While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 8

  Having sent Maggie to her suite, Kathryn, Jaren, and Margaret headed directly for the bridge after docking the shuttle.  

  “Report.” Kathryn ordered as they passed the doorway and pulled themselves into their respective seats and secured their harnesses.

  “You can see the zoomed in image here on the wall,” Felix answered, gesturing to the main wall screen.  “It looks kind of like a bunch of grapes with lots of bulbs covering a roughly triangular shape with what appears to be one large engine port currently slowing it down.”

  “It’s… slowing down?” Kathryn asked.  “Heading?”

  “We calculate that it appears to be on course to enter orbit around the sun.”  After a moment he felt the need to add: “Well technically everything’s in orbit around the sun of course, I mean the engine is burning on a trajectory to put it into orbit ranging between one and three million kilometers from the photosphere.”

  “That’s a lot closer than our rift crystal at 5 million,” Jaren remarked.  His concern for their only way home became clear and infected Kathryn to some degree.

  “Whoa.” Felix uttered in disbelief.

  “What?” Kathryn demanded with irritation.

  “It’s deceleration, it’s really crushing it, over fifty gees…” he marvelled.  “That’s why we didn’t detect it before, it just wasn’t there before.  It must have come in at a significant fraction of the speed of light and now it’s hammering the brakes hard now that it’s in the system.”

  “Have you tried to scan it?” Kathryn asked, pulling her hands apart after realizing she was picking again.

  “No,” Felix answered.  “On protocol we were waiting on you for that.  It’s impossible to know how it might react to that.”

  “Good man,” Kathryn offered.  She studied the strange looking ship on the wall in front of her.  Backdropped by a nuclear fireball, the optical sensors were working some kind of miracle just letting her see anything more than a black silhouette.  “Alright, let’s do this by the books people,” she commanded, trading her excited explorer hat for her very serious business one.  “We send the First Contact Package.  When ready, Commander.”

  “Yes Ma’am,” Felix answered, turning his chair around.  “Transmitting package now.”

  The First Contact Package was a set of communications which all ships had buried in their storage banks for just such an unlikely occasion.  Created by a special Star Fleet committee some years back, it offered a carefully considered peaceful greeting in all known linguistic and non-linguistic communication forms and included basic information about humans and how to communicate with them.  A prime number sequence was used as a frame to communicate in math and binary at first, and it was hoped that it could serve as an invitation to develop ever more sophisticated means of communicating.

  Jaren undid his harness and leaned over closer to Kathryn from his XO seat beside her.  “What do you make of it?” he asked in a low enough voice for privacy.

  “Hard to say yet.”  She was doing her best to avoid any undue speculation.

  “I wonder about it not having made any attempt to communicate with us first,” Jaren noted.  “Has it not noticed us or found us unnoteworthy?”

  “Yes, that is interesting…” Kathryn considered, again noticing herself picking at her nails and dropping her hands.  “It must see us here as readily as we see it there.  It just doesn’t seem to care.”

  “At least we’ve been able to determine it isn’t native to this system,” Jaren pointed out.  “We’ve only seen it travel sub light so it couldn’t be from just anywhere but at that speed it could have come from quite a ways, from a lot of star systems out there.”

  “True,” Kathryn acknowledged, pushing her pony tail out of the way after it floated into her face.  “It looks too small to be a colony ship.”

  “And any life forms like we’ve ever encountered would be liquefied by that extreme a deceleration,” Felix pointed out.

  She allowed herself a smirk at him which he saw and seemed to appreciate.  Liquefied was certainly an exaggeration, but not too big a one.  Crushed, certainly.  “So it’s a probe,” she surmised, “like the ones we sent out.”

  “A reasonable hypothesis… but to what end?” Jaren asked himself as well as her.  “Is it possible that it came here to establish a rift system like ours?  It’s proximity to ours alone concerns me greatly.  If anything happens, whether accidental or incidental we’d be stuck here with no way home.”

  “What happens if two different rift systems try to operate around the same star?”

  “I have no idea, I’d… have to do the math,” he admitted.

  “Get on that please,” Kathryn ordered her husband before looking back at the screen.  “Hmm,” she considered.  “It is incredibly fast…  Maybe it’s just a research probe that will just transmit information back.  Maybe it just starts at the star as a central point to begin its observations.  If you weren’t interested in any particular kind of world like us that might make sense.  

  “If it’s from a world say, fifteen light years away,” she continued, “and it could accelerate at the rates we’ve seen from it, it could easily get up to ninety percent of c pretty quickly.  It could cruise the rest of the way to avoid significant relativistic effects, get here in twenty or twenty-five years, transmit data back… a thirty five year mission for the researchers back home?  That’s not unreasonable, is it?”

  “Well with acceleration like that they certainly couldn’t take the trip themselves…” Jaren conceded.

  “Only if they’re organic,” Margaret reminded them.  This time Jaren just nodded thoughtfully that she was absolutely correct.

  “Any response from our transmission?” Kathryn asked Felix.

  “Well no,” he answered, “but they’re far enough away that it would only just have arrived.”

   

  So, they waited.  And they waited.  Time seemed to be passing too slowly as they all seemed to hold their breaths awaiting a response.  The only sound on the bridge aside from the cacophony of soft beeps and boops from the station consoles was the slow successive rapping of Kathryn’s fingers against her arm rest.  It irritated many, but she was in charge and it was no one’s place to complain.  Before it could go on too long though, Jaren placed his hand over hers and held it both to comfort her and to spare everyone the rapping.

  “Margaret.  Calculate how long it takes for a signal to travel back and forth between us and put up on the screen a count up since they’ve had the opportunity to respond but haven’t.”

  The sim nodded and turned her chair to execute the rather simple request at her terminal.  “Going up Admiral… now.”

  Red digits beneath the ship on the screen with days and hours zeroed out, minutes at seven, seconds ticking up from thirty-two, and milliseconds flashing by too quickly for her to read.

  “Damn, is that all?” Kathryn asked in frustration.  It already felt like so much longer.  “And days?  Really?” she asked Margaret, who just shrugged in response.  

  Kathryn leaned over to Jaren this time.  “I’m not sure how long is reasonable to wait.  I don’t want to rush it,” she explained, “but we certainly can’t just leave things like this for days.  At some point we can be reasonably assured that it either didn’t understand the package or is just choosing to ignore us.”

  “I agree, but how long is up to you,” Jaren said.  “You might want to gradually ramp up your scanning over time to avoid spooking them with a sudden barrage.  Give it some time and then maybe start with a passive radar scan maybe, then work your way up to-”

  “We’re getting a response…” Lieutenant Commander Grayson interrupted as she looked off into the distance listening in her earpiece.  She tapped at her panel, and it came in over the bridge loudspeaker.

  “More.”  The language was eerie, robotic and disembodied.

  “Is that all?” Kathryn asked.

  “That’s it.” Felix shrugged.

  “What does it mean?”

  “More information I would guess,” Jaren offered.

  “About what?  Us?  Our language?”  Her frustration was mixed with excitement.

  “I’d guess… our language?” Felix suggested.  “Maybe it’s saying if it had more of our language to study it could figure out how to speak to us.”

  “Big assumption,” Margaret cautioned.

  “Maybe,” Felix granted, “but I think it’s most likely.”

  “Felix how long until it’s in range of our rift satellite?”

  “About thirty hours.  Looks like its deceleration is slowing as it falls closer in.”

  “Right,” Kathryn acknowledged, pausing for a moment to consider the next move.  “I don’t want to just send them our entire literary library, too much context, too much too easily misconstrued about us…  Suggestions?”

  Kathryn had all but forgotten Patricia was sitting at a station behind her until she spoke up.  “You could send a small selection of books you consider safer, maybe even just one at a time.”

  Kathryn turned her chair around to acknowledge her.  “Good idea.  Send them… ‘Contact’ by Carl Sagan.  Can’t off the top of my head think of a better literary emissary to new sentient aliens if we’re trying to convey our best hopes and intentions.”  Patricia returned her warmly uncomplicated smile and Kathryn melted a little inside for a moment before turning back around.

  “Right, give me one second…” Grayson asked, before: “Package away, light delay eight minutes.”

  “Give me a clock until earliest we could receive a response please, Margaret,” she asked the simulant who obliged and the count up on the screen shifted to a countdown to some fifteen minutes and change remaining.

  “Oh shit we’re being scanned,” Felix reported.  “The heavy stuff too,” he said, “it’s fully mapping our interior and personnel.”

  “How hard, harmful?” she asked.

  “I’d say carefully calibrated to be suspiciously just shy of harmful,” Felix answered.

  “Well then by all means Felix, please do return the favour.”

  “Yes Ma’am,” he called back as started tapping at his console.  “Commencing comprehensive multispectral scan.”

  “Margaret, second timer until our scans come back please.”

  The simulant nodded and the second timer appeared, almost two minutes longer than the first.

  It was a tense thirteen minutes.  Kathryn undid her restraints and floated out of her chair to have a good stretch.  She noticed a couple others on the bridge do the same once she signaled it was acceptable to do so.  A steward came and offered her a bulb of coffee and she was thankful.

  Getting first scans back, Admiral.” Felix reported.  “Hunh,” he said soon after.  “Well that’s funny, I wonder if I try…”

  “What’s wrong?” Kathryn asked.

  “Well, all my penetrating scans just bounced off the exterior; I can’t get inside.  The hull must be made of some kind of material we’ve never encountered before, or… or it’s shielded in some way I don’t understand.”

  Jaren floated over to Felix’s station and looked at his work over his shoulder.  “Kathryn everything we’ve learned so far suggests that this thing, whatever it is, is far more advanced than us.  We should be extremely cautious here.”

  Kathryn nodded that she understood.  ‘Be careful’ was so obvious a point by now that she found it hard to believe he thought she needed to be reminded.

  “Its scans have ceased,” Felix reported.

  “Understood,” Kathryn acknowledged with a slow sigh.  “I guess now we just wait to see if-”

  “What is your purpose?” that same eerie voice came in over the bridge speakers.

  Kathryn looked at the others and they all seemed as stumped as she.  She pushed a button on her arm rest which patched into her chair’s microphone to respond.  “Alien vessel, we offer friendly greetings.  We are explorers sent by an organization we call Star Fleet, an organization commissioned by humans like us from four different worlds.”

  Kathryn looked inquisitively up at Jaren for feedback, and his face contorted to express a sentiment of ‘yeah, sure, good enough.’

  Kathryn sighed as she settled in for another long wait on the light delay.  “Man,” she exclaimed, “that light delay is gonna-“

  “Your purpose here is exploration?” the transmission came through.

  Kathryn froze.  “That can’t have been a response to what I just said, can it?”

  “Not unless they can alter the laws of physics somehow,” Felix balked.

  On a hunch, Kathryn pressed her chair’s comms button again.  “Yes, peaceful exploration.  What is your purpose?”

   “You can’t really expect that-” Jaren started after a few seconds before being interrupted by the impossible.

  “To establish an interstellar gateway in this star system,” the ship answered.

  Kathryn turned off her microphone and looked at Jaren.  “How is that possible?” she demanded.

  “It’s… it’s not!” Jaren balked.  The apparent violation of the limit to the speed of light seemed to have left him more flustered than she’d ever seen him.

  “Anyone?” she asked of the bridge.

  “Way, way more advanced than us,” Margaret offered with the first note of concern she’d ever heard in her voice.  

  “So you were right,” she said to Jaren in a lower tone but not one expected to keep her words private.  “They’re here to set up their own rift point.”  

  She turned the microphone back on.  “To whom am I speaking?” she asked.  “Where are you from?”

  “Is the existing portal system around this star yours?” it asked.  

  The way it completely ignored her own question about its origins made her acutely uncomfortable.  Alarms were starting to go off in her reptilian brain but she mammalian urge to diplomacy kept pushing them away.

  “Yes, it is.  Who are you?” she asked more forcefully.  “Please answer.”

  “We cannot operate parallel rift systems,” the voice informed.

  The words hit her like ice.  That same reptilian brain already knew where this was heading.  “Then perhaps we can work together to enable mutual-”  She was cut off by the alien ship’s subsequent transmission.

  “Your portal system must be destroyed to allow ours to be established.  Do not attempt to interfere.”

  “That is absolutely unacceptable!” Kathryn yelled at the disembodied voice, anger finally boiling over.  She pressed the button to mute the channel.  “Byrne,” she commanded.  “Plot an intercept course, full military thrust.  Get us back to the star as soon as humanly possible.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Byrne snapped back.  “Full military thrust.”  As trained, the officer opened a ship wide channel.  “Ready for max thrust,” he warned the rest of the crew.  “Max thrust in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.”   

  Kathryn re-opened ship-to-ship as she felt herself pushed back down into her seat at nearly a full G.  The unusual acceleration was especially challenging for those in the habitat pods, which now had two different orientations of simulated gravity, making it impossible to keep your bearings.  They’d all been trained to make their way to the central section of the ship as quickly as possible when warned of max thrust.

  “We must work together to establish a system we can both access.” Kathryn demanded.  “We will not stand by and allow you to destroy our only way home, certainly not before we can traverse it, we’ll be stranded here!”

  Six seconds, ten seconds, fifteen seconds of silence on the bridge…

  “DAMMIT!!” Kathryn roared as she hammered her fists down on her arm rests.  “Options!?” she demanded angrily from the others around her.  

  “We could keep trying to communicate with it,” Jaren obligatorily offered but so half-heartedly it was obvious he saw no hope in it.  “We could keep trying to reason with it.”

  “If it destroys even one of our collecting satellites around the star…” Felix said, shaking his head, “our system becomes inoperable.  We only have six months of regular provisions onboard, and six months of emergency supplies beyond that, and there’s nowhere in this system to resupply either.”

  “Jaren is there any way we could use their system after they’ve destroyed ours and left to establish a connection to one of our others?” she asked.

  “Highly unlikely,” he answered in his serious professional business tone.  “We can’t be sure it’s even the same kind of technology.  Even if it is, what kinds of frequencies and activation codes are involved would make it… I mean we make a point of locking our system out to those who aren’t authorized, I have to imagine they must too.  Besides, even if we had their blessing there’s no way to know if our two systems are mutually compatible.  Each may only be able to access gateways in their own networks.”

  The room was silent for what seemed like an eternity.

  “Alright,” Margaret finally spoke up.  “I’ll say it if no one else will, we have missiles.”

  “You want to attack them.” Kathryn balked in disbelief at the suggestion.

  “Attacking them seems to be our only move other than resigning ourselves to a slow agonizing death,” she insisted.  “Worst for me, I’ll have to watch all of you suffer and die long before finally dying of boredom and loneliness myself.”

  “Molly…” Kathryn implored her in exasperation.

  “Kathryn why do we even have those weapons if not for exactly this kind of situation?” Margaret insisted.

  Kathryn looked away but Margaret kept at her.  “They have clearly stated hostile intent to actions that will condemn every human on this ship to a slow death.  What clearer justification could there be?”

  “I will not be both the first to discover alien intelligence and the first to kill it!” She angrily yelled at her friend.  “Byrne, ETA?”

  “Still over fifty hours Ma’am, and that’s without slowing down.”

  Kathryn looked around the bridge.  “Are there any suggestions short of a military response?” she asked, forcing an injection of calm into her voice.

  Byrne turned around in his chair.  “I trust your judgement Ma’am.”  The rest of the bridge crew nodded in agreement.

  Kathryn got the impression that he agreed with Molly but not strong enough to say so out loud.  It occurred to her she got that same impression from everyone else on the bridge.  Naturally nobody wanted to be the first to open fire on the first alien intelligence they’d had contact with, but even more so they didn’t want to be the first to be stranded in an alien system.  Everyone wanted the chance to go home a little more than they didn’t want to attack.

  Kathryn leaned forward, laced her fingers together and put them under her chin in concentration as she studied the strange ship on the screen in front of her.  Why couldn’t this have gone differently, she asked herself in frustration.  For a moment she silently cursed the ship for putting her in this position.  She was responsible for all of the lives under her command.  She had a duty to do everything she could to get them home.

  “Jaren please assume the tactical station.” she asked, her tone masking anything other than pure resolve.  He nodded and was quickly out of his restraints and on the move.

  “Open the missile ports.” she ordered and Jaren nodded in acknowledgement.  “What is our compliment of weapons?” she asked as he sat down at the previously unoccupied station and input his credentials.

  Jaren floated back to his seat and tapped at his panel as he strapped himself in.  “Besides our primary laser and chain guns, eighty-six missiles total, sixty-four conventional, twelve nuclear, twelve anti-matter.”

  “I doubt that laser would do much more than bounce off their hull given how it laughed at our scanning beams,” Felix said.  “Chain guns only effective at close range.”

  Kathryn nodded.  “Problem is we don’t know what kind of weapons they’ve got themselves,” she considered out loud.  “We can throw everything we’ve got at them and try to destroy them on our first volley, or we can fire a warning shot and risk them blowing us out of the sky for it.”

  “They must have some kind of weapon if they intend to disable our satellite network,” Jaren suggested.

  “Alright,” Kathryn decided, leaning back into her chair.  “I want to be certain to severely disable them, but if possible I don’t want to completely destroy them.  Ready one nuke and dial it down to lowest possible yield.  All those bulbs…” she looked at the screen and thought.  “It’s a good bet those are their equivalents of our collecting satellites, or at least what will shape into collecting satellites when they’re deployed.  Maybe if we destroy enough of those it’ll realize its mission is impossible and have to negotiate with us to get home using our system.  If that’s even possible of course,” she granted Jaren in response to his look of skepticism.  “You’d think they’d have a better shot trying to use ours with our help than the other way around.”

  “Fair reasoning,” Jaren granted without looking back again.  “Missile ready.”

  Kathryn thought of their daughter and said a silent prayer to herself and the universe that this was the right decision if only for Molly’s sake.

  “Fire.”

  With a single last tap at Jaren’s panel, the wall superimposed a second screen in the lower right corner of the primary image of the alien ship, where they could see an opening in the forward section of the ship for a moment before the ship’s linear magnetic accelerator missile launchers left only a barely visible blur before disappearing from view.  The secondary window then switched to a view from the ship’s telescopes to keep track of its approach.  Soon after launch its anti-matter engine fired and it accelerated away far faster than humans could possibly tolerate.

  “Missile away,” Jaren reported.  “Time on target… twelve minute.”

  “Oh for…” Kathryn muttered in frustration, “that’s a fucking eternity!”

  “Well,” Jaren shrugged, “space is still really, really big.”

  Kathryn fell back into her chair exasperated.

  “Admiral…” Felix started with obvious concern, “I’m detecting a massive power build up in the alien ship.”

  She looked up at the screen and watched as it turned around to face the forward point of its cone shape towards them.

  “Oh no,” she softly whispered in horror.

  They all watched as a soft glow in a recess at its tip grew brighter and brighter until it hurt their eyes to look at it, and the cameras began filtering out the more blinding parts of the light.  Not long after a brilliant pillar of yellow and white light fell upon them like a cosmic thunderbolt of some ancient unfathomably powerful god of thunder.

  The ship’s shudder felt catastrophic, but they were still alive a few seconds later when the beam subsided.  All of their screens had gone blank and the lights were dim when they did finally flicker back on while emergency lights and sirens otherwise filled the air.

  “Damage report!!” Kathryn screamed.

  “Well, we’re still here…” Felix answered, pulling himself back into his chair after being flung out of it, confirming Kathryn’s own weightless sense of the engines having failed.  Back in his seat, Felix tapped at his panel at first, then hammered his fist down on the glass in anger before flinging himself out of his seat to an adjacent unoccupied station which he seemed to have better luck with.  “Most of our instruments on the forward section are gone, utterly shorn away from the hull with that blast.  The hull underneath held, just barely though.  I think we were lucky and just caught a glancing blow, only the periphery of the ship’s weapon.  If we get hit by that thing dead on at full power, I’m pretty sure it’ll leave us nothing but a mist.  We have to get out of here now.”

  “Engines?” she asked.

  “Tripped, but still functional,” Felix quickly reported.  “Restarting them now.”

  “Lord, was that a warning shot or just bad aim?” Jaren exclaimed, his rare blasphemy as clear an indication as any of how rattled he was.

  Kathryn quickly looked up on her side console the location markers of all of the crew.  Everyone had made it to the engineering section, including Maggie.

  “I don’t plan on sticking around to find out,” she said.  “Mister Byrne, turn us around and make for the far side of Yuri at best possible speed.  Get us out of line of sight of that damn ship, I don’t care if you have to burn out the engines and snap off the habitat arms to do it, just get it done.”

  “Y-, yes, Admiral, understood.” the younger pilot was clearly shaken, but instinctively followed protocol.  Opening a ship-wide channel, he warned the crew.  “All hands, warning!  Warning!  Full military thrust!  Five seconds to activate pressure wraps!”

  All Kathryn could do was hope that all of the crew were following protocol and were already in their pressure wrap chairs which as their names implied, put a cover over your entire body and squeezed your limbs separately hard enough to force blood back into your torse and through the brain.  At this point she could only hope against hope that her daughter had heeded her orientation and gotten into one of the chairs as well.

  Kathryn’s seat wraps automatically came up and over her torso, arms, and legs, squeezing them individually until they were so tightly they hurt.

  “Five, four, three, two, one…”

  The main antimatter engines roared to life and the ship began accelerating back towards the planet at ten Gs according to her readouts, slamming them agonizingly hard into chair.  Their course was locked in since even with the wraps there was a fifty-fifty chance any one of them would pass out under this load, including the pilot.  She could swear she could hear the bending and twisting of metal in the habitat arms as the ship accelerated far faster than it was ever designed to.

  Kathryn tried to demand a report on their missile, but only a croak escaped her.  She could barely breathe as it was, and it was fifty-fifty if Jaren was even still conscious anyways.

  A minute later they were on a high orbit behind the planet and out of the alien weapon’s line of sight.

  The pilot had passed out and Kathryn ordered Margaret into the pilot’s chair.  “What’s the status of our missile?” she demanded of Jaren after seeing he’d also managed to remain conscious.

  “Hold on, patching into our planetary and solar satellites.”  Behind the planet he was having to hop signals between their different assets in the system to get a read.  He managed to put up on the wall screen a feed from an optical orientation sensor on one of the solar satellites.  It had nowhere near the resolution of the now blown away ship borne telescopes but it was enough.

  “Contact in seven, six, five, four, three, two, one…”

  They all watched as the image of the ship was replaced with a blinding white light which the system automatically filtered down to what their eyes could handle before it resumed normal imaging as the image settled.  The satellite’s limited sensors made it difficult to make out how badly they’d damaged the ship.

  They were fortunate that the missile had made it at all.  It was smart and programmed to evade countermeasures, but she was still a little surprised that it survived to make contact with the enemy ship after witnessing the terrible power of their light weapon.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Kathryn asked as she struggled with the image.

  “Hang on…” Jaren insisted, “I’m going to try setting up an interferometric link between several of the satellites.  Here.”

  Combining the resolution of several satellites was tricky, but once successful it produced a resolution which rivaled that of the ship’s original primary telescope.  The pilot woke up to join in on their horror at the absolutely untouched appearance of the ship.

  “We didn’t… fuck, we didn’t even scratch it,” Kathryn whispered to herself.

  “Jaren.”

  “Yes?”

  “Ready a full spread of antimatter missiles; maximum yield.  Fire when ready.”

  The nukes created a massive explosion, but the anti-matter weapons outright explosively annihilated with terrifying energy output whatever matter was in the path of the magnetically contained bottle of antimatter the missiles wielded at their tips.  Soon after her order, she was all four launch tubes whisk their warheads clear of the ship before their own engines burned them around the planet towards the sun.

  “Missiles away Admiral.  Time on target, twelve minutes.”

  “Still with us Felix?” she asked as she saw him start to stir.

  Felix’s head bolted up awake in disoriented panic.  “What happened?” he demanded.

  “Nuke seems to have had no effect.  We’ve launched four max yield anti matter missiles at it.  I need a comprehensive damage report from you.  Can you do that for me?”  She’d taken on a friendlier tone for the moment to pick her bridge crew back up.

  “I… of course, yeah.” He said as he turned back around to his station, shaking the cobwebs from his head as he went.

  “Grayson, you good?” she asked

  “Yes Admiral, thank you,” she said as she pulled herself back to her comms station.

  “Byrne?”

  “Still here Ma’am.”

  “Good.  I need you to plot an elongated orbit which keeps us behind the planet to that ship for as long as possible.  Calculate the burn we’ll need to conduct when we come around the planet again.”

  “Yes Ma’am, right away.”

  “Molly, I want you to survey the rest of the ship and assess if we have any casualties.”

  Margaret nodded respectfully, understanding that this was no time for jokes.  As she floated past Kathryn on her way out, she grabbed the simulant’s arm and squeezed as she looked up and let her see the fear in her eyes.  Margaret gently placed her hand on Kathryn’s quietly reassured her.  “Of course, I’ll check on her first.  Don’t worry Kat, I’m sure she’s okay.”

  Kathryn nodded at her sternly before releasing her arm and turning back to Felix as she left.  “Talk to me Parker.”

  Less than a minute later Felix was reading out his full report.  “Not good, but not catastrophic is the takeaway,” he offered.  “Obviously our propulsion and tactical systems are still functioning, but our hull is dangerously compromised.  Outer hull is compromised in several sections.  Thankfully there are no inner hull breaches yet, but where we were hit worst inner hull integrity was reduced to… Jesus, just over five percent, barely enough to hold out against the vacuum.  I’m honestly impressed the hull held up during that hard burn, a stiff fucking breeze could breach the hull at this point.  Emergency bulkheads would snap shut if we do get a breach but that wouldn’t help anyone in those section if it happened.”

  “Jaren, evacuate anyone in a section vulnerable to a hull thickness below twenty percent and seal off those sections as a precaution.”

  “On it,” he answered.

  “What else Felix?”

  “Our electrical and data systems are right fried.  Half of our stations here on the bridge are out.  Everything is on manual control and only that one wall panel up there is working.  Communications are… intermittent at best.”

  “Fixable?” Kathryn asked.

  Felix sighed.  “Patchable maybe.  In parts, at best.  Any better would take returning to dock for an extensive rebuild.”

  “Understood.  Do what you can.  Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” Felix chortled, anxiety giving way to nervous mirth.  “We bent the fuck out of the habitat arms.”  He put an external view of them from the forward most ship facing camera and showed how the arms were still lazily spinning, but now had a distinct swept back curve to them.  “How aerodynamic,” he dryly observed.

  “Missile is three minutes out,” Jaren reported a couple minutes later after Kathryn let her people have some time to do their work.  She’d even done her best to refrain from distracting them with her finger tapping but had given up trying to not pick at her fingers and was starting to draw blood from her mangled cuticles under the stress.

  “Good.  How about those sections?”

  “It took me some time to figure out how to communicate with people in that section, but I managed to just sound the evacuation alarm in those sections.  They seem to have gotten the hint and are almost all out.  Should be able to seal it up before the missiles hit.”

  “Good,” Kathryn said with an assured quick nod to herself.

  Margaret returned to the bridge and reported.  “Two people are still unconscious from the heavy thrust, didn’t manage to get to their wraps in time.  They’re in the infirmary but doc says they should recover before too long.  Everyone else seems alert and on station but obviously shaken.  They’re professionals though; you can count on them.”

  “And Maggie?” Jaren asked.

  “Fine, just fine.  It’s all clearly more excitement than she’d bargained for, but she actually seems oddly thrilled by it.  She’s a smart girl, followed her training and was already in her chair and all wrapped up when we went under thrust.  She claims she didn’t even lose consciousness.  Seemed a lot more worried about us than anything else.”

  “Does she know what’s going on?” Kathryn asked.

  “She didn’t when I got to her but I explained.  She’s appropriately alarmed but also I’d say appropriately fascinated by it all.”

  “Good,” Kathryn said.  “Glad she’s handling herself well.”

  “Missile strike imminent,” Jaren reported.

  “Take your station please Margaret.”  

  As the simulant dutifully pulled herself into her seat, everyone on the bridge looked at the one remaining wall panel together.  “Five,” Jaren called out, “four, three, two, one…”

  The blast looked very much the same as the nuclear one had, but in four successive bursts and on a scale which was orders of magnitude greater.  The whole screen washed out in white light and fully luminesced for several seconds before starting to settle down.  Nuclear bombs had to be detonated to convert their fuel into energy, but the antimatter payload in the missiles only had to come into contact with any regular matter for both to mutually annihilate into energy and have the same effect.  Whether it struck the enemy hull directly or was shot down while it approached at hypersonic speeds, both resulted in a spray of antimatter particles which each exploded like a tiny nuclear bomb when they came into contact with any of the target’s regular matter, instantaneously releasing all of the matter of both into tremendous amounts of pure energy.

  When the light subsided, the telescope system zoomed in again.  This time the result was very different.  The ship had several concave sections excised from it, like some great beast had come up and taken great big bites out of the side of the ship.

  “Much better,” Kathryn observed with satisfaction.  “Report.”

  “Its power readings have… dropped off a cliff,” Felix reported with relief.  “Its engine was annihilated and it appears to be ballistic.  I doubt that weapon of theirs is still working as well; the section we saw it emit from was also annihilated.  Even if it wasn’t I can’t imagine that ship still having the power required to use it anyways.  Pretty sure it’s dead in the water Kat.”

  “Alright then,” Kathryn half smirked.  “Now we can talk.”