Chapter 46

It only took a few centons of watching the latest bridge video log to see the battle with the Destructors. The Star Hunter did in fact have the powerful planetary defence weapon and they also had what looked like the equivalent of nuclear missiles. They fired everything they had and didn’t seem to even scratch the surface of the Destructor, when that wasn’t working they had tried to attack the main weapon that was destroying the planet, but they got too close to the beam and it jumped to their ship, like a spark of static electricity, moving more like lightning, instead of in a straight line like a laser.

The beam cut straight through their ship and shields, instantly venting everyone on half of the ship into space. When the order to abandon the ship was given, Brian Hawker and Sebastian exited the bridge via a door at the rear. Less than a centon later, the ship began exploding, so the bridge sealed itself off and the rest of the staff got into the escape pods off the side of the bridge.

It was Adam that then said, “That puts a big question mark around the status of Sebastian and Hawker ... were they just elsewhere on the ship and got vented into space or did they escape with the Rifters? I think we can rule out they were in escape pods ... and it’s unfortunate that everyone that got into the escape pods would be dead now, since escape pods would’ve taken them to the surface of the planet and they would’ve died as the planet was destroyed ... unless they were bouncing around amongst the debris like Ra’ki was.”

Mark immediately asked, “Wait! Do our escape pods do that?”

“Yes, that’s the way they design all escape pods. If a ship is in trouble and people need to escape, the pods will head to the nearest habitable planet so they can survive, if it does not reach a habitable planet within a few sectares, the pods put you into a cryogenic sleep and automatically wakes you when you reach a habitable planet ... or you end up drifting into a sun and die ... but at least it’s a peaceful death.”

“That didn’t work out so well for the crew of the Star Hunter! Maybe we should change the way our escape pods work?,” then Mark started walking and talking, which everyone had learned was when Mark was thinking up something important, so they just watched and listened as he continued, “If the pods detect the Atlantean sensor network, they should simply hold position and broadcast a distress signal or homing beacon. Now that we have ships staged all over the place, it shouldn’t take more than a few days to reach pretty much anywhere in our known universe. Then as a safety, if there is no sensor network detected, then they can search out a habitable planet. Also all escape pods, should have a reusable construx in it to build a basic house with recycling, a food synth and drink dispensers. If it’s reusable, they can pack it up and travel with it, then set it up when they need shelter or when they find other survivors.”

Cricket said, “Better yet, why don’t we make the escape pods themselves a reusable construx house. That way, even if the pod goes to an uninhabitable planet, it could still create a house around them and they could live in it until we can rescue them. It would require the occupant to be a citizen to prevent the technology from falling into other hands, but they would literally wake up in a bed in a house. After they wake up, they could pack up the house and take it with them, unless of course, it’s an uninhabitable planet in which case the house won’t even have opening doors or windows.”

“That’s a great idea! Do it!”

“I will change the pods on all security ships, unfortunately I cannot manipulate those on civilian ships.”

Adam said, “Those are brilliant suggestions, I take it you’re making those changes?”

Mark smiled, “Yes, not exactly as I outlined though. The escape pods themselves will be construx and as they land on a planet, they will construct a house around the occupant. That way, even on an uninhabitable planet, they could live in the house with the amenities until we can rescue them. On a habitable planet, they could pack up the house and take it with them. We’re making the change for the security ship escape pods, anyway! Do we have a time on the medibay yet?”

Adam called medical to inquire about the status of the survivor ... there was still no time on the medibay, so he asked, “Since we know the person is Silican, should we return her to Silica?”

Mark said, “Do you remember seeing a person with blue hair doing anything on the bridge? I don’t! So yes, we should probably return her to Silica, but right now my top priority is to find the nebula and rift, so let’s go in the direction the other ships fled. I have the Sentinel manufacturing special rift jumper versions of our seeding ships for a mission. In fact, I’m building two pairs of them, just to be redundant.”

As everyone looked at him in confusion and curiosity, Mark explained his idea, “I want to know more about these rifts, so I have an experiment in mind. The first step is to see if we can actually communicate inside the nebular cloud. If we can communicate with the beacon inside the cloud, then we’re just going to drop a sensor beacon near the rift, deploy the second rift jumper and they can both go through. However, based on what Ra’ki said, I seriously doubt we can communicate from inside the cloud, so if that’s the case, the ship will exit the nebula, we’ll update the protocol and deploy the second rift jumper, so the pair of them can drop six sensors all around the periphery, before re-entering, finding the rift and going through it.

Once they exit the other side, they will follow the predetermined protocol and do the same procedure on the other end, but with those sensors IDs being incremented by 1. Then, if they ever exit a rift and find existing sensors, they would just append another ID number. This nebula will be our starting point, since it’s now in our sensor network and we can monitor it. So if we ever see the sensor ID change from 1 to 1-12, for instance, you would know that there was 11 rifts before they used this one again. Then on the third pass, they would have a better idea of the network, 1-12-24 would show it’s likely a network of 12 rifts, but if you saw 1-12-32, that would prove that the rift network was random.

This, of course, is all just hypothetical, from what Ra’ki said, there could be an infinite number of rift nebulas in the network and they may never use the same rift twice, but eventually our normal seeding ships will detect the sensors in, or around, these nebular clouds and we can react to anything that comes through them or, if we can map them, maybe we can use the rifts ourselves.”

Liyana asked, “So why four rift jumpers?”

Mark realized he hadn’t explained, “Sorry, I forgot to explain the second pair! Once the first pair enter the rift, we may never know if they worked, and one thought that had crossed my mind, referred to something else that Ra’ki had said ... smaller ships go through the rifts quicker than large ships ... since the rift jumpers are pretty small, they may catch up to the Destructors on the other side and possibly be destroyed, they have shields, but the shields didn’t seem to protect the Star Hunter. So the second pair of rift jumpers will follow the first pair by a secton, they will work on the same jump count as the first pair. All four ships will record their own jump counts into the sensor IDs, that way if we ever find these rifts we’ll know which jumpers have found it and what their jump counts were.”

Ra’ki sat in amazement, “You guys can really do that? You guys are definitely in a different league from anyone else we’ve ever met. We thought Sebastian and Brian were pretty advanced, but I guess not. I also get the sense that you guys don’t seem to like Sebastian much. He seemed nice from what I saw, was he really that bad?”

Mark said, “We can’t make that determination for you, let’s just say he’s a wanted criminal on pretty much every planet we’ve ever found. Maybe some more of the bridge logs will shed some light?”

Hoping she would see the man he was for herself, they returned to reviewing some Star Hunter bridge logs. Fortunately, any logs that involved firing weapons were easy to find. After the meeting with the Rifters, they found the logs of the attack and devastation they bestowed upon Thulark.

From the bridge video, which is actually at the front display looking back at everyone on the bridge. They clearly heard a person on the bridge mention Thulark and they could see Brian and Sebastian discussing a suitable target to test their weapons on, then instructing a technician to lock on to the target they had chosen. They smiled as they said, ‘Fire away!’ ... then it seemed like there was a bit of a ruckus, everyone seemed to shout all at once and nothing was comprehensible and then the video seemed to cut off suddenly at that point.

Upon viewing that video, Ra’ki, and most everyone present, was crying, and they clenched their fists in anger.

Ra’ki asked what happened to Thulark, so they showed her the video that Liyana had made for AFNN, showing the devastation of the planet and the senseless killing of over a billion people.

After watching the video, Ra’ki excused herself and left, as all the girls followed just to make sure she was OK.

Everyone else was visibly mad, saying that they hoped Sebastian was still alive, so they could torture him to the brink of death, heal him and then do it again.

A notification came through to Adam saying the medibay was now displaying 1:12.

Adam informed everyone, “We’ll hopefully get more answers in a little over an centar, when that Hawker tech gets out of medical.”

Trayak was very near the edge of the sensor network, so the Poseidon’s sensors were already scanning far out into uncharted space, and it didn’t take long until they found the rift nebula. They dropped a couple of sensor beacons to cover the gap between the nebula and the rest of the network, so it monitored this nebula.

Ahead of them, the scanners were detecting the gaseous anomaly and had correctly identified it as a nebula, but was suggesting avoidance. Mark now understood why Ra’ki called them micro nebulae. Usually nebulae are massive clouds hundreds or even thousands of light yahren across, thought to be the dust and gases of an exploding star. This nebula though was still fairly big, at roughly 200,000 kilometres cubed ... but quite small on the galactic scale, about two-third of the distance between the Earth and the moon.

They continued toward the nebula, with those on the bridge enjoying the beauty of the blue, purple and green cloud in front of them. While everyone was commenting about how pretty the cloud was, Adam and Mark just stared in awe at the slowly morphing nebula, wondering what mysteries lie inside and beyond.

Myrria and Nyssia informed Adam that they had determined, from the computers and data, that Hawker and Sebastian had boarded a shuttle and escaped before the ship exploded. They couldn’t tell the shuttle’s destination, but they saw it got away OK, and they headed it in the same direction as the other ships. So there was a good chance that they were now with the Rifters.

During the sub-light trip from Trayak to the nebula, the Sentinel had completed all four rift jumpers, so they stopped at the edge of the nebula and deployed the first pair of rift jumpers. One went into the nebula and they set the other to go around the nebula and drop 6 sensors.

Everyone watched in anticipation as the rift jumper entered the nebula. They could detect it for a moment, and then it disappeared from the scanners. Mark stared at the point in the nebula where the rift jumper went in, knowing that if it couldn’t communicate, they programmed it to turn around, exit the cloud and drop sensors around the periphery. After a centon, there was still no sign of the ship and it wasn’t detected on the scanners, so Cricket set the protocol parameters for the other rift jumpers, to drop six sensors around the nebula before entering it. Hopefully, by having six sensors covering the X, Y and Z axis, they could make an approximate calculation of where the rift in the centre of the nebula was.

They then watched the second rift jumper as it circumnavigated the nebula deploying the six sensors. Several centons after deploying the second rift jumper, the first rift jumper emerged from the cloud, albeit in a different spot from where it went in. It updated its protocol and joined its partner dropping sensors until they deployed all six, then they both entered the nebula.

Since the other pair wouldn’t enter the nebula for days, there was nothing more they could do. Adam then suggested heading by Thulark on the way back to Silica, so the Hawker tech was going to recover soon and they could see what they did to the poor people of that planet.

More time than they thought must have passed, while they watched the first stage of the experiment, for as soon as they entered FTL, a message from the medical staff informed them that the Hawker technician would soon be out of the medibay.

Mark and Adam made their way to medical, just in time to meet the guard escorting the Silican woman to a cell.

Like other Silicans, the technician was tall, close to 7-foot-6 in height and looked very fit and was knockout attractive. She had long blue hair and blue eyes, she had huge breasts that had to be at least DD size, and a very shapely body.

Upon seeing Mark, she smiled and said, “You look exactly like Sebastian described you, I suppose you’re here to torture and interrogate me?”

Mark laughed, “No, that’s not our way. Besides, we downloaded everything from the ship, so there’s not a lot we don’t already know. What is your name and what was your role on the Star Hunter?”

The technician replied, “My name is Astra, and I was Brian’s mistress, I didn’t really have an official role on the ship. Do you think Sebastian and Brian survived?”

“Well, there’s a good chance they survived. They both got into a shuttle and flee before the ship exploded.”

“I hope you catch them, I want to rip Brian’s balls off for leaving me to die!”

Adam and Mark both laughed, as Mark asked the next question, “Do you have any idea how many of those construx devices Sebastian had?”

“Once we met the Rifters, they started working on some designs for new ships and I remember Sebastian saying he only had 9 left, those might be the devices you are referring to? Rifters didn’t have faster than light travel, so from what I gathered, they were going to go through the rift, find an asteroid field, build some huge new ships and transfer everyone to those and then lose the Destructors by using faster than light speeds. Then the plan was to find a habitable planet and call it home.”

At that point in time, Annabelle and the rest of the girls showed up to see the new girl.

Mark nodded his head as he turned and explained to everyone else what he was thinking, “That’s exactly what I would do in that situation as well. As soon as Ra’ki said nothing was faster than light, that immediately told me how to lose the Destructors. If they can only travel at sub-light speeds, I would go through a rift and, if there are no planets anywhere close to that rift, I would find an asteroid field and build the new ships, then transfer everyone to the new ships and use FTL to escape, leaving the old ships there for the Destructors to destroy. That would leave the Destructors in the middle of nowhere and no one to chase, but at sub-light speeds it could be hundreds to thousands of yahren before they encounter another habitable planet.”

Adam then asked the next question, “Do you know why they attacked Thulark?”

The look on Astra’s face dropped in a heartbeat. “That was just awful. They wanted to try out some new automatic targeting system they had developed, so they were going to fire the particle weapon and some missiles at Thulark’s moon. Unfortunately, the targeting system went awry and instead of targeting the moon, it locked on to every major city around the planet and started launching missiles. They tried, but couldn’t gain control of the system, so they eventually powered down the entire ship and restarted it to get control back, but by then the time everything came back online, the damage was done. They couldn’t bring themselves to go down to the surface to see if anyone survived. I take it you’ve been there? Were there any survivors?”