Chapter Twenty-One

Portal Ship

Come on, figure it out. Figure it out.

Sorilla didn’t have access to any of the Alliance codes, for obvious reasons, and there was no way she was getting into the Ross computers to send a signal through their systems, so she’d had to get a little creative when it came to sending a warning to the Alliance cruiser.

SOLCOM pulse code was a simple, emergency coding system that was similar to the old form Morse Code from earlier centuries. It was also one of the first codes that they’d confirmed the Alliance had cracked during the war, though no one really cared much if they had because no one used it for any sort of classified intelligence.

It was more intended for sending mayday calls with improvised transmitters, and if you were in that kind of trouble, you usually didn’t care too much who was answering the signal.

Getting the Ross ship to pulse a transmission that the Alliance ship would pick up was tricky, but not overly so. Every ship, the Ross designs included, were constantly radiating across multiple bands. Heat, light, gravitational waves, and EM bands. Probably more that she wasn’t personally aware of, but those were enough.

Getting into the less secure systems wasn’t easy, per say, but it was certainly doable, and after that it was all a matter of reconfiguring them to pulse out in specific radio bands that the systems were normally designed to suppress. Since it was harder, technically speaking, to make them not transmit than to make them do it, she had a bit of an advantage there.

Unfortunately, there was no way it was going to go unnoticed.

So Sorilla was getting pretty antsy, hoping that someone there got the message before someone here cut it, and her, off.

This would be so much easier if I had enough system access to code in a repeating cycle.

In truth, Sorilla supposed she might actually have that much access… she didn’t know, her understanding of the interface was rudimentary and largely based on SOLCOM reverse engineering since the Child of God mission. Without better understanding, all she could do was the equivalent of standing in one place and flipping a switch to turn the ship’s running lights on and off.

She really hoped it worked, because she still needed to figure a way out of this situation with the intelligence she’d gathered. At the moment, that part wasn’t looking so good.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

“odd.”

“What is it?” Sienele asked, looking over sharply to where the Lucian was staring at the screens rather than the command deck below.

“I would swear that I know this code,” Kriss admitted.

“Lucian? Sentinel?” Sienele asked. “I know it is not Alliance Operations.”

“No, neither. Wait… it’s repeating,” Kriss grunted before suddenly pulling himself upright, looking surprised. “It’s human.”

“What?”

Sienele had a hard time believing that. There shouldn’t be any human source of signals in the entire system aside from…

“You don’t suppose…” He asked, hesitant to even say it.

Kriss grinned, “Oh if this woman were a Lucian… The children we could…”

“Kriss!” Sienele cut that line of thought right off. He did not want the imagery of that particular scenario anywhere near his mind’s eye. Just the hint was enough for him to feel mildly ill.

“Apologies. It is a simple emergency pulse code used by the humans during the war. Not encrypted, but rather intended to be used when you have extremely minimal transmission capacity. Even a reflective surface would work.”

“Interesting, but do you know what it says?”

“Not even slightly, aside from the obvious.” Kriss admitted.

“And that would be?”

“That she, and the Ross ship, are out there?”

“I’ll tell the Captain.”

*****

Elim swore as he closed the link from the observation deck.

A human code. That’s a new one, He supposed. He had not had any interactions with the humans, either during the war or since, but had heard from others in the Parithalian Fleet that they were respectable ship handlers.

The only human for many lightyears, however, was not a Master of Ships, but rather a soldier.

A clearly capable one, but still only a soldier.

He had the ship’s database looking for the code, but he didn’t know if they’d stored the information from the war in the last database update or not. His cruiser was not assigned anywhere near the human worlds, so it would not be a priority addition.

He didn’t need to know what the coded pulses actually said, however, to glean a great deal from them. Most importantly, the human had been lost while investigating Ross presence on the planet, and now was signalling from a sector of space where the Ross ship was thought to be.

It did not take much to connect those points in spacetime.

“Signal all decks, prepare for high endurance maneuvering,” He ordered, stepping back to his command console and settling in.

“Yes, Master of Ships. Signal sent to all decks. All decks cleared for maneuvers.”

“Hard about, full power burn,” He ordered. “We will not make this easier on them by blundering right into their range.”

“Yes, Master of Ships. Hard about, full power!”

The Upwind seemed to list as the ship came about, the maneuver stressing the inertial compensation as much as it dared in order to eke out every last bit of performance possible. Elim held on to his console, keeping himself upright relative to the interface, and kept working through the maneuver.

“Prepare all countermeasures,” He ordered. “Configure systems to counter spacetime anomalies.”

“Yes, Master of ships! Countermeasures online, systems reconfiguring!”

Now, I suppose we wait and see what the enemy does.

*****

Portal Ship

The conclave had a moment that could only be described as a stunned slice of time, during which most, if not all, of them metaphorically blinked as everything around them changed, seemingly at once.

The Alliance vessel is moving to evade our own ship, did they detect us?

Negative. No signals reached the detection threshold. There is no way.

They saw something.

The conclave puzzled over that briefly, trying to work out what happened there when something else was noticed.

Our vessel is broadcasting a signal through waste energy.

What? How?

Silence met that question, since if they’d known how someone would already have pointed out the cause.

Investigation into the cause has begun.

Entropy.

That word caught their attention as the conclave ceased operations abruptly to refocus on the situation in that context.

Are you certain?

Certain? No. However, what else would be disrupting our efforts at this precise moment in this precise manner? Coincidence, perhaps, but Subject Entropy personifies malicious coincidence. It is her.

Find her.

*****

Sorilla could see the Parithalian vessel abruptly turning away from its approach through the Ross vessels’ own sensors and decided that was probably as good a response as she was likely to get. She started shutting her access down quickly but took a moment to start figuring out her exit strategy.

She didn’t have a lot of options, unfortunately.

Her armor was rated for a period of time in hard vacuum, but without a reasonable expectation of a pickup within a few hours at most, she wasn’t going to try her luck just jumping ship. The Ross didn’t seem to believe much in smaller ships, like the little bush plane she’d taken from the terrorist cell on Allah’s Word, so that was out.

Her only reasonable way off the ship seemed to be the portal room, but that left her with the rather large problem of that those portals only seemed to lead to other Ross ships.

Need to pick my path carefully, she knew. There weren’t a lot of good options, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any at all.

A brief scan of the inventory of the ship she was currently on didn’t give her much. They had some captured Alliance equipment, and a few things from SOLCOM, but nothing useable. Likely scrap, almost certainly intended to seed the ground of any attack they pulled off to shift the blame around, or at least confuse matters.

That left the portal room.

I need a map of the ships this thing connects to, and their locations in the galaxy… and, well, rather more than that actually. Here we go…

Sorilla, at this point, didn’t really have much of a plan, per say. She’d already accomplished her direct mission objectives. It was the long-term ones she was still working on.

Wait… what is this?

Sorilla leaned into the projection in front of her, practically feeling the results of it blowing softly across her face as she did, even through her armor.

That…

She swallowed.

It can’t be.

Sorilla had to get off the ship.

*****

Entropy has been located.

Then she did manage a precision passage through the Paths. Impressive.

Cease admiring her, she is a threat. End her!

The Conclave were already attempting to backtrack the actions of the target while she’d been on the ship, but while they were doing that, she had abruptly ceased her actions and left the secure terminal room, moving quickly back toward the Paths.

Stop her! If she gets into the Paths again, we may lose her for too long to prevent her from causing more damage elsewhere!

That command was easier said than done, however. Security had been alerted, and were certainly in motion, but the subject had already proven to be far more capable in close quarters than even significant numbers of their security mechanoids… and there was no chance that any Ross individual would volunteer to get anywhere near the target without rather significant forces protecting them.

Without more preparation time, they could only count on slowing her down.

*****

The portal room was up ahead as Sorilla loped back toward it. She could sense security moving around her, but they weren’t in position to stop her yet, and she had no intention of giving them that chance.

She needed to get off the ship, and out of Ross controlled space… or spacetime, she supposed, with the intelligence she’d acquired intact. That left her with few options, to say the least.

The paths to other ships were open. Sorilla didn’t think they ever ‘closed’ precisely, but that wasn’t as useful as it might be. Most, well practically all, of the Ross vessels were a long way from anywhere she wanted to be, after all. The known ships she could have used to get into safe points in spacetime were destroyed, like the one at Allah’s Word, for example… and after what she’d seen on that star map…

She pushed herself into a run, ignoring the throbbing pain that was coming from every cell in her body. The beating she’d taken was going to be with her for a long time, no matter what, but she didn’t have time to let it slow her down. Not now.

With the portal room in sight, a squad of security Goblins burst from an entry way off to one side, forcing her to move even faster as her muscles screamed at her. The pulses of their weapons charging were the early warning she needed to dive out of the way when they discharged. She hit the ground rolling as they tracked on her position and movement, barely staying ahead of the twisted pulses of spacetime that tore chunks out of the deck and walls around her.

Adrenaline rushed again, her soreness forgotten for the moment, and Sorilla pushed forward as the team charged her position with their weapons blazing. Amid a burst of spacetime pulses and a last desperate dive from her… she vanished back through the portals from which she’d appeared.

*****

Alert to every station. Find her. Find Entropy!

*****

Sorilla hit the deck in a roll this time, coming back to her feet before skidding to a stop on her heels. She looked around, but didn’t see any sign of enemy presence yet, so she had to decide what to do next.

The portals were an interconnected web that spanned all of the Ross’El controlled space, and then some. Their ships had been embedded deeply in worlds that for varying reasons may once have been their space, or not, but now were certainly behind enemy lines so far as they were concerned.

Sorilla didn’t know what it was that caused the lines of their controlled space to change, that was information she hadn’t acquired in her perusal of their database… or, at least, it was information she had not been able to translate. What she did know was that they had ships in sectors of space they considered to be unremittingly hostile… or had once been.

Worse, perhaps, from the point of view of the Ross, was that if she were reading the information correctly, they had neither built, or even designed the portal network. She needed more information, but at this point she was honestly uncertain if it were worth the risk to try to find out more… what she’d already learned would cause SOLCOM to flip their shit if she could just get it back to them.

I have to risk it… I need to know.

Sorilla checked around her ahead before she left the portal room of the ship she had jumped too, heading once more for the secure terminal room she was aware of.

*****

Parithalian Cruiser Upwind

Elim examined the readouts carefully. Once they’d determined the location of the Ross ship, locating it had became a matter of time and nothing else. While active scanners required a specific threshold of return before an object could be found with them, passive systems really just required that you be looking in the right direction… well, that and that the object in question be in that location at the appropriate time conducive to when you were looking.

The Speed of Information across the normal sidereal universal spacetime was often a bit of an annoyance when it came to that sort of thing, after all.

“Are they following?” He demanded, confused by what he was seeing.

“Not as of the time of this scan, Master of Ships… the enemy vessel almost seems… disabled?” His scanner chief said, sounding confused.

“Fortune may favor us, but not by that much,” Elim countered. “They are up to something. Continue to watch. Navigation!”

“Yes, Master of Ships!”

“Make for the alternate jump point, exceed maximum thrust rules.”

“Very well, Master of Ships, I will need second part confirmation to that order.”

Elim looked over to his second, who just nodded curtly before speaking up.

“Confirm the order.”

“Yes, Master of Ships, Master of Crews, order confirmed. Exceeding allotted maximum thrust. Entry is being made in the Upwind’s maintenance log.”

Elim ignored everything after the confirmation. He knew the consequences of exceeding the set limits on a ship’s acceleration. The Upwind would likely wind up being put in for a full refit after the mission was over, a process that could take… ages, almost literally. However, he felt that it was necessary to seeing to the safety of his crew and the success of the mission.

The deck rumbled under them as the full power of the big military thrusters engaged, and again the deck tilted significantly as they felt the inertial systems pushed just past their limits.

Elim held on, eyes being drawn back to the scans of the Ross vessel.

Just… sitting there.

What are they doing?

*****

OceanofPDF.com