Wanderer - Origins

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Jess stared at the empty system, feeling hollow inside. He couldn’t believe that after everything they’d been through there was nothing to find. He slumped in his chair, fighting against tears. Ali had been lost, maybe destroyed, for this?

The Wanderer nudged his mind. It seemed excited about something. Jess resisted, not wanting to be distracted from his gloom. The Wanderer nudged him again. Then again. Reluctantly Jess opened his mind to find out what had the ship so excited.

An image formed in Jess’s mind. An image that washed all the gloom away. There was another step to the journey. One that required the jump engines. The Wanderer’s homeworld wasn’t in real space. It was somewhere beyond.

Excitement flowed through Jess as he told the Wanderer to go ahead. The jump engines leapt into life, wrenching the Wanderer out of normal space… but not into jump space. Not as Jess knew it, anyway.

Through his connection with the Wanderer Jess knew the jump engines well. He’d felt them in every state from normal operation to desperately clawing for extra traction, but he’d never felt them like this. They were groaning with stress, struggling for grip on something that was neither real space nor jump space. In places space around the ship felt like glass. Slippery and smooth, impossible to grip. In others it was more like a craggy cliff face, offering so much grip the engines were spoilt for choice. And there was no way to distinguish between the two until the engines grabbed on.

The Wanderer slammed to the left as space on the right suddenly shifted from craggy to smooth. Jess’s curse died on his lips as something emerged from the mists ahead. Something immense. Something the Wanderer was heading straight for.

His first impression was of a wall, a wall where there should be nothing. A wall the Wanderer was rushing towards. Jess lost precious moments staring in shock before the danger they were in dawned on him. If the wall was solid, as it appeared to be, then the Wanderer would be smashed apart when it struck.

Jess queried the Wanderer, asking whether they could safely drop back out of jump space… or wherever they were. The Wanderer’s answer was clear and concise. No. Not without destroying the ship. The space they travelled through wasn’t like jump space. There was no easy way back to real space. They needed to reach where they were aiming for… or die trying.

The jump engines strained again, pushing the ship back towards the right. The Wanderer highlighted a tiny area of the wall, drawing Jess’s attention to it. There was something there. A patch of deeper darkness in the dark grey coloured wall. The Wanderer was straining to reach it, and straining was the right word. Every time the ship got somewhere near to heading in the right direction the jump engines would struggle for grip once more and the Wanderer would be sent careering away, heading for an unbroken section of the wall.

The jump engines were more than groaning now. Some were operating at their safe limits already. Many were showing signs of the exertion. At this rate they would start dropping out, and with them any hope of reaching safety. Assuming the target they were trying to hit did offer safety.

Jess focused hard, joining with the Wanderer and trying to decide on the best course of action. The Wanderer thought they were only two or three minutes away from colliding with the wall, but it was impossible to be sure. There was no sense of scale, nothing to tell him how close the ship was to the wall. The Wanderer was estimating two or three minutes and that was the best he was going to get.

The first thing he did was to shut down several of the jump engines, allowing them a chance to recover and arranging immediate replacement of some damaged parts for two of them. The Wanderer resisted his commands for a moment before capitulating unhappily.

With fewer engines available the Wanderer was struggling even more with keeping on course. Jess threw himself into the fight, adding a layer of intuition the Wanderer lacked. Where the ship was reacting to one incident at a time, and even then slower than was needed, Jess pulled back a little. He tried to sense all of space surrounding them. He diverted a few jump engines to testing space around them, mapping it out.

The Wanderer expressed its concerns once more. With the additional engines out of action the ship was drifting further and further away from the safe course. Over the next few seconds things continued to deteriorate, then they stabilised. While not back on course yet, they were at least not drifting any further away.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, the ship started to move closer to the correct course. Jess shut down even more engines, flagging them for immediate repair, but the ship kept getting closer to the correct course.

Jess allowed himself a brief smile of achievement, not letting up one bit. Things were better, but not good enough. If the Wanderer’s estimates for distance were right then the target they were aiming for was only about five times wider than the ship. Tricky enough normally, but disastrous now. Whenever a lack of grip sent the Wanderer swinging off course the deviation was tens or hundreds of times the width of the ship. Assuming space was as difficult to travel close to the entrance, the Wanderer stood very little chance of hitting its target.

They were pretty much back on track, but they spent more time being flung off course and recovering than actually heading in the right direction. Jess continued to bring down jump engines. With only thirty seconds to go, assuming the estimates were correct, he’d shut down nearly half of the jump engines. The Wanderer kept pushing him to restart some, or all, of them. He kept refusing. He did at least stop shutting down any more.

With twenty seconds to go they were actually heading in the right direction. Space surrounding them had settled down over the past few seconds. The ship no longer encountered the glassy slickness. Maybe, just maybe, they’d braved the worst of it.

At fifteen seconds to go Jess was starting to feel optimistic. In some way they were sheltered from the effects they’d faced before. The closer they got to the dark tunnel the easier the journey.

At twelve seconds he was proven wrong. A massive loss of traction by the jump engines sent the Wanderer not only careening to the right but shoved the ship into a spin. They weren’t sheltered where they were. They weren’t safe. And now they weren’t going to make it.

It was now or never. Jess activated all the jump engines he had powered down before. Some had been patched up. Most had simply been given the chance to rest, a move designed to stop them failing as there was no time to repair anything more.

Several engines blew completely, buckling under the strain. Many of the others were struggling badly, but they held. For now.

Jess felt the Wanderer start to slide back to the required course. It was going to be tight. Too tight! If he didn’t pull off a miracle the ship was going to be destroyed. The engines just weren’t moving the Wanderer fast enough for it to get into position and stop the sideways momentum.

The answer was obvious… and exceedingly dangerous. He could get the ship on course in time, but he couldn’t stop it from overshooting after they entered the tunnel. Still, hitting the tunnel side on sounded a whole lot better than smashing head on into the wall at such massive speeds.

Jess stopped worrying about stopping the sideways movement and instead focused solely on ensuring the Wanderer would make it into the tunnel in the first place. He’d worry about what happened then when the time arrived.

As the seconds ticked down Jess wrestled with getting the Wanderer back on course for the opening. It continued to suffer losses of traction repeatedly. Sometimes they shoved the Wanderer further off course. Other times they worked in Jess’s favour, pushing the ship in the direction he wanted.

With only a second left Jess couldn’t tell whether they would make it. Several more jump engines were on the verge of failing from the strain. A sudden loss of traction sent the Wanderer skidding off to the side, before Jess could even respond the patch had passed and the Wanderer was moving in the right direction once more.

The wall was rushing closer and the angle to the opening was increasing all the time. They weren’t going to make it. In desperation, Jess threw more power at the jump engines. Several blew under the strain but not before they had given the Wanderer a boost, and the rest continued to operate above their safe levels.

Even with his mind accelerated Jess couldn’t tell if it was enough. The wall rushed towards them even as the Wanderer tried to reach the entrance. The distance to the wall was crashing down towards zero. Jess watched, unable to do anything more than he already was.

They hit the wall with a huge crash. Jess was crushed in his seat as the Wanderer bucked and span. It took him a few moments to realise the ship was still around him. Still in one piece, at least where he sat. Jess studied the ship, trying to work out what had happened.

He chuckled slightly when he worked it out. The Wanderer hadn’t hit the wall. Its shields had. The ship’s hull had reached the gap with only a few metres to spare. It had been enough, but just barely. Jess checked the ship over. Some of the shield generators had taken a battering but the hull was intact and there were no other dangerous indications.

The Wanderer reached out to Jess. He could sense the urgency it was sending. Jess cursed. They were already over halfway towards the tunnel’s wall and closing fast. Fast enough to do some serious damage.

Jess threw energy into the jump engines, trying to stop the ship’s sideways movement. It wasn’t going to be enough. Even with the engines straining at maximum they were still going to hit, and hit hard.

As the tunnels side loomed closer Jess desperately tried to find something, anything, that he could do. There was nothing. In fact he made things slightly worse, burning out several jump engines when he tried to force more power through them.

Even with his mind accelerated the side of the tunnel was rushing towards them. Jess wasn’t sure the Wanderer could even survive the collision. It would definitely be badly damaged, possibly too badly to support life. Belatedly Jess realised he should have had the ship create him a survival suit in case of a hull breach. Too late now.

At the last moment Jess’s body took over, forcing his eyes shut and making him tense against the impact. It made no difference. He still saw everything through the ships sensors. The tunnel’s wall looming over the ship. The distance indicator racing down to zero. The sudden change in the ship as energy was routed from the engines to the shields. Then everything went black as the Wanderer struck the tunnel wall.

Jess could feel his heart hammering in his chest. His hands still clung to the arms of his chair and his stomach was in knots. His body was prepared for the impact with the tunnel wall. An impact that he hadn’t felt. Had he passed out?

He checked with the Wanderer. No, he hadn’t. There hadn’t been any collision. What happened? The Wanderer seemed almost as confused as Jess. The ship had shot straight through the tunnel wall as if it wasn’t there, even though it had been reading as solid on the sensors.

Now the Wanderer was outside of the tunnel, drifting through a featureless blackness like none he had ever seen. The only thing visible was the tunnel, but now he was seeing it from the outside.

Jess marvelled at the shimmering tube which stretched forwards and backwards for as far as the sensors could reach. Had they travelled that far from the tunnel’s entrance? Jess didn’t think so. But then nothing he saw made any sense.

Jess fired up the jump engines again, not wanting to drift too far from the tunnel. Alarm immediately flooded into him from the Wanderer. Most of the engines couldn’t get any traction. This wasn’t like before, where the surface of jump space was there but too smooth to offer a grip. Now there was nothing. No surface. No possible traction.

No. Not quite. A few of the engines were still finding traction. Jess checked them quickly. The tunnel! The engines could get a purchase within the tunnel. Jess had as many of the jump engines as possible stretch out to space within the tunnel. The difference was clear immediately as the Wanderer’s movement away from the tunnel began to slow.

It wasn’t enough. The Wanderer slowed but it was still moving away quickly. Each jump engine needed a distinct section of space to attach to. Trying to overlap just caused both to completely lose grip. As the Wanderer drifted away there was less and less of the tunnel within range, which meant Jess could do less and less to slow the movement.

Jess knew it was hopeless but he kept on trying. Right up until the Wanderer moved out of range of the tunnel and the last engine lost its connection. He kept trying for a few minutes, hoping that somewhere, somehow the jump engines would gain some traction. They didn’t. He tried using the jump engines to punch back to normal space. It didn’t work. He even tried using the normal thrusters but they had no effect at all.

Jess turned to the Wanderer, but it couldn’t suggest anything. The endless nothing that surrounded them was as new to the ship as it was to Jess. Everything it could think of he had already tried.

Finally Jess just sat there, staring at the outside of the tunnel as it grew smaller before his eyes. Knowing that sometime soon the tunnel would be gone which would leave Jess, and the Wanderer, stranded and helpless in the total emptiness that surrounded them.