But that was for later. Right now we were heading towards a rogue satellite which had been launched a few days ago from Kazakhstan. We were just about to get close enough to actually see the thing when we received an unexpected order from ground base. The intergalactic ship Defiant had been hi-jacked by its own crew and they were taking it out of orbit. We were the nearest interceptor and we were to go after it, grapple it if necessary and prevent it from making a leap.
“Jesus!” I breathed.
Mike gave a kind of groan. I realized that up to that point he’d coping by counting off the minutes until we could drop out of orbit and return to base.
But he was a professional. He put his fear to one side, located the Defiant and calculated a trajectory which would intercept theirs in about three and a half hours. Then off we went, me leaning out of the window to stick a flashing blue light on the roof.
Well, okay, I made that last bit up.
Tommy:
They used to say there were only five people on Earth who really understood how a gravitonic engine worked, and I certainly wasn’t one of them. What I do know is that, for a few seconds at the point of leap, what an engine does is generate an artificial gravitational field that converts the space around it into the equivalent of a black hole. And because an engine works by gravity, it can’t be used too close to any large object with a gravitational field of its own. This would distort the field and would result, at minimum, in the ship emerging in a completely different place from the target area. At maximum it could result in the field failing to properly enclose the ship, so that the ship itself would be damaged or destroyed.
This was why, at the rate of acceleration that the Defiant could achieve with its conventional Euclidean drive, it would be eight hours before we could reach the nearest safe point to make our leap through sub-Euclidean space: the so-called leap point. It would take half that time in any case for the engine to build up a sufficient charge.
It was after we’d been going for about an hour that we became aware that we were being followed.
“It’s gaining on us too,” Mehmet said.
“Shall we talk to them?” Dixon asked.
I thought better not. But the others decided we should call and tell them if they didn’t back off, they might get sucked down into sub-E with us when the time came to make a leap.
We were surprised to hear the voice of a self-assured young Englishwoman in reply.
“We’ll reach you long before you get to your leap point,” she said in response to our threat, “and we are certainly not going to back off.”
Dixon winked at us.
“Listen,” he radioed back, “When you get close to us, we leap, even if we’re four hours short of the leap point. It’s up to you.”
Mehmet looked at me with an expression that said, “He’s bluffing, yeah?”
But he hadn’t seen the gleam in Dixon’s eye, the mad religious gleam as he turned back to watch the power monitor.
The interceptor drew closer. There was no sign of them backing off.
“I meant what I said,” Dixon told the orbit-cops.
“So did I,” said the young woman who we now knew to be Sergeant Angela Young.
Dixon shrugged.
“Okay, then,” he said, “here goes or it’ll be too late! God save us all.”
“What!” Mehmet and I simultaneously yelled. We were still three and a half hours short of a safe leap point!
But Dixon laughed as he switched on the field.
“Thy will be done!” he hollered as we plunged into the pit.
Angela:
Purple lightening prickled up and down the Defiant’s pylons, and the stars all around it shuddered like a mirage. Our vehicle shook violently, its metal groaning with the strain as it was sucked towards the artificial gravity the galactic ship was generating. And then suddenly the stars and moon and sun and earth all vanished and all around us, in every direction, was something like a huge distorting mirror. It was like when you’re under water and look up and you can’t see the sky or the world outside, only the silvery undersides of waves. Our own faces were there in front of us, little distorted reflections of our frightened faces maybe fifty yards away, peering back at us from a distorted reflection of our cabin window. There was a jolt like an explosion and I vaguely remember hearing a hissing noise coming from somewhere and Mike giving out a despairing groan. Then I blacked out
When I came round again I was in the Defiant, and those three famous galactonauts were looking guiltily down at me like naughty little boys who’ve done a stupid dare and it’s gone wrong.
“Hi, you okay? Listen, I’m…”
“Where’s Mike?”
“Your partner? He’s okay. He’s not come round yet, but he’s okay. Listen, I’m Mehmet Harribey and…”
“…and I’m Dixon Thorley.”
“…and I’m…”
“I know. You’re Tommy Schneider. The famous love rat.”
My head was killing me, and I was very scared and feeling sick, but I was damned if I was going to show any sign of weakness.
“I meant to leap before you got too close to us,” said Dixon, “but I must have left it too late because we pulled your interceptor vehicle through sub-E with us. It was very badly damaged but the three of us came over and managed to get you and your crewmate out before the pressure dropped too low.”
“So we did complete the leap then?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid we’re kind of…”
“So where the hell are we?”
“Well, we’re…”
“The truth is,” Mehmet said, “that we don’t exactly know. We’re in intergalactic space, I’m afraid, which… um… is kind of a first. But we believe that the nearest galaxy is our own. So it should still be possible to…um…”
“…to get back to Earth and not suffocate or freeze to death in space – although that is the most likely outcome. Is that how it is?”
“Well, yes, I’m afraid so,” Mehmet laughed ruefully. (I grew to like him best of the three. He was nice-looking, had natural friendly manners, and didn’t come with a reputation either as a religious nut or a serial adulterer. I remembered seeing a photo of him in some magazine with a pretty wife by the Aegean somewhere and three or four pretty little Turkish kids.)
I looked around. The cramped little cabin was about as big as the back of a small delivery truck and it smelled like the boys’ changing room at school, but as far as we knew it was the only habitable place for thousands and thousands of light years: the only place in which a human being could remain intact and alive even for a single second.
“You arseholes,” I told the three of them, and I felt like I was a copper back on the streets of London, pulling up three silly naughty little boys. “You selfish, childish, thoughtless little arseholes.”
They never had a chance to respond because suddenly Mike screamed. He’d opened his eyes and the first thing he saw was the wheel of the galaxy outside the porthole.
Tommy:
It was pure hell there for a while. The British guy hollered and roared and grabbed us and snatched at the controls and swore and wept. I got a black eye, Mehmet got his shirt torn, Angela was yelling at us to back off and not make things even worse (but where the hell were we supposed to back off to?) and all of us were getting dangerously close to seeing ourselves just like the Englishman saw us: doomed, doomed to die slowly and horribly in a stuffy tin can with nothing but nothingness outside.