Solfleet: The Call of Duty

by Smith, Glenn

  “Caesar, get the hell outta there!” O’Donnell shouted, knowing that his friend couldn’t hear him but helpless to do anything more.

  Caesar must have had the same thought at the same moment, because he quickly hit the appropriate buttons on his left forearm to seal and pressurize his flight suit, then reached for the emergency levers directly above his shoulders and blew the canopy. Denied their fuel, the flames quickly flickered and died, and the smoke dispersed into the vacuum of space. Small bursts of sparks continued to erupt for the next several seconds, but soon they ceased as well.

  Elementary school science class thought everyone that for every action there was always an equal and opposite reaction. That basic law of physics held especially true in the gravity-free vacuum of deep space. So when his friend’s wrecked plane began to drift slowly away as a result of his having blown the canopy, O’Donnell simply made a very slight but necessary adjustment to his own course and speed to match its new trajectory. Then he carefully maneuvered closer to the wreckage, almost close enough to reach out and touch it, and matched its adjusted pitch.

  The rest was easy. He fired his towline at the side of Caesar’s plane, then pressurized his suit and depressurized his cockpit, opened his canopy, and simply waited for his friend to evacuate his own plane and pull himself over.

  “I’m in,” Caesar told him over the internal link as soon as he’d strapped himself into the rescue seat and plugged in.

  “So what brings you out here so far?” O’Donnell asked him as the canopy closed them in.

  “Very funny.”

  O’Donnell grinned, then asked, “Seriously, what hit you?”

  “I have no...” Gazing out the side while O’Donnell concentrated on safely moving away from the wreckage and turning back toward the Victory, Caesar saw it first. “Oh my God.”

  “Oh my God, what?” O’Donnell asked, suddenly very concerned. “What is it, Caesar? What’s wrong?”

  “Check the Victory, Tom.”

  “Check the...” Then he saw it. “Aw hell.”

  All they could do was watch in horror as the huge burning mass of battlecruiser wreckage crashed into their mother ship’s lower portside jump nacelle and ripped it and most of its dual support structures away from the main hull as she tried unsuccessfully to pitch downward and roll out of the way. One small section broke away and smashed into the Victory’s lower scanner array, which then ignited into a brilliant but short-lived web of spastic, electric-blue energy bolts. Then, deflected by the sheer mass of the dismembered nacelle, the wreckage crashed into the rear of the upper nacelle as well, twisted it and tore it away from its aft support structure, and then tumbled off into space.

  O’Donnell could only imagine what the whole thing would have sounded like, if sound could travel through space. He could only imagine what terrifying hell his shipmates were going through at that very moment. Miraculously though, despite being severely wounded and scarred, pitching and yawing and rolling out of control, with fires breaking out through the hull in at least a dozen different places, the Victory didn’t explode.

  “Jesus Christ!” one of the other pilots exclaimed.

  “What the hell are we supposed to do now?” another asked.

  “We are totally f...”

  “Stand by, Star Hawks,” the squadron commander instructed. “Give them a chance to bring her under control. They’ll issue instructions as soon as they can.”

  O’Donnell could only hope the major was right—that someone remained alive onboard their mother vessel. Onboard their home.

  * * *

  Still lying on the deck beside the helm station where he’d come to rest, Rawlins looked up at the viewscreen and saw the stars racing by in an upward arch. They were pitching forward again and rolling at the same time—tumbling completely out of control. But at least they were alive. Some of them, anyway.

  “How bad is it, Ensign?” he asked, quickly surveying the entire bridge as he picked himself up. Somehow, with the exception of one of Lieutenant Irons’ scanner displays, which had shorted out when the array was hit—she’d put the fire out quickly and saved the rest of her instruments—the bridge appeared to have been spared any further serious damage.

  “Don’t ask me how, sir, but we’ve still got our high-speed and maneuvering thrusters,” LaRocca answered as he wiped a small trickle of blood from his chin. “Give me a minute or two and I’ll have us under control again.”

  “Life support is fluctuating, Commander,” the engineer added, holding his hand over a small bleeding cut on his forehead. “We’ve got fires breaking out all along the port side. Damage control and medical teams are responding, but the damage is pretty extensive. Port gun emplacements have all been knocked out and initial reports indicate we’ve lost both port nacelles and the entire lower scanner array.”

  “Bridge, this is the CAG.”

  Good, Rawlins thought as he moved to the front of the command station. They still had at least partial internal communications. “Rawlins here,” he answered. “Go ahead.”

  “Status report from Flight Operations, sir. There’s some minor buckling across the width of the portside landing deck near the threshold, but our interceptors should be able to overfly it and land without a problem. Soon as the equipment that broke free and fell all over the place is cleaned up, that is. Starboard deck is in good shape.”

  “Does Chief Simmons know how long it’ll be before the port deck is operational again?” Rawlins asked.

  A brief moment of silence on the CAG’s end spoke volumes. Rawlins knew immediately that they had lost the chief.

  “Master Sergeant Rosas tells me they’ll be ready to recover the interceptors in ten or fifteen minutes,” the CAG reported solemnly.

  “Confirm that with him, Commander,” Rawlins ordered emotionlessly, even though as one of several officers in the fleet who had actually learned a thing or two from the chief when they were all much, much younger men, he felt this particular loss most acutely. As the acting captain, he reminded himself, he couldn’t let the crew see any signs weakness in him. “I want our pilots back aboard as soon as possible.”

  “Aye, sir. CAG out.”

  Rawlins faced the engineer again and asked, “How bad are our main drive systems?”

  “Reactors are offline and cooling down quickly, sir,” the young man reluctantly reported. “Mister LaRocca’s thrusters are all we’re going to have for a while.”

  “How much time to bring them back online?”

  The engineer turned and faced his superior officer with a grim expression. “Commander Marshall says they’ll need about three months repair at a proper shipyard before we can even try to bring them back online, Commander.”

  Rawlins sighed. Three months. And that was just for the reactors. Much of the ship had sustained substantially worse damage. He snickered and shook his head. First time in complete command and he’d broken his captain’s ship. He’d broken it but good. “That’s it then,” he finally said. “We’re out of this one for good. Mister Noonian, call some medics up here to... No, belay that,” he amended, realizing that the Medbay probably couldn’t afford to spare anyone. “Call another engineer and a helmsman up here.”

  “They’re on their way, sir,” the cyberclone advised him almost immediately.

  Rawlins then turned to LaRocca and the engineer in turn and said, “As soon as your relief shows up, I want you two to head down to Medbay and get patched up.”

  “Yes, sir,” they answered in unison.

  Rawlins turned back to the helmsman and asked, “Mister LaRocca, how soon can we make it to the jumpstation on high-speed thrusters?”

  LaRocca did his best to lick the fresh blood from his chin as he entered the query into his nav-comp. “About three and a half days, sir,” he answered. Then he looked up at the commander and added, “Maybe three flat if we can cut down on the course changes significantly enough.”

  “All right. We’ll do that, as long as we don’t pick up a
ny signs of...” He looked over at Tactical. “Do we have sensors and scanners, Miss Irons?”

  “The Z-minus forward array is a total loss, sir,” she answered. “And the Z-minus aft has sensors only. No active scanners. Other than that, we’re good, sir.”

  “All right,” he said as he turned back to the helmsman. “Direct course, as long as we don’t pick up any signs of pursuit, Mister LaRocca. But under no circumstances will we lead the Veshtonn toward the jumpstation. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly, sir.”

  “Make sure your relief understands it just as clearly when he gets here, too. Initiate as soon as the last of our fighters has landed.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Three and a half days, Rawlins reflected as he stepped around the command console and finally sat back down. Perhaps three, if they were extremely lucky. About four hours for station personnel to outfit the ship with two emergency nacelles for the jump home, provided they had them on hand and waiting for them when they arrived—two days work for that prep. Three at the most. All right. They’d send the request to the station immediately. Then they’d maintain strict communications silence and hope—and pray—that the Veshtonn didn’t spot them enroute.

  And that the jumpstation would still be there when they finally arrived.

  “I want casualty and damage reports as you get them, people,” he advised the bridge crew in general. “Sergeant Noonian, send a request for two emergency nacelles to the station and give them our E-T-A. Tell them not to respond, and maintain strict communications silence after you send that message.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The next three days were going to be three very long days indeed.

  Chapter 8

  Rather than go through the trouble of shaving—beard retardant made him break out like a teenager with a bad case of acne, so he never used it—pulling on a uniform, and going into the office to work like he’d done every other Saturday for the last several months, Admiral Hansen had decided to work from home to ensure Heather didn’t try to sneak out again. As it turned out, his plan worked too well. Not only had she not tried to sneak out of their quarters, she hadn’t even come out of her room once all day. She’d even refused to open her door long enough for him to pass her a plate of food at lunch time. As one of the lucky ones, one of those people who could eat all they wanted of whatever they wanted and still not gain any weight, it wasn’t like her to skip a meal. She must really have been upset. Was that movie she’d wanted to go see, or more precisely that actor, really that big a deal?

  Given a choice, of course, he would have preferred to let her go. Or even better, to have spent at least part of the day with her himself, outside their quarters, doing something fun at one of the station’s recreational facilities—when was the last time they’d done anything together?—instead of playing warden to her. Then again, she probably wouldn’t have been very pleasant company on this particular day. But Earth and the Coalition were still very much at war with the Veshtonn Empire, and the resultant workload hadn’t allowed him that luxury in a very long time.

  Using a secret back door password that he’d written into the programming himself, back when he first assumed command of the agency, the admiral had tied his home terminal through Hal into the fleet intelligence net and had spent the day looking into the Excalibur situation and all that related to it. To his surprise he’d discovered that working from home had actually enabled him to get much more than his typical amount of work done a lot faster than usual. Just why that was the case, he couldn’t guess. After all, it was Saturday. If he’d gone into the office like he usually did, he still would have been alone and undistracted. Well, except for Vicky, that is...and the duty officer, whoever that might have been. Vicky would have shown up a few minutes before him and made a pot of coffee—how she always knew exactly what time to be there was a mystery unto itself—then left him alone to work, and whoever the D.O. happened to be would have bid him a good morning and then done his or her best to avoid him like the plague for the rest of the day. Beyond that there would still have been nothing to distract him.

  Oh well. It had worked out well, regardless, and working barefoot in shorts and a tee shirt was no unpleasant benefit either. In fact, the only downside he’d noticed at all was that his coffee tasted noticeably inferior to Vicky’s. He used the same blend at home as she did in the office, but for some reason it just didn’t taste as good.

  Apparently, he lacked her magic touch.

  “Excuse me, Nick,” Hal’s voice said through the terminal speakers, startling him.

  “What is it, Hal?” Hansen asked.

  “You have just received an encrypted and scrambled transmission burst from Lieutenant Commander Quinn of the Europan field office.”

  “What does she say?”

  “She has forwarded an enhanced copy of the same transmission record she sent earlier.”

  “Oh, good,” he commented as he straightened slightly in his chair. “Download it to my home terminal and play it for me, please.”

  “Certainly.”

  The playback began almost immediately.

  “I hope you can hear me,” the man’s voice said, coming through much clearer than it had before, now that most of the white noise had been eliminated. Hansen could even hear the stress and exhaustion in it now, which made it sound a lot more genuine than he expected. The man might or might not have been Lieutenant O’Donnell—the jury was still out on that question—but he was definitely human. Whether that made him Terran, Cirran, or Sulaini, who could say? But he certainly sounded like a Terran. More specifically, he sounded like a North American.

  “My name is Robert O’Donnell. I was a tactical officer aboard the Earth starcruiser Excalibur. I am alive, somewhere in Veshtonn space. The Excalibur was NOT destroyed by the Veshtonn. I repeat. The Excalibur was not destroyed by the Veshtonn. The attack was carried out by the starcruiser Albion and two former Solfleet vessels in service with Newstar Corporation. They took us completely by surprise. Those of us who survived were taken by...”

  As before, the message ended abruptly at that point with a short burst of loud static that made Hansen jump. Why couldn’t they have toned that down, too?

  “Does Commander Quinn add anything new to what she said before, Hal?”

  “Only that her technicians were not able to restore any more of the message beyond what you just heard. There is nothing further.”

  “All right. Thank you, Hal.”

  “You are welcome, Nick.”

  Hansen leaned back in his chair with a sigh and stretched the kinks out of his stiff neck, then tried to relax. The Newstar Corporation...again. Back in late ‘82 Newstar had made an illicit deal with Hansen’s predecessor to develop the recently encountered ‘Morph Virus,’ as it had promptly come to be known, into a sort of techno-biological weapon for use against the Veshtonn. A few months later, after something went terribly wrong at the facilities where the company was carrying out its illegal research, that illicit deal subsequently became a matter of public record and proved to be the S.I.A. Chief’s guillotine—the one mistake that decapitated his career and landed him in prison, and opened the door for Hansen to step into the job that he’d secretly coveted for so long.

  About a year and a half later, after several secret and unsuccessful attempts at executing a hostile takeover of the Dunn Corporation’s operations on Procyon IV, the new denizens of Newstar had hired dozens of mercenaries and raised that hostility to a whole new level, and that, as it turned out, proved to be not only their guillotine, but Newstar’s as well. Their aggression became the guillotine that decapitated the entire company—the singular cause of the company’s rapid downfall and ultimate demise.

  The Newstar Corporation had been one very shady company to say the least, especially in its final few years of life. But to attack a Solfleet starcruiser directly, particularly in the middle of an interstellar war when they were counting on that very same fleet for their own defense
? That simply didn’t make any sense. Even with a rogue starcruiser on their side, what could they possibly have stood to gain by committing such a foolhardy act? If in fact the message was true, why had they done it?

  “Excuse me, Nick.”

  “Yes, Hal?”

  “Please do not be alarmed. There is no danger to your quarters or to this station. The environmental sensor and control systems in your quarters have detected a small concentration of a potentially carcinogenic gaseous chemical substance dispersing within the atmosphere of your second bedroom. Shall I... Wait a moment. Heather has just activated the filter vents. The room’s atmosphere will be clear in a few seconds. There is no further need for attention.”

  “Wanna bet, Hal?” Hansen commented, feeling the heat rise in his face as he stood up.

  “I am incapable of gambling,” Hal informed him.

  He approached Heather’s bedroom door and, despite the fact that she had locked him out several hours ago, tapped the ‘open’ button, just in case. As expected, the door didn’t budge. It was still locked. “Security and safety override,” he said to the door’s blank, Earth-brown surface. “Icarus Hansen, father, code Heather zero one alpha.” To the right of the door, the panel’s green indicator lit. The latches released and the door slid aside, just in time for him to catch a glimpse of his daughter, wearing only her underclothes as usual, throwing something into her sink right before she whirled around to face him under the dimmed lights. Standing rigidly before him, almost at the position of attention, she seemed afraid to move another inch.

  At first, neither one of them said a word to the other. They just stood there, not ten feet from each other, and stared silently at one another like a pair of manikins in one of the station’s department stores. After about thirty seconds of that, the admiral folded his arms across his broad chest, but he still didn’t say anything. Sooner or later, he knew, she was either going to exhale or pass out. Either way, she wasn’t going to win.

  Fifteen more seconds. “Lights. Full,” he said.