فصل 6

Chapter Six

Hetzal System. Republic Longbeam Auropa IX. 75 minutes to impact.

“You sure about this, Captain?” Petty Officer Innamin said, pointing at his screen, which displayed the rough path of one of the hyperspace anomalies as it sped toward the center of the system. “We need to shoot this thing down before it kills someone. Maybe a lot of someones. The problem is that our targeting computers can’t calculate the trajectory. The anomaly’s moving too fast. At best, I’d say we’d have a one-in-three chance of hitting the target.”

Captain Bright shook his head, his tentacles rustling against his shoulders. He knew he should probably reprimand Innamin for questioning his orders. The kid did it all the time—he was young for a human, little more than two decades old, and as a rule thought he knew better. Bright usually let him get away with it. Life was too short, and the ships they flew were, on balance, too small to bring unnecessary tension into the mix. A thoughtful question from time to time wasn’t exactly insubordination.

One in three, he thought. He didn’t know exactly what he’d expected. Just…better than one-in-three odds that they could actually accomplish their mission.

The Longbeam, call sign Aurora IX, was state-of-the-art, a brandnew design from the Republic shipyards on Hosnian Prime. It wasn’t a warship per se, but it was no pushover, either. The vessel had distributed processors that could handle multiple target firing solutions and prepare a spread of blasterfire, missiles, and defensive countermeasures in a single salvo. Not too hard on the eyes, either.

Bright thought it looked like one of the hammerfish he used to hunt back home on Glee Anselm—a thick, blunt skull tapering into a single elegant, sinuous tailfin. It was a tough, beautiful beast, no doubt about it. On the other hand, their target, one of the mysterious objects racing through the Hetzal system, was moving at a velocity near lightspeed. It had whipped out of hyperspace like a red-hot pellet fired from a slugthrower. The Aurora IX might be state-of-the-art, but that didn’t mean the ship could work miracles.

Miracles were for the Jedi.

And they were, apparently, otherwise occupied at the moment.

“Fire six missiles,” Bright ordered.

Innamin hesitated.

“That’s our full complement, sir. Are you sure—”

Bright nodded. He gestured at Innamin’s cockpit display. A red threat indicator—the projectile—on a collision path with a larger green disk, representing a solar collection station equidistant from all three of the Hetzal system’s suns. The thing was still some distance away but moving closer with every moment.

“The anomaly is headed straight for that solar array. The data we got from Hetzal Prime says the station has seven crew aboard. We can’t get there in time to evacuate before it gets hit, but our missiles can. If we have a one-in-three chance at shooting the object down, then sending six doubles our chances. Still not perfect odds, but—” The final member of his crew, Ensign Peeples, buzzed his proboscis as if he was about to speak, but Bright waved him off, continuing without stopping.

“Yes, Peeples, I know that math is off. I’m mostly worried about a different equation: If we fire six missiles, we might save seven people.

Let’s see what we can do.”

The Aurora IX’s targeting systems chugged along, not seeming quite so state-of-the-art now as the deadly red dot crept closer to people trapped on a solar farm with no way to escape. The Longbeam zoomed toward the array at its own top speed, narrowing the distance its weapons had to travel, sort of an interesting problem of trajectory and acceleration and physics, something that awakened Bright’s own three-dimensional instincts built on much of a life lived underwater.

He shook his head again, rustling the cloud of thick green tentacles that emerged from the back of his skull, angry at himself for getting distracted when people out there were praying for their lives.

The missiles fired, six quick whmphs transmitted through the ship’s hull, and the Aurora IX was down to lasers only. The weapons shot away, leaving thin trails of smoke behind to mark their path. They were out of visual range in an instant, accelerating to their max velocity in seconds.

“Missiles away,” Innamin said.

Now it was up to that fancy distributed processor, and whether it had successfully transmitted effective firing solutions to the missiles.

Maybe all six would hit. It wasn’t impossible.

The deck crew looked as one at the display screen tracking the six missiles, the fast-moving anomaly, their own ship, and the solar array that was rapidly becoming the collision point for all nine objects.

The first of the missiles blinked out on the screen. Nothing else changed.

“Missile one is a miss,” Innamin said, unnecessarily.

Two more missiles vanished. Bright held up a hand before Innamin could speak again.

“We can all see, Petty Officer,” he said.

Two more misses. Leaving one. All else remained unchanged.

The last missile vanished from the display, nowhere near the

incoming anomaly. A communal sigh of despair washed across the bridge.

“Blasters?” Bright asked, knowing the answer.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Ensign Peeples said, his voice a high-pitched, reedy whine. “Even the best gunner in the universe couldn’t make that shot, and I would guess I’m barely in the top ten.”

Bright sighed. Peeples’s species had a radically unique understanding of humor—not the jokes themselves, which were often decent enough, but the appropriate moment to deploy them.

“Thank you, Ensign,” Bright said.

The solar array was now visible in the viewscreen—a large, spindly structure, like one of the feather corals back in Bright’s homesea.

Hundreds of long arms arranged in a spiral spinning out from a central sphere in which the crew lived and worked. Each of those arms fitted with collection eyes along its length, blinking and rotating slowly as they drank in the light of the three suns that gave Hetzal Prime and its satellite worlds their uniquely long growing seasons. The array fed the sunlight back to the cropworlds, storing and beaming it down through proprietary technology that was the pride of the system.

The array was beautiful. Bright had never seen anything quite like it. It looked grown—and maybe it was. Supposedly every crop in the galaxy could grow somewhere on the worlds of Hetzal. Perhaps that extended to space stations.

Then, a bright streak, too fast to process even with eyes as capable as Bright’s large, dark orbs, designed by evolution to pick out details in the lightless depths of the seas of Glee Anselm. In an instant the solar array was destroyed. One moment it was intact, performing its function. The next, it was ablaze, half the collection arms shattered, drifting slowly away into space.

The central sphere remained, though flames washed across its outer hull, the muted dance of fire in zero gravity. As Bright watched, the array’s exterior lighting blinked, flickered, and went out.

Bright put a hand to his forehead. He blinked, too. Once, slowly.

Then he turned to his crew.

“We don’t know for sure that the people aboard that station are dead,” he said, looking at his crew’s solemn faces.

“I would like to try to attempt a rescue, but that”—here he pointed out the viewscreen at the wrecked, burning array, getting larger as the Aurora IX approached—“could collapse at any moment. Or explode.

Or implode. I don’t know. The point is, if we’re docked when it goes, we’re dead, too.”

Bright tapped one of his tentacles with a fingertip.

“I’m Nautolan, a fact of which I’m sure you’re both aware. Green skin, big black eyes, what else would I be? What you might not know is that these tentacles of mine let me pick up pheromones from other beings, which I translate into an understanding of their emotional states. That’s how I know you two…are terrified.”

Peeples opened his mouth, then, somehow, miraculously, thought better of making a joke and closed it again.

“I get that you’re scared,” Bright went on, “but we have a duty. I know it, and you both know it, too. We need to do this.”

Innamin and Peeples looked at each other, then back at their captain.

“We’re all the Republic, right?” Innamin said.

Bright nodded. He smiled, showing his teeth.

“Indeed we are, Petty Officer.”

He pointed at Peeples.

“Ensign, take us in.”