Dark Echoes - Part 8

Hayes closed the comm channel with a subtle signal from Smith. Odyssey’s crew pressed against their computer stations to stay upright as the hull shuddered around them.

“Commander Wilson, see what you can do to maneuver us out of that thing’s grasp!” Smith Commanded.

“Hull stress is climbing rapidly! If we don’t do something fast, the dorsal hull’s gonna buckle!” Jones shouted.

“Confirmed!” Connors added with a shocked look. “Cannons are offline!”

Aaen turned around in his chair at Sandberg, noting the look on Jones’ face, “Standby torpedoes! Lock onto that towing cable!”

Sandberg already had the torpedo queue open and armed a full spread. The towing cable was HUGE! He noted.

Odyssey swerved sharply from starboard to port, back and forth, but the data on Wilson’s screen didn’t change. He couldn’t help but stare at a large red warning pop-up that made his stomach churn and his spine tingle with a cold chill, “I can’t break us free!” he declared disappointingly at the top of his lungs.

The layers of hull and circuitry overhead were crackling and groaning under the incredible and increasing pressure from the four docking cable claws; their physical impression was becoming more pronounced by the second! The bridge crew noticed.

“TARGET ACQUIRED!” Sandburg shouted over the increasingly loud metallic groaning sound filling the bridge, his hand hovering over the command to fire the high-explosive volley.

Aaen struggled back into his seat against the force of inertia—realizing some of the inertia cancellers had been compromised! “FIRE!”

“TORPEDOES AWAY!”

Another alarm sounded with red alert as six nearly blindingly bright white torpedoes fired in perfect duet sequence from their respective silos, finding their targets with near-lightning speed and precision and detonating instantly on impact. The viewscreen whited out as the crew looked forward from under their arm. Aaen looked slightly left, “EMERGENCY EVASIVE! GET US OUTTA HERE, COMMANDER!” the tow separated violently as the fiery spherical explosion was still expanding. He realized Sandberg put the torpedoes on high-yield!

“AYE!” Odyssey swerved hard and sharply, if not unsteady, to port like a car skidding around a wide corner in a Hollywood action movie as Wilson slammed the command for maximum translight. The stars blurred sharply out of sight in seconds.

“Are they following us?” Aaen asked Jones.

Let’s hope not, Smith silently agreed, gasping to catch his breath as he pushed himself upright against his station.

“AFFIRMATIVE!” Jones declared in a panic, also trying to catch her breath. “AND GAINING RAPIDLY FROM OUR SEVEN AND FIVE O’CLOCK, HARD AFT!”

Aaen looked over his shoulder, “ANYWHERE NEARBY WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO LOSE ‘EM?”

“I’M LOOKING!” She looked at the passive sensor data pouring onto her screen and realized she was going to have to work fast.

Another alarm sounded. Sandberg sat upright with a shocked look on his face at what he was seeing on his screen, “THE TWO SMALLER SHIPS ARE IN PURSUIT! THEY’RE TRYING TO ESTABLISH A WEAPONS LOCK ON US!”

“CONTINUE EVASIVE MANEUVERS!” Aaen commanded forward. Jones conducted a scan with both short and long-range sensors . . . THERE! She thought, pointing to her screen.

*****

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Dark Echoes - Part 7

Captain’s log: supplemental. Odyssey is presently in tow of the USSC Valiant en-route to the specified coordinates for drop-off. Our doctor has confirmed the generally good health of that ship’s crew, though we are still trying to make heads or tails of how they managed to get here. The common theory among my crew is they got here through some kind of a space and time distortion. Sensor data is still being analyzed. The Valiant’s technology is impressive, to say the least, by comparison to our own—though many questions are still left to be answered, like why our remaining undetected is so doggone important for this mission, and why that ship is so apparently valuable to our government and the military? 

We are traveling at translight seven, and we’ve extended our stealth field around the other ship. It’s mass is notably greater than ours, which makes me wonder why my ship was sent to recover it instead of something larger and with more technological muscle, like the Voyager? That ship could have completed this mission much more quickly, especially considering its hilariously more powerful Translight drive. My guess is Voyager wasn’t chosen for this mission because it’s too big to remain totally undetected. But I still wonder by ‘who’? And ‘why’? I guess only time will tell. . . In any case, at present speed, my helmsman reports we will be arriving in a few minutes. Sensors officer Jones has reported and noted the coordinates are in a region of space that has not officially been explored. My inquiry into ship’s database revealed nothing—literally. This has to be the first time we’ve ever traveled anywhere inside what is technically our own space and not know exactly where we’re going—or being able to know what to expect. My gut tells me something’s up, but I can’t seem to narrow it down. I almost feel like someone, for some reason, doesn’t want us to know that much. . . The ship we’re towing doesn’t strictly follow the same design configuration as any other ship in our database, which is very extensive and detailed. What the government and military’s interest is in the Valiant. . .? Aaen concluded the mission journal entry, saved the file, then returned to his chair.

“We’re two minutes out!” Wilson declared, eyeing his computer’s navigational data.

“Stealth field is stable!” Connors announced, carefully monitoring its power readings. The rest of the crew, especially Aaen and Smith, took some solace in this. Connors noted the stealth field was drawing an incredible amount of juice from the ship’s main power grid, and yet the rest of the ship’s systems were minimally affected. Ordinarily, the story would be very different for this detail.

The bridge shuddered abruptly and the lights flickered sporadically for several seconds. The crew watched as their computer screens abruptly and erratically blinked in an out irregularly.

“Report!” Aaen commanded to the rest of the bridge as he gripped his chairs armrests anxiously. The deck was still vibrating strongly. 

“I am no longer in control of the ship,” Wilson announced hesitantly, trying to use the ship's thrusters to correct their heading. 

“Speed change: one-quarter-sublight,” the Main Computer announced intelligently. The Translight corridor quickly disappeared as the stars—what very few there were—became visible.

“We appear to be caught in some kind of a dampening net. . . It's like we're a fly that just hit flypaper!” A sensor alert sounded. “WOAH!” Jones exclaimed, eyeing the new contacts on her screen. 

“What is it?” Smith demanded, rushing to Jones’ station, eyeing the new data flooding into the screen—“HO-LY-COW!” 

Aaen turned in his chair and snapped, “What?”

A loud BANG shook the bridge. The vibrations suddenly turned into a sharp quake, and the bridge ceiling collapsed partially in the shape of a metallic four-clawed grip. The crew in the center of the bridge forward shouted and ducked from shock. A few eerie metallic groans flooded both decks. 

“We’re at a dead stop!” Wilson declared sharply.

“Two HUGE ships are decloaking at 11 o’clock and 1 o’clock! Heavily armed! Their weapons are fully powered!”

“Hail them!” Aaen commanded to Hayes.

She complied, then turned her head three seconds later, “They’re not responding!”

The deck shuddered again, this time so hard the entire crew nearly fell out of their seats.

“How can they see us?” Smith asked Jones. Aaen was thinking the same thing.

“They shouldn’t be able to! They’re too far away from us!” Jones declared.

“Who are they?” Aaen asked Jones.

Jones turned her head, “No idea! They’re not giving any transponder signal!”

Their configuration was familiar for a ship of their classification, but that class of cruiser typically aren’t equipped to detect, much less overpower a ship like Odyssey. Something’s not right, here, Aaen noted as he watched the two ships come about. In less than a minute, all three ships stopped as a fourth gradually seemingly dissolved into view over the course of thirty seconds. This one’s size, alone, made the two cruisers and Odyssey look almost like three flies on a car’s windshield by comparison, and it’s design. . . It had to be some kind of a dreadnaught.

“Shut down the stealth system!” Aaen commanded.

“Captain? What are you thinking?” Smith asked, approaching Aaen.

“They can see us, which means the stealth system was designed to prevent other ships from detecting us so they wouldn’t attempt to intervene. These ships clearly know how to see through it. Besides,” Aaen spoke at nearly a whisper, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,”

With that, Smith took his seat and put the ship on alert condition two. The bridge lights turned yellow. Sandberg took the ship out of silent running. Connors took all power out of the stealth system and re-distributed all that power. Smith looked aft. Connors nodded at him to let him know the captain’s order had been carried out.

An alert filled the bridge. Hayes turned around, “Captain. We are being hailed. . . The frequency isn’t listed under standard fleet channels. I have no idea who it is,” the alert echoed again.

Aaen looked at the viewscreen and nodded as he commanded, “Answer the hail. On-screen.” His spine chilled and tingled as he leaned into his chair.

The image on the screen changed to show a six-foot-nothing Caucasian male with short dark-hair wearing a black suit and shirt and a dark-blue tie with silver four-point diamond highlights sitting in the center of a room Aaen and Smith silently reasoned was the dreadnaught’s bridge. The bridge was manned by men and women who offered a steely look and wearing some kind of pitch black, unmarked tactical gear, and appeared to be armed to the teeth with firearms and assorted explosives.

“Hello there, Captain. You’re looking well. That’s good to see!” the suited man told Aaen.

Jones tweaked the scan frequency on Odyssey’s external scanners and started a scan of the two smaller ships. Seconds later, the results appeared on her screen. Something told her whoever the Captain was talking to wouldn’t want this data to get out, so she quickly transferred the data to a separate peripheral memory storage drive. The frequency of the next scan was also adjusted, and then she started another scan on the larger ship.

“You seem to have me at somewhat a disadvantage. Who am I speaking with?” Aaen’s gut told him there is no way that guy is military. . .

The data was transferred to the same peripheral memory storage drive. Maybe the scans’ frequencies were just low enough that they wouldn’t have detected them? Jones asked herself. She felt butterflies in her stomach and she felt her head swelling with anxiety.

The suited man grinned as he made direct eye contact with Aaen and subtly chuckled as he glared at Aaen with a cold stare, “I’ll be asking the questions, Captain. You will surrender your ship, and the Valiant—now—or you, and your ship and crew, will be destroyed,”

*****

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Dark Echoes - Part 6

Phasing took about five seconds—

Firm gasps filled the away team’s comm-links before a loud shout of terror blasted through the away team’s environmental suits as a human crew member in a naval duty uniform.

Aaen looked over his left shoulder with a wince. His left ear was still ringing. With a subtle gasp, he asked, “You okay?”

The Chief Engineer nodded, taking a breath.

The away team looked around in front of them. They each recognized what this room was for, though the design had changed. Radically, Aaen noted. “Away team to Odyssey, come in,”

“Go ahead!” Smith replied promptly.

“There’s a crew aboard this ship. From the looks of things, I’d say the ship was either under attack—or, they went through something similar to what we did before we got here,”

Smith winced, “Say again, sir?”

“This ship’s crew are suspended, somehow. . .like, they’re frozen in various postures, like they’re hiding or running away from something.” Aaen exchanged a look of curiosity with the rest of the away team. “We’re going to try to find their bridge. Maybe we’ll be able to learn more, there,” Aaen said with a gesture.

“Roger that,” Smith agreed.

The ship’s infrastructure was designed intelligently enough to enable the away team to navigate a simple maze of dark-red-lit metal tunnels and crawlspaces until forcing a way through what they collectively reasoned was a maintenance hatch. The ship was clearly on red alert, and from the looks of things, whatever the ship had gone through, it didn’t bode so well for anyone or anything inside. Of the three crew members on the bridge, they looked frozen in their seats—completely motionless, and. .asleep?” Aaen wondered, noting their viewscreen was full of part snow, part void.

“According to these readings, these people are stuck in space, and time,” the temporal readings were unmistakable, “They’re from the same space and time as we originally are,”

“And their uniforms and their ship changed around them all-the-same, too,”

“Yeah,” Aaen agreed.

“They’re all alive and alert. I’m getting healthy vital signs from all of them,”

“How do we get them in-sync with this space and time?” Aaen asked generally.

“Away team, this is Jones. That ship you’re on. .my close-range sensor analysis suggests it’s trapped in a temporal entanglement. The phenomenon will release that ship and its crew, but it’s going to take some serious firepower to break an entanglement as strong as the one that’s holding it where it is,”

“What kind of firepower?” Aaen asked. The comm-link broadcasted his voice through the bridge effectively.

She replied with wide-eyed and nodding as though to indicate she was being very serious, “Like a FULL SPREAD of high-yield torpedoes!”

“Are you kidding?” Smith asked Jones sharply. “At THIS distance?” That many torpedoes at high-yield could take out both ships!

“By the way, we’re running out of time! The space surrounding that ship is stabilizing! If we don’t free it, it’ll blow up in our face and create an explosion with ten-times greater magnitude!” Jones glared at the sensors screen, It’s THAT, or we RUN-LIKE-HECK for our lives to get out of the blast radius! NOT likely!

Smith faced the front of the bridge, “Sir?”

Aaen thought about the options for a second, then decided, “Do it!”

Smith snapped, “Arm torpedoes—set for high yield!”

Jones improvised—carefully—as the order was carried out. “Torpedo warheads armed. .and locked on!” The targeting her hand hovered over the firing controls.

“FIRE!” Smith commanded.

The away team braced against anything that looked sturdy.

Odyssey’s viewscreen filled with six almost white, nearly blinding warheads as they shoot at their targeted coordinates in a seeming blink of an eye. The detonation shook both bridges violently. The Valiant’s crew were as motionless as metal statues; the away team forced as much of their weight as they could into the bulkheads. The away team was shaken around sharply like a two-year-old shaking a fish in a bag full of water.

“Away team?” Smith asked with some noticeable concern in his voice.

“We’re here!” Aaen answered, noting a change in the behavior of the Valiant’s crew. “And so is the crew of the Valiant!”

*****

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Dark Echoes - Part 5

The room remained dark except for the running lights of passing ships dropping out of translight near the station, all of which flew so close after slowing to sublight and behaved as though they were completely oblivious to the station's being there, “Have we heard back from them, yet?”

After a long pause, the answer came as, “Not yet, sir. It’s only been about three hours.” ‘Three hours’. . .a lot can happen in that time under these circumstances, especially. He felt a heavy pit in the bottom of his stomach, considering. . .

The one wearing four stars on their high collar, sitting in the tallest, darkest and most cushioned seat took a sip of their darkly colored beverage, set the small glass on its coaster, then turned to their right and looked out of the view windows at the stars in the deepest visible depth of the vacuum—“When was the last contact?” the question came darkly.

“Twenty-two-hundred. Several of them have letters from their families that are a few days old that they haven’t read yet.”

“If they’re in stealth mode—and they likely are—even the Voyager would be lucky to detect them.” A third voice said. The mission objective rolled around the back of his mind like a hot coal. If they don’t succeed. . .

A corpsman entered the room, set a handheld in front of the four-star and then sharply left the room.

The four-star picked up the handheld, thumbed through the contents for several seconds, and then dropped the handheld on the table. He could feel the attention throughout the rest of the room bearing down on him. Regardless, he continued looking out the window into space. “We got another message from them—they made it into deep-sector space.” This news left no comfort. If anything, the tension and uneasiness in the room climbed sharply, especially with the four-star. The fact of that crew being comprised of space naval officers and having recognized the risks involved with such tours of duty and what the possible consequences could be of such a tour of duty meant virtually nothing right now.

The four-star leaned into his chair, took a deep breath and then asked, “Is there any chance of getting a message out to them?” yet, he already knew the answer to this frankly redundant question, he reminded himself.

A head turned, “Negative. Their stealth system makes our best reconnaissance. .heck, even our best counterintelligence drones seem like child’s toys by comparison.” Would that be for the better, though? He asked himself. That system was an enormously powerful piece of equipment that most of the more tenured and generally respected captains didn’t even know about. To say nothing about where they got it from. Nah, he silently corrected himself, where it came from is nothing compared to who helped us develop that technology. It was a collaborative engineering project—and Odyssey got the prototype. He reminded himself that a bunch of The Union’s bigger chips was invested in this mission. He still wondered why The Union’s ‘friends’ didn’t carry out this mission instead? The answer came as quickly as the question: that region of space has gone completely-unexplored for decades for a very—long—time. And for very, good, reasons. . . But still, his curiosity in silence piqued, would that system be enough? He sensed the four-star was thinking the same thing.

A subtle, high-pitched chime filled the room; the tension broke slightly, but the relief was short-lived. A female voice in its late 40’s filled the air, “Sir, your guest has arrived,”

The four-star sat upright and turned towards the doors and gestured for the guest to be allowed to enter.

With a touch to the doors’ control panel, the primary entrance doors into the room parted with a subtle mechanical hum. The light from the outside corridor shined into the room. In a blink, a six-foot-even security officer, clean-shaven, wearing a black cap with complete and unmarked body armor, and a stiff, straight face entered first sharply carrying an automatic compact assault rifle with the safety switched on. A dark humanoid shape stood just outside the doorway facing the room; its head was slightly disproportionate to the rest of its body. The shape's front appeared to be blackened out because of the lighting from behind it and the darkness in front of it.

The four-star faced the doorway, “‘Spike’! Please, come in.” 

*****

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Dark Echoes - Part 4

“What-is-THAT?” Jones gasped wide-eyed. The crew was fixated on the center of the viewscreen. The contact was inching toward the center of the radar.

The shape?. . .The mass. . .? Smith wondered about who made such a ship. Is it a ship? Whatever it was, it was maintaining its position with little or no effort or power. If it was a starship, it had the sleekest shape he had ever seen. And the running lights. . .if it was made by human hands, the manufacturer seemed to have designed it to be as tough as it was nearly invisible, judging by the darkly-colored hull. Or was that extra hull armor? What kind of weapons are those?. . . The only way the crew could see its exterior was because of the sunlight brushing against what he guessed was its dorsal side. “Lifesigns?”

Jones entered the commands for a scan. Ten seconds later, she leaned back and looked left, turning her head, “None. But I am getting a technical reading when I tie-in the targeting sensors,” Are you serious? Are you kidding me? She wondered in silence, rhetorically in the back of her mind as she widely-eyed her screen.

“You-did-what?” Jorgensen asked directly, snapping to his right. Jones turned her head and waved him off. Jorgensen noted the look on her face and turned his attention to the technical activity on her screen.

—Jeez! He gasped.

“Captain!” Jones called out, “That thing’s equipped with some really impressive tech. . .”

Aaen noted the subtle change in her tone as his interest piqued, “And?”

“I’m also getting a transponder signal,” she turned and looked at the viewscreen. Smith looked briefly looked at Jones curiously and then turned to the viewscreen with a more steely look. “U-S-S-C. . .Valiant,”

The crew recognized that name and sharply faced forward in shock and surprise.

“The chronological signature is the same as our hull,” The crew quickly came to the same silent realization: it is a ship—and they came from the same universe as us!

“Is there an atmosphere over there?” Aaen asked quickly.

Jones conducted another scan and nodded, “Yes!”

Alright, let’s see what we’re dealing with here. Aaen made an enthusiastic command decision. “Maintain silent running. Away team: prepare to go aboard.”

*****

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