Tagrale - Desolate Stars

Chapter 1

1

Jenna stared at the stars, her mind stunned both by how many she was seeing and the implications of the stars she saw. She’d done it! She’d entered the Tagrale… and emerged at another place completely.

She’d known that was likely, that was the whole point of entering the Tagrale after all. But knowing it was possible and experiencing it were turning out to be two totally different things. Especially as the huge number of stars she could see in all directions showed she’d travelled hundreds of light years or more.

Now the ship was drifting away from a new Tagrale in a new system. The Tagrale she had travelled to. The immense structure of the Tagrale still loomed over the Hind despite the increasing distance.

Jenna gave herself a mental shake. There wasn’t time for this! The Trailblazer had gone through the Tagrale ahead of her. Those aboard it had already tried to destroy the Hind with her on board, or those in charge had at least. She had the Professor’s hidden warning to thank for even knowing there was a problem on the Hind which she’d needed to fix.

But the Professor wasn’t in charge of the Trailblazer. Harry Tyler was. Harry Tyler who’d recruited her for a journey of exploration when most people wouldn’t even spit on her. Harry Tyler who’d seemed so friendly. Harry Tyler who’d betrayed her.

Jenna ran through her checks, trying to find out how close the Trailblazer was. She was locked out of most of the Hind’s systems, part of the attempt to strand her aboard and have it blow up, so knowing how long she’d have before being attacked was critical.

There was a good chance there wasn’t anything she could do in time. Her decision to follow the Trailblazer through the Tagrale had been made on gut instinct and out of fear that she might never be able to activate the gateway again. Now she was starting to think she’d made a massive mistake.

She checked the sensors… then checked them again. Both times they showed the same thing. No sign of the Trailblazer at all. How could that be? There hadn’t been enough time for it to get out of sensor range!

Were the sensors being blocked in some way? It was possible, but it didn’t seem likely. The new Tagrale was shown, slowly falling behind, and the sensors had shown the Trailblazer well enough before entering the Tagrale. It seemed unlikely the sensors would suddenly start ignoring the other ship now.

So what did that leave? Had the Trailblazer been destroyed somehow during the transition? Or had they arrived somewhere else? No. Most likely she was the one who’d arrived somewhere unexpected. The Hind had barely been under control at all when it entered the Tagrale. She’d managed to give it a shove toward the curtain of energies the Tagrale had created, but where the Trailblazer had gone for the centre, she’d been much closer to one edge. And the Trailblazer had gone through not long after the portal opened. Her gut told her the Hind had made it through just seconds before the gateway shut down again.

If she had ended up somewhere different to the main destination did that mean she couldn’t get back to Sironus? Did it mean she was in a system the Tagrale in Sironus wasn’t designed to ever connect to? Or would there be a way to return?

She didn’t know. Despite all the problems she’d had in her life, she couldn’t help feeling a pang at the thought of never returning to Sironus.

The Tagrale she’d arrived through looked dead now, with no signs of it having been active, but for all she knew that might be normal after it had been used. It was thousands of years since anyone had travelled through a Tagrale in the Sironus system, either to arrive or leave. Detailed records of that time were long gone.

She pulled up the sensor logs and ran back through them to the point the Hind had arrived. The Tagrale had been active, or at least the space it enclosed had been, but the effect faded away almost immediately. Did that mean the Hind created the disturbance as it came through? Or had it only just made it through before the gateway shut.

What would have happened if the gateway had closed while the Hind was coming through? She quickly clamped down on that thought. She had no way of knowing, and worrying about it certainly wasn’t helping her to get the Hind in any sort of shape. She started working through the rest of the systems, testing them to find what she had control over.

Not very much, it turned out. The engines had gone into emergency shutdown as a result of her efforts to save the ship from a plasma overload. She had access to use the engines, but apparently not to recover them from the shutdown. That required a higher level of authority.

In terms of being able to move the ship that left her with just the manoeuvring thrusters. She used them to keep moving slowly away from the Tagrale, not wanting to drift into any of the gnarly areas of gravity she assumed would be surrounding it based on her previous experience with the two Tagrales in Sironus.

The sensors were working at least, which let her know where the Hind was and that nothing was around it. Other than the sensors and the thrusters… well, she could probably get a hot cup of coffee if she wanted, but really not much more than that.

The lockdown which had been triggered when she entered the code Harry had given her, supposedly to access his cabin, was close to being total. She thought she could work around a few of the restrictions, but it would be time consuming and she’d never be certain her workarounds wouldn’t fail at just the wrong time.

Which left her with one option… a full system reset. That was a terrifying option. It was only designed to be implemented when a ship was safely docked. It would turn off everything aboard the ship… and if for some reason the system didn’t come back up then the ship would die. And, soon after, so would she.

Thirty minutes later and Jenna was still arguing with herself, trying to think of alternatives to a total shutdown. Deep down she knew there was no choice, but she’d only just saved the ship and herself from destruction. She was finding it difficult to throw herself into yet another dangerous situation.

She’d even spent ten minutes just studying the amazing view through the bridge window, but the risk of another ship finding her when she was so vulnerable had soon intruded and set her back to the issue at hand.

“All right,” she said to herself. “Think it through. I need control of the main systems. I might be able to achieve that without the full shutdown, but it’ll take time. Much too long to do it for every system, so that leaves the ship working in some ways and not in others. It would let me move somewhere else and spend some time thinking things through, though. So no need to go for the full reset yet if that’s all I’m worried about.”

She sighed and shook her head.

“But it’s not,” she muttered. “I’ve got no idea what other surprises that arsehole Harry left behind. I might gain control of a system and find that triggers another injection of malicious instructions, perhaps one which I wouldn’t spot before it killed me or destroyed the ship. And even if that doesn’t happen straight away I’ll have no way of knowing if there’s something lying dormant.

“Hell, it might even be something that won’t activate unless I catch up with the Trailblazer. When that happens the last thing I want to be worrying about is essential systems suddenly dropping offline. If it’s lying dormant then I could delay the full reset… but if it’s waiting to activate as soon as I gain control of key systems then I can’t.

“Which means I can sit here achieving nothing while I argue with myself, or I can damn well get on with the reset.”

She forced herself to her feet, her decision made. She was going for the hard reset. Either she was going to gain full control of the ship or… well, she would lose control completely. That really wasn’t an option she wanted to think about.

Still, she wasn’t going to be stupid about this. She’d been forming a shopping list of what she’d need in her mind. Her spacesuit. Food. Spare oxygen cylinders. Warm clothes. A torch. Her datapad. She’d take the large toolbox too. She shouldn’t need it, but she was determined to be as prepared as she possibly could be. She’d only get one shot at this.