“I’m…getting sued?” Matt massaged his temples as he tried to incorporate this new, more absurd reality into his own. He sat in what he had to admit was a quite comfortable, leather-bound chair across from the lawyer to whom he was paying a considerable amount of money. The latter seated himself in front of a sparse, stripped-down desk with almost nothing on it. Behind the lawyer stretched many a bookcase of what Matt presumed was a lot of legal shit; he found it oddly comforting to know that he wouldn’t be able to read any of it, since it was all in Braille.
Miles Lawton sported a wide smile, not quite in Matt’s direction. His darkened glasses did not help in the personal-contact department. “Yep. As the proximate cause of the death of one Declan Cox. The suit is brought by the family of the aforementioned. Don’t worry, this is a fishing expedition.”
“Fishing? You said that before. This sounds like they have more solid evidence, at least if they’re bringing this thing to court.” Matt felt an unexpected and unwelcome spike of fear in his chest. He’d have to lie his ass off under oath yet again…
His lawyer’s phlegmatic voice cut into his rising panic. “Matt.”
Matt coughed and laced his hands together. “Yeah?”
“You know how to wriggle through muck and such to get eyes on target. Trust me when I say I can navigate this. If they had solid evidence of criminal activity on your part, they’d have handed it over to the local DA and waited for the grand jury to hand out indictments. Then, if nothing happened, they’d bring a civil suit like this one.”
Matt unlaced his hands and practiced his breathing exercises, something he hadn’t had to do since MASC. “Still, they figure they must have something.”
Lawton laughed, looking at a point over Matt’s shoulder. It was kind of disconcerting, not knowing exactly where he was looking. Matt took some solace in that, since he figured that the lawyer had used this exact technique in court to great effect. “My guess? What they have is a certain rather-disgraced Senator’s words during that shitshow of a hearing. Forgive the somewhat stale analogy, but the family smells blood in the water. Declan Cox has been declared missing, presumed dead and he lived in close enough proximity to your dwelling. As I said, this is fishing. They want us to panic.”
Matt shrugged, even though he knew the gesture was wasted on the sightless lawyer. “Okay. So what are our options? More importantly, how do we make them panic instead?”
Lawton fiddled with his folded-up cane. “Option one, we go full turtle defense. We deny any wrongdoing, of course, and wait for them to ask for discovery. All we have for the latter is your sworn testimony to multiple law-enforcement agencies and, of course, to the United States Senate its own bad self.”
“It sounds like there’s an option two,” replied Matt.
The lawyer’s sunny smile didn’t abate. “Why yes, there is. We go on the offense, full scorched earth. Colorado has some pretty decent Anti-SLAPP laws. We have a very good chance of having the court declaring this a frivolous lawsuit.”
The marine thought he was pretty good at navigating acronym-ese, but this was a new one on him. “Er, what is that? SLAPP, I mean.”
“Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.” Lawton’s gentle smile didn’t abate. “The Teal Deer is that Anti-SLAPP is a counter to someone bringing a lawsuit…or, more exactly, the threat of a lawsuit and all of its legal fees…against someone for the sole purpose of shutting them up.”
“Okay. So. That means we have legal precedent for getting them to go the hell away?”
“Oh, better than that. It means we can counter-sue and punish the shit out of them.”
Matt began to feel at least a little bit better. “Okay. Wait. If this is a Colorado issue, can you, um, perform in Colorado court? Sorry, I don’t know if that’s the right term.”
Miles Lawton laughed. “Oh yes, I passed the bar in Colorado, a month ago. I’ll be able to plead your case in state court.” He tapped his earlobe. “A little birdie told me I might need to do so. Only took me a couple of weeks to get it all set up.”
“Right. Sorry, this is all new to me.”
“Don’t apologize. You’re now entering my arena. And trust me when I say that this will get squashed. Everybody in this hemisphere was able to see the Rithro’s drive plume when they started accelerating away. Any potential juror will know what’s at stake. I’d be shocked if the prosecution could scrape together an actual proper jury for a civil suit, even if this thing goes to court.”
__________
“Aaand…we’re done.” Dhuz’s voice was toneless and professorial, which Clark appreciated. After all, it wasn’t every day when you got an alien hypodermic needle shoved up into your spine while you lay on your side in a compromising position in a sickbay made by the aforementioned aliens.
It was a bit strange, but Clark felt better knowing that Khomkolov was present during the, er, ‘sample retrieval’. He figured that the newly-regenerated and quite beefy Russian could start breaking some alien heads if something appeared off.
“Feeling okay?” asked Khomkolov.
He nodded. “Just a bit of a pinch.” Clark felt a sudden coolness at the base of his spine, as Dhuz applied what was probably an antibiotic salve over the tiny puncture wound she’d just inflicted. “Wiggle your toes,” she said with a dry, professional air.
“Eh?”
“Wiggle your toes, please. I need to make sure I didn’t damage your spinal nerve bundle.”
He wiggled his toes to a fare-thee-well, and it must have passed muster because Dhuz nodded with a pleased hum. “Good!”
She turned to a wall-mounted unit and proceeded to deliver the few micrograms of harvested nerve tissue into its opening. The little auhn bounced on her clawed toes as she waited for the results…which took only a few seconds.
The medic’s horns rose in triumph. “Excellent! You might even beat the xyrax in terms of combating jump fugue! Although there’s nothing like the real world to tell us such things, eh?”
As Clark sat up, he and the Russian looked at each other. They both knew now, in their bones, that this was real. This was not a simulation, the two of them were going to go interstellar and do so as the first two humans.
“Real world,” said Khomkolov. “Da, real world. We’re going to find out, one way or another.”
__________
Tepora found this whole experience both ‘more of the same’ and yet different. She was normally what they termed a ‘self-actualized’ person. Once she set herself on a task, it was difficult to dislodge her until she literally passed out from lack of sleep.
But now she was trying to apply that same focus upon a task which someone else had set her. She had to admit that Chaz was right; she had a lot of good coffee close at hand, which eased the sting somewhat.
What didn’t ease the sting was her new partner, a blonde woman of shorter stature who was utterly jacked, bearing a muscular physique which even loose-fitting clothing couldn’t hide. It was something that made Tepora feel that particular set of butterflies in her stomach, when she found a lady that she fancied. Except that this lady was, without a doubt, off of the table. Corporal McCoy’s girlfriend-boyfriend relationship with one of the giant udhyr had been smeared all over the tabloids. That unfortunately meant that there was no chance for herself to get a piece of that quite amazing ass.
“Checking Pad Two,” said McCoy.
Tepora refocused. They’d found nothing through a purely-internet search, so now they were down to dissecting one of the new, spare motors to see if there was anything to actually worry about. She looked at the oscilloscope in front of her; she didn’t trust mere human software at this point, and wanted to see the raw voltage output. This pad had indeed the output she expected.
“Pad Two is good,” she replied. “Man, I wonder if we’re jumping at shadows.”
McCoy grinned at her. “You know what it really means to be a soldier? It means that you get to turn yourself into a professional paranoid. Get on my level, scrub.”
The latter bit of her statement was obviously said in good fun, so Tepora just smiled back. “Guess I will. Next!”
“Checking Pad Three…”
Tepora blinked. Wait, this component should only have two pads to check. “Stop. A third pad?”
McCoy looked down at the guts of the vivisected motor. “Yeah? Unless my eyes are crossing. We’re looking at this little guy, here, right?”
The hacker leaned over the splayed-out bits which controlled the motor in question. “That’s…that’s just a voltage regulator. It doesn’t need a third input. The specs only show two inputs.”
McCoy stepped back. “Is this dangerous?”
“No, it just means that we have an out-of-spec part. Maybe it’s innocent. Maybe the supplier couldn’t find the right parts for the spec and substituted something else. But why the extra pad?”
“If we probe it, will this thing blow up?” asked McCoy.
Tepora laughed. “If it does, it’ll be a wet fart of a firecracker. That chip has hardly enough room to contain an explosive. But maybe it’ll do something more terrible to this motor, under the right conditions.”
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
She stood and plucked the probes out of McCoy’s un-resisting hands. “I can look at it, if you want.”
The latter shook herself, and Tepora felt a bit of triumph at the bad-ass corporal’s unease. “No,” said McCoy. “I can do it.” She took the probes back from Tepora. “Just let me know if this is going sideways, eh? I can dive out of the way pretty good.”
“I very much believe you.” Tepora focused back on the oscilloscope’s screen. “Go ahead.”
After all the verbal buildup, the actual result was a bit disappointing. The linear glow of the phosphor on the ‘scope’s screen remained at a steady, monotonous line. “Nothing,” said Tepora. “No voltage output.”
“…so, maybe it’s a mistake? No, fuck that. This stinks on ice. How do we figure this out?”
Tepora rose up from her regard of the oscilloscope. “Corporal McCoy, can you take apart and reassemble an M4 carbine in the dark?”
The normally composed military woman blinked at the sudden change in topic. “Um, yeah. Oh, I had to also clear a malf in a M203 in a driving rainstorm at night but I can’t really take credit for that because it’s really just an aluminum tube…”
The hacker interrupted her with a raised hand. “My point, my dear corporal, is that you are a nerd. In a very different way, but I’m sorry to say you’re a nerd just like me.” She pointed at the offending chip. “We have access to a legion of the very best nerds out there. So let’s de-solder this fucker from the board and hand it off to them.”
__________
Captain Sadaf Ta’Shakka was back where she should be, at the head of her ship and ready to jump to another star system. She looked down at her right hand, where the various biodata read-outs from her crew were listed. Two new ones were there, both showing an admirably even pulse in spite of being in a situation that the two new sapients were not at all ready for.
She looked up at the central overhead display. They were passing beyond the seventh planet of the human’s solar system, and Kexal had been beside himself in not getting a better scan of the weird spinning-on-its-side planet.
“I really wish we could have gotten a better look at Uranus. Voyager got a decent peek, after all,” said Clark in her ear.
Kexal spoke as well. “It’s amazing how much data you were able to get off of such a small package. I admire your…pluck? Pluck…is that the right word?”
“It’s close enough,” replied Khomkolov with a chuckle. “It means the liver and related organs of a particular person. Not my country, but I will pass along your compliments to my American competitors.”
Sadaf mostly ignored the verbal byplay in her ear as she watched the tactical display. “Five minutes to jump. Grakosh?”
Her flat statement made them all hush up, except for the engineer. “We are a go, captain. Fusion drives are at full power, jump drive is powering up.”
__________
General Levant De Vries had quite a number of spinning plates at the moment; one of them did not include the smiling and shaggy-haired man who now sat across from his desk. He really hoped this meeting was worth his while; he really liked his current adjutant and would hate to berate them for wasting his time.
“So, without sounding too melodramatic, why are you here?”
Peter Beck leaned closer. “I just wanted to let you know we’ve been working on a contingency.” The man had a Kiwi accent thick enough to cut glass.
De Vries steepled his fingers and tried to play the elder statesman. “I mean, I know your company of course. You’ve launched a bunch of cube-sats for my government. The Electron is a fine rocket, and with luck the Neutron will also be an equally capable vehicle…”
“We can launch a human.” Beck’s simple statement seemed to hang in the air like a magic spell.
The general un-steepled his fingers. Yes, this was very much worth his time. He made a mental note to give his adjutant an extra cookie this month. “Explain.”
The general’s office included, of course, a giant dry-erase board. “May I?” asked Beck, as he gestured towards the latter.
Upon the general’s nod, he smiled a very sunny smile and walked over. “Right!” He plucked a black dry-erase marker from the base of the board. “The problem is this. We have sixteen people currently on board the Dreadnaught. Each a specialist in their field, the best possible sixteen that humanity could offer. Minus the two brave souls heading out towards Uranus, of course. But that’s based on yesterday’s news. What if we need to send up someone to Dreadnaught with specialized knowledge, one which isn’t held by the original crew?”
De Vries felt the need to speak up for his own logistical back-end. “We do now have SpaceX building an extra Crew Dragon for stand-by.”
Beck started to fill the empty dry-erase board with a set of equations on the left, along with a crude diagram on the right. “That won’t be ready for several months, at best. We have the know-how to get a rocket ready to send into orbit inside 24 hours. Now, I know what you’re thinking ‘Pete, this is just a smallsat launcher!’ But we can easily fit a human…a human with a pressure suit. Minimum mass for Electron is 200 kilograms, that’s not the problem. The big problem is how to get a proper couch to take the acceleration. We’ve looked at various commercially available things. It turns out that some racing chairs are both lightweight enough as well as have the proper structure to act as the aforementioned couch.”
De Vries tried to take in what the nutso Kiwi was telling him. “You want to launch a person. Into orbit. Wearing a pressure suit. While sitting in a fucking race-car chair?”
“It works!” replied Beck with an oblivious smile. “We ran the finite-element analysis, it’ll feel pretty bad but it’ll be very survivable.”
__________
Clark looked at the bridge’s central display as he tried to ignore his heart’s attempts to climb up into his chest. The area of the jump-point was outlined in blue, and its size brought something to mind. Even though the thrust from the fusion drive was lower than Earth-standard, it still seemed to sit on his chest as he spoke.
“Um, just curious. What’s the margin of error on the jump point? I mean, how exact do we have to be?”
Grakosh replied, and the snek’s voice was admirably dry. “It doesn’t have to be that exact. We have to be within, say, a few kilometers of the center. And the jump point itself shifts, of course, thanks to star motion.”
“Of course it shifts,” muttered Clark. He looked over at Khomkolov, who responded with a wry grin.
“Still beats flipping hamburgers, eh?” asked the Russian.
Clark looked up at the display again, watching the little blip of the Rithro inching ever-closer to the blue blob of the jump point.
Grakosh’s voice continued to be as dry as the Sahara. “Sixty seconds to jump. Everyone check that you’re strapped in.”
Even though he’d checked it thrice, Clark looked down to make sure his body was properly held down. It wouldn’t do to be the first of two humans to go interstellar and wind up floating around the bridge like a bump on a log whilst in the middle of jump fugue. From his low-key quizzing of his alien ship-mates, the latter was nothing to sneeze at.
“Thirty seconds.”
Clark just focused on his breathing. He had to, otherwise his mind would start yelling at itself about the truly ridiculous thing he was about to do.
“Ten seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two. One…Jump!”
And then Clark knew nothing but agony, for one long and horrible moment.
__________
“GAH!” Khomkolov let out a gasp as he came back to himself, after the worst thing he’d ever experienced. He glanced around the bridge in a panic as he tried to re-group; what the hell had happened? Then his memory reasserted itself, and he relaxed. He looked over at Clark’s couch and met the Canadian’s eyes as his fellow human also blinked and came to.
The Russian looked around the bridge, noting that only the xyrax were beginning to stir. “Hey?”
“You’re already awake!” said Tifa. “Wow, that’s amazing!”
Captain Sadaf groaned. “Both our newbies okay?”
“Still kicking,” said Clark. “Whoo, speaking of kicking that was a helluva one.”
“Am still kicking as well,” replied Khomkolov with a smile as he looked up towards the central display. “Bernard’s Star, eh Clark?”
Clark unstrapped himself from the couch and with one elegant push floated himself towards the cupola set into one side of the bridge. His body became still, then he looked around at his Russian counterpart with a strange, placid look on his face. “Khomy. Get over here.”
The beefier Russian didn’t manage it quite as gracefully as Clark, but he managed to float himself over next to the nearest human within six light-years. The pair stared out of the cupola’s windows at the nearby star…no, they were close enough for this to be a sun. It didn’t look as red as Khomkolov expected, but then again human eyes were really good at readjusting under different light conditions.
“Real photons,” said Clark, in a near-whisper.
“Real photons bouncing into our real eyeballs,” replied Khomkolov. “We’re here.”
They stared at each other for one long moment; an onlooker might have even thought they were about to launch into a passionate kiss with each other. Instead, the entire crew flinched as one long, glorious dual scream of excitement sounded out through the bridge of the Rithro.
“YES! FUCK YEAH!” screamed Khomkolov.
“FUCK YEAH INDEED!” Clark yelled back. “WE’VE GONE INTERSTELLAR, BAYBEEEE!!!”
The two humans embraced while Takh looked at the two of them with a quirked mandible, then he looked over at Captain Sadaf. The latter just shrugged a horn. “Let them have this moment. It’s the least we can do.”
__________
After the humans had gotten over their (completely justified) freak-out, the Rithro fired up the fusion drive and also started to communicate with the left-behind drone at the other jump point. That in turn connected them to the Coalition network.
Sadaf sagged back into her couch. “Final report sent.” She wondered if her crew was going to get another accolade for this whole strange affair…the humans called it a ‘clusterfuck’, which was a very elegant term as far as she was concerned. The CEB might also turn around and smack them all with a hefty bit of censure; after all, they’d broken just about every rule in the book by making contact with a species without proper backup.
Some of her worrying must have bled out into the ether, because a warm human hand gripped her shoulder. “Hey,” said Clark. “You need a witness or two at your courts-martial, let us know. We got about, eh, seven billion or so who will testify on your behalf.”
Khomkolov appeared next to Clark, looming a lot more than his human counterpart. “Da. Even if does not work out, then you can just stay with us, eh?”
The Captain chuckled. “Exile on Earth doesn’t sound all that bad, honestly. You’ve been really good hosts…well, except for the conspiracy to kill us.”
Then a ping sounded from her console. She took at look at the message. “Oh. Oh no. We need to get back right away.”
Clark looked a bit panicked. “What? What’s wrong?”
“The Coalition network has indications that a Breaker is headed in this direction. The one we destroyed must have sent an alert into their own network.”
“Eh, frinx,” said Khomkolov with the weight only a Russian could bear upon a swearword. “Figures. Things were going far too well.”
Clark rubbed his chin. “Could we interdict them here? Your ship’s repaired, you could fight them in this system and we can have Dreadnaught in our system as a backup. I know that sounds like we’re throwing you to the wolves, but could it work?”
“No.” The captain’s response was flat and final. “We can’t fight a fully operational Breaker one-on-one. Either we fight them in conjunction with Dreadnaught or we die.”
__________
Stephen Zehr leaned back in his chair and massaged one temple. He was US Air Force, not Navy, and this was his first proper exposure to the AEGIS system. They’d just finished a simulation run at a Breaker. “Jesus tap-dancing Christ, that AEGIS is one scary bitch.”
Next to him sat a tow-headed woman, one Caitlin Allen. She was the Dreadnaught’s expert on the aforementioned radar system. “Yep!” she said with far too much cheer and in a thick Midwest accent. “No matter where you are, she’ll see ya, she’ll smell ya, and for sure as shit she will shoot ya!”
He leaned forward. “Okay, the radar bit is working okay but did it look to be interfacing correctly with the guns and missiles?”
“Oh, fer sure! Give my girl a go, and she’ll have that motherfucker’s cybernetic guts for garters!” Caitlin then looked a bit abashed at her swearing. “Sorry, sir.”
Zehr laughed. “It’s fine. We should run another test using the CWIS as well.”
Caitlin coughed, a polite method to let a senior officer know he was saying nonsense. “Sir, if that Breaker gets that close to us…I mean, it’s thirty kilometers long. In that case, we’re done for.”
“Maybe.” Zehr gave her a gentle thump on the shoulder. “Never say die, right?”
“Never, EVER, sir!”
“Hmm…” He looked at his new command’s fuel situation. Thus far, he was very much satisfied with the sixteen under his command…the very first space-warship which humanity had ever fielded. He would need more liquid hydrogen, at least if he was going to more proper training and have enough reserve to support the Rithro’s own weaponry. “All right, I have to call this in. We’re going to need more fuel, at least.”