Echelon’s End
Book 6
PlanetFall
By
E. Robert Dunn
PROLOGUE:
“Pioneer Pod Four Log. Mission Status Report. Five hundred and seventy-six rotates and eight nodes since launch. Commander Capel Perezsire reporting,” he spoke into the ship diary program’s audio pick-up. Five hundred and seventy-six rotates and eight nodes too long, Perezsire thought cynically as he surveyed the bowport in front of him. Once more Capel was safely ensconced in the Pioneer Pod 4’s recessed contoured piloting chair, dressed formally in his gold-black color-coded, long-sleeved regulation uniform.
“In the cycle of 6752 A.T., ill-fated Systemite–kind had been ambushed by their archenemies, The Tauron. Moreover, the terra-forming probeship Saarien blown to molecular scrap only rotates after its maiden launch. We six survivors of Aidennian-origin became stranded in one of the colonizing mission’s Conestoga-class Podships, and took refuge on an uncharted, un-benighted planet doomed for annihilation by its own guardian stars…”
He paused, reclining lazily in the recessed piloting seat. Something worried him, but he could not put his finger on it.
“Only the Universe can know what has happened to Systemite-kind after we the crew of the Pod Four had left our kin so ungracefully and unexpectedly. Violent battles must have raged as the Tauron attack strafes loomed over and then descended upon the ill-informed population centers of the united planets; huge squadrons of Tauron Starhounds must have risen and swamped half the worlds… “
Again, the commander paused as he imagined the scene and felt the thin knife-edge of agony burn into his heart. “Presently the Pioneer Pod Four galleon is en route toward the remnants of that life. We are on our way back Home.” His internal voice mused, And going back into a future time. It was an interesting thought. “It has left both the crew and me filled with a mixture of anxiousness and apprehension for what is to come.”
Capel snapped off the log computer and sat up admiring the wide, sweeping expanse of Space that lay ahead of the podship out the bowport. Apart from the stars and invisible matter of hydrogen ions and meteoric dust, the vista was empty. There seemed to be no explanation, no cause for the commander’s sudden discernment. He swallowed hard and tried to return to his executive duties.
“Next Of Kin”
CHAPTER ONE:
One storey below the podship’s flight deck, the cabin was like a museum, shelves littered with model aircraft, early spaceships, prototypes of early rocket ships, replicas of various types of Spacecorps vessels. An airship swung on a thread; a painted aerial fighter made a livid splotch of color. Fabricated personal effects, items created to replace things lost with the demise of the Saarien.
It was all to create a sense of belonging, a sense of Home to the podship’s second-in-command; Major Nicraan Matasire’s world and his life. One he shared with his soul-mate, Lieutenant Retho Capelsire, a handsome male with brown hair and dark blue-green eyes and medium build. Dressed in a civilian fatigue, he was mixing a special nutrient solution needed by his rare Aidennian rainforest orchids that were intermixed with Nicraan’s menagerie of engineering miniatures. Uniforms color-coded with decorative stitching and nahru-neck collars, accompanied by various badges and patches. Red, navy, or dark-green jackets were options for various temperature variations on away missions. The females of the crew tended to wear skirts and knee-high boots while in-flight, rather than the tailored trousers of EVA activities.
The stateroom, like much of the podship’s interior design, consisted of 4-by-8-retem plastic foam-board wall panels (some were transparent for lighting), linked together into whatever room configuration was required; it made for a uniform appearance. A muted color palette and the integration of recognizable equipment and accessories added to the verisimilitude. Matasire sat at the side table piecing over food that needed something done to it. Retho shrugged when he mentioned it.
“I can’t perform miracles, Nic,” Retho replied in his typical impish sense of humor. “To get sugar, facilities need to be provided to grow beets which means we have to cut down on cereals. And I need sugar to feed the yeast, which provides the basic materials for surrogate milk, bread, butter, and compotes of fruit, soy protein, and scrambled eggs. The algae are more economical but that needs plenty of light which means a larger share of power which means less for …”
“I know, Retho,” said Nicraan. “But we’re not short of power.”
“… making new dirt, crushing stone and treating it so that it becomes soil, sterilizing the working areas and converting podship’s deposits into water and useful chemicals.” Retho paused for breath. “And power alone isn’t enough, Nic. I also need crew-power. We still do not have a surplus of labor over and above that needed for essential maintenance. Do you realize how many nodes it takes to develop a new strain of yeast, to flavor it, gain the correct consistency appropriate to, say, fish, and then to get it into full-scale production with the food-prep computer?”
“Too many,” said Matasire. “And it always takes too long. I’m not grumbling, Retho, just requesting.”
“I agree with you,” admitted the lieutenant. “But don’t worry about taste; I’ve developed a salt which will take care of that.”
Nicraan turned as a computer tone sounded in his ear. He had been absent-mindedly toying with a piece of lint on one of his green-black colored regulation fatigue’s pant-legs.
It was the signal he had been waiting for, and happily drew his attention toward the sounding stateroom’s holo-set.
“Yes, Computer?” he called out, almost impatiently.
The Spacecorps insignia, overlaid with the emblem for the podship and the Miran Probe Mission, remained in the holographic blue screen. “Final stage of testing complete. Please report to Engineering,” the on-board replied, absent of its superior’s glee.
“Duty calls,” Matasire smirked, opening the cabin door panel.
Hurrying into the lower deck’s engine section, the pilot commanded, “Report, please.” The formality was misplaced; the electronic brain of the Podship did not care about politeness.
Nonetheless, the main workstation’s holo-set fill with data, the results of an experiment the pilot had been running. Quickly, yet deliberately Nicraan read the captions and surveyed the 3-D graphics to make sure he was not seeing what he wanted to see. Yet, after the third pensive scrutiny, the conclusion was the same.
“Is this true, Computer?”
“Insufficient data to reply. Please restate the nature of your inquiry.”
“The findings! They confirm that the cold particle stream works, is this correct?”
“Affirmative.”
The glee the echelon felt was evident in both his smile and his gestures. The root to his joy was in the fact that conventional spacecraft engines were notoriously inefficient -- in fact, anything giving off heat because of work fell into that category. Even Pod 4’s main engines worked better than ninety-seven percent effective at peak efficiency, sometimes as low as ninety-five. The question that needed an answer then was why chemical energy could not be turned directly into movement as a muscle did?
It was all a matter of the mode of combustion. His theory was to impart a directional velocity to the plasma molecules used as propellant instead of the current random turbulence of thermal agitation brought on by anti-matter interaction. The first phase of his experiments to bring about that end was to create containment crystals that were regular. That had been done, the crystals had been grown and cooled to near absolute zero in a vacuum and then detonated. A parallel beam of fast cold particles had been revealed. A turbine in that stream could convert better than ninety-nine percent of the explosive force.
A completely cold, super-efficient propulsion unit was just shown to be possible. The small prototype engine floated before his pride-filled eyes on the holo-set’s jutter box. When the Aidennians made a landfall, he wanted them starting as high or higher on the technological scale as the civilization they had lost to the Taurons.
The applications would be endless. The possibilities never had time to enter Nicraan’s realm of consciousness. As he began calculations in his mind, there was a lessening of pressure in the air – a changing of the subtle atmospheric tension.
Throughout the podship, the crew felt a slight coldness run through them – Retho Capelsire as he hummed a tuneless little melody to himself as he tended his orchid collection in his and Nicraan’s stateroom, Moela Darasiress shivered as she breakfasted in hers, Dara Lidasiress as she dressed next door, and Capel Perezsire as he checked through navigational reports uptop. It was not so much the temperature had dropped, but the coldness of reality had shifted.
Nicraan felt suddenly weak, as though vast amounts of his life force stolen from his body. Curiosities had him going to the engineering command panels and activating the ship’s sensors.
Two sine waves appeared on a nearby holoset. They ran gracefully and evenly through each other; at regular intervals, their rhythmic undulations froze. The sine waves’ threadlike lines became jagged and uneven. Nicraan frowned as a single, continuous line crossed the holoset, indicating blocked podship sensors.
“Computer,” Nicraan called out. After the recognition tone sounded, he ordered. “I want precise scanner readings and an explanation of what is blocking sensors.”
A moment, then “Turbulence is probably magnetic …” came over the air.
The deck below him jerked him violently off the work stool and onto his knees. On the console, the command holo-set changed from the prototype representation to a tale-tell that glowed red, it accompanied a klaxon. The on-board’s voice seemed to boom over the concealed PA ominously.
“Warning! Propellant error. Main drive malfunctions.”
The usual background din of the hyperplasmic drive, which normally had become commonplace and thus forgotten, suddenly changed pitch and Nicraan’s experienced ears noticed it. A blue fire howled to life within the transparent plasma support conduits that fed spatial nuclei from the podship’s nacelles into the hyperplasmic assembly. The deck suddenly felt wrong! Another unexpected jolt caught him mid-rise and he fell once again to the polished deck, this time accompanied by a shower of unrestrained equipment thrust off the operations console’s workstation.
“Warning! Impurities detected in plasma intakes,” the on-board reported an explanation to the secondary jolt.
The communication’s panel bleeped for attention as the klaxon cut off and Capel’s strained voice echoed hollowly through the lower deck, “Nicraan! I need you up on the flight deck!”
Turning toward the engine room’s portal, he called out as he went through the obliging threshold, “I’m on my way.”
Unseen by Nicraan as he climbed in earnest the rung ladder that connected the two decks, Retho was busy misting the epiphytes in the stateroom he shared with Nicraan when all hell had broken loose onboard. Recovering from the unexpected lurching of the Podship, the lieutenant hurriedly began to don his purple-black regulation uniform’s pressure under-suit, then its tunic.
Hidden forces drove a breakfasting Moela to the deck from her side table and chair. The lieutenant commander felt her pelvis, and then her shoulder blades slam to the hard carpet as the side of her head scraped the slumber couch’s support stanchion. The added weight of her pregnancy seemed to amplify the artificial gravity pull that had seized her from her first meal.
Dara, one stateroom over, took the direct approach to finding out what was happening. She thumbed the living unit’s communication call contact point.
“Capel, is there anything wrong?” she asked, running a hand through her tousled hair. She had been dressing when the disturbance had happened, her coiffure was the last thing she did as she prepared for her duty stint. She had pulled it back in a simple knot that only accented her perfect cheekbones, and her dark eyes.
The flight deck was pulsing with suppressed uncertainty. The bowport was holding the tableau of a destabilizing hyperspace field. Seated before this vista were Capel and Nicraan, both desperately trying to come to resolution over the escalating problem at hand. Dara’s call could not have come at a more inconvenient time. Yet, the commander tabbed the reply icon.
“Looks like impurities in the plasma streams. We are going to try a short blast at maximum supralight thrust to clean them out. Have everyone stand-by below.”
With that, he flipped off the communicator and turned his attention back to Nicraan. The pilot had been working algorithms and programs through the engineering computer’s flight and navigation database during his distraction. Now the pilot looked toward his commander for his next order. And, Perezsire gave it.
“All right, Major, maximum supralight acceleration at full forward thrust for one macronode.” With that, Capel attached his chair’s safety harnesses.
Nicraan did the same and then echoed, “Maximum supra-acceleration, full forward thrust for one macronode.” Then he thumbed the appropriate control on his piloting board and prepared for the G-forces to come.
The pilot was not disappointed. He did not have time to sit back into his contoured piloting chair –pushed forcibly back. Beneath the crew the Pod 4 jerked again, a stray stream of the saucer’s hyperspace borderlight bubble fracturing, a tendril missed the ship. Space around the craft seemed to rip itself apart, the hull ringing to the invisible impact of cosmic atoms. The controls felt sluggish, the ship slow to respond, and Nicraan thinned his lips as a second glare followed the previous.
Additional blasts followed the preceding. Ataxic slipstream particles fired hyperspace vapor that in turn could trigger the fission of the shell the ship burrowed. Perhaps even something more, maybe the fusion of Space itself … if that should happen …
The whirl of the hyperplasmic engines filled the anxious air of the entire ship. It was reaching a crescendo. A lump formed in Capel’s throat as he watched the command console’s timer tick away.
…56 … 57… 58…
“Capel?” Dara’s voice was anxious over the PA. “What is our situation?”
…59 … 60…+1…
The timer reset and the world outside the bowport seemed to come alive with fractured rainbows, a coruscating shimmer like iridescent fish scales. The engines continued to climb in their whirling symphony. All Space suddenly seemed to blaze with blinding blue-white light, a swirling nexus into which the Pioneer 4 vanished. The ship’s vibrations increased.
Nicraan blinked his eyes, dazzled. He did a manual turn at trying to override the computer program, but to no avail. “Power won’t turn off! There’s electromagnetic interference from some gravity source ahead of us …sensors reporting very high gravimetric flux density readings...”
“What in the name of the Oversoul is this?” Capel cried wildly.
“A hyperdrive fissure, Commander,” Matasire reported, piecing together frantic reports across his spastic board. “It’s a rift in Space!”
“Evasive action!” Perezsire shouted.
The Pioneer Pod 4 engines groaned, straining against the pull of an energy tendril. The ship shuddered constantly, helpless, as the fragmenting hyperspace bubble lashed against it. Blackness was folding on blackness creating a spiraling mass that defied definition. Where there had been nothing there was a primeval chaos, a spiraling mass that whirled at incredible speed and was suddenly alive with color as tongues of incandescent gas spat from its spinning center. All Space just wavered.
“Instrument readings are wild!” the pilot raged, frustrated.
Standard lighting replaced by the hue of emergency illuminations as RED ALERT glyphs flashed and klaxons sounded out through the podship. The hurrying saucer seemed to sidestep in Space. Loose gear slipped everywhichway, there were sounds of banging, straining alloy, and personnel caught off balance flung to the deck. By the time Dara had hauled herself into the auxiliary cabin the ship about looked like a disaster area.
Moela followed her in with Retho only micronodes behind them. Over the PA net, an executive report called out, “Velocity still increasing.”
“Capel! Our situation?” the doctor’s call came again.
Damned bad, but Capel did not say so. And he wasn’t even given the choice to do so; Nicraan was speaking.
“Flight controls are not responding. We are still at maximum supra-acceleration…”
The podship’s forward screens flared with unseen molecular impact, and its anticoncussion fields cut in instantly on collision. Airtight doors began sliding shut automatically, triggered in anticipation of any decompressive hull ruptures.
The Pioneer 4 was clawing for purchase in hyperspace.
“Concussion dampers failing,” the on-board computer reported. “Sensor readings detecting gravitational eddies along ship’s flight vector …”
Capel gripped the arms of his trembling chair with enough force to turn his knuckles pale yellow; he opened his mouth to reply or to order Nicraan to try again, but he did not give that entirely futile command. There was an unbelievable crash of static, loud enough to put an ache in each crewmember’s ear. It filled every cabin with dizzying sound. The ferocious rainbow patterns of the rift shimmered, subsided, and then abruptly, quickened again. Pseudo-lightning seemed to lash out of the rip in the fabric of Space.
The Pioneer 4 was engulfed, its sensors muffled by the tidal wave of spatial destabilization. Nicraan, with one eye on his own sensors, saw that the podship was driving straight on through the hail of electromagnetic chaos, even though blinded.
“We're on runaway thrust,” Matasire reported, his voice under strain. Manipulation of his flight board did nothing to relieve the red rash of warning icons. “I can't slow us down.”
“Hit the emergency circuit breakers!”
The PA net hummed a warning tone, then the onboard computer announced dispassionately, “Warning! Velocity now equivalent to speed of light. Warning! Velocity now increasing beyond E.M. radiation speed. Flight Factor Two and accelerating.”
“No response from breakers. Gravimetric anomalies are increasing exponentially,” Nicraan said suddenly. On one holoset, graphs replaced the jagged tear in Space -- a whirlpool of energy and gas. It resembled an overview of a funnel cloud. “If this keeps up, we could have a collateral wormhole. Or a spatial aberration.”
The bowport had gone wildly out of focus. Edge to edge the frame was crowded with the most terrifying phenomenon they had seen. It was a churning vortex, shot with streamers of brilliant fire. Matasire’s fingers stabbed at his command board’s computer overrides, he hit controls, cutting in the podship’s retro thrusters as he shouted, “Everybody brace! We’re going to…” and slammed back in his seat. The Pioneer Pod 4 spun and tumbled end-over-end in total and abysmal blackness as if being suck down some immense drain.
Nicraan began to feel his skin pulled away from his body inside his uniform. That was the result of the invisible fingers of a huge gravitational attraction. The effect produced by the shuddering movement of Pod 4 trying to traverse the wormhole coupled with the dragging energy of some unknown gravimetric lasso thrown around the podship.
Semi-paralyzed, Matasire tried to reach across to the acceleration cancellation contact point one more time. But he was scarcely able to move. His muscles were paralyzed with the load they had to bear; his being screamed with pain.
“We’re still at … runaway … thrust,” he choked out in a report. “I can’t … slow … us down.”
Whatever had the Pioneer Pod in its grasp seemed to have infinite strength and control over the ship’s power systems. It could have crushed or shattered the craft without recognizing resistance.
“Try the … emergency breakers…again…” Capel’s voice showed the same strain as the pilot. “Quickly…”
Nicraan tabbed the appropriate algorithm out on the command panel’s keyboard just as the on-board made an announcement.
“Warning! Decompression danger!”
The response to Nicraan’s gesture was a shower of sparks from over-burdened hardware. The flight deck filled from the outside with light; thick ropes of luminescence coiling, lashing like the thongs of whips. Tendrils wreathing the Pod in a tightening embrace.
Metal creaked as Nicraan flung himself back into the safety of his piloting chair. The secondary shields contact point illuminating beneath his fingers just before his head contacted the headrest. A thin whine mounted, rose, jarred the ears and teeth, and rose to ultra-sonic silence.
“Secondary shields … activated,” his voice sounded unnaturally weak in the cacophony.
“What … is happening, Major?” Capel shouted above the din as he squirmed in his seat. “The ship … can’t take it!”
Another powerful wave shook the ship. The shuddering increased violently. The Pod slewed; turned and veered, now hopelessly out of control. It became just a mass of alloy without a course as it spiraled in a backward-circling current of a collapsing wormhole.
The crew on the lower deck clung to their acceleration seats in the auxiliary control room as the ship tilted; the floor went up behind, in front of, and around them. Smoke and sparks burst out from flight controls shipwide.
“The ship’ll … break up,” Moela Darasiress coughed, speaking with great difficulty through the smoke and the heat.
A terrific hammer blow hit the Pioneer Pod and the decks went white around the crew. They clung grimly to their senses as the ship battled for its life against hyperspace gone unstable.
Another moment passed, and the shaking continued.