"Well...let's just hope it is."
* * *
Mavis was right: he was pissed.
Chris seemed to notice that weapons were free after about an hour, and cursed out loud. He yelled at me, he yelled at the captain, he yelled at everybody. And his attempt to get into Gunnery was even more entertaining. Short of an electron torch (which Dieter had in Engineering, but pointedly refused to hand over), he couldn't open it by force, and he seemed to understand it was unwise to try and compel a full-limb cyborg to do, well, pretty much anything. It also would have been mutiny, which was a High Crime in every part of space -- even here, and even now, under these circumstances. If Team were to capture us, instead of just blow us out of the sky, we'd all likely get charged with espionage -- but an attack of any kind on Mavis, by a member of the crew, would have put the perp into a whole other class of villain.
He ordered me to come out.
Then he ordered me to hang off the trigger.
When I didn't respond, he stopped with the orders and just seemed to sulk. It was a distasteful side of the guy.
To be fair, he hadn't been such a bad leader, over all -- and I didn't like to think of myself as a bad follower.
But maybe I was.
The plain facts were, Mavis, Dieter, and I worked for the ship; Chris, John, and Stinna worked for the mission. The engineer hadn't weighed in, except to state that the captain was always going to be right, so just leave him out of it. Dieter had the ultimate, practical power on the ship, since he could shut off any systems he wanted, right at their source. But Chris hadn't suggested that he do so to Gunnery -- maybe because he didn't think of it, or maybe because he knew the man wouldn't.
So I stayed at my station.
The high ergonomic quality of Shady Lady's Gunnery design included emergency biowaste systems, and even a water dispenser and ration bars, just in case the person in the chair had to remain in the chair for a while. I hadn't thought I'd need any of it when the cruise started. It was good to be wrong.
After a time, I decided to break the brooding, which was seeming childish by this point. I called the ML on a private channel.
"I have an obligation," I told him. "You know that."
"We all have one, Ejoq. You better believe it's true that a fight here could lead to interstellar conflict. You know that neither Meerschaum nor UH foresaw any of this. Can we at least come to an accord? Will you hold off any shooting, unless there's absolutely no choice?"
"That was always the plan, Chris. I'm not about to attack without a very good reason. They jumped in hot and little off-true. Mavis pulled us out of their targeting range, and now it's looking like they can't make up the difference. If they get a lock on us again, though, I make no promises: we absolutely cannot let them strike first."
"I don't believe they will."
"I don't have a reason not to believe it."
And that about ended the conversation. We simply didn't agree -- either on this, or on just disagreeing.
Civilities notwithstanding, I wasn't ready to unlock the door (or, ask Mavis to unlock it, more like), not because I thought he'd make a move on me now -- I mean, having the captain's backing pretty much defanged him in that regard -- but because I didn't trust the situation outside the ship. I couldn't afford any distractions, or for somebody to swing by Gunnery to discuss my point-of-view or cruddy attitude.
I had to watch all current data, the Situational Status.
I had to sim what I saw, and prepare for as many outcomes as possible, likely or otherwise.
I had to wait.
Maybe for nothing -- hopefully for nothing.
But maybe I was waiting for some tell-tale long-range optical evidence of a missile cluster racing out from Liquidator. Maybe I was waiting for it to take up an attack position in anticipation of firing a broadside with directed energy weapons. I had no defensive techniques for dealing with things like those, but it still wasn't a party to be late to...
And then all the ship-wide alarms sounded again.
Graviton!
EMP!
Targeting lock!
Just like before -- and just like before, Jaybird appeared smack in front of us, well within its likely attack range.
"Hold on!" Mavis called over the open channel, and Shady Lady's wonderful inertial compensators were hard-pressed to manage the sudden gees from these maneuvers, hard-pressing me into my seat!
Both John and Stinna cried out in surprise, the ship's sideways zag catching them off-guard. It sounded like Stinna had been up from her seat, and maybe thrown headlong.
The auto-fire protocol I'd put into place after the last surprise visit kicked in the instant the freejump's weapon lock was confirmed.
Our port and starboard missile tubes emptied their loads simultaneously, then rotated, ready to do it again.
Our single forward multi-spectrum gun spat a 14 Gw beam of energy that ran through a very healthy range of the EM spread every single millicycle, fully tracking Jaybird for a solid three seconds.
At the exact moment Shady Lady was turning and lashing out, it was also rocked hard, and I heard a thick bang from somewhere aft, beyond the bulkhead. Damage warnings flashed in my retinals, and I felt us swinging laterally through the compensators.
"We're hit!" I shouted, just as my displays went blank.
"I'm blind up here!" John cried at the same time. "Passives are down!"
"I have damage!" put in Dieter. "Electrical and structural!"
We were all talking over each other, but Mavis cut us off.
"Pipe down!" And we instantly did, while the ship, itself, seemed to straighten out. "All hands, sound off in order."
One by one, we reported in, including Stinna, who seemed shaky but okay.
"Dieter," Mavis then ordered, "damage report."
Shady Lady's Engineer spoke quickly, and with a grimness I didn't like.
"We had a kinetic hit, port-side aft. It must have buckled the outer hull, and severed a trunkline. We have total power loss to, ah...Third Zone systems, as well as the forward gun. Comp, life support, and main drives are all fine, and there's no breach of the inner hull."
"Sensors," Mavis said next, "What have you got? Because I have nothing up here."
John still sounded shocked, overwhelmed.
"We're...doing a hard reset right now," he replied. "It takes time to calibrate. I...I don't know what happened! There was a flash -- different than the one before. Everything went down."
"Gunnery."
"I confirm that the forward multi-spec is red-lined. Missile systems are still green. I put UV Pulse-Communications on Active for those, because of the interference effect off the hull. UVPC only works over a very short range, but it was enough. Of the eight darts launched, I have two impact confirmations on the target, two more lost to what I assume was enemy fire, and the rest all...hmmm...the rest sent back auto-abort sigs."
"What?" Chris asked, perplexed. "Why did they do that?"
"Looks like they got kill confirmations from their own onboard sensors, and self-destructed as per SOP. The freejump must be gone, but I can't tell for sure with eyes shut like this."
"I said we're working on it!" John barked.
"Yeah!" Stinna put in, pointlessly, and a beat behind.
"Dieter?" the captain queried, ignoring the chatter now that it was clear we were mostly intact, "What's our stealth capability right now?"
"Embedded sensors show hull damage only at the point of impact," he relayed, after a moment. "I would have to get out there and check for sure, but right now, it looks like there are no rad or thermal leaks. I'd say we have a small spot on the hull that could be visible to enemy sensors -- maybe only up close, but I don't know yet."
"Can we return to silent running? Does pre-cooling still work?"
"It, um...yes. It looks okay. Should I engage?"
"Yes, do it now. Ejoq," she then pursued, "did we fire first?"
I scanned the log, read the numbers twice to myse
lf to be sure, then spoke up.
"Yep, by point-three-seven seconds."
"So they were trying to strike first?"
"Absolutely. And I still don't know what it was they hit us with, but I will soon. Let me gather my data. I'll present a report in twenty minutes."
"Sounds good. And...thank you."
"My pleasure," I replied, truly feeling the words, truly happy to be able to say them.
I took a deep breath of recycled air inside my plastic hood.
It was sweet, like candy. Being alive was like candy.
Everything was different now.
We had learned what was likely the biggest secret of modern times, about the greatest technological breakthrough in centuries: a space vessel capable of intra-system transit....the most advanced starship in history.
And I'd just blown it up.
||||||||||
Ten minutes passed. (It flashed in my eyes.)
Slowly, my breathing became less frantic, my shivering less like a seizure.
A half-hour.
My arms and back ached from holding on, but I needn't have, so hard: there weren't any stresses or forces pulling me away now; there was no gravity. The ship was rock steady in the middle of a spherical, pitch black space. The strut vibrated under my arms and legs from the workings of the engine and power plant, but now that the universe was in vac, these machines were completely silent.
That was good.
I relaxed my hold a bit.
Oh, hey! The infrared filters were still active on my retinals.
I muttered the deactivation phrase, and they returned to the visible light setting.
Yeah, that was better. Things weren't so red and orange anymore.
Forty minutes.
Clearly, we were jumping away from the system. There were warships posted at the rim, so there was no getting out that way.
An hour.
We had to be going much further out -- probably mid-space somewhere, between stars, where the ship's superluminal graviton wake wouldn't be detected upon reentry to the real universe, even with highly-calibrated sensors looking in all directions (which, by now, they most certainly were).
We could be in jumpspace for many more hours. Or for days.
Weeks...?
Clinging to a landing strut the whole time wasn't going to work!
||||||||||
seven
* * *
When it seemed safe, Mavis ordered ship's atmo restored, and within minutes, we were able to remove our pressure suits. Sensors were back online about an hour after this, including actives, but John and Stinna still had a tonne of recalibrating to do. All their equipment was way out of true. Something had hammered us across the entire EM spectrum, far beyond what the station had been doing.
The fact that we were no longer showing radio band interference revealed that Mylag Vernier had stopped hitting us with that odd beam. It didn't represent much improvement in the situation, but any good news was noteworthy.
We decided to let the Sensor Specialists have the Common Room to themselves so they could work without distraction, and convened the postmortem amidships, with Mavis, Chris, Dieter and myself sitting on our bunks.
"...so when Jaybird jumped in front of us the second time," Chris was clarifying (while taking notes for his own report, which he'd need to turn in to Meerschaum eventually, just as we all would), "it was already locked on to us?"
"Within half-a-second, yeah. It must have been getting telemetry piped from the station, because it arrived facing us, matching speed and movement in all three axes -- though somewhat below our plane. We were less than a hundred kilometers apart, making us an easy target."
"Then why are we alive?" Mavis asked, her bright mechanical eyes following everything I said and did.
"Three reasons," I supplied, counting them off. "One, they were below us, like I said; possibly a telemetry error. It would have taken their targeting systems just that much longer to acquire us. They could detect us at that range, since they knew where to look, and the efficacy of our stealth system relies on distance as well as technology. Two, Mavis reacted faster than they could have anticipated, turning us from a standing target, relatively speaking, into a moving one. And three, after their first appearance, I set up an automatic attack sequence, keyed to run on a certain set of criteria. This specifically included a graviton exit cone within a close radius, and a weapons lock upon Shady Lady -- the same events as the first time."
"Why did they pull the same move twice in a row?" the ML queried.
"I don't know. It was a mistake, for sure, but they probably thought we wouldn't be expecting it again so soon. In point of fact, I wasn't, but I'm compulsive about some things."
"What did they hit us with?" Mavis inquired, her brows knit.
This required a visual, so I moved to the center of the companionway, between them all, and knelt down. Bringing up a hasty animation assembled from the data returns we'd gotten in the microseconds before sensors were overwhelmed, a soft glow filled the narrow companionway, painting strange images on everyone's faces. The resolution of my wristcomp wasn't great, but it sufficed for this.
"I don't think they hit us at all," I explained. "I think we hit us."
With subdued hand gestures, I advanced the scene slowly. It showed a generic bat-shape (just a stock model from the library), which represented Shady Lady. I placed a blinking dot to its port, then zoomed in close to one side of the display field so as to draw a bright yellow line coming in at an angle.
"From what I can figure, they fired a spiralling particle lance. Far deadlier than the neupac gun I was expecting: think of it like a focused beam made of plasma. It struck Missile G just after it was ejected, but a twentieth of a second prior to the missile's engine ignition. We were pulling a tight arc at that moment...Mavis, how many gees was it?"
"At least twenty-four," the captain supplied.
"Wow! Okay. At that speed, and with that kind of an arc, we would have been in a position like this." I flicked my finger a bit to turn the bat over by a hair, and facing more to the right. "The beam hits the missile, which is still just outside the ship, but no longer near its launch tube, because we're turning away. It's closer to port aft, down here."
"We don't have any armor on this tub, to speak of," Dieter stated, then pointed to the spot where we were hit. "Why weren't we rippped open when the missile went off?"
"Because it didn't. Civilian Class missiles just about can't detonate by anything other than intentional means. It's a safety feature."
Moving the animation forward, I drew the beam down to touch the dot, which in turn, bounced back into the bat.
"So, the beam hits the missile," I continued, "instantly converting it to a ball of debris and hot gases, which, in turn, slams directly back into Shady Lady. We collided with the wreck of our own missile...but we should be happy we did: it deflected the plasma strike. Had the beam actually hit us, it would have sheared off the back end of the ship. That was, in fact, a Class III lance; spectral analysis pegs it as military-grade. I've never seen one before, but it's listed in the library."
"I thought we hit them first," Mavis said, confused.
"No, we fired first, but missiles move slower than laser or plasma beams. Actually, our forward laser may have hit them spot on, without any lateral tracking. If so, that would, indeed, be first blood to us, but I don't want to pester John or Stinna to run a log search right now."
"No," Chris agreed, "we'll figure it out later. Could either of your weapon systems account for the energy burst that followed?"
"Not a chance," I replied, with a firm shake of my head, and getting back to my feet. "It was something aboard Jaybird. Maybe that experimental power system going critical? A weird effect of the freejump tech?"
I shrugged.
That was it for me, so I sat down and relaxed. It was easy to do, because I'd been presenting the good news. Dieter was next, and his was all bad.
"I've been runn
ing some numbers," he started off, then squirted out a localized data pack, so we could follow along with our own communication and display tools as he spoke.
In my eye-view, I saw a request for a conference call, and opened it up. Icons for all of us in the meeting appeared there, super-imposed over the real us. The engineer's information packet blinked in front of his avatar. I did a head gesture to open it up, and a table of data dropped down. The others did similar movements, Chris with his dual watches -- one on either hand -- and Dieter with a multi-piece thing attached to his flight suit in various places, which he utilized with a combination of finger moves, button taps, and sub-vocalizations. Mavis was interacting with the rest of us just fine, but didn't apparently need to do anything but think about it.
"That power line was cut clean through, as far as I can tell," the man with the permanent hangover explained. "I've been able to access all affected systems, and reroute through the two remaining trunks. We're back up to full, but this revealed a serious problem..."
One of the entries flashed red under his command, then centered itself in the image and grew in size. It was under the subheading: STARJUMP PRE-CYCLE.
"What is that?" Mavis asked, suddenly concerned. "A simulated starjump? Why is the power-up sequence failing?"
The man touched the air over his chest, wiggling his fingers and drawing a circle around several subsystems on the list.
"Everything in Engineering is integrated in order to save on space, and allow for adequate masking during stealth runs. There's no direct access to the starjump engine, unless I pull out all controls for the main drive, disconnect maneuvering thrusters, and remove a couple of backup systems for life support."
"How much time?" the captain queried.
"I can't even guess...weeks?"
"What if you had help?" I offered. "I know a bit about engines."
"You don't have clearance," Chris put in, but then turned to Mavis. "You could order him to help, which would be a legal exception in the Security Contract, but they might give you flack over it later."
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 8