On this sled, with its wide-open design, I saw how twenty different booster engines worked in concert to change our speed and direction as we flew. Before I could come to a stop, engines had to provide counterthrust to stop my forward momentum. A set of thrusters on the bottom of the sled fired forward. As we rose into that gash, several engines burst on and off as I fine-tuned the ascent to avoid jagged edges and debris.
“Stop!” one of the SEALs shouted.
The sled did not stop on a dime, but it stopped quickly enough. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’m picking up security sensors,” the SEAL said.
“Active sensors?” Illych asked.
“That’s what I’m reading,” the SEAL responded. “They’re ancient, and I mean ancient…electronic motion-tracking sensors.”
“This ship is fifty years old,” Illych reminded the other SEAL.
At first I thought their reconnaissance armor contained technology that my combat armor lacked. All six SEALs stood huddled together staring straight up like bird-watchers trying to spot some rare species. Then I saw that they each held some sort of remote in their hands.
“Think we can jam it?” Illych asked.
“No problem,” that first SEAL replied. He held up the remote, something the size of a deck of cards with a row of buttons across it. He pressed one of the buttons. The button lit up red.
“Nice spotting,” Illych said. He turned to me. “You won’t have one of these stealth kits, sir.” He held up his remote for me to see. “Stay with me. As long as you are with one of us, the sensors won’t detect you.”
I nodded. “Is it safe to enter?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, Colonel,” that first SEAL said. “If you have one of these stealth kits, you can skip rope, pass gas, and cook cheeseburgers all at the same time, and the sensors won’t spot you.”
I restarted the sled. Rising through the wreckage, we passed two decks and stopped on the third. We rode past hallways so dark that they seemed to digest the SEALs’ spotlight beams. I did not have a spotlight. I had to rely on the night-for-day lens built into the visor of my helmet. In that blue-white version of the world that the night-for-day lens showed me, I saw flat black spaces instead of corridors. Night-for-day vision let you see in the dark, but it took away your depth perception.
Whatever Porter and his fleet had fired at the battleship took out every system. I saw no signs of working electricity. The artificial gravity was out. The life support was down.
“You seen anybody?” one of the SEALs asked all of us over an open interLink frequency. “I expected dead sailors floating around.”
“Think they evacuated the ship?” Illych asked me.
“Don’t count on it,” I said. “Anybody in this area would have gotten flushed out.” I had seen big ships explode. Once something pierces the hull, the pressure of the ship’s atmosphere flushes bodies, furniture, and other debris out of the gap until the pressure equalizes.
“So you think we’ll find bodies?” Illych asked.
“Sure we will, over a thousand of them if this battleship had a full crew. You and your boys aren’t squeamish?” I asked. I knew they were not, but I could hardly pass as a credible officer if I did not take a cheap shot every now and then.
After landing the sled on the first solid stretch of floor I found, I told the SEALs to divide up.
“What did you have in mind, sir?” Illych asked.
I sent five of the SEALs to the bridge to examine the navigation computer and whatever charts they could find. There was no need to tell them what to do if they found live enemies. These clones had tactics hardwired into their brains. They knew what to do in these situations as instinctively as they knew what to do in a latrine.
“Why don’t you come with me to the engineering section?” I asked Illych. The smart display in my visor read the SEALs’ virtual dog tags, allowing me to tell them apart. I’d had enough trouble telling them apart before they put on their identical armor.
Illych saluted and followed.
Before leaving the Kamehameha, we preloaded the general deck map of a GCF battleship into our helmet computers. The maps were based on fifty-year-old information, but they proved reliable. I had no doubt that the other team would find the navigation computer in the bridge on the top deck by following the map. Whether or not they could remove the data storage from the navigation computer was a different issue. For that matter, I did not know how I would remove the data storage unit from the broadcast computer in the engineering section.
What we saw on this trip was almost as important as what we stole. We had video-recording devices in our helmets. Anything we saw would be stored on a chip. I wanted to explore as much of the ship as possible so that I could create a video record to show Yoshi Yamashiro and his engineers. The Japanese renovated these old ships when they partnered with the Mogats.
I suspected that something had changed since the Separatist alliance fell apart. When the Mogat Fleet attacked Earth, Unified Authority ships had more than enough firepower to sink its ships one-on-one. Now a handful of Mogat ships had routed the Outer Perseus Fleet. What changed?
“What’s in engineering?” Illych asked me as we pulled our way across the deck. With no gravity to hold us down, it was easier to float than walk. We sprang from bulkheads and pulled ourselves along walls.
“The broadcast engine, for openers,” I said.
In truth, I think I had already started to piece some things together. I was a Marine, not a sailor; but I had seen some big space battles. I had a good idea of what happened to ships in those battles, and I had never seen a gash like the one on the belly of this ship.
Illych must have noticed it, too. “Do you have any idea what could have cut through a ship like that?” he asked as he peered down the well of the gash and into space.
“It had to be a laser,” I said. “Did you see the damage on the outside of the ship? The plating around the edges melted. Particle beams blow things apart; lasers cook their way through.”
“But this?” he asked. “It must have been some kind of new laser.”
“From what Admiral Brocius told me, the Outer Perseus Fleet doesn’t have anything new, just hand-me-downs,” I replied. “If you had some miracle laser, would you waste it out here?”
Illych said nothing. He might have nodded in agreement, but that gesture would have been lost inside his helmet. Trying to communicate by nodding or shaking your head was a rookie mistake made by people who had not acclimated to armor. When it came to combat armor, Illych came across as a rookie.
We headed down a corridor. Through the night-for-day lens in my visor, I saw the hallway ahead of us in blue-white and black. It was as smooth and as featureless as a sheath for a sword. The walls, ceiling, and floor were entirely untouched. There had probably been people in this area of the ship when the laser breached the hull. There may once have been bodies, chairs, and equipment around the hall, but all of that would have been flushed out along with the oxygen. The corridor ahead of us was chillingly immaculate.
“If they just had a run-of-the-mill laser, how did they make that hole?” Illych asked.
“Simple,” I said. “Someone on board this ship must have shut down the shields.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Illych and I floated through the ship like superheroes flying through an abandoned city, stomachs down flying parallel to the floor. We passed hatches, some opened and some closed. Nowhere did we see any signs of life.
“Why would somebody lower the shields?” Illych asked. “That would be suicide.”
“I’m only guessing here,” I said. “I think one of their officers committed suicide and took the ship with him. This would not be the first time the Mogats sent a crew on a kamikaze mission.”
When they attacked the Earth Fleet, the Mogats destroyed the Unified Authority’s most powerful ship by broadcasting a cruiser into it. That was classified information. Illych could not have known about it.
“You wouldn’t need a kamikaze crew,” I said, “just one man. Once the guy controlling the shields turns off the power, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the crew believes.”
“But they were winning the battle when this ship went down. They could have had the whole damned fleet on a platter.”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering why the Mogats would purposely lose a battle. A saboteur, maybe. But that did not fit. U.A. Intelligence had not penetrated the Mogat military. For some reason the Mogats had apparently sacrificed the ship and the battle.
We came to a companionway that ran between decks. Peering through a window, I looked into the shaft. “There might be air in here,” I said. Air in the shaft would present a hazard. The pressure from that air would send everything flying out at us the moment we cracked the hatch.
“May I have a try, sir?” Illych asked. I had already come to like working with Adam Boyd clones, these synthetic men created specifically for special operations. They moved carefully and deliberately. They observed their environment and took sure steps.
I pushed away from the hatch.
Illych replaced his particle-beam pistol in his belt and pulled out a tiny laser torch. It was a tool, not a weapon, though you could certainly use it to burn through an enemy in a pinch. Illych aimed his laser at the hatch and bored a pinprick hole. First the red dot appeared, then the beam intensified. The material of the door bubbled and melted away. Had there been oxygen in the stairwell, it would have leaked through the hole. Nothing happened.
“Looks like it’s safe, sir,” Illych said.
“Can you remove the hatch?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” Illych said. He slowly traced across the hinges. A minute later, he gave the hatch a tug, and it drifted out of our way.
Kicking off the walls, we dropped down the open companionway to a lower deck. Haphazard webs of icy black beads shimmered inside the shaft. With a light push, I shattered my way through them, not wanting to see what awaited me on the other side. The webs were frozen blood. Below me, looking more like deformed marble statues than human beings, were the bodies of three dead sailors. I passed over them and entered the vast cavern of the engine room.
Normal battleships needed huge generators to power their shields and weapons systems. Self-broadcasting ships required twice the generator capacity of their general-issue counterparts to power their broadcast engines. The engine room we now entered on this ship was twice the size of a basketball gym.
“Colonel, we may have a problem,” Illych said, interrupting my thoughts.
“What is it, Illych?” I asked.
“I just got a call from the guys on the bridge. One of their stealth kits failed.”
“Did the sensors spot them?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” Illych said. “Whether or not someone was watching is another question. They say they switched to a different kit quickly.”
“I better radio the pilot and have him keep an eye out for visitors,” I said. I did so, then went back to exploring the engine room.
The dead men inside the engine room were not dressed in pressure suits or space gear. When the laser sheared through the hull and the vacuum of space replaced their pressurized atmosphere, the blood pressure in their bodies burst through their skins. Blood vessels, veins, eyes, and skin all popped like balloons. The basic shapes of the men sprawled along the floor looked human enough, but it looked like someone had tried to peel their faces from their heads.
Large flaps of skin and tissue hung open from their heads and hands—the only fully exposed parts of their bodies. They wore jumpsuits with long sleeves. They wore boots. Who knew what I might find under their heavy clothes.
Without oxygen to cause soaking, the beads of their blood had penetrated their uniforms like water pouring through a sieve. The face of the man below me floated off his skull, his nose and mouth frozen but still recognizable. His burst eyes remained in their sockets looking like crushed white grapes. His lipless mouth grinned up at me.
During my days as a Marine, I’d seen worse. So, apparently, had Master Chief Petty Officer Emerson Illych. He quietly surveyed the area.
The engine room itself lay in ruins. Some of the equipment must have exploded before the air ran out. I saw scorch marks on the walls, and a few of the bodies bore signs of incineration. Looking around the room, I saw overturned desks and smashed computers. There was not so much as a working console in the entire vast cavern. Even the emergency lights in this morgue were dead.
Across the floor from me was a dormant broadcast engine of enormous proportions. Each of the brass cylinders stood thirty feet high. They were shaped like bullets but were the size of missiles.
“What happened in here?” I asked.
“Colonel, back here,” Illych called.
He headed toward the back of the engine room. As I followed, I saw an odd flickering glow that shone on the walls and furniture. I almost missed the subtle light changes surveying the room through my night-for-day lens. Switching to my standard, tactical lens, I saw the blue-white glow of an electrical arc. It looked as if someone might have been using a spot welder around the corner.
“What do you think of this?” Illych asked me. “How do you think it survived when everything else got blown up?”
Peering slowly around the corner, my pistol drawn, I saw a second broadcast engine. It did not have the thirty-foot-high brass cylinders of the battleship’s main broadcast engine. It was smaller and tucked away at the back of the ship. The eighteen cylinders in this engine were about eight feet tall and connected together by a web of cables as thick as my arms. Across the top of the cylinders, jagged lines of electricity danced from joint to joint.
“That’s not possible,” I said. It did not make sense that something as delicate and power-consuming as a broadcast engine could be up and running when every other system had failed. Also, when it came to broadcast equipment, I had never heard of any ship carrying spares.
I started toward the engine for a closer look, but Illych pulled me back. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “There may be a shield around it.”
I inched slightly closer but did not see the telltale glimmer of an electrical field. Had I had more time, I might have fired a particle beam at the floor beside the engine, but I did not get that chance.
“Colonel, they’re coming!” the pilot sounded frantic.
“Mogats?” I asked.
“Who the speck cares,” the pilot said. “I’ve got to get out of here!”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“They just broadcasted in. I picked up the anomaly.”
“I’m going to need a couple of minutes…”
The pilot interrupted me. “I don’t have minutes! I don’t have seconds!”
“Everybody back to the sled!” I called over an open frequency so that all of the SEALs would hear me. I pushed off against a railing and bounded back toward the companionway.
“Colonel, what is it?” Illych asked, sounding impossibly calm.
“Mogats,” I said. I had already flown half the distance back to the stairs.
“In the ship?” Illych asked. These Special Operations clones were small, but they had muscles like steel cables. He kicked off a wall hard enough to catch up to me.
“Outside,” I said. “The pilot picked them up on radar.”
“What’s happening out there?” I asked the pilot.
“Two ships coming in quick,” the pilot said. “I can’t wait for you. I need…”
“You can’t outrun them,” I said. “Find someplace to hide and play dead.”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he screamed.
“You can’t…” But the connection was already broken.
I tried hailing the explorer twice more, but knew I would not get through.
“Shit,�
�� I said.
“Sir?” Illych asked.
“We just lost our specking ride,” I said.
On our way to the engine room, Illych and I passed a room with a broad window looking out into space. I headed toward the room and told Illych to tell his SEALs to join us. There was no reason to head for the space sled anymore; our explorer was gone.
“Regroup on my mark,” Illych told his men over an open band. His men responded without comment.
I went to the glass wall and stared out, not knowing what I hoped to find. In the back of my mind, I guess I expected to see the smoldering wreckage of the explorer. It was nowhere to be found, of course. In the seconds that I spoke with the pilot, he might have flown ten thousand miles.
“Do you see anything out there, sir?” Illych asked.
I did. Just for a moment I saw a black shadow that got between our ship and the stars. It moved quickly, and I lost track of it, but it was out there. I imagined that ship, big and unstoppable, knocking the carcasses of dead fighters out of the way with its shields.
“How the speck can they know that we’re here?” I asked.
I voiced the question out loud, but it was mostly directed at me. The signal from the security sensors should not have traveled faster than the speed of light. Could it even have traveled 100 million miles in the few moments we had been on board the ship? Yet the Mogat ships had broadcast in. Broadcasted in! That meant that they had come from a long way away. They would have had to have been close to receive the signal, but they should not have needed to broadcast in if they were close enough to receive it. How far could they go and still hear their burglar alarm?
My mind flashed on the working broadcast engine we’d seen in the engineering section. “There is no way that broadcast engine could have survived. The room is a disaster,” I said out loud, even though I was only thinking to myself.
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