Wanderer - Origins

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Jess felt his heart hammering as he studied space between the Wanderer and the tunnel. Where before it had been empty, there was now a line of ships. The space between each ship was less than the distance a jump engine could reach. The ship closest to the tunnel could easily reach out and pull itself clear, but that wasn’t the point. The line of ships had a different purpose. To get every ship out. Including the Wanderer.

Jess found it difficult to focus on the ships. Each seemed to be similar to the Wanderer, but none were the same. He wasn’t sure where they had come from either, but that wasn’t important.

All that mattered was the intricate operation they were about to attempt. Each ship would reach out with its jump engines, attaching to the next ship in the line. The timing had to be exact. Activating too early would pull the next ship in the line out of position, preventing it connecting and so dooming it, the ship attaching to it and every ship further down the line. Once that happened there would be no chance to try again.

The Wanderer was at the very end of the chain. If anything went wrong then the Wanderer would be doomed. Jess felt his hands growing sweaty as the seconds counted down. Three… two… one… activate!

Jess felt the Wanderer’s jump engines activate and checked their status. They had connected to the next ship in the line correctly, and the Wanderer was slowly starting to move closer to the tunnel. Jess couldn’t celebrate yet. He turned his attention to the chain of ships, following each link in turn. Terrified that he would find a gap, a break, which would doom the Wanderer and every ship between it and the break.

He didn’t find any. He kept working his way up the chain until finally he reached the first ship. Something seemed odd about it. It was much larger than the others, for a start, and it looked very different. Where the other ships were all clean lines and curves, this ship was blocky and utilitarian. And it looked familiar. Why?

As the Wanderer slowly closed in on the nearest ship, and on the tunnel far further away, Jess suddenly realised why he recognised it. It was the battlecruiser from the fleet that was chasing the Wanderer. But how was it here? How could it reach this strange area of space without the Wanderer’s special jump engines? What was it doing working with the other ships to save the Wanderer?

Before he could think about it any further, something changed with that first ship. Space around it buckled and curved, breaking the hold the next ship out had established. Jess’s heart sank he realised he was seeing a deliberate act. The battlecruiser had deliberately broken the chain of ships.

Even as he watched the battlecruiser accelerated back towards the tunnel, towards safety. The chain of ships started to collapse, to compress inwards, as the ships pulled against each other without the end point being anchored.

The ship closest to the battlecruiser was suddenly replaced by a blazing explosion. For a few moments huge swirls of reds and yellows flared against the nothingness, then they faded away, leaving no trace of the ship. Seconds later the next ship in the line went the same way. Then the third. Jess stared in horror as ship after ship was destroyed. The wave of destruction was speeding up. Soon it seemed to be racing down the line of ships.

Jess jerked out of his daze as he realised how much danger the Wanderer was in. He tried to force more power into the shields, but the ship felt sluggish. It responded slowly, far too slowly. Fear churned Jess’s insides as the line of destruction raced towards the Wanderer.

The remaining ships were exploding less than a second apart. Ten were left. Five… four… three… two… one… none. Jess tensed, gripping the arms of his chair. Then he was screaming as blinding brightness and intense heat hammered into him.

Jess jerked upright, still screaming, as darkness enveloped him. His heart was hammering painfully and as the scream petered out he panted for breath. Soft lights came on around him, illuminating the flight deck. He stared wildly around for several seconds before reality started to sink in. He collapsed back onto his chair, still panting hard.

A dream! It had just been a dream. He quickly connected to the Wanderer. Had the whole thing been a dream? Was being trapped in the nothingness also part of the dream?

No. That was real. The Wanderer was still stuck. It was still slowly drifting away from the tunnel. Jess let out a sigh. It was almost a shame that the destruction of the Wanderer had been a dream. At least it would have spared him from the despair of the situation.

A few minutes later Jess dragged himself out of the chair. It was clear he wasn’t going to get any more sleep after that dream. He shuffled his way into the living area to get a cup of coffee and something to eat.

Jess ate the food mechanically, then sat nursing the coffee. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t stop the dream returning. It had seemed so simple. With a long enough line of ships the Wanderer could still be pulled to safety. Now all he needed was a group of ships to miraculously turn up.

The Wanderer nudged Jess’s mind. It had carried out the calculations. The idea from the dream would work, in theory at least. All it needed were sufficient ships with the same jump engines that were unique to the Wanderer. Laughter fought tears within Jess. He’d found a way out of their predicament. If only they had a small fleet of ships.

Jess refilled his coffee then headed back to the flight deck. He sat in his chair, staring out at the nothingness and the tantalising tube of the tunnel, now far off in the distance. He still couldn’t get the idea from his dream out of his mind.

Fine, he thought, let’s follow it through to show how ridiculous it is.

He started to list out what was needed. First off, a significant number of ships. Second, every one of those ships had to have the same style of jump engines as the Wanderer — together with the necessary power generation and control systems. Third, he had to get them strung out towards the tunnel. How could he do that when it was impossible for anything to move in this place?

After that there would just be the small matter of ensuring all the ships could latch onto each other, and that the strain didn’t rip any of them apart. That was almost trivial compared to the three impossibilities.

It didn’t help. With nothing else to think about Jess’s mind kept returning to the problem, and to the first requirement. The ships. With a sigh Jess reached out for the Wanderer, starting a simulation of the problem. First he worked out where the key positions would be. Then he added the ships. Stripped down to little more than jump engines, and the support infrastructure to power and control them, the ships were much smaller than the Wanderer. They reminded him more of drones than ships.

Jess’s eyes widened and a weight seemed to have landed on his chest. He didn’t dare breathe deeply in case he chased the idea away. Drones! Could the ship create drones with jump engines? Could it create enough to get them clear of the nothingness? Jess reached out to the Wanderer to find out.

He immediately sensed reluctance from the ship, and for a reason he’d encountered before. Restrictions were built into the Wanderer. Restrictions that prevented it becoming too powerful. Those restrictions had limited the robots aboard the Wanderer to just four.

Now the Wanderer explained why they meant Jess’s plan was unworkable. The drones he wanted fell foul of two restrictions. The first was a familiar one. Creation of completely autonomous units was f*******n. The Wanderer needed to keep at least high level control over all robots and drones. The distances involved would mean many of the ships would be out of the Wanderer’s direct control. That was something the Wanderer could not do.

The second issue was creating jump engines on anything separate from the Wanderer. Part of the problem was autonomy again — if one of the drones used its jump engine it could easily become separated. The other problem was the risk of a drone falling into the wrong hands and giving away the secrets of how its jump engines were different to the norm.

Hope drained out of Jess again, replaced by a sullen anger aimed at the Wanderer’s creators. Why did they have to limit the wonderful ship with such rigid rules? Couldn’t they have left a little wriggle room for emergencies?

Jess frowned as something bled over from the Wanderer. He sensed intense concentration and… pain?. No, not pain. Severe discomfort, though. Jess focused, watching what the Wanderer was doing without interfering. To his surprise the ship was still running with his idea to use the drones, but modifying it slightly each time the inbuilt rules rejected it.

This was something Jess hadn’t seen the Wanderer do before. It was trying to work around the fundamental rules it had been given. Why now?

The Wanderer must have detected his thoughts because it sent back a reply. It was doing it for Jess. Jess had done so much for the ship, including freeing it from millennia of suppressed mental capacity. The ship was determined to do as much as it could for him.

Before Jess could properly take that in the Wanderer radiated pleasure. It had found a solution! Jess studied the details while the Wanderer carried on running through ideas, trying to find improvements.

The solution was simple enough. The main problems were caused by the drones existing beyond the Wanderer’s control, both in terms of what the drones could do and what others could learn from them. The solution was a bomb. A bomb with a fixed timer. A bomb that would be guaranteed to destroy the drone when the time came.

The idea passed the internal rules, but only if the fuse on the bombs wasn’t longer than twenty-six minutes. Luckily the countdowns didn’t have to start until the drone ships started to move away from the Wanderer.

Which raised a new problem. How could they get the drones strung out between the Wanderer and the tunnel when no engines could work in this place?

The Wanderer already had a solution. The drones could use their jump engines to push against the Wanderer. The force needed to shove the drones into position would push the much larger Wanderer in the wrong direction, but only a little each time. Not enough to endanger the plan.

Jess told the Wanderer to get started. He wanted to get back to the relative safety of the tunnel as soon as was possible. He sensed that the Wanderer felt the same.

There were problems to overcome. The first was ensuring the drones countdown’ to self-destruction didn’t kick in from the moment they were completed. It took several attempts to secure a design where the timers would only engage once the drones moved away from the Wanderer and not before.

The other main problem was resources. While the Wanderer had sufficient resources for most of the parts, the jump engines were another matter. They required rare materials of which the Wanderer’s stocks were already very low. There was no way to create as many jump engines as they needed.

Instead Jess had the Wanderer cannibalise some of its own jump engines. The Wanderer had to sacrifice nearly two-thirds of them which would make it far less manoeuvrable in jump space. The self-destruct requirement meant none of those resources would be recoverable. Jess decided he would worry about the Wanderer’s handling in jump space if they ever made it back to the tunnel — something which still seemed incredibly unlikely.