"Tie the other end of that thing around the pipe you just smashed with the BFW!"
"Huh, oh! I see, sir." The engineer's mate first class tugged at the ten-centimeter-diameter power cable and dragged it across the deck, sloshing through the hot coolant pooled on the floor. The weight of the cable was too much for him to wrap around the conduit by himself, and two other firemen joined in his struggle with the thing.
"Pull, Fireman's Apprentice Cain! Pull, goddamnit!" Shah shouted as the three men struggled against the cable. Shah had both his feet against the pipe and was pulling with both hands at the cable, tug-of- war style.
"As tight as you can get it, Shah!" Buckley glanced over his shoulder at the EM1 and his team working at the cable. "Weld that son of a bitch into place!"
"Yes, sir," Shah held onto the cable with all his might. "You heard the lieutenant, Fireman. Weld that son of a bitch down!"
Buckley frantically rerouted power couplings via the board and through various DTM connections. His AIC was always four or five switches ahead of him, but he had to authorize each throw, unless he were incapacitated for some reason.
Twenty-eight, twenty-seven . . .
"Engineering! Any time now."
"Almost there, Captain!" Buckley replied.
"Lieutenant! Cable is in place, sir!"
"All right, clear out."
The fire crew cleared out, and Shah took Buckley's left flank.
"I'm here if you need me, Lieutenant."
Buckley was too busy to respond at that point. The clock was ticking down, and the board had to be reconfigured just right, or a power breaker could trip and the power would never make it to the jaunt drive. He reached up to the control board and tracked down the relay switch to set the power rerouting into motion. All of the system was going to dump a small star's worth of exotic energy through the various parts of the ship, and hopefully it would reach the projector. And, hopefully, it wasn't going to fry everybody along the way.
"Here goes nothing," he said.
The clock in Joe's head ticked to seven seconds as he finally depressed the relay switch, and lights on the board all turned red in sequence, like a stack of falling dominoes. Several of them physically blew out. Sparks began flying across the switching system, and several fires broke out on the back side of the computer controller rack. Had every alarm and klaxon not already been sounding in the ship, they would've most certainly started blaring then.
"Uh, EM1 Shah, I suggest we get the fuck down!"
"All hands, all hands! Brace for impact! Multiple hull breaches. Emergency crews standby! Second hit imminent in five, four, three, two, one . . ."
"CO, CDC!"
"Go, CDC."
"We've got massive electromagnetic signatures forming above the teleport facility!"
"I'll worry about that in a minute," the CO muttered.
A bolt of electricity stronger than most bolts of lighting jetted out from the busted valve stem of the coolant flow loop through the large power cable and across the gap to the projector power coupling. The cable danced around, at first wildly like a poorly thrown jump rope, and then it was locked still with a snap by the extreme electromagnetic bottle created from the field lines of the system. The cable sheathing melted away, and the metal strands glowed bright like the filament of an incandescent light bulb. Then the cable vaporized into a plasma of metal gases, and the electric arc hummed and filled the gap between the conduit and the projector power coupler. The bolt grew white-hot with shades of violet pulsing through it. The projector began to whirl up. It whirled faster and faster as the gamma particles tried to breach the massive gravitational boundary of the event horizon within it. The exotic energy flow pulsed through the space-time bubble created within the field projector.
It's working, Joe!
Yeah, let's hope and pray it does quickly!
Sparks exploded off of several systems as smaller fingers of the electric bolt tried to dance free of the electromagnetic bottle. Each time a bolt would strike a bulkhead, part of the metal would be vaporized, and more nasty gaseous fumes would be added to the room's already nauseous atmosphere. Joe's DTM still displayed the engineering drawing of the makeshift power conduit path that he had created, and along the path, he could see emergency systems being activated. There were fire alarms, secondary explosion alerts, loss of atmosphere, overpressure, and any other type of alert that was in the safety protocols of the ship's systems. Then there was a rupture along a maintenance corridor six decks down, and the power drained off to ground in the deck plating of the floor for a microsecond before the power supply ground-fault circuit interrupters kicked the breakers. The lightning bolt across Engineering vanished, and the whirling of the projector slowed to idle.
"Maybe that worked." Buckley crawled up to his feet giving the engineer's mate first class a hand.
"We're gonna need a shit load of mops, sir." Shah shook his head at the mess in the Engine Room.
"Actually, Vineet, we need to run as fast as we can to sickbay."
"Why, sir? I feel fine."
"Yep, so do I. But in about five minutes, our bodies are going to realize that we've just been hard-boiled by all the extremely high energy x-rays that we were just exposed to, and we're gonna start dying of extreme radiation dosage." Buckley looked at his hands to see if they were swelling yet. He felt the need to grunt and clear his throat, which was definitely a bad sign.
Start a clock, Debbie.
Already did, Joe. In three minutes, it will be hard for you to keep walking. Now, get moving. Joe?
Yes, Debbie?
The ship is still here. Your father would be proud. Joe noticed that the clock for the mass driver impact was now at plus twenty-eight seconds.
"Let's move it, EM1."
"Jesus, sir. I don't wanna die!"
"Well then, you'd better fucking hurry to sickbay."
Chapter 14
October 31, 2388 AD
Sol System
Oort Cloud
Saturday, 7:17 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time
"Splash another one." Jack stomped the left lower pedal to stop his bot-mode spin and then toggled back to fighter, yanking his HOTAS hard right to pull back into some sort of formation with Fish.
"Bank left, DeathRay! Hard left!" Fish exclaimed over the net. "Fox three!"
"Whoah!" he pulled back left on the stick, adding some throttle and slip and gritted his teeth into his mouthpiece as a mecha-to- mecha, QM-guided missile passed within a meter of his cockpit. "Fish, where the hell are you?" He could see her in his DTM but didn't have a visual on her.
"Splash four!"
"Holy goddamed hell, DeathRay, we're getting hammered!" Lieutenant Dave "Deadstick" Barber cried over the net.
"Just think of it as a target-rich environment, Deadstick," Fish replied.
"Roger that shit, Fish," Hula grunted, obviously working against a high g-load.
"Fish, you with me, girl?" Jack scanned his DTM for more Seppy Gomers and caught a formation of four directly above them, engaged with Demonchild and his wingman, Stinky. He finally caught a visual of his wingman in his rearview mirror, as he toggled over from bot mode into fighter mode and pulled in tight on his right wing.
"Roger that, DeathRay."
"Let's help out upstairs, angels twelve, two o'clock high." He gave Fish a moment to catch the bogies in her DTM and gave a shout-out to Demonchild and Stinky. "Demonchild, Stinky, you've got four Gomers taking up the angle on your seven o'clock trying to gain advantage on you."
"Roger that, DeathRay! Can't seem to shake these motherfuckers!"
"Just hold 'em off for a few more seconds. We're coming." Jack pulled the stick back to his stomach and slammed the throttle forward against the stop. The Ares-T fighter plane rocketed upward, farther away from the planetoid facility into the higher altitudes of the engagement zone and deeper into the blackness of space. The acceleration of the maneuver pushed him against his seat with a steady six gravities. His wingman held tight right beside him.