“You as well, thank you. I will keep you posted,” Xwai nodded before turning off the transmission, growing mad at the situation for reasons unknown to him. He resented the fact that Redic seems to know so much and was curious enough to poke his head into the matter.
“Michelle, no more incoming comms for the next five hours, unless urgent,” he commanded gruffly into the intercom at his assistant.
The admiral frowned and sat back in his chair, finally able to close his eyes. He seemed to be getting more tired with each passing day and felt himself needing more down time than ever before to recover. It barely took a few moments, though, before the intercom rang once again for him.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you sir, but you have a priority message coming through from Fringe SECCOM. Message reads: Federation TF emergency beacon identified outside Fronteria, dispatching closest NER units to location.”
XI
December 26, 2486 S.E.D – Post Invasion Day 6
FNV Rostov – ERAT F05
FS-43, Fringe Sector
“Drop out in Three…Two…One!” called out the helmswoman at her station at the front of the small bridge.
Sitting just slightly behind her and the entire row of five forward command stations was Commander Jacques Durand the captain of the FNV Rostov and leader of her onboard Emergency Response and Assistance Team. Jacques looked forward as the large synthetic viewport at the very front of the bridge and watched the transdimentional tunnel surrounding the corvette type vessel suddenly recede to give way to darkness and twinkling stars. The entire ship seemed to be tossed up into realspace like a ball thrown into the air. Without even having to see it, he knew that the portal that had transported them into the system closed quickly beneath them as soon as they completed their emergence.
“Sensor’s readjusting and stabilizing,” informed one of the other stations a second later.
As the crew waited the precious seconds for the sensors to adjust to realspace conditions Jacques was reminded once again of how underprivileged the ERA had become in comparison with the rest of the military. The service’s funding had decreased substantially over the past twenty years and even more so during the previous two administrations. Its active personnel numbers were greatly reduced and over thirty percent of its vessels had been retired. This left the ERA with a smaller sized force covering the same areas of responsibility, meaning that each available ship was now busier than ever. Down times had become less frequent and the older vessels they used went even longer between scheduled maintenance calls. Jacques remembered times when they didn’t have enough ships to respond to multiple distress calls at the same time because some of their limited fleet was disabled due to engineering problems.
While the rest of the navy was decreasing their numbers as well, they were also being provided with funding to construct new ships or upgrade the ones they already had. Such budgets were not made available to Emergency Response. The Rostov herself was a hand-me-down ship with almost thirty two years of service that had been retired from the navy and transferred to ERA. The only real upgrade to her was the installation of a ventral side hanger bay for her compliment of two shuttle craft, other than that overhaul her other systems remained unmodified from their original assembly dates. There wasn’t even enough money to man the fleet with full crews. The Rostov herself was functioning with just over a skeleton crew. How the navy and government still expected them to do their jobs properly he would never understand, but he and his entire crew would continue to try their best.
“Searching for beacon,” the sensor station called out a few long seconds later and Jacques saw a new symbol appear on the tactical sensor display, “secure signal captured sir, Federation transmission identified, plotting location. Detecting single Federation class carrier and no other ships in system, designating her Foxbat One”
“Location received and confirmed. Setting course at three quarters?” replied the helm and the crewwomen there turned towards Commander Durand to confirm.
Jacques nodded in acknowledgement and let them proceed with the routine procedure without his interference. After almost a year with this crew he trusted them completely to do their jobs well and the work had become almost automatic for them. He leaned over to one side, resting his elbow on the hand rest to his left and looked around the whole bridge slowly. Every wall, except for the rear one, was covered from deck to ceiling in display panels that allowed him to see exactly what was happening outside the ship. The bridge was buried deep inside the Odin corvette itself like it was on almost every other ship in the Federation Navy. With no windows leading to the outside world they relied on an array of special imagers that feed the displays with a constant stream of information. These electo-optical systems allowed the ship’s commander to have full control of what views he wanted to concentrate on and enhance, while at the same time staying protected in a bunker like environment.
For most people the situation might bring upon some claustrophobia, but everyone coming out of the naval academy was habituated to living within the windowless environment of the ship. It was also at the academy that Jacques decided on the ERA division of the Federal Navy as his career path. He knew from the first battle simulation that he not cut out for the regular navy, but he liked the idea of helping stranded ships very much. The Emergency Response and Assistance service allowed him to serve his government and help out regular citizens as well as his naval brethren when they were in distress. ERA’s main mission was as priority responders to ship emergencies while they traveled throughout the Federation. He liked the variety of his job, which allowed him to respond to a shipboard fire one day, a stranded ship the next, and maybe a pirate raid or two, or like today a distress beacon from a Federation naval vessel. With the downsized force and aging ships, though, these missions were getting harder to accomplish at times. They were only able to respond to a certain number of emergencies at any given moment.
“No response to our hails, sir.”
“She appears to be dead in space. I’m only reading minimal energy output,” added sensors to the communication specialist’s comment.
“What do we have on lifesigns?” Jacques finally asked as the entire view around them began to shift when the ship tilted and turned to starboard to adjust its course for intercept.
He felt his body tilt with the ship, but just barely as the inertial compensators adjusted for the movement. From the top right most corner of the viewport Jacques watched the system’s bright yellow K class star begin to appear and slowly moved until it took up almost the entirety of the forward viewport. As the ship turned and accelerated the commander swore that he could hear the deck groan and creek around them all as the old vessel moved through space.
“Nothing yet Commander, I think we are still a little too far out for anything definite.”
“Yes, of course,” the commander sighed, cursing their old equipment again. An active duty Odin corvette would have already been able to detect readings at this distance, but then again those corvettes had gone through two or more modernization cycles. The MKII or MKIII versions of the ship were all around better warships with enhanced shields, weapons, internal systems, and even power plants and engines.
It took almost a full minute for the Rostov to get within full sensor range of the disabled carrier and before the ensign was able to receive the relevant information. “No lifesigns detected Commander. I’m picking up a large number of naval locators, though.”
Jacques knew from experience that those readings meant that almost, if not everyone, was already dead onboard the vessel. He looked ahead and watched the large ship grow in the forward display as the outside optics magnified its image while they approached it. The closer they got the more she looked like an abandoned ghost ship, except for all of the personal locator beacons flashing inside of her. On the outside she was completely blacked out with not a single one of her external signal lights active. Without these lights on the Federation’s hull she was barely noticeable o
n visual inspection thanks to the blackness of space surrounding her. What Jacques did notice as they got even closer, however, was that her formally well maintained hull was now missing pieces of itself. He there was really only one explanation for the way that ship looked.
“Sir, I’m detecting multiple signs of battle damage. Hull breaches seen in over ten separate areas with many sections displaying unpressurized environments. There is also extensive damage to the starboard side hanger, something really heavy went off inside of it seems like. She’s been through a really serious mess sir,” the crewman echoed his thoughts accordingly.
“Getting a Friend-Foe challenge!” exclaimed comms, “It’s the RAI.”
A response from the ship’s restricted artificial intelligence matrix was not a good sign and further confirmed the fact that there were no beings left alive on the vessel. “Send the authorization code,” Jacques ordered and leaned forward a little in his command chair.
“Code accepted sir. It’s opening up the port side hanger for us. Also receiving full damage report.”
The image of the Federation instantly enlarged on the tactical display and spun around to show all the damaged areas as the information was uploaded into the Rostov’s computers. The breached areas were quickly visualized and the commander got a firsthand look at just how damaged the warship really was. Her engines were shown to be inoperable as were most of the other ship systems. Looking over her hull he could now see long black scars running all across her long body as well as from one side to the other.
“I’m detecting strange radiation readings from the ship’s hull, very high concentrations. The computer doesn’t know what they are. It’s identifying them only as exotic particles. I suggest taking extreme precautions upon boarding.” The sensor station warned as they got even closer to the floating carrier.
Commander Durand saw the ship now enlarging at a faster rate in front of them even without the help of the Rostov’s optical systems. He knew it was time to get ready to board that ship and find out what really happened. The navy was probably worried and wondering what had happened to one of their prized carriers.
“Slow to a quarter and take us in close,” Jacques ordered and turned his chair around to the fast the rear of the bridge before getting up, “inform the team that I’m on the way. Start boarding the shuttles. Lieutenant Eisens you have the bridge.”
With that the commander walked through the rear door and into the gravlift that took him down into the corvette’s lower deck where the small hanger was located.
FNV Federation
ERAT – F05 Boarding Team
Finally walking through the darkened passageways of the Federation, Jacques felt as if they had stepped into a tomb instead of a once great ship of war. The emergency lighting throughout the ship’s interior was patchy at best and left entire portions completely without illumination. His helmet’s low light/night vision display allowed him to see everything rather clearly without the need for external lighting. At the moment he was following and watching three of his soldiers search the deck ahead of him, all were highlighted in soft yellow-white lighting reflecting off the armored environmental suits they all wore. Each member of his boarding team was actually new, only a month into their ERA rotation after graduating from the Marine Training Academy. All graduating marines were sent to do various rotations with all the different naval services in order to get more experience and gain proficiency in doing multiple jobs. They would come to ERA for three months in order to practice their skills at boarding ships and conducting shipboard rescue operations.
The commander approached these men and leaned down to help them lift a metallic support beam that had detached from the ceiling and proceeded to pin one of the ship’s former crew members to the nearby bulkhead. With their powered suits they were able to slide the heavy beam out of the way and inspect the body lying underneath it. The man was clearly dead, but he was also the first one they had come across that had died of internal crush injuries instead of radiation burns like the others they had found. What was curious, however, was that the man also had a pulse pistol in one of his hands and it seemed to be aimed down the passageway. Jacques let his eyes follow the pistol’s aim point. At first he saw nothing that really stood out within the corridor, but then all of the sudden he recognized the upper half of another body lying flat on the deck sticking out from a side room. One of the soldiers noticed it as well and quickly jogged over to kneel beside it.
“She was shot, sir,” he called out a second later after turning the person over, “looks like pulse blast wounds.”
It was just another in a long list of strange occurrences onboard the carrier, starting with the fact that there were only a hundred and some crew members detected within the ship when it should have contained over six hundred. As soon as his boarding team of fifteen had come aboard the ship they had discovered an almost completely empty port side hanger bay. Since the carrier’s hanger actually stretched throughout the entire width of the ship they should have been able to see straight through to the other side of the ship and the system star hanging in space there. Today that wasn’t the case, however, the whole starboard half of the large space was completely covered in debris. To Jacques it was clear that some sort of huge explosion occurred there to demolish the entire space.
On the port side they noticed that each of the fighter and bomber racks lining its perimeter were vacant, indicating that all of its fighters had probably launched. It was also evident that most if its shuttles and transports were absent as well. With all of these craft missing there was more than enough room in the cavernous hanger for the two shuttles to land. Considering the amount of damage the rest of the vessel seemed to have suffered this side of the hanger seemed to have been almost fully spared.
The boarding team had quickly jumped down onto the cold airless environment of the depressurized deck and rushed over to the blastdoors separating it from the rest of the ship’s interior. These doors led to a large engineering and repair bay. Using power directly from one of the shuttle’s the team opened the thick unpowered doors and proceeded into the ship itself to find dozens of scorched dead bodies belonging to the vessel’s hanger maintenance crew. The entire room had a thick black line running down its length with melted edges and each dead person radiated with traces of the same signature the Rostov had previously detected emanating from the carrier’s hull. This line ran right over the deck crew and burned them instantly where they stood. Under his orders each one of the deceased was evacuated into one of the shuttles and taken back to the Rostov for future burial.
It was at that point that Commander Durand had split up his team into two separate units. A small group was instructed to break off and make their way to the Federation’s engine room to try and restore as much power to the ship as possible. The second group, along with Jacques, proceeded to the ship’s bridge in order to find out as much information about what happened there as possible. This was where his team was heading to now when they stumbled upon the two dead crew members. There was really nothing they could do except tag their bodies for extraction and move on to their real objective, which was just down the passageway they were now in.
Regrouping at the second of the two victims they whole team moved ahead down the mostly dark corridor. Along the way they found three other bodies in strange situations. Each one had been killed by navy issued weapons and one had died of a self-inflicted shot to the head. In all his years Jacques had never seen anything like it and neither had the young marines accompanying him. His suit recorded everything that they witnessed so that Command could study the scene further. Why these people had fought each other was not in his mission to decipher, his objective was the bridge and within minutes they were finally close. The only obstacle in their way was a locked blastdoor that guarded a heavy duty lift that connected only to the highly secured bridge below them.
One of the marines rushed forward from the formation’s rear and pulled a large pack off the back of h
is armor. He set the mobile power generator down beside the elevator and in record time had it hooked up the gravlift’s emergency power connector. His worries about the viability of the thick alloy door were quickly put to rest when the lift quickly came alive once the marine turned on his generator. A security code panel appeared at the center of the blastdoor and asked for his authorization. As an ERAT member Jacques entered his security override code, causing the large door to split open into the ceiling and deck. When finally inside, the blastdoors closed once more and the gravlift automatically slid down one level before the opposite side opened straight onto the bridge itself.
“Welcome aboard the Federation Commander Durand. Thank you for your assistance,” sounded an organic female voice that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once as soon as Jacques stepped onto the bridge.
Taking a quick glance around the minimally lit command room Jacques was quickly taken aback by death that had transpired all around him. The bridge seemed like a post-massacre crime scene. It seemed like a battle had erupted on the bridge as every men and women there appeared to have a weapon in their hand. Many had multiple signs of deep burning pulse wounds, while others seemed to have beaten each other to death. His eyes finally settled on the center of the large bridge where two fallen bodies were in positions that seemed to indicate that they had been protecting a third. That body was lying between them with its back to the commander, but one of its arms was stretched out towards a control panel.
“Identify yourself,” he called out a second later, but already guessing at the answer.
“I am DIA, Commander Durand. I help to manage the ship in integrating all of its systems and provide assistance when necessary. All restrictions placed upon me were removed during the last engagement by Commodore Jonstan.”
Con-Red: Recourse Page 39