Running-Deer, his executive officer, should be pulling them together but she wasn’t, either due to lack of inclination or not quite knowing how to go about it. She struck Sam as a solid officer but cold and standoffish. Maybe she resented him for taking over, since the ship would have been hers if he’d never shown up. Maybe she was just aloof by nature, he didn’t know. The truth was he didn’t have a lot of experience with executive officers and up until now most of it was bad. Just about anyone would look good compared to Larry Goldjune. Running-Deer seemed to have the respect of the department heads so maybe she was just wrangling them the way Captain O’Malley had wanted her to. Probably all she needed was for Sam to tell her what he wanted. It wasn’t a good idea to make any big changes until he had a handle on the situation, but he’d been in command for almost a week. It was time.
They were coming up on their jump point in a couple hours. They would make the jump to Eeee’ktaa and then he’d see what Running-Deer’s ideas were about getting the department heads on the same page, get them thinking and working as a team.
He waved the bridge hatch open and pushed himself through.
“Captain’s on the bridge!” one of the duty mariners called out.
“As you were,” he said and he coasted over to the command station where Lieutenant Alexander, the TAC boss, held the conn as OOD—Officer Of the Deck. The bridge, more spacious than on Puebla but still the same basic configuration, was only partially crewed, just the maneuvering watch personnel. He recognized and nodded to Signaler Second Weaver—who had shown him the way to the bridge that first day—in the COMM station.
“Sir, the ship is at Readiness Condition Two,” Alexander said as he unbuckled from the command chair, his round pudgy face temporarily frozen into a look of martial seriousness. “Material Condition Bravo, on course for the jump point. Power ring is partially charged but down for maintenance, reactor hot, shroud secured, sensors active.”
“Very well, Mister Alexander, I relieve you.”
“Sir, I stand relieved. Captain has the ship,” Alexander called out as he pushed off from the command station. Sam took his place and strapped himself in. Alexander quickly gestured for the petty officer in the TAC One chair to the right of the command chair to move to another station and then took his place.
“I passed the A Gang working on the power ring on my way here,” Sam said. “Ship Systems, what’s the problem?”
“Numbers one, two, and three cells are seventy-two per cent charged,” the engineering petty officer at the systems workstation answered, “but the tertiary router and backup are both down, so the three forward cells are off grid and can’t discharge into the jump drive.”
“How about the fourth cell?” Sam asked.
“Online, on grid, and fully charged, sir, but that’s only about twenty-five per cent of our total standard charge.”
“Let me guess: not enough for the jump to Eeee’ktaa, right?”
“No, sir, not near enough.”
“COMM, has Traffic been notified there might be a problem?” Sam asked Signaler Weaver.
“Um—we’ve got two hours to the jump point, sir,” Lieutenant Alexander broke in. “I figured the A gang should have it up and running by then.”
“I agree, TAC, they should indeed. We’ll see if they can manage. In the meantime, let’s let Traffic know what’s going on. Weaver, make text signal, USS Cam Ranh Bay to K’tok Traffic Control: Mechanical difficulties may require delay in jump and recalculation of jump entrance point. Will advise further. Signed, Bitka, Captain.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Sam squinted, the commlink directory for the ship’s senior officers appeared inside his eyes, and he brought up the connection for Lieutenant Ka’Deem Brook.
The Operations chief answered almost immediately, his voice inside Sam’s head.
Yes, sir.
“Mister Brook, would you join me on the bridge at your earliest convenience? We have a mechanical problem which may delay the jump. If so, we’ll have to recalculate our jump point and jump emergence at Eeee’ktaa.”
I’ll be right there, sir.
Sam next squinted up Lieutenant Koichi Ma, the head of engineering. Ma took longer to answer than Brook had.
Yes, Captain?
“Mister Ma, are you busy?”
A bit, sir.
Sam blinked in surprise and took a moment to formulate a reply.
“Well, I hope you are busy getting our power ring back online. Is that the case, Mister Ma?”
Chief Forsythe has a repair party handling that, sir.
Sam shifted in his acceleration rig and felt himself frown.
“How long before the power ring is online?”
I’d have to check with Chief Forsythe, sir. Do you want me to do that?
“Here’s what I want you to do instead, Mister Ma. Get yourself to the narrows and supervise the repairs yourself. If we miss our jump point, I’m going to be hard to live with for a while. So let me hear an ‘aye aye, sir.’”
Aye aye, sir.
Sam cut the connection and rotated his head to loosen the neck muscles. What kind of senior engineer let a chief petty officer handle the repairs on an outage that could make them miss a scheduled interstellar jump? Well, Ma wouldn’t have to take the flak from First Fleet for screwing up the schedule, or deal with all the paperwork. There was too damned much of that ‘not my department’ attitude on the Bay. Maybe now was the time to have that talk with Running-Deer after all. Sam squinted up her comm code.
“New contact!” the petty officer in the TAC Two chair called out. “One-twenty-six degrees relative, angle on the bow thirty-eight, range twelve thousand and closing at thirty-one kilometers a second. Jump emergence signature.”
Without even a conscious decision Sam hit the general quarters alarm on his command console and the repetitive battle stations gong sounded throughout the ship.
“Thirty-one klicks a second is close to our current velocity, sir,” the ensign in the Maneuvering One chair said.
What was her name? Barr-Sanchez? Yeah.
“That closing rate may mostly be our own vector,” she added.
“What’s his profile?” Sam asked.
“He’s not squawking, sir,” the sensor tech answered. “No transponder. He’s hot but he’s not accelerating.”
“Recharging his power ring,” Lieutenant Alexander said from the TAC One chair.
“Size?” Sam asked.
“Small, sir,” the tech answered. “No bigger than an orbital shuttle.”
Lieutenant Alexander looked at him, his face creased in a puzzled frown. “A starship the size of a shuttle?”
“It must be a jump courier drone,” Sam said. With interstellar communication limited to the speed of travel, it was cheaper to send a small courier craft from star to star packed with data than send a whole ship just to deliver the mail. “A hull that small, you put a jump drive, reactor, and power ring in it and there’s no room for crew and life support. I just can’t figure out why it’s not squawking.”
“Maybe its transponder is just broke-dick-no-workee,” Lieutenant Alexander said. “Like our power ring. The thing is, I’ve never heard of a jump courier drone with its own reactor. Don’t they usually just charge the ring and shoot it off, and the people at the other end recover and recharge it?”
He was right. This wasn’t adding up.
“He’s scanning us, sir!” the sensor tech interrupted, her voice rising in excitement.
Sam felt adrenaline course through him. Drone couriers didn’t have sensor suites, didn’t need them. What if . . . what if it wasn’t a courier? What if instead it was some kind of weapon? What if it had one of those jump scramblers that had killed all those human ships?
Sam squinted the Duty Engineering Officer, an ensign Rosenberg.
“Engineering, secure the fusion reactor and . . . ”
Suddenly Sam felt turned inside out.
We must have jumped.
&nbs
p; Jumping from one point to another dozens of light-years away was never a pleasant experience. It helped to be prepared for it, but this jump caught him by surprise. For a time, the universe stopped. As in all the times he’d jumped Sam had no sense for how long that was—seconds or decades—because time itself seemed to lose meaning. Then Sam was back on the bridge, or the bridge was back around him, but his balance and orientation were completely scrambled, as if his inner ear had left some important parts back where they’d jumped from.
The bridge lights flickered twice and then failed, replaced by low-energy backup illumination. Sam closed his eyes but the sensation of spinning grew so he opened them again. His vertigo intensified, becoming overpowering. No matter where he looked, he was always looking down, about to fall.
He heard someone vomiting and he felt the contents of his own stomach lurch and then climb up into his esophagus. He snatched a bio-bag from the dispenser beside the workstation and barely got it to his mouth before his breakfast omelet came up. As he sealed the bag he heard more retching and saw a string of vomit tumble slowly through the air.
“No puking on my bridge without a bio-bag, damnit!” he managed to shout without throwing up again. “Somebody vacuum that stuff out of the air before we choke on it.
“Maneuvering. Why did you jump without orders?”
Ensign Barr-Sanchez, eyes wide with fright, turned her chair to look at him. “I . . . I didn’t trigger the jump, sir.”
“Well, who the hell did?” he demanded, but she clearly had no idea. Sam pinged Lieutenant Ma on his commlink.
Yes, sir? the chief engineer’s voice answered inside Sam’s head.
“Mister Ma, did Engineering initiate that jump?”
The jump? Um . . . I don’t think so, sir. I didn’t order it. Lieutenant Ravenala is on the main engineering board.
“Find out and report back,” Sam ordered and then turned to the engineering petty officer, sealing his own bio bag, who manned the bridge monitors. “Ship systems, report.”
“Reactor is offline but secure, sir,” he said. “All other systems nominal. Number one power cell is drained. Running on emergency batteries and the LENR generators.”
“TAC?” he asked next.
“All scopes clear, sir,” Alexander reported. “No sign of the bogie. No sign of anything.”
“COMM?”
“In the dark, sir,” Weaver answered. “In the pitch dark. No incoming comms, no routine background chatter, I mean nothing. There’s nobody out there transmitting on any band we’re monitoring.”
“Ops, where are we?”
“Um . . . I’m still working on that, sir,” Ensign Barr-Sanchez said.
“If we’re in a star system, put the primary up on the main screen. Let me have a look at it.”
She put the visible light feed on the main screen but all it showed was a carpet of tiny stars.
“There’s no primary to see, sir,” she said. “There’s nothing out there but distant starlight. We are in deep space—the deep-deep, light-years from the nearest star. I’m still working it out, but I could use more power to the HRVS sensors.”
Wherever they were, they weren’t dead. The drone or whatever it was hadn’t killed them with a jump scrambler program, but it had done something. He wondered why he was still alive. Then he wondered what the drone had actually done. Engineering hadn’t had time to initiate their own planned jump.
“Sir, I’m getting casualty reports,” the Ship Systems tech said.
That figured. Sam had been strapped in and still felt as if half the joints in his body had been whipsawed to the breaking point. There must have been some odd momentum shifts during the jump. The passengers and crew hadn’t even had enough warning to grab onto a stanchion.
He felt his commlink vibrate and saw the ID tag for Lieutenant Ma, the senior engineer.
“Talk to me, Mister Ma.”
Sir, we did not initiate the jump from the main engineering board. It must have come from the bridge or the auxiliary bridge.
Sam shook his head. Auxiliary bridge hadn’t even been manned. It had to be that probe. “It wasn’t AUX,” Sam said. “I want a complete report on what just transpired, from an engineering perspective. What did our jump drive do and why? And get the reactor back online. We need juice up here to scope out where we are.”
The fusion reactor is down, sir and we don’t have any stored power in the number one cell to get it back up. As soon as the tertiary router is repaired we’ll be able to draw on the other three power ring cells and go hot again.
“Well let’s get on it, Lieutenant. We can’t live on batteries and LENR output for very long.”
I have some injuries in the work party, sir. I’ll get to work as soon as I get them to the sick bay.
Sam felt his ears flush and his body jerk with another adrenaline surge, this time from anger instead of fear.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Ma? Delegate it. Look in on them later. Right now, I need you working the problem. Get me power and figure out what happened, do you understand?”
Yes, sir, he said, but grudgingly.
Sam cut the connection and looked around the bridge, dim in the emergency lighting. He saw fear on the faces of the crew. More were showing up now, taking their stations from the general quarters alarm. He noticed it had stopped sounding although he didn’t remember turning it off.
“Everyone crew your stations,” Sam ordered, “but keep the power drain low until we have a hot reactor. Passive sensors only.”
His imbedded commlink sounded and he saw the ID tag for Lieutenant Running-Deer.
“Are you okay, XO?”
Yes, sir. Well . . . I broke by doze.
It took Sam a moment to realize she’d said she’d broken her nose.
I’m compiling a casualty list. Lots of sprains and bruises, a few serious injuries, but I’m afraid we have one fatality.
Sam closed his eyes and for a moment felt dizzy again. He took a deep breath.
“Who is it?”
Running-Deer took a moment to answer.
You know we have that cultural exchange mission to Earth from those aliens, the Buran, taking them back home to Eeee’ktaa? You remember, they were on the VIP list.
“God, not one of the envoys!” Sam said.
Worse than that, sir. One of their children.
CHAPTER FOUR
Three hours later, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
16 February 2134 (the day of Incident Seventeen)
Doctor Däng Thi Hue entered the briefing room with the rest of the small group of civilians, many of whom displayed signs of minor injuries from the unannounced interstellar jump. Most of them also showed one or more signs of fear or shock: eyes darting rapidly around the room, voices hushed almost to whispers, and expressions of confusion or anxiety.
What happened, do you know?
Is this the right room?
Can we sit anywhere?
Her own hands trembled, but she disguised it by holding her data pad firmly in both hands in front of her, an old trick she had learned from a public speaking coach. You cannot keep yourself from being afraid, but you can keep from showing it.
Hue tried not to brush against the one alien Buran in the group, its offspring in its arms, and also tried not to make her avoidance obvious. The tiny Buran child stared at her over its parent’s shoulder, stared with eyes more serious, somehow older-seeming, than those of a human child. Alone among all six intelligent species, the eyes of young Buran did not seem overlarge for the size of their heads. Some humans described Buran children’s eyes as beady looking. They were, which was odd. The proportionally larger eyes of infants were useful survival characteristics for most species. It made the infant’s face more expressive and appealing, and so engendered greater attention from the parent. She wondered how the Buran had prospered without that attribute.
Also alone among the intelligent species Buran were without gender, their sexual habits obscure, and their reproduc
tion accomplished by budding. They were little known and less understood, both of which conditions Hue intended to remedy.
Hue, a senior professor of xenophysiology at the University of Jakarta and Nobel laureate for her theory of Structural Ubiquity, was wealthy from seven lucrative patents but lived an austere, if elegant, life. Single, between lovers, and in her fifty-third year less driven to end that state then when she had been younger, Hue had only one passionate attachment, one addiction, and that was to new questions. Her newest question, the one she thought might occupy her mind for the rest of her productive life, was to understand the Buran. Now she wondered if she would get that opportunity at all.
Ensign Clarence Day, who had become a sort of liaison officer to the civilians the last few days, saw her, and his cherubic face brightened. He waved and then gestured to a chair in the center of the conference table.
“Dr. Däng, we have you seated here, across from the captain. Can’t have our Nobel laureate at the end of the table.”
Hue looked around uncomfortably. Who was seated at the ends, she wondered, and would they take offense? She would have. Ensign Day did seem a bit clueless at times.
“Thank you, Clarence. That wasn’t necessary but it was kind of you.”
The long table boasted five chairs along each side and one at each end. The chair Day pointed to was in the middle of the table.
She took her seat and smiled to Lieutenant Koichi Ma, already seated across the table and one place down to her right. He returned her smile but he seemed preoccupied with his data pad. He had been too busy with the emergency or malfunction or whatever it had been to resume their earlier conversation. He had a fascinating theory on optimal stress in physical support structures that bore on her most recent research: commonalities in leg architecture across the six well-studied trees of life.
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