* * *
Decisive departed Tejat Minor the following day after a nine-hour acceleration. The trip to Bursa was a bit shorter than the first leg of their patrol from Neda to Tejat, a warp transit of just under four days. Most of the ship’s company quickly fell into their transit routines of watchstanding, professional study, and working out, but the engineers pored over the power-system diagnostics and fault-testing around the clock, while the Ops Department adjusted the ship’s patrol plans and prepared an arrival briefing for Bursa. Michael Girard presented it to all the officers not on watch—or busy overseeing the generator repairs—halfway through the trip, assembling Decisive’s department heads and division officers in the wardroom just before supper.
“Attention on deck!” Amelia Fraser called as Sikander entered the room.
“Carry on, everybody,” Sikander replied, taking his usual seat at the head of the table. “Mr. Girard, you have the floor.”
“Thank you, Captain.” The very idea of addressing twenty fellow officers and the ship’s captain would have sent the young Ensign Girard into a panic attack, but he’d gained a little self-confidence since Sikander had first met him. He began by calling up a cluttered system map on the wardroom’s large vidscreen. “This is the Bursa system, named for its primary inhabited world. We’re scheduled to terminate our transit at 1423 hours the day after tomorrow, which should return us to normal space about here. As you can see, that’s a remote arrival point. The Bursa system is home to three significant asteroid belts, and we need to make sure we err on the side of safety. Most inbound shipping arrives at least seven AU out.”
“No reason to show off with precision navigation,” Sikander observed. Or scour the locals with hard radiation if Decisive missed its arrival point by a little bit, for that matter—starships dumped vast amounts of energy in arrival cascades when the time came to cut off their warp bubbles, so it was important to make sure you didn’t make your arrival too close to anything you cared about. And, since ships returned to normal space with the same velocity they’d built up during their transit acceleration, it was a good idea to make sure there was plenty of open space around the intended arrival point. Colliding with an asteroid or an ore freighter when you returned to normal space at eight or ten percent of the speed of light would be spectacular, to say the least. “Continue.”
“Bursa itself is a semi-terran moon of the fourth planet, which is a superjovian that helped to make all those asteroids. No other moons or planets in the system are remotely habitable, but the asteroid belts are rich and they’re the center of an impressive extraction industry.”
“Lots of places to hide,” Zoe Worth observed. “And lots of local traffic for a pirate to blend in with.”
Girard nodded. “Bursa has suffered more pirate incidents than any other system in the Zerzura Sector. It’s probably our best chance to actually catch someone in the act.”
“Is there any pattern to the attacks?” Sikander asked.
“They’re pretty random, sir.” Girard continued on to an overview of the recent attacks in the Bursa system: a dozen attacks over the last year, including two superfreighters plundered of cargo worth millions. If there was a pattern to them, Sikander couldn’t see it. You’d think at least some of these pirates would be rich enough to retire by now, he thought glumly. God knows they seem to be doing all right for themselves!
His officers seemed as stumped as he was. “How do we catch them?” Carla Ruiz asked. “The only rule of thumb I see here is that acts of piracy stop whenever the Navy’s around. The cockroaches don’t show themselves when we’re in the kitchen, and we can’t be everywhere at once.”
“Sooner or later someone is going to make a mistake,” Sikander replied, speaking as much for his own reassurance as the medical officer’s. “All we can do is be ready to act when our opportunity comes. Have a little faith, Doctor.”
The day before their arrival, Amar Shah notified Sikander that he’d completed his initial investigation into the generator two failure. He came to Sikander’s cabin to present his report; Amelia Fraser joined them. Darvesh Reza quietly set out coffee, tea, and small pastries for their discussion before disappearing into the tiny galley that adjoined Sikander’s cabin. Sikander and his XO studied their dataslates for a long time, reading over the summary. When they finished, Sikander set down the report, frowning. “So it comes down to a bad installation, as we suspected,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Shah said. “Two of them, just as Chief Ryan predicted. The control unit had a bad board, which failed when a minor power fluctuation shorted out a vulnerable component. The control unit should stand up to that sort of thing, but our generators are no longer new models and the available parts have been sitting in storage for twenty years in some cases. Anyway, the board’s failure caused a cascading failure in the control program—”
“—which collapsed the magnetic bottle,” Fraser said, finishing Shah’s thought. She’d spent more time in engineering billets than Sikander had; she had a better grasp of the power systems than he did.
“As you say, ma’am,” Shah replied. “That failure I can forgive. Nothing would have showed up in the routine testing performed after the installation. The second fault is the one I’m angry about: The magnetic flux sensor was improperly installed. There was a bad weld which created a gap in the sensor’s thermal protection. When the bottle started to fail, the reaction chamber’s rising temperature melted the sensor before it triggered fuel-injection shutdown. As a result, the bottle collapsed completely and the thermal panels—our last line of defense against a containment breach—vented as designed.” The Kashmiri engineer shook his head in disgust. “Thank God those at least were properly installed. Otherwise we likely would have lost the entire generator room.”
Sikander frowned. He hadn’t realized just how close they’d come to disaster. In retrospect, returning to Neda might have been a better decision than making the repairs and continuing their deployment. “All right, Mr. Shah. Make sure you’ve got your investigation fully documented, and I’ll forward your report to the squadron and the shipyard. Clearly we need to hold the yard to a higher standard.”
“Yes, sir. I have already prepared the report.” Shah made a few notes on his dataslate, then pulled up a new document. “In addition, I have drafted a letter of reprimand for Sublieutenant Hollister for you to attach to the report.”
“A letter of reprimand?” Sikander asked sharply. That was a very serious step—few careers survived a formal reprimand. “On what grounds?”
“Mr. Hollister signed off on the flux-sensor installation, Captain.” Shah showed Sikander the digital form on his dataslate. “Here. You can see he specifically checked approval for the weld-test inspection last month. The shipyard made a mistake, yes, but so did he when he accepted substandard work. His oversight could easily have led to very serious damage to the ship, or even loss of life.”
“He was acting chief engineer at the time,” Fraser pointed out. “He must have signed fifty acceptance certifications a day toward the end of our yard time.”
“Which does not relieve him of the obligation to confirm that the work he certifies was actually accomplished,” Shah replied. He looked back to Sikander, his expression unflinching. “I believe that someone must be held accountable, sir.”
Sikander hesitated. In theory, yes, an officer was responsible for anything he signed. But in practice, the Navy expected that a division officer would delegate a job like verifying a weld test to an enlisted technician with expertise in that sort of work, then rely on his subordinate’s report. He could easily imagine that the weld had looked okay to a visual inspection, or that a busy generator technician had spot-checked some welds without checking each and every one. A formal reprimand would have been appropriate if Hollister had known it hadn’t been checked and signed off anyway … but if he’d been told that it had been done by a shipyard worker or a Decisive crewhand and had no reason to suspect otherwise, then it was an hone
st mistake in Sikander’s book. For that matter, it might have been an honest mistake from the start, he thought. A misread instrument, simply forgetting to check one part of the job, a distraction at the wrong moment. We’re all human, after all.
“Let me think on the question of a reprimand,” he told Shah. “It’s not a step that should be taken lightly. But go ahead and transmit the rest of the report when we arrive in Bursa. I will add my endorsement of your findings.”
“Sir—” Shah started to object, then stopped himself with a small scowl when he saw that Sikander had made his decision. After a moment, he nodded. “Yes, Captain. I will await your decision.”
“Thank you, Mr. Shah. And please convey my appreciation to your team, as well.” Sikander tapped his finger on the report on his dataslate. “This represents a lot of hard work in a short amount of time. Carry on.”
* * *
Sikander took his place on the bridge a few minutes before the end of the ship’s transit, making a show of reading through old message traffic on his dataslate while he quietly observed his crew at work. Like the command decks of most Aquilan warships, Decisive’s bridge was located in the center of the hull in the forward third of the ship for protection against enemy fire, although no destroyer was designed to stand up to heavy damage—agility served as Decisive’s best defense. A series of deck-to-overhead vidscreens arranged in an arrowhead shape provided a nearly 360-degree view from the ship’s exterior hull cams, over which the tactical sensors displayed augmented icons and informational tags describing anything the bridge team needed to know about. In routine operation that meant the locations and orbits of celestial bodies and the course and speed of system traffic, but in combat the displays included targeting data, threat analyses, damage reports, and more. At the moment, however, nothing more than a scenic starfield and a large countdown ticking down the time remaining in the ship’s transit occupied the bridge’s displays. Ships in a warp bubble couldn’t see anything of the universe outside their own warp field, so the ship’s systems projected a best-guess image of what they’d see if they were in normal space. Sikander had always rather liked the view, even if it was only a simulation.
“One minute to arrival, Captain,” Lieutenant Girard told him. He served as the ship’s officer of the deck during transit initiation and termination. “All stations report manned and ready.”
“Very well,” Sikander replied. Aquilan warships normally assumed battle stations for arrival, not that anyone expected to come under immediate attack—after all, the idea was to arrive with a safety cushion of millions of kilometers of empty space. However, if some catastrophic error in navigation left the ship in immediate peril upon its return to normal space, setting general quarters meant that the ship was as ready as possible to deal with sudden damage or emergency maneuvers. He keyed the ship’s general announcing system from his command seat. “Attention, all hands: This is the captain. Make ready for imminent system arrival.”
He returned his attention to the countdown timer. Precisely at 0:00:00, the ship’s warp generator cut off, and Decisive returned to normal space in the Bursa system. Some people claimed that they could tell when a ship dropped its warp bubble, but Sikander doubted it: No one had ever proved that the pocket of space surrounding a ship inside a warp bubble differed in any way from the rest of the universe outside of it, or demonstrated any physiological effects to warp travel. The only cue that anything had changed was a sudden flicker in the bridge displays as the ship’s computers replaced the simulated projection with live sensor feed.
“Clear arrival, sir!” Ensign Grace Carter reported from her post. A bright and almost painfully eager young Caledonian, she served as Decisive’s sensor officer. During battle stations, she manned the bridge’s sensor post and supervised the ship’s sensor techs. “We have a little traffic at nine million kilometers bearing zero-five-zero up thirty, but our courses are diverging.”
“Very well,” Girard replied to the report. He studied his own displays at the tactical officer’s position, then looked up at Sikander. “We’re about fifteen light-seconds off target, Captain—we cut the warp generator a bit late.”
“Close enough, Mr. Girard.” In fact, it was pretty good—once or twice Sikander had seen ships miss their navigational targets by dozens of light-minutes, a rather unsettling lack of accuracy. Tiny deviations in course or timing ensured that no one ever hit the exact point they were aiming for, another reason that ships initiating a warp transit made sure to navigate toward safely empty patches of space at their destinations. “Send our arrival notification to the local authorities, depower and retract the warp ring, and secure from transit stations. Set course for Bursa.”
“Aye, sir,” Girard replied. Somewhere aft of the bridge, the motors controlling the ship’s warp ring hummed briefly, folding the structure back into its hull fairings. “Looks like about nine … make that eight hours and forty minutes at standard acceleration to kill our velocity and reach orbit.”
“Very good.” Sikander returned his attention to his reading as the bridge team settled into their normal-space underway routine. Decisive spun around to point her powerful drive plates in the direction her intrinsic velocity carried her, and began applying thrust to decelerate and begin bending her course toward Bursa’s inner system. While Sikander had no special obligation to remain, he’d always felt that it was good for the commanding officer to see and be seen by the crew, and he enjoyed the comfortable buzz of activity on the bridge. Some captains allowed the administrative burden of the job to trap them in their cabins, but he’d never felt the need to seek isolation in order to concentrate, and preferred to work on a busy bridge whenever he could.
He lost himself in his electronic paperwork for an hour or more, approving a number of routine reports and evaluations. Then Michael Girard called for his attention. “Captain? We’ve got something unusual here.”
Sikander looked up and put away his dataslate. “What’s that, Mr. Girard?”
Girard pointed toward the display screen. “Unknown vessel, bearing three-two-five, distance thirty million kilometers. Zero acceleration, no transponder, no response to our comms.”
“That’s suspicious,” Sikander observed. He stood up and joined Girard by the display. They were still quite a way from the busier parts of the Bursa system—any ship they ran into out here should have been under acceleration and going somewhere more interesting. And of course no honest captain turns off the ship’s transponder, he told himself. “Very suspicious, in fact. If you were a pirate looking for an opportunity to ambush an arriving ship…”
“Then you might go dark and coast along in the system’s outer reaches,” Girard said. “She has to know we’re here, Captain. We’re not exactly hiding and we just pinged her with radar.”
Sikander nodded. A ship might hope to avoid attracting attention by reducing power and avoiding electronic emissions, but in general open space was a terrible place to hide—simple thermodynamics made it impossible. Maybe a freighter with civilian-grade sensors might not notice a powered-down pirate at long range, but anyone paying attention to their surroundings couldn’t miss the thermal signature. If Girard’s drifting vessel was a pirate, he appeared to have a great deal of misplaced confidence in his ability to avoid detection. “Class and type?” he asked.
“Messina-class medium bulk carrier. We can’t quite read the registration number off the hull yet, so that’s all we have for the moment.”
“Bulk carrier?” That seemed an unlikely type for use as a pirate, but it was possible that Decisive had detected a ship under attack—another vessel might be close alongside the target, hiding in her sensor shadow. “Change course, Mr. Girard. Give me the fastest interception we can manage at full military acceleration.”
“Aye, sir. Helm, come left to new course two-seven-seven. All engines ahead full.” Girard studied his tactical display for a moment. “Thirty-five minutes to firing range, Captain. Eighty minutes for a zero-zero intercept.”<
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“Very well.” Sikander made himself return to his battle couch, settling in for the wait. Could we really catch a pirate by pure dumb luck? he wondered. The odds of ending their warp transit in the neighborhood of a pirate hoping to ambush incoming traffic seemed literally astronomical, but then again, if their quarry was indeed lurking near likely arrival spots, maybe it wasn’t so unlikely after all.… He tapped his seat’s comm panel. “XO, could you come on up to the bridge? We might have something interesting here.”
“On my way, sir,” Fraser replied. She appeared less than a minute later—like Sikander, she had a cabin that was located very close to the bridge. “What’s up, Captain?”
“Unidentified ship, no transponder,” Sikander told her. “We’re heading over to have a look.”
“That seems a little shady,” Fraser observed.
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Sir, we’ve got a registration for the target,” Girard reported. “Her hull number indicates that she’s the Carmela Día, sailing under the Pegasus-Pavon line. Bursa Traffic Control lists her as overdue—she was supposed to arrive eighteen days ago.”
“That doesn’t sound like a pirate vessel to me,” Fraser said to Sikander.
“No, that sounds like a victim,” Sikander agreed. “Anyone hiding in her sensor shadow, Mr. Girard?”
“No, sir, I don’t believe so. It’s just Carmela Día.”
“Very well.” Sikander sat back in his seat with a grimace of disappointment; he’d allowed himself to hope that maybe they’d actually caught one of the bad guys this time. Regardless, they had an obligation to investigate and to do what they could for any survivors. “Mr. Girard, make for a zero-zero intercept, and have the rescue and assistance team stand by. Someone over there may need our help.”
Scornful Stars Page 9