13: BACK IN BLACK
A new ship was slicing through the dark, but it wasn't that new. From the outside it looked like a beat up old mission class courier from the past. In fact the outer hull was! But there the illusion ended. The interior was entirely new, even if the name was not. The 7th Sister rides again, and its alter ego, the SS Pleiades, out of Deneva, reappears on the big universes' radar. In this case the ship sports a generation-9 warp core, although the warp nacelles still look generation 4. Deck one was almost stock, but the interior would give the ship away. The new LCARS bridge would belay her late model refit, but the only thing other from deck 1 was the secret room. The transporter room was also moved aft to balance the cargo bay and increase the size of the VIP quarters. When you reached the second deck the modifications were "less" hid. The crew lounge was smaller and half of the deck 2 quarters was missing as well. In their place was a set of dual shields including a cloaking device and multi-phasics. The armory was also missing and a weapons locker had been installed in the VIP quarters. What that meant was deck three had the room for an oversized impulse reactor and warp core. Taking a page from section 31, the phasers were still type 13, using turret emitters as opposed to phaser strips, as the latter would certainly give it away. The torpedo tubes were improved and were fully loaded with multi-phasic torpedoes, including 4 cruise torps.
The crew totaled six, Razia, Sara, and me on deck 1. That's why we needed the expanded VIP quarters on the ship. And we were all "back in black" as it were in our black SS Pleiades uniforms out of the past. Sara never seen them, but Razia did. I was shocked when she produced her uniform from 7 millennia ago, still intact and magically preserved. Then there was Nergat, K'Tee and Toki, living on the second deck…
Razia gave me a hug, as she sported her old uniform. I actually had to get a new one made, as well as one for Sara. We all had matching black uniforms, except for the number of wing sleeves. Unlike the runabouts the 7th Sister could land at any civilian spaceport and no one would be the wiser. She was just another small tramp freighter with a small but slightly weird crew. And that was the point. We were headed to a small freight starport on some backwater planet, in my mana-less universe. It would take a month to get there.
I was on the bridge examining a ring.
"What's that?" Razia asked when she entered
"That is the reason we're here," I replied. "This ring belongs to none other than Grand Admiral Moyesha Halfview."
Sara turned from ops. "You're kidding, right?"
"This ring and this note are the entire reason that I had this ship built, and the entire reason we are here. Either Halfview somehow jumped forward, or one of his descendents sent that, specifically to Ravnica and Sunhome. Usually they can't or won't come in person, no matter how desperate. And just in case I need to know. You're here to beat anyone that tries to attack us into snail snot…"
"OK, I'll bite. Who is Grand Admiral Moyesha Halfview?" Razia asked.
"Just the head of the Rimworlds navy during our tenure there," Sara answered. And Sara would remember him more vividly than I with her eidetic memory. "And if it actually is him then curiosity has definitely killed this cat!" Sara winked at me. She had actually seen the Far Side cartoon!
We were out in that region of space beyond the rim, where a few human lost colonies resided. We were going to a planet that we knew was parocial and backwards: Covenant. The last time we headed out here it was to the planet Wellbefallen, with disastrous results. Its fellow planets were Mairianis and … Covenant. That meant that my fellow angel crew might put us at risk! But then again, it might make us untouchable either. The technology had not improved much, but warp powered vessels did land here. Even as a stock Mission class, we would be top of the heap. Being 9th generation would be a total shock out here. I hoped we wouldn't have to let the cat out of the bag, as it were. What the descendents of Halfview would be doing out here was anybody's guess. We also had an ace in the hole…
We received permission to land at Covenant's main spaceport, which we did. It wasn't much of a spaceport to talk about anyways. Then it was registering with the authorities. This was going to be tricky, having two angels among the crew. To our surprise, they seemed to be non-plussed, taking our strange crew in stride. We entered the port city without any problems. Now to find the current owner of the ring…
Actually it didn't take that long as a search of the spaceport bars quickly turned up a suspect. Something about our unusual crew, which stood out amongst newcomers to this planet. As soon as we entered the main spaceport bar and got a booth for ourselves, a visitor approached. He looked familiar, but was definitely NOT Moyesha Halfview. It turns out that it is one of his descendents that figured out who we were, and sent the ring. But that was OK. I half expected that, and our preps were 'just in case' anyways. Our meeting was rather … interesting.
"This is a surprise..." he stated. "If you arrived in that mission class courier that landed earlier, either you left most of the angels behind, or there are that few… By the way I am Andrew Halfview."
"I'm Stephen Michael, and this is Razia and."
"Sara, I do believe. I have heard all these fancy tales about you," Andrew interrupted.
"Fancy tales?" Sara asked.
"Yes. Especially the one about surviving the destruction of your ship and waiting or a couple of hours in space for a pick-up."
"That did happen." I warned. "In fact any angel in their mana-verse can survive vacuum indefinitely. Sara had to go through it again with the rest of the angels when the Parhelion II was destroyed. If it weren't for that and other angelic abilities, all us mortals wouldn't be here right now…" I finished by looking over at Nergat. If he could have shrugged his shoulders, he would have.
"Oh. So all those other stories…"
"On first order think of an angel as a winged humanoid with an indefinite lifespan. They are orders of magnitude stronger and faster than we are. In their own universe their bones are almost un-breakable and their flesh can be pierced only by special materials. They can wield magic and are impervious to many kinds of it. They have other special abilities as well."
"Flight obviously," Andrew responded. "But what else?"
Razia decided to answer, "You would have to join the Boros Legion to find that out."
"OK, I'm not quite ready for that! But right now I need your help. I'm stranded on this planet!" He exclaimed. "As soon as the authorities found out that I'm alone on this planet, they charged me with 'carnal sin' and seized my shuttle!"
"Now where have we heard that one before?" I queried.
"Wellbefallen!" The rest of my old crew shouted, leaving Razia puzzled.
I looked at Razia, "I'll tell you that story sometime… Look, we'd better get back to the ship, before they decide that they can try for ours too." We quickly left the spaceport bar and headed towards our landing bay. I turned to my angels. "You should fly ahead and secure the ship."
"But what if you're attacked? No way - we go together, and that's that," Razia ordered. So we stayed together, and our return trip to our ship was unexpectedly uneventful.
"Odd, no events, and nobody tried to break into the ship," I mused.
"And how do you know that?" Andrew asked.
"Watch…" I cycled the airlock door. "See this little red light?"
"Now I do."
"Any time this door opens that light comes on. It has to be manually reset, like this…" I went through the set of steps to reset the light.
"Are you paranoid or something?"
"Yes!" Both Sara and Razia shouted.
"Happy –go-lucky guys don't get to be my age," I stated.
"Right. Grand Admiral would be over 1200…"
"Then let's go up to the crew lounge…"
A few hours later and we were sitting down to dinner. It was a buffet type affair, so Razia could stick to her vegetarian regime. By this time, Razia was used to the fact that Sara would eat some meat on occasion. I can remember the shocked look on Razia's face when she first saw Sara eating a slice of bacon…
We were discussing Andrew's predicament and the intriguing story that was his reason for journeying way out here. It was only by dumb luck that he found a passing through freighter to take the ring to Ravnica. Apparently some of my exploits have made the galactic news net (or what's left of it actually) thanks to the avens and some others.
An alarm interrupted our dinner. I patched a comm. channel from the Covenant spaceport to the crew lounge.
"You have been convicted of engaging in carnal sin. Prepare to be boarded!" Came the announcement from the spaceport control. I looked at Razia and Sara. Their expressions indicated that this was just tiring.
"And who's army is going to enforce that?" I queried.
"The Covenant Religious Defense Force!" Came the reply.
"Bring them on," I responded. "I promise to leave the bodies piled high."
An hour later and absolutely no one showed up. This waiting was becoming tiring, but at least Sara told Razia about our exploits on Wellbefallen.
Razia's response was, "bring 'em on! We'll send them back in body bags!"
Eventually a 'device' was pushed into the landing bay. It did set off our radiological alarms.
"Oh look. A nuke. Hope it's on a timer…" I pulled up the remote for the transporter, and a flash later and it was gone.
"OK, where did you move it to?" Andrew asked.
"I beamed it directly to their control center. That's why I hope it has a timer. But looking for an evacuation and not seeing any … hmmm … " Another quick transport, and under a minute later vehicles were speeding away form the spaceport.
"What did you just do?" Sara asked.
"I beamed an empty torpedo casing to their control center. If anyone opened the service panel a clock will be counting down from 20 minutes."
"You bastard! I love it!" Razia got out between fits of laughter. "They are running from the fake bomb but not the real one. Leaving is going to be easier than I thought!"
We headed to the bridge. It was time to heat up the warp drive while the torpedo counted down to zero. Andrew came to a dead stop as soon as he entered. "So, there's more to this ship than meets the eye," he accused while looking around at the LCARS displays. "Aside from our stock and well-disguising exterior, just how advanced is this ship?"
"Completely top of the line," I mentioned.
"If she was built at Wa-Lu, that would put her in the eighth or ninth generation…"
"Ninth, with enhancements. We had to make a few compromises however."
"Like what?"
"Like using small nacelle warp coils to fit them into the old style tubes, and removing half of the crew quarters to fit in the shields and structural integrity fields," I mentioned.
"I thought that crew lounge was a bit small…"
We reached the planetary system that Andrew's crew had found. There was no response to our hails…
"Approach with caution," I mentioned. There were only a few crewmembers aboard the 7th Sister but they were all friends, rather than 'crew'.
"Doing that," Nergat replied. There was no question about Nergat's abilities. His friendship was well cemented. But that didn't stop the events that were about to unfold.
As the ship approached the planet, all power systems died. We were headed at high velocity straight at the planet, with no means of maneuvering…
"Shit! We lost all power!" Nergat exclaimed from his console. "Batteries are fading fast – soon we'll lose visual sensors!"
"Will we impact before then?"
"Yes. We get to see us augur in without inertial dampeners!"
"This is new," Andrew answered to my look.
I was on the engineering console. A quick reroute, and it went dark inside the little ship. It was dark and silent for a moment, and then you could hear the single tone of the landing thrusters. "Time to pray if anyone's in the mood," I mentioned.
"Pray to whom?" Razia asked. She was as helpless as everyone else on board, and now we were flying blind. In Ravnica, Razia was usually prayed to.
It seemed an eternity while we waited in the dark. Nobody was speaking. Then there was a sound like a freight train going past, followed by silence.
"According to my chronometer, we should have impacted by now," Nergat pointed out.
"That might be moot as the Batteries will be totally drained in about 10 minutes. Switching power to the forward view screens," I stated.
As the view screen came up, we found out what had happened. We had altered our course to just skip off of the planet's atmosphere and were heading back out into the depths of this solar system.
Sara piped up. "I guess we traded fates. Instead of dying due to deceleration trauma, we get to freeze to death in deep space…"
Then, as abruptly as it went, the power came back on. I maneuvered the ship into a station-keeping position relative to the planet. It was time to call in our backup…
A few hours later and three ships arrived in the system. The Helion3, Aleya, and the Nimbus were here as were all the angels, except for Feather. She was back in her office running things while we were out.
We entered the briefing room on the Helion3. It was time to figure out what to do next. Andrew was totally shocked by the presence of the fleet, but reacted well to the deception. He at least found where the rest of the Ravnican angels were.
We decided on an interesting plan. We would "lower" the 7th Sister onto the planet from here, using the Helion3 as the tractoring ship. This would take some time…
…It almost worked too. As soon as the 7th Sister hit the atmosphere, the tractor beam cut out. Luckily our batteries weren't fully drained, so we survived the impact with the ground by channeling power to the inertial dampeners.
"Well, we're down…" I mentioned.
"But we don't have enough juice to even contact your main ship!" Andrew exclaimed.
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," I mentioned. "First let's find your party."
Our phasers and other equipment were as drained as the ship. We had to manually crank open the doors, and the only lighting was the sunlight coming in through the portholes.
"Just a second," I mentioned as I opened the door to our quarters. "I have a blast from my past…" After the shooting incident with the Romulans, I had replicated my collection from the 20th century. I pulled out a pair of .45s and handed them to Razia and Sara, selecting a 9mm for myself. The angels could easily take a .50AE, but the desert eagle was not a service pistol, and wasn't in my collection.
Andrew's ship was a couple of kilometers away. The drift was the product of the planet's rotation. A short hike brought us there. Sure enough, Andrew's crew was here, camped out, as their main ship was as dead as ours. Andrew had left for an equipment run just before they made it into the ruins. As soon as they did that, all powered equipment was dead. They had been stuck here for over 4 months! Luckily they were primitive planet explorers and relic hunters, and had fall-back equipment.
"Something in there is doing our power systems in," Susan, Andrew's partner, stated. I expect we wont see them for most of this evening…
"Sun's going down, and it gets pretty nippy here at night." That was Scott, another of Andrew's crew.
So we settled in for the night. "Any dangerous fauna around here?" I asked.
"Nothing that will approach the fire. But from some of the sounds there is some pretty big critters out there." I suddenly felt that a 9mm was a bit under-gunned. Perhaps a .50BMG with some explosive tipped rounds…
We woke up to a crisp cool morning and the smell of bacon cooking. "There goes Sara's self control," Razia quipped.
Sara must have been practicing the stink-eye. "Just because YOU don't have the courage to try some barbeque…" It had become a long-running joke between them.
We stepped out into a camp in reveille. Scott passed, mentioning, "Their royal highnesses are still sleeping. They must have had a little too much fun last night."
Breakfast was being served. We ate well while Andrew and Susan slept through it. They eventually awoke to cold eggs and bacon. Andrew's crew was packing some heavy projectile firepower, including a couple of RPG's. Not good for close quarters, but suitable to keep those "big critters" at bay. We headed out to the ruins, about a three-hour walk. I expected Nergat to meet us there as he was taking the subterranean route.
It was a large round building buried in the sand. It appeared to be a squat cylinder of immense diameter, which changed into a truncated cone. It was metallic, and appeared to be here a long time. A precursor building? Only about a quarter of the wall was exposed, the rest buried in the sand. That would put the building over ½ kilometer in diameter, and about 100 meters tall.
"We got in trough that opening there," Scott said, pointing to an opening about halfway up the building side. The shifting sands allowed us to climb up to the opening.
"Then what happened?" Andrew asked this time.
"Then as soon as we cut our way into a corridor, the phaser cutter cut out. Since then, nothing electrical, nuclear or gravitic has worked," Susan replied. By now we were standing in that opening. Scott and Paul were setting up a pair of ancient carbide lamps. Good ol' chemistry to the rescue…
"You might not need those except as backup," I mentioned. You could see the chunk of wall that was cut out to make a hole into the corridor. Light was coming from the corridor. We started down the corridor. A little while later, I asked, "Who here is an engineer?"
No one answered. Then Paul stated, "Well, Scott knows enough to keep the ship running…"
"I thought as much. I have a news flash for everybody. We're not in a building," I hinted.
"Ok, I'll bite." Sara responded.
"We're in a ship," I concluded. "We entered through a hangar bay, and activated some kind of ship's system. Time and sand scoured any equipment in the hangar into unrecognizability. Take a look at these corridors."
"Then where is this power coming from?" Andrew asked. "From that sandblasting, this thing has sitting here for millennia!"
"Take three guesses," Razia answered. She figured it out real fast.
Realization dawned on his face. "US!"
"Somewhere on board is a power absorbing machine," Sara concluded. "We need to knock it out."
"How about we just starve it out?" Nergat asked.
"How do we do that?"
"Since the lights are still on, our ships are still producing power," Nergat replied. "It's just being sucked here, before we can use it. We go back and make sure every system is shut down and totally cold. Then whe we return it cant use our energy against us."
"Makes sense to me…"
So back we went and went through all our systems making sure everything was off: Reactors, injectors, switches. By the time we returned to the camp-out it was getting dark, and a campfire dinner was underway.
Razia left Sara and me at the barbecue pit in search of "safer" sustenance. Here in the mana-less universe even angels had to eat. Wonderful thing a good barbecue sauce is. Could be pork … could be lizard. It didn't really matter in the long run as long as I didn't get scales stuck in my teeth…
THWACK! Something strikes me in the back of the head. It turned out to be a pickle. I was soo enjoying the barbecued meat that I forgot about the telepathic link under high emotions. "I actually tasted that!" Razia accused.
"Then taste it again…" I grabbed her and gave her a big smooch, knowing full well the fact that I had a face full of barbecue sauce. Razia actually giggled like a little girl! It was the first time I had ever seen her do that! Next thing I know is I'm being dragged off to the tent. I guess there won't be any shows of us making out by the barbecue pit…
"As long as it goes through your digestive tract and not mine…"
I was pretty sure that morning came too early. Either that or I am getting too soft for tent camping. A hearty breakfast, gear up, and hike to the wreck. Climb back in … and the lights are still on. "Great. That didn't work," Andrew observed.
"Actually in part it did," I noticed. "The lights are noticeably dimmer than yesterday."
"It thought we turned everything off…"
"You can't really turn off a nuclear battery… This thing is very advanced. It intercepts the power right at the source, and it doesn't seem to matter what that source is," I stated. We found a control node of some sort. The controls appeared to be quite manual. There were runes written on the panels here.
"Anybody recognize these?" Andrew asked.
"Stephen does," Razia replied.
"No I don't," I corrected.
"Yes you do. I've seen them in your mind."
"Well, since I don't have an eidetic memory like you do, it will be impossible for me to systematically sift through all those auto-teacher lessons to find the right one!" I exclaimed.
"But I can, for you," Razia explained. "It's about time you find out exactly what our telepathic link can do…"
"Well…" Andrew was getting impatient. All his crew did was spend the last three hours watching the three of us sitting on the floor, with Razia and Sara's hands held to my temples. Nergat, K'Tee and Toki got the same boring show.
"They are the Kelvan," I answered while getting up. Then I nearly fell over. It was like being drunk, but on thoughts. Not only was there a permanent presence of Razia and Sara, I felt like the guy on the movie Limitless. "That also explains the deck height. A Kelvan was a little larger than a minotaur." This heightened awareness would get some taking used to.
"Where are they from?"
"The Andromeda Galaxy."
"You're kidding, right."
"No, this ship is from another galaxy, and that explains the different technologies. A ship this size would be either a warship or colonizer. Since we aren't currently being enslaved, I'd say the crew didn't make it," I concluded. Man this unbridled access to my memories is heady! I had already realized where we had to go.
It took a while to get there. Although I knew where we needed to be, I didn't know the layout of this ship, so we ended up wandering around a lot. We eventually found ourselves in a chamber at the hull of that ship. This large array swooped over our heads. Cables, like tentacles, snaked from what looked like a "taproot from hell" spread outward to points on the array. A control panel was near the "taproot".
"That is the central power node. The panel appears to be on some sort of emergency acquisition mode. Its main job is to act like shields, but by sucking up the energy rather than deflecting it."
Great minds think alike. Or fools seldom differ! By the time I drew my pistol, my angels had brought theirs to bear. Three clips emptied in rapid succession. Sparks emanated from the console. Two RPG blasts to the "taproot", and the power-draining machine went dead. "Time to go!" I ordered. The dim light had started to flicker. Soon the only light would be from two carbide lamps.
There was a mad scramble from the wreck to our ships. Andrew and his crew made it back first, and as we approached the 7th Sister, he was in his airlock. One final wave goodbye and we boarded our own ship, after a short hike. A quick trip to the hyper limit and we had a rendezvous with our fleet. Then it was back to Ravnica.
Just one problem. The rift wasn't there!
