Test of Mettle (A Captain's Crucible Book 2) Read online

Sure enough Robert stood beyond the glass, the concern obvious on his face.

  Bridgette glanced down between her legs.

  I can do this.

  She pushed, despite the pain. She couldn’t help the scream of agony that escaped her lips.

  She paused again, panting. The doctor hovered above her groin, his hands ready to assist.

  “Come on!” he said.

  Bridgette stared at him for a few moments. And then: “No.”

  He glanced at her. He seemed stunned. “What?”

  “I said: no. I don’t want you to kill my baby. Stop this.”

  The doctor glanced over his shoulder. “Nurse. Prepare for caesarean.”

  The Weaver robot came forward, telescoping one of its limbs. A needle extended toward her skin.

  “No!” Bridgette said. She fought against the sudden binds that strapped her to the bed. “No injections! No!”

  The needle touched her skin, and she fought a few moments longer, then slumped on the bed. She no longer felt any pain. She no longer felt anything.

  “Nurse, make the incision,” the doctor commanded.

  The Weaver robot positioned itself over her swollen belly, and a scalpel appeared in a different telescoping limb. The blade touched her skin. She thought it felt cold, though the distant part of her mind that was yet conscious couldn’t be sure. She saw the blood dripping down her pale skin.

  No. Eugene. No!

  With that thought the vision stripped away and she found herself floating in darkness. She was a small, spherical mass of energy, blue in color. Beside her was another smaller mass, green in color, joined to her by a thin thread. A larger, pulsating red smear towered above her, reaching its crimson tentacles toward the green, threatening to rip it away from her.

  She tried to move, but couldn’t. She knew she had to protect that green sphere at all costs. She focused on it with all her being, and tiny tendrils sprouted from her body. She willed them to grow toward the smaller sphere. As they grew near, tinier tendrils reached out from the green mass, and her own entwined with them. She was able to draw in the green sphere, and then she wrapped her protective tendrils around it, shielding it from the red smear that threatened to devour them both.

  Those evil tentacles enveloped them and squeezed. Bridgette knew it was too late, but she reached down inside herself anyway, hoping to find the strength to resist a while longer. But then she discovered something entirely unexpected: an energy reserve vastly superior to anything she had on her own. She joined with it.

  The hospital came back into view. The doctor was leaning forward, eagerly watching the operation, but then he abruptly stood up and staggered backward as if struck. The Weaver retracted its limb, and its servomotors whirred as the robot retreated.

  The restraints were gone, and so Bridgette sat up.

  “I will not let you kill my baby,” she intoned imperiously.

  She looked at the robot, and it crumpled into a metallic ball that dropped with a loud clank to the floor.

  She turned her attention on the doctor next. The man slammed against the far wall of the room, and then slid upward until his head touched the ceiling. He quivered rapidly in a kind of seizure, and then his body ripped apart in a stream of gore.

  She opened her eyes. She was back in the alien compartment, breathing hard. Beside her, Barrick panted just as loudly.

  She instinctively reached for her belly: she still had her baby. She exhaled in relief.

  “You are strong,” Barrick said.

  Ignoring him, she pulled on the lower portion of her liquid cooling and ventilation undergarments.

  “So confident,” Barrick continued.

  Bridgette spun on him: “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

  Barrick raised his palms defensively. “I only did what you asked me to.”

  “Yes,” Bridgette said. “And thankfully you failed. Haven’t you ever heard of antenatal depression? Sometimes I have rash thoughts. You fed those thoughts, didn’t you? With your psychic powers. You amplified them.”

  “Not at all,” Barrick said.

  She thought he was lying.

  “Either way,” Barrick continued. “I failed, as you said. However, ask yourself this: how can you be so certain I didn’t purposely back down?”

  Bridgette considered his words. Then she began to don the lower assembly of her spacesuit. “Why would you go through all that trouble?”

  “Perhaps I was merely testing you. To see how strong you were.” He stared at her intently. “You have the ability within you, I see that now. It is latent, more dormant than even the captain. But like Captain Dallas it is weak, undeveloped. It is no wonder Zhidao had no influence over you. Still, somehow you managed to link with your unborn child, and combine his strength with your own.”

  She shook her head, annoyed by his nonsensical talk. She reached for the torso assembly of her spacesuit, which lay on the deck beside her.

  “I didn’t tell you this before,” Barrick said. “But the Raakarr intend to execute you. The darkness will come for you, likely tonight.”

  “Then my baby and I will die together,” Bridgette said firmly.

  Barrick stared at her, his expression grim. “You’re assuming they will kill the baby.”

  Holding the torso assembly, she paused, feeling a sudden horror. “Then... we have to go through with the abortion after all.”

  Barrick smiled emotionlessly. “No. Actually we don’t.” He tossed her a small packet. “Install that.”

  She looked at the metallic wrapping suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “An anti-rad,” Barrick said.

  She frowned. “How is this going to help me?”

  “You’ll need it, trust me. As will your baby. Especially your baby.”

  She still hesitated. “How do I know you haven’t put some poison in it?”

  Barrick seemed amused. “If I wanted to kill you, do you think I would resort to poison?”

  “What if it’s something else, then?” she said. “Like a custom carrier virus and accelerant designed to mess with my DNA?”

  Barrick raised a hand in resignation. “Apply it, or don’t. The choice is yours. I won’t be responsible for what happens to you when the radiation hits.”

  She opened the metallic wrapping. Inside was a thin, keycard-like drip that she recognized as an anti-rad, and a laser scalpel of the same width.

  She gave Barrick a last suspicious scowl and then, sighing, she rolled back the sleeve of her ventilation undergarment and pressed the cold laser scalpel to her forearm. She felt the small prick as the device injected a local anesthetic, and then black smoke wafted from her skin as the laser made an incision the same width as the drip. The laser partially cauterized as it cut so that only a thin red line marked the incision.

  She grabbed the keycard-sized drip and held the edge to the wound. She shoved inward, trying to slide the anti-rad horizontally inside the gash, as if tucking it into a thin pocket. She kept missing the opening in her flesh.

  “Do you need some help?” Barrick asked, his voice thick with sarcasm.

  In answer, she kept trying. The anti-rad finally slid partially underneath her skin; she flinched at the dull pain, knowing it would have been much worse without the anesthetic. Grimacing, she continued to push the anti-rad inside until it was buried entirely underneath her dermis; the only evidence it was installed was the small rectangular bulge of flesh under her forearm.

  Fresh blood laced the wound opening, so she pressed the laser scalpel to the area, cauterizing it. When that was done, she tossed the medical laser aside and rolled down her sleeve. Other than the vague throbbing in her forearm, she felt no different than before. That was a good sign, she supposed.

  He nodded toward the far bulkhead. “Finish suiting up. I’ll instruct the guard outside to open the airlock. Then you will go.”

  She frowned. “Where?”

  “The guards will escort you to a medical bay. My prison. Set an alarm on your
aReal for oh seven hundred hours.”

  That was twelve hours from the current time. She reluctantly set the alarm. “What happens at oh seven hundred?”

  “The medical bay hatch will open. Make your way back to the shuttle, using the map made by your aReal. You’ll have to evade my guards: they’ll grow suspicious when the hatch opens and you don’t answer their telepathic requests. Make sure you’re off the ship by oh seven thirty.”

  “And if I’m not?” Bridgette asked.

  The telepath didn’t answer.

  Bridgette didn’t know what to make of the man. “Why are you helping me?”

  “I promised Captain Dallas I would eventually set you free if he let me go. I’m fulfilling my part of the bargain.”

  She shrugged, then finished donning the spacesuit. When the helmet clicked into place, a permission request appeared on the aReal built into the faceplate.

  “I’m sending you the access codes you’ll need to operate the shuttle,” Barrick said. “Please accept.”

  She did. After that, the telepath tossed her a spare oxygen canister and she fitted it to her harness. Once it was secured, she said: “The aliens are going to know I’m not you.”

  “Take this.” He kicked a small device to her.

  She bent over to regard the thing. It looked like a remote control of some kind, though without any buttons.

  “A darkness generator,” Barrick said. “What I call a tartaan. Don’t let go of it until you’re aboard the Dragonfly. Not unless you want them to recognize you.”

  “What about when I’m in the medical bay?” she asked. “Can I set it aside then?”

  “No,” Barrick told her. “It is of paramount importance that you grip the device at all times while aboard, especially in the medical bay. And remember, no matter what happens, you must be off the ship by oh seven thirty.”

  She wrapped her hands around the cylindrical object.

  Black mist swirled from the tartaan and enveloped her. The fog seemed to pulse, alternating between opaque and translucent.

  “Goooo.” It was Barrick. His voice sounded low-pitched, distorted. His movements were ridiculously drawn-out, as if he moved in slow motion.

  The far bulkhead opened and she stepped into the airlock.

  BARRICK WATCHED THE hatch seal with a resounding thud behind her.

  Most of life was a series of long sedentary moments, a build up toward the short times when action was needed.

  One of those moments of consequence was imminent.

  Bridgette’s piece had been set into play. Would his careful planning prove enough? The fate of humanity hung by such a precariously thin thread. In the many visions of the future the dead Raakarr had awoken in him, rarely did the path lead the current way. Still, he knew there was a chance, if a small one. He must stay focused on the end goal.

  He could feel the leader of the rogue faction reaching out to him. Valor, Barrick called him, because when the telepath asked its name, the alien returned that word.

  Barrick interpreted the three dimensional point cloud sent by Valor to read:

  We must act soon.

  Barrick sent a point cloud back. I have released the caged bird. When the executioners come, I will be ready.

  He retrieved the small laser weapon Valor had given him. It was a human blaster with a suit attachment, meaning it could be handled while wearing the gloves of a spacesuit. It had been modified to penetrate Raakarr shielding.

  When the aliens arrived for Bridgette, they would be in for a little surprise.

  thirty-two

  Jonathan had his left arm folded over his chest to grip the opposite bicep. The right arm was hooked toward his face, and the thumb, index and middle fingers of that hand tapped the stubble on his chin and upper lip.

  He stared at the tactical display, and the view from the external video feed beside it. He felt both awe and dread.

  On the video feed the view was consumed by two bright spheres: a cooler red subgiant and near its horizon a smaller, yet hotter blue main sequence star. The cool companion had a mass of four solars, and a surface temperature of ten thousand degrees. The hot companion had a mass of sixteen solars, and a surface temperature of thirty thousand degrees. Tidal forces pulled material away from the weakly bound outer layers of the subgiant toward the main sequence star so that the subgiant appeared to bulge on one side, and the long stream of matter from it accumulated in an accretion disk around the smaller, oblong-shaped sun. The radiation emitted from the accretion cloud was more intense than that given off by both stars combined.

  Jonathan felt so small, so inconsequential beside those stars. The fleet under his command seemed little more than microbes compared to the giant, radiating masses.

  And he was taking those microbes ridiculously close to them.

  The tidal forces were already so high that the usage of fighters by either side was out of the question. The Delta-V requirements necessary to transit into the higher orbits would cause the controls to seem extremely sluggish, and would rapidly exhaust the relatively low-supply of propellant carried aboard the Avengers. While the heat shields might protect them for a while, any fighter dispatched out there ultimately wouldn’t return home.

  For the same reason, missiles launched from the Avengers would behave closer to mortars than anything else, able to deviate very little from their launch vectors. Assuming the X90s didn’t detonate prematurely from the extreme heat. Still, he wanted to have the option to fire those missiles if need-be, which is why he had kept the fighters mounted to the hulls.

  The Avengers had attached to the shadowed regions of the starships, away from the suns. While the heat shields of the fighters were rated to withstand atmospheric reentry, Jonathan preferred not to test that rating, if he could. Besides, the radiation armor on a typical Avenger, while good, wouldn’t protect the occupants very well under the current conditions. But he was more worried about the tidal forces: he knew it wouldn’t take much to peel away one of those crafts from the hull. Maxwell and the engineers had promised that the Avengers would readily stick, but Jonathan knew it would only take the failure of one or two grappling hooks and a couple of mounting magnets to lose a fighter—and any pilots aboard.

  He remembered Rail’s objections during the conference.

  “You’re going to leave the Avengers mounted out there while we travel to the suns?” Captain Rail had said. “They’ll be out there for days. It makes no sense.”

  “I want their missiles ready to fire at a moment’s notice,” Jonathan had told her. “After the first battle, only the unmanned drones will mount to the hulls. And any pilots who elect to volunteer.”

  Rail had laughed. “Only madmen would volunteer.”

  Unsurprisingly, all the pilots had loaded up on anti-rads and volunteered.

  “Ops, status on the Avengers?” Jonathan asked.

  “They’re holding steady,” Ensign Lewis answered.

  Jonathan nodded slowly. “What about our hull? Is it stable?”

  “Stress readings are within tolerances,” Lewis said. “Despite the haste of our repairs.”

  “External temperature?” Jonathan asked.

  “Continuing to rise,” Lewis returned. “We’re at six hundred degrees Kelvin, starboard side. Heat armor is holding.” At that distance they had to keep the port section pointed away from the suns at all times, because with all the breaches cut into the armor there, it would fail under the high temperatures. Due to conduction, the heat would still transfer a short distance from the starboard side to the bordering hull sections of course, but it would quickly dissipate into the surrounding space.

  The external video signal on his aReal was occasionally interrupted by small flashes and streaks of light, thanks to the impact of energetic protons on the sensitive optical electronics that were only partially embedded in the radiation armor.

  “Radiation penetration?” he asked.

  “As expected,” Lewis answered. “The armor is filtering out most
of it, despite the high levels emitted by the accretion disk. But let’s just say, you wouldn’t want to go out there on a spacewalk. If the heat doesn’t kill you, the rads will.”

  Jonathan glanced at the small, square-shaped bulge situated on the underside of his right forearm. He’d installed a subdermal anti-rad under his skin, which would drip-feed radiation treatment into his bloodstream based on the levels expected to penetrate the hull. He’d ordered the medics to distribute similar subdermals to the crew and the Callaway’s civilian dependents, and instructed the other captains in the task group to do the same. He had asked Maxwell if suiting up would help, and the AI had laughed for the first time ever, telling Jonathan that if the several layers of hull armor and the intervening bulkheads between compartments wouldn’t hold off the expected rays, the thin anti-rad coating found in a spacesuit would hardly make a difference.

  Jonathan’s understanding was that there were different layers to the radiation armor, meant to protect against the two subsets of rays: electromagnetic versus particle, and the different wavelengths and energy levels possible within each subset. The outer layer was composed mostly of steel and lead that protected against the majority of the electromagnetic radiation, including the gamma ray weapon the enemies possessed. The inner layer was liquid water sandwiched between a combination of concrete and high Z materials that provided shielding against everything else, including any high energy particles such as protons and neutrons that penetrated the outer layer.

  The issue with the inner particle layer was that the armor itself became radioactive over time. That problem was abated by the radiation scrubbers inherent to that layer—basically the liquid water was constantly cycled out. Ordinarily the scrubbers could pass muster even during a solar storm, at least when operating a safe distance from the sun. But with what Jonathan planned, not even Maxwell believed the scrubbers could keep up.

  The bridge was theoretically one of the most heavily-shielded compartments aboard, thanks to its position at the center of the ship. It contained some extra radiation armor, essentially turning the compartment into a bunker. For that reason, the bridge personnel probably didn’t need the subdermal anti-rads embedded in their skin. He had decided to order them all to wear one anyway, despite the discomfort.