ARC OF THE IMMORTALS: Book 1 — Pursuit
Chapter 4.3 — The Impossible
Jac and some of the cabin’s contents were sucked out into the space of the jump tube.
[one scene of ambiguous violence]
“I’ve got you Jac,” Fish responded.
The force of the breach sucked Jac and his things out into the jump tube behind the ship. A force field air space formed around Jac. The air pocket/force field brought him back close to the ship like the gentle hand of a mother. Breathing labored he climbed through the hole onto the deck.
Nez maintained a force field around Jac’s favorite objects in a trail behind her and sealing the cabin. Jac heard Pursuer laughing at him inside his head.
Nez erected a secondary medical bible around Jac to augment and repair lung function.
“Jac, you’d better get up here, we’re approaching critical speed,” Touzdae raised her voice, alarmed.
“What is that?” she yelled at herself.
That ship. Over there. It’s the Fish. I can see myself on board through the portals. I can almost read her lips. Is she saying that she can do a jump by bending space with Fish’s help? I feel crazy. Maybe I am crazy.
Jac forced himself to his feet, restored as well as could be.
Touzdae lowered her head for a moment. When she looked back expecting to see her double inside the Fish, they were all gone.
The Fish began to quiver as the warp of space became distorted.
Jac transported into the melding chair. He received an image of the disk healing chamber on the ventral side of the ship, from Nez. The equator of the disk slashed by Pursuer’s weapon fire. Much of the interior of the chamber damaged.
‘Repairs in progress,’ Nez send the thought to Jac.
“I’ve set everything as close as I can to the settings we need,” Touzdae reported.
“Everybody strap in, it gets rough from here on out,” Jac commanded.
Jac disappeared inside the chair.
The Fish’s lasers cut holes in the tube.
There was an explosion. The tube collapsed. Fish ejected from the tube.
The ship jettisoned out of the hyperspace jump tube in an explosion of light. She tumbled end over end for thousands of miles. The explosion rendered Jac, Touzdae, and Harry unconscious.
The Fish’s spinning slowed. She entered the ice ring territory, past Pursuer’s Needlecraft. The ice rings formed shards around clumps of asteroids. The Fish craft slowed to a crawl as it crashed through some of the rings.
Jac stirred. The melding chair receded releasing him. As he removed his seat harness he floated upward.
“Fish, restore gravity stasis field.”
Silence.
“Fish. Nez Fish, are you conscious?”
Jac waited for a response.
“I guess not. I’ll have to find manual override.” He grabbed a handhold overead and thrust himself downward toward one of the control consoles. He positioned himself over the instruments and maneuvered a dial and a few switches. Gradually, gravity restored itself.
The turning motion of the ship was still powerful enough to cause unsteadiness inside. Jac swayed from side to side. He awakened Touzdae.
She blinked at him.
“I need your help. Fish is unconscious. We have secondary power. I need you to monitor the panels up here. I’ll go down to Fish’s core to stop the ship from drifting before we destroy ourselves.”
“Where are we?”
“Purgje Ice rings, but in a part of the field that I’ve never seen before.”
“Great. Back where we started. What about Harry? Shouldn’t we attend to him?
“He’ll be fine. Leave him be.”
Jac went down the hatch. Touzdae monitored the screens under the dim light of secondary power.
The Needlecraft was still. Then one maneuvering jet fired followed by a glow of lights from the craft’s interior.
Touzdae stood gazing out through the window at the slow arc of the Fish through the ice field. She saw the Needlecraft begin to move. Unsure, she sat at the monitor screen with a great desire to talk with Fish. But she endeavored to use the thermal sensors to track the Needlecraft.
The monitor displayed the Needlecraft moving infinitesimally . Touzdae slid to the nearest com-link and said:
“Jac, you’d better get up here. Pursuer is on the move.”
“I see him,” Fish said. “Monitoring. No immediate danger. Will inform. Stand by.”
“Thank Spirits, you’re conscious,” Touzdae exclaimed.
Harry groaned.
The Fish stopped rotating. She drifted: main power restored.
The ship began to move, by the hand of Nez. The distance between the two craft widened with Nez in the lead, at a crawl..
Jac emerged from the corridor. He walked through the salon towards the ladder to the bridge. He stepped into a shimmering ring of energy that formed around him without warning.
He was in the La Maz five hundred years past where he walked through the labyrinth helmeted.
“Oh Spirit, no,” Jac heard Bhantu’s voice in his head.
Before Jac responded, he felt the ground shake and heard a loud crack. Jac stumbled falling to one knee. The walls fell as the flick of a switch into dust. Massive stone columns and blocks from the roof crushed him. It was La Maz in the Levelz; again.
Jac stumbled forward breaking through the ring at the base of the ladder.
“Fish — — What’s happening?” He tried to catch his breath
“Caught, you were, in one of Pursuer’s time eddies. I’ve set up a reflective field back to his ship. I’m illuminating all-time distortion fields still within me. Stay out of them until I can shrink them out of existence, please.”
The hull of The Fish glowed reds and greens as the fields for identification. Nez Fish removed them as slices from the ship.
A wide particle beam emanated from the Needle Craft. It refracted off Fish’s shield shattering five ice rings. The rings fell back all over the Needle Craft’s nose and fuselage. The particle beam ceased.
Jac entered the bridge.
“We’re just out of the field.”
“Status of Pursuer?”
“I don’t know what to make of it,” Harry peered at the monitor.
“What the hell?” Jac glances at the monitor’s stats. “ It looks like he’s trying to create a static transdimensional bubble.”
“That’s crazy, he’ll kill us, including himself.” Touzdae.
The Fish shuddered under the first wave of Pursuer’s transdimensional field. The deck liquefied and then reassembled itself. Jac threw himself into the melding chair. The chair wrapped around him so completely that he disappeared.
The space around The Fish began to collapse. The Needle Craft was at the center of the vortex of whirling energy.
The Fish twisted out and into two dimensions of space. The next transdimensional shockwave hit. The molecular structure of the ship to oscillate. All matter liquefied on its way to becoming gases. The process halted. All that liquefied returned to a semi solid state. Some of the so-called matter in gas from reverted to atomic energy waves. Fish buckled in on herself.
Jac remained in the melding chair. His head emerged.
“Crash couches, everyone. We’re going to jump through the Melga Nova. Readying the Neutron Burst Accelerator.”
“That’s crazy, we’ll be killed, no one has ever survived that kind of jump.” Harry.
“Exactly, but he’d be insane to follow us, wouldn’t he?” Jack
“Yeah,” Touzdae beamed, dissociating.
The Needle Craft cleared the fields and fired a plasma burst. It exploded as Jac opened a transdimensional jump tube. When the flash of white light dissipated the Fish was gone, presumably vaporized.
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