Chain of Command

by Frank Chadwick

  “Yeah, but the closest gas station’s at Mogo, about eight hundred million kilometers from here, and I don’t know how many times they’re going to pull off these little raids before the big show. Don’t want to empty our magazines, either. What have we got—four missiles out there? Secure from firing. Maybe Petersburg is having some luck.”

  “Captain, additional bogie,” Chief Burns reported from Tac Two, his voice sounding surprised and angry. “Tagged Bandit Three. Jump emergence signature, bearing five degrees relative, angle on the bow one twelve, range twenty-two thousand, closing speed fifty-four kilometers per second.”

  “Fifty-four klicks? He’s not on a cargo run!” Filipenko said.

  “Captain,” Chief Gambara said from his left, “I have Commodore Bonaventure on tight beam for you,”

  Sam ignored her for a moment. “Burns, stay on long-range sensor scan. Keep your eyes open for more bandits showing up. Lee, align the boat on the bandit. Close enough is good enough for a coil gun shot.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Immediately the lateral acceleration klaxon sounded and seconds later the ACTs kicked in, pivoting the boat to face the rapidly closing uBakai ship.

  Sam updated his tactical display and saw the course track for the new contact. It would pass on the opposite side of K’tok from the other two cruisers and, due to the happenstance of orbital positions, only Puebla would have a shot at it. All the other boats would have the mass of K’tok between them and the target until it was probably too late to fire. At that speed, once it was past K’tok, no missile they had could catch it.

  Sam glanced to his right and saw Filipenko staring intently at him, the way she so often stared at others, and he finally understood. She had grown up on a world which reached out and snatched people away without warning, for the flimsiest of reasons, and so whenever she saw someone, she could never be certain it was not the last time she ever would. She was memorizing how he looked, just in case. Then she looked back at her workstation display.

  “Captain, I have a standard block four in the tube and one in each of the two ready racks.”

  “Sir, Commodore Bonaventure is insistent,” Gambara said.

  “Okay, patch him through.”

  Bitka, what’s going on over there? We just got the relay feed.

  “We have a single bandit closing rapidly. I am engaging.”

  Another one? That’s what Wu on Petersburg said but—”

  “Sir, can’t talk now, he’s right on top of us. Puebla out.”

  Sam cut the connection.

  “Multiple contacts!” Burns reported.

  “More ships?” Sam looked at his display but the contacts had appeared around the original uBakai ship.

  “No, sir. He’s firing but . . . damn, how many missiles did he just unload? Let me . . . twenty missiles, all at once! How did he do that?”

  Sam pinged Menzies.

  Yes, sir.

  “Menzies. Are you still in the missile room?”

  Yes, sir.

  “Still got a sunflower ready?”

  Yes sir. Standard Block Four’s in the tube. You want me to swap one out?

  “Affirmative. And get ready to load another sunflower right behind it.”

  Sam cut the connection and looked back at his holodisplay. The uBakai missiles showed hot—still accelerating. As near as Sam could tell they had under three minutes before they were within detonation range.

  The bridge hatch opened and Sensor Tech Second Elise Delacroix glided in and quickly strapped herself into Tac Four and Chief Mohana Barghava slid into Maneuvering Two beside Lee.

  “Burns, stay on sensors,” Filipenko ordered. “Delacroix, take point defense.”

  “Boat aligned on target,” Lee called out.

  “I show a sunflower ready in the tube,” Filipenko said.

  “Fire.”

  Filipenko hit the firing button and Sam again felt the slight shudder as the missile left the coil gun’s muzzle.

  “Now we’ll see if this thing works as advertized.” Sam brought up his weapon system summary. They were down to six operational point defense laser mounts, but at least all four forward mounts were active.

  “Delacroix, heads up,” he said. “Sunflower will only take out some of those missiles, fifteen if everything works right.”

  Delacroix looked back over her shoulder at him and Sam could tell what she was thinking: It better work. No kidding. Twenty missiles coming at one target was nuts.

  Sam checked the display again. The bandit was still coming. If this was some ship that only carried twenty missiles and fired them all at once, Sam figured he’d be breaking off by now. He’d want to get as far away from retaliation as possible, since he couldn’t accomplish anything more by hanging around. But he was hanging around, so he had more missiles.

  “Sunflower just shed its nosecone,” Filipenko reported. “It’s looking for targets . . . seeing lots of targets . . . locked on fifteen targets. We’re coming up on twenty seconds to the bandit missiles being within detonation range of us.”

  Sam took a deep breath but resisted the temptation to cross his fingers.

  “Ms Filipenko, light ‘em up.”

  His display immediately turned white in the space ahead of them, and all data behind that white flare disappeared from his screen. The sunflower’s nuclear warhead had detonated and the burst of radiation, superheated plasma, and fine debris temporarily blocked the sensor view ahead. They had no way of knowing how many, if any, of the uBakai missiles had been neutralized and wouldn’t until the remainder came through that wall of dissipating interference.

  Nor could the uBakai missiles “see” Puebla. They couldn’t even ditch their nosecones and start seeking a target until they were through the debris cloud, not without risking high velocity debris damaging their target acquisition gear. The uBakai cruiser was probably still coming on, but he couldn’t see Puebla or know what it was doing. The uBakai captain might assume Puebla would behave the way an uBakai cruiser would, because that was what they would be used to exercising against.

  But Puebla had different capabilities than uBakai cruisers: more missiles, lower launch rate, better multitargeting capabilities, and a point defense laser suite with much more punch.

  Tenth Principle of Naval Leadership: Employ your command in accordance with its capabilities.

  “Maneuvering: sound the acceleration klaxon and then give me a full burn on both the direct fusion and MPD thrusters.”

  Lee turned and looked at him, eyebrows high in surprise, but her hand already was reaching for the acceleration warning.

  “Filipenko, fire that second sunflower, then load a conventional block four.”

  Sam felt Puebla shudder as the sunflower fired, then the klaxon sounded and a few seconds later the main drives kicked in followed by the MPD thrusters. The acceleration quickly built to two gees, pushing Sam and the others back into their acceleration rigs, pressing their eyeballs back into their sockets. It hurt but they could take this; all of them had taken much more in training.

  “Lee, cut the MPDs after one minute,” Sam said through clenched teeth. They only had about two minutes worth of full power for the MPD thrusters in the power ring, and they had to save some to juice the lasers and coil gun.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Beside him, Filipenko grunted.

  “Good plan, sir,” she said.

  Sam wondered if she’d figured it out or was just being sarcastic. Or maybe both.

  The math was simple, except Sam had to do it in his head, fast, and under two gee acceleration. The sunflower had exploded after only about a ninety-second flight time. At six kilometers per second, that put it about five hundred klicks out from Puebla at detonation. The uBakai missiles had been right at five thousand kilometer range when the sunflower fired. They were coming in at a closing velocity between sixty and seventy kilometers a second.

  That meant seventy seconds from detonation to when any surviving missiles crosse
d the debris cloud. Maybe another couple seconds to clear their nosecones off and then another couple seconds to acquire Puebla and point their laser rods. Seventy-five seconds total, but they should have five seconds after the missiles broke through the debris cloud, but before the missiles could fire, for Puebla’s point defense lasers to take them out. They’d be firing at under five hundred klicks, so there would be effectively no beam dispersion. Every hit would be a kill. Unless the sunflower hadn’t dented the missile package, this should work. Then there was the next step.

  Sam had wasted at least ten seconds before the drives kicked in. As he thought this, he felt the acceleration drop to about a gee and a half as Lee cut the MPDs. One minute gone, ten seconds left. Concentrate.

  One minute at two gees put their velocity up a kilometer a second. They’d add another half-kilometer per second to their velocity for every minute of one-gee acceleration. Assuming they survived the missiles, they’d hit the debris cloud at about the five-minute mark from when they started accelerating, and their velocity would be about three kilometers per second. But before then that uBakai cruiser would come barreling through in the other direction at over fifty kilometers a second.

  “Getting target echoes from the cloud,” Burns reported. “Here come their missiles!”

  Sam stopped thinking and watched his display: six intact targets. Sunflower had actually taken out fourteen out of fifteen of its targets. ATITEP engaged and fired, fired again as insurance, fired at large fragments of the original targets and some of the larger debris chunks emerging with them. Then it ceased firing and went back into standby.

  “I’ll be damned,” Joe Burns said quietly, “it worked. It really worked!”

  “We’re not done yet, Chief. We’re about four minutes from crossing the debris cloud, little less. Filipenko, our second sunflower is about to penetrate the field and we’ll lose direct control. Put it on auto-seek, with a one-second delay after it loses radio contact with us. Then poop out as many regular block fours as you can in the next minute. That cruiser’s going to come through that field before we get to it, and we are going to mess him up.

  “Gambara, burst transmit our bridge log to Cha-cha and get me a tight bean to the Commodore.”

  “Already open, sir. He’s been waiting.”

  Bitka, what’s going on?

  “I’ve got maybe a minute, sir, so just listen. If we get splashed, you’ll be able to figure out what I’ve done so far from the bridge recordings. But I’ve figured out how to beat these sons of bitches. We use the sunflowers to keep their missiles off us and blind them with the hot debris cloud. We use our regular Block Fours to do whatever damage they can, but also to distract their point defense batteries. But we get our boats in as close as we can and gut them with our own point-defense lasers.”

  Jesús, Bitka, you’re loco, but it’s the kind of crazy I think I like. We’ve got our hands full here, but if we’re still alive ten minutes from now, we’ll back you up. Give ‘em hell, ‘Bow-on!’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  6 January 2134

  (later the same day) (sixteenth day in K’tok orbit)

  The fight had been short and violent. A fire lance hit aft of frame seventy-four cut power and communication between engineering and the rest of Puebla, plunging the forward hull spaces into darkness. Emergency lighting came up quickly, damage control had been able to route energy from the forward power coil to the sensors and bow point-defense lasers, and with almost the last of their stored power they blew the enemy cruiser open and turned its power systems into rapidly cooling twisted metal.

  “Confirm enemy status,” Sam said.

  “He’s dead,” Chief Burns answered. “Outgassing, no active sensors or comms, engineering spaces are slagged.”

  “Boat status, what happened aft?”

  “I have pressure in the boat forward of frame seventy-nine, sir,” the engineering tech answered, “I don’t show anything on my panel aft of there.”

  For a moment Sam’s heart fluttered. Had they lost the entire engineering section? But then the tech put his hand to his ear and nodded.

  “Sir, Lieutenant Hennessey’s on commlink. She confirms engineering is operational. There’s just a bad data and power break between seventy-seven and seventy-nine. Damage control is working on it.”

  “Filipenko, you have the boat,” Sam said. “I’m going aft to find out how bad it is.”

  Minutes later Sam stood aside as a damage-control party, led by Lieutenant Carlos Sung, pushed three large tool containers ahead of them.

  “I thought the damage was aft, Mister Sung.”

  Sung grabbed a stanchion to arrest his glide and waved the detail to keep going.

  “Yes, sir. Main damage appears to be just forward of frame seventy-nine. I left a party there under Ensign Robinette to re-rig the power and data feeds. I’m going to make sure the forward power ring’s nominal and see why number four laser has gone off line.”

  “Okay, get to it. I’ll check on Robinette.”

  Sam pushed back toward engineering, wondering why Robinette was there instead of his battle station in the auxiliary bridge. He slipped though the open hatch at frame seventy-seven and took in the scene with a glance: bulkhead sealed at seventy-nine, glaring work lamps secured to the passage walls, three A-gangers floating near the dorsal corner of the access tunnel with two access plates already removed and fibre circuitry exposed, sparks flying from the line fuser, Ensign Robinette floating a yard back and watching the work.

  “What’s the situation, Ensign?”

  He turned and surprise showed on his face.

  “Captain! Um . . . it looks like that fire lance hit tore right through the starboard hull and out the port side, but off center. It blew out a lot of hydrogen tankage and cut the main power and data feeds in the armored conduit that runs just dorsal of the transit tube. But we really ducked a bullet, sir. I mean, fifteen meters forward it would have taken out both missile rooms and the aft power ring. Fifteen meters aft it would have taken out the whole forward engineering spaces. Ten meters ventral and we wouldn’t have a coil gun. As it is, all we have to do—”

  Sam didn’t hear the explosion, didn’t feel it slam him against the forward bulkhead, didn’t fee the brief searing flames before his helmet faceplate automatically snapped shut. He saw the fire around him, felt someone pulling him, then pushing him, felt himself float and the fire fade away, and then everything faded away.

  He came to in the the wardroom and found himself restrained in a zero gee harness. As soon as he called out, the medtech Tamblinson pushed over, released the restraints, and ran him through the short form concussion protocol. As he answered the questions, he saw four grey composite body bags tethered and floating at the far end of the compartment.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Two. Who are those?”

  “What’s the square root of nineteen?”

  “I have no idea. Something between four and five. Who’s in those body bags?”

  Tamblinson drifted back slightly and watched Sam for a reaction. “Herrera, Norquist, Simms, and Robinette. Do you remember what happened?”

  Robinette. For a moment the lights seemed to dim in the wardroom.

  “Not really. Little bit. There was an explosion, right?”

  “Captain, are you okay?” he heard, and he saw Lieutenant Carlos Sung at the open hatch. He waved him over.

  “Tell me what happened, Lieutenant.”

  Sung glanced at the floating body bags and then pushed gently off toward Sam. Sung was a big man, big-handed with broad fingers and rough knuckles, flat-faced with broad, coarse features and right then terribly sad eyes. He stopped and then sighed.

  “Secondary explosion—an undetected O2 leak contaminating the hydrogen tank right overhead. It blew you forward through the open hatch. Everyone else in the compartment died.”

  Sam looked at the body bags and he swallowed hot spit two or three times, fighting back the ur
ge to vomit.

  “Why?” It came out harsher than he intended.

  “Mister Robinette used to be A-gang, sir,” Sung said quickly, “and he was always good with electronics. We didn’t know what else was broke-dick up forward so I figured—”

  Sam held up his hand to cut him off.

  “Not why did you turn the party over to him. Why was he even there?”

  “He said the XO sent him back to help. Tell you the truth, sir, I think he volunteered. He doesn’t . . . didn’t like hanging around Mister Goldjune very much.”

  Sam closed his eyes and felt the competing waves of anger and sorrow wash through him.

  “Okay, explain what happened.”

  “Well, sir, at first it looked like all the damage was external to the access tunnel, so we got to work fixing the power and data breaks. Like I said, there must have been an undetected O2 leak into the hydrogen tanks. Pressure was nominal in the boat so it must have been from a compressed oxygen storage tank. Even that should have shown up on our boards but a lot of our low-level system monitors were still off-line. Anyway, they got cutting and all of a sudden that tank above you blew. It must have been like a blow torch into the compartment, all that oxygen.”

  “Their shipsuits couldn’t take it?” Sam asked.

  “The shrapnel from the explosion compromised their suits. We think the three ratings died pretty much instantly. Mister Robinette got his helmet closed, but like I said his suit was compromised too. Don’t know why yours wasn’t.”

  “Robinette was in the way, must have stopped most of the fragments himself. Go on.”

  “We found him by the emergency bulkhead. All the power was out forward so the automatic bulkheads didn’t close, but there was still pressure in the access tunnel. That fire could have kept going all the way forward. He hit the manual hydraulic backup and got the bulkhead at frame seventy-seven sealed before he died. Maybe saved the boat, sir.”

  The Jughead saved the boat.

  Sam closed his eyes for a moment. “He saved me too. I didn’t get blown through the hatch. I hit the bulkhead, stunned me. Somebody pushed me through. Must have been him.”