by Smith, Glenn
Hansen sighed, then said to the lingering hostility, “I love you, too, Princess.” Then he yawned.
She was his daughter, his only child, and as difficult as she could be to deal with sometimes, he loved her very much, unconditionally, no matter what. Someday, he knew, that love would pay off and she’d thank him for staying strong and putting up with all the grief she’d caused him over the years. At least, that was what his parenting counselor had always said, back when he still had time to attend their sessions.
Would be nice if today turned out to be that day.
He drew a deep breath, heard the shower water come on as he slowly exhaled, then reached up and wiped a layer of perspiration from his forehead. What the hell was going on, anyway? Had he eaten some bad food last night or something? He hadn’t had any nightmares in a long time, let alone those nightmares. Not in nearly two decades, in fact. So why now all of the sudden?
“Must be stress,” he mumbled under his breath.
He lay there for the next several minutes and allowed his mind to linger on the memories of that horrific tragedy from so many years ago. Then, suddenly, it hit him. Something wasn’t as it should be. Something in the here and now. Something wasn’t right with...with what? What was it? What had caused the little hairs on the back of his neck to stand on end?
He thought about work—about the mystery that had come to light just yesterday. Was it something about the man—the one who claimed to be O’Donnell? Unlikely. The question of his identity was straight forward enough. The alleged originator of the message either was or was not the former member of the Excalibur crew. Period. They’d figure that out one way or another soon enough.
Something about the starcruiser Albion then? No. No, that didn’t feel right either. The question of that vessel’s status at the time of the Excalibur’s destruction, while certainly still an unknown at this early stage of the newly reopened investigation, wasn’t what was bothering him at that moment either.
Was it the fact that more than nine-hundred personnel, all of whom had been assigned to the Mars Orbital Shipyards at that same time, were all long since dead? Clearly, something was very wrong there, but no. That wasn’t it either.
There was something else. Something unrelated to the whole Excalibur question, he somehow knew. Something more...more tangible, and much more immediate. But what was it?
Something to do with Heather? As usual, she was running around their quarters in her underwear again—he hadn’t even realized that until just now—and she was certainly behaving like the same mood-swinging problem child he’d always known and loved, so everything was status quo where she was concerned. Still, if there really was something wrong, there was a good chance she was connected to it in some way.
He listened for a moment to the shower. Then for another moment, and then another...and still another. That was it. The shower water. No splashes, no pauses, no changes in sound whatsoever. Just a constant unvarying flow.
He threw off his blankets and climbed out of bed, adjusted his pajama pants and pulled on his robe. Then he stepped out into the living room and caught Heather, fully dressed—at least what she considered to be fully dressed—with her hands wrist deep in the pried open door panel, apparently trying to bypass the lock code. She looked across the room at him, met his eyes, and froze stiff, unblinking, like the proverbial deer in headlights.
“Go to your room, Heather,” he said calmly. “Right now.”
There must have been something unyielding in the forced calm tone of his voice, because with no reaction beyond a simple sigh of resignation, not even the usual disgusted roll of her eyes, Heather immediately and quite silently complied with her father’s order.
Chapter 7
In order to maintain required manning levels throughout their involvement in the ongoing battle to defend the Rosha’Kana star system while still providing her crew sufficient time off to rest and rejuvenate, Captain Bhatnagar had instructed her executive officer to extend the regular eight hour duty shifts to twelve hours, and to shorten the rotation cycle by one day. While it was true that the modified schedule actually added four hours to everyone’s regular duty week, it also provided them an extra day on standby—an extra day they didn’t have to work, provided the call to battle stations wasn’t sounded. That old but innovative solution to the emergency manning problem—there were a handful of grumblers, of course, who wouldn’t have described it in quite that way—had allowed everyone to enjoy some sense of normalcy, despite having to operate under extended alert conditions.
Everyone, that is, except for Captain Bhatnagar herself. She’d been pulling sixteen to eighteen hour shifts every day, seven days per week, for the past three weeks, and except for an occasional bathroom break she hadn’t left the bridge at all over the last twenty-seven hours. Not even to have her injured hip taken care of, despite the fact that her ambitious executive officer—too ambitious for his own good, she sometimes thought—had shown up for his own shift a couple of hours early and had threatened to have the chief medical officer relieve her of duty for at least a week if she didn’t go to Medbay on her own, and then go straight to her cabin for some much needed sleep.
She knew he was right, of course. Over the few hours of relative calm that had passed since they’d been forced to withdraw from battle, her hip had really started to ache a lot, no matter how she sat, and exhaustion had finally begun to catch up to her. She didn’t doubt that the best thing for her to do would indeed be to leave the bridge in his more than capable hands, have the doctor take care of her hip, and then retire to her cabin for a few hours. Even better, for a few days. But she also knew that her ship and her crew weren’t out of danger yet, and her ship and her crew always...always took priority over her personal needs.
“Captain!” her X.O. sharply whispered.
Bhatnagar jumped at the sudden intrusion and opened her eyes, and felt a sharp twinge shoot through her hip and upper leg, which she then realized had gone numb from the back of her knee to the small of her back. That couldn’t be good, she knew.
She peered up at her second-in-command, towering over her with his massive forearms folded across his broad chest, staring down at her through those narrow, penetrating hazel eyes of his. He looked like an old-time comic book superhero or a frustrated father standing over his disobedient child. An interesting talent, she mused, the ability to shout and whisper at the same time without attracting anyone else’s attention. A talent that he’d made good use of several times over the last few hours.
“Yes, Mister Rawlins, what is it?” she inquired, feigning impatience, even though she knew it wouldn’t faze him in the least.
“What is it?” he asked in return with a snicker, keeping his voice as low as possible. “Are you kidding me, Captain?” Unfazed, as expected, he uncrossed his arms, leaned on the arm of her chair, and lowered his voice to a near whisper. “You’re now working on your third straight shift. Do I really have to spell it out for you?”
She drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled to buy a few seconds, but she couldn’t think of a single argument to support her staying on the bridge. “No, Commander,” she answered, finally surrendering to the inevitable, “that won’t be necessary.” With no small amount of difficulty, she stood up, “The bridge is yours,” and hobbled toward the doors. But before they opened to allow her exit, the ship vibrated and rolled slightly to port. Not enough to throw her off balance, and only for a brief moment, but definitely enough to grab her and everyone else’s attention. She stopped and turned on her good leg to face the viewscreen, which showed nothing but the distant stars ahead of them.
“Report,” Rawlins commanded as he moved behind the command console and sat down.
“Detonation astern, Commander,” Lieutenant Irons responded, checking her instruments. “Approximately eighty meters distance.”
“Detonation of what, Miss Irons?” the captain inquired as she started limping toward the tactical officer’s station.
Irons turned and looked up at her commanding officer apologetically, swallowed hard, and reluctantly reported, “Unknown, Captain.” She knew from her first days at the academy that when the ship’s captain asked questions, the ship’s captain wanted answers, not unknowns, especially when the ship’s captain was already frustrated over having to deal with something that interfered with her ability to command. Having to respond in that way was something no junior officer ever wanted to do. Her least of all, as far as she was concerned.
As a life-long overachiever, Irons expected to rise quickly through the ranks—having made full lieutenant already, she’d gotten off to a good start—and to earn her own command one day. Perhaps even to break Commodore Andrea Johansson’s record and become the youngest ship’s captain in fleet history. True, Johansson had still been a commander by rank when she got her first ship, and that ship had been nothing more than a deep space troop transport that made the training run back and forth between Earth and Lucifer’s Lair, but it had been her ship just the same. At least until someone blew it out from under her ten years ago. At any rate, not knowing the answers to the captain’s questions was not the road to quick advancement.
But at least she was prepared to explain why she didn’t know, and explain she did, before the captain could even draw a breath to say anything else. “Whatever it was didn’t register on the sensors or trip a proximity alarm, and it either flew or drifted right into our fusion blast, so there isn’t anything left of it to analyze.”
“And doesn’t the fact that it didn’t register on sensors or trip a proximity alarm indicate to you that its exterior was almost assuredly made of bolamide, Lieutenant?” Bhatnagar asked, pointing out the obvious.
Irons opened her mouth to answer, but found herself without words.
“Think we’ve got ourselves a shadow, Captain?” Rawlins asked, hoping to rescue the pretty young lieutenant, at least for the moment. But Bhatnagar ignored him and continued staring at Irons, waiting for her answer.
Thoroughly embarrassed over having missed the most obvious explanation—everyone in Solfleet knew that bolamide was the rare, sensor and scanner-invisible element in which the Veshtonn encased their missiles and torpedoes—especially after all they’d been through over the past few weeks, Irons finally dropped her gaze and timidly answered, “Yes, ma’am.”
“So the fact that there’s nothing left of it is therefore irrelevant, isn’t it,” the captain went on admonishing. Then, without waiting for an answer, she started limping back to her station again. Rawlins watched her approach, but didn’t budge to surrender the seat. “Conduct a quick, wide range sensor sweep, Lieutenant,” she ordered as she stepped up to the executive officer’s side. “If the results are negative, then follow up with a tight, short range scan of the surrounding area and expand outward in a...”
The ship rumbled and lurched forward suddenly and rolled hard to starboard. Bhatnagar tried to grab hold of the command console and Rawlins tried to grab her arm, but both of them missed their targets and she fell back and cracked the back of her head hard against the edge of the Operations deck.
Rawlins slapped his hand down on the console’s only green button and shouted, “Medical team to the bridge!” then practically leapt out of the command chair and rushed to her aid.
“Direct hit, port side astern!” the engineer shouted.
“Calmly, Ensign,” the executive officer reminded the younger man. “I won’t understand your reports if you’re hysterical.” Then, being very careful not to move the captain’s neck as he checked the back of her head, he called out, “Tactical report.” No blood. That was good. At least he assumed it was good—he wasn’t a doctor, of course—but she was out cold.
“Veshtonn battlecruiser directly astern, Commander,” Irons reported. “Power building in their main laser cannons. They’re preparing to fire again.”
“Evasive maneuvers, helm,” Rawlins ordered. The enemy was diverting weapons power to their laser cannons. That meant they’d already exhausted everything else. At least they had that in their favor.
“Fusion drive is offline,” the engineer advised, still keyed up, but significantly more composed than before. “All we’ve got are high-speed thrusters.”
So much for the flight half of fight-or-flight, Rawlins concluded. “Sound battle stations,” he ordered as he leaned down over the captain and listened to make sure she was still breathing. “Weapons free, and scramble the interceptors!”
* * *
Lieutenant Junior Grade Thomas Patrick O’Donnell, the Victory’s newest and greenest interceptor pilot, had barely picked himself up off his squadron’s ready-room deck when he heard all six of the alert interceptors power up their main engines and catapult down the launch deck, two at a time, like half a dozen missiles rocketing out of their tubes. He tossed his pool cue onto the table as the room lights turned red and the alert klaxon started blaring—he hadn’t really wanted to shoot pool by himself anyway—then grabbed his flight vest and pulled it on as he fell into line with the rest of the scrambling pilots.
“Battle stations, battle stations,” the all too familiar announcement resonated from the ship-wide as they stampeded out onto the launch deck and dashed toward their planes. “Veshtonn battlecruiser astern. Fighter pilots, man your planes. Scramble all interceptors. Battle stations, battle stations.”
“Lieutenant J.G. Thomas O’Donnell, fit to stick!” he shouted to his ground crew chief as he reached his plane and started up the ladder toward the cockpit, indicating that he was in no way physically impaired or otherwise unable to fly.
“Star Hawk eighty-one thirty-seven, fit to fly!” the grizzled old crew chief responded proudly, indicating that his starfighter had finally been nursed back to one-hundred percent operational status.
O’Donnell had learned early on that, like most other crew chiefs throughout the fleet, Chief Simmons thought of his fighter as his own, and that its overall condition was a matter of personal pride for him. But this was the first time since O’Donnell’s first and very nearly last combat mission that he’d made that proclamation, and it came as such a surprise that O’Donnell actually stopped halfway up the ladder and looked back at him, but he didn’t have to ask.
“We just installed a whole shit-load of new parts in the old girl,” the chief advised him.
“Great,” O’Donnell grumbled. Like all the fledgling fighter pilots onboard, he’d heard all the old stories about untried replacement parts failing in the middle of a fight. In some cases, the planes had actually broken up on their own under the stresses associated with high-speed combat maneuvers, if the stories were to be believed. He ascended quickly and, bracing himself on either side of the narrow fuselage, threw his feet into the cockpit and dropped into the seat. “That’s just fucking great,” he grumbled.
The chief appeared at his side not three seconds later with his helmet, seal ring, and gloves in hand. “You know damn well I don’t like the idea of flying into combat with untested parts, Chief,” O’Donnell sternly reminded him.
“Not to worry, L-T,” the chief assured him as he dropped the gloves into the rookie’s lap and fastened the seal ring in place around his neck. “There isn’t a single story you’ve heard that I haven’t, and there isn’t a single brand new part in your plane. We took them off Sunshine’s bird. Damn Veshtonn shot he hell out of it yesterday. Won’t fly no more, so it’s just a collection of spare parts now.”
“Who installed them?” O’Donnell asked as he pulled his gloves on. He hadn’t learned to trust any of the other deck gang yet.
“Just me and my hammer, boss, and I managed to increase your guns’ ammo capacity by close to ten percent, too.”
O’Donnell looked at the old West Tennessean in a whole new light. As the senior ground crew supervisor, Chief Simmons shouldered the overall responsibility for all of the ship’s small vessels, shuttles, attack fighters, and interceptors alike. The attack fighters had all been handed over to the task force right before th
e Victory pulled out of the fight, so they at least could stay in the fight, but the chief still rarely ever had time to get his own hands dirty anymore, despite how much he loved doing so. So for him to have devoted the kind of time that job must have taken really said something about how he felt toward his newest pilot.
O’Donnell grinned—he was even referring to himself as belonging to the chief—but before he could say anything more than “Thank you, Chief,” before he could get all gushy and sentimental, the leathery old senior NCO pushed his flight helmet down over his head and locked the seal into place.
“Now you look here, L-T,” he shouted over the din echoing through the launch bayas he started strapping O’Donnell into his seat. “I expect to have to tell my people to paint a few lizard heads under your name when you get back here. With all that extra ammo you’re carrying, you should make ‘Ace’ in no time.”
“I’ll be happy just to make it back home again, Chief,” O’Donnell responded, hollering through his helmet’s face shield, unsure whether or not the chief could possibly hear him over the deafening, high-pitched whine of the other planes’ combined engines as they all started powering up at the same time.
The chief quickly pulled his wired headset into place—it doubled as heavy-duty hearing protection—and opened the comm-channel, then connected O’Donnell’s oxygen intake and personal electronics package to their power sources behind the seat. Then, with a quick but sharp salute for emphasis, he said, “Good hunting, Lieutenant,” and then descended out of sight.
“I thought you never addressed us rookie pilots by our proper rank, Chief,” O’Donnell commented, recalling their recent and quite memorable first meeting with a sense of humorous nostalgia as he closed and locked his canopy.
“After all we’ve been through lately, L-T, no one’s a rookie anymore.”
“No, I suppose not.” He couldn’t have agreed more.