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– Chapter 5 –
Deathrace
Within five minutes of launching the Misfits found themselves pursued. The Naga’s six fighters immediately started to gain on their prey. Ahead, the malevolent glow of the brown dwarf filled Mervyn’s viewscreen offering them, if not salvation, at least a reprieve from their pursuers. Too massive to be a planet but not dense enough to be a sun, it still presented a formidable obstacle.
Mervyn studied Loren’s new star map, ‘If the alternative is certain death I say we go for it.’
‘Put like that,’ Aurora said, ‘how can I refuse?’
‘I agree,’ Tarun said, ‘and if we can save some lives by doing this I say we at least try, but I have to tell you, I’m glad I’m not driving.’
The sleds slowed to match Loren’s calculations: reeling in the fighters until committed to the false trajectory.
‘There’s something else we can do to improve the odds of success,’ Loren said.
‘What, from zero to just above zero, you mean?’ She ignored Aurora and called up a new schematic.
It took a while for Mervyn to work it all out, ‘Is this possible, Loren?’
‘Oh yes... theoretically. But I’ve never actually rigged it up,’ she said. ‘Remember all those evenings I spent in the sled bay while you lot played on the simulators? This is what I was working on.’
‘It looks fiddly,’ Tarun said, ‘do we have time to fit all this?’
‘I don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out.’
‘Ok, I’ll have a go, but I’m really not sure what I’m looking at here so you’ll have to talk me through it, Loren.’
‘We’ll do it together, Tarun, step by step.’
‘Uh oh, fighters engaging their weapons,’ Tarun reported, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing with this slowing down business.’ No one needed reminding about the earnestness of this race.
Without warning, a photon blast erupted behind them making everybody jump. The hunters were catching up.
‘It’s ok,’ Loren assured them, ‘just someone taking a pot-shot -- they’re nowhere near close enough to actually hit us -- so far.’ The hunters gained steadily, and every once in a while one of them tried a shot.
‘Those blasts are getting closer,’ Tarun commented as the Brown Dwarf loomed under them. Mervyn could clearly see the surface now; the Dwarf’s mantle broiled an angry red with orange flares licking up towards the minuscule sleds. Soon they would be mere specks crossing the vastness of the failed sun’s surface.
‘They’re just trying to unsettle us,’ Mervyn said, ‘get us to make a mistake. Stay focused, keep the speed steady, and trust Loren’s calculations.’ He wished he felt as confident as he sounded, but in the end what choice did he have? All that lay between them and death was Loren’s brilliance.
Another photon blast, the closest so far, shook the sled. Cubby holes and cupboards burst open spewing their contents into the cockpit. Mervyn tried to ignore a pen cart wheeling lazily in front of his nose.
Suddenly, an angry buzzing filled the sled.
‘Help. Mervyn, there’s something alive in here,’ Loren screamed. ‘It’s in my hair. Get it out. Get it out!’
He tried to ignore Loren’s frantic screams and concentrate on the sled’s trajectory: no way could he leave his seat and help her now. ‘Keep still, Loren. Calm down -- don’t antagonise it.’
‘What’s going on over there,’ Tarun demanded. ‘Are you hit, Mervyn? I repeat, are you hit?’
‘No, it’s your blasted Skitterbug. The blast shook it loose and it’s attacking Loren.’
‘Skitterbug!’ Loren screeched. ‘If we survive this, Tarun, I’m going to kill you.’ More buzzing greeted her outburst, but it soon died down so she must have sat still. A scratchy sound caught Mervyn’s attention and out of the corner of his eye he caught movement on the flight panel. The Skitterbug crawled slowly towards the main controls clicking its way from one pad to the next. Mervyn held his breath and watched it crawl within reach of his hand. Swiftly, he snatched it up, and holding its struggling wings closed, stuffed it into a pocket of his jumpsuit, ‘Got it.’
‘It was just a parting shot,’ Loren said regaining her composure. ‘See, the fighters are falling away below us already. A few more seconds and they’re committed to their course round the dwarf’s equator.’ She was right, the fighters dipped towards the dwarf’s surface as its massive gravity field took hold. They sped up too.
Mervyn felt his gut sink towards his seat. Gravity. ‘Hold the speed steady -- don’t raise any suspicions.’
‘On my mark,’ Loren instructed, ‘Three... two... one... dive!’
Mervyn piled on the power and accelerated towards the broiling mass below. No graceful slide towards the surface for them, instead a roller coaster ride towards hell. He felt the lurch of weightlessness again -- free fall. Their reckless dive took them below their pursuer's horizon, and for a few precious minutes they became invisible to the hunters.
The proximity alarm sounded and amber lights flashed, ‘Impact warning: altitude too low...,’ Mervyn ignored the computer and race on.
‘Ready for correction?’ Surprise was everything.
‘Affirmative.’
‘Yes.’
‘Three... two... one... execute!’
Mervyn wrestled the sled out of its dive and hauled it round to the new heading. Gravity reasserted itself with a vengeance slamming him against the back of his seat.
‘Red proximity breach imminent. Automated course adjustment standing by,’ the sled blared.
‘Whatever you do guys don’t go into the red zone. Any course correction could prove fatal,’ Loren warned. ‘Red means dead.’
Mervyn struggled to reach the controls and hold the sled just above the red zone as gravity accelerating them round the curve of the Dwarf. The new route took them away from the Dwarf’s equatorial plane towards its northern most pole. The speed continued to mount as gravity did its job. Then, without warning, the sled lurched alarmingly towards the red zone.
‘Gravity well,’ Aurora called. It was the first of many.
Mervyn fought to keep the sled out of the red zone. Besides the gravity wells they attracted magnetic flares from the dwarf’s surface. These would well up from below and blast them off course. Constant adjustments were needed to keep the sled heading on the right trajectory. Loren’s warning kept repeating in Mervyn’s head like a death knell, ‘Red is dead. Red is dead,’ until he was sick of.
When they emerged over the Dwarf’s north pole Mervyn heaved a sigh of relief. The fight had exhausted him, but they were safe if somewhat battered and bruised.
‘There they are!’ Tarun shouted excitedly as the fighters emerged from behind the Brown Dwarf on a trajectory almost at right angles to their own. ‘Look, they stayed on the original heading -- they’re way off course. It’ll take them ages to pull back onto an intercept heading. Bunghoy -- what a team!’
The friends whooped and shouted their relief at escaping the fighters, except Loren, who sat quietly in thought.
Mervyn knew trouble when he saw it, ‘What’s the matter, Loren?’
‘We didn’t pick up enough speed. The gravity wells slowed us down. I didn’t allow for that. It’s going to be touch and go when they catch us up. ‘
Tarun, sobered up instantly, ‘What can we do about it?’
‘Nothing. We’re committed to our course and they’re committed to their course, we’ll just have to see who gets there first.’
‘Look,’ Aurora cried. ‘They are splitting up.’ Sure enough, as the six fighters turned into a wide arc three pealed off on a different heading. ‘Where are they going?’
‘Oh no,’ Loren groaned, ‘they’ve sussed where we’re headed and they’re going to come at us from both sides,’.
‘Is that bad?’ Mervyn asked.
‘Very bad.
If you’ve got a god you’d better start praying.’
Mervyn woke with a start and crawled out the cubby-hole that served as a bed to find Loren sitting in a web of tangled cross-crossing the cockpit. She held her head in her hands.
‘Where are we?’
Loren stared at the floor, ‘We’ve just crossed the heliosphere into the gravitational pull of the neutron star,’ she mumbled.
Mervyn floated across to his seat and, just for the sake, did a back flip on the way. He could hardly believe he had slept, but he did feel refreshed. Vast billowing clouds of orange superheated gas filled the viewscreen; in the centre burned a white-hot neutron star blasting the surrounding gas clouds into ragged streamers -- the remnants of a long forgotten star. Globulous dust clouds, starkly black against the glowing gas, floated across the surface. The scene looked strangely beautify and as always Mervyn was moved by the grandeur of the Galaxy. How could such destructive forces posses such beauty? There was no sign of the heliosphere ,which marked the boundary of the star’s gravitational and magnetic influence, but the instruments had detected it.
He glanced back to where Loren still sat dejectedly on the floor, ‘What’s up?’
Loren lifted her head from her hands -- she looked miserable, ‘I doesn’t work.’
‘You mean linking the sled’s controls to our biolinks?’
Loren nodded, ‘I’ve tried everything -- they just won’t talk to each other.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘If I knew that, Mervyn, I’d fix it, wouldn’t I?’ She glared at him as if it was all his fault.
Mervyn shrugged his shoulders, ‘It was only a theory -- maybe it’s not possible. We’ll just have to cope without it.’ He was not used to seeing Loren looking despondent.
‘There’s no reason why it shouldn’t work. I’ve tried everything I can think of. I just wish I knew where I went wrong.’ She kicked the nearest bulkhead. ‘I hate bioelectrics!’
Mervyn tried to think of something sympathetic to say, but was saved by Aurora’s voice echoing in his ear.
‘Mervyn still asleep?’
‘No, I’m awake. Did you sleep, Aurora?’
‘Like a baby. Let’s hope our friends in the fighters are feeling cramped and weary. I bet they thought their sport would be over by now.’
Mervyn reached for the viewscreen, ‘Where are the fighters?’
‘Good morning,’ Tarun chirped, ‘the fighters behind us -- the beta group I’ve called them -- are just about to hit the nebula’s shock wave, we passed through it a while ago. They’re gaining relentlessly now so let’s hope it slows them down a bit and we can lose them in the dust clouds. The others -- the alpha group -- are pulling ahead of us. If they try to turn in and cut us off they will fall behind. The real danger, though, is when they slingshot round the neutron star and come straight at us. And, Loren, I think I’ve solved the biolink problem.’
‘Yeh, sure.’ Loren still sat on the floor among the cables.
‘No, really, listen -- the up-feed from the biolink is responsible for decoding the thoughts from our brains, right?’
Loren half listened, ‘So?’
‘So we don’t need to worry about coding anything from the sled, we just bunch all the controls together and plug them into the up-feed -- it’ll think it’s another brain and do the unscrambling for us.’
Mervyn sighed, ‘That sounds way too simple, Tarun.’
‘Simple is beautiful, Merv.’
‘No. If Loren says it can’t be done then we give up and concentrate on surviving.’
‘Actually, Merv...’ Loren jumped up and started yanking out wires, ‘maybe I am making it too complicated,’ more wires were ripped out, ‘if I take this and this and this, and put it all in here...’ The sled gave a sudden lurch.
Mervyn lifted his hands from the control panel, ‘Hey, what did I do?’
‘Tarun, you’re a genius,’ Loren screamed. She jumped around and danced a little jig, ‘You’ve done it -- we’re biolinked.’
‘I am? You are?’
‘Ok, Tarun, here’s what you do... ‘
At first he found the biolink made the sled react too quickly -- moving before the thought even formed in his mind. Aurora suggested allowing the sled to prime itself, but wait for an execute order. Mervyn tried it out with small housekeeping commands and found the method worked well. He tried the major systems and soon the sled felt like an extension of his own body.
‘Look, no hands,’ he said with his arms behind his head, and performed a victory roll, ‘This is incredible!’
‘Yahoo!’ Aurora crowed. ‘I could perform miracles.!’
‘Good, because that’s exactly what you will have to do,’ Loren muttered. ‘Here comes the next gas cloud.’
There was little to see at close quarters, but as they dived deeper into the gas and its loose density folded behind them the space around took on an eerie red glow. The temperatures of the gas rose around them and the glow changed to orange, and then yellow, and finally a creamy white. The outside hull temperature also rose, partly from the friction of gas particles on the hull and partly by absorbing heat from the surrounding gas. The friction produced another more serious effect: it slowed their headlong charge, only slightly, but enough to make a difference in this dash for life. Ribbons of electrostatic charge marbled the hulls of the sleds with lighting, as if flying in through some strange thunderstorm. The electricity, crackling over the hull, reminding Mervyn there was little between them and the vacuum of space.
‘At least this heat and static will conceal us from the beta group’s sensors,’ Tarun said. ‘That last course correction should have confused them, and the next one will throw them right off.’
But Tarun was wrong. When the sleds burst out into clear space, lit by the harsh white glare of the neutron star, the fighters were still right on their tails, and closer than ever.
‘How do they do that?’ Tarun asked, ‘there’s no way they could have seen through that globulus. Are we transmitting or something.’
‘Quarks, Tarun, you are getting paranoid,’ Aurora quipped.
‘Well you can hardly blame me in the circumstances -- someone is trying to kill me.’
‘Hang on, what’s that?’ Loren said. She worked away at her control panel.
‘You are not actually checking, are you, Loren? Aurora said scathingly. ‘How paranoid can you get?’
Mervyn’s stomach sunk, but not from gravity this time. Whenever they made progress another obstacle always dragged them down again. How long could this streak of bad luck last? ‘What have you found, Loren?’
‘I don’t know... it’s very weak.... got it! Great Muons! We’re transmitting, a super-luminal beacon, and it’s coming from inside the sled?’ Mervyn looked around frantically for anything that could resemble a superluminal transmitter, but everything looked normal.
‘We’ve got to get rid of it before the next course adjustment. What size is it, Loren?’
‘I don’t know. As long as my forearm and just as thick I suppose -- it’s not a small thing -- hard to conceal, probably disguised as something else.’
The sled dived into the next globulus. The final course correction was due any moment. Hadn’t they been inside a globulus when first kidnapped by the Naga? Even before they announced themselves the Naga’s pilots knew exactly who they were. How had he tracked them that time? Had their sleds been transmitting since then? If so then someone had tampered with their sleds on Academy One. A half remembered heard conversation in the star dome came back to him.
‘The extinguisher!’ He snapped himself free and grabbed the canister from its cradle. ‘The extinguishers, Loren, -- De Monsero told Hidraba to switch the extinguishers in our sleds. Quick, Aurora, chuck yours out the airlock!’
‘Extinguishers? De Monsero? What are you on about, Mervyn?’
Mervyn slammed his fire extinguisher in the airlock and vacat
ed it. The canister spun off into space. Without propulsion it dropped far behind at subluminal speed.
‘You’re right, Merv,’ Tarun said, ‘your sled’s no longer trans--’
‘Final course correction coming up in three,’ Loren interrupted, ’Tarun, ditch your extinguisher, now... two...’
‘I’ve got it.’
‘One... ‘
‘Canister evacuated.’
‘Execute!’
They waited as a pure white light shone through the gloom of the thinning globulus like a lighthouse beam through fog: the neutron star. Ribbons of dust spiralled around them, torn apart by the solar wind streaming from the star. Then they were clear.
‘It worked,’ Loren shouted. ‘The beta fighters are still on our original course.’
De Monsero would answer for that one, but right now Mervyn had more pressing matters to think about. He looked about for the other fighters, ‘Where are the alpha group, Tarun?’
‘Somewhere round the other side of the nova, you don’t need to worry about them yet. The next time you see them though, they’ll be coming straight at us.’
He didn’t like the sound of that, but at least they had eluded the beta group for the moment. They entered the gravity well of the neutron star -- he could feel it tugging at his guts. He allowed himself a brief smile -- another small victory, but the biggest test of all was still to come
The piercingly brightness of the star, hauntingly compelling in its purity, filled Mervyn’s viewscreen. The star drove everything from it, sweeping away the surrounding gas and dust. Soon even the viewscreen’s highest filters could not cope with the intense brightness and he had to switch them off, flying on instrument readings alone. The sensors clearly showed the gamma jets streaming out of the star’s poles, gyrating like gigantic lasers attached to a crazed gyroscope. The gamma jets left the star at almost the speed of light, corrugating the fabric of space time into as they went. This was their goal. He swallowed hard, if he mistimed the crossing the jet would be shred them down to their subatomic particles. One moment there; the next wiped out ever. A high risk strategy, but their only chance of survival in this deadly pursuit.
‘Fighters dead ahead,’ Tarun shouted, as a photon blast exploded ahead. The alpha group were early: three fighters hurtling straight towards them. The lead fighter opened fire again.
‘Stay on course!’ Mervyn ordered, as photon blasts erupted around the sleds, making them bounce and jerk wildly. He fought the controls.
‘We’re hit! We’re hit!’ Tarun screamed.
‘Quiet,’ Aurora snapped. ‘I’m trying to concentrate. We’ll deal with it in a moment.’
‘We’ve got a fire and no extinguisher.’
‘Smother it with the fire blanket before it gets any bigger,’ Aurora ordered.
Normally it would have been madness to attempt to avoid head on photon blasts, but the biolink gave him pinpoint control. He was as one with his sled. The lead fighter shot past and came about for another run. Mervyn dismissed it from his mind -- it would have to catch up again -- the two ahead were far more deadly. He no longer needed to think what he was doing, as soon as he saw the photon blasts the sled adjusted to weave between them.
Without warning a crunching noise filled his ears. He whirled round to investigate, but their sled was intact.
‘It’s caving in!’ Tarun shouted hysterically.
‘Transfer full auxiliary power to hull integrity!’ Aurora said calmly.
‘The transfer link’s out.’
‘Re-route it.’
‘No time, we’re losing hull integrity.’
‘Suit up!’ A lot of scrabbling and bumping followed Aurora’s order.
‘Oh quarks,’ Loren breathed. ‘They’re putting their spacesuits on.’
‘What’s happening over there, guys?’ Mervyn asked. More crunching sounds, and a scream, which echoed through the biolink it could only be Aurora.
Mervyn froze as he heard the ominous hiss of escaping air.