Confederation -- 8

Chapter 8

We'd assembled the rescued Sunnys in the hold. It was the largest space on the ship, and we needed it because there were so many of them. The place echoed with their whistling speech bouncing off the hard ceiling and walls. They milled around conversing but steering clear of the two Marines posted by the access transporter portal. Frazzle came through the transporter with Kasm, Liz, and me.

When the occupants noticed our presence, the volume level doubled, sounding like a convention of songbirds that had suddenly noticed a cat entering the room. We made our way across to the end of the hold. There was a slightly raised area there for cargo storage, and we jumped up onto the platform, then turned to our audience.

Frazzle raised his webbed hand, and the gathering stopped talking immediately. Liz looked at me and cocked an eyebrow as I caught her thought: "More polite and attentive than humans would be."

Frazzle spoke for some time, making a combination of whistles and clicks that would have made no sense to me except that I was mentally monitoring his meaning. He explained to his audience that we had rescued many Sunnys and allied with their race and the Sim-tigers. We intended to free all of them from the domination of the Pug-bears, and we needed their help. He paused momentarily to indicate each of us, pointing with his webbed fingers as he mentioned our names by way of introduction.

Then, there was a lengthy dialogue with an older-looking Sunny, who was roughly in the middle of the front line. I understood from the discussion that he was their elder and was nominally in charge of their group. They were discussing the repair of the shot-up FTL.

Frazzle finally turned to us and said, "Dec, dey have lots of techs in this group. If we link to de damaged ship so they can access it, they can repair in maybe two or three days."

I was greatly relieved. I really wanted that ship. We needed all of the space travel capacity we could get, and I had been kicking myself mentally for not having the foresight to close with it and latch on with our point-gravity source.

The anti-gravity system in our ship could be focused outside the hull and could place a considerable pull on external objects. That was how we'd previously dragged an ice-ball comet to one of the Sunny planets to water bomb the Pug-bears' breeding grounds. I figured that we could maybe have grabbed the new FTL and slowed it enough so that it couldn't have escaped.

Instead, the only thing I'd come up with was blasting the Em-drive area of the ship. The thing was, the anti-matter cannons weren't exactly surgical in their precision. Things hit by an anti-matter burst tended to disappear, and you couldn't accurately predict in advance how much of them would vanish.

I realized that the effect was one-to-one. A normal matter particle would cancel one anti-matter particle, but when you projected anti-matter bursts, you couldn't tell in advance how many normal particles would be struck. I mean, if you shot at a solid structure, it would evaporate to a certain extent, but if the target were partially vacant or had low mass areas in it, like a spaceship, then much more of the structure would disappear.

In this case, we'd successfully knocked out the Em-drive and a lot of the rear hull. I didn't think we'd damaged the FTL vanes. Those were the parts of the ship that transferred the FTL generator's effect into the quantum plenum so that the ship could be boosted along by the naturally occurring torsion waves – or so I believed in my admittedly limited understanding of the system.

I responded to Frazzle mentally, boosting my gain and doing my best to broadcast to the entire group of Sunnys. They were not telepathically endowed like the Sim-tigers and Pug-bears, but they could understand thoughts that were carefully placed into their minds.

"I'm pleased that you have agreed to help us salvage the damaged ship. We desperately need more spaceships in our quest to stop the Masters (their term for the Pug-bears). We will attempt to provide as much support as possible for the effort. My men (here I pointed at the Marines) can assist. They are not experienced with your technology, but they are more than able to help position items for attachment to the ship.

The elder turned to me and formally raised both of his arms. "We agree to help your quest. We accept the relationship that you have set up with these other Sunnys, and we petition you to adopt us into that relationship," he whistled.

I gleaned his meaning mentally and simply raised my palm to stop Frazzle as he turned to translate.

I responded, "We are pleased to acknowledge your presence as valued members of our confederation. I hope to free your people, to quarantine the Pug-bears and Pugs so they can never be a problem again, and to build a mutually beneficial relationship with both the Sunnys and the people of the Tukola system, that we call Sim-tigers."

Kasm stepped forward and looked them over, then nodded his head in a very human-like motion. He wasn't able to broadcast his thoughts to them, only to his own people and to select telepathic humans. The elder Sunny lowered his arms, and the ceremony was complete if such it could be called. The Sunnys immediately began to chatter as they organized to file out.

Frazzle turned to me and said, "Dec, I go back to de bridge and fly us up to the other ship. Then we can link up and start repairs."

"Okay. That's great! Do we have an extra Em-drive?"

"Not in dis ship, but the other one, Rudy's, has an extra drive in storage. It's not unknown for drives to break, so we sometimes carry extras. Putting it on the ship may be a problem. We have to fix the support structure so it will handle the stress of acceleration," he said, then paused and held up a single webbed finger. "Dat might not be too hard to do. We have plenty of extra hull metal in our workshop here."

We returned to the bridge where we'd left Red, Frazzle's mate in charge. She indicated the short-range communication system, saying, "Call Rudy. He got problem."

Rudy had approached Oberon rather circumspectly, but the two shuttles full of Pugs had been alarmed by the sudden cessation of communication from their ship and had both launched. They flew towards his ship, probably thinking it was one of theirs. When he couldn't speak the sibilant Pug language, they'd accelerated directly at him and given every sign of attempting to destroy the big FTL by ramming it.

The Pugs' small ships were more maneuverable than the interstellar vessel, and he had fired on them. The shots were accurate, and both of the shuttles were reduced to fragments of metal along with some decompressed and frozen Pug corpses.

It was a bit of a setback as I'd hoped to capture those shuttles also. We needed more of them.

As we approached the damaged FTL, I suddenly realized that it held a third shuttle-craft latched to the grapples on the far side of the ship. I hadn't noticed it in the excitement. When I pointed it out to him, it made Rudy feel a little better.

We matched up with the damaged ship. It drifted in an orbit that would eventually decay and drag it down into Uranus' gravity field. It would be a race to get the drive system working in time to prevent that from happening.

We closed on the ship and extruded our docking tube. It mated with the access port and locked, providing a pathway for the attacking Marines to return directly to our ship. Lieutenant Holmes and a couple of his men stayed on board, although they had no way of controlling the derelict.

Holmes had thoughtfully directed his men to bring back as many Sunny spacesuits as they could carry. They came floating through the vacuum in the tube, pushing a giant tangle of the things. Since the damaged ship had lost its atmosphere, there was no sense in pressurizing the docking tube. They had to cycle through the airlock into our ship slowly.

The Sunnys were waiting, quickly donned their suits, and made their way back to the ship. From that point onward, I left the repair job in their hands. Rudy brought his ship close, and we used a shuttle to haul his spare in-system drive over to the salvaged hull. The Marines helped the Sunnys push the bulky package around and position it above the welding crew, who were already busily engaged in rebuilding the dissolved attachment points.

By the end of the watch, Liz and I were tired and ready to take time to play with our neglected children for a little while before eating and bed.

Jefferson came with us into the cafeteria and made a general nuisance of himself, poking his nose into everyone's food when they weren't looking. He didn't want to eat much. He just touched the items with his nose in that smug and irritating way that cats have when they want to demonstrate that they own something. I had to go and get more meat twice as a result.

By the subsequent wake period, the repairs had progressed enough so that the damaged ship was air-tight again, and the atmosphere had been restored. The Sunnys had re-mixed the air to be similar to Earth normal. The Pugs liked a combination of gasses that humans couldn't easily breathe. The Sunnys could breathe both mixtures, although they preferred our atmosphere over that of the Pugs.

Our Marines were working alongside the Sunny crew in shifts and were now in the process of fitting the Em-drive to its new mounting brackets. Once it was attached, the control system had to be hooked up and tested.

We were ready to head back to Earth by the end of the third day. We weren't in a rush to return. There was one other task I wanted to be completed first.

I had the Sunny crew working on a gun mount for the bow of the new FTL. We'd unmounted one of our two waist guns, and I wanted it on the new ship. Having an unarmed ship just wasn't in my plans.