by J. W. Kurtz
What the broken pieces of the mug did was give the Captain a small scale visceral reminder of the damage that the Belle' had incurred both inside and out during the recent ordeal. He tossed the handful of ceramic shards into a rubbish bin on his way out the hatch. He emerged from the bridge and into the length of corridor immediately outside, which of course still lacked an operational local artificial gravity system. He moved weightlessly along using handholds to guide his path.
Wray mentally prepared himself for the painfully long list of needed repairs.
Upon arriving at his cabin he again was faced with a mess, a mess that was a microcosm reflecting the status of the Bellerophon. Standing just inside the hatch, Wray took in the frustrating sight. Half the space, like half the corridor he had just traversed on the other side of the steel bulkhead, was in freefall, again due to malfunctioning, damaged, or an outright destroyed local artificial gravity system. Numerous personal effects, including a small picture of his son when he was about 8-years old, and other minutia were floating weightless to his left. And to his right, the remains of his upended and broken desk, torn from the weak secure points on the deck, waited silently for him to return it to an upright position.
The death and destruction of the day had failed to slow or paralyze the Captain at any point. This mess however froze him in his tracks. Maybe, now that he was no longer running on a high induced by the multiple jolts of adrenaline his body had forced upon him, the fatigue was finally setting in. Or perhaps it was because his entire life never seemed to proceed with anything approaching the word "smooth." Wray was suddenly very...frustrated. Oddly a laugh, a chuckle, slipped from him. Wray was surprised by the slip. Giddiness was not something that he was used to feeling or exhibiting. Not in the least. The escaped laugh did prod him from his frozen stance.
As he moved to his right, to oblige his desk in resetting the antique workspace, sadly his oldest and most faithful friend, he passed and quickly inspected his mini vault containing the datapad from the Osprey. Happy that the mini vault appeared not to have been tampered with, he then wrestled the heavy desk back to an upright position. Straining his back slightly as he did so. He then righted an undamaged chair and quickly took a seat as he was suddenly light headed. Again, he laughed aloud upon finding this not so very funny situation comical. It was then that he remembered that he himself was one of the walking wounded.
The throbbing pain from his head wound returned as he remembered that the wound was there in the first place. Wray rose from his seat and carefully checked the bandage affixed to his head via the reflection from the mirror over the small wash basin. Wet crimson shined through the thick bandage. Head wounds normally bled like a bitch and his injury was unfortunately no exception.
He glanced about the cabin and located the emergency kit, which was one of the few items in the compartment actually well secured enough to not be in a pile on half the deck or floating weightless about the other. The Captain retrieved the kit from the secured mounting beside the hatch and, after several minutes of cleaning the wound thoroughly, he affixed fresh bandages and applied nanite infused medical gel.
His more in-depth assessment of his injury was that he would need treatment beyond what he himself could perform from the simple emergency kit. Wray considered making his way to Dr. Skansi for a more professional administration of medical treatment. Beyond the still bleeding laceration he assumed, at minimum, that he had a concussion. He quickly nixed the idea of going to medical at the moment as he knew the Doctor had far more serious injuries to deal with. Wray knew head injuries were not to be trifled with however so he promised himself that he would get checked after the upcoming status meeting.
Wray located and recovered his personal datapad on the deck nearby and logged into the Belle's network.
Data was being entered continuously from various departments throughout the ship. He reviewed the casualty lists, not lingering over the names, not out of callousness but out of expediency. He was more interested in active crew and their designations and specialties. Wray needed to see which departments would need support for repairs of major systems.
There would be time to go over the names more closely of lost colleagues and friends soon enough. It was the practice of Wray to award a lost crewmembers next of kin with their remaining contracted pay plus a small bonus that came directly out of Wray's own share. A practice for which he was very much chided for by his corporate masters as there was no legal requirement to do so. The corporate accountants scoffed at him for wasting the credits. Totts had told him once that he was "pissing away funds that could be better used to keep this junk heap running." Wray was glad that Totts was not on his payroll because it would surely be pissing away funds for his next of kin to receive even a penny of credit when...if Totts was killed.
Chapter 27:
Wray continued his review of the damage reports being filed by the various departments throughout the ship. Several status states stood out. First was the list of available manpower. More than half of his crew had been killed or injured in the collision with the frigate, the impact of the boarding arrow, or the subsequent actions by the boarders. The Captain was momentarily taken aback. Such heavy losses were not unheard of in the privateering contract sector but they did of course happen. The recently destroyed frigate that had attacked the Bellerophon supported that argument very well, for if that craft constituted the lone instrument of that operation then their losses were 100 percent across the board.
Failure or poor luck in this line of work resulted in a penalty more severe and permanent than the red within a ledger.
Also standing out to the Captain was the just updated report from engineering. Propulsion, both the ripper and maintainer drives as well as the local electromagnetic drive, were listed as inoperative. A repair time for the local propulsion drive was stated to be approximately 24-hours. An extra day spent adrift would earn the Belle's operation no credits, but seeing that such a major system was repairable was great news. The FTL however was a far greater matter of concern than local propulsion however. Without FTL they were light-years from their base of operations, and even if someone went looking for them when they were overdue it would be nearly impossible for the Belle' to be found as space was a fairly large sea to search, even if one was only searching a single cubic light-year.
Wray looked closer at the report regarding the FTL system. It was reported as currently inoperable but oddly it was not highlighted in red due to damage. When he queried the system for more detail he was informed that the inoperative status was due to a low fuel state. Wray tagged the FTL system report and moved it to the top of the discussion points for the status meeting upcoming.
Immediately another report, from the many, caught his attention. This one was regarding the grave status of the life support system. That vital system, which they had fought so hard to defend, was among the systems that were down with no estimated time to repair. No FTL and a down life support system. Very ominous information when one is light years from help. The thoughts of Wray were interrupted by an automated announcement over the 1MC alerting the crew that the department status meeting was occurring imminently.
A half-dozen windows appeared on the now active large display affixed to a bulkhead in his cabin. The display and data stream, with the updating live reports, were slaved to his personal datapad so he could review the information his people shared and talk to them all face-to-face at the same time. Wray waited patiently as the department heads, and acting department heads, joined the meeting that was about to begin.
Normally, after an action, Wray would hold a face-to-face in person meeting with his crew but with the damage to the Belle's high-speed transportation system and the heavy losses to the crew he thought it wise to meet in this manner instead. Thankfully absent from the meeting was Simon Totts who had been escorted to medical for treatment just prior to Wray leaving the bridge.
The last face to join those patiently on the display was the youngest of th
e bunch. The very concerned and harried face of CHENG James Callo flashed onto the screen in the space allotted to the engineering department. He was looking down at something out of view of the camera, most likely a datapad. He was biting his lower lip when the meeting was called to order and didn't immediately look up. As the Captain began to lay out the agenda CHENG Callo interrupted.
"Captain, excuse me, but umm..."
"Yes, CHENG, we were going to lead with your report. What's the status of the FTL. I read it is a 'fuel state issue.' Can you elaborate on that?" Wray asked.
"Yes, Captain I can. We're dead in the water in regards to transit space travel," Callo answered. "One of the systems damaged by the hostile in engineering was the fuel controller. The system dumped our H3 reserves. Our tanks are dry, sir. Bone dry...but that is the least of our worries."
The rest of the department heads all shared confused looks on their faces. Owen Sebastian, an assault skiff pilot, and now acting department head with the death of Lisa Royals in the hangar, killed by the same boarder that had heavily damaged engineering, chimed in with the question on the tip of everyone's tongue.
"If being dead in the water, light-years from any support is the least of our worries, what's our big worry then, CHENG?"
"I estimate we have two weeks of air left. Life support is down and irreparable with the parts and raw materials we have on hand. When the power was cut throughout the ship by that Minervan device...err element, whatever it is, it damaged a major component in the active system. Even if on standby the damage would most likely have occurred. It was unavoidable. The component melted to slag and we don't have a spare. Nor can we fabricate a new one. Two weeks. That's all the air we have left. And then we're dead. The good news is that we probably won't freeze because the climate controller doesn't appear to be damaged," CHENG Callo responded.
Captain Wray smiled at this disclosure by his Chief Engineer. Looks of bewilderment appeared on the faces of the gathered department heads.
"Captain?" Bachman said breaking the silence.
"We'll figure something out," Wray said with confidence. "We'll figure something out. Because what other choice do we have?"
END OF BOOK 1
Message From The Author
Thanks for reading this book. I hope you found it to be entertaining and left you wanting more. Please stay tuned as rest assured this is just the beginning in a larger story within the Captive Galaxy Series. Also, please tell your friends about this series and the promise of others to come! You can follow me on my Amazon.com author's page, or even better, on my blog where I tend to share my thoughts on just about everything including my current and upcoming writing projects.
My blog: http://jwkurtz.wordpress.com/
Thanks!
J.W. Kurtz