The Hades Connection by Gabriel S. Timar

Table of Contents Chapter 1, part 1 Chapter 1, part 2 Chapter 2 Chapter 3, part 1 Chapter 3, part 2 Chapter 4 Chapter 5, part 1 Chapter 5, part 2 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8, part 1 Chapter 8, part 2 Chapter 9 Chapter 10, part 1 Chapter 10, part 2 Chapter 11 Chapter 12, part 1 Chapter 12, part 2 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15, part 1 Chapter 15, part 2 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18, part 1 Chapter 18, part 2 Chapter 19, part 1 Chapter 19, part 2 Chapter 20 Chapter 21, part 1 Chapter 21, part 2 Chapter 22, part 1 Chapter 22, part 2 Chapter 23, part 1 Chapter 23, part 2 Chapter 24, part 1 Chapter 24, part 2 Chapter 25, part 1 Chapter 25, part 2 Chapter 26, part 1 Chapter 26, part 2 Chapter 26, part 3

Chapter 10 part 1 of 2

The Nimrod was an old, war-weary vessel, but as far as the spaceships of Khomu were concerned, she was state of the art. The Americans had manufactured her components a long time ago in Seattle, and a Russian team blasted them into orbit, one by one, from the shores of Lake Ladoga during the darkest days of the Great War. She distinguished herself during the war as the most powerful battleship of the Northern League. In fact, she became a symbol of courage and perseverance.

Had it not been for the postwar epidemic depopulating Khomu, the grateful governments would have cut the Nimrod up in orbit, reentered it piece by piece and set her up in one of the major war museums to keep company the last Sopwith Camel, Spitfire, Stormovik, and B-17. As she was huge, any national park may have set the Nimrod up as a shrine or a memorial like the battleship Missouri.

Initially the Nimrod was an orbiting gun platform capable of limited movement only. During the war, she was equipped with heavy laser cannons and self-propelled, solid-fuel torpedoes carrying nuclear warheads.

After the war, when the demand for spaceships grew, the Khomus salvaged all the old orbiting battle stations and turned them into efficient interstellar transport vessels. There were quite a few of those gun platforms, and their conversion was not very difficult. The crew quarters and the protective impact shields were already in place, as were the steering jets to control the ship’s attitude or change its orbit. The main power plants had to be replaced with far more powerful nuclear- or hydrogen-powered gravac rams. The huge ammunition storage vaults were adequate to hold the fuel reserves and supplies.

To operate properly in conjunction with the gravac drive, the hull had to undergo major modifications. The now outdated gravac (gravity-accumulation) principle was very simple: the spaceship was in a constant state of acceleration or deceleration. From the time the ship and her rams pointed in the right direction and applied steady acceleration, the ship reached efficient traveling speed — many times the speed of light — in about ten to fifty hours. From there on, the ship accelerated at roughly 0.5 gravities for another twelve hours, then decelerated at the same rate for the last twelve hours of the travel phase. This way, the ship could achieve good average speed and maintain constant gravity on board to assure the comfort of the crew.

When the gravac principle was developed, conservative scientists felt that a ship could not exceed the speed of light. However, the first test ship proved them wrong. It was doing twice the speed of light when it collided with something solid and disintegrated.

At that point, the engineers realized that the maximum velocity of a spaceship was limited only by its structural strength and shielding. The shield had to protect the ship against damage by collision with space debris, because at speeds faster than light a collision with a speck of dust may represent a force equivalent to a direct hit by the largest laser cannon. The shielding of the first gravac ship was not good enough. And it fell apart.

When acceleration changed to deceleration on any gravac ship, the directions up and down also shifted. Therefore, everything had to rotate 180 degrees to maintain order. With a single-hull vessel, the maneuver was very complicated. Therefore, the designers suspended the old globular hull of the Nimrod on two mighty pins and installed the old ship in the center of gravity of a new spherical exterior shell.

At the transition from acceleration to deceleration, the inner shell rotated on a signal from the attitude control computer. Thus, the crew hardly noticed the change.

After the modifications, the old gun platform had become an efficient spaceship. The Nimrod’s hefty force field generator was good enough to withstand hits by modern weapons but not strong enough for high-speed space travel. The engineers redesigned the shield generators; eventually a mighty shield surrounded the spaceship.

Some scientists felt that the Nimrod’s grossly overdesigned shield was strong enough to withstand even the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere. They were convinced that the Nimrod could land on Earth or on Khomu. However, the scientists did not put the shield through this test and had never attempted a planetary descent.

When the Artemis, the sister ship of the Nimrod, discovered Earth Two, the Captain put out spy satellites and dispatched a robot ship to Khomu to carry the news of his discovery. Trusting the strength of the shield, he attempted a landing. Allegedly he had already made radio contact with the terrestrials and assured their friendly reception.

The retro-rockets kicked in, and the Artemis sank into the Earth’s atmosphere with the shield generator set to maximum. At 75,000 feet, when the entry was actually completed, the fissionable fuel storage exploded. The terrestrials publicly recorded the nuclear explosion over Siberia as the “Cossack Comet.”

While parts of the Artemis’ story came from von Vardy’s memory, the Cossack Comet’s story was from my own, since I had studied UFO’s and visitors from outer space. Now, as I became an extraterrestrial, many pieces of the immense puzzle started to fall into place, and the first one was the Cossack Comet.

As always, the establishment ridiculed the scientific conclusions, insisting that there had been no explosion; the big bang was a meteorite. Although the Americans had satellites in the vicinity observing the explosion, they agreed with the Russians to call it a meteorite even though they knew it was an extraterrestrial spaceship. They had to cover up the incident.

A few honest scientists maintained that the blast was an air burst of a nuclear device, not a meteorite. The few supporting this theory had their research funds cut or were sent to a gulag. The honest researchers sank into scientific obscurity.

The automatic data transmission from the Artemis suggested trouble in the storage of fissionable fuel. It was important to find out what had gone wrong; the captain of the Nimrod wanted to recover the Artemis’ automatic flight recorder if possible.

* * *

I was slowly accessing the retentive memory of Captain von Vardy. At first, it was difficult, but I quickly learned how to deal with my new dual identity. Actually, the Captain’s identity disappeared, surfacing only when it came to specifics of the Nimrod. The other command responsibilities, the controls of the ship and the related technology were slowly clearing; I was beginning to feel the confidence of a professional.

On the instrument panel in front of the captain’s chair I checked the power settings. We were driving our rams at twenty-eight percent capacity and accelerating at the rate of 0.577 G’s. That was well within the prescribed range. Checking the force field generators, I found the shielding was slightly more than required for our current speed. I left the shield settings where they were. I felt safer that way.

The force field generators drew their energy from the rams. The navigational program of the master computer carefully controlled the dispersal of the power. The Nimrod’s rams, running at five to ten percent capacity, could supply enough energy to maintain normal acceleration and deceleration. The shield needed another ten percent of the output of the rams.

My next check was the status of the weapons. Apparently, the Khomus did not want the Nimrod to travel to unknown places as a toothless lion and had moved the ports of the powerful laser cannons to the exterior shell, next to the launching ports of the solid-fuel torpedoes carrying fearsome neutron and biocon warheads. At these stations, the gravity was the same as everywhere else on the ship; but at the time of changing from acceleration to deceleration and vice versa, temporary weightlessness prevailed.

The Nimrod’s rams could generate enough thrust for fourteen G’s positive or negative acceleration while supplying sufficient energy to maintain the proper strength of the shield. Even if we applied maximum deceleration, it would take a long time to slow from top speed to a halt; therefore, careful route planning and navigation were essential.

As the captain of a ship has certain privileges, I decided to exercise them in the interest of my main mission.

“Mr. Fedorov,” I intoned, “take the conn. I’m going to my cabin for a moment.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” came the prompt reply.

I undid the safety harness, got out of my chair, and left the bridge. I saw young Fedorov taking the captain’s place with a big smile on his face. A petty officer appeared from nowhere and took the pilot’s seat.

The captain’s quarters were practically next to the bridge. I was not only curious about the place, my home for the next few months; I also wanted to know what I looked like. I also wanted to visit Ann Forrest to make sure the transfer had been successful.

My cabin was strange yet familiar. I looked around and my eyes stopped on the framed picture of a spaceship, the Saturn. Before the question posed in my mind, the retentive memory of Rudolf von Vardy hurled me back in time.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...

Copyright © 2004 by Gabriel S. Timar