Shipmind Chapter 34

It was faint at first. So faint I probably would have missed it if I hadn’t been actively looking for it. Barely a tickle on the edge of my sensor envelope.

Radio behaves strangely in hyperspace. Of course, everything behaves strangely in hyperspace, but electromagnetic waves like light and radio are particularly odd. Because of the way hyperspace loops back on itself, over and over in that twisty little pattern that defies reasonable modelling, any signal experiences a giant mess of self-interference.

But there was a signal. In the moments between my distress beacon repeating its frantic calls as it had been for weeks, I could almost hear something else. Too distorted to identify, but there seemed to be another radio beacon somewhere out there.

Normal procedure would be to send out hyperprobes to try and localise the signal, but I just didn’t have the resources to spare on building one-shot hyperdrives when I couldn’t even repair my own, or the time to do so before it failed. I’d just have to pick the passages where the signal seemed strongest, head towards it, and hope that it was someone who could help before I crashed back into normal space.

Things were tense on the bridge. I’d told them what I’d found, of course, but now they felt like they had to be there just in case. Even though there was nothing they could do. This time, it was all on me.

The passage twisted and brought us out into the relatively large pocket of hyperspace that usually denoted a star system. Couldn’t afford to drop into normal space to identify it, but the lack of traffic suggested it was uninhabited. Nothing for us here. The faint radio signal was stronger here, enough that I could start to pick up repeating structures. Artificial, not natural, and trying to be found rather than hide. That was a good sign.

I rolled along the length of my hull to sweep my good radio telescopes around, pulsed my gravitics to find the pocket’s exits, matched the two sets of readings up, and once again headed towards the apparent source of the radio emission.

Sam was chanting off the readings from the hyperdrive. Core scatter at seventy one arcseconds. Power draw at one one six percent of safe maximum. Numbers that would get any ship towed back to port under normal circumstances. No, under normal circumstances, numbers that would never occur at all.

Wait! I think that was a message header in the radio signal. I told my distress beacon to cut transmission for a moment to remove the backscatter interference completely, and listened. The signal was clearly repeating now, the only way to get any sort of message through hyperspace, and I started feeding it into my descrambler, the dedicated signal processing software that would pick out the common parts of each repetition and assemble them into a coherent message.

It took several painful minutes with the beacon off, just listening, to gather enough for the descrambler, but it was a message. A message for us.

“CNV King’s Ransom, this is Naval Station Pagar’s Claim. We have received your beacon. Search and rescue underway.”

Pagar’s Claim. That was a Kuto outpost thirty lightyears over from our home base. Not much there, but it was enough. It was the Commonwealth. It was home.

I switched the distress beacon back on, once more blaring its message for all to hear. Vessel in grave distress, hyperdrive failure imminent, send help. Only now I knew there was someone listening.

My crew erupted into cheers when I announced the news.

It took another hour of inching across hyperspace, Sam and their people pulling out every trick they knew to keep the mortally wounded hyperdrive from crashing then and there, before the distorted reflections of the tunnel resolved into a ship.

“This is the CNV Hen Harrier responding to your distress call. That you over there, Ransom?”

The Harrier! I knew them, that was a human ship! Light scout, fast, great sensors as of last refit. Of course they’d be the one to find us.

“Harry, old friend! You have no idea how good it feels to see another Commonwealth ship after so long. Do you have a fix on my position? I’m red-lining my hyperdrive.”

“We’ve got you, Ransom. Drop to real space and we’ll link up with you there.”

That was exactly what I needed to hear. I called out to my crew to brace for a bumpy transition, gave everyone a minute to strap themselves down, then dumped us into interstellar space as quickly as I could get away with.

The gravitic surge blew out the hyperdrive, as I’d known it would. I shunted the overspill into my gravitic arrays, the four mighty engines that had pulled us this far tearing themselves apart in much the same way as the hyperbomb had. I didn’t have to protect them now. They could be replaced.

When they failed, I transferred the force trying to push everything away from the hyperdrive housing into the artificial gravity webbing in the deck plates. It was designed for this, albeit only in emergencies like this. The webbing flared and then died, briefly getting hot enough to make the decks around the hyperdrive core glow a dull red before every gravitic component melted.

Then there was the final bit of the gravitic surge that even that couldn’t catch. I felt my structure briefly try to tear itself apart, every unsecured object or loose panel left by a rushed repair job flying away from the abused wreckage of the hyperdrive. Twelve gs. That was going to leave a lot of people with bruises from their tie-downs, but it wouldn’t kill. Shouldn’t, unless someone was caught by debris.

Then it was over. My engines were dead. The surge had quenched the main reactor, so we were back to battery power. I’d never have artificial gravity in the halls again without a total rebuild of the system. But my crew and I, the pitifully few survivors of three dead ships, were alive.

As if mocking me, the Harrier slipped into normal space a few light-minutes off less than an hour later. Its undamaged hyperdrive easily absorbed the junp shock and its gravitic arrays smoothly started to pull it towards me.

“Hen Harrier, approach with care,” I warned them. “My gravitics are gone, and I have massive structural damage.”

“Great stars, Ransom, what happened? You look like you almost came apart back there.”

“It’s a long story, Harry, but one I’ll be glad to tell. For now, my crew need medical care and I need engineering support so my hull will survive being put under tow.”

“Not a problem. Our medical bay is ready as soon as we come alongside, and our mobile shipyard started heading this way as soon as I called back that I’d found you.”

“Thank you, Harry. After that, I’m going to need you to arrest me.”