A4 - ShipCore - Chapter 198 – Blowback (Patreon)

USD: Thirty-Nine hours since hostile fleet incursion.

Location: Meltisar System, MNS Thea’s Hackjob, CIC

A confirmation signal arrived from Wormy, and Thea confirmed with Engi that all systems were operational and ready for the stress of wormhole generation. She did her own run down through the systems to double-check and found everything reporting ready.

Or rather, ready enough. There were too many additions and improvements to be listed that needed to be made, but all of them came at the expense of time. Considering the situation, time was the one thing they didn’t have.

“Elis, can you com Admiral of the 6th and ask them if they are ready for transition?” Thea asked the other woman.

Two red eyes skewered her with an annoyed look. “You literally fired everyone and now you want me to be in charge of security and communications? On a moonlet larger than a fleet battleship?”

“I’m busy dealing with all the physical stuff,” Thea countered.

Elis rubbed her forehead and shook her head. “I’ve done this before with Alex, you know. I’m not a comms officer. Let Captain Mackey and his crew off the Alacrity to help.”

Thea frowned and looked back at her operations panel that highlighted the docked cruiser in the moonlet’s main hangar. She’d pulled the engineering and operations crew from the ship since there were things that humans could do that would spare her and Engi from having to go through extra effort and focus, but she had kept those numbers strictly under control.

It wouldn’t do to replace one type of stress and focus for another: monitoring them for sabotage and covert actions.

“Fine. Call Captain Mackey and have him handle ops for us,” Thea muttered.

Elis shook her head as she picked up a hand mic. “You’re just like her.”

Thea shot her a glance, but turned back to make sure the wormhole drive was ready. Everything had been slapped together in such a frantic fashion that her MainComputer was pinging warning messages everywhere about a more than 1% chance of self-detonation.

Preparations were quickly underway, and an anticipative hum began to fill the entire moonlet. There wasn’t anything she could do about that; there hadn’t been time to install vibrational baffles. It became loud enough for Elis to shoot her a worried look.

“We aren’t about to explode, are we?” Elis asked seriously.

“Not too much,” Thea replied while gritting her teeth. She transferred a second computronic module to Wormy, but the danger was really just a factor of how quickly things had been put together. Still, the extra processing power allowed more rapid on-the-fly adjustments to the drive as it powered up.

When the green light beside the drive’s status bar lit up, Thea let out a breath of relief.

“Opening communication point at suspected 1st fleet location,” Thea declared.

Outside the ship, there was a sudden spark of light and then a small slit in the universe was sliced open. It was small, barely large enough for a person to fit through. That was more than enough to facilitate a high-band signal.

A positional encoding from the 1st fleet arrived almost immediately. The fleet was not at all where Thea had expected, and she was forced to cut the wormhole connection off.

“What happened?” Elis asked with a frown.

“Wrong position. Luckily, such a small wormhole doesn’t require a full recharge of the system,” Thea replied. A minute later, the hum through the Hackjob began to permeate everything again, but it ended much more quickly.

A second slit opened, and this time, Thea directed a tight beam laser through it to the Aegis. The real-time FTL communication was technically violating a bunch of universal laws, which was the purported reason such technology was banned.

Alex’s image flicked into existence on the Hackjob’s bridge in the form of a hologram.

Thea smiled. The technology was banned, probably just because of what they were about to accomplish using it.

Big Blue’s expression wasn’t what she expected, and Thea’s smile slid into a neutral line. “Situation Report? Do you have a trajectory for us to come in behind on the Imperial Fleet?”

Alex shook her head and began her report without preamble. “The First Fleet has held off the Imperial Fleet’s advance. We’ve inflicted heavy casualties on their side and you aren’t needed here.”

Thea and Elis both shared a look and looked back at Alex with surprise.

“Instead, I need you to support the 2nd and 3rd fleets fighting the Ertan Fleet. They were caught off guard and were in a rapid retreat.”

“I need you to assist them,” Alex said, her eyes meeting Thea’s gaze head-on through the hologram.

“Understood.” Thea nodded firmly, already reaching for a set of coordinates to establish a connection with the 2nd and 3rd fleets. “I’ll need to cut the connection.”

Alex turned toward Elis and gave her a smile, and wave before her hologram winked out. There was an extra burst of reports and information from Nameless that Thea filed away, then released the wormhole.

“I’m updating High Command and Tia. Captain Mackey has confirmed he can work as the go between with the 6th fleet, but reminds you he can’t leave his ship,” Elis said.

“That’s not a problem.” Thea waved her hand and suddenly the entire front wall of the bridge melted away into a hologram of the Alacrity’s bridge. Everyone on the bridge froze, some of them even jumping out of their seats as they looked back at an image of Thea and Elis on the Hackjob.

Captain Mackey fixed them both with a serious frown.

“Sorry, you’re essentially on board, and this should work better than shouting at Elis as a go-between,” Thea said.

“I’m supposed to be security,” Elis complained.

The Captain cleared his throat. “The 6th fleet has acknowledged the operational changes, but is still waiting for confirmation from Fleet High Command.”

Thea shrugged. “I’m about to open another communication hole and see about contacting Admiral Bithermoore. According to the update provided by Chi Alex, he’s assumed operational command of both the 2nd and 3rd fleets.”

“There’s been that much damage?” Captain Mackey asked before an even deeper frown appeared on his face.

Thea looked away, scanning the wormhole generator’s progress, and confirming it was ready for another even horizon creation. “Let’s find out.”

As soon as the new event horizon winked into existence, warning alarms began to go off. Data streamed into the moonlet’s tactical computer, dozens of hostile red blips appearing on the other side of the system.

Elis’ brow furrowed. “What—”

“Killing connection!” Thea shouted as she punched a few keys on her console. The wormhole vanished just as fast as it had appeared, but the rapid flutter of her heartbeat continued. “Fuck. We opened it almost in the middle of the Ertan Fleet.”

There was a moment of silence from Elis, and the bridge crew of the Alacrity. Truthfully, they weren’t at too much risk. The wormhole had been tiny, but if the enemy had been able to react in time, they could have put a deadly amount of focused laser energy through it.

And the Hackjob wasn’t that far away from the event horizon. They would have had a good chance of hitting the moonlet.

“Adjusting coordinates. It looks like the Ertan fleet pushed the 2nd and 3rd further and faster than expected,” Thea said. She punched in several commands, some for Wormy and others for Engi.

A warning appeared from Wormy and Engi, informing her of a delay. Thea looked over at Elis and then at Captain Mackey. “We are going to need to take five minutes to check on the equipment. Multiple small wormholes opening in succession could tax the generator in ways that aren’t entirely obvious.”

The delay turned into a tense silence as Thea allowed the two sub-cores to run through diagnostics and checklists. There really wasn’t much extra for her to do, so she watched the quiet operations on the Alacrity’s bridge. The distance to Meltisar mean their message would likely be arriving to High Command in the next few minutes as well.

She wasn’t sure how quickly Tia and the High Admirals would be able to react. Maybe they’d need to direct yet another wormhole closer to MIL-1A to speed that up. Things would have been considerably simpler if they had the ability to open more than one wormhole at a time, but that was exponentially more complicated due to the destabilizing effects an open wormhole had on newly forming event horizons.

She wasn’t even sure if it could be done on something smaller than a full-sized moon.

Their moonlet was a far cry from an actual moon, not even having enough gravity to form itself into a sphere.

Green bars flashed and Wormy sent an indication that things were ready.

“Opening portal to suspected 2nd and 3rd fleet location now,” Thea declared.

The moonlet hummed as the generator formed a new portal, this time much closer to the friendly fleet. A tactical connection was established almost immediately, and Thea aimed a tight-beam at the response they received on high-band.

Thankfully, there was no hint of Ertan interference this time, and a connection blinked into existence with the 3rd fleet’s flagship. Admiral Bithermoore’s flag bridge appeared, but things didn’t look too good. Smoke wafted out of damaged consoles while sparks sporadically crackled from damaged overhead panels. Everyone visible, including the admiral himself, was wearing sealed skinsuits.

Bithermoore’s gruff voice crackled from the bridge audio feed. “We’ve sustained serious damage. We’re within missile range, but we’ve depleted our stores. They seem to have used all of theirs in the first exchange as well.”

His voice echoed in the silence for a second as he glanced at one of his tactical screens. “The 2nd and 3rd fleets are outnumbered and damaged. Mostly damaged ships that’ve been slowed. If we pull away from them, we’d be leaving nearly a quarter of our ships behind. Unfortunately, they’re almost up to our rear and I’m expecting a long-range laser engagement any minute.”

Things were considerably worse than Thea had feared.

“Understood, Admiral.” Her reply was crisp. She glanced briefly at Elis, who wore an equally grim expression. “The 6th fleet is standing by to transit to your position and assist. We are just waiting on authorization.”

His gaze flicked back to her, but he didn’t object. No doubt he was wondering what the situation with the 1st Fleet was since they were due to assist them, not him. “We won’t have much time for coordination.”

Thea gave a curt nod. “Understood, Admiral. Prepare for our arrival.” With that, she severed the connection and turned toward her console.

Instead of the familiar hum of the wormhole generator powering back up, a shrill warning alert echoed through the CIC. Frowning, Thea pulled up the diagnostic report from Wormy. Her eyes widened as she scanned through the data; the repeated opening and closings of wormholes had taken a toll and the generator, and several critical components were showing signs of imminent failure.

The estimation was they could only make one more wormhole before the entire system would need a full overhaul, taking at least half a day.

Elis looked at her with concern. “Problem?”

Thea nodded and looked to Mackey. “Captain, contact the 6th fleet and prepare for immediate combat transition. We need to hit them before they break the 2nd and 3rd fleets.”

Captain Mackey frowned. “The Admiral isn’t going to like that. We really should wait for confirmation from High Command. Why don’t you open a real time connection with them?”

Thea shook her head. “The generator is on its last leg; we can only manage one more event horizon before needing at least twelve hours to make repairs. It needs to be a full fleet transition.”

The man cursed under his breath before finally nodding. “I’ll inform them about the situation, but it’ll be up to the Admiral.”

Thea turned her attention to shoring up the station’s defenses and equipment. The moonlet wasn’t defenseless and had a full array of weapons and even a fortress double d-layer defense field. Even if they didn’t intend to engage in the battle, there was a chance with how big the wormhole would be that enemy ships could traverse it from the other side.

If that happened, she needed to cut them down before they oriented themselves and figure out what had happened.

All her checks reported operational status with little else to do. She’d made plans and given them to Engi, but getting the moonlet fully weaponized would just require more time. Not for the first time, she cursed whoever had stalled the engineering teams with useless busy work on the crew quarters and other useless facilities on the station.

After what felt like an eternity, Captain Mackey finally got off his private comm line. “The 6th fleet is making ready to transit, Chi Thea.”

Thea nodded, then turned to Elis. “Security is operational?”

The redhead nodded.

Releasing a tense breath, Thea turned to her console and checked the fleet positioning. Ships were tightening up their formation. She shot out a traffic alert and prepared a lane for the fleet to transit, as well as estimated enemy locations and allied movement. She’d be placing them in front of the 2nd and 3rd fleets, allowing them to rendezvous and then engage the Ertan fleet together.

The wormhole generator was capable of modifying the exit velocities of ships entering the wormhole. That required extra dense calculations from Wormy as well as making sure the wormhole was positioned correctly, or ships would enter and then literally crush themselves in a sudden self-destructive fusion.

Final confirmation came through, and Thea let out a sigh of relief. “Let’s do this.”

Elis nodded, and Thea activated the portal.

The massive slit wide enough for the fleet to traverse opened—and then a massive flare of radiation and gas slammed into them.

Alarms and warnings began blaring frantically as the moonlet was battered by the blast and shoved aside. The Hackjob’s Double D-Layer turned a brilliant blue as it absorbed the massive amount of energy.

That wasn’t the main issue, though.

Elis’ knuckles turned white as she held onto her console. “The gravity is sucking us in!”