A Taste Of Despair (The Humal Sequence) (15 page)

“How are we looking with that jump calculation? Did it come up all green?” He asked.

Johnson glanced at the nav console to her side. “I think so. Lewis seemed happy with it, but I don’t really know how to tell.”

“Let’s have a quick look.” He said and leaned across her to examine the console’s readout.

Everything looked fine with the jump coordinates but it wasn’t until he had assured himself of that fact that he realized he had completely invaded her personal space by leaning across as he had. The tension in her bearing was palpable.

“Sorry.” He muttered. “That was a bit rude of me.”

She smiled as he sat back in the pilot’s seat. “Not rude.” She disagreed. “Just unexpected. Rude was when you pinched my ass and made me yelp!”

He frowned. “I don’t recall it being your ass I pinched and you are never going to let me forget that, are you?”

She shook her head. “Not for as long as I have the damn bruise, anyway!”

He chuckled. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

She looked away, ostensibly to check on the comms panel, but in reality to hide her smile.

“Shall we get out of here?” He said, putting his hand on the throttles.

She turned back and nodded, still smiling. “Absolutely!”

Hamilton pushed the levers forward and the
Morebaeus
leapt ahead with renewed vigor.

*****

On the
Ulysses
it seemed like everyone was shouting at everyone else. The captain was shouting at Veltin. Puckett was shouting at Veltin. Grimes was shouting at his captain. Jones and Klane were shouting at all of them to stop shouting.

The only person not engaged in yelling was Veltin himself. He sat, bathed in sweat in the pilot’s chair, hands gripping the waldos lightly. Despite the tension on the ship, and in their situation, he had a slight smile on his face. He had long since tuned out the shouting.

The
Ulysses
had slowed dramatically since he had turned the vessel and applied reverse thrust. As a result, the Assault craft had gained on the customs vessel hugely, making up all the ground they had lost in Veltin’s slingshot orbital maneuver. The inbound torpedoes, however, were taking longer to reach the ship than anticipated. There was no question that both would reach their target. The question was when and where.

How do they not see what I’m doing?
Veltin wondered. To him, his maneuver was obvious. He had seen it as the only possible solution the moment he had heard the torpedoes had been launched. The sensors echoed basic data to his own console. Positions, velocity, acceleration. He really didn’t need any more than that. Nature had gifted him with a uniquely visual way of perceiving all things related to movement. In the instant the torpedoes had appeared on his screen, along with their data, he had seen the only way out. It was this immediate ability to grasp anything to do with complex motions that had marked him out as an extraordinary pilot at the Imperial Flight College.

That, however, had not made him immune from errors. His first, and only real error, had cost people lives. It had also cost him his shining and promising career path. There had been nothing wrong with his mental thought processes that day, but he was still blamed for the accident that had cost a dozen people their lives. There had been something wrong with the training shuttle. It had not responded as it should have. The crash taught him one thing. Know your equipment as well as you know your flying. Since then, he had always kept up with developments in engineering. Materials, technology, techniques. He always studied them all.

Ahead of them now, the Assault craft at last saw what he was intending, or at least a part of it, and veered away. A couple of them continued on anyway, insanely. Behind, the torps were almost within trigger range.

Almost there……almost there.
He thought. The
Ulysses
was, for a spaceship, almost at a complete stop. A touch of the thrusters had her pointing back out into space again.

The bridge fell silent as he flipped the two protective covers off the Skip Drive activator buttons, one attached to each waldo.

“Don’t do it!” Puckett was wide-eyed next to him.

Twenty-five percent
. He thought. If they changed the tolerance margin in the last five years, they were all dead. His mental mathematics evaluated the gravitational flux the planet generated against his velocity and the
Ulysses
own mass and came up with a figure of twenty one percent over nominal and dropping.

Good enough. Now we just need those torps to…

The EMP torpedoes reached the edge of their proximity detonation range and blew. Or rather, the one slightly ahead of the rest detonated, its energy pulse immediately rendering the other three nothing more than inert lumps of metal.

Veltin pressed the two buttons to activate the Skip drive almost simultaneously, just fractions before detonation.

The
Ulysses
lurched, the star-field in the viewer vanishing into a grey nothingness as the ship began to transition to hyperspace.

Fractionally later, the EM pulse struck the
Ulysses
entry point, collapsing the hyper-space field milliseconds after the Skip Drive had created it and the ship had entered it.

The result was that the
Ulysses
, for the tiniest fragment of time, used the Skip Drive before it was artificially shut off by the pulse from the torpedo. In that moment, the
Ulysses
Skipped over a million kilometers away towards its jump point.

Strident warning alarms hooted from nearly everyone’s console. Systems had overloaded at the strain of jumping within a gravity well. Some had shut down automatically. Others had valiantly tried to carry on and failed, usually in a shower of sparks or a small fire.

People ran about, trying to extinguish the flames, though there was no real need. The fire suppression systems were already sucking away any smoke and non-conductive firefoam was spraying into any blaze via the automatic nozzles in every bulkhead and console.

“Situation report!” Rames bellowed.

“We’ve skipped at least a million klicks from our previous position!” LeGault called.

“A lot of the Assault craft were caught in the EMP blast.” Klane yelled. “The rest were close enough to suffer malfunctions and temporary shutdowns as a result.”

“The
Triton
and
Shiva
?” Rames demanded.

Klane glared at her console. “
Triton
is beginning to turn towards us, but she was going at a fair clip in the opposite direction. It’ll be a minute or so before she can turn sufficiently to bring us into her Skip arc.
Shiva
is still barreling towards us, but she’s so far back she’ll never be a problem.”

Veltin adjusted some settings on his console. The Skip Drive appeared unharmed, though a raft of red alerts regarding temperatures and containment fields still plagued his screen. He commanded them to reset themselves and observed with smugness as the reds turned to amber.

“Mr. Veltin!” Rames demanded. “Explain that maneuver!”

Veltin spun his seat. Until the Skip Drive reset for the next jump, there was little for him to do and no reason for him to ignore the captain.

“Simple.” He told Rames. “Skip Drives have a twenty-five percent power overkill built into them. Basically, that extra power is used to overcome things like gravity fluctuations and the ship’s increased mass due to velocity. By killing the ship’s velocity and therefore, effective mass, I managed to get the gravitational distortion of the planet down sufficiently to allow the Skip Drive to operate. The torpedo detonation artificially disrupted the hyper field before it was fully stable, thereby causing a shutdown of the Skip Drive almost as soon as I triggered it. As a result, we skipped clear of the EM pulse, leaving the Assault craft to take the brunt of the blast. Because of the early shutdown, the Skip Drive wasn’t damaged, just stressed.”

Rames looked stunned, as did most of the others.

“You mean to say you planned for the torpedo detonation to collapse the field?” Puckett was incredulous.

Veltin frowned. “Not really. I was just leaving it to the last minute to trigger the Skip. As it happened, the EM pulse probably ended our little hop quicker than I could have done manually. I still think I could have done it fast enough to avoid damage to the drive, but even whilst I was pressing the appropriate button the drive was already shutting down.”

“Couldn’t you have just…” Rames shook his head, unable to frame a question.

“Either way.” Klane pointed out from the side-lines. “We’re alive. That’s the whole point of this. How long until we can Skip again? The
Triton
is nearly turned around.”

Veltin spun back to his console. Most of the tell-tales were green, with the odd amber warning still being stubborn about it.

“We’re good to go anytime.” He told them. “However, I won’t Skip us until the
Triton
does so first. There’s a slight turnaround on Skip jumps. A delay between Skips under normal circumstances. When they Skip, so do we. By the time they’re ready to Skip again, we’ll be doing a proper hyperspace jump. Then we’re home free.”

Klane scrutinized her console. “The
Triton
is coming to bear on us. She’ll Skip any… ah!”

Silently the
Triton
seemed to materialize a few hundred kilometers from the cutter, immediately beginning to fall away from the cutter as her earlier spatial momentum was restored.

“Launch detection!” LeGault called. “Incoming warheads!”

It was a spread of torps, Klane saw on her console. “Looks like they fired all sorts at us this time. Veltin, you’ve got a few seconds to do something or we’re dead!”

“Relax.” Veltin muttered, slipping his hands back into the waldos. A few deft presses and the starfield turned gray once more. This time, it stayed gray for nearly a minute.

When the stars reappeared, there was no sign of the
Triton
, or the weapons it had launched.

LeGault let out a sigh of relief.

“How long until we jump?” Rames growled.

“Just a few moments more.” Puckett answered. Since he’d been relegated to the navigation console, the main hyperjump was his responsibility.

“Captain?” Grimes called.

Rames looked around at his exo. “What is it?”

“I’m getting some confusing comms traffic from Tantalus Station. It seems like another ship has left the berthing ring without permission. Tantalus seems to think it’s been stolen and is demanding the
Shiva
return and pursue it. They’re referring to it as a bulk freighter…”

“The
Morebaeus
?” Rames exchanged glances with Grimes and Klane.

“Told you he could take care of himself.” Klane muttered, the hint of a smile on her face.

“It sounds like it.” Grimes agreed. “Apparently they’re at full thrust and quote ‘they are outrunning the PDC’s!’”

“Sounds like the
Morebaeus
then.” Rames snorted. “That thing has huge engines.”

“Is there anything we can do to help them?” Jones asked.

Rames shook his head. “Not now. Not so close to our own jump.”

“We’ve already helped them anyway.” Klane pointed out. “We drew off the heat.”

“Okay everyone. Here we go!” Puckett announced. “Five, four, three, two, one. Jump!”

The stars vanished yet again.