Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology

by Honor Raconteur

  The first unconscious form in the smoke-laden shadows that Vladimir found was Sergeant Rimcus Vanags, an engineering technician from Barkava, Latvia. The sergeant was wedged between two consoles, a nasty looking laceration across his forehead and an even worse looking gash on his upper right thigh. A pool of blood was already collecting near the man’s injured leg.

  Vladimir tucked his broken arm up tight against his chest and pulled himself to Vanags.

  “Sir? Can I help you?” asked a feminine voice.

  The ship’s communications officer, Junior Lt. Lena Dabrowski, with first aid kit in hand, appeared nearby in the dim light.

  Vladimir nodded and waved her over. “We need a pressure dressing on Vanags’ leg, before he bleeds to death. Then we’ll need to do something about his head wound.” He glanced at the lieutenant as she tore open a plastic bag and handed him a compress. “What about you? Are you hurt anywhere?”

  “Just some bruises, sir,” she responded with a tight smile before eyeing his arm. “Your arm, sir, is it…?”

  “It is. But it isn’t life-threatening. Help me tear his pants leg open.”

  Instead, she produced a pair of scissors from the kit, which he used to cut open the fabric around the wound.

  “Sir? What happened?” Dabrowski asked, a trace of shrillness in her voice. “I mean, what exploded, sir?”

  “We don’t know yet, Lieutenant,” Vladimir answered calmly as he applied the compress. “I’ll hold this tight while you wrap it.” He paused, watching her work. “That’s it, as tight as you can get it. Good. Now snap those pins closed.”

  “Sir, I recommend that you let a medic take care of that arm,” Dabrowski gently suggested. “Let Col. Aptekar assume temporary command…”

  Vladimir shook his head sadly, fighting back a surge of grief. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Fedosia didn’t make it.”

  Dabrowski gasped, her eyes widening in horror as she glanced over in the direction of the command chairs. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know.”

  He faked a confident smile. “We’ll get through this, Lieutenant. Worse things than this have happened to me. Col. Opinchuk will be here with help soon. We’ll figure everything out as soon as we get the wounded taken care of. Now, we need a dressing for Sgt. Vanags’ head. You hold his head still while I clean the wound.”

  As they worked, Vladimir couldn’t stop thinking about the explosion. So far, none of the department heads had reported in yet. That was not a good sign. Once again, he wondered how much death and destruction had been done by the explosion. As soon as help from Opinchuk arrived, he needed to get a handle on this whole mess, determine the extent of the casualties and damage, and then make some decisions.

  His PHUD imager picked that moment to light up, the likeness showing Major General Bogdon Kandinsky nervously biting one lip. The general was the Flight Center Control Director for this mission and was still obviously sitting at his station in the Center in Elista, Russia.

  “Col. Ushakov, we’ve been trying to reach you!” the general declared sharply. “Status report! What happened? Why has the telemetry and video from your ship stopped? Col. Opinchuk reports that there was an explosion on board the Johann Kruzenshtern and that he’s scrambling teams to assist you!” The general blinked and peered harder, eyes narrowed at Vladimir’s face. “Why is it so dark there? Is that blood on your face?”

  Vladimir squashed an urge to shout obscenities at the man. The general was, after all, a superior officer, even if he was also a micro-manager and a bit of a thick-headed clod.

  “General Kandinsky, if you please! We’re a bit busy at the moment. We’ve got a lot of injured people to take care of! I’ll get back to you with a full report as soon as I can!”

  “But what happened?!” Kandinsky insisted on knowing. “The Kremlin is demanding answers, and right now! The world press is having a conniption fit! We need to know, chert poberi! Was it the drive that failed?”

  Vladimir just couldn’t help himself, his frustrations building past the boiling point. “General, I don’t know yet what happened! I can’t even tell you how many dead we have here, sir! I’ll get back to you!” And with a mental command, he snapped closed the comm channel.

  Less than ten minutes later, the first of a dozen space-suited figures, their helmets removed, entered the engine bay from one of the side corridors leading toward the external airlocks. Vladimir recognized Opinchuk in front of the group as well as other members of the Savitskaya’s crew.

  Excellent. Vladimir gave Lt. Dabrowski a quick nod before turning and pushing off from the archway, floating slowly in Opinchuk’s direction.

  The other man was gawking at all the flotsam drifting around the engine bay, the grip of his right hand on the arm of the crewman next to him.

  “Welcome to the party, Colonel,” Vladimir greeted him with a grim smile.

  Opinchuk’s eyes widened further. “Sir! You’re hurt! Medic, over here….”

  But Vladimir waved him off. “Triage, Colonel. There are others far more injured than myself. I’ll wait my turn. Get your team over there, near gen-jector housing #5. There are several injured people over there.”

  “Sir, General Kandinsky has been trying to contact you. He called me three times during my EVA over here. He’s most anxious for me to give him a report as soon as possible.”

  Vladimir snorted in response. “Don’t worry about it, Colonel. I’ll take care of it. In the meantime, please help the injured; get them back to your ship.”

  Opinchuk glanced around. “You should get that arm taken care of. Where is Col. Aptekar? We could use her help…” And then Opinchuk registered the slight twitch in Vladimir’s facial expression. “Col. Aptekar…is she…?”

  Vladimir shook his head gravely before looking away. “It happened pretty fast. I would like to think that she didn’t suffer very much.”

  Opinchuk swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, sir. I know how long you’ve worked together.” He grimaced. “Uh, I’ve got two more teams coming, another one for medical aid and one for engineering assistance. Your ship has a slight yaw on. We’ll need to access your thruster controls, then align and set up for docking. That’ll be the fastest way to get your ship evacuated.”

  Startled, Vladimir glanced at the man and started to reply but held himself back. His only intention at the moment was to evacuate the seriously wounded from the Vanya to the Savitskaya (dubbed by her crew as the Sveta) to get them appropriate medical care. It was premature to consider a full evacuation of the entire crew, at least, not until he knew more about the Vanya’s status. However, now was not the time to argue about it. That could come later, if necessary.

  “Thanks, Colonel, for getting here so quickly. Do what you can, please. I’ve got a few more things to take care of.”

  Vladimir watched Opinchuk take two of his men and move deeper into the gloom of the engine bay. With a grim shake of his head, he mentally commanded his PHUD to open a comm channel through to the Sveta and then a link to Earth.

  “Flight Command, Col. Ushakov here.”

  The image of General Kandinsky appeared again in his viewer but was this time accompanied by the images of the Russian Minister of Defense Pavel Sokolov and the General Director of the Russian Federal Space Agency (RKA) Dariya Lyovkin. Their presence in the transmission immediately told Vladimir that the political situation created by the emergency with his ship was rapidly escalating up the chain of command back on Earth. He clenched his jaw, anticipating that this conversation would not be an easy one. If he were not careful, his next words could even mean the end of his career—assuming, of course, that the explosion on board had not already sealed his fate in that regard, and assuming that the Vanya didn’t kill him in some fashion or other in the next few hours.

  “Colonel Ushakov!” roared Kandinsky angrily. “Report your status now, Colonel! And that’s an order!”

  Vladimir stiffened to attention. “Sir! At precisely 13:13:05 hours GMT, there was an explosion on board the Jo
hann Kruzenshtern. Main and backup power systems are down. The hull is intact and—”

  “What about the drive?” Kandinsky interrupted heatedly. “Was it the cause of the explosion? What exactly happened?”

  “We don’t know what happened yet, sir,” Vladimir responded in a restrained manner, his jaw still clenched.

  “Why not?” hotly demanded Kandinsky. “Get your engineering crew working on it, immediately! We can’t seem to contact Dr. Polachev or Mironov! Tell them we need answers, Colonel! Tell them to contact us! Now!”

  “Dr. Polachev is dead, sir,” Vladimir reported in a cold hard voice, still feeling the echo of horror that had swept through him only a few minutes previously from the hasty and incomplete reports given to him from his few remaining department heads. “Along with fifteen others that we know of, including Chief Engineer Tarasov and my executive officer, Lt. Col. Aptekar. There might be more deaths as well. Not everyone has been accounted for yet. Dr. Mironov is critically injured. Shrapnel punctured her left lung. I’m told she might live, though the odds are not in her favor.”

  Kandinsky blinked in shock while Director Lyovkin gasped, holding one hand to her mouth.

  Minister Sokolov was the first to respond.

  “It’s as bad as all that?” he inquired, closing his eyes in a pained look.

  Vladimir bowed his head. “Worse. I can’t tell you what caused the explosion. We don’t even know which item of equipment exploded!”

  “Why not?” asked a pale faced Lyovkin.

  “Because every person that was in the engine bay is dead, missing or comatose with critical, and in some cases, multiple injuries. Our first order of business has been to help all the injured. I’m afraid it’s going to take a while before we can figure out what happened, sirs. At the moment, I don’t even know if I have any able-bodied engineering officers left! Col. Opinchuk is sending an engineering team over from the Sveta. We may have to wait for their assessment.”

  “What a mess!” muttered a disgusted Sgt. Nikola Borisov of the Sveta as he maneuvered his way through floating shards of shattered equipment, gaping at the huddles of medical personnel rendering first aid to seriously injured members of the crew.

  “The best way we can help these people,” declared Senior Lt. Mikhail Istomin, scowling as he searched the darkness around them, “is to get them to the sickbay on the Sveta. To do that, we need to get the manual thrusters working and get the two ships docked.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed the sullen Borisov as he spotted and propelled himself toward the Vanya’s maneuvering station. “That’s going to be hard to do without power. This console station is totally dead!”

  Two sweating engineering technicians arrived behind them steering a massive portable power source between them.

  “Then let’s get this hooked in!” Istomin ordered, his eyes narrowing as he reached down to un-dog the maneuvering station’s access panel.

  Borisov helped position the power source while the techs pushed it down to the deck. Then all three of them got busy connecting a buss feed line.

  “Sir? I have a question,” Borisov said hesitantly.

  Istomin found the thruster breakers inside the panel and snapped them off. “Go ahead and ask, Sergeant.”

  One of the techs shoved a cable to Borisov, which he hurriedly passed along to Istomin. “Sir, the scuttlebutt is that we’re going to evacuate this whole ship, take everyone on board the Sveta.” He glanced around the bay, noting all the destruction that he could see. “The damage looks pretty bad. But will Col. Ushakov really abandon his ship? I mean…I guess I’m asking what kind of commander the colonel is.”

  Istomin quickly finished terminating the feed line and nodded to one of the techs to switch the power source on. He grunted as he flipped the breakers back on underneath the console. “I guess you don’t know Col. Ushakov’s background, do you? Or you wouldn’t have asked that question.”

  “Do you, sir? Know his background, that is.”

  Istomin pulled himself back up to the console and activated the maneuvering station. Some of the panels and indicators lit up. Many did not.

  “They call him the Russian Napoleon, Sergeant,” Istomin explained absently. “Partly because he is so short and looks like Napoleon with that deep barrel-chest, thick black hair, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. But also partly because he is so smart and determined.” Istomin stopped pressing buttons long enough to chuckle in humor. “Even in a military dress uniform, no one is going to mistake him for recruiting poster material, now will they?” The engineer resumed work pressing still more buttons. “Ushakov was born in the heart of Siberia, raised as an orphan. No family connections, no money. Worked his way up the ranks. He applied for entry to Officers Training. Passed all the entry tests with flying colors. Earned a science degree and an officer’s commission and all without a patron.”

  “I’m impressed,” admitted Borisov as he scanned the console readouts. “If he doesn’t have a patron, how did he get command of an important ship like the Vanya, sir? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  Focusing on one of the display panels, Istomin began typing commands on a keyboard, eliciting a limited response from the indicators. “I don’t mind telling you. It was quite a coup. You see, there were a lot of government departments that were involved in the building of this ship. And they all had their own candidates cherry-picked to be the commanding officer too. I’m sure you know the type. The stereotypical alpha male. Those with money and social connections. The tall, broad-shouldered ones with a lantern jaw and steely-eyed stare, the ones that can issue orders in a voice of thunder. But a lot of those candidates didn’t have the right experience or education. Ushakov was a plank officer and the commander of the Russian destroyer Retivy, so he had experience with naval construction and deep space operations. Plus, he wasn’t anyone’s favorite candidate. So, because of the turf-battles fought over all of the other candidates, the powers-that-be had no choice but to compromise on someone like Ushakov, who had no patronage at all. Ah, there, that does it!”

  The indicators on the display were all active now, most of them in the green. The lieutenant took his hands from the board.

  “You stay here with one of the techs and man this station. I’ll take the other tech and start a survey of the fusion power plant. We need to find out why we don’t have main power. Oh, and I’ll report to Col. Opinchuk that we’re ready to try lining up the ship for docking.” He turned to leave but stopped to look back over his shoulder at Borisov. “But, just between you and me, Sergeant, I’d be very surprised if Col. Ushakov abandons this ship. Very surprised indeed.”

  TWO

  Vladimir was getting an update on the ship’s medical situation from a med-tech while she splinted his left arm. She had just finished both tasks when Senior Lt. Mikhail Istomin suddenly appeared, floating forth from the shadows. The young lieutenant snapped a salute. A startled Vladimir automatically returned it.

  “You have a report, Lieutenant?” the colonel asked, his eyes narrowing. “You’re an engineering officer from the Sveta, is that right?”

  “Sir. Yes, sir. I’m not really sure, but I think I might be the only engineering officer still functional, sir. I couldn’t find any of the Vanya’s engineers. At least, none of them that were…” And he winced, looking down at the deck.

  Col. Opinchuk chose that moment to reappear, pulling himself forward along a hand-line on the bulkhead. “Col. Ushakov, I see you’ve met Lt. Istomin. He is one of my most capable engineering officers. I asked him to give you a report in person. Lieutenant?”

  “Sir!” Istomin responded. “Manual control of the thrusters has been established. I’ve taken the liberty of initiating the ship’s alignment procedures. We should be ready for docking with the Sveta in a few minutes. But sir, the bad news is that the fusion power plant…well, it was the source of the explosion. Apparently in the containment vessel itself. All the system safety shut-offs are secure; I checked. So there is no danger of a
nother explosion. Frankly, I think we got off lucky, sir.”

  Vladimir gave him a sharp look. “You do, do you?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. I remember when there was a fusion plant explosion aboard the heavy cruiser Doblestnyy that vaporized the entire engine section, sir, and broke the ship in half.”

  Vladimir nodded, looking down at the deck. He remembered the incident all too well himself. He’d been in boot camp at the time. The engineer was right; the explosion aboard the Vanya could indeed have been worse.

  “Sir,” Istomin spoke up. “There is no chance of us getting main power on-line again. It will require at least two months’ Yard time for repairs.”

  Opinchuk grimaced and took a deep breath. “Sir, once the Sveta docks, we won’t have much time. As soon as you give the order, we need to start evacuating the Kruzenshtern. It will be a tight fit, of course, but we can squeeze everyone on board the Savitskaya as per emergency procedures and detach in less than an hour—”

  “Hold it there, Colonel!” Vladimir interrupted sharply. “Who said anything about abandoning the Kruzenshtern?”

  “No!” a highly agitated female voice nearly shrieked at them from the murkiness. “You can’t abandon the Kruzenshtern! Russia’s future survival depends on this ship! It took five years and cost 500 billion rubles…!”

  Startled, all three men turned to face the newcomer.

  “Dr. Dubov!” Vladimir gasped before swallowing hard. “I was told you were among the missing! Thank the heavens you’re all right!”

  The slender red-headed woman floated forward into the dim light. She was the most senior member of Dr. Mironov’s staff, and now, the only member apparently still alive and on their feet.