Chapter 1

Three light-years out from Earth, on the J-Type Freighter "Olympus", early 2096

Spacer Third Class Robert Wise was feeling just a bit too old for his job. In point of fact, he was a good fifty years older than almost everyone else on the ship, probably one of the only octogenarians (at least, the only human of that advanced of an age) in space. There were many days when he questioned his own sanity at his particular choice of career—most of his friends were comfortably retired, resting in lovely little communities on Earth and maybe playing some shuffleboard on occasion. They certainly weren't opening up entirely new chapters to their life, setting off to the stars like some starry-eyed teenager. At present, he wondered if retirement wouldn't have been a wiser decision.

"Report, Spacer!" the first officer, Mike Chambers, ordered.

"Yes, sir," Robert responded in a voice weakened only minutely by his age. "Polarized hull plating is maintaining seventy percent integrity. It will fail though if we don't haul our asses out of this ... whatever it is ... soon. I can't give you an exact estimate of time since the radiation intensity is varying immensely, but I'd say five or six minutes at most."

Robert's hands flew over his console, trying to coax a little more information out of the failing main sensor array. No matter what he tried, he couldn't seem to get anything useful out of the computer.

"Why didn't the sensors spot this phenomenon in the first place?" Jill Branson asked from her place in the captain's chair in the center of the bridge. "And just how the hell did it pull us out of warp?"

"Unknown," Robert responded. "I can only guess that this energy cloud's electromagnetic interference pulled us out of warp. Zefram Cochrane built the chambers for our warp core himself, and we haven't even been pushing the speed specifications for a J-Type ... I seriously doubt if this was just some mechanical glitch."

Such a thing certainly would have been possible back in Robert's heyday of course, back in the early 21st Century. Back then immoral corporations were close to ruling the world, and the planet was spiraling towards the disaster that would be WWIII, a particularly bloody chapter of human history that Robert himself had fought in. It was his extensive experience on early space-capable fighter craft and impulse warships from that war that had enabled him to join the Western Coalition Merchant Marine, despite his advanced age. Unlike back during the war when planes would fall from the sky due to shoddy and rushed construction, there was little chance a modern vessel would possess much if any in the way of technical problems. Ever since Zefram Cochrane had brought warp travel to humanity, Earth had rushed headlong into a nearly utopic state. The new governments on Earth were few, nearly immune from corruption, and had steadily solved a great many of the problems that had plagued Earth for generations. There was even talk of forming a "United Earth" government, something that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago. The new Western Coalition was fanatical about safety and reliability aboard space vessels, and the J-Type freighter 'Olympus' was no exception to their standards.

Captain Branson stood and approached Robert's console, staring towards the display intensely.

"Just what the hell is this thing anyway?" she asked him, staring the rapidly fluctuating energy readings.

Robert shook his head with frustration. "Other than that it is a cloud of energy of some sort, I really couldn't tell you, Captain. I can definitely say it wasn't on our sensor screen even three minutes ago; the log confirms this. I checked just to make sure I wasn't growing inattentive with age."

Captain Branson smiled wryly. "Robert, me and you both know that you have ten times the experience and capabilities of any other crewman on this vessel, and you are still able to keep up with the rest of us ... including scoring damn nearly perfectly on your physical evaluation ... and I have no lack of confidence in your skills. That's why I accepted your request to serve on this vessel. I'm hoping you can use that well-seasoned brain-"

"Ouch," Robert commented with a smirk.

"—experienced if you prefer then, but I'm hoping you can use it to conjure up a way out of this mess for us. We have no thrusters, no impulse engines, no warp engines, our hull will buckle inside of five minutes, and main power will fail even before then. What can we do?"

Robert shook his head slowly. "There's not a lot we can do. With the consistency of the energy drain, our escape pods would never be able to escape this phenomenon before becoming disabled. Since our reaction control thrusters are offline and we have no form of propulsion available..."

"What is it?" Captain Branson prompted urgently as she saw the look of hope in his eyes.

"We jettison the cargo using emergency explosive detachment procedures," Robert stated forcefully, punching numbers into the computer to calculate thrust variables even as he continued to verbalize his plan, "and then open the aft-facing exterior supply bays to space. The release of oxygen and the force from the cargo decoupling combined will generate enough thrust that we'll clear the central part of this cloud within three minutes. We'll be cutting it incredibly close, but it's a shot."

"Do it!" Branson ordered as she took her seat, and both Robert and First Office Chambers began tapping rapidly at separate parts of Robert's console. Three seconds later, the ship shuttered and everybody grabbed to the nearest handrails—the Olympus was low enough on power that the inertial dampers were nearly completely offline—as the ship suddenly plunged forward through a swirling cloud filled with pockets of intense radiation.

"Two minutes forty-eight seconds until we clear the most intense section of the cloud," the helm officer shouted from her post over the sounds of the acceleration and emergency alarms.

"Three minutes fifty seconds until main power failure!" Robert informed the bridge.

"Transfer auxiliary batteries to the structural integrity system!" Chambers commanded.

Robert attempted to do so, keying up a series of switches that would dump power from the auxiliary banks into the fields of energy responsible for reinforcing the hull. His computer warbled back at him in a distressed tone.

"Power shunts offline," Robert reported, "unable to access auxiliary circuits. Estimated three minutes thirty-five seconds now until hull failure; there is a considerable margin of error there though as the peak energy intensity levels are all over the board!"

"Ma'am!" an engineer exclaimed from a rear-facing console at the back of the bridge. "I don't know what just happened, but some sort of energy build up suddenly disabled the hull polarization on our ventral side."

"Evacuate the crew to the upper decks!" Captain Branson ordered. "What's the status of the ventral hull; has any of the energy burned through?"

"Negative," the engineer replied, "but radiation is now flooding those decks. Lethal radiation doses registered in some of the most exposed sections. I'm isolating the environmental controls for that section and containing the radiation; we won't be able to help the crew who have already been exposed, but we might be able to keep the radiation from spreading throughout the ship."