Hunter Legacy 9: Hero at the Gates (13 page)

"What the fuck was that!" I
yelled, as I bolted up in bed.

Angel jumped off the bed as fast as she
could, and shot out. Aline yelped, and sat up beside me. She was reaching to
hug me, when the twins ran in.

"What was that?" they said together.

I couldn’t speak. I disentangled myself
from Aline, dodged the twins, and ran into the bathroom.

A haggard face greeted me in the mirror.
You'd think I’d have been used to this by now. But no. Each new venture into
nightmare land left me shaken and shaky. I splashed water over my face, and
toweled off what was still mostly sweat.

The three girls peered in the doorway at
me.

"You okay Jon?" asked Amanda.

"No. Not really."

"You need a hug?" asked Aline.

"Give me a moment."

"Out here when you're ready,"
said Aleesha, and the three of them vanished from the doorway.

"Jane?"

"Jon?"

"What's the time?"

"The clock says three."

"We need to rethink the tugs."

"Oh?"

"Bad oh."

"How bad oh?"

"Everyone dies bad oh."

"Oh."

There was a moment's silence.

"Cause?"

"Prometheus disintegrates as soon as
the tugs take the load."

"I was afraid of that."

"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

"I will. Suggestions?"

"We need to test the hull before we
try to attach tugs to it. And we need a plan B if the hull is so brittle it
can't take a tow."

"Most obvious alternative is rigging
the tugs to push from the rear only, and to ramp up the speed very slowly."

"Next best alternative?"

"We send over repair droids to try to
get her engines going again."

"What's the likelihood they will
simply explode?"

"No way of knowing."

"Anyway we can strengthen the
hull?"

"I'll ponder it. There are some
simulations I can run, based on my scans of Enterprise."

"Fine. We'll talk after
breakfast."

"Confirmed."

I went out to a group hug with three naked
girls. I hardly noticed them, such was my worry. I shooed the twins back to
their own bed, and went out to find Angel. She was on the top of her tree,
looking apprehensive. I gave her a good hug and pat, and told her to come back
to bed. She stayed where she was.

Back in the bedroom, Aline tried to arouse
me, but nothing was happening in that direction. Going into the Death system
had me totally consumed, and not even naked girls could disengage my worry. I
only had to make one mistake, and we were all dead. As a mood disrupter, it was
pretty effective.

Aline gave up, turned over, and went back
to sleep.

I lay there.

I was sitting
in my command chair, in space.

Hundreds of
people stood behind me, beginning with the twins, each line containing two
extra people to form a huge triangle.

No ship, no
life support, no nothing.

Just me, in my
chair, in space. With a triangle of people behind me.

Space around
me was vaguely familiar.

As I looked
around I saw no planets.

There were
many asteroid fields.

In the
distance, two gas giants.

A movement in
front of me caught my eye.

A black dot
had appeared at long range.

As I watched,
another dot appeared.

Then another.

Then ten, a
hundred, a thousand.

Space in front of me turned black.

I bolted upright again, and kept going right
off the bed. I lay there for a while, before finally Aline appeared above me.

"Whatcha doing?" The twins rushed
in again. "Oh."

"Time Jane?"

"The little hand is on the five, and
the big hand is on the twelve."

"In adult please?"

"Five."

"Thanks."

The twins hauled me up, and flopped me back
on the bed.

"Jon," said Aline. "Have you
ever thought of not going to sleep?"

"I wish."

"We wish!"

"Not biologically possible,"
added Jane.

"What was it this time?" asked
Aline.

"Darkness nightmare," said
Amanda.

"Which means something bad happens
tomorrow," said Aleesha.

"Oh joy," said Aline.

"Yeah," said the twins together.

"Anyone want more sleep?" I
asked.

"NO!" they all answered together.

"Fine. I need to shoot
something."

We found BA and Jack already down in the
ranges, and she set us going on courses designed to stop you thinking about
nightmares. It almost worked.

The jump into the Death system was
stressful, but uneventful. The shields held. The new emitters operating from
Unassailable, gave us a secondary shield inside our normal shields.

To make sure we were safe, all the ships
were linked up into one or the other shield. In addition, everyone was in full
suit protection mode, connected into seat life support ports.

The sense of anti-climax was palpable. We
didn’t die, the computers didn’t fail, Jane remained unaffected. Nothing out of
the normal happened.

The one difference from being in a normal
system was the sun. Normally at jump point distance, the sun was invisible. The
HUD showed where it was, but it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye without
magnification.

Death was a regular blinking dot to the side
of the view ahead. There was something about it which bothered me.

"Jane, why can we see Death?"

"Where?" said Dick in a horrified
tone.

He looked around wildly, and then got it
together again. I grinned at him.

"Death the sun, not Death the
reaper."

"You damned near gave me a heart
attack!"

"Sorry."

The tension broke as people chuckled.

"Jane?"

"What's wrong with seeing a pulsar at
long distance?" asked Annabelle.

"What' right with it?" muttered
Grace.

"It's an anomaly," said Jane.
"The rotation is in the milliseconds, which should be way too fast for the
human eye to detect. Somehow, there seems to be a second, much slower, rotation
going on. Which is impossible."

"The impossible is our stock in
trade," said BA.

"But miracles always take a little
longer," I added.

"Let's not complicate things,"
said Alison.

"Is it white?" asked Dick.

"To the human eye, yes," answered
Jane. "Why?"

"Death rides the pale horse."

No-one took him up on this.

"Any effect on our shields?" I
asked Jane.

"Very slight. We have a definite time
limit in the system, but we're talking something like twelve hours, give or
take. It would be enough to make it to the other side where there is presumably
another jump point, but I’d hate to have to search for it first."

"Get us moving along the line to
Prometheus please."

"Confirmed."

"Do we need the suits?" asked BA.

"Give me time to make sure," said
Jane.

"We'll do our own checks as
well," said Magnus.

She and several of her people unplugged,
rose and left the CCC. Everyone was in safe zones, and as far from the outer
hull as possible.

I reached for my pad, and remembering the
nightmare, put it back in the holder.

We sat there watching the various monitors,
as BigMother rapidly crossed hostile space. At the back of our minds was the
hope we would be cleared to go back to 'slinky red' before we needed a toilet.
While the suits could open the appropriate hole to allow us to go, the whole
thought of that part of the anatomy suddenly getting a dose of gamma radiation,
tended to induce crossed legs syndrome. The whole thought induced an intense
déjà vu feeling.

Eventually, Jane put us out of our misery.

"You can rest easy," she said.
"The shields are protecting us fully. The new emitters are cancelling out
the gamma and x-rays effectively, and our normal shields are coping with
everything else. There is a slight drain, but as I said before, we're talking
twelve hours in-system without running into danger time."

As a group, we all shifted pretty much at
the same time.

Angel was especially glad to not be in her
suit any longer, and she sat on her pad and started in on a full bath. Nut joined
her on the console and together they engaged in a lick fest.

By midday, while I was eating finger food
Jeeves had brought in, Prometheus was large on the screens. Jane slid us
alongside at a careful distance.

A tug launched from the Flight Deck, and
proceeded to cross the gap between the ships. It came to a stop with the hull
just outside its shields. A repair droid crawled out, and proceeded to do scans
of the hull.

"Not good," said Jane. "The
hull has very little integrity left. As far as I can tell, the insides aren’t
as bad."

"Plan B then?"

"No, I don’t think that will work. Any
sort of acceleration in her current state will likely rip her apart."

"Plan C?"

"In progress."

The repair droid had returned inside the
tug, and the tug itself was moving now to the left Flight Pod. Once inside, the
tug stopped next to an airlock. The repair droid exited, moved to the lock
door, attached a power cable, and commanded the door to open. It did. The droid
disconnected the power cable, moved inside, reconnected, and shut the outer
door. It repeated the procedure for the inner door.

It looked like things still worked, as long
as you supplied your own power.

"Droid isn’t in good shape Jon,"
said Jane. "But it's functional enough to get to the power generators. But
the scans I'm getting are not promising. Even if we do get engines going, I
think the same disintegration will happen as attaching tugs."

"Plan D?"

"Almost ready."

"What's plan D?" asked Amanda.

"We place a series of structural
integrity generators around the hull to start with, and then use the tugs to
supply a single shield. It won't be a very effective shield, but it should protect
the generators for long enough, and make movement less dangerous. If we can't
get the engines going, we'll use a pair of tugs to push her along on a direct
course for the jump point, and let inertia push her through if they fail before
she gets there."

"Let's get on with it," I said.

"Confirmed."

We'd taken nearly five hours to get there.
It took nearly an hour to place the structural integrity generators and tugs,
and create the full shield. Our shields were edging downwards all the time. By
the time the tugs were ready, the repair droid had sent over enough data for
Jane to advise not trying the engines. She fired up the front tugs very slowly,
and Prometheus slowed to a stop, and started moving backwards towards the jump
point.

We made full speed instead, and left
Prometheus well behind us. The tension and novelty now well worn off, the crew
went about their own activities, albeit within the safe zones of the ships. The
simulators were used almost to capacity, as were the safe assault courses.

I stayed in my chair in the CCC, eyes going
in a constant rotation across the screens with the important information on
them. The closer we came to the jump point back into Pestilence, the more often
my eyes took in the shield screen. We were cutting it fine. And we didn’t
actually know exactly where the not enough shields point was. The stress
mounted as the day wore on.

As Jeeves appeared to ask if I was eating
dinner in the CCC, Jane jumped us out of Death. After a few minutes, she
declared the ship safe, and we all had dinner in our normal places.

George was the only one who appeared not
wearing 'slinky red'. Instead, he wore jeans and a white t-shirt, with black
writing which read 'I survived Death!'

I pinged him to send me a copy, whilst
holding my grin in.

It was obviously the topic of conversation
on his area of the table at one point, as I heard someone say, "Isn't that
just asking for trouble?"

Only time would tell if the cosmos
appreciated the joke. Or not.

On my way out, Carter's daughter stopped me
and asked if she could ask me a question. Not remembering her name, I had to
dig it out of my PC. Jill. I waved in front of me, and I showed her into my
suite, where we sat in my living room.

"How are you liking living on the
ship?" I asked her.

"I love it. At first I didn’t think I
would, but Jane showed me everything I needed."

"What do you do with yourself?"

"Study mostly. Mum won't let me fall
behind. I've never been much for school, but your Library is incredible. I've
never seen anything like it. Jane showed me how to do a search, and instead of
conventional information coming back, it delivers six hundred years of
accumulated knowledge."

This was news to me. Music, and flat and
hollo screens, I'd brought with me from Outback. The rest sounded like
Outback's copy of Galactica's main archive, continually updated in the
centuries since she vanished. But how had Jane obtained a copy of it?

"Locked yourself into a study track
yet?"

"Not yet. Mum wants me to consider
medicine of course. And I may study it too. But for now, I'm doing a wide
course which leaves all my options open."

"What can I help you with?"

She looked at me for a moment as if trying
to figure out how to ask something. I smiled at her.

"I talked to the girl you stopped from
being raped, down on Treasure Chest, before she left the ship. She told me what
you did to the man. I bullied Mum into confirming it."

My smile died.

"And?" I prompted.

"How could you do such a thing to
anyone, given the religious crap you believe in?"