Across the Great Rift Read online

  Across the Great Rift

  By

  Scott Washburn

  Cover image by Jonathan Cresswell-Jones

  Winged Hussar Publishing, LLC, 1525 Hulse Road, Unit 1, Point Pleasant, NJ 08742

  This edition published in 2016 Copyright ©Winged Hussar Publishing, LLC

  ISBN 978-0-9970946-9-5

  Bibliographical references and index

  1.Science Fiction. 2. Alien Worlds. 3. Action & Adventure

  Winged Hussar Publishing, LLC All rights reserved

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  Chapter One

  All through her training, Carlina had been amazed at how easy it was to kill a person. There were so many places where even a modest amount of force applied in just the right fashion would cause fatal damage. Now that she had actually done it, she was relieved to discover that it had been just like training—easier, really, since she had no instructor hovering close by to criticize her technique. Of course, it was fortunate that she had chosen Petty Officer Jerrin Eastman for her first victim. The man was a jackass and had rubbed her the wrong way from her first day aboard Exeter. He seemed to think because he was related—very distantly—to Lord Allendale that she should have strained a muscle hopping into his bunk. So now, when it was time to act, it had been no problem at all tempting him into this bunk—or to kill him. It was just a matter of waiting until he was in the proper position and then a quick blow had crushed his larynx. He’d choked to death in just a few moments and she’d only had to restrain his first panicked thrashings. She had found no pleasure in doing it—not really—but she’d had no real qualms, either.

  She wasn’t sure the rest would be quite so easy.

  She carefully disentangled herself from his arms and legs and then began to get dressed. The bunk space just off the bridge was for the use of the captain or the senior watch officers, but it was still about the size of a closet. She banged against the bulkhead several times before the task was done. She turned to open the hatch and then hesitated. Fear rose up in her and she pushed it back down with some difficulty. She’d been trained—very carefully and thoroughly trained—but she had never actually done anything like this before. Her instructors were now an impossible distance away and she was utterly alone, completely surrounded by enemies. She shut her eyes, clenched her fists and breathed deeply for a moment until the panic was gone. She had a job to do and she would do it.

  Carlina quickly opened the hatch, slipped through, and closed it again. She glanced around the bridge and was relieved that Sharon Detweiler was still the only one there. The ten-man caretaker crew on Exeter was divided into three three-man watches, plus Lieutenant Hadley, the officer of the watch. No one else should have come wandering in here. But occasionally, Hadley would come by at random times and any of the others might drop by to chat just out of boredom. But no one else had, and now she was alone with Detweiler.

  “Well, that didn’t take long,” said Sharon. “Although you certainly made enough noise in there. Jerrin wear himself out in one mad rush after you put him off for so long?”

  Carlina froze for an instant. Apparently Eastman’s death-throes had been more noticeable than she’d thought. Fortunately, Sharon had interpreted them as an entirely different biological event.

  “He’s finished now.”

  Sharon laughed and turned back to stare at the main viewscreen. Carlina walked slowly over to her own communications station and picked the stylus off her input board. It was a featureless, pointed metal rod eighteen centimeters long and a centimeter thick. She walked back over to stand behind Sharon’s chair. Her heart was pounding. She’d liked Sharon, damn it. But it should be painless this way…

  As Sharon Detweiler turned her head slightly to look back at her, Carlina rammed the pointed end of the stylus into her neck just below the base of the skull. The woman jerked once convulsively and then collapsed out of her chair onto the deck. Her eyes were wide open and an expression of surprise filled her face. Carlina clutched the chair to steady herself. The bridge seemed to be spinning slightly.

  Two down, seven to go. Seven, seven, seven, Lucky seven. Six-five-four, three-two-one, who’s the next lucky son-of-a-gun? Carlina was breathing hard, her hands trembling and her mind running in circles. Training, she had to remember her training. This was important, incredibly important. She could not turn back or fail now. Gasping, she braced herself on the control console and looked out the viewport at the Rift Fleet.

  Thirty or forty ships were plainly visible, all very close and all linked together by a rigid framework of girders. They hung, seemingly motionless, against the unchanging backdrop of hyperspace. Another fifty or sixty were not in view, but they were there with all the rest. Ninety-eight ships in total, thirty of them Protectorate warships—and at this moment, there were only eight people awake aboard the entire armada.

  Shortly, there would only be one.

  Carlina went to work.

  * * * * *

  “Shit,” groaned Charles Crawford, “time to get up already? Hell, it’s only been ten years. I need a solid twelve or I’m cranky for the next century.” He knew that no one could hear his witticism, but he said it anyway. He lay with his eyes closed, floating gently in the zero gravity. Part of him very much wanted to go back to sleep, but the drugs coursing through him would not allow that. Besides, he was getting cold. A chilly draft was brushing his bare flesh and it was getting uncomfortable.

  With considerable effort he opened his eyes and then squinted against the faint light in the cold-sleep compartment. He slowly began to flex his muscles as he had been instructed to. He’d never been in cold-sleep before and the sensations were weird. Not quite like waking up from a normal sleep, not quite like restoring circulation to an arm or a leg. Something different.

  After ten minutes it seemed as though he could control his movements adequately and he was becoming pretty chilled by that time. He brought up his hands and carefully began detaching the monitoring patches, the restraints, and the IV insert. He’d spent half his adult life in one zero-G construction site or another so the free fall seemed entirely natural. Finished, he slid himself out of the capsule and opened the small locker next to it. His underwear, coveralls, socks, and shoes were all right where he had left them ten years before. He quickly dressed and tried to stop shivering. The temperature in the compartment was pretty low and it was probably that way through the whole massive bulk of the construction vessel Neshaminy. He’d have to go back to his cabin and get warmer clothes.

  After he got some coffee in him.

  He moved past the other capsules toward the exit. There were rows and rows of them, almost filling the large compartment; hundreds of capsules. He instinctively glanced at the ones he passed, looking at the faces of the people within and checking the status monitors. They were all part of his construction crew and he’d known most of them for years—they were like family. An ugly lot without t
heir clothes, that was for sure, but damn fine men all the same. There were plenty of damn fine women working for him, too, but they were all over in their own section. He was tempted to check on them as well, but there were security cameras watching all the cold-sleep compartments and sure as shooting, someone would claim he was only there to ogle them without their clothes and file a harassment grievance with the Guild. Better leave it to the machines. Hell, he was probably going to get in trouble for waking himself up early as it was, he didn’t need any more problems heaped on top of that.

  He went through the hatch and floated down a corridor toward the galley. Before he went into cold-sleep he’d made sure that the coffee and the coffee maker were where he could find them when he woke up. They were exactly where they had been ten years ago and shortly he had a huge zero-G bulb of evil black brew cradled in his hands. As he sucked in both the flavor and the warmth, he let out a sigh of contentment. Just the thing to wake up to after a ten year nap. He moved out of the galley and into the crew lounge. He flipped the switch controlling the viewport shutter and watched as it slid up.

  The Rift Fleet was still there. Good.

  For a few minutes he just stared at the immensity of it. During the months that it had taken to assemble—literally assemble—the Rift Fleet, Crawford had been so busy making sure his construction team was ready, he’d had precious little time to stand back and really look at the marvelous thing that was being created:

  An expedition to cross the Great Rift.

  The audacity of it was still a bit daunting. Long ago, when Mankind had first ventured out among the stars, it was natural that the explorers would travel to the systems that were closest. The disappointing realization that only one world in a million was Earth-like and that easily terraformable worlds were only slightly more common had forced the pioneers to travel farther and farther to find places worth going. But even when the distances from Old Earth became truly enormous, it still made the most sense to stay inside the Orion Arm where the stars were densely packed. The relatively empty gaps which separated them from the Perseus and Sagittarius Arms were uninviting and remained largely unexplored. Mankind expanded along the Orion Arm in both directions, both spinward and anti-spinward as directions were reckoned, but made no attempt to cross the thousand-parsec wide rifts.

  Until recently.

  The story of the Orion Arm was as confused and as complicated as any similar stretch of human history. The rise and glory of the United Worlds, its decline and destruction; civil war, crusade, jihad, genocide, and chaos. They were all there and the full story was lost along with so much else. But Mankind had pulled itself up as it always had and new empires had arisen. Smaller and weaker empires than before, to be sure, but with all the old ambitions to expand. The empires near the unexplored frontiers of the Orion Arm could satisfy those ambitions peacefully if they desired, but those that grew up in the center, amidst the rubble of the former civilization, did not have that option. They could only expand at the expense of their neighbors…

  …or by crossing the Rift.

  Naturally, most tried the former option first. It was easier and the methods were all too well understood. Wars had raged, borders shifted, planets changed hands, empires were destroyed and created and destroyed again; but in the last few hundred years, the borders had remained nearly stable and looked to stay that way. Eyes had started turning toward the Rift and the virgin stars which lay beyond.

  The Petrunans had been the first to cross. Their territory lay on the edge of the rimward rift that led to the Perseus Arm and they were completely hemmed in on the coreward side by the much larger Hebyrnan Hegemony. The Petrunans had also had the advantage of two well-placed star clusters to act as way stations across the Rift, and a few daring expeditions had finally made it across about seventy years ago. Their initial reports had been encouraging: habitable and terraformable planets in about the same proportions as in the Orion Arm, fissionables in the expected amounts, and, most importantly, no prior owners. Electromagnetic scans from across the Rift, made centuries earlier, had detected signals which might have been of intelligent origin and considering those signals were at least four thousand years old by the time they arrived, the prospect of running into an advanced civilization had been a major worry. But the Petrunans had found no evidence of any such thing, so either the early scans had been in error, or any mythical aliens had packed up and left.

  Getting across had been a great accomplishment but would have been nothing more than an interesting stunt if it had not been for some simultaneous advances in gate technology. The transport gates, which allowed instantaneous transit between star systems, had been what allowed the ancient United Worlds to exist. They were also instrumental in the rise of the newer empires. Starships were simply too slow to bind together any large political unit, but the gates provided lines of communication, commerce, and military movement that made them possible. Unfortunately, their range had always been limited to a few hundred light years—not nearly long enough to jump the thousand parsec-wide Rift.

  Petrunan scientists had solved that problem, or at least partly solved it. They had developed gates which could make the jump to those handy star clusters and then from cluster to cluster until they could reach the far side. Without the gates, the trip across the Rift was hardly worth the effort. Nothing, no matter how valuable, could be economically transported across the Rift by starship. No colony established there could ever return anything to the mother country, neither resources nor military strength. And few colonists would be interested in making such a journey in the first place.

  But with a gate in place, things were different.

  The gates made a journey across the Great Rift no harder than jumping from system to system within the Orion Arm. Colonists could go out and bring back fissionables and anything else of value that might be found. Colonies could be tied into the commercial and military systems of the parent easily. With gates, the Perseus Arm was there to explore and exploit. And Charles Crawford had come here to build a gate; the largest and most powerful gate ever constructed.

  He had a faint memory of a dream—could you dream in cold-sleep?—that when he woke up the Rift Fleet would be gone. Everyone on Neshaminy was gone, too. He was alone on a huge ship drifting through hyperspace. Some people would have considered that to be a nightmare, but it was only slightly disturbing to Crawford, and only disturbing because of how much more difficult it would be to get the job done without all the ships and the people. And he would get the job done if he had to do it alone.

  He had no trouble at all with solitude. He liked being alone. People made him nervous in any non-work situation. Give him a job to do and he could command and direct a thousand workers to get it done without any qualm. Stick him in some goddamned cocktail party and ask him to socialize and he’d be ready to dive out the nearest airlock—with or without a vac suit.

  So right now he was alone. He knew that there would be a skeleton watch on one of the warships keeping an eye out in the extremely unlikely event of any trouble, but hopefully they didn’t know about him. In slightly less than two weeks the computers would realize that the long journey was nearly at an end and start waking everyone up. The ships’ reactors would power up, the life support systems would go to normal, the artificial gravity would come on, and Crawford would not be alone anymore. Neshaminy’s skipper would probably be pissed as hell that Crawford had overridden the computer commands and awakened early, but there would be nothing he could do about it then.

  In truth, there was no harm in it that Crawford could see. He had calculated that if he left the hatches open, there was more than enough air in the huge ship to keep him breathing without turning on the life support systems. By leaving off the artificial gravity, the amount of battery power he’d use to cook his meals and run his computer would be trivial and he’d use the toilet and shower on one of the shuttles to avoid having to use the main recyclers. No, there was no real harm in this and he intended to savor th
e next two weeks to the fullest.

  Two entire weeks to study the construction documents and plan out his operation. Two weeks without an endless stream of people demanding he answer their questions and fix their problems—right then and there! Of course, he knew the plans nearly by heart and the entire construction schedule was laid out in precise detail, but he still wanted to go over it again. This was the biggest job he had ever been in charge of and the most important by several orders of magnitude. It would be the crowning triumph in a long, successful career. Hell, he might even wangle a knighthood out of this—and oh, the opportunities that would open up! He was determined to keep the screw-ups to a minimum.

  He finished the coffee, washed out the bulb, and returned it to its holder in the galley. Then he propelled himself along corridors and through hatches to his quarters. These were standard shipboard accommodations which he had done little to personalize before departure; just a place to sleep and store his modest belongings. He got out fresh (and warmer) clothes and then went to the shuttle bay. He picked one of the bigger ones, went aboard to use the toilet and shower, shave off the equivalent of three weeks of beard, and dress again. Then it was off to his office, a much larger and far more personalized space than his quarters. He fired up his computer, activated the wall-sized schematics display, and went to work.

  * * * * *

  A red warning light began to flash on the control panel and a piercing alarm began to shriek as the computer detected a catastrophic systems failure. With a snarl, Carlina slammed shut the visor on her vac-suit to keep out the noise. It could not keep it all out, but muffled it to a tolerable level.

  Nearly tolerable.

  It had seemed entirely tolerable two weeks ago when she’d started this. At first she had not bothered with the suit. The noise had been annoying, but nothing more. After a few days, however, she started wearing the suit to block it out. Now it seemed she could hear that same cursed electronic wail even when she was locked away in a quiet spot. It seemed like she could hear it in her dreams. Maybe it would never go away…