Trial by Fire - eARC

by Charles E Gannon

  “So those damn water-tanks tried rock-nuking us?”

  “Major Patrone, we are unable to confirm that. However, we do know that the Ktor had legal and ready access to our system at the time the rock was weaponized.”

  Gaspard rubbed his chin. “And the motive? After all, less than six weeks ago, the Ktor attempted to woo you into joining their protest against Dornaani preeminence.”

  Elena shrugged. “Yes, but that may have been the Ktorans’ plan B, Mr. Gaspard. For all we know, their plan A was to drop the doomsday rock on us and thereby remove us from the current game before we could even get on the playing field. When that scheme failed, recruiting us may have become their next-best alternative.”

  Gaspard’s nod and pout suggested that he not only approved of Elena’s hypothesis, but of her quick wits. “Yes, that would be consistent. Either action has the same implicit end: to destroy the Accord, or at least isolate the Dornaani and make them ineffectual.”

  “And to grab turf,” muttered Lemuel. “If you’ve read the report, then you know that the Ktor representative came on to us like Ribbentrop trying to sweet-talk Chamberlain into allowing Nazi expansion. Gave me the chills.”

  Gaspard nodded absently in Wasserman’s direction as he checked his watch and rose. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I found this briefing most stimulating. And now I must go.”

  Downing forced himself to remain courteous, despite Gaspard’s indecorously abrupt leave-taking. “Mr. Gaspard, are you sure—quite sure—this is all the briefing you require?”

  “Quite certain, Mr. Downing. I read your basic reports thoroughly on the flight over. The topics we have discussed were the ones that wanted further explication. Good day.” With a brisk stride, he was out the door.

  “Damn,” muttered Opal, staring after him, “guess he flunked charm school.” She turned to the rest of the group. “Now what?”

  “Now,” answered Downing, “we wait.”

  “For what?” asked Wasserman.

  “For tidings of peace,” sighed Downing, “or war.”

  Chapter Nine

  Adrift off Barnard’s Star 2 C

  Rubbing the goose-egg bump on his head, Caine watched Trevor paw through the utility satchel they had filled with burnt-out power relays during their painstaking survey of the damage done to the auxiliary module. The relays clattered noisily against each other. “How bad is it?” Caine asked.

  Trevor shrugged. “It's not good. With this much damage to the control circuitry, the environmental reprocessors are as good as dead. The air we have right now is all we're going to have. Of course, we can use electric current to crack water and get extra oxygen, but that means cutting into our drinking rations and running the power plant more. Which means becoming a much bigger signal for our enemies to detect.”

  “So how much life support do we have?”

  “No more than three days, and that assumes that we shut down most of the module and limit minimal life support to a small, sealed area.”

  “Great.”

  “There's more good news. We have only fifty percent fuel left in our attitude control system.”

  “Fifty percent? Why?”

  “We were in one hell of a three-axis tumble after the fusion plant on the cutter went up. Getting this coffee can stable was a pretty lengthy task.”

  Caine frowned. “On the other hand, why should we care how much ACS maneuver time we have left?”

  “Funny you should ask. I have a plan.” Trevor activated one of the screens. A miniature replica of the Auxiliary Command module blinked into existence, rolling through space on its long axis like a log going down a hill. The image diminished rapidly, shrank until the module was a small blue speck. Trevor tapped another key; red specks appeared, most of them traveling along the same vector as the blue speck and then flowing past it. “The red is wreckage, mostly ours and some of theirs. If we could manage to match vectors with the right piece of junk, the salvage might enable us to hang on for an extra week, maybe a whole month.”

  Caine, studying the creeping red stream, rubbed his chin. He immediately regretted the action; the tug on his skin reopened the wound that the door jamb had inflicted on his lower lip the day before. He pressed the back of his hand to the gash, gestured at the screen. “How did you get those vector fixes on the wreckage?”

  “Three-second, narrow-field, active sensor bursts. Four of them, over the last ten hours.”

  Caine glanced at Trevor. “The OpFor might have left passive sensors behind.”

  “Maybe, but that isn't likely. This area isn’t important enough to monitor, and they’re not going to leave their own hardware behind if they can help it. Every piece of equipment they've got with them they had to carry in on their own backs, and they're at the end of a very long and very narrow supply line.”

  Caine nodded. “Okay. So, based on your data, what sort of delta-vee do we need in order to make intercept with the salvage?”

  “That varies,” answered Trevor. “Most of the junk is moving in roughly the same direction we are, only a little faster. And the stuff that’s gone past us is already too far away to catch.”

  “So we have to assess the trajectories of objects that have yet to overtake us and make intercept in the next two or three days.”

  “Right. And then we have to accelerate the combined mass of our module and the salvage toward a reasonable destination. Whatever that turns out to be.”

  Caine looked at the red motes. “Sounds like a tough job.”

  “Actually, it's two tough jobs. First, we've got to match vectors with whatever piece of trash we ultimately choose. That's hard enough, given our fuel limitations. Second, our intercept should ideally end in a hard dock, or at least in a solid mooring. But that requires two things we don't have: a docking ring—which we lost when we blew the jettisoning charges—and fully-fueled terminal navigation boosters.”

  Caine nodded. Without navigational boosters, it would be hard to control their final approach. Their reliance on the main thruster made them highly susceptible to errors of over- and under-correction. They were as likely to ram the wreckage, or overshoot it, as they were to make a safe intercept.

  “So how can I help?” asked Caine.

  “Get out of that emergency suit and hop into the sensor ops spot.” Trevor indicated the appropriate chair. “We're going to need more precise vector definitions on the pieces of wreckage that we can still reach, and then we're going to need to get an idea of what the wreckage is.”

  “If I remember what my space ops instructor was saying two weeks ago, the only passive sensors that are going to help me with this task are spectrographs and mass scans.”

  “Correct. And if you get the chance, make a fast sweep for other approaching objects. Better safe than sorry.”

  Trevor was halfway into his emergency suit by the time Caine had strapped into the sensor ops position. “And where will you be?”

  Trevor flexed his gloved fingers. “Pressure-sealing the access ways and B deck so we can terminate environmental functions in those areas. I'll start by sealing off— Damn!” Trevor exclaimed suddenly, grabbing his shin.

  —at the same moment that Caine clutched at a sudden spasm in his left arm. “What the—?”

  “Coupla old men,” Trevor grinned ruefully, rubbing his left tibia.

  “Yeah, but having our recent wounds bother us at the same second?” Caine wondered.

  Trevor shrugged. “Ah, I’ve heard of stranger stuff, and we don’t know what kind of sensors or other field effects the bad guys may be playing around with out there. Sometimes, just the right—or wrong—frequency can twinge a break or trouble a tooth.” He smiled, finished sealing his gloves. “Space is funny, that way.”

  Caine nodded as Trevor clanked his helmet into place and ran the locking rings home with a sharp, sure sweep of his hand. They exchanged waves, then Trevor took two long bounds and was out of the control room and into the main corridor.

  * * *

/>   Caine started awake, jerked upright, was not sure where he was for a moment. His hands were still poised on the virtual keyboard of the sensor panel. Like many repetitious activities, what started out as a sequence of challenging sensor tasks had quickly become a mind-numbing routine. And without a high-end computer in the auxiliary module, a detailed search routine was only so automatable.

  Two quick ladar bursts at each target would have provided the needed results, but that might have also been enough to attract any nearby enemy pickets. So far, thirty percent of the possible targets for salvage intercept had been eliminated simply because of the low confidence level of the sensor measurements. The module's limited fuel situation prohibited any intercept attempts that were based on “best-guesses.”

  Trevor’s voice in his earbud snapped him further awake. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine. Slow. Boring. You?”

  “I’m curious. Do me a favor; check on the Prometheus’ trajectory.”

  Caine expanded his scan field, found the right blip, noticed that the thermal signature of the shift-carrier’s pulse-fusion engines had grown much fainter due to rapidly increasing distance. “They’re crowding three gee constant. And it looks like they’ve also added a slight delta vector. Meaning what? A change of shift destination?”

  “Sure sounds like it.”

  Caine nodded. “Then they’re heading to Ross 154.”

  “What? Instead of warning Earth?”

  “Oh, Earth is being warned—silently. Downing will have set up a no-show code as part of a contingency plan. That way, if Barnard’s Star is hit, the Prometheus can warn Ross 154 instead.”

  Trevor’s voice was suddenly in the room with him. “And Earth interprets the no-show of the Prometheus as a warning flag. Sure. Two messages for the price of one shift.” Caine turned. Pressure helmet off, Trevor was already clambering out of the suit. “You’d better pause the salvage survey. Their initial attack group will have refueled by now and they won’t waste any time commencing preacceleration for their next shift. But before they do, they'll run an advance patrol through this area.”

  “Why here?”

  “Because it's the only debris field with metallic elements anywhere within two hundred planetary diameters. If our side managed to sneak in any dormant killer drones while the invaders were wrecking The Pearl or hunting down our shift carriers, this is where they'd expect them to be, mixed in among other objects with very similar sensor returns.”

  “You’re sure they got all six carriers?”

  “Yeah, it looked like it. Now, jack your commlink into the intercom. We’re not even going to risk using our collarcoms. When you’re done with that, seal your suit.”

  Caine did as he was told, and looked over at Trevor—just as the lights went out. “Cutting power?”

  Trevor nodded, started tapping commands into the computer’s one manual keyboard. “Everything except the visual sensor arrays and the required computer element is blacked out. We're running on batteries.”

  Caine glanced at the REM level indicator. “What about the EM grids?”

  Trevor did not look over. “We have to cut them for now. The meter of water lining the outer hull will take care of a lot of it, but we've got to wait until their advance force has swept the area before we energize the grids again. Then we can bring them back up. Slowly.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “We take the rads, or get taken by exosapients.”

  The smell of old sweat in Caine’s suit was suddenly overpowering. Or was it simply new sweat that had the same tang of mortal fear? He felt a saline drop land on his swollen lip, winced as the salt burrowed into the tender tissue with microfine tines of pain. He wondered how much large particle radiation was similarly digging into and through him.…

  * * *

  “Motion on visual array seventeen-F.” Trevor’s voice betrayed no anxiety. Caine looked over at the zoomed-in image. The streamlined Arat Kur hull appeared against the gas giant’s milky-amber whorls, heading in their general direction at a leisurely pace. They had noticed its emergence from the uppermost layer of the atmosphere half an hour ago, at which point the enemy ship had been retracting some kind of refueling drogue.

  Caine turned to his sensors, ran the drill Trevor had taught him. “Establishing range and bearing.” He ran a quick superimposition of the ship's progressive positional changes over the star field backdrop. The computer chewed through the data, correcting for the module's rotation and orbital movement. Numbers striped across his screen. Caine read them off. “Range: ninety-six thousand km. Ecliptic relative bearing: 283 by 75. Current vector suggests she's looking to break orbit and make for our debris field. ETA, thirty-eight minutes.”

  “Are they running active sensors?”

  “Nothing radiant, but I can't tell about ladar.” Caine paused, considered the lack of active sensors. “So, will they conduct broad sweeps as they approach the debris, or wait until they're in the field before lighting up their active arrays?”

  “I think they’ll wait until they're on top of us, and I mean that literally. They're worried about our drones, so they’ll want to stay dark until the last second, and want to stay out of the field itself. They’ll probably make their run ‘above’ and against the flow of the wreckage. That way, the vector difference between themselves and any doggo drone is going to make them pretty hard to catch. And the enemy is sure to have a few drones of their own out front, trying to lure ours out of hiding.”

  “If only there were some to be lured.”

  Trevor shrugged. “It would be a waste of equipment. We've lost this round.”

  Caine sighed. “What a godawful first combat assignment, watching the enemy go through the stately rituals of invasion.”

  “Actually, this is a pretty darned good first combat assignment.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  Trevor’s smile was mirthless. “We're alive.” He turned back to the sensor readouts. “So far.”

  Well, thought Caine, Trevor called it to the letter. Riordan watched as the cursor denoting the enemy hull spawned a growing swarm of smaller signatures, like a fish giving birth to a cloud of almost microscopic fry. “They’ve deployed a screen of small, fast drones.”

  Trevor nodded, watched them begin to bore through the heart of the debris cloud, the two foremost lighting up powerful active arrays. Immediately behind them, other drones—presumably hunter-killers—waited for the first sign of hostile response. As this menacing contingent approached within ten thousand kilometers, Trevor shut down even the battery-powered systems.

  And so, sitting in the darkness, they waited. Caine closed his eyes, imagined what he had come to call the enemy “shift-cruiser” looming large and shooting past, drones preceding and trailing, like a whale attended by a retinue of hyperactive minnows.

  Trevor let a minute pass, in which time Caine’s radiation exposure indicator came on. The classic orange icon blinked urgently at the top center of his visor's heads-up display. He checked the dosimeter: thirty rem. Well within the limits that a healthy body could repair without sickness.

  The red cursor that marked the enemy hull was now well past them. Trevor turned the battery-powered systems back on, then leaned toward the passive sensors, frowning. “That heavy—let’s call it a ‘shift-cruiser’—just deployed a number of retroboosted packages. Dormant drones, probably. But I can’t keep track of them without active sensors. So they’re going to get mixed into the trash with us and we won’t be able to sort them out later. That means we’re not going to be able to undertake sudden vector changes. The drones will be keyed to respond to any new movement other than that explicable by debris collisions.”

  “That eliminates at least seventy percent of our salvage opportunities.” Caine envisioned the fruits of his tedious visual sensor labors being flushed down the toilet.

  “Probably more like eighty percent.”

  Caine sighed and brought the now-familiar passive sensors b
ack online. He glanced at the environmental countdown clock Trevor had started: sixty-eight hours left.

  Give or take a few last breaths.

  Chapter Ten

  Adrift off Barnard’s Star 2 C

  Caine double-checked his survey results and sighed. So our survival depends upon my skill as a trash-scrounging sensor jockey. Great.

  Trevor checked the tactical plot, leaned back, removed his helmet, and powered up the life-support systems. His words rode plumes of mist up into the chill air. “Enemy hull now crowding three gees, passing five light-seconds range—and good riddance.” Trevor swiveled toward Caine. “Time to pick through the junk. What looks best?”

  Caine scanned down the list of possible salvage targets, now fallen off to less than fifty, and compared apparent mass with total thrust required for intercept. “Only one promising target remaining. This one.” He pointed. “It’s a fast mover and near the leading edge of the debris field.”

  “Is that still in range?”

  “Barely. We have twenty-two minutes left to initiate an intercept burn.”

  Trevor looked at the fuel numbers, shook his head. “Damn, that's an expensive intercept, Caine. We'll burn up all of our primary thrust fuel, and we'll have to dip into our station-keeping fuel by ten percent.”

  “I know it's expensive, but take a look at the mass and volume estimates of the other remaining targets.” Caine pointed to the depressing data. None of them were likely to be larger than six meters in their longest dimension. Most of them were probably fairly light as well. “Just hull fragments, I'd guess.”

  Trevor’s misty breath fogged the computer screens in front of him. “Any possibility for new targets, ones we haven’t seen yet?” Without commenting, Caine displayed the statistics on wreckage density. Trevor saw the sharply diminishing values, then nodded soberly. “Looks like this vein is just about tapped out.”