by David Adams
“Dispatch damage control teams to that section,” was Iraj’s command, and Jiang nodded and began speaking into her headset.
Liao watched on the radar screen as their most recent missiles smashed into their targets. Fortunately, it seemed to have an effect; most of the energy barrage withered and slowed almost to a crawl, and all she could see on the radar screen was a confusing spray of debris. Further, the large cloud of wreckage slowly spreading out from the station seemed to be playing havoc with whatever the Toralii Alliance used for guidance... their aim worsened considerably. Coupled with the reduced rate of fire, the barrages hitting the ship almost completely stopped.
Dao’s shout cut over the chatter. “Captain! Multiple radar contacts – ships are jumping in all over the system. I count... seven, no, eight warships appearing at nearby Lagrange points more could be beyond the range of our radar… Make that nine!”
Nine was too many. Way too many. They couldn’t jump into the point that the Beijing occupied, they hoped, but Liao didn’t want to take that chance.
“We’ve done enough. Recall the strike fighters,” she ordered, “and power up the jump drive. Prepare the ship to return to the Sol system. Mister Hsin, signal the Tehran... message as follows: ‘Mission complete. Withdrawing to rendezvous.’”
“Aye aye, Captain!” Hsin went to work.
Summer called over the din. “Jump drive charged, Captain. Ready to cut artificial gravity on your mark!”
Liao nodded. “Thank you, Rowe, but we’re still waiting on our strike fighters!” She pulled up the ship’s short-range communications handset and spun it to the strike craft’s communications frequency. She pressed the talk key.
“Attention all strike craft, this is Beijing actual; all birds return to the ship immediately. Mission complete... We are leaving.”
She heard Alex’s voice, charged with adrenaline and energy, call back at her. “Confirmed, Beijing, we are already RTB!”
Melissa grabbed the console, holding herself and preparing for the inevitable wave of nausea that would accompany the lack of gravity. “Mister Iraj?”
The Iranian man appeared beside her, key in hand. “Ready, Captain!”
There was a tense series of moments as the surviving Toralii ships opened up on them. The Beijing weathered wave after wave of enemy fire as they waited for their strike craft to return. Liao saw another wave of their missiles strike the giant station and, judging from what she saw on Dao’s radar screen, a sudden loss of mass. Their thermal cameras showed the bright stars of secondary explosions within the station and, based on the thin sliver of a crack, the station slowly breaking in half. The rest of that station’s ships floundered and broke apart as the blast waves from nuclear detonations struck them again and again.
Liao’s short-range communications handset crackled to life. “This is Jazz, all strike craft recovered!”
Melissa gave Dao a meaningful nod and, with the flick of a switch, the gravity disengaged again. Liao’s black hair floated around her face as both officers inserted their keys, giving them a twist.
The steady rain of fire hitting the Beijing immediately ceased. There was, once again, the strange silence as nobody knew what to expect.
“Jump complete, Captain,” came Ling’s report. Liao gave him a curt nod, although she couldn’t hold back a fierce grin, either.
“Excellent. Restore gravity, Mister Ling.” Only moments later, Liao’s feet slowly began drifting back to the metal deck as gravity was gradually restored. She used the jump console to steady herself, breathing an audible sigh of relief as her toes touched the deck.
“Well done, everyone. Mission complete. Mister Rowe, contact Engineering and get a damage report. I want to know how badly my ship got bruised...”
“A little, but not nearly as bad as they did,” Summer observed, to low chuckles all around the room. “We smashed them! It was like watching the yanks get pummelled by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour. They were completely unprepared and we kicked their asses!” … and then, with an afterthought, “... Captain.”
Liao raised an eyebrow at that comment, which she thought was a very strange but accurate assessment of the situation. “Agreed, somewhat, but remember that the Japanese ultimately lost that war.” She let herself mull over the sobering words for a moment before letting her fierce grin return. “...So next time, try to compare us to the winners, will you?”
Turning to face the rest of the crew she cleared her throat. “But yes, a successful raid.” She shook her head, half with disbelief, half with pride. “Masterfully done, all... You’ve earned your pay today. Drinks are on me. Mister Ling, please contact the Tehran and offer our congratulations to Captain James Grégoire.”
There was a pause before Ling answered. His voice was quiet... and worried. “Uhh - Captain Liao?”
“Yes, Mister Ling?”
“...There’s no sign of the Tehran on our radar, Captain. They haven’t jumped back yet.”
Commander Iraj frowned in confusion, glancing around the room for confirmation. “That’s... odd. The two ships were supposed to jump back together... did they mis-jump? Are you sure they haven’t ended up at a different Lagrange point? ”
“Very sure, Commander, at least none within our radar range. It’ll take us some time to check all of the points in the system, however... speed of light and all.”
Liao ordered the radar on a long range sweep, biting on her lower lip as the minutes ticked by. Lieutenant Dao, with her watching over his shoulder, began checking the nearby Lagrange points, especially the L2 point where the Tehran was scheduled to appear.
But it did not.
Fifteen minutes later, with no sign of James or his vessel, Liao decided that she had given them enough time. “Rowe? We’ve waited long enough... We’re going in after them. Prepare the ship for jump. All hands return to general quarters.”
There was a nervous shuffle from the red-headed woman. “Wait... We’re going to jump back there?”
Liao nodded, folding her arms in front of her. “That’s correct. The Tehran was supposed to jump back with us; the fact that they have not after quarter of an hour shows that they require assistance, assistance I plan to provide.”
Kamal Iraj appeared by her side, dropping his voice so only she could hear. “Captain… we don’t know the full situation in the Hades system at the moment, but one thing we do know is that we stirred up the hornet’s nest pretty good there before we jumped out. If we jump back there now, well… this time they’ll be ready for us. There’ll be another six minute delay before we can jump out again if we need to, and given how many ships were jumping in there as we were leaving, I’m not sure we could hold out that long...”
Kamal paused for effect. “Think this through, Captain... We can’t go back. All we can do is wait for the Tehran to make their way back on their own.”
Liao fixed her gaze upon the Arabic man, turning to squarely face her first officer, following Kamal’s lead and keeping her voice quiet. “I’m not sure I made myself clear,” she whispered. “The Tehran represents fully one third of the TFR’s naval assets. Although we were sustaining significant fire from the station before we disabled it, the jump point we attacked should be clear. At the very least, we can and should perform a reconnaissance-in-force to assess the situation.”
‘One third of the TFR’s naval assets...’ it was with a sudden wave of anger, shame and regret that she realized that Commander Sheng had said the exact same words, back during the battle of Jupiter, to try and convince her not to attack the Toralii scout - words she had dismissed him from her ship for. Now here she was saying the exact same thing... and all for the wrong reasons.
Kamal considered for a moment, his face screwing up in thought. Liao opened her mouth to take back what she had said, but the Arabic man spoke first.
“...Actually, I agree.”
That took Liao by surprise. She had sensed his regret and was just about to change her mind, retract her previous statement
and agree to settle down to wait, but... apparently Kamal had come around to her line of thinking.
Doubt gnawed at her for a moment, Liao’s hands gently folding in front of her. “Uhh... You’re not just saying that because I ended up throwing the last first officer who questioned my orders into the brig, then subsequently shot him… are you?”
Kamal gave a low chuckle, shaking his head. “Captain, I... I know James means a lot to you, but that fact alone couldn’t sway me to change my mind. I genuinely think we should assist the Tehran if we can, or at least find out what’s going on and why they can’t jump back.”
Still mildly taken aback by Kamal’s agreement, she nodded. Iraj turned away from her, to the rest of the Operations crew, clearing his throat.
“Rowe, prepare the ship for jump.”
Summer looked uneasy, but nodded. “Alright, then. Making jump preparations... Prepare for stage one.”
She and the rest of the Operations crew worked for a time, stepping through the now familiar routine. Although readying the ship for a jump once its jump drive was charged only took a few minutes, to Liao those minutes seemed to crawl by.
Soon enough she felt the now familiar lurch as the artificial gravity was switched off, her hair floating around her head as she and Kamal once again inserted their dual keys, twisting them to the right.
However, this time, the ship’s systems immediately began screaming at them; dozens of alarms squealing and crying at once. Liao snapped her head around to Summer’s console.
“What the- Report! Report!”
Summer thumped her fist against the console. “Jump failed, Captain! There’s a gravimetric disturbance at the jump site. Possibly another ship, possibly a gravity mine... The jump drive’s gone into safe mode to prevent melting itself into slag and ripping the ship to pieces. We’re still in the Sol system.”
“Safe mode?” Liao echoed Summer’s comment incredulously, her tone laced with confusion. As she spoke the artificial gravity slowly came back, the Operations crew gradually floating back down to the metal of the deck. “What the hell does that mean?”
Summer gave another of her trademark derisive snorts, much to Liao’s chagrin. “It means,” she answered, “that instead of tearing us apart by jumping into an occupied location, the system cancelled the jump. It’s blown out its capacitors and massively overheated, however, so we won’t be able to jump for some time.”
Liao gripped her command console so tightly her fingers hurt. “How long is ‘some time’, Rowe? Specifics, please.”
The redhead shrugged helplessly. “A few hours, best case scenario... more realistically, half a day. We’ll have to wait until the jump drive cools and then we can begin the work, which is pretty laborious in and of itself, and-”
“No. Unacceptable. I need that jump drive now, Rowe, so we can try again – so we can jump to another jump point within the Hades system and then rally with the Tehran at sub-light-“
Summer gave a barking laugh. “I’m sorry reality is unacceptable, Captain, but this isn’t some fucking science fiction story where you can just invert the polarity and fix something... And I’m not Montgomery-fucking-Scott. The jump drive is sitting pretty at nearly six hundred degrees Celsius, and it’ll take hours to radiate all that heat out. Now, normally, changing the capacitors takes thirty seconds each... and there are twelve, so six minutes to change. However, we’ll have to shut down the drive completely to try and get that heat away from the core as fast as possible, so we’ll be approaching this from a cold start. Takes five minutes per unit, so right on an hour, and then we have to go through the jump preparation all over again…”
Liao felt helpless anger building up within her. She turned to Hsin, the Communications officer. “Signal the TFR Sydney. I want to speak to Captain Knight – tell him to charge his jump drive. We’re going to send the Sydney in as a rescue mission. Their jump drive should still be functional and-“
“-has been plagued with problems since her launch, Captain…” Kamal stepped up to her again, once again keeping his voice low. “…as has most of her systems. The whole reason we’re here is because they’re not combat ready, remember? Besides... what’s to say that they won’t just encounter the same problem and blow out their jump drive too?”
The man put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Captain. You know there’s nothing we can do but wait now.”
Melissa was quiet for a moment, and then she just gave a small nod.
*****
Later
The minutes turned to hours. Fleet Command had requested a debriefing; Liao had Mister Hsin send through a terse message that, since the Tehran had not yet returned, the operation was not complete so no debriefing could take place. Fleet Command had sent back a response but Liao had not bothered to read it. She could guess what they would say anyway.
Liao did not leave the Operations room except for a brief excursion to the head. There, once away from prying eyes and the demanding gazes of her crew, she resisted – somehow – the urge to vomit all over her shoes. She felt nausea come in waves, as though her stomach were being punched and kicked from the inside. She knew it was stress - worry for the missing ship, worry for its missing Captain. Ghostly images, fears both rational and irrational, danced through her head, each more brutal and horrid than the last.
She could not shake the mental image of the Tehran floating in space, her back broken in two, her hull smashed open like an egg under a mallet... And just like an egg the white atmosphere would pour into the void, followed soon after by the soundless stream of human yoke, sucked out into space to asphyxiate and die. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the faces of James’ crew facing an ignoble death in the orbit of a dying star millions of light years away from their homes and friends with nobody to mourn them. The families of the crew would have no graves to visit or bodies to bury, their frozen loved ones floating forever through the frigid ink-black emptiness, until pulled in by the tiny but inexorable pull of the dead star’s gravity well and-
The thought was too much for her. She had skipped dinner, so Liao was suddenly reduced to dry heaving over the steel toilet bowl, coughing up saliva and bile. Soon the hacking and wrenching was punctuated with quiet sobs. The sounds were her only companion as her grief finally made itself known.
They had to go back.
Liao used the hand towels available in the bathroom to clean herself up, glad that there appeared to be no residue on her uniform aside from a few spots which she quickly cleaned up with a dry hand towel. She washed her hands several times, gulped down mouthfuls of freezing cold water, touched up the small amount of make-up she was wearing in the small mirror, and then stepped back out to confront the crew.
She half expected Iraj or Jiang to be waiting outside the head for her with another of their endless reports, but it seemed as though fate was prepared to grant her at least one small mercy this time. Her walk back to Operations was solitary, although when she arrived she found that the room was a hive of activity.
“Mister Iraj, status report.”
Iraj turned to face her. “Captain, we just detected a jump-in at the L2 Lagrange point.”
A jump in! Melissa’s heart leaped, eyes widening. “Good news or bad? Is it our people?”
Iraj looked like he desperately wanted to give good news, but instead gestured to Hsin. “Communications is trying to raise the ship, Captain, but we haven’t heard a reply to our hails on any frequency. That said... they haven’t made any aggressive moves, nor have they made any transmissions of their own that we can detect. Yet.”
Liao realized she’d been holding her breath. She slowly let it out, closing her eyes a moment and steadying herself, then opening them again. “So... a little from column A, a little from column B.”
“That pretty much sums it up, yes.”
Melissa crossed the floor of the Operations room, moving over to the Communications console. The Chinese woman leaned over Hsin’s shoulder and examined his readings.
“What about signals in other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum? Anything on thermals?”
Hsin craned his neck, glancing over his shoulder to his Captain. “Too far away to see anything of interest on thermals, Captain… Way out of range to get anything more than a blob. The resolution on these things just isn’t as high as our radar...”
Lieutenant Dao called over to Liao. “Captain – we’re detecting an active radar signal from the unidentified vessel. They appear to be targeting us... intermittently.”
Liao clenched her fists. This was strange behaviour for a friendly ship, but it might be something the Toralii would do if they were trying to paint them as a target...
Something nagged at her, though.
“Intermittently?”
“Yes ma’am. On and off, then on again, then off… but not a steady pulse like a sweep would be. Maybe they’re damaged.”
Liao frowned. She moved over to Dao’s console, taking in the readings from the passive sensors he was using to observe the unknown ship’s signal. “That doesn’t make any sense. Normally, attempts to scan for targeting information or obtain range should be regular and rhythmic…” She pointed to the screen. “...This is anything but.”
Summer slipped her way over to Dao’s console. “Lemme see.” Liao, unable to learn anything more, stepped aside and let the red-headed woman take a look.
“There’s a pattern,” Rowe announced almost instantly, “with the radar pulses. It’s not intermittent. Or rather... it is, but it’s not random... it’s repeating. See that? Long, short, short, long...”
Liao’s eyes widened. “It’s Morse code!” She snatched up a notepad and pencil, scribbling down the signal.
When it was almost done, she dropped the writing device with a small gasp. She knew the word before it was even finished.
P-E-A-R-L-S