Flashmaster (Short Horror and SciFi)

Cube Root

"Lieutenant Garrison, your presence is requested in the electromagnetics bay."

Jake Garrison's eyes shot open. It seemed strange to be sleeping in the middle of an interstellar battle, but, after three days of kilometer long capital ships hurling phased matter at each other, waiting for the other's capacitors to overload, all but the most skittish eventually fell asleep.

The T.N.F.P. Peabody rumbled under Jake as he pulled his boots on. The battle was still going. He'd been so tired when he'd fallen into his bunk under his already sleeping bunkmate that he'd fallen asleep mostly dressed.

The door opened on his command and the lights were still on. That was good. The auxiliary systems would be the first to go if the electromagnetic capacitors started leaking. He looked down through the iron grate under his feet at the dozen ship's levels below him. No one was in sight and the only movement was a caged light several levels below flickering to itself. The battle had gone on so long, the ship had gone quiet.

He grabbed the iron handle of the #3 ladder and started climbing. There was no using the vortex gravity tube during battle. An unexpected surge in power and that thing would send its rider shooting out the top or bottom of the ship.

He arrived at Electromagnetics barely winded. The scene was, like the rest of the ship, eerily quiet. On either side of the V shaped room and over him, were the capacitors, huge dark green tubes with black coils as thick as Jake's arm running in and out of them. In the center was a control panel full of black nobs and radium dials. Ticker tape whirled out of it in three places. In front of that a group of soldiers were gathered, heads together as if in prayer. The whole place smelled like hot plastic.

"What's going on." Jake sauntered into the room. He was a little concerned to see Lieutenant Linney on duty. She was his flame haired sometime sweetheart. They hadn't spoken since he told her he had a girl back on the moon. Linney had cried and said some mean things but he didn't think it was right, leading her on just because they were so far away in space and facing battle. She didn't seem concerned about him at the moment.

Jenkins, the Captain in charge of electromagnetics whirled on him. "Get your ass over here Garrison. We've got trouble. It's these new capacitors."

Battles in space happened just like battles on land. You got the biggest thing you could find and you shot it at your opponent as fast as you could. Only in space a powerful enough electromagnetic field could keep just about anything from rupturing the steel plates of your ship. Even an atomic bomb would blow right over and hardly rock the boat. Only phased matter, fired at high speed, could drain the energy out of an electromagnetic field. That's where the capacitors came in. The bigger the capacitor, the more phased matter it could handle without shorting out. The Peabody happened to have the first ever Mark XX HighVoltage Capacitor set, which was why Ships Commander Anderson had been so willing to get into combat so far from support.

Jake looked at the power levels and thermal dials for the three huge capacitors. "Everything looks all right." He shrugged.

"Just wait." Jenkins said. "Watch the output levels."

Sure enough, a few seconds later all three output levels danced a crazy jig for a half second before rebounding. Jake whistled. "What is that?"

"If we knew that, we wouldn't have had to wake you." Jenkins barked.

"Here Jake." Linney said in her clear but sultry voice. "These are the output tapes for the last hour." She handed him a spool of ticker tape. "It's happening about once a minute."

"And the Kash-hites are on to it." Jenkins added. "They're trying to time their phased matter bursts to hit when the failure does. They haven't done it yet, but Jake," the older man caught Jake's eye, "they've only got to get it right once. We have to stop this now."