Wing Commander #07 False Color

by William R. Forstchen

  The orders had drawn a few frowns around the table, but it was Steiger who resisted the most. His ship and crew would bear the lion's share of the burden, and like most Landreichers he didn't see any need to honor Mankind's most inveterate enemy. The transport captain glared across the table, first at Richards, then at Murragh and Donald Graham, who had been invited to the meeting so that Richards could discuss plans for the burials with them. "I wonder if you'd be so considerate of all these Cat stiffs if you weren't trying to impress your new buddies," Steiger said bluntly. "Some of you may think it'll make a difference, but I tell you the Cats won't care one lousy bit if you bury them, shove them out the airlock, or shove 'em in the fusion plants. They'll still be back shooting first chance they get."

  Richards half rose, than sank into his chair again. When he spoke he sounded more tired than angry, but Bondarevsky could read the fury behind his icy eyes. "I'll only say this once, Captain," he said flatly. "I don't care in the least what the Kilrathi think of me. I would have ordered a proper burial for those people if there wasn't a single Cat within a hundred light-years to see me do it. We've been at war for more than a generation, but in my book war is no excuse to abandon our principles, and I say anyone, man or kil or whatever, deserves to leave this life with dignity and according to his or her beliefs." His tone grew harsh. "Or would you prefer that we stuffed you or your men into the fusion reactors if you're killed while we're out here, Captain?"

  Steiger flushed. "Damn it, Admiral, it isn't the same!"

  "Yes, it is," Bondarevsky put in. "I agree with the Admiral. How can we pretend to be better than Thrakhath was if we show the same contempt for our enemies that he did?"

  Richards nodded. "Exactly. At any rate, Captain Steiger, whatever the morals and ethics of the situation, I've made it an order, and unless you would like to be relieved and shipped back to Landreich in a ship's brig, you will carry out that order. Is that understood?"

  There was a long pause before Steiger responded. "The crew won't like it," he repeated. "But . . . aye aye, sir."

  Richards let out a sigh and slumped back in his chair. "Very well. I think we should take a break before we get on with the rest of the meeting. Shall we say half an hour?"

  The Goliath staff adjourned, most of them making their way to the adjacent compartment where the carrier's mess crew had set up a buffet table with coffee and an assortment of pastries. Bondarevsky remained seated, and so did Richards, who started checking over his notes on his computer terminal with the air of a man on the very edge of physical collapse.

  Murragh and Graham stood and walked slowly towards the admiral. "Admiral Richards," Murragh said quietly.

  Richards looked up. "Oh, yes, gentlemen. I think we've covered everything you need to be here for. I suppose you'll both want to go to Nargrast for the service?"

  "Yes, Admiral, I know that I would, and all of my people," the Kilrathi prince said gravely. "But before we leave, may I thank you sincerely for your observance of our ways. It is . . . not something I expected. I fear that were the roles reversed few Kilrathi officers would have been so generous toward human dead."

  Richards waved a hand vaguely. "What I said was true, my Lord," he said. "I didn't order it for your benefit."

  Murragh gave a human nod. "I grasp that, Admiral. That is what is so impressive." He paused. "Admiral, I have been thinking, and talking with my friend Graham. I was of service to you in the matter of the computer, was I not?"

  "Yes, of course," Richards said. "we couldn't have pulled it off without you. I'm not quite sure how I can repay you for it, but I assure you I'll move heaven and earth, and maybe even Max Kruger, to try."

  "The desire for compensation does not motivate the Kilrathi," Murragh said calmly. "Any more than your decision in the matter of the dead was motivated by a desire for personal gain. We believe in doing our duty, living with honor, and facing our enemies with courage. But since I was of service to you, I believe I could be so again . . . if you will allow it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Admiral, I do not know the details of your intentions for Karga, but it is clear you are attempting a major

  repair effort, presumably to put the ship back into service

  again." Murragh said it casually, but Bondarevsky was impressed. The Kilrathi had been kept as far out of

  the picture as possible for security reasons, but the prince obviously had the imagination it took to see where Goliath was heading.

  "And if we are?" Richards was suddenly very much the ConFleet intelligence officer, wary and poker-faced.

  "There are many dissimilarities in technologies to be overcome, whatever you are trying to do," Murragh said. "If you had the assistance of Kilrathi officers who knew his systems, your work would be speeded considerably."

  Richards frowned. "I'm not sure . . ."

  "If you accept, you will have each kil's word of honor to support your work honestly and fully," Murragh said. "My people will not attempt to sabotage your efforts. I have already told Bondarevsky and Graham that I view your people as my allies against Ragark, who would set himself up as an usurper on the throne that belongs to my hrai. Cannot an ally assist an ally in a venture to their mutual advantage?"

  Graham spoke up. "He's serious, Admiral. Hell, I wouldn't mind joining your little party myself, as a volunteer, since I'm not likely to be getting a ride back to Terra anytime soon to report in. And me and my guys and gals have a lot of experience in splicing Cat and Ape gear together without having it blow up in our faces. We're willing to help any way we can. And I think it would be to your advantage to have us on board."

  Richards didn't answer right away, and Bondarevsky could see that he was wavering between the paranoia that went with his training and the hope that he might obtain precious help.

  "I think you should consider it seriously, Admiral," Bondarevsky said quietly. "Let's face it, these folks could make all the difference in actually making this harebrained scheme work. Let's sign them up."

  After a moment, Richards nodded. "I think you're right, Jason. Very well, Lord Murragh. Commander Graham. Welcome to the Goliath Project."

  CHAPTER 11

  "No Warrior should fear honest labor, as no Warrior should shirk onerous duty."

  from the First Codex

  04:22:10

  FRLS Karga

  Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System

  2670.321-355

  They had plenty of volunteers from amongst the Nargrast survivors, both human and Kilrathi. All of Murragh's Cadre officers were eager to follow their prince's lead. That, Bondarevsky decided, was only to be expected. They were loyal to the hrai of his uncle, the late Admiral dal Nokhtak, and Murragh was now the last living representative of that clan in addition to being heir presumptive to the throne. Their branch of the hrai had long been rivals of Thrakhath's, so they had no great feelings of loss regarding their erstwhile war leader. As for Ragark, he was considered something of an upstart, and evidently wasn't thought of as a proper Kilrathi warrior at all. So the collection of Kilrathi experts were willing to mobilize at Murragh's word to aid the humans in restoring the ship. Their comrades, crewmen from the crashed escort and a number of surviving fighter pilots off the carrier, were more suspicious. A few, taking their cue from the embittered Kuraq and others like him, refused to have anything to do with the hated "apes." They remained in open confinement aboard the City of Cashel while their comrades got down to work.

  The Goliath Project staff needed all the help they could muster, and inside of a few days the assistance of Murragh's people was already proving invaluable.

  Time after time it seemed as if they would not be able to get the job done, but time after time the men, women, and kili working on the Karga rose to the challenge and somehow made things work. Bondarevsky was continually amazed at the adaptability humans and Kilrathi could bring to bear when they tried. Slowly, painfully, it began to look as if the Karga would one day sail the void once again.

 
With the tender docked and the bodies rounded up and cleared, the first job was to repair Karga's shattered hull. The ship had suffered major penetration damage in a score of places, and minor holes in countless other compartments. The tender's force fields allowed the carrier to retain an atmosphere, but the hull needed to be patched as soon as possible so that the energy expended on keeping the atmosphere from leaking away could be used for more productive purposes.

  So the first order of business was brute-force space construction on a massive scale. It started with survey crews swarming over the hull, measuring, recording, locating the major breaks in the hull and transmitting detailed images of each to computer records aboard the dozens of shuttles detailed to support their work. The computers analyzed these records and produced detailed specifications for the sections of hull plating needed to fill the gaps. A pair of naval architects attached to Diaz's team pored over each of the computer models as they were completed, double-checking the work. Humans were far slower than computers, but it still sometimes took an organic mind to make sense of engineering designed for organic life, and despite the bottleneck created by these reviews Admiral Richards overruled Tolwyn and ordered the process to go on.

  The factory ship Andrew Carnegie had settled into orbit close by the Karga. Swarms of smaller carried craft had been dispatched to Nargrast loaded with automated vehicles and small supervisory crews. They set up camp near the site where Graham and Murragh had settled with their castaways, the vehicles ranging outwards in search of needed raw materials according to a list provided by the computer analysis of the needed components and modified by Diaz's team where the computer parameters couldn't be easily met. Unfortunately Nargrast was poor in many of the elements that would have been best suited for the job, but there was plenty of iron ore, and that was still the basis of the most basic parts of the hull that needed repair.

  The vehicles excavated and extracted ores where they were discovered, carried them back to base, and loaded them aboard the ships waiting there. A constant string of vessels operated back and forth between Nargrast and the Andrew Carnegie, endlessly feeding the insatiable demands of the factory vessel for the raw materials necessary for fabricating Karga's hull plating and other requisite components. A landing party from Tolwyn's crew also worked over the remains of the escort Frawqirg, following up on the initial survey work Bondarevsky had done while rescuing the survivors Though badly damaged in the crash and far too small to provide all the needs of the damaged carrier, the escort was a useful source of parts and materials that otherwise wouldn't have been available.

  Aboard the factory ship, the iron ore was smelted and processed, refined and re-refined to produce the durasteel alloy needed for hull plating. The computer designs obtained from the first surveys controlled the pouring, shaping, and cutting of the individual patches or replacement hull sections, and as quickly as they came off the line they were released into space, picked up by the one-man work pods carried aboard Sindri, and maneuvered into the proper places. The pods—essentially egg-shaped capsules with thrusters and manipulating arms, barely larger than a man - were supported by work gangs of spacesuited crewmen who wrestled the hull plating into position and then brought their plasma welders to bear to seal the new segments of the hull in place.

  Space construction work was difficult and dangerous, especially on the scale required for Project Goliath. With so many crew members operating in spacesuits, there were bound to be accidents. A few inevitably forgot that weightless hull patches retained all of their mass and inertia in zero-g, and as a result there were casualties. Commander Katherine Manning, Karga's Medical Officer, was kept busy handling fractures and decompression sickness in the carrier's sick bay complex buried deep on the fifth deck of the superstructure. Fortunately little damage had occurred there, and the sick bay area was even air-tight, so she had less work to do to get her part of the ship up and running and could concentrate on taking care of the injured. But with power still limited and the unfamiliar Kilrathi medical equipment mostly off-line, Manning complained bitterly of having to perform surgery under primitive conditions, using a field surgery package normally used by marines planetside to fill in for the usual amenities that weren't yet available aboard Karga.

  There were, of course, fatalities. The first major replacement to the buckled hull plating around the entrance to the starboard side flight deck proved particularly awkward, and when Crewman Chan misapplied thrust to his work pod at a crucial moment the result was three men dead, crushed between the new plating and the hull, and five other injuries. Chan was one of the dead, and his pod was ruined in the accident.

  Bondarevsky, who had been supervising the work, wondered if Geoff Tolwyn wasn't more concerned at the loss of the pod than at Chan's death. It wasn't that the admiral was callous . . . he was merely consumed by the need to finish the job, a man so obsessed as to seem unable to perceive reality.

  One by one, though, the major patches were welded into place. Other spacesuited crewmen worked their way painstakingly along the outside of the hull, using a liquid patching compound to fill in the smallest holes and marking those too large for their attention but too small for the major pieces. These were dealt with by follow-up crews armed with small plates that could be sealed over an opening and then spot-welded. By the time they were through Karga's hull was a bizarre patchwork quilt, but she would hold atmosphere without the assistance of Sindri's force fields.

  Bondarevsky's role in the exterior work was limited to getting the flight decks repaired. Early on Richards gave him priority in the waiting list for patches and parts, since the faster the flight deck could be restored the more easily personnel and supplies could be transferred aboard. For the first two weeks, until the bulk of the patches were in place and the testing of hull integrity was well in hand, the salvage team and the crewmen working with them had to be shuttled back and forth each day from the City of Cashel. It was only after they could be reasonably confident the ship wasn't going to suddenly lose atmosphere that crew members could begin moving in to quarters on board on a more or less permanent basis.

  All these considerations meant that work on the starboard flight deck was first on the list of things to be done, with Bondarevsky in personal charge of the details assigned there. The physical problems of repairing the wrecked hull and deck plating didn't take long to finish, but once that was over there were myriad details to deal with. The force field airlocks at each end of the flight deck had to be repaired and tested, and the massive clamshell doors that sealed off the deck when flight operations were not in train had to be put in order so that the crews working inside didn't have to rely entirely on the force fields while they were performing tasks too delicate to be done in space suits. Bondarevsky left most of the actual flight deck work to the supervision of Sparks McCullough, who knew more about the cycle of flight deck operations than most of the Landreicher crew was ever likely to learn. He concentrated on a related section of the ship, the Flight Control Center, located on the deck below the CIC where Admiral Tolwyn was hard at work attempting to restore some semblance of order to the carrier's most vital command and control systems.

  The FCC was actually a whole suite of related compartments, each individual chamber responsible for one aspect of the supercarrier's flight ops. Central to all was Primary Flight Control, the nerve center which oversaw all of the fighters, bombers, and support craft operating off the carrier at any given time. Primary Flight Control was relegated to a fairly low position on the priority list of places to be restored to operational order, however, since it would still be a long time before regular flight ops were conducted off Karga. Instead, Bondarevsky focused on CSTCC—the Carrier Space Traffic Control Center—located directly forward of the Primary Flight Control compartment. CSTCC governed the operations of craft in space within five kilometers of the carrier, and oversaw launching and recovery of all craft. The compartment had received only light collateral damage from the hit that had blasted CIC, but this structura
l damage had to be made good before anything else could be done. Banks of instrumentation had to be removed in order to install bulkhead patches and deck plating in CIC, using lighter versions of the hull patches that had been applied to the ship's exterior. Then the instrumentation had to be returned, with each system being thorough checked and tested before being installed to ensure that everything was at least potentially in working order. Two of the most vital systems in CSTCC relied on repair work being performed elsewhere on Karga: the sensor arrays located near the top of the carrier's towering superstructure, and the communications system. Fortunately these were high on everyone's priority list, and Diaz had specialists tackling these systems almost from the very beginning. Still, it was over a week from the time the CSTCC was physically restored until the first tests of ship's sensors and communications, and two more days went by after that tracking down a series of small but disabling glitches.

  In fact, the computers came on-line before the sensors were fully working, and that was accounted a minor miracle by anyone with more than a smattering of computer knowledge. Given the vast differences in design philosophy between human and Kilrathi technicians, it had been touch and go for a time. In fact, it wouldn't have been possible to get the computer systems up and running at all without the active assistance of Hrothark, the Kilrathi Cadre Computer Officer who worked with Diaz's experts to modify their code to something the Kilrathi computers would recognize as usable. Fortunately the computer network was designed not only for redundancy and flexibility, but for a high degree of self-programming. Once Diaz and Hrothark introduced the basic directives into the system the computer net itself did most of the work of developing operating systems. Still, the sheer number of different jobs the computer had to oversee in order for the ship to work required a great deal of programming time, and even after the computer system was on-line and functioning programmers were continuing to introduce new routines as they became necessary. Computer control for environmental systems was introduced first, followed by sensors, communications, and the ship's power grid. But minor errors continued to be almost constant reminders of how much they had to do, from the periodic shutdown of gravity and light in the crew quarters on Deck Six to the fault that caused the entire computer system to crash every time someone tried to send a passenger lift to the ship's recreation section.