Mote 3: Expiry Date

I was doing a tour of duty at the Peace Corps enclave on Irini. The war didn't seem to be going well for any of the four sides and the whole death thing was beginning to depress me. It's quite common, when you spend all your time in a war zone for it to begin to get to you, and I'd just been transferred from the Tendan system where a particularly vicious drugs war was being waged. The only thing so far to improve my week had been helping a private detective to find someone's lost family member. I was meant to be on ambulance duty but the war was raging so heavily at the moment that even the ambulances were finding it hard to get through. If we couldn't help people then there was no point being here. In fact the whole camp had taken on the air of a spare wheel on a hover craft.

In war nothing stays in one state for long. The camp got woken from its reverie rather suddenly by an aircraft which was obviously in trouble and heading straight for us. The Peace Corps are used to this kind of thing, people often head towards the Peace Corps camp if they think they're going to crash, because they know they'll be looked after there. This one had cut it a bit too fine though and was about to come down right on top of us. Unfortunately he crashed into the one building (or rather tent) that we needed to save his life; the operating theatre. Which left us with only one option for the badly burned and scarred body we pulled out of the wreck. So, seeing an opportunity to be useful, I volunteered for the Medical Evacuation mission to the orbital hospital at Fornash. At the back of my mind was the thought that I would get a bonus for the mission, but you don't really join the Peace Corps for the money.

I have great respect for the career Peace Corps officers, they have devoted their lives to helping in humanitarian crises. But I didn't expect to stay with the Peace Corps forever, I wanted to get enough credits together to start my pension fund before I retired. But I kept saying that this would be my last tour, then I would find another worthy cause, and follow the Peace Corps there. I guess you could say my real problem was my overactive conscience. Welcome to the dilemma of Fenris Gunn, lieutenant, 1st class, Peace Corps.

My ship for this run would be Nightingale. She wasn't fast but she made the grade when it came to space and facilities. Flemming, Lister, Pasteur and Jenner, her sister ships, all sat on the launch pad beside her and made up the Peace Corps fleet on Irini. They were all medical vehicles, the really big Peace Corps vessels were all away at more important wars. Any way, we loaded Private No-name onto the ship, with some other less critical casualties who needed to go to the hospital, plus Inda Jaira the accompanying medic and we were ready to leave. I made all the pre-flight checks and activated the take-off thrusters. As we lifted off I broadcast on the general wave-length that a Peace Corps ship was coming through, and if people could just hold off shooting each other for a little, while we got out of the area, it would be most appreciated.

"Fenris?" said Inda. "How long will it take for us to get to the hospital at Fornash?"

"About as long as it takes to get to and from the jump gates at each end. The jump itself will only take a few minutes. Is anything wrong?" I replied.

"Private No-name is in very bad shape, I'm doing everything I can but the sooner we get there the better."

"Understood," I said and clocked up the acceleration.

We hadn't been fired upon and we made the jump gate in good time. Everything seemed to be going well, as I programmed in the co-ordinates for the jump to Fornash. We entered the jump gate and it all seemed to be normal, but suddenly it was as if the whole of hyper-space hiccuped and spat us out. I checked our co-ordinates, we were not at Fornash. We had miss jumped, a one in a million chance, we had been thrown out of the wrong jump gate. It was a delay, and one we could well do with out, but Peace Corps ships always carried extra fuel and we had enough for a second jump to Fornash. It should have all been fine, except when I turned the ship round to face the jump gate we had just come through, I got a nasty shock.

There was no shimmering jump gate hanging in space, waiting to whisk us off to Fornash. No, instead was a burnt out husk of a jump gate. Its spurs had been mangled, so that they were no longer perfectly parallel, and the fluorescence that jump gates usually possessed had turned into an ominous absence of light. Every so often it would pulse with a dark red light but would then crackle with sparks and lie still. I had heard stories of broken jump gates, but I had never expected to encounter one, the gates were normally checked so thoroughly that they couldn't possibly malfunction. Something violent had happened to this gate and that worried me. If someone was willing to damage a jump gate, an object sacrosanct to the space-faring community, then they wouldn't be too worried about attacking a small Peace Corps ambulance ship like Nightingale.

Getting out of the system was obviously a top priority, but how do you get out of a system without a jump gate. I certainly was not going to chance using a broken jump gate, and I said as much to Inda when she suggested we just try it. Hyper-space is strange at the best of times and who knows where a broken gate could lead. I had heard about pilots that had entered hyper-space and were never seen again. So much could go wrong when you jumped through hyper-space, if your drive failed who knows what might happen, no one had yet lived to tell the tale. A broken jump gate was ten times worse then a broken drive, I was guessing that we were lucky to have made it here alive.

My sensors began picking up other ships. We weren't the only ones who had been pulled in by the gate as it turned out. I got hold of a few of them on the radio, they told much the same story as we did. Out in hyper-space, quietly minding their own business, when shudder, shudder, hiccup, and they were here. This was the Salaan system, there were no habitable worlds but extensive mining operations were being carried out. Not very hospitable and certainly no where for us to land or, more importantly, refuel. Not all of the ships had brought extra fuel, miss jumps were so rare that most ships didn't bother. I thank the Peace Corps regulations for being thorough enough to stipulate extra fuel be carried on every mission.

None of the ships had their own jump gate generator, that was the first thing that we thought of. We considered a distress call but each one of us knew that would bring every pirate in the system to our position. And it would be no comfort to us when we were dead to know that the pirates would be as stuck as we had been. My casualty patients weren't getting any better, Inda was tearing her hair out and the rest of the ships, who had been here longer then us, were getting angry. There weren't any derelicts though, which meant that it hadn't been broken for that long. Some checking revealed that most of the ships had arrived over the past few days.

Jump gates are pretty sophisticated, so repair was out of the question. Besides I was no engineer and the rest of the pilots weren't owning up to any hidden skills. We couldn't just sit here though, either our food, our fuel or our air would run out. I didn't want to wait to find out which one would go first. I brought up the navigation information, the nearest star system with a jump gate was several weeks journey away at full speed. None of us had enough fuel or food to get there and summon help, let alone find any of us alive once they found help. My conscience was pricking me because I knew I should contact the Peace Corps so that they could get a ship here and prevent this from happening to more ships. But there didn't seem to be any way I could do that either.

The only consolation I had was knowing that we were now over due at Fornash and they would have to send someone out to look for us. They would not necessarily go very far though, it depended on who had sent them. The police at Fornash were good at their job but their jurisdiction ended at the jump gate and they wouldn't go through it. If another Peace Corps ship was sent out, they would do their best to find us no matter what. The Peace Corps have a different attitude to other people, they exist to help people and boarders don't matter to them. I only hoped that if they did send a Peace Corps ship it was one equipped with a jump gate generator. It was standard procedure for a Peace Corps rescue ship to be carrying a jump gate generator, but recently the Peace Corps had had to send a lot of its resources to the Algon/Hegemony war zone. The war went hot and cold but was always there, recently it was definitely hot. Each faction had asked other powers for help but the Confederacy always remained strictly neutral and the Spiral Arm Empire had its own problems to deal with. Other Peace Corps units were in the Empire trying to prevent a humanitarian crisis on Giwen in the Triserene system. The conclusion to this discussion on the politics of the galaxy was that we would probably not get rescued any time soon.

At least our companions seemed friendly. To be on the safe side, I broadcast a general message to inform them of the fact that we were carrying wounded and a Peace Corps ship would be out looking for us. I knew that if any of the ships attacked us at least half of the ships would probably leap to our defence, but you could never be sure. One of the marooned ships was a , it was absolutely bristling with guns and a lot bigger then we were. My scanners were showing its mass to be huge. Then I realised that it wasn't the that was causing the large mass reading on my scanners. There was something else big out there and it wasn't visible through the view port. May be that was because it was too far away. If it was too far away and it was visible on my scanner now, at such a huge mass reading, then once it got closer it would be off the scale. I couldn't think of a single ship which would be able to produce such readings. I went back to check on Inda and her patients.

"How are they?" I asked.

"The non-criticals are still fine, but Private No-name is fading fast and unless we get to a hospital soon he isn't going to last much longer," replied Inda.

"There may be trouble coming, there's something big on the scanner and its heading our way. You'd better get every one strapped down and then strap yourself in."

"Fenris," said Inda, "is there anything we haven't tried?"

"Going back into the jump gate, but you can't go into a broken jump gate, its suicide."

"How do you know, has anyone ever tried it?" asked Inda.

"Certainly, if they did, no one lived to tell the tale. We don't know enough about hyper-space to know what would happen." I certainly wasn't going into a broken jump gate just to satisfy Inda's curiosity. I had never seen anything look so malevolent as that jump gate did now.

I went back to the controls and strapped myself in. The plot on the scanner was getting bigger by the minute and the small fleet of ships around the broken jump gate were getting nervous, most of them had only just realised what was going on. By now they could see a blob in the distance, it was most definitely coming towards us. It was large by anyone's standards, about the size of several space stations strapped together, maybe even as big as a small moon. It was coming towards us and it was firing. The weapons it had were not good, very old models, but it had lots of them and it was taking all my concentration to stay out of their line of fire. Nightingale only had a small defence capability and certainly nothing which could even make a dent on a ship that size. On all sides ships burst into flames or exploded, shedding their cargoes, the large was the first to go. It was far less manoeuvrable than the rest of us.

I just kept on thinking, where did pirates get a ship like that? I had to admire their scam, breaking a jump gate to pull us in to an uninhabited system, then attacking us like we were fish in a barrel. Pretty soon I began to realise that these were not pirates though. They were using all the wrong tactics, pirates wanted cargo and this lot were destroying cargo with everything else. Pirates would not have been so clever. And been more careful of their prospective salvage. I set the automatic beacon to broadcast our Peace Corps identity hoping that they knew what it meant. Obviously they didn't though, because they were shooting at us just as much as at the rest of the ships.

The radio was receiving tens of distress calls at once but these were overridden by the attacking ship which began to broadcast a message of its own. "This is the GenShip Cordavius, leave this system immediately. You have no rights here. Your circular gate weapon has been disabled and any attempts to resist will be met with retribution."

It was them that had attacked the jump gate. Only a Generation Ship would do such a thing. They hated the idea of interstellar travel, they had spent years traversing space and certainly didn't want anyone else doing it the easy way. Another incident like this had happened a few years ago when a generation ship had reached its target system and discovered it was already occupied, in fact had been occupied for some time. The generation ship had destroyed the settlement and the jump gate, that system was now off limits to general traffic. When a whole civilisation turns up on your door step it is hard to argue with them, and several galaxy wide statutes said that interfering with generation ships was forbidden. Generation ships had been turning up recently, they had been travelling for thousands of years to reach their destinations and it was about that long since they had been sent out in the first place. They often had a very peculiar outlook on existence, being in space for that length of time would be enough to make anyone eccentric. A few of their populations had definitely gone mad, en masse, and the discovery of jump gate technology was one of the things that usually instigated their madness. I was guessing that this was what had happened here. Rather than accepting it, they were going to destroy it and any ships which had used it to get here.

We probably would have been killed if the Confederacy carrier Scorpio hadn't entered the scene through the jump gate. It was confused by what it found when it emerged from hyper-space and certainly didn't expect to see a generation ship bearing down upon it. Rather than fighting back it began evasive manoeuvres and moved to one side of the jump gate, until it could work out what was going on. Typical tactics for the Confederacy navy, which had never been known to start a war of its own, but had certainly put a lot of thought into destroying its attackers. This had made the Confederacy one of the most stable parts of the cosmos.

The generation ship Cordavius was flying straight towards the Scorpio, but was unable to correct its course and speed for the evasive manoeuvres which the Scorpio made. Generation ships were built for endurance and not speed or manoeuvrability. The assembled ships watched in disbelief as the Cordavius attempted to change course but ultimately began to enter the broken jump gate. The jump gate sucked the ship in greedily, looking far too much like a live animal for my tastes, and the Cordavius disappeared into the gloom.

None of us liked to think what had happened to it. Perhaps it had made it into hyper-space, but with no hyper-drive it would have no way to move and would drift endlessly. Maybe one day it would reach a jump gate and exit, but when that would be, I wouldn't like to guess. Or it could have entered some sort of nether-space, neither here not there, and it was impossible even to conjecture what that place would be like. Pilots often told ghost stories about derelict hulks found drifting in hyper-space and this was another they could add to their tales.

The Scorpio was a large ship and had its own jump gate generator. We all made the trek out to the edge of the system, away from the mass of the broken jump gate, to where Scorpio could open a jump gate. We were the first to leave the system and we made good time to Fornash. Our patients were still alive when we got them there, I didn't have the courage to enquire about our critical case's health before we left. Inda asked but she never told me what she found out, she knew I didn't want to know. You can't ferry injured people to hospital and not wonder whether they make it, but early on in my career with the Peace Corps I decided that it was better to wonder than know. I had never been able to develop the clinical detachment which people like Inda did.

I passed through the Salaan system a few months later, when I was ferrying supplies to the Peace Corps detail there. I had meant to leave the Peace Corps after my tour of duty on Irini finished but I couldn't bring myself to do it. My main impulse was still to help people and in a universe like this one, there was only one way you could do that. The evidence of that statement was right in front of me in the Salaan system. The gate was still broken, but being fixed slowly, so the Peace Corps were using one of their larger flag ships to open jump points for the unwary who were pulled in by the malfunctioning gate. There had also set up a supply depot to refuel those who had not been cautious enough to bring extra fuel with them into the depths of space.

I dreamed while I was being unloaded and these days I dreamed of being Fenris Gunn, Admiral, Peace Corps.

© Thalia Drogna, September 2000

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