There was more, but I wasn’t really listening. I was heading for the hatch, heading for the test ships. If the Bugs were coming again, in force this time, the general was absolutely right. There was precious little time left for humanity to figure out the Rheeth drive system and get it into production to use effectively in the fleet.
The Bugs had screwed up and left us an FTL drive behind to study during their first invasion attempt. We had duplicated it perfectly, but could not yet control the power of the reaction. So far we had only managed to kill a lot of good pilots with it.
“Where are you going, Davis?” boomed the general as he followed me through the hatch.
“I want to fly this one, sir,” I said pointing to one of the lonely-looking huddle of test ships in the vast hold. “That weird-looking bird with the big nose.”
“Another frontal-armor theory job, huh?” snorted the general, coming into step beside me. Now that we both knew the real score, our differences were gone, and we were back to doing our jobs again. I had completely forgotten my anger, and the general had dropped his.
It didn’t matter that these ships had all been tried and failed. It didn’t matter that we would die. The entire human race was about to die. We had to try. We had to take the chance, even if it was no chance.
All that mattered now was getting past the Demon. That’s what they had called the deadly physics that destroyed their test planes when pilots had first tried to break the sound barrier a century ago. Their Demon had eaten many pilots in Old America. But they had eventually beaten their Demon, and I was going to beat ours.
The Barrier had to come down. We had to be able to travel faster than light. We had to have a working FTL drive in order to beat the Bugs.
The general and I stood looking up at our prospective flying coffin. The test ship was larger than most and carried an unusually large nose-cone on the front of it, which was just hollow space. The theory behind this one stemmed from the fact that our test ships that had failed early had all shown blast-scarred noses. Often the mix of molecules after a full collapse showed early damage to the nose section as well. The theory went that somehow these craft had survived the fantastic pressures built up on the craft by letting a frontal section take some of the shock for the ship.
In truth, it was more of a hunch than a theory.
“The thing does nothing for the physicists, you know. They can find no basis in to support the idea,” the general told me.
I shrugged. “True, but I believe in what seems to work.”
“Interesting, but it isn’t your turn yet.”
I turned in surprise, my eyebrows arching.
“I’m taking the next shot at the demon,” he told me.
“May I ask why, sir?” I felt cheated somehow.
“I’m a better pilot than you are. Here, hold my revolver for me,” he said, handing me his gun belt with his black-barreled Colt. 45 automatic tucked into the holster. He grinned at me. “No sense taking any extra mass, I weigh enough by myself. I’ll be back for it when the Barrier is history.”
I didn’t agree that he was the better pilot, but kept my thoughts to myself. Twenty minutes later the general was going through pre-flight in the cockpit of the ship I had chosen, while I paced the deck back in the control room.
The ship was eased out of the Ulysses frontal bay into space and boosted away, floating to a safe distance before engaging the drive. The countdown commenced. On the big viewscreen I watched as the general reached up to flip the switch which fired the core and released the Kheeth reaction.
The screen flipped to a serene view of the heavens as seen from behind Hyperion. The testship was a tiny streak. I moved with incredible rapidity. I watched for one second… Two… Three…
At six seconds it was over. Another brilliant flash of detonation. I lowered my head.
“He’s still transmitting, sir,” said one of the techies. Kumar, I thought it was. My head snapped up. Kumar pushed his sweat-sliding glasses back up his nose and pointed to the counter on the wall. It read 96.54 then 98.50.
“Is it right?” I shouted. “Has he made it?”
No one had ever passed 97.65 before. The speed of light was so near, he had to be compressed and slowed to a fraction of our space and time.
Kumar nodded vigorously, his glasses slipping again.
“Ease back down,” I whispered to myself, knowing that the general would never do it. Many of the pilots had gone up close and knocked on the Barrier before, then eased off the throttle and lived to tell about it. None had ever gotten so close before. I was sure that if he still lived after that initial detonation, as the transmissions indicated that he did, we had made a giant leap forward in reaching a solution. I wanted him to slow down, to return, but I knew he wouldn’t. He was going to knock down the Barrier and tweak the Demon’s nose, or die trying.
Then there was a second flash. The telemetry coming back from the General’s ship ceased. The final reading was 99.71.
I put on the general’s gun belt, which I was still holding. Somehow the weight of pistol felt comforting against my hip. For the first time I thought I understood why the general always wore it. In the act of buckling it on, I mentally came to a decision. I paused only a moment to grieve over him before rushing down to the hold.
The general had come close. Very close. Now it was my turn to see it through. I selected another craft with a very narrow profile, almost a needle-shape, and climbed in. Fixing on the headset, I contacted Kumar on the control deck.
“Test 968 ready to launch.”
“Sir, we haven’t had a chance for the pinnaces to locate and retrieve the previous wreckage yet,” objected Kumar, sounding nervous.
“Don’t worry, I doubt I’ll run into it,” I said soothingly, firing up the maneuvering jets to get out of the hold. “I want you to do something special for me this trip, Kumar. I want you to fly a drone right in front of my nose- cone.”
“Sir, regulations on this mission state that you can’t launch without first allowing us to recover the wreckage.”
“Screw the wreck, Kumar!” I boomed, my breath blowing over the mike and distorting the transmission. I wanted to just do it, to get it over with. I knew inside that I was probably committing flashy suicide and I suddenly had no patience for formalities. I was Earth’s last Kamikaze, and I was going to get after that carrier, right now.
“I’m in command now, and I order you to launch a drone!”
He did so, and I maneuvered directly behind it. Using the computers to synch-up the firing of the reactions, my ship and the drone sped off together, like two bike racers on a sprint, one following in the other’s wind tunnel.
The reaction started and I took off, only feeling a slight pain of acceleration due to the partial stasis field that the ship generated to keep my bones from pressing out of my skin. Even so, I had to be under a good eight gees of force as I watched the drama of a Barrier run play out in front of me. Only this time, I was in the cockpit.
First heartbeat.
A brilliant flash of color that was Saturn swept by the quartz window, beginning to blur.
Second heartbeat.
My eyes blinked away the afterimages, my mouth opened of its own accord due to the acceleration. My eyes crawled up to the gauge: 33.45 already. That was good.
Third heartbeat.
I closed my eyes, then opened them again.
Fourth heartbeat.
The gauge read 67.90 percent and climbing. I tried to lift my hand for the shut off switch, made it half-way there. The fifth and sixth heartbeats went by in a haze, but I managed to wrap my thumb around the kill switch that would shut off the reaction that throbbed behind my crashseat.
Seventh heartbeat. It seemed that I was closing in on the drone. I was less than three hundred kilometers behind it now. I knew its onboard computer systems had failed. Red digits showed: 96.89 percent.
Eighth heartbeat. 98.89 percent. I was less than one hundred kilometers from the drone and about to collide with it, my thumb applied pressure to the kill switch.
