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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ack1308 on 2024-07-02 23:22:00+00:00.
Part 5: Out of Time
[A/N 1: This chapter beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]
[A/N 2: Yes, I know I said the last one was 4 of 5. This happens. Sorry, not sorry.]
Having safely jumped into hyperspace ahead of the pursuing Korrgan warship, the first thing Julia did was go over the information regarding the system she’d jumped the Far Horizons toward. She wanted planetary ring systems or asteroid belts; while they absolutely were not packed shoulder to shoulder with tumbling rocks as shown in the very best holodramas, they would still supply enough clutter to make locating small—or large—objects a definite pain. If it didn’t have any, she’d just have to move on and try again.
Bingo. A tight smile creased her face as she picked out the information she wanted. Apparently the system—HJ-459-Alpha-3—had had not one but two proto-planets that hadn’t quite made the cut, and the resulting asteroid belt was actually listed as slightly hazardous. There were also two gas giants with ring systems—not as gorgeous as Saturn’s, but she’d take what she could get—which gave her a ton of options.
Next, she flicked her way through the ship’s control menus until she was able to patch herself into the survey satellites stacked in the secondary hold of the Far Horizons. The hold had been retrofitted to be able to disconnect the satellites from their trickle chargers and launch them without the need for human intervention, while each satellite was equipped with thrusters, a radio transceiver, a proximity detector, and a modest onboard computer to control everything else.
Programming each and every satellite individually with laboriously typed commands would’ve taken far too long; fortunately, she didn’t have to go that route. Each satellite came equipped with preprogrammed subroutines that she merely had to select or deselect, and provide specific parameters for.
Even with the shortcuts, it was a long and involved task, and she lost herself in it to the point that she nearly missed the visual alert she’d set herself for dropping back into realspace. With less than thirty seconds to go, she finished the last set of commands, then turned control of the satellites over to the computerised launcher. Under normal circumstances, there would be a crew member monitoring the launching process to make sure nothing went awry; these were anything but normal circumstances.
Worse, all her ‘safe’ options were too safe to work in the current situation. What she intended to do would absolutely get her arrested if she tried it in an occupied system, and might just get her killed where she was. Unfortunately, she was going to have to go with ‘might just die’ as opposed to ‘really will die if the Korrgan catch up with me and the Deep Black Two’.
They would strafe the cryo-transport until it disintegrated, its precious cargo spilling into vacuum and fire, and dying without even having the chance to wake up and fight for their lives. Her, they would probably capture alive, so they could make an example out of her. Not for them the honourable sparing of an enemy who had made a good showing against them; the Korrgan, as far as she could tell, were the epitome of sore losers.
The Far Horizons shuddered gently as it slid into realspace, and Julia got busy. She’d set up the multiple displays of the pilot station to handle the essential jobs, and as data flowed onto her screens, she checked each one in turn. It was really something that needed several crewmembers to be doing, but right then she was out of such luxuries.
Her first priority had to be encroachments: other problems could be dealt with more or less at her leisure, but a space rock tumbling in her direction would mean she had no time to waste. She checked the radar returns and motion detectors carefully, and let out a cautious sigh when the screen showed everything was clear in her local patch of space.
Next on the agenda: had she actually fetched up at HG-469? It was not unheard of for poorly trained or downright lazy astrogators to screw up their jump plots badly enough to end up somewhere they hadn’t intended to be, but the drop back into realspace was likely to be a lot more dramatic in situations like that. Besides, she was close enough to the local primary to see it as a disc, whereas most mis-plotted jumps ended up in deep space.
There was, after all, a whole lot of nothing between star systems.
Still, she checked, and ended up with the result she’d expected (and privately prayed for): the Far Horizons was indeed within the target system. By this time, under normal circumstances, she’d be setting up the plot for the next jump outsystem, but the current situation required a different set of plans. She could keep jumping, but the Korrgan would keep chasing, and sooner or later they’d overhaul her.
Going to ground was a possibility, with a few specific alterations to the concept considering that she was in a spaceship, towing the galaxy’s biggest high-speed ice-cube tray (as Bradley had indelicately put it). However, the Korrgan would absolutely scour the system to the bedrock if she just went radio silent. So, she had to go after their weak point: their arrogance.
Humans had their pride, but there was nothing so single-mindedly insane about winning as a Korrgan who’d been told he couldn’t do something. Which meant that to stop them from thinking logically, she had to screw with their heads and give them an impossible challenge to overcome.
Fortunately, she’d come to this particular battle well-armed. But she had a lot of prep work to do and not a huge amount of time to do it in, so she wasted zero time in self-congratulation, and went straight into the next stage of her hastily conceived plan.
The closer gas giant had the more impressive ring system, so she aimed the nose of the Far Horizons at it and prepped for an in-system jump.
This was the truly problematic part of her plan. Hyperdrive jumps worked best when jumping out of a gravity well, or into one; jumping within a region of stressed spacetime caused excessive wear and tear on the delicate systems that made up a hyperdrive engine. It was possible to get away with it for a while, especially if a very good engineer was sitting over the engines and tuning them for best performance, but since Julia was only moderately competent as a spanner jockey, and she had to pilot the damn ship anyway, this was probably going to suck.
The faint silver lining in all this was that LOS (line of sight) jumps were a lot easier to plot. She already had the system data queued up, so all she had to do was tell the Far Horizons to skip through hyperspace and come out … there. It would barely even qualify as a jump.
Sealing her faceplate just in case, she held her breath and eased the jump lever forward. It felt like the drives took forever to engage with hyperspace, but she was sure that was only her imagination; the two-kilometre-long mass of the Deep Black Two hanging off the stern provided an inertial anchor that was only overcome by the drive repeaters built into the cryo-transport itself.
When the drives did kick in, the jump went by in barely half a second. Belying the brief stint in hyperspace, when the Far Horizons fell back into reality, it did so with a bang and a shudder that had Julia worried that they’d collided with a piece of the gas giant’s ring system. Checking the screens proved that wasn’t the case, but the engineering data showed a hyperdrive oscillation that was taking its own sweet time going away.
She had to hope it would be ready to go again by the time she needed to jump. The Korrgan had to be hunting through every system she could’ve gone to, and this one would definitely be on the list. But for now, she couldn’t afford to worry.
Having aimed as close to the ringed gas giant as she did, she would have enjoyed the view of the sparkling shards of ice amongst the slowly orbiting bits of rock under different circumstances. She checked for encroachments (none of note) and in-system signal traffic (none at all), then cast a concerned eye over the engineering data, grimaced, and took hold of the controls.
The realspace drive was designed to push the Far Horizons along at a fair rate of acceleration, but the Deep Black Two slowed it down somewhat. Still, any acceleration was good acceleration, and the cryo-transport only hampered the ship, as opposed to pulling it to a dead stop. This was the benefit, Julia absently mused, of being in space as opposed to trying to pull an obstinate load with a groundside transport. Different rules applied, and if you knew what they were and how they worked, you could set about bending them pretty damn hard.
Far too slowly for Julia’s peace of mind, the Far Horizons towed the Deep Black Two down into the orbiting ring system. Nothing she picked up on scope or radar seemed big enough or had enough of a differing orbital path to pose a significant hazard to the cryo-transport. It had its own internal power supply, which was designed to maintain the cryogenic syst…
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