We All Died at Breakaway Station (5 page)

Tall and black, Abrams rose with embarrassment on his face and nodded to his fellow officers.

“Lieutenant Commander Corona, commander of Scout Team Two from the
Hastings,”
the admiral said as Dante Corona rose and received her applause, smiling, in the height of her glory.

“Lieutenant Commander Hybeck, commander of Scout Team Three from the
San Juan.”

Awkwardly Hybeck got to his feet, tried to smile and nod to the sea of faces around him, feeling heat coming to his face, and wondering why, and then grateful when he could sit back down, only half hearing the admiral’s next words.

“Lieutenant Commander McKim, commander…”

Admiral Mothershed never completed the introductions, for a voice interrupted his and sent the briefing room into a babble of whispers.

“Admiral Mothershed, Captain Stalinko,” the voice said from the communications station on the bulkhead behind the lectern. Hybeck thought he recognized the voice of Lieutenant Cruso, the Officer of the Bridge, and he thought he recognized a restrained urgency in that voice.

“Yes,” Mothershed said, spinning and placing his hand against the switch panel of the comm station.

“Admiral,” replied the Officer of the Bridge, “could you and Captain Stalinko come to the bridge at once, please, sir?”

“Yes, of course,” Mothershed replied, his face going white. Turning, he said to the
San Juan’s
captain, “March, come with me, please.” Then to the assembled starship officers in the briefing room: “Ladies and gentlemen, please hold your seats.”

The whispered babble ceased and with it a shiver of apprehension ran through the crowd. The senior officers of eleven starships besides those of the
San Juan
sat in this room, all separated from their commands by the long emptiness of space. And if something were really wrong, if something were endangering their ships…

“Admiral,” said Captain Farago, commander of the
Chicago,
“may we have permission to return to our ships?”

“Shortly, captain,” Mothershed said. “This may be a matter of no great importance. Please let me determine what is happening and then, if necessary, you may return to your ships. I will be back in a moment.”

And without further discussion Mothershed and the captain of the
San Juan
departed from the growing confusion of the briefing room.

There was a turmoil in Hybeck’s mind, and he asked himself what could be of great enough significance to cause the Officer of the Bridge, calm old Cruso, to call the captain and the admiral out of conference. And there was only one answer in his mind: Jillies!

He looked through the crowd to where Naha Hengelo still sat, her face showing something that he read as the beginning of fear, and he wanted to go to her and tell her that there was nothing to be afraid of, but he knew that he had no business doing that. The admiral had told them all to keep their seats, and they’d all better do just exactly that until the admiral said otherwise. And really, he tried to tell himself, it might not be much of anything at all. Maybe Cruso’s scanners had picked up a dust cloud or a magnetic storm or something like that and he had just panicked. Maybe it was something like that. Maybe.

Then he waited to find out what it was for sure.

“What do you make of it, Hybeck?” Abrams asked in a hoarse whisper after a while, leaning over the back of his chair to speak.

“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions,” Hybeck said.

“No,” Abrams said, “shouldn’t do that.” He paused, “But, look, Hy, the O.B. wouldn’t call him for nothing, would he?”

“Well, I don’t think so. I mean…”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the voice of the admiral, coming from loudspeakers in the briefing room’s ceiling, “indications are that we have been detected. There is what appears to be a fleet of warships approaching. Your shuttles are being prepared to return you to your own ships now. All
San Juan
personnel are requested to report to their duty stations. Thank you, and good luck to all of you.”

With those final words the room exploded in confusion. Men and women, those who had not already risen, jumped to their feet, and nearly everyone began moving toward the exits.

Hybeck held back, waiting for the more senior officers and the captains to make their way out, and saw that Lieutenant Naha Hengelo was doing the same. The turmoil in his mind increased, doubled, leaped in quantum jumps despite his effort not think about what was coming‌—‌and with the turmoil came fear. Now, after so long, after having come so far and accomplished so much, they were going to be attacked. They were going to have to fight‌—‌and perhaps, here in the heart of Jillieland, they would be overpowered. No, that couldn’t happen! They had to get home with the information they had.

Hybeck forgot about Naha Hengelo and turned and started toward the nearest exit as he heard the wail of the call to General Quarters filling the ship.

An hour and a half after Bracer’s conversation with the commanding officer of Breakaway Station, the shuttles began arriving from the planet below, matching orbits with the huge hospital ship
Rudoph Cragstone,
rendezvousing, transferring the dead and half dead from the shuttles to the enormous starship.

After a brief tour of his own ship, a stop at sick bay for a routine medical check, a brief, unpalatable meal, Absolom Bracer had returned to the bridge where he could better watch the shuttling process in the large main tank. He “stood” at the modified command position, his hands resting on the now inactive controls, his living right hand, his mechanical left, letting his mind run free.

One week out of Adrianopolis, he thought as he had thought so many times during the past hour, and two weeks to Earth. A third of the way home, and now almost out of the portion of space most heavily menaced by the Jillies‌—‌and without trouble so far. Pray to God we don’t run into any trouble. Could we handle it? How much could we handle? What could
we
take before…

He purposefully cut off that train of thought and looked at the tanks that showed composite views of Breakaway and near space. The three starships and the planetary shuttles were now passing over the planet’s northern pole, the illuminated portion of the planet on Bracer’s right, the night side on his left. Breakaway’s axis was inclined some 29°, and it was now summer in the northern hemisphere, long shadows arching across the top of the planet, down across the pole and over into the dark side, the pole a land of midnight suns.

On Breakaway’s illuminated side, light reflected from the huge complex of structures in the northern hemisphere, visible even from five hundred kilometers up. Domes of metal and paraglas sparkled in the midday light, giving the barren world an appearance of life that it only partially possessed.

Below the curve of the planet, invisible to Bracer during this part of the orbit, ringing the equator, were the nearly twenty thousand square kilometers of solar receptors, the source of the basic power that began the vast and complex process that took place on the dry, barren world. North from the power receptors, where light energy was converted into electrical energy, ran great trunk lines that carried the megavolts of electricity from the receptors to the main power station where that electrical energy was used to initiate the process of generating even more power, where atoms were stripped of their electrons, and then the naked atomic nuclei were smashed, broken apart into their component particles, and the raw power of those particles consumed. Thus the substance of the world called Breakaway was devoured to provide men with the energy needed to talk across the distances between the stars.

From the glint that represented the huge main power station, Bracer’s mechanical eyes followed an invisible line of power conductors northward to the pole, up to the modulation station and the antenna array that was the very reason for this enormous power generation, up to the faint violet glowing of ionized atoms in Breakaway’s thin atmosphere, the shaft of light that climbed skyward.

High above the planetary system’s plane of the ecliptic, situated almost directly above the north pole of Breakaway’s sun, but millions of kilometers away from that yellow dwarf, was an artificial world over a kilometer in diameter. This tiny worldlet, enormous artifact, was embedded in a huge complex of cables, braces, metal tubes that extended some dozens of kilometers into space around it, the receiving and transmitting antennae of the relay station, the purpose of Breakaway Station, the ultimate reason it existed at all.

Let me tell it this way: from beautiful Adrianopolis to old Earth, nearly forty light-years. Between Adrianopolis and Earth there were eight stations such as Breakaway, eight relays receiving, amplifying, transmitting and retransmitting the beam of electromagnetic energy that connected the worlds. This was the FTL communications chain from the Paladine, leading to Earth. Similar chains of energy led to Earth from other portions of the sky. All major human colonies were so connected to Earth. All paths led to Earth.

Gigawatts of power generated at the power station in Breakaway’s northern hemisphere were fed to the modulation station at the planet’s pole. From the modulation station this power was beamed skyward toward the relay station some millions of kilometers away‌—‌after several very important things were done to it.

It was something like this: incoming signals were received by the relay satellite above Breakaway’s sun, those signals were demodulated, at least to the extent that could be impressed on ordinary electromagnetic radio beams, rather than subspectrum waves. This intelligence, beamed down to the modulation station at Breakaway’s north pole, was fed through computers, and again demodulated another step down‌—‌here information directed to Breakaway was subtracted, outgoing information added, random, nonintelligible noise clipped away. Then the intelligence was used to modulate the outgoing beam, the unbelievable quantities of energy that were beamed back to the relay, and then sent Earthward or toward the Paladine.

Now, electromagnetic energy travels at a very fixed speed, of course. About 300,000 kilometers per second in a vacuum. That is the prime law of the universe. Actually, the supposed exceptions aside, nothing can go faster, not in this space-time. Nothing, friend! Nothing with substance. Nothing that is, well, real. So, when Breakaway Station first went into operation some one hundred and fifty standard years before, it had taken 4.3 years for its first message to reach Hart Station, Earthward; 3.9 years to reach Obad Station toward the Paladine. That was the first message. The second took no measurable time at all.

From Breakaway Station to Hart Station: like I said, four point three light-years: a beam of photons, continuous, unbroken, stretching across that distance, bundles of invisible energy completing the link. Now, when that link was completed, the transmitters on Breakaway continuously pouring energy into space, there was a
bridge
between Breakaway and Hart. The bridge had taken 4.3 years to
grow
, but passage across the bridge, if done in the proper manner, well, that was virtually instantaneous.

Subspectrum energy is not self-propagating. I mean, it does not occur in nature except under the most exceptional conditions, like in the hearts of stars going nova, for example, or in a quasar. It is a parasitic form of energy, if energy is really the proper term. It can exist only when electromagnetic energy is available in sufficient quantities, handled in just the proper way. But, when conditions are right, subspectrum energy exists and it does have one very unusual quality: since it isn’t real, that is,
real
in the sense of corpuscular energy, real as photons are
real,
it isn’t bound by the immutable laws of the universe.

Explanations in words don’t exist. Words just aren’t adequate. Certain highly evolved mathematics are, but then very few people have a grasp of them. I certainly don’t. I’ve long accepted what I cannot really understand which is simply this: standing waves of subspectrum energy impressed on a beam of electromagnetic energy can be modulated, and these modulations will proceed along the standing waves in something like zero-time. They exist and then they don’t exist, but during the instant during which they do exist, they will be felt all along the beam upon which the standing waves had been impressed.

Instantaneous communications!

It costs like hell, in time, in money, in energy, but once the system is there a signal can be “sent” from Earth to Adrianopolis in no more time than it takes to modulate the intelligence onto the subspectrum standing waves, allowing for the time involved at each relay station where the signal is demodulated, cleaned up, and then remodulated. In the case of a message from the Paladine to Earth, an hour, at most, is required to cross forty light-years of space.

Starships of course, aren’t that fast. They bypass Einstein in another, cruder, slower fashion.

Captain Absolom Bracer watched as the starships and their accompanying shuttles arced down across the pole, hundreds of kilometers from the power beam that climbed from the planet’s pole, out toward the relay station. A planetary shuttle broke away from the
Rudoph Cragstone,
entered a path that would return it to its launching site in the northern hemisphere, and vanished. Moments later another shuttle arrived, docked, and men and machines began to unload another dead cargo.

“Unfriendly looking place, isn’t it, sir?”

The voice that startled Bracer out of his meditations was that of the
Iwo Jima’s
second officer, Lieutenant Commander Cling Reddick, who now stood less than a meter from Bracer, looking up at the tank that showed the cold, sterile globe of Breakaway.

“Yes, it is, Mr. Reddick,” Bracer replied after a long pause, puzzled at Reddick’s behavior for two reasons. One was that it was very unusual for an officer to approach the captain during his periods of meditation unless the matter was urgent‌—‌and apparently this wasn’t. And secondly, Reddick wasn’t even supposed to be on duty now. Not that he was banned from the bridge when he wasn’t on duty, though his presence was unusual considering the incident earlier in the day.