by Aer-ki Jyr
The gravity disc wasn’t all that wide, with the corridor floors angling up on a steep curve that soon led them to a stairwell. They floated up to the second ring and encountered another closed door on that level. It didn’t have power, so Markinson pulled off the small panel beneath the motion sensor nub and manually cranked it open a couple inches via a rotational handle, after which he and Harry pried it open further and moved on deeper into the recesses of the dark ship.
They proceeded in a similar manner until they made it to the core and floated ‘down’ through the circular opening and out into the ventral gravity disc’s upper stairwell, which likewise was unpowered and no longer spinning. Several levels out and they came to the normal gravity ring and made their way to the bridge compartment, prying open the doors there.
“Hello,” Harry said as his helmet lights flashed across a pair of bodies floating in the middle of the room…and one more sitting in a chair. None of them responded to their presence or the bright lights.
“Check them,” Markinson ordered, heading over to the individual seated in the pilot’s station. When he got close he saw that the man was strapped into the seat via a thigh strap. He reached out with his armored hand and poked the man in the chest, finding the body stiff and lifeless.
“Dead,” Markinson said over the comm.
“These too,” Harry reported, gently pushing the floaters aside. “Either the carbon dioxide or the cold, can’t tell which.”
“Save them for retrieval later,” Paul’s calm voice said through their helmet speakers. “The main computer console is directly behind the Captain’s chair. Plug in and see if you can download their sensor logs.”
Markinson looked around and found the appropriate station just behind the pilot’s depressed cubicle. He circled around behind the solid Captain’s chair and saw a stone-like pillar attached to the back of the seat with several interface points.
“Found it,” he said, motioning for Harry’s power pack.
“Catch,” he said, floating it across the room slowly as he made a sweep of every dark nook and cranny.
Markinson’s traction-covered fingertips had little trouble snagging it out of the air and pulling out the attachment cord, which he input into the proper receptacle, followed by his forearm module’s interface. As soon as limited power was reestablished he had full computer access…along with a security code prompt.
“Captain, Archon…don’t suppose either of you know their security codes?”
“I’m afraid not,” Borsk said.
“Since we built the ship our overrides should work,” Paul said confidently. “Type in the following sequence: J-A-C-K-0-I-N-0-T-H-E-7-B-O-X.”
Markinson suppressed a laugh until the computer let him in, then he indulged himself. “What kind of a security code is that?”
“Something long and easy to remember,” Paul said evenly. “It should work on all Star Force built ships, both ours and the public ones, for a ‘view only’ mode. You can copy out any data, but you can’t make any alterations. By the way, that code is classified and something you’re not to share with anyone not already on this comm line…but it’s also something that you might want to remember for future use.”
“Yes, sir,” Markinson said gratefully. He had no idea there were generic access codes for Star Force hardware/software, and he doubted that the buyers knew either. “I’m rigging my module for relay transmission rather than download and shunting you their entire database. Let me know when you’re ready to receive, Captain.”
“Standby,” Borsk said as he made the appropriate arrangements. “Archon, we’re setting up a datalink back to Atlantis as well. You’ll get what we get, but I’m saving ours to the hard drive just in case there’s some data lost to signal interference.”
“Good call,” Paul agreed. “Route it through this same line. We’re ready to receive.”
“Same here,” Borsk said, talking for Markinson’s sake. “Send it over.”
“Here we go,” Markinson said to himself as he keyed the ‘copy all’ function. The transmission icon lit up with a scrolling data transfer score immediately beginning to build set against a percentage complete marker, which was ticking up at about 2% every 5 seconds. “Are you receiving?”
“Yes,” Borsk answered.
“Ditto here,” Paul confirmed a moment later.
Kara and Andy made their way through the limited number of rooms on what was left of the dorsal gravity disc, coming up against another sealed door three quarters of the way around the arc which wouldn’t open due to atmospheric safety protocols…meaning they’d made their way back around to the breach point, so they doubled back to the nearest stairwell and headed up a level, eventually arriving at the ship’s galley.
When they entered the thermal readings on their armors’ external monitors jumped 13 degrees up to -7. The two bodies they’d seen on the surveillance camera were floating mid room, but there were five others spread out attached to various chairs, tables, or cabinets by makeshift ties to keep them from floating around. All of them were wrapped up in what looked like thermal blankets.
Now that they were in atmosphere their armor pumped the external sound through their helmet speakers, so when the crinkle of synthetic material sounded it got their attention immediately. Both of their helmeted heads turned to the right and saw one of the bodies twist slightly, crackling the makeshift blanket he wore.
Kara walked over to the person, tied to a floor-mounted chair via a wristband, and saw frost on his face and eyebrows, along with a plume of white as he suddenly exhaled in the frigid conditions when he realized someone had found him.
“Captain, we’ve found a survivor,” she reported. “We need an evac suit over here on the double.”
“This one’s dead,” Andy said, beginning to check the others.
“What’s his condition?” Borsk asked.
“Disoriented and frozen. Possible frostbite,” Kara reported. “We’ve got 7 people holed up in the galley wrapped in some type of blankets…might even be packing material. This room is slightly warmer, due to their body heat I’d guess.”
“Got another,” Andy said, his voice elevating a notch. “She’s barely showing life signs. We’ve got to get some heat in here.”
“Are the scrubbers working?” Borsk asked.
“Last I checked, yes,” Markinson said from the other side of the gravity disc, monitoring their conversation.
“Archon,” Kara asked, “is there a junction box near the galley?”
“Yes, should be a few steps away…too your left,” Paul said, checking the ship schematics.
“I’m going to try and get the heat on, see to them,” she said.
“I’m sending over recovery pods,” Borsk added. “You can use their internal heaters to warm them up. Are any of them responsive?”
“Barely,” Andy answered. “Visual recognition only. No speech…got another dead one.”
“How many survivors?” Paul asked.
“Looks like just the two here,” Andy said, double checking the woman. “But I’m not sure if this one is going to make it. And we haven’t finished searching the ship yet.”
“There’s also a few rooms attached to the depressurized section that we couldn’t search,” Kara pointed out. “Aside from soft sealing each one I’m not sure how we can get at them.”
“We have drill cams for that,” Borsk noted. “I’ll have some sent over with the pods. If we find anyone then we can soft seal, but for now attend to the ones we’ve found and keep searching the ship. Priority goes to them first.”
Andy looked at the pair of survivors, bobbing about slightly attached to their tethers. “Not much we can do here for them. Get those pods over here as fast as you can.”
“They’re coming,” the Captain promising.
Twenty four minutes later Kara and a medic from the ship hauled four thigh-sized cylinders into the galley, one held under each arm. Kara passed one to Andy and ‘dropped’ the other, let
ting it float lazily across the room as she looked at the man staring back at her with what looked like dead eyes, but the small puffs of breath oozing out of his nostrils testified to his continuing existence, and she hoped he could hold on long enough to get back to the ship.
She checked her thermals…now up to +4 in the room, but still below freezing elsewhere in the ship. The thermal strips in the walls, ceiling, and floor had been jacked up as high as they could go and were eating up a significant portion of her power pack, plugged into the wall outside, and woefully insufficient to warm up the entire disc, but hopefully a few degrees here would buy the survivors some more time.
Kara watched as both Andy and the medic opened their respective cylinders and pulled the insides out, expanding the compact bundles into what looked like sleeping bags. The soft, flexible material then mushroomed out into an elongated pod as hard ribs unfolded, along with a clear face cap at the opposite end from the hard equipment bundle at the feet.
“Some help,” Andy asked Kara as he began to pull off the woman’s blanket.
Kara stepped over and helped him slide her inside the pod, then hurried over and helped the medic do the same, sealing the survivors inside and activating the limited internal life support, warming the inside air, adding small amounts of oxygen, and scrubbing out the carbon dioxide.
“Take this one,” the medic said, switching over to look at the woman as Kara began walking the pod out of the galley.
“She’s weak,” Andy said as the medic looked at the condition of her face through the clear shield.
“Worse than the other,” he declared. “She goes first then. Let’s hurry.”
Together they pulled the pods back to the breach point and loaded them up on another support craft which ferried them back over to the SR, with the medic riding on the outside of the craft along with his two patients. He had a receiving party waiting for him in the hangar back on the ship, and signaled to them to get the woman through the airlock and into the med bay first. He stayed with the man for the three minute delay, then followed his pod inside.
The search team stayed with the ship, loading up the dead bodies into pods after looking for and finding no additional survivors. The engineering compartment under and aft of the saucer section had been completely depressurized with several holes opening it directly to space…and the cargo sections behind it were in even worse condition. Whatever had hit the ship had hit it hard and repetitively, making a mess of what had once been a truly elegant starship.
With the survivors onboard the SR and the recovery efforts continuing, Paul and Roger went over the ship’s sensor logs meticulously, unfortunately with little data to work with. The radar records clearly showed another ship in the vicinity of the Leo at the time of the incident, but it had no transponder and had made no contact with the Taiwanese vessel.
It took quite a while to sift through the external camera feeds, but an enlargement of three of them showed the culprit firing off a series of missiles at range, just before the feeds went dead. The ship was hazy, due to the range and magnification issues, but using the various angles they were able to construct a rough wireframe of the vessel, which didn’t match any on file, Star Force or otherwise.
Paul stared at the diagram, slowly spinning on a wall display next to the fuzzy images trying to piece it all together.
“Any theories?” Roger asked.
“It’s Earth tech, obviously,” Paul said, still looking at the screen. “But I don’t see anything here to identify the ship, and there’s no record of any ghost sightings in the traffic logs. All radar contacts have been tagged, so whoever this is, they’ve been sneaking about outside the detection range of our facilities.”
“Seems like someone has gone to significant effort to hide this ship, and perhaps others from us,” Roger said ominously.
“Meaning Davis was right,” Paul agreed. “They’re starting it all over again.”
4
November 5, 2059
Paul casually leapt up the stairs into Davis’s office, easing into an almost silent walk on the top step and passing through several intense sunrays coming in through the 360 degree, wrap-around window late morning to find Davis pouring over a mountain of data that he didn’t look up from. Paul walked forward and sat down in one of the three opposite chairs and waited for him to finish.
“The survivors?” Davis asked several long seconds later, finally looking up from his corporate figures.
“Transferred into the medical facility on A-23 three hours ago.”
Davis nodded. “Get anything useful from them?”
“Nothing in addition to the sensor data, and the woman is still in coma. I doubt she’ll have anything to add if and when she wakes up.”
“I haven’t reported the incident to the Taiwanese ambassador yet, and so far they haven’t made any inquiries. I wanted to decide what we were going to do before word gets out.”
Paul frowned. “How could they not know they’ve got a ship missing? The moment the transponder cut out they should have seen a red flag.”
Davis inclined his head skeptically. “Either they’re not as vigilant in monitoring their ships…or they’re waiting to see if it will eventually come in.”
“Sloppy,” Paul said dismissively.
“Course projections showed it wasn’t due to arrive at the Exchange until the day after tomorrow. I assume that’s not going to happen?”
“No it won’t. We’ve already diverted what’s left of the ship safely away and it should rendezvous with a proper tug within a week. The debris is another matter. The SR took care of the big pieces, but the sweeper team won’t get there for another two days. We’ll need to yellow flag the area for the public within the next 12 hours.”
Davis nodded. “And tell them what?”
“I don’t know,” Paul said honestly. “We haven’t been able to locate or backtrack the ship. We have no idea who owns it, who built it, or where it’s hiding…or how many of them there are.”
“What do you want to do about it?”
Paul stared him straight in the eye. “I want to bring in the fleet and hunt it down.”
“Which means letting the cat out of the bag.”
“We can do it quietly…for a while. But if there is a rogue warship out there we have to protect our civilian fleet. We’ve kept them unarmed for political reasons, which makes them target practice without escorts.”
“And escorts are visible.”
“Again, we can keep it discrete, but we don’t have enough warships to cover our own transports unless we start grouping them in convoys, which would then be letting the cat out of the bag.”
“Why convoy if there’s no escort?”
“Exactly.”
“Any guesses as to where it came from?” Davis asked, already having formulated a few of his own.
“There has to be a covert shipyard somewhere,” Paul said emphatically. “We already keep surveillance on all the current ones to make sure new ships are transponder tagged and they know it. The question is, where is the shipyard and how did they build it without us knowing.”
“I’m assuming this warship is too big to have been launched from Earth?”
“Yes, it’s roughly corvette-sized, and even if it was brought up from the surface in pieces we would have detected the launch.”
“Because they have to be transponder tagged,” Davis echoed. “So when can they get some peace and quiet away from us?”
“Best guess would be a side trip by an unmarked auxiliary craft or drone,” Paul said, laying out the possibilities that he’d been calculating the past 2 days. “A transport makes a routine run through a dark zone with us tracking the transponder. It launches a smaller, faster unmarked craft that travels to an orbital slot off the main detection grid and drops off supplies or parts, then it accelerates to catch up and re-dock with the transport before it comes within radar range of any other ship or station.”
“How big of a transport are we talking
?”
“Any cargo module would work, but it’d have to be listed as an empty berth or a mislabeled one if the business they were carrying out was with us, and most of it is. If it was between other parties they could carry whatever they wanted, but most of those trips are within station groups or along high traffic lanes. Bottom line is there’s some opportunities to exploit, but in order to do so they’ve had to be very sneaky and innovative…and it would be very expensive.”
“Where’s the most likely place they’re hiding?”
“My money would be mid orbit along the transit lanes from Luna. A station parked there would come into alignment every few weeks, but that would also put it in detection range of passing ships temporarily, so it’s not exactly the perfect hiding spot. It could also be trailing the moon in the same orbit, outside the range of our Lunar Cyclops, but the deviation point would have to be well prior to arrival at Lunar orbit, meaning a great deal more range to cover. It’s something I’d try, but with their limited technology and fuel reserves it’s unlikely…unless they’re very committed.”
“Which is a distinct possibility,” Davis added.
“Another option is that they’ve refitted one of their known stations with an internal shipyard…one that we’re not monitoring. It’d be a game of cat and mouse in closer to the planet to avoid detection, but it does appear that the warship had at least moderate stealth plating that would diminish effective radar range.”
“But no AG?”
“Not based on the shape and size, no,” Paul said relatively confident. “Either it’s a drone ship, which I find unlikely, or they’ve got their crew in zero g round the clock, which is just plain stupid.”