sat there like idiots for several minutes, watching those horrible things creeping up on us. The sublight drive was at max thrust, accelerating us outwards at a bit over ten gees… pretty good for a little freighter, but it seemed creakingly slow under the circumstances. Several minutes later the big thing from Yenne approached Gunston Station. It zoomed up to the station, then spread out its tentacles, and seemed to slam to a halt right behind the station. Of course, it was on the scale of a moon; the station was just a speck. The tentacles were nine or ten times bigger in diameter than the station was long; one reached out to the station and, I swear, sucked it right up like a vacuum cleaner hose sucking up a speck of dirt. Don’t ask me how you suck up a space colony in the vacuum of space, it just did it. Then it started swimming towards us again. The pause to eat the station didn’t really buy us any time since the smaller ones were bearing down on us.
I knew the George well enough to tell by vibration that George had just added a few percent more power to the sublight drive, jacking the reactors up past the redline to do so. The gravity plating was really complaining by this point; it had a hard time compensating for the heavy orthogonal acceleration. We could feel a sort of shear running through us… if you’ve never felt that, it’s hard to explain. The conflict between the acceleration trying to pull us aft at over ten gees and the artificial gravity system trying to stabilize us at one gee pulling down produced within the air itself a deep drumming sound, about two beats a second. Goddamn drums. Drums out of nowhere, coming from everywhere. Drums you could feel in your lungs.
Bleah. Believe you me… bleah.
Several minutes later George announced that the external hyperdrive circuitry would be sufficiently repaired to allow for a jump to hyperspace within two minutes… but that the leaders of the smaller things were faster than expected and would get to us within seconds of when the hyperdrive would be ready. Additionally, with the stars doing their little time-travel dance, accurate targeting would be impossible. “Look,” I said to him, “I don’t give a rats ass where we go, just go. Pick a direction and go that way at top speed for a few minutes, see where that gets us. With luck they won’t be able to follow us, and we’ll get beyond whatever’s going on here, and can re-target the nav system.” Nobody had any better ideas.
As the seconds counted down, the closest of the things could be seen on the monitors looking… well, agitated. Excited, like they were living things ready to kill prey, and overjoyed at the prospect. Not having any reason not to, I unlocked the rear defense guns and opened fire. I knew it was probably pointless, but damned if I wasn’t going to take some shots at them. They were approaching at millions of kilometers per hour and the slugs from the guns wouldn’t get to them until they were right on top of us, but the slugs would hit at incredible velocity. As I fired, the things rushed out of the dark and were on top of us… just BAM! And there one was, then another, and another, big as life and twice as ugly, just sitting motionless fifty meters astern. Unconcerned with the sublight engines pouring relativistic exhaust into it, nor apparently all that bothered by four twenty-millimeter autocannon firing at a combined 5,000 rounds a minute, right into the heart of the thing. After moving so fast, it now moved real slow and deliberate-like, a few tentacles coming towards the ship. The screens suddenly flashed, then went dark… we were in hyperspace! And I’ll be damned if one of them didn’t actually reach into hyperspace. One of those tentacles somehow reached in and tried to grab the ship, but it just sorta flickered out. I’ve never heard of anything doing anything remotely like that… each hyperspace bubble is supposed to be its own pocket universe, unassailable from outside. Well, I guess those rules don’t apply to them things, either.
The hyperdrive was not fully repaired, just repaired enough to come on and run for a few minutes. It suddenly shut down, dumping us back into normal space. We’d traveled nine or ten light minutes, distance enough to give us some breathing room in case the things decided to continue the chase. George dutifully scanned for them, and since we’d outraced the light, found where they were nine or ten minutes earlier. We wouldn’t know for more than nine minutes if the things would decide to continue the chase. Repairs resumed on the hyperdrive. A look at the stars, sadly, showed the same jittery effect.
The minutes ticked by. George wanted to take as long as possible to get the circuitry patched up; several hours at least would be needed for a full repair. Sarah was willing to give him ten minutes…. time to see what those horrors deeper in-system would do. So, we watched and waited. The main telescope was good enough to make out the George, ten minutes earlier, as a tiny speck boosting straight towards our current position. We could see the closest of the things as also tiny specks, bearing down at an astonishing clip. Just as one about reached the George it slammed to a halt relative to that earlier us, and our ship gave a quick flash and was gone. But the horrors didn’t stop… they kept swimming along their original path, following our trail in hyperspace. But fortunately, they didn’t seem to be accelerating… they could swim fast, but apparently had a top speed. Sure. Why not.