by Allen Stroud
“How big is it?”
“We estimate it’s a complete sphere, the size of a large beach ball.”
“And our relative velocity?”
Keiyho smiles. “If you mean are we travelling slowly enough to grab the object, Lieutenant Travers and I have already come up with a plan to do just that. We were going to raise you on the comms to make a decision about it if you didn’t make it here in time.”
“Good thinking,” I say. I find myself smiling too, despite my exhaustion. Keiyho’s expression is infectious. “What’s your assessment?”
Keiyho shrugs. “Truly, Captain, I have no idea. It could be an explosive charge, but I’ve never seen one like it. I did a cross-reference check with the data archive you unlocked, and there’s no mention of a weapon designed like this.”
“Maybe there should be. Super dark chemical coatings aren’t difficult to produce.”
“No, they’re not, but there is nothing to indicate we’re looking at a weapon.”
I glance around the mostly empty bridge. “Who else knows about this?”
“Just us, Captain,” Keiyho replies. “Although anyone you met en route might be curious as to why you were called here.”
Another marginal decision to make. “Okay, let’s do this,” I order.
“Of course.” Keiyho swivels away from me and hunches over his console. After a moment he announces, “Bafflers deployed.”
The ship’s bafflers are large steel nets designed to harvest objects from our immediate vicinity. Ships use them to capture and clear away debris or to pick up samples for analysis. In this case, they’ll do the job, entangling the object and drawing it into the collector so we can bring it inside. The only danger will be our speed. An encounter at high velocity would tear right through the metal mesh.
“Time to dead stop?” I ask.
“Twenty-eight minutes,” Travers says.
I turn to the screen in front of me and key up some of the readouts from the strategy room. I’m thinking about the message from Admiral Langsley and his harassed face on the video file. Keiyho and Travers won’t ask about the video, but I know they’re curious. The choice is made. I can’t tell them what I saw and heard. Instead, I try to get my mind on the issue at hand.
The laser scan is on my screen, and now that Keiyho has removed the computer compensation, I can see the gap in the readout. It’s like a dark wound in the spherical sweep, getting wider as it moves farther away from the ship, as if there’s something out there blocking our view of anything behind it. Some complex triangulation has verified the object’s position, but we still can’t be completely sure of its exact coordinates owing to its ultra-dark surface.
“Distance to baffler intercept?” I ask.
“Twenty-five kilometres,” Travers says.
I’m staring at the data. “Has it moved? It seems very convenient that it would pass this close to us, unless there are lots of them out there.”
“There’s no suggestion that it has altered position since we detected it, Captain,” Keiyho says. “As a precaution, I’ll be keeping it outside of the ship and we’ll do a thermal conductivity test.”
“Good plan,” I say.
“You’re not wrong about this being a lucky find, though,” Travers mutters.
“Our albatross,” I muse. “Only it’s supposed to arrive before we’re becalmed, so we can bring the curse upon ourselves. Maybe we did that anyway.”
“If you say so, Captain,” Travers replies, clearly not getting the reference.
“Never mind.”
The numbers descend and the bafflers rotate into position. Keiyho is having to run an isolated calibration to operate them, as we’re currently fooling the Khidr’s computer into managing our slow deceleration. I pull up an exterior view. Many of the cameras were knocked out in the last altercation with the Gallowglass, so the angle isn’t great, but I can see the nets.
“Time?”
“Forty-five seconds.”
I don’t know whether the object will hit the section I’m looking at, but I can’t take my eyes off the window on my screen. There’s something strangely enticing about trying to spot something you know is almost impossible to see.
“Fifteen seconds.”
I glance at Travers and Keiyho. They are both fixated on their screens. The last moments evaporate in silence until there’s a catch in Keiyho’s breathing. That’s the only sign of his achievement.
“The object is collected, Captain,” he says.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Johansson
Arkov’s bullet wound is minor. The slug grazed his biceps. Thankfully, as it came from a low-velocity firearm, there wasn’t much danger of explosive decompression. That’s why they have these gas-powered guns. Body armour in space is pretty impractical, so the military thinking is that any combat would involve unarmoured opponents and that the integrity of a pressurised environment needs to be preserved. In a zero g atmosphere, there’s less degradation of velocity, so there needs to be less velocity to start with, provided there’s still enough to punch through flesh.
Pretty awful business when you think someone had to work all that out.
I seal the wound with a solvent strip. Battlefield injuries have been treated with a variation of this stuff since the 1970s. These days, the bonding agent is designed to degrade in a specified time, so in seventy-two hours, I’ll be checking Arkov’s injury again.
If we survive that long.
“You’ll do for now, Vasili. Take it steady and you’ll hardly feel it. I’ll come find you when the seal needs to be changed.”
“Thank you.”
Once he’s left, I open up the tactical and strategy information on my portable screen. The conversation with Captain Shann was frustrating. I put together the audio she asked for, but even if we herd the Gallowglass in, just as she wants, we’re still at a disadvantage.
We need something else.
I played chess as a child. I loved the board and all the game components, particularly the tall queen. When I was very young, I would make up stories about her as the real power in an imaginary kingdom, ruling alongside an ineffectual king. However, when I played, my tactical game would fall apart when there was a need to exchange and sacrifice my pieces for my opponents. I’d made up characters for the knights, the rooks, the bishops and the pawns. I didn’t want to lose any of them.
I really didn’t want to lose the queen.
Maybe there’s something of that in Captain Shann. After losing so many of the crew to a mutiny, betrayal and warfare, maybe she’s clutching hold of us too tight. Sometimes leaders have to order their soldiers to take risks, or follow an order that’ll probably get them killed.
I go through the data again, looking at the captain’s proposals. Our chances are better, but they’re still not good enough. Of all the ideas I’ve had, the propelled vehicle with someone going EVA still offers the best increase in our odds. That said, I was definitely wrong about sending a team. We can’t afford to lose more crew.
However, we could send one person.
Me.
I use the screen to locate and alert Sam Chase. He’s returned to the ship’s stores. I don’t try to message him, just send a request for him to meet me in medical.
He arrives a couple of minutes later, looking a little irritated at being summoned.
“Something you want?”
“You said you owed me a favour?”
“Yes, although I thought I’d paid it back by sorting the medical inventory.”
“Ah, okay then, I need a favour from you.”
“What do you want?”
I’m hesitating to make my request. Once I say what I want, I can’t take it back. This is a crazy idea, the kind of risk heroes and fools take. I’m neither.
“You remember you said we needed
to throw out the rule book if we were going to survive?”
“Yeah, and you set me straight.” Sam gives me an inquiring look. “You want to open up that discussion again?”
“Not really.” I pull out my portable screen and hand it to him. “I need you to help me make these modifications, in less than an hour, without telling anyone.”
Sam stares at the screen. I know how much he’s read by the changing expression on his face. “You want to do… This is fucking nuts.”
“I’ve done the calculations. It’s the best chance we have to improve our odds against their ship. Can it be done?”
“What’s the chance you’ll survive?”
“Not…great.”
Sam glares at me. “Either way, I get court-martialed for letting you try and kill yourself.” He hands the screen back to me. “In answer to your question, yes it can be done. The oxygen tank and manoeuvering thrusters you want can be rigged up pretty quickly because we’ve already stripped out a couple of torpedoes. I doubt Duggins will notice one of them going missing.”
“You’ll help me then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I glare at him. “I’m not doing this to die. I’ve done the math.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Sam sighs and rubs his face. “If we do pack you into an empty torpedo with an oxygen cylinder and a couple of thrusters, wired up to a portable screen, we make a very neat little manned carrier. If we weren’t going into combat, I’d consider doing this and adding some of our robotic tools from the drone garage to make a really awesome little repair and rescue vehicle. But there’s a big difference between doing this then and doing it now. What the fuck do you think you’re going to do out there?”
“Did you scroll down?” I ask.
Sam smiles. “No, I stopped when I realised you were trying to murder yourself.”
“If I can get close enough to the Gallowglass, I can make use of the information we have on their ship to interfere with the control system. We can win.”
“And if they notice you?”
“That’s the risk I have to take. Our chance of defeating the Gallowglass without taking a chance like this is next to zero.”
“Has it occurred to you that someone else might already have a shit crazy plan and that by going all lone gun, you’re getting in the way?”
“That’s a good point,” I say. It is a good point, a really good point. Maybe I am being arrogant, thinking Captain Shann or Engineer Duggins haven’t already come up with some special sauce to go on their strategy that they’re not telling us about. “I don’t want to get in the way, but if we don’t know what they’re doing…”
“My turn to remind you about the chain of command.”
“That’s fair.” I look at the screen again, trying to figure out what Shann or Duggins could be planning. I can’t see anything that would make a massive difference. “How about we put this together and make a go or no-go decision when we have a better idea of what’s happening?”
“So, we prepare our insubordination and choose whether to disobey orders if we don’t like what’s going on?”
“No one specifically told us we shouldn’t be doing this.”
Sam laughs. “That’s a game of words and you know it, Ensign. Captain Shann will see right through it.” His expression grows serious. “I’m not going to let you kill yourself, April.”
He’s looking at me. The appeal is honest and frank. He’s right; there’s no point in me taking a mad risk that’ll make no difference to whether we all live or die. But then, if we have to die out here, at least I can choose my ending.
And besides, I genuinely believe this will work.
“It’s a tough task. I’m under no illusions about it, but I’m not planning to die. If I was, I wouldn’t be asking you to help me.”
Sam scowls, but he’s nodding now. “All right, we put this together, but if there’s another way—”
“If it ups the odds, of course, we go for it.”
“Good.” Sam pulls out his own portable screen. “There’s a whole set of issues you haven’t thought about, though.”
“Like what?”
“Like how are you going to launch your little ship?”
I nod and smile. He’s partially right, but it costs me nothing to concede the point. “I’d thought we’d mix me up with the other torpedoes being launched as mines.”
“That would work, but unfortunately, Duggins has fixed the launcher, so the ignition velocity would likely tear your little ship apart. Even if it didn’t, you wouldn’t have enough thrust to maneuver toward the Gallowglass from an undirected position. No, you need a low-powered launch, aimed in the right direction.”
“Okay, can we do that?”
“Thankfully, yes, as I’m operating one of the launchers. Before that, the captain wants to jettison another load of debris, which I need to total up and sign off. That’ll give me some time to work on these changes.”
“Great.”
Sam gestures down the corridor. “In the meantime, Shann’s called some of the crew to the airlock. We should show our faces before we do this.”
“What does she want?”
“We should go and find out.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Shann
“The Gallowglass is thirty minutes from range.”
The Khidr is at dead stop at the end of a self-generated debris field with just over three per cent of fuel reserves left. The moment we arrived, I gave orders for Bogdanovic and Sellis to be moved so we could bring in what we snagged in the bafflers. Now, I’m outside the airlock, with Quartermaster Sam Chase, Technician Arkov, Major Le Garre and Ensign Johansson. We’re staring at what I know is a round sphere, but my mind refuses to accept this. Instead, it looks like a hole in the middle of the room.
“It’s so strange,” Arkov says. “No matter what angle you look at it, you can’t get a sense of its size or shape.”
“We determine shape by the way light reflects off things,” Johansson explains. “There’s no discernible reflection, so there’s no way our eyes can work out the dimensions of what we’re looking at. The sensors say it’s a sphere, and I guess if we could touch it, we’d feel that.”
“The question is, what’s it doing out here?” Le Garre asks.
“No idea,” Arkov says, “but we are registering a temperature drop and a small atmospheric drain in the room. The object appears to be absorbing both the heat and the gas around it.”
“Like it’s feeding or breathing.” I’m thinking out loud.
“Was it wise bringing it on board, Captain?” Le Garre asks. “Our course change to this location can’t have been a coincidence.”
“It probably wasn’t a coincidence,” I say. “The Gallowglass must have known about this being here. However, the conductivity tests don’t register any kind of residual output.”
“None at all?”
“No. Not even a heat trace, which is very unusual.”
Johansson looks at me; she seems annoyed. “Do you think there were more of them? I mean, we only noticed this one because Keiyho and Travers spotted the anomaly in our scan readout. The computer would have passed detecting this off as a glitch.”
“You think there’s a chance we missed a few others?” I ask.
“Well, yeah.” Johansson runs her hand through her hair. “Our scan records go back weeks. We might have missed hundreds of them.”
“Something to analyse when we have more time,” I say.
Le Garre turns away from the window. “What are you going to do with Bogdanovic and Sellis?” she asks me.
“I want Bogdanovic on the comms telling the Gallowglass we’ve surrendered.”
“How’re you going to convince him to do that?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
Johansson taps o
n the DuraGlas. “What’s the plan with that, Captain?” she asks, pointing at the black sphere.
I shrug. “Again, I don’t know. I saw something on a drone feed when we were exploring the Hercules just before it went out. There was some kind of packing crate that held objects like that.”
“You think they had these on the Hercules?”
“If they did, people allied to our enemies stole them. Like you said, Major, it can’t have been a coincidence we picked this up here. The Gallowglass must know it’s in this location. They must have planned to retrieve it or for us to retrieve it.”
“We can’t spare the time to analyse it beyond the basics,” Le Garre says. “If it’s some kind of weapon they left for us, we’ve done their job for them.”
“The decision is made. We’ll see what they say about it,” I say.
Johansson frowns. “It’s completely laser absorbent, right?”
“Yes, the surface is more light absorbent than any material talked about on Earth.”
“Could we fire it at one of their turrets? Jam it right in front of their weapons?”
“I’m not sure how we’d do that,” Le Garre says.
“When we solve that, we start considering it as a tactic,” I reply. “Arkov, can you get it to the rocket ordnance chamber?”
“Yes, of course, Captain.”
I turn to Johansson. “How much longer do we have left on your little composition?”
Johansson grins. “About ten minutes; then we go radio silent. You’ll want to get Bogdanovic talking to them before they reach weapon’s range.”
I nod. “Time I went down there then.”
“Probably,” she says.
* * *
The storeroom has been emptied, but it’s still cramped with three people inside. Bogdanovic is blindfolded and strapped into the acceleration chairs. Chase is standing by the door with Taser in hand.
I’ve prepared myself as best I can. The personnel files on both of our prisoners are extensive. Bogdanovic has worked as a doctor in a variety of off-Earth assignments for the last fifteen years. Sellis is career military, a specialist on system maintenance drafted in from the army, and was one of the reasons the Khidr has stayed intact after we faced the Gallowglass the first time.