Scornful Stars

by Richard Baker

  “Commander North to see Captain Broward,” he told the admin specialist at the squadron’s reception desk. “I believe he’s expecting me?”

  The admin checked his dataslate. “Yes, sir. Go on in.”

  Sikander nodded his thanks, and headed into the squadron CO’s office, pausing to knock once at the door. “Captain Broward?” he called.

  Wilson Broward, commanding officer of Pleiades Squadron and the sitting Senator St. John, looked up from a row of colorful windowsill plants he tended and set down his watering can. “Commander North! I see that you’ve returned. Come on in.”

  “Thank you, sir. It’s good to be back.” Sikander walked in and offered an easy salute, which Broward returned with an absent wave of his hand; he didn’t really stand on the formalities. Short in stature and rather thick-waisted for a serving officer, Broward had passed the customary retirement age for officers who failed to screen for flag rank years ago. Most who reached the rank of captain and missed out on a commodore’s star chose to retire at fifty-five or sixty, but Wilson Broward had simply shrugged it off and kept on going, bouncing around various shore commands and the sort of postings more ambitious officers avoided as career suicide. How he’d managed to even reach a captain’s rank in the first place Sikander couldn’t say, but then again, a senator’s seat went a long way in the Commonwealth Navy.

  “How was your leave?” Broward asked.

  “Very good, thank you. I had a nice long visit with my family. But I admit I missed Decisive.”

  “There’s nothing quite like your first command,” Broward agreed. “I kept an eye on your XO in case she ran into any headaches with the shipyard, but as it turned out she didn’t need my help.”

  “She doesn’t really need mine, either,” Sikander admitted.

  Broward laughed out loud. He had a pleasant laugh, rich and rolling, and he seemed to use it a lot. No doubt his amiable nature had helped him along the way just as much as his lofty pedigree; Sikander honestly liked the man even when he wondered whether he was any good at what he did. “Half the job is recognizing when our people just need us to stay out of their way. Speaking of which, I’m sure you’re anxious to take Decisive out and give her a good shakedown cruise.”

  “I am, sir. We’re scheduled to provision and fuel the ship first thing next week, and get under way Thursday morning.”

  “Good. She’s a handsome ship, but she’d look better in space.”

  “I agree. Anything you’d like to add to the op orders, sir?”

  “Not especially. After you see to your shakedown exercises, it’s a standard antipiracy patrol. Escort any merchant ships that request protection, stop and investigate suspicious vessels, show the flag—just like your last two patrols. I imagine that any pirate in your neighborhood will go to ground when he sees Decisive on the beat, but at least you’ll make them keep their heads down.”

  “Until we move on to the next system, anyway.”

  “Well, we can’t be everywhere at once, and extended patrols are better than nothing. You’re in a rotation with Giselle Dacey’s Harrier and Davis Newcomb’s Vigilant, so any troublemakers in the systems you visit can’t be sure when another one of our destroyers might pop up.”

  “Very good, sir.” Sikander hoped it worked out that way, but as Broward said, it was better than nothing.

  “I suppose the only thing I’d add is a note of concern from the Foreign Ministry,” said Broward. “They’re worried that the Caliphate’s sector governor—a fellow known as Marid Pasha—might be thinking of going his own way. The sector government quietly put out some feelers to the neighboring powers, and our diplomats got wind of the pasha’s dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in his corner of the Caliphate. Zerzura is independent in all but name anyway, and Terra probably couldn’t do anything to stop him if Marid Pasha did declare himself king.”

  “I haven’t met the man, but I’m familiar with his reputation,” Sikander said. “What does that mean for us?”

  “No one’s really sure. The most pessimistic estimates suggest that Marid Pasha could precipitate a general fracturing of the Caliphate by inspiring other sectors to follow Zerzura’s lead. Some others think that he might instead have ideas of forming his own Terran union by convincing his fellow pashas to support him.” Broward inspected one of the small plants on his windowsill, and applied a little more water. “We’ve got a special envoy on Dahar now, trying to sort things out. God knows the Caliphate could use some new blood at the top, but the Foreign Ministry’s worried that Dremark or Montréal or Velar might see this as an opportunity to rearrange this whole region more to their liking, and of course we wouldn’t want that.”

  “The sick old man of the Coalition.” Sikander had certainly read plenty of speculation over the years about whether the Terran Caliphate could survive in its current form, and what it would mean for the great powers that made up the rest of the Coalition of Humanity if it collapsed. “Sir, I have to admit that I’m not sure how that impacts our antipiracy patrols. Am I supposed to avoid stepping on Zerzuran toes? Cooperate with other powers, or keep my distance if I run into any of their ships?”

  “Carry on as you normally would, I suppose,” said Broward with a shrug. “Our best course of action is to show this Marid Pasha that Aquila can be a valuable friend, so do what you can to catch pirates. Good hunting, Commander.”

  5

  CSS Decisive, Tejat Minor

  Shrieking sirens from his cabin’s alarm panel woke Sikander an hour before reveille on Decisive’s third day of propulsion tests in Tejat Minor. He flew out of his bunk in his sleeping shorts, dimly recognizing the unique warble of a power plant failure alert, and punched the ship’s command circuit. “This is the captain!” he barked. “Main Control, report!”

  No one replied for a moment, although Sikander heard shouts and alarms wailing in the engineering spaces over the live audio feed. He was about to repeat his order when he finally got an answer: “This is Sublieutenant Hollister, sir, engineering officer of the watch. Catastrophic failure of magnetic containment in generator two. The thermal failsafes kicked in and vented the reaction chamber to space. We did not, I repeat we did not, suffer a containment breach—it looks like the system caught it in time. We’re bringing generator three online now to pick up the load.”

  Sikander shook his head, not sure he’d heard the report correctly. The ship’s fusion generators—Decisive carried four of them, two each in the two generator rooms—were about the safest and most reliable system in the whole engineering plant. Theoretically, a sudden failure of the magnetic fields that contained the fusion reaction could result in star-hot plasma breaching the generator chamber and slagging the surrounding compartment, but fusion plants were designed to shut down automatically long before that sort of disaster could unfold. If the fusion generator had dumped its incandescent fuel mix out into space instead of quietly shutting down, something had gone very wrong indeed.

  “Captain, Bridge,” his command circuit announced. “Sublieutenant Worth, officer of the deck. Sir, we’ve had a serious casualty in engineering. We just lost generator two, but it appears there is no other damage—I’m trying to get more details now. Shall I set general quarters?”

  “I’m already on the line with main control, Ms. Worth,” Sikander told her. He briefly considered whether to send the ship to battle stations; it would provide Decisive with the most extensive and redundant level of system settings and compartmentalization, providing some extra protection against cascading damage. But it would also distract the team currently working on the problem in the engineering spaces, and wake up the whole crew for a situation that seemed to have already run its course. “No, don’t sound GQ. Secure from maneuvering and leave all power settings and machinery configurations as they are unless main control tells you otherwise.”

  “Secure from maneuvering, don’t change any power or machinery configurations, aye, Captain. We’ll just coast until we hear otherwise. Bridge, out.”r />
  “Main Control, captain speaking,” Sikander said. “I’m on my way down.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Hollister replied. “Um, Mr. Shah just got here.”

  “Very well. Carry on.” Sikander cut the comms, and checked the damage-control circuits and status displays by his desk—a captain’s stateroom included repeaters for most of the ship’s alarm systems. Several indicators in the engineering plant flashed orange, but nothing else seemed to be in imminent danger. Until this moment, the shakedown cruise had been going well—they’d gotten under way on time, they’d executed a seamless transit from Neda to Tejat Minor, and for the last three days his engineers had worked the ship’s propulsion plant from one end to the other without finding anything more serious than scuff marks and misplaced tools after the stint in the shipyard. Losing a major system like one of the ship’s four generators was not supposed to happen just weeks after a refit.

  It must have been a faulty installation, he thought as he pulled on his uniform and ran a comb through his hair. Thank God the reaction vented safely!

  He left his cabin and hurried aft. Decisive’s main engineering plant consisted of two generator rooms, two engine rooms housing the ship’s induction drives for propulsion in normal space, the drive room with its warp generator and exotic-matter storage system, and various auxiliary spaces for the ship’s life-support and artificial-gravity systems; the five large machinery rooms formed the core of the ship. The main control station was located between the alternating engine and generator rooms, eighty meters aft and three decks down from Sikander’s cabin. He refrained from sprinting, since it was important for the commanding officer to avoid an appearance of panic, but he did make the trip in less than a minute.

  He found Amelia Fraser only half a step behind him when he reached the last hatch. “Good morning, Captain,” she said. “Not the way we expected to start the day, is it?” Her only concession to the unexpected hour was a simple ponytail instead of the more carefully arranged bun she usually favored for her shoulder-length hair.

  “Not quite,” Sikander admitted. Naturally, his XO had responded just as quickly as he had; the ship’s info assistant repeated the same alarms he received in her cabin, too. “Well, let’s see what the trouble is.”

  He opened the hatch and headed inside. Main control was about half the size of Decisive’s bridge, a long and narrow room that ran athwart the ship with armored windows looking out on the drive room to one side and the first engine room to the other. Between the windows stood large consoles that controlled virtually every system in the engineering plant—hence the name of the compartment. In addition to the normal watch team, half a dozen senior personnel from the Engineering Department crowded into the control room, including Amar Shah, main propulsion assistant Olivia Haynes, Chief Petty Officer Nicole Ryan, and Generator Tech First Class Eduardo Cruz of P Division. Everyone in the compartment seemed to be talking at once.

  “Captain’s in main control,” Chief Ryan announced loudly, cutting through the chatter.

  “Carry on,” Sikander told the assembled engineers. “Mr. Hollister, you’ve got the watch. What’s the status of the power plant?”

  Reed Hollister glanced around uncertainly; sweat gleamed on his forehead, and his eyes seemed as wide as saucers. “Um, Mr. Shah has relieved me, sir. But we secured generator two and we brought generator three online. Generator one was unaffected by the, er, problem, and it’s fine. No outages or interruptions in supply as far as we can tell.”

  “Very well,” Sikander replied. He wasn’t sure that he approved of Shah relieving Hollister—if nothing else, it could be seen as a very public expression of no confidence in his subordinate—but he’d bring that up with Shah later. By regulation the chief engineer of an Aquilan warship had the right and duty to assume the engineering watch whenever he saw the need, and as far as Sikander knew Shah was correct in doing so. “Thank you, Mr. Hollister. Mr. Shah, can we resume our previous acceleration?”

  “Yes, Captain,” Shah replied. “Our power-plant configuration is now stable and no other systems are affected.”

  “XO, please advise the bridge to resume course,” Sikander told Fraser. Decisive was millions of kilometers from any possible collision danger or need to maneuver, but they had a patrol plan—he saw no reason not to continue it. Fraser moved over to the ship’s intercom and called the bridge, while Sikander turned his attention to the displays in the control room. Other than the icon for generator two blinking red, everything else seemed normal enough. “Okay, Mr. Shah. I see that the generator’s magnetic bottle failed and the normal shutdown routine didn’t kick in, so the thermals blew out and vented the chamber to space. Can we tell why that happened?”

  “No, sir, not yet,” Shah replied. “The watch was engaged in conducting some routine capacity checks on the generators when it happened, so I imagine that’s the immediate cause of the failure. But as far as I can tell on a quick inspection, nothing exceeded normal operating parameters. It will take a little investigation to determine exactly how the capacity checks blew the bottle.”

  “And shorted out the shutdown routine,” Chief Ryan added. “We’ve got two faults here, Captain, not just one.”

  Sikander nodded—he’d already noticed that much. He didn’t have the specialized training of an engineer, but any Aquilan officer who aspired to command needed to learn the fundamentals of operating the ship’s engines and power systems. He’d qualified as an engineering officer of the watch back in his second division-officer tour, and Command School had included a strong focus on ship systems as a refresher for officers who hadn’t spent much time in engineering billets. “How bad is the damage to generator two? Can we make repairs under way, or do we need to return to a repair facility?”

  Petty Officer Cruz spoke up; as the leading technician in the power plant team, he was the ship’s resident expert on the fusion generator. “Sir, at a minimum we’ll have to replace the thermal-fail panels and the injector nozzles. We carry spares for those, and it’s not too bad a job. But I’m worried about the control circuitry—something clearly failed there to short out the magnetic bottle, and we won’t know what until we crack open the console and trace it out. I’ll know more in a few hours.”

  “Then I’ll get out of your way and let you tear it down,” Sikander replied. No one would work any better with the commanding officer hovering over their shoulder; time to let his people do their jobs. “Mr. Shah, keep me posted.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Shah replied.

  Sikander took one last look at the display, and left the compartment. Fraser followed him out and closed the hatch behind them; they paused in the passageway just outside main control. “What do you make of it?” he asked her.

  “Bad installation from the shipyard,” she replied. “It must be. The generator itself is original machinery, but the control units were all replaced during the refit. What else could it be?”

  “If we can’t repair the control unit, we’ll be short a generator,” Sikander said. Decisive could run on the output of a single generator in an emergency, but normal operation called for two generators online and two offline at any given time, and of course all four generators were expected to be in service during any kind of combat or emergency maneuvering. “Our standing orders would require us to cut short the patrol and return for repair.”

  “Damn. It feels like we just got here. I’d hate to turn around and head for home.”

  “Me too. I came here to look for pirates, not to break down and return to base.” Sikander sighed. “Well, I’m up now. I might as well have some breakfast and start the day.”

  Three hours later, Amar Shah came to see him, with Supply Officer Grant Edwards in tow. The engineer’s jumpsuit had picked up some soot marks, but he otherwise seemed as fresh and alert as when Sikander had seen him first thing in the morning. “I have some news, Captain,” Shah began. “We’re still working to determine how exactly the fault occurred, but we believe the generator is not ser
iously damaged. We’ll have to replace some circuitry in the control unit, and then we can bring generator two back online. As a precaution, I have ordered that we avoid running any of the generators in the test mode number two was in until we finish our investigation into the cause.”

  “Very good,” Sikander replied—it was certainly better news than he’d expected to hear. “I believe I hear a ‘but’ coming?”

  “You do, sir,” said Edwards. “Replacing the control circuitry will deplete the ship’s spare-part stock. It’s a mission-critical stock and we’re supposed to seek immediate resupply when we fall under the minimum level.”

  “Plus, we just experienced one failure,” Shah pointed out. “If we have another—”

  “We won’t be able to fix it,” Sikander finished for him. “Damn. So it’s back to base.”

  “Maybe, sir,” Edwards said. “I’ve been looking into local sources to see if we can restock without heading back to Neda. There’s nothing here in Tejat Minor, but there’s a local logistics facility in Bursa that should have the spare boards we need. It would probably cost less than a thousand credits out of our operating budget.”

  “Bursa, you say?” Sikander ran a hand through his hair, thinking. It was the next system on their patrol route, and technically closer than Neda. While Captain Broward certainly wouldn’t fault him for bringing Decisive back to base, it would throw off the rotation Pleiades Squadron had arranged to patrol the Zerzura Sector. Using a little initiative to make repairs and stay on station was well within Sikander’s discretion. “All right. Mr. Shah, proceed with the repairs. Mr. Edwards, prepare your shopping list. We’ll cut short our stay here in Tejat and restock our spares in Bursa as regulations require. I’ll have Mr. Girard work out the schedule change.”