James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 07 Read online

  Worlds Apart Book Seven:

  Yronwode

  C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 0 7 J a m e s G . W i t t e n b a c h w w w . w o r l d s - a p a r t . n e t

  A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . N o p a r t o f t h i s b o o k m a y b e r e p r o d u c e d o r t r a n s m i t t e d i n a n y f o r m o r b y a n y m e a n s , e l e c t r o n i c o r m e c h a n i c a l , i n c l u d i n g p h o t o c o p y i n g , r e c o r d i n g , o r b y a n y i n f o r m a t i o n s t o r a g e a n d r e t r i e v a l s y s t e m , w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n i n w r i t i n g f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r .

  M a n u f a c t u r e d i n t h e U n i t e d S t a t e s o f A m e r i c a L i b r a r y o f C o n g r e s s C a t a l o g i n g i n P u b l i c a t i o n D a t a W i t t e n b a c h , J a m e s

  W o r l d s A p a r t B o o k 0 6 : C r u c i b l e I . T i t l e

  I S B N 0 - 0 - 9 7 6 3 3 8 4 - 0 - 8

  CHAPTER: 01

  TIME: 694 days after Pegasus left the 12 255 Crux System The Derelict

  Deep within the wreck of an ancient and gigantic spaceship, Trajan Lear was getting his ass kicked.

  Lear flew through the air backwards across the deck and landed hard, kicking up a spray of hoarfrost crystals that had coated the deck. The ice-flakes remained hanging in the near-vacuum, unworried by the almost non-existent gravity. Trajan, sprawled belly-down on the deck with his nose and mouth pressed against the faceplate of his spacesuit, watched as a trail of hoofed footprints appeared in the forst, making a trail toward him. “It’s coming around again!” he shouted into his COM Link.

  A blaze of charged plasma blasts cut through the air above him, spewing from the pulse-rifle of Warfighter Johnny Rook. “Stay down!” Rook yelled, which was unnecessary and which reverberated loudly and angrily inside his helmet. The blasts, meanwhile, connected with the invisible creature, creating a brief afterimage of some giant, demonic man-bull with long horrible limbs and a face with the skull on the outside of the skin. The blasts did no apparent damage otherwise.

  “Yeeeearrrrrgh!” Max Jordan, attired in the same black and gray space-armor as the others, gave a war cry (also splitting his own ears inside his space helmet) and ran across the deck firing his pulse rifle. Just as he reached the monster, an invisible paw swung, making swirls in the frosty air, and smacked Jordan hard in the chest. No one but he heard the sharp snap of two ribs breaking, and Jordan was hurled back against the bulkhead and crumpled to the ground.

  Meanwhile, the monster barely broke its stride and continued to bear down on Trajan Lear.

  “Just keep it busy,” came a voice in their COM Links. It was Tactical Lt. Cmdr.

  David Alkema. “It took us two years to find this ship. Its NavCore is the only clue we’ve got to navigating in the Orion Quadrant.”

  “As if we needed to be reminded,” Trajan muttered as the monster picked him and threw him against the far bulkhead.

  Jordan sneered and raised himself up, “Is that all you got?” He picked up a sturdy length of pipe from the frosty deck and jacked up his suit’s strength augmentation until he had enough to punch through a blast door, then charged the beast again.

  He slammed his stout length of pipe hard against the beast’s back. The pipe bent like a banana and the beast emitted one of its horrible, electromagnetic howls that filled their COM Links with white noise that sounded like unholy beasts shrieking in the pit of hell.

  Then, it swung about, picked up Max Jordan by the front of his space suit and shook him like a dog would shake a dead ground monster.

  The part of the ship where TacLC Alkema was working was in even worse shape, containing no air, no heat, no light and malfunctioning gravity that resulted in a light, disorienting pull to the side of the shaft, which was covered with broken and jagged beams of what remained of the ship’s structure. The only illumination in the long, deep well came from his spacesuit, and it was just barely enough to make out the pattern of lines and crystal along the surface of a tall cylinder suspended in the shaft; the ancient ship’s braincore.

  He used a tool from his pack to pry open one panel on the side, revealing three small cylindrical crystals. “Crap on a cracker,” he muttered. Moving gingerly in the near-weightless environment, he felt his way to the next likely location of the crystal where Navigational Data was stored.

  Previous attempts to access the Core had been thwarted by the presence of the weird alien creature being kept distracted by Trajan Lear and the warfighters. They didn’t know whether the creature was part of the ship’s defenses, some kind of animal that was being transported on board, or some alien entity that had taken residence in the ship’s wreckage. Also, they didn’t care. All they knew was it was about three meters tall, mostly invisible, and it had been holding off their every attempt to retrieve the ship’s navigational data core.

  And so Alkema had come up with the idea that someone should keep the creature occupied while he went down into the Braincore and salvaged the ship’s navigational data to find human colonies here in the Orion Quadrant, on the opposite side of the galaxy from where they had begun their journey; a Quadrant about which they knew nothing except that somewhere was a planet called Earth that had been the cradle of all humanity.

  Hopefully, there was only one of the creatures on board.

  Pegasus had arrived in the Orion Quadrant lost among thirty billion stars without a map and over 3,000 souls short of a full crew. The Combined Odyssey Directorate had ordered Pegasus to remain in the Perseus Quadrant and continue its mission of exploration and discovery. Prime Commander Keeler had disagreed with those orders and had snuck Pegasus through the StarLock Chapultepec while no one was looking (with the inadvertent assistant of Acting Shipmaster Goneril Lear, who had somehow gotten the impression that Lexington Keeler, the Pathfinder ship whose repair she was overseeing was experiencing massive total systems failures).

  The memory banks of the Chanticleer StarLock had been wiped clean like those of the Chapultepec StarLock back in their own Quadrant. The StarLock’s systems had begun coming on-line as soon as the crew flew over. Chanticleer was different than Chapultepec. Instead of sterile white, its interior was a kind of sandy beige. Its diameter was 1,044 kilometers wide, not quite as large as Chapultepec. Four large spheres were positioned at 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees around its perimeter, each a vivarium, a miniature world containing plant and animal life. As the station had sat vacant for over a thousand years, the plant and animal life had begun spilling into adjacent sections.

  In its hangar levels, they had found a quantity of interstellar probes. The probes were somewhat large than their Aves shuttles, built like semi-spherical shells around a central propulsion systems with sensors and transmitters tucked into the space between. Drawing on knowledge gleaned from the Chapultepec Station, the crew …

  mostly Tac LC Alkema … figured out how to launch the probes through the StarLock and into star systems around the types of stars suitable for terra-class planets.

  Unfortunately, they had only 1,381 probes, and over 6,000,000 nearby stars to survey. The first 106 probes found no colonies, and neither did the next 180 or the following 97.

  But, while processing telemetry from probe 383, they had picked up a weak signal that they eventually identified as the transponder signal from an ancient starship that happened to lie between Chapultepec StarLock and the star system the probe was examining, and it lay less than a light-year from the station.

  It was a huge wreck of a ship, but the intact sections left the impression of a sort of space train. The ship consisted of segments joined together in a long chain nearly 40 kilometers in length. At the front and rear of the space train were segments containing the navigation an
d propulsion systems that powered it through space. Over the centuries, its cohesive integrity had broken down, and sections had begun breaking loose from the framework. And along its 10,000 meter length, gravity, stress, and radiation had begun to tear the old ship apart.

  The chance discovery of this ancient ship, Hewlander, by what remained of the name on its hull, had been an extraordinary lucky break and recovering its navigational laws was probably their only chance to find the human colonies in this Quadrant.

  Trajan Lear picked up himself up and shook off the mildly stunned feeling he had gotten from landing on his neck. He charged full force at where he thought the invisible creature was and punched out with his right arm. He was wrong, and the force of his swing sent him spinning to the deck. When he hit, the creature brushed him hard and backwards back into the bulkhead.

  Also, the creature threw Max Jordan across the deck, and he landed lightly on top of Lear.

  Johnny Rook stood off to the side, considering the situation. “Plasma blasts, completely ineffective. Blunt instruments with augmented suit strength, also ineffective.” He paused. “Hey, guys. Have we tried reasoning with it?” Lear pushed Max from on top of him. From his angle on the floor, he caught sight of the large open hatchway through which Rook had been tossed. He hit his COM

  Link “Rook, if we can get it into the next section, we could seal it off in there.”

  “It walks through walls,” Jordan reminded him.

  Lear continued. “We could disconnect the segment and blow it into space. It’s worth a shot.”

  “Can you blow the disconnect?” Rook asked.

  “I can figure it out,” Lear assured him.

  Rook struggled to his feet and found the hatch release. It opened into yet another section. At that moment, the creature made itself visible directly in front of Rook, and howled.

  “Here, reason with this,” Max Jordan yelled, and pulled a Stick-E-Grenade from his belt and slammed it onto what he guessed would be the creature’s neck. The creature responded by tossing him through the open hatch into the next compartment.

  David Alkema removed another panel from the braincore. Here was an array of nine thin cylinders arranged in a matrix. They gave off a faint blue glow. “Kumbayah!” Gingerly, he pulled the matrix from the cylinder.

  Slowly, deliberately, he connected the interface patchcord to the side. “Okay, Chloe, I’ve attached an interface to what I am pretty sure is the NavCore. I’m using the transmitter in my spacesuit to upload it to Pegasus’s primary telemetry lab.”

  “Got it,” answered Specialist Chloe Idaho. “We’re receiving data from the storage crystals. I’m going to need a few minutes to find a translation matrix.”

  “It would be good if you could find that quickly, Chloe. I don’t know how much longer the guys can hold out.”

  “Oh… crap…” Rook said as the grenade detonated.

  The creature was not harmed by the detonation. Not very much, anyway.

  That section of the ancient ship, however, was not in very good shape.

  It was, in fact, in such a fragile condition, that the blast from the grenade was enough to blast open a sizeable hole in its side.

  The good news was, this blew the creature out into space.

  The bad news was, that section of the ship was in really bad shape, and the blast of a grenade was more than enough to initiate its complete structural collapse.

  “Piss!” Rook shouted. The part of the section closest the hatch was a wreck, and the two sections were starting to tear apart. Rook quickly moved to the hatch to pull in Jordan and Lear before they could be spaced.

  One at a time, Lear and Jordan grabbed his arm and pulled themselves through. Then Lear sealed the hatch behind him. The section they were in was shaking.

  Tremors were running the length of ancient ship’s hull.

  Rook scrambled toward the next hatch, as the ship began to disintegrate.

  Remembering his low-gravity training, he kicked with his legs toward the open hatch.

  The drift toward the hatch seemed to take a very long time.

  “What the hell just happened?” came David Alkema’s angry voice through their comm-links.

  There was a pause as though deciding who should answer. Naturally, it fell to Trajan Lear. “Remember how you warned us that this ship’s structural integrity was in a very precarious state?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “We just detonated a plasma grenade in one of the most fragile sections.” Lear paused for a second. “We should probably leave before the rest of the ship falls apart.”

  “Crap on a cracker,” Alkema turned his attention to Chloe Idaho. “Did you copy that?”

  “Copy it where?” Idaho asked.

  “Did you hear what they just told me? If that isn’t the Navigational Core, we may not have a chance to find another one.”

  Alkema could hear Idaho frowning through her next transmission. “Hold on, there’s a lot of corruption in this data, and it’s not even in any standard language that we know.”

  “I don’t have time for this, Chloe.”

  “I’m going to try cross-matrixing it to the code used in the StarLock’s systems.” Alkema bit his lower lip, a bit angrily. Logically, using the StarLock’s code as a starting point should have been the first thing they tried. Vibration from the distant collapse several kilometers away from his position were beginning to reverberate through his own section.

  “I’ve got it,” Idaho reported. “It’s got star charts, drift calculations, … navigational data. It’s the core, Rook, Jordan, Lear… you can get out of there now.” Fortunately, Rook, Jordan and Lear were already getting out of there, running through the ship’s superstructure while the rear compartments blew apart behind them.

  Trajan called out, “Phoenix, track my signal. I need you right now!” Outside, his Aves heard him. Phoenix detached from the ship’s hull, and flew a few hundred meters down to the source of its master’s signal. It was an enhanced model of the Aves spacecraft they had departed from their homeworlds of Sapphire and Republic with. It still retained its elegant shape… the viper’s head command module joined to a primary deck and propulsion section, blended wingblades, and perched elegantly on its wings a pair of Accipiters, short range ships used for fighting and reconnaissance. Most of the enhancements were to her systems: a more powerful reactor, better speed, sharper vision, smarter and more powerful weapons. However, there had been no need to upgrade the Artificial Intelligence (AI). Phoenix was almost psychically bound to her pilot, Trajan Lear, spoiled whelp of Pegasus’s former and unlamented Executive Officer. It came to him like a loyal Spaniel, secured itself to the outer hull of the ancient freighter, and sealed its ventral airlock to a contact point on the hull.

  After that, it waited.

  “Phoenix is secure to the outer hull. Airlock in place,” Trajan Lear reported.

  “Let’s get ourselves out of here.” Lear, with the intense patience for which pilots were known, tried and failed to release the docking hatch.

  “It’s non-functional,” he reported. “We’ll have to move to the next section.”

  “Jam that!” Max Jordan shouted, and displaying the capacity for getting-angry-and-not-thinking-things-through for which he was known, he took out a small plasma detonator and attached it to the lock.

  Rook and Alkema, who had not had time to tell Jordan not to do that, ducked.

  Jordan had set the charge low, but not so low that the hatch didn’t spray the interior with shrapnel.

  “Balls! My suit’s leaking,” Jordan said, but he was already tearing the hatch open.

  The ship continued to judder and quake. Rook helped Jordan finally wrestle the docking hatch apart. From there, it was just matter of drifting into Phoenix’s main deck.

  The Aves helped them by shunting a little artificial gravity their way. Getting to the main cabin through the dorsal hatch required a climb through the Aves weapons bay, past racks of Hammerhead missiles.


  Once on board, Trajan Lear stripped off his helmet, and climbed up to the flight deck, which was one deck up from the main deck. Lear was a handsome blond man in his early twenties, with strong cheekbones and the gray eyes typical of his family line, which had been part of his homeworld, Republic’s, ruling political class for centuries.

  That he had chosen a career as an Aves pilot had been a grave disappointment to his mother. He slid into the command seat, and the ship formed an instrument cluster in front of him and a neural interface appeared on his cheek. “Lt. Cmdr Alkema, are you ready for extraction?”

  Alkema packed the precious navigation core crystals into his backpack. “I’ll be at the extraction point in five minutes.”

  “Make it three,” Trajan told him.

  Looking at his head-up display, Trajan saw that the sections – containers really

  – of the freighter that had broken loose were now banging against other parts of the ship, creating a kind of chain reaction. Space around the old freighter was filling with loose sections and debris. He detached the airlock coupling and guided his ship forward to the command section of the old wreck, a kind of wedge-shaped section that extended above and beneath the main frameswork. He turned Phoenix on her side and re-attached her ventral airlock coupling to the airlock closest to the Braincore shaft. “Lt.

  Commander Alkema, I have a seal on the airlock you went in through, but I don’t know how long we can hold it.”

  Rook and Jordan joined him on the main deck, having taken off their space helmets as well. Both appeared slightly younger than he, being each barely out of their teens. Johnny Rook was a clean-cut figure with brown hair and eyes – a face that might have been spoiled by a too-large, too-angular nose but he somehow he made it work –

  and a tight athletic body. Max Jordan was a little sloppier, a little more boyish, a little softer around the edges with thick sheaves of light red hair that spilled from his tactical helmet.

  “We’re waiting on you, Lieutenant Commander,” Lear informed Alkema.

  Rook looked at the head-up display and gave a low whistle. “2000 years of solitude, and we ruined it in a few minutes.”