“Well? Can you overload it or not?”

  I winced at the impatience in her tone.

  Stacy and I had managed to gain access to an engineering terminal in the reactor room with her OptiBlaster (Patent pending) which we’d integrated into Frankie. Her improved design of the OptiMaster I’d used to override the security in order to save my bacon back on the station planetoid was, quite simply, insane. Once we’d managed to splice into the optical cables, it was only a matter of seconds before we were able to get into the computer system.

  That was the easy part.

  “Commander, even with Stacy’s magnificent processing power, deciphering the language of whoever this species was isn’t easy.” I tried to explain, “I want to get this done and get out of here ASAP myself; The ktonshi are moving around down there now. But so far the only thing we’ve been able to make sense of is that the reactor down there is using a tesseract to somehow pull power directly from Sagittarius A*. If we do this wrong, for all I know we could open up a wormhole directly from here to there.”

  “We don’t have time to waste Mr. Aacen, if they get…” she started, before what I’d said caught up with her. “Wait. The reactor down there is somehow feeding off the energy of a supermassive black hole? How is that even possible?”

  “I don’t know, Commander.” I told her, I could hear the anxiety heavy in my voice even though I was trying hard to control it. “And I’m not sure I want to know. The idea scares the hashreex clean out of me. If this kind of tech got into the hands of someone as unethical as Benson Fisch, for example, we’d have to completely redefine the term ‘war crimes’.”

  “Can you at least shut it down safely? I’ll start convincing the Kintzels to let us use one of their missiles to take out the complex, but we need to deal with this quickly. Your sister has found news casts from your CNC hinting that there are more ktonshi incursions happening on the edges of your Commonwealth’s space.”

  “Fuck.” I swore, then winced, “Pardon my language, Commander. I’ll get back on it with Stacy and do my best. Part of the reason I unplugged was to plug the alien engineering database the Keeper gifted me into the network for Stacy to access. We can’t afford for me to be selfish and hog it for myself now, I’m hoping she’ll be able to find a match, which will give us the answers we need.”

  A long stare was all I got for a long moment before she gave me a curt nod. “Get to it Mr. Aacen.” She ordered. Then in a more casual voice, “And Thomas, thank you.”

  Shrugging with what I hoped was non-challance, I gave her a smile, “Priorities are priorities Ma’am. I’ll let you know when we have something.”

  With that, I hurried to medbay. I hadn’t forgotten the sudden onset of a headache, nor of Stacy telling me there’d been a startling spike of neurological activity in my brain. When I’d decided to drop out of the interface with Stacy and the droid, I figured it would be a good idea to rejoin the link from medbay so that Tratsa could keep an eye on me. I knew if I tried to hide it, there’d be hell to pay.

  Thankfully, while a quick scan did show elevated neural activity, it was quickly dropping back into baseline range. “But if something causes a spike enough to cause pain, it’s safer we monitor it closer.” she admonished me with a scowl, and held up a small triangular medallion-like device. “This is a neural monitor. I know there’s one built into the link you’re using to ride along on that over-engineered drone of yours, but this is tuned more to medical conditions and will send the readings directly to me here. You will wear it, or there will be consequences.”

  One should never argue with a woman who knows where you sleep and has access to a wide spectrum of pharmaceuticals… and frightening medical devices.

  So, with the new monitor attached to my temple, I double checked that the Keeper’s database was plugged into the ship’s network so Stacy could access it, then parked my ass back in my comfortable chair.

  “Alright Stacy, let’s get back to work.”

  I haven’t stopped working Tommy-cakes, she said as I merged back into our link with Frankie, Unlike you, I can be in multiple places at once. But that’s ok, you make up for it with your cute butt.

  How do you even know enough to judge if my butt is cute? I asked, finally voicing something that had nagged at me for a while. I appreciate the compliments, but seriously Stacy…

  Girls talk, Oh sweet engineer of my naughtiest dreams. She laid on the flirtatious tone heavier than a cargo hold full of tungsten, and I fought not to roll my eyes, that, and the StellarNet is for pr0n!

  Shattered Stars, is that meme still floating around out there? I swear it’s gotta have coprolite dust all over it by now!

  Truisms never die! Petrified dinosaur poop or not!

  I shook my virtual head and attempted to put that train of thought aside. Any luck while I was meat-side?

  I found a mention of a self-destruct protocol, but it’s locked behind encryption that even I’m having trouble breaking it. She did not sound happy about admitting that, Every time I thought I had it cracked, there seemed to be a new level of security behind it. It’s downright maddening baby-cakes. I need a hug.

  With a chuckle, I tried to imagine giving her a soothing hug. It was hard as hell though. How do you hug someone who’s physical body is technically over a hundred light years away and spanning most of the interior of a small planetoid?

  Eventually, I ended up just thinking soothing feelings of “there, there” at her.

  Thanks Tommy-bear.

  Anything for Silicon Sweety. I said, smiling mentally, now let's get back to work.

  Alright, but my substrate isn’t actually…

  Work, back to it. I interrupted her, as you so generally pointed out, not all of us can multitask to your extent. And we are running out of time.

  And I wasn’t kidding. The sounds of ktonshi movement out in the corridors was chilling. More of the colonists must be completing their metamorphosis with every minute that went by. If we didn’t find a solution soon, the whole place would be absolutely crawling with the creepy buggers.

  If overloading the reactor is too dangerous, I asked after some thought, are there any internal defense systems still operational that we could bring online?

  It turned out that there weren’t any internal defenses that were still functional, and getting them functional would take far too long. About the only thing functional in the whole place was limited life support (which by a happy coincidence supported most known sophonts in the Orion Spur), lights, and the power core itself. And the only thing we were finding in the databases we could gain access to said our options were simply to shut down the tesseract that linked the core to the super massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, or to cause a runaway feedback loop that would likely cause an astronomic catastrophe that would reshape the entire galaxy.

  Frankly, I wanted to slap whatever bunch of void damned twatwaffles thought it was a good idea to build such a device in the first place. It reminded me of the old stories of Oppenheimer not knowing if the first fusion bomb detonation would ignite earth’s atmosphere and kill everyone, but still pushed the button anyway.

  So, Stacy simply began copying all the data she could access into heavily protected storage she planned to isolate and analyse in detail at a later time, (especially that encryption loop she couldn’t crack. That really seemed to piss her off worse than my Mom after Dad ate her hidden stash of eridani chocolate ice cream just before that time of the month.)

  While she did that, we also started scouring the Keeper files for any kind of matching technology.

  An hour later, we heard the first impact on the blast door of the reactor room.

  We’re running out of time Stacy. I thought while my heart ramped in a crescendo. If we don’t find something soon, we’ll either have to risk the cataclysm or get that sagittarius missile down here. And it looks like we might lose Frankie regardless.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  We can rebuild Frankie. She replied, more blumintum can be hunted down eventually. But if we turn the galaxy inside out, there’s nothing left for any of us.

  So we call for the missile strike then?

  I’m not seeing any other options. Shall I inform the commander?

  I’d been using the unfocused mind technique as I had done earlier for the last fifteen minutes, hoping maybe it would help as it had to get us here. I was still in that unfocused, perceptive state, stubbornly trying to find some other option as I began to tell Stacy to go ahead and inform the commander. But before the thought had a chance to fully form, when that flash of clarity struck again.

  It was like looking out onto an edge of a dark forest and just seeing the trees, but then suddenly everything falls into stark monochrome except the pack of wolves crouched just beyond the trees, glowing in vivid color while staring at you with ravenous intent. Multiple entries in the Keeper database just jumped out at me in stark contrast, leaping into my cerebrum like wolves on a wounded elk.

  Wait, hold on.

  Sugar-bits! Your neural activity just went off the charts! Stacy cut me off, alarm coloring her virtual voice like I hadn’t heard before, Tratsa says you should sever the link immediately! She’s on her way to engineering to do it herself if I don’t.

  Hold ON! I insisted, wincing as a fresh headache to dwarf the one from earlier crested over my brain. We don’t need the missile, and we don’t need to overload the power core! We just need to pulse it.

  What are you… She began, but I clenched my jaw and thought to her what I’d seen.

  The entries that had jumped out at me were not about another tesseract based power core, certainly not one linked to a supermassive black hole, but of other exotic power sources used by species far beyond the Orion Spur. Two in particular stood out in how similar they were to the effects of the Sagittarius missiles.

  Except that they didn’t generate a microscopic black hole; They contained one.

  A stable microscopic black hole, kept in a bottle and used in the same way folk from this part of the galaxy harness antimatter reactions.

  Buried in the technical notes on the designs were safety was the advisory that should, for some reason, the energy levels being emitted by the singularity begin to spike and overwhelm the containment, they would initiate a pulse sequence to bleed it off. It would still be an enormous amount of power, and be dangerous to the facilities around it, but the damage would be far more localized.

  We might just be able to adapt the same procedure here. The issue would be the sheer scale. The difference between the kind of singularity those folk utilized, and the power of Sagittarius A* was so vast, I didn’t even want to try to calculate the ratio. To effect a pulse small enough to destroy just this facility would require timing down to the petasecond.

  Forgive me if this is insulting Digi-bits, I said cautiously, but can you handle that timing?

  A momentary pause, and I could almost feel her core processes fluttering through the calculations. Of course I can handle the timing! She finally announced, but her voice wasn’t as chipper and playful as I expected. The problem is the equipment keeping the tesseract stable and linked. Advanced as it is, it does not have the reactivity to initiate a pulse of that period.

  The wince that rocked my meat body back on Elegance might just have been record breaking if it was something people measured. So what difference of magnitude are we talking about here? Double the area? Triple?

  Another pause, then, Tommy-bear, the shortest pulse we could initiate would split this planet in half, if not obliterate it completely.

  I blinked.

  At the same time, I heard the horrendous screech of cermet being strained behind its limits and glanced over at the blast door. One long, spindly, carapaced appendage was poking through the door, and there were signs that more would not be that far behind it. The blast door would not hold the ktonshi off for much longer.

  We don’t have time to find any other options. Stacy stated urgently, It’s either the missile, or the pulse. And remember, we don’t even have any guarantee the missile will do anything more than collapse the outer tunnels leading to this facility.

  Get started setting up the pulse. I’ll inform the commander. We need to move the ship far out of blast radius.

  Be expeditious about it Dreamy-Steamy. We want to set off this pulse as soon as possible.

  Roger that Babe.

  I came out of the link shouting. “Commander! Get us away from the planet, NOW! Just pick a course and go, MAXIMUM VELOCITY!”

  Before she’d even replied, I felt the shift in harmonics from the conventional engines ramping up. “Report Mr. Aacen.”

  “We found a way to deal with the ktonshi, and possibly destroy the alien power core at the same time. But it’s likely going to blow the entire planet too. We need to get out of here! Stacy is going to set it off any second.” I paused as I remembered something, “Fuck! The Cutlass! Warn them!”

  “Ms. Aacen relayed the warning to bug out the moment you communicated it to us.” Jophixa replied. “And did you just say the whole planet was about to be destroyed?”

  “Yes!”

  “Sweet Goddess,” I heard Boudya say from across engineering, and I looked over to find her running to a control panel as wisps of smoke started to come from a coolant port on the side of the main plasma conduit.

  I stood up rapidly, cursing my wobbly knees and the stabbing headache behind my eyes. Tratsa tried to grab me and pull me back down into the chair, but I pulled away. “I’ll rest when we’re out of this.”

  It didn’t take long for Elegance to accelerate to her maximum safe conspace velocity, and shortly after that, hitting the damage threshold. Jophixa was not taking matters lightly, and was pushing the engines hard to make sure we were out of range of the blast. I could hear the pulse of the plasma conduits thumping with a beat that almost felt like the rhythm of my own heart when I woke from a nightmare.

  “Commander,” I heard Stacy ask in my head, knowing it was echoing through the bridge intercom. “You and Cutlass should be at a safe enough distance. Ktonshi are about to break through, I must set off the tesseract pulse. Prepare for pulse in ten seconds.”

  Letting out a curse, I grabbed the emergency straps on the chair I was in and buckled in before activating the magnetic locks on the wheels. I looked over to bark an order to Boudya to do the same, only to find she’d already done so.

  My knuckles went white as I gripped the chair’s restraints, the echo of Stacy’s countdown ringing in my head. “Five, four, three, two, one…Pulse initiated”

  The nothing that happened at first was expected due to lightspeed lag. We’d put enough distance between us and the planet that even light reflected off of it wouldn’t reach us for at least forty-three seconds. Forty-three seconds which felt like an eternity as we waited for the carnage to befall the colony of Eve’s Blessing. Like that old expression, “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” only far worse.

  And then it hit us.

  First it was the radiation; Hawking radiation, gamma rays and x-rays pummelled the shields. Sparks exploded from a console not far from me, and I flinched away from it, bringing my arm up to shield my face.

  “Shield emitter four-alpha offline. Shield strength down to eighty-nine percent.” Stacy announced.

  Swiveling my chair around so that I could reach the terminal nearest to me, I stretched out and tapped at the controls, trying to shunt power into the remaining aft shield emitters a moment before Jophixa shouted over the intercom ordering just that action.

  “Boudya! See if you can reinforce the anti-matter containment with a containment field. When the blast wave hits us we don’t want…”

  She’d barely gotten her hands onto a console when the ship was rocked by the shockwave and multiple alerts started sounding. We were both thrown against the straps of the emergency restraints, even as she continued to reach the console. So focused was she, that she didn’t see the access panel on the ceiling pop loose, tangle an optical coupling, and swing right towards her head.

  “Look out!” I shouted at her, but I was too late. The panel connected with the side of her head, sending it reeling sideways with a jerk, and her whole body went limp.

  I reached for the buckles of my emergency restraints to work the release, only to find them locked. I tried them again, only to catch the telltale beep indicating that the release had been overridden. “Stacy! Why are my restraints locked?”

  The ship bucked again, and more sparks showered across the deck. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a coolant line spring a leak, spraying the scalding fluid over half the deck. Smoke started billowing from out of one of the tantaja tubes. I could feel the temperature in the room start to rise, sweat breaking out on my brow. “Stacy!”

  “Freeing your restraints would endanger you greatly Tommy-bear.” she finally responded, her voice coming out garbled through engineering’s intercom. “There is a significant chunk of the planet coming straight towards the ship, and inertia dampeners were offline during the initial shockwave.

  “If you are not buckled in, you could be severely hurt during evasive maneuvers. Commander Jophixa has ordered the lockout.”

  “Boudya is hurt!”

  “I know sweet-cakes.” She replied, regret heavy in her voice, “But you won’t be able to help her if a sudden maneuver throws you into that coolant leak. I can detect that her breathing is still strong, if reduced due to being unconscious. Once the danger is over, we’ll get her to medbay, I promise.”

  “Stacy, release the restraints right now!” I screamed, still struggling against the unyielding buckles, “she needs help!”

  Another impact to the shields sent the ship lurching sideways, and a bit of ragged titanium that had been blown loose from somewhere slid across the deck and hit my boot. Seeing it, I strained hard against the harness to pick it up, figuring I could use it to cut myself loose from my harness and go tend to Boudya’s wounds. I was not about to sit there and watch her bleed without doing something.

  “Tommy-Bear, please stop! You’re going to hurt yourself when…”

  In the next instant, I heard the sound of metal shearing, felt myself get thrown violently forward, then blinding pain against my forehead.

  Then nothing.

  The Salvager’s Plague

  https://ko-fi.com/theacornscribe