The Alpha Protocol: Alpha Protocol Book 1 by Duncan Hamilton (free ebook reader for iphone .TXT) 📗

Bounty’s superstructure was nothing to boast about, so they’d be relying on whatever shielding the agitator could provide. That meant topping it up with power as high as they dared, rather than the minimum amount needed to open a portal, increasing the risk of catastrophic failure along with every extra joule.

Risk explosion from overpowering the agitator, or disintegration in the Current. Why couldn’t the decisions ever be easy? He supposed if he had been looking for easy, he should have chosen another career.

It was a common problem, and one he’d had to consider theoretically a number of times before. It was curious how being in the situation for real focused the mind. Ships had to leapfrog through systems for longer trips, their time in the Current dictated by their Nexus Integrity. The overall journey was prolonged by the amount of time the ship needed to recharge the agitator and travel through the system to the next Nexus portal—the only places where the Current could be entered. The strategy of Current navigation was a major component of the curriculum at the Academy, even for those who weren’t on the astronavigation track. Each ship had to compute its own course, charge its own agitator, and consider its time in the Current according to its own capabilities.

All of this made moving a fleet of ships complicated, all the more so when each vessel could spend a different amount of time in the Current. Deploying a fleet directly into combat was one of the most high-stress jobs in the Navy, although Samson felt his predicament was inching close. He had no idea what the Bounty’s Nexus Integrity Rating was, so assuming even a five-minute transit in the Nexus was safe would be an act of guesswork based on virtually nothing. Of course, five minutes would get them nowhere. The time he had in mind was more like five hours. The Sidewinder had been capable of ten. A large capital ship might manage as much as thirty-six before starting to take damage. Could he take the chance that the Bounty might be safe for a measly five hours?

If Arlen had been involved in inter-system smuggling within that sector, it made sense that his ship would be capable of making the shortest of transits between systems. Samson tried to be content with that, but it was easier said than done.

The agitator, into which every joule of their spare power was being poured, could fail in any number of ways, both spectacular and unremarkable. It might fail to hold the charge past a certain point, releasing all that it had in an explosion that would destroy the Bounty. It might not be able to direct enough energy into the Nexus portal to open it, meaning they were stranded. It might fail at a critical point and flood the ship with all the excess energy, frying every system, likely killing everyone on board and leaving the Bounty a hulk drifting through Frontier space until it eventually got pulled into a gravity well. He was sure he could come up with more scenarios, but forced himself to stop.

The simple fact was, the ship wasn’t fit to sustain seven people for very long, and in that part of space, rescue would come too late, if at all. Waiting for help was a death sentence. The agitator and Holmwood were their best options. Trying to make it back to Dobson, the system’s only inhabited planet, in the hope of waiting there until a supply ship stopped by or the Navy came looking for them would have been possible with a smaller crew. He’d run the numbers, and they had no chance of making it as they were—the atmospheric control wouldn’t be able to keep up, there wasn’t enough food or water, and the longer they ran the ship, the more chance there was of her failing completely. That was assuming whoever had destroyed Sidewinder didn’t get to them first. Then there was his duty to get word back to the Admiralty of what had happened, and he could only do that from the depot. In his mind, there was only one choice.

With the Bounty being their home until a naval relief force arrived in the sector, Samson reckoned it was time to apply naval principles and set the crew to work. There was plenty of cleaning and maintenance to be done, and after so terrible an event he didn’t want to give them too much time to mull over the loss of crewmates and friends. He certainly knew he could do with some activity to take his mind off everything. There would be time for grieving later. They had a duty to report what had happened to the Admiralty, and he had a duty to keep them all alive while they worked toward that objective.

The first leg of their journey was the day it would take them to get to where the navigational scanner indicated the nearest Nexus portal was. In a well-maintained naval vessel, they would accelerate hard for as long as they could, before putting the engines on full reverse to decelerate as aggressively as they could get away with. Samson reckoned that type of treatment would snap the Bounty in two. He needed to be careful with her until he had a better idea of what she could handle. But that had to be balanced against the threat posed by the unidentified vessel. If they were caught and destroyed, the Navy might never discover what had happened to them, the Sidewinder, and her crew. Whatever threat lay out there would go unchallenged, until it was too late.

Once again, the balance between being killed by the unknown or his own decisions raised its ugly head. Command really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. The uniforms were a bit nicer, but was it really worth it?

He programmed the Nexus portal as the navigation waypoint in the computer, set a conservative thrust level, and felt the gentle pressure from