First Contact

Chapter 955: The Setting Sun

Time is a flat circle. - The Detainee

Big wheel keeps on turning, Proud Mary keeps on burning - Auntie, Terran Warlord and ruler of Bartertown, to the wanderer Raggedy Man

Nakteti sat in her Captain's chair, staring at the viewscreen.

Despite the roughness of the image, she had to admit the sensor systems had been up to the wildly different universes she had moved through. The fact they had self-adapting programming, shifting hardware, and polymorphic circuitry was the only thing that allowed the sensor packages to reconfigure themselves each time.

Now, the It Tastes Sweet sat inside of nothing but raw plasma fire that had the ship's shields at maximum strength and still required the emitters to be rotated out on a strict schedule to keep the shields from failing.

She was glad she had the foresight to have the station to armor and shield the Sweet like it was a Confed dreadnought. The shields could stop a C+ cannon round from a battleship. True, it would only do it once or twice, but it could still do it. It could also hold off a few plasma wave phase motion gun hits before the shields collapsed.

The shield emitters were acting as if they were being continuously hit by a C+ cannon's pressure and a plasma wave phased motion gun's energy.

And that was exactly what was happening outside. Particles ravened against the screens, trying to equalize the charge between the hyperactive particles and the energy of the shielding.

She could barely notice the roaring crackling sound now, her mind editing it out as mere background noise.

On the viewscreen was a hole. It was roughly a hundred kilometers wide and a thousand kilometers wide, the edges rippled due to gravity and space distortion. It was impossible to see with the naked eye through the burning mass surrounding the Sweet, but the sensors had done the impossible and spotted it two weeks prior.

It was slowly approaching as the Sweet's engines labored to push it through was essentially solid plasma.

Two weeks, and the Sweet had barely moved a thousand miles, with the engines at 40%. Any higher that 60% and the Sweet had difficulty bleeding off the heat. She had chosen 40% since it had the best mixture of thermal control, speed, and shield degradation.

She glanced over at where Surscee was sprawled out in the chair at the DCC console, then over at where Magnus was sitting at the astro-control console, using his boot knife to carve a chunk of endosteel into a rather ugly Terran duck.

"Two more days," she said.

Magnus just nodded.

"This waiting, this whole thing, doesn't bother you in the slightest, does it, Magnus?" Nakteti asked.

Magnus set the chunk of endosteel on the astro-control console and sheathed his knife as he turned the chair to look at Nakteti.

"More than you would believe, Milday," Magnus said. He held his hand out at arm's length, wrist cocked so he could see the back of his hand and fingers. "I am helpless, entrusting my life and sanity to your skills. All I can do is sit in this chair, carve my duckling, and wait until there might be some poor task that my meager skills can assist with," he said, staring at his fingertips. "My skills, my knowledge, are by far surpassed in this quest."

He dropped his arm down. "It bothers me greatly. Within the depths of my soul. What part do I really play in this grand theater? There are no creatures to fight, no feat of strength or endurance," Magnus put his feet up on the chair opposite of him, staring at Nakteti with clear blue eyes. "I stand at your side, guarding your person, as I am oath sworn to do, but of less importance that the most humble circuit of this starship."

Nakteti shook her head. "Without you and your sister to lean upon, I would have been lost to madness 'ere now."

"Perhaps," Magnus said, pulling his feet off the seat and turning back to his carving. The edge of the dagger gleamed in the harsh light of the viewscreen. "Perhaps."

Nakteti just nodded and put her chin in her catching hands, her gripping hands folded on her belly, and stared at the viewscreen.

-----

The Sweet moved forward, slowing, as Nakteti cut the engines down to 5% as the Sweet approached the space around the 'hole' in space.

The burning particles raged and roared at the edge of a pool of perfect emptiness and stillness that surrounded the ripped hole in the universe, unable to get any closer than ten thousand miles from the edges of the wound in space.

It was a thin oval, the pointed edge up, ripples around the tear, thinner at the top than the bottom. A bulge of warped space just under the point, and what looked like a tightly wound, almost flat vortex at the bottom.

Nakteti steered with her scarred hand, angling the ship, dropping down to line up with the vortex.

Magnus moved around the bridge, checking the stations, throwing the breakers on any that had gone live, checking the restraints on Nakteti and Surscee, checking on to make sure the Digital Sentience Watchful Code 993149 AKA "Chuck" was firmly protected by the Fairy Day Cage.

Every time the Terran woman looked at the viewscreen, Surscee had an almost hidden smile on her face that Nakteti didn't understand the source of.

Magnus sat down and buckled himself in.

Nakteti glanced around again, then frowned when Surscee looked at the viewscreen and got a slight, secretive smile for a moment.

"What is so amusing?" Nakteti asked her.

Surscee flushed slightly. "Oh, nothing," she said.

"Never mind," Magnus said. "She is being perverse again."

"You see it too?" Surscee teased.

"Never you mind," Magnus said stuffily.

Nakteti looked back at the viewscreen, ignoring the twins, realizing it was another one of their games that she didn't understand.

"The vortex might not be able to handle the Sweet's size," Nakteti said. "We'll have to be careful, keep a gentle hand on the till."

Surscee made a snerking noise.

Magnus glared at her.

Nakteti tensed as the ship crested the barrier between unrestrained ravening energy and nothingness.

The snarling static sound vanished and for a moment Nakteti was disoriented. She recovered quickly, shifting the heading and dropping down again to line up on the vortex at the bottom of the tear. The sensors were mostly hashed, trying to compensate for the sudden new rules.

Nakteti reversed the engine until she could be sure that she wasn't drifting toward the opening.

After a few minutes the viewscreen cleared, showing range to target, the height and width of the tear, the ripples and folds, the bulge at the top of the teardrop and the vortex at the bottom.

The vortex was smaller than Nakteti had presumed.

"It's going to be a tight fit," Nakteti said, looking at the instruments. "Going to have to take it easy going in."

Surscee snickered.

Magnus glared at his sister again.

Nakteti nudged the engines, bringing them up to a fraction of a percent.

The Sweet moved forward slowly, Nakteti adjusting the velocity and angle of the Sweet's approach.

"Easy, easy," Nakteti said as the ship slowly drew closer.

Again, Surscee snickered and Magnus glared at her.

The nav system started pinging and Nakteti checked it.

"Might not fit," Nakteti said, feeling her fur slicken up with oils as she started to stress sweat.

"Hit the bulge at the top with low power lasers, run it up and down the bulge at a slow interval," Surscee said, her voice full of amusement.

Nakteti was too focused to hear the amusement, instead she brought up the point defense lasers, put them on low power, and started running them up and down the bulge in space.

"Just a light caress will do," Surscee said, then snickered, ignoring her brother's glare.

"Five seconds," Nakteti said, "Vortex looks like its responding. Good guess."

Surscee's smile appeared again then vanished as she hid it quickly.

The nav system and the sensors stated the Sweet wouldn't quite make it, but Nakteti was sure she could push the Sweet through the vortex as long as she went slow and careful.

Magnus grabbed the rails under the console, his forearms bulging. Surscee grabbed the bars of her console, still smiling.

"Bite its ear as we go in," Surscee said.

"Huh?" Nakteti asked.

"Nothing, she is being perverse," Magnus said, his voice slightly offended.

"Two seconds," Nakteti said, putting the twin's shenanigans out of her mind.

"Bring the shields in close, barely off the hull, to wrap us in protection," Surscee suggested. "Increase the integrity fields to ensure the hull is firm."

Nakteti adjusted the emitters.

The leading edge of the Sweet contacted the vortex. There was a shuddering as the ship slowed nearly to a halt.

"Increase thrust," Surscee said. "Just a little thrust should do it."

Nakteti nodded.

She could see the vortex starting to warp around the Sweet's prow as the Sweet began to push into the vortex. The ship groaned as the vortex's confines squeezed it, shuddering slightly as the Sweet pushed fully inside the vortex.

"We're in," Nakteti said.

The watched the displays then frowned. "We're coming to a halt. Too much resistance," she said.

Surscee's grin appeared. "Reverse thrust. That should do it. We need to pull out."

"Won't we be back in the other universe?" Nakteti asked, slowly reversing thrust.

"Depends on how strong our pullout game is," Surscee said enigmatically, a smile teasing the corners of her mouth and dancing in her eyes.

"I hate you so much," Magnus growled.

Figuring it was just another one of the twin's dominance games, Nakteti ignored it, concentrating on reversing the Sweet's course.

The vortex seemed to contract as the aft hull of the Sweet suddenly left the vortex. The Sweet was pushed backwards, almost forced out of the vortex.

The Sweet popped out of the vortex with a splash of dark matter.

Nakteti cut the engines as the screens went to hash, just using the station keeping gravitics.

"Whew," Surscee said, slumping slightly in her chair and fanning herself with one hand, looking up and panting. "Such lewdness. I am overcome."

Nakteti frowned.

Magnus just scowled.

The screens cleared and Nakteti just stared.

They were surrounded at 95 million miles by a complete shell. There was a high energy source that the sensors identified as the same type of energy they had been moving through before entering the vortex.

The communication's console chirped and Magnus frowned. He unbuckled and moved over to the console, sitting down and picking up the headset. He put it on at the same time as he activated the screens. He listened for a moment then turned to Nakteti.

"It's an automated system. It's telling us to hold position, docking tenders are enroute, we'll be docking in slip Five-Alpha-Three," he said.

"Any idea who it is?" Nakteti asked.

Magnus reached out and hit the holographic key to tie in the bridge speakers to the communication's console.

"...repeat: Unidentified vessel. Docking tenders are enroute to bring you to slip Five-Alpha-Three. Any change in course or hostile action will result in destruction of your ship without warning. You are in a high security area," the voice said. "The Third Terran Republic informs you that at this time the facility is on total lockdown due to [ERROR DATA CORRUPTED] and you will remain onboard your vessel until instructed otherwise by facility authorities. Repeat: Unidentified vessel..."

Magnus turned down the volume as it repeated.

"Is that..." Nakteti started to say.

"Terran Standard, Glassing Era," Magnus said.

"Where are we?" Nakteti asked, staring at the screen, which was still showing nothing but darkness around them and a single hyper-collapsed mass in the center of the globe. She shook out her scarred hand.

Neither Surscee nor Magnus answered.

"No matter. What matters is, I think this is our destination," Nakteti said, staring at the twisted scar on the back of her hand. "Wake up Chuck, instruments say it's safe for him here."

She looked at the screen again.

"Wherever we are."