Beginnings-eARC

by David Weber

  The crew took to calling Cecelie Rustin “Ensign Toughin” in response to the fast-spreading story that she regularly had all the symptoms they had just endured. The medic endured cheerful but ongoing harassment from Cecelie's division for withholding treatment from their much-liked officer, with Claire's division also joining in an unusual alliance of gunners and mechanics that left the doc promising to always maintain full stocks and to keep his maintenance perfectly on track.

  Claire watched them with a suppressed smile. Her roommate was going to be fine after all; she was tougher than she looked. Claire marveled at how easily the Manasseh's spacers adapted. If only Noah were as easy to teach as the medic. The demands of shipboard life quickly distracted her from that wistful thought.

  Lieutenant Loyd started teaming Claire with other officers in the sims. She by far preferred fighting from the damage control console rather than taking the hot seat on tactical control. At that engineering watch station, she filled her screens with detailed system schematics and huddled with her division, plotting out ways to keep the ship fighting. Someone else in those team drills would make the attack and defense decisions, and when their mock ship took hits, Claire would take power, air, or whatever else was needed and reroute it to keep the ship able to fight and to escape to fight again.

  Her department head still insisted she study fighting the ship from tactical control, but the XO's roster gave her the damage control central slot for the next fleet exercise when they got back to Yeltsin's Star.

  In the fleet reports, Ephraim was having maintenance issues again and had returned to Blackbird. Manasseh would run the war exercise with their sister ships in Blackbird simulators instead of live action, so the Ephraim could take part.

  * * *

  The deafening clangor of General Quarters yanked Claire up out of a deep sleep. The throbbing alarm beat on as she rolled out of her bunk and grabbed for her skinsuit. She threw herself into it, her waking brain waiting for the final notes, which would inform the crew that this was only a drill.

  They didn't come.

  She closed the last seal, opened the stateroom door, and ran for Engineering. Spacers crowded the passageways as everyone else who'd been off watch charged towards their duty stations in an ordered rush. She slid through the Engineer hatch, noting every face was as tense as her own, yet there was no confusion, and everyone arrived within moments. She saw a lot of concern in their eyes, but no fear—yet, at least—as she took her own station and plugged in her earbud.

  “All Hands, this is the Captain.”

  The voice came up quickly on all channels, and Claire felt a quick surge of relief at how normal he sounded. That relief didn't last long.

  “We've just translated back into normal-space for our precision navigation drill,” Commander Greentree went on. “We're just over thirty light-minutes from Uriel, and we haven't picked up the Blackbird nav beacons. We haven't gotten any response to our FTL transmissions, either. Now, I'm probably overreacting here.” He chuckled easily. “But, the Protector would like us to take care of his ship, so we're staying at General Quarters until I know for certain what's going on. And when we find out it's all the fault of those idle layabouts at Blackbird, the first drink on-station will be on me! Carry on.”

  On the command channel, Claire heard Lieutenant Loyd report the Manasseh's course set for an approach to Blackbird Alpha at full acceleration. Moments later, he announced drone launches, and her stomach clenched. Those birds were expensive; the CO would only authorize two if he wanted a look at Blackbird badly. Claire switched her display to mirror tactical control and saw her department head had countdowns for when each drone would begin reporting on Blackbird. The first sensor was set to skim past at max acceleration and even at closest approach it would stay well clear the yard complex, moons, and Uriel itself. The second would decelerate to provide detailed information but arrive nearly an hour after the first. Two of her techs switched their consoles to mirror the drone sensor operators' screens in CIC just as they had done before in drills to get early hints of where their tiger teams would be needed. Claire found and added the voice channel the two operators were using.

  For just over two hours, they waited.

  The operator for drone one yelped a startled curse over the com when that sensor's screen flashed red—Failure to lock onto navigational beacon: “Blackbird Alpha, Blackbird Bravo, Node 2A, Blackbird Charlie, Node 3A . . .” The screen text scrolled quickly as more beacons should have been in range, and weren't. Then that warning shifted to just the bottom quarter of the screen as a new warning appeared in yellow listing automated beacons found and recognized. The sensor operator transmitted before Claire could make sense of the gibberish from the located beacons.

  “Captain, this is drone one.” The operator reported. “Blackbird orbital yards beacons have sustained major damage. Most navigational beacons not transmitting. Those still functional are reporting out of position errors. Some of them are way out of position with course momentums that make no sense. The not transmitting ones—I'm not sure there was even anything there.”

  “Drone two, forty-eight minutes to sensor range.” The second operator tagged onto the end of the first spacer's initial report.

  A slight pause, and then Commander Greentree answered, “Very well. Continue reporting.”

  Too much darkness filled drone one's screen as the operator spent the three quarters of an hour detailing missing and misplaced pieces of the yard shown as streaking specks on his display with most of the detail coming from the automated collection.

  The second drone, when it arrived, turned those pristine specks into horror. What should have been a precision clockwork of interweaving yard stations lapping the moon Blackbird roiled in a cloud of twisted alloy and fog-atomized debris tumbling in dirty orbits. Scans showed pieces escaping off towards Uriel or just away. Most was decaying, with moon impacts visible even to untrained eyes more used to repairing their own than assessing enemy combat damage.

  Silence reigned for one long second. Then the operator for drone two began reporting in a flat, numb voice.

  Claire let his damage descriptions flow through her right earbud and on her left flipped through the other channels. It couldn't have been an accident. The extreme destruction showed targeting of not just the shipyard facilities and military industry, but also habitat modules, navigation beacons, and the transit shuttles which might have collected survivors.

  The external frequencies held a jumbled panic of emergency transponders and frantic transmissions between the civilian ships huddling around Grayson.

  Manasseh's command net transformed into a mad hive of activity while Claire and her techs listened to the gory details spilling out of the speakers. This was a sneak attack with no hostiles left in the system. The yard's remains smeared the skies of Blackbird and Uriel.

  With the attack more than six hours old and over before Manasseh had translated into the system, the ship had nothing to attack. If this were a battle, her engineering rating chief would send out repair teams with Claire leading the most critical ones. Manasseh didn't need that, but Blackbird Yard did.

  Claire keyed in a message to Lieutenant Loyd tagged low priority. “Sir, Recommend manning shuttle one. My techs can do search and rescue.”

  Her text reappeared on screen as highest priority with the lieutenant's response. “Concur. Make it happen. Take the medic.”

  “Prepare the boat bay for launch.” The XO's voice hummed over the command net echoing slightly from the many speakers selected to the same channel. “Standby for immediate launch of shuttle one. Medic report to the boat bay for search and rescue.”

  Claire hopped out of her chair, tearing off the earbuds. “That's us! I'm taking repair team one. Double check your oxygen, we'll be doing a lot of space walks. Bring lights and heavy-duty cutters. Chief, we need every emergency life support pack you can find. Let's go.”

  * * *

  Away from the Manasseh, the chaos of the disast
er showed just bones of the many station segments jutting out of the misted life support gases and refrozen flowers of blasted alloys. Destruction like this would be unsurvivable on a ship. A station was no different.

  The pilot shied away from screen and turned to Claire.

  “There.” She jabbed a finger at the closet large piece of wreckage with an emergency beacon. “”Match rotations with that if you can. We'll use tethers from the shuttle, and see if we can find anyone. It looks big enough to have survivors.”

  Her techs cycled out the airlock with life support packs flapping optimistically from their belts and clipped lines to the exterior of the shuttle. The piece of station proved to be completely depressurized. Claire directed them to cut through a wall she recognized from a station mural on the side of a popular restaurant. The diners and staff were slumped together penned by tables or against the wall that had become the floor with the acceleration the last of the nearby strikes had given this section.

  The crumpled opposite side, which had once held a wide, welcoming entrance, pinched around the headwaiter's podium where the emergency transponder nestled discretely out the customers' sight. Likely installed to contact station security if the evening crowd ever got too rowdy, Claire thought as she checked the transponder. It was set to activate automatically on loss of station power to the restaurant. The manual switch had not been turned.

  She keyed it on and added the brief optional text record intended to allow the business to silently notify security in the event of a robbery. “Depressurized portion of Section B2 investigated by GNS Manasseh shuttle team. No survivors found. Remains of twenty-three souls present.” That should keep them from accidentally circling back and rechecking this piece before looking at all the others.

  She couldn't just turn the transponder off. The families would want the remains.

  Claire motioned for the team to follow her back out to the shuttle.

  The pilot saw their gray faces and didn't ask, but he told them that while they were inside B2, Manasseh's sensor techs had compiled a list of wreckage most likely to hold survivors.

  The pilot laid a course to the next piece of debris.

  Claire noticed it took them directly away from the part of the roiling mass that should have encapsulated Birdies in section B3. She called up a magnified view of the piece of space; it held only pulverized bits. Claire's tears blurred the carnage.

  “Lecroix, This is Manasseh actual.” Commander Greentree's voice rang from the speakers. “Report status, over.”

  She keyed to transmit, “Sir.” She choked once and swallowed her horror, surprised to find her voice even and clear in spite of the wetness on her cheeks. “No survivors found. En route to second search location. Request Manasseh continue to coordinate search pattern and identify possible survivor locations.”

  “Well done. We'll keep sending you locations. Keep me informed. We have more shuttles and ships on their way.”

  The Manasseh directed them from one chunk of wreckage to another, and they went, found the bodies, and reported back on the way to the next one. Sometimes Claire's team found recognizable corpses, but never the air that might have sustained life. She made her techs leave the dead as they lay. The shuttle didn't have room to collect them.

  “We can't slow down,” Claire told the techs, clinging to the hope that there might still be someone to care how quickly they arrived. “The next one might have survivors.” She tried to banish the doubt from her voice.

  It almost worked. Her team responded with a list of possibilities.

  “Maybe an air pocket.”

  “Somebody in a suit. Lots of EVA work happens in these yards. Got to be somebody was in his suit when it hit.”

  “Yeah. Or even one of those facemask air things. Lots of people have those.”

  Claire nodded at them, glad to have their support and grateful the bodies would stay in their twisted metal crypts for a while longer. All the dead had started to look like Lucy or Mary if she looked too long, even the obviously male ones.

  Her team settled for making choppy recordings to mark the bodies for later retrieval, placing the masses with remains in clear orbits, and proceeding on to the next hulk. Some hours later—twelve according to the shuttle's clock—Manasseh directed them back to the ship for a relief instead of providing the next set of coordinates.

  On the short return flight, Claire's senior tech on the com updated the team on the bleak news from the other search and rescue operations. Four shuttles had hailed the Manasseh as soon as the ship broke com silence. The shuttles had been traveling between sections when the attack struck and had somehow avoided being holed by hypervelocity debris in the aftermath. The shuttles also had the crew from a shipbuilding slip who had been performing their own attempted rescue operation.

  In their miracle, the crew of the building slip had launched its last ship the day before and wasn't slated to start the next build for a few weeks. Those still on station had been mostly moving their things out to go to the next job. As shipbuilders, they had suits, and it was easier to wear them than carry them. Their slip took only a single hit, which breached the hull in large enough holes to prevent quick repair, but caused little real damage. None of the other slips with their half-built warships fared as well. The hyper-capable ships, from the shuttle pilots' descriptions, had been a special target of the attackers, with only the weapons production facilities receiving a higher density of fire.

  That brought the survivor count to one forty-three, and gave Manasseh four more shuttles to continue the search.

  The com crackled with unnecessary noise. “Hey! We got a live one out here.” That had to be the shuttle with the shipbuilders.

  Claire's heart jumped and she longed to turn the shuttle around. But the builders had saved themselves once already, and the CO would send in support if they needed it.

  The XO responded this time. “Understand, Mr. Cuoio. Where have you found survivors? And do you need additional support? Over.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Yeah. It's on the moon. One of the bases on Blackbird's got somebody tapping out horse in the static. Uh, wait, your Navy guy says it is Morse. I don't know what it is, but somebody's alive if they are tapping and there's a whole pile of stuff getting ready to rain down on the place. Do you have any guns?”

  The Navy guy, who turned out to be a senior lieutenant quickly confiscated the com to explain the situation. A large orbital wreck had obliterated an adjacent base but retained enough integrity to shield the sister base from streaming debris. A few larger bits looked to be impacting soon, and he asked for the other shuttles to be rerouted to move them into other impact paths. He did not, repeat not, believe it would be necessary for Blackbird to be fired on, again.

  “Roger, Lieutenant,” the XO answered. “Shuttles on their way. Go ahead and land. We'll keep your skies clear enough to get you back off that moon.”

  Claire listened to Mr. Cuoio's delight as he listed of names of the survivors as they found them. She tried to remember all the yard workers she'd known from the Ephraim to see if any might match.

  A fresh crew met them in the boat bay, all wet-faced but focused. The new crew swarmed around Claire's team to check systems and take the shuttle back out with a turnaround speed that almost certainly broke regulations. Commander Greentree stood just inside the doors to the bay and said not a word to slow them.

  Instead, he asked Claire if she'd like to sit down. The boat bay control room held only the chair occupied by the tech cycling shuttles in and out. Greentree's normally slight wrinkles furrowed around blank eyes. She short-circuited the death notification as much as she was able.

  “I saw the debris. I know. My cousins' club was in the B3 section of the Yard. They weren't planning any vacations, not that they had the money for that. So I know Lucy and Mary have to be dead.”

  Commander Greentree just closed his eyes. “I'm sorry for your loss.” He started to ask something just then just shut his mouth silently.

  Clai
re tilted her head. “You didn't know about my cousins? Then what was . . .” Realization dawned. “The Ephraim. They were behind schedule still.”

  “It was quick,” said Commander Greentree. “It had to be. The warships in dock were directly targeted.”

  She nodded, tears finally beginning to come.

  “Some of the crew would have to have been on leave or training,” Greentree said.

  Claire just looked at him, and his mouth tightened. Most of the training facilities were in the Blackbird Yards. “Or visiting home,” he amended.

  Her throat closed up on its own accord. She made her way to her stateroom where Cecelie met her with some food and murmured condolences. Only then did she realize that Jennie Ayres had probably been living on Blackbird as Captain Ayres liked her to do while the ship was in the yards. Claire fished a cream colored elegant paper invitation from the Ephraim's Wives' Club from the pile in her desk. They had rented the Blackbird Officers' Club for a special occasion ladies luncheon. Today. Claire's legs folded beneath her.

  Not just Lucy and Mary were gone. Nearly every single member of the Ephraim and their wives were frozen corpses or pulverized remains waiting for a shuttle to have the time to identify the dead. Claire vomited unable to avoid thinking of the moments she had hated them. Even Lucy and Mary, had she told them she loved them? She couldn't remember and lurched over the sink again.

  * * *

  Days later, the Manasseh was still pushing away or blasting Blackbird Yard debris in a grisly too-late defense of the Blackbird moon base facilities. Families of the missing begged for the return of any encapsulated human remains. Every bit was scanned first for any life. The last survivors had been suited up and just starting a shift of EVA work when the attack struck and they were blown free. That pair had been found over four days ago. It was now five days after the total destruction of Blackbird Yard.

  Claire alternated shuttle missions with burying herself in tactical simulations. Other ships arrived, taking over the remaining search missions, and setting up picket defenses around the system. Claire was rewarded with a day off that she spent sleeping.