Queen Anne's Revenge

by Blaze Ward

  “Symptoms?” Phil asked.

  “Combination of things,” Siobhan said. “Control systems suddenly lost their minds, and a fuel line seems to have physically separated, releasing explosive gases into the generator’s housing. Either would have been salvageable, but Kam couldn’t see that the lines were still pumping hydrogen in, and couldn’t get it to respond to a shut-down command. She orders one of the Damage Control teams into immediate action.”

  “How long did they take to respond?” Phil probed.

  “First team was in place in five minutes, trying all the usual steps,” Heather said. “That failed. Kam ordered them to just shut the thing down hard for now, until she could get a full engineering team prepped to take the generator apart. She still doesn’t know she had a leak on her hands, because the sensors have stopped transmitting data outside their local array.”

  “Did one of the Damage Control people cause the explosion?” Phil asked in a hard voice.

  “Negative,” Heather was firm in her opinion. “They had just acknowledged the order to shut it down and were starting to open their toolboxes when the generator exploded, catching all five of them in a fireball and shockwave. Dominguez and Lee were killed immediately. Magone died later on the operating table. Ariana Trudeau is in critical but stable condition right now. El-Hashem is in serious condition. Dunklin returned to duty with his arm in a sling.”

  “Needs must when the devil drives,” Phil quoted, acknowledging the hard-headed man getting his arm glued shut earlier. “So, explosion and fire, contained to engineering?”

  “Affirmative, Phil,” Heather said. “Everybody was already in air-gear, so Kam shut down oxygen as fast as she could confirm everybody was ready, but the feed line was already compromised. One of Boatswain’s folks wrenched that line shut from the other end, shutting down most of the aft generators, Kam blew the atmosphere, and dropped the room to about forty degrees Absolute. Cold enough to freeze any fires. That’s done, but we’re dead in the water right now.”

  “Location?”

  “Forty-three light hours out from Severnaya Zemlya,” Siobhan replied. “Well south and in a relatively thin part of the outer system, so we won’t run into anything, but we can’t get back into JumpSpace until everything is repaired and tested. Kam says three to five days, best estimate.”

  “So we’ll miss the rendezvous with Jessica?” Phil confirmed.

  “Yes,” Heather said. “Even if she waits over the normal deadline.”

  “Assume we’re on our own then,” he replied.

  “A scout with no offensive firepower, a thousand light years behind enemy lines, with a broken JumpSail?” Siobhan asked.

  “You joined the Navy for a challenge, right?” Phil asked.

  Scene of the Crime (April 4, 402)

  Anybody but the Boatswain doing it, and Kam would have insisted she be the one waist-deep in the shattered remnants of the auxiliary reactor, tracing lines and identifying potential issues. But Bok had literally been doing this since before she was born and had put his foot down.

  She could have overridden his objections, but Bok had lost several of his people in the explosion and was taking this extremely personal.

  At least they had managed to repair the damaged louvers and establish a good atmosphere in here. She couldn’t imagine how hard this task would be in a lifesuit.

  Bok’s feet disappeared into the reactor housing as she watched. A moment later, his head appeared, probably standing on the port transverse bracing, to be eyeball level, with her squatting next to the device.

  “It’s a flipping mess down there, Kam,” he said in a harsh growl.

  “And?”

  “Looks like the upper housing held when the line caught fire,” he continued. “Expanding gases couldn’t go up, so the pressure went down. I’ve got a couple of plates that look like torn paper down here.”

  “That’s not good,” she observed, prompting Bok to keep talking when his eyes got that far-away look.

  “Worse, Kam,” he said. “Looks like we vented into the underside of the JumpSail array. Metal there is deformed from heat.”

  “That would explain why we dropped into RealSpace,” Kam said. “How bad is the damage?”

  “We’re going to need to pull the primary converter, both coolant systems, and probably a good chunk of the data cores, just to get underneath, but I can see soot here, so something organic fully oxidized.”

  “Okay, stand by,” Kam said, grabbing the comm of her belt and keying channel six. “Ngo, this is Rushforth. Grab Dunklin and a toolbox. I need you to take apart the main JumpSail housing while we look at the reactor here. Higher priority than whatever else you’re doing right now.”

  “Acknowledged,” the man’s voice came back. “Eight minutes while I get my lunch to go.”

  “Just shovel faster, Hossam,” she said. “You’ll be up late, so eating your food now is good.”

  Kam cut the line and picked up her engineering slab from the toolbox behind her where it had been waiting for her needs. Best place for it was between them on the deck, so she dropped it there and keyed the holo-projector.

  She could see what the reactor was supposed to look like, back when it had a top and a front, rather than ragged teeth where it had spalled off lethal fragments. On her left, the controllers for the JumpSails, the unit that this particular reactor normally powered in combat. Behind the broken machine, across a small corridor between massive columns of steel and power, the secondary JumpSail. The tiny one that was designed to be used in an absolute worst-case scenario.

  Like now.

  She called up a secondary menu and reviewed the current damage status of everything, according to her team and all the sensors they had available.

  There. Not even in the top twenty things to fix, by priority. That would need to change, if the main JumpSails were as badly damaged as Bok thought.

  She had been unconsciously assuming that the shockwave just jarred things loose and they could patch it all up in a day. She changed the priority for repairs to the secondary JumpSail to number three and updated the list.

  Bok must have been reading her mind. He was already climbing out of the well when she looked up. Kam grabbed the toolbox and her slab and stepped back.

  “This is going to be a long journey,” he said as he stood up next to her.

  They were the same height, but Bok probably massed double what she did. Power wrenches would offset his advantage, but sometimes you had to get under a pry-bar and try to move the world. Bok was good at that.

  “Why, so, Chief?” Kam asked.

  “In my entire career, I’ve only been on a ship that had to use the secondary JumpSail one time, Kam,” he replied. “Back on the old destroyer Paramaribo. About the time you were born.”

  “And it wasn’t pleasant, Chief?” she asked, following as he set out. For a short man, he walked extremely fast. She had to hurry to keep up.

  “Those boats were junk, Chief Engineer,” he said over his shoulder. “Should have been sent to the wreckers about the time I was born. Navy didn’t finally agree until about fifteen years ago, but at least Paramaribo was done after that. Lost the primary while out on patrol, clear down near the far border corner with Lincolnshire. Took us a month to limp to a port where we could get food and enough parts to make it to Ramsey. That got us enough parts and assistance to make it home, but a three-week shakedown cruise had us at sea for nearly four months. I don’t even know what the closest friendly harbor is here.”

  “That’s Phil’s job,” Kam said as he stopped and rested a possessive hand on the casing of the secondary drive.

  Kam wondered if he was trying to read the state of the machine by osmosis or telepathy. You never knew with Bok, but he always seemed to know what was wrong with a device.

  He turned to her now with a dark, heavy look in his eyes.

  “Remind me to have a polite chat with that pirate fellow, Bedrov,” he observed.

  “Oh?” Kam raised an
eyebrow.

  Chief Battenhouse had never been one for port-side brawls, but that was the look on his face right now. A good, old-fashioned bar fight, usually over the slightest things.

  “I agree with him that this particular layout is probably the most efficient use of space possible,” Bok said with a nod. “But I think we need to shift the two JumpSails arrays to either ends of the Engineering spaces, with a frame between them, and add a second generator to handle the backups. This generator managed to kill both array controllers, one of them by melting the damned thing. This one was killed by a feedback surge over the electrical lines.”

  He squatted down and grabbed a power wrench from her toolbox as she called up the interior specs of the unit. Smaller than the main system by an order of magnitude. Barely big enough inside for a person, if you took out all the innards. Everything looked like wires and boards here, with just a few solid boxes.

  Old design, going back centuries, probably, to when Baudin first invented the system. Too small to go fast, and probably too fragile to travel very far, but at RealSpace speeds, anything FTL was necessary if they wanted to get home.

  “So you rewire everything here?” Kam asked. “If the lines are burned out?”

  “That’s what frightens me, Kam,” Bok said as the first bolt backed out. “We could handle that part. Take maybe a week. Problem is, we’ve got nothing to calibrate it, so we have to throw ourselves into Jump, run for a while, then bounce out and spend a day or two figuring out where we landed.”

  “That’s an engineering problem, Bok,” she observed.

  “Yeah, but we just blew up their damned Starbase back there, Kam,” he said, attacking the second bolt. “Gonna be some very angry people out here looking for us while we’re dinking around.”

  “Like I said earlier, Bok,” she said. “That’s Phil’s job. Ours is to get the ship running again so he can get us there.”

  Unspoken, the implicit assumption that they could do that. Otherwise, they might have to open a direct beam signal back to Severnaya Zemlya and offer to surrender.

  Assuming Buran took prisoners.

  Wardroom (April 4, 402)

  Siobhan stood and waited for Centurion Gephardt to look up from his paperwork. They were in the mess hall, so it was public, but she thought it would be rude to just slide into the seat next to the man while he was figuring out meal schedules and his staff cleaned up everything from lunch.

  Something caught his eye and he glanced up. A moment later he blushed. At least as much as a man with such light brown skin could.

  Siobhan could blush all day long and nobody could tell, unless they saw her pupils. But she was from Dekoa, and that planet had been colonized almost exclusively by a diaspora from Central Africa on Earth, by way of New Cameroon and Stokley. Her skin could appear as polished onyx in the right light.

  Julius Gephardt was from Ballard, and obviously related to the famous Iwakuma explorers, a mix of the best elements of Upper European Finns from Earth with the folks from Zanzibar that had been first to return to space after The Darkness. His skin was much lighter than hers, although not nearly as pale as the Euros or Chinese aboard. And he had inherited a beak of a nose from some Viking along the way.

  Just none of their aggressiveness.

  “Second Officer,” he said formally with a nod.

  Siobhan didn’t take it personally. Julius retreated to formality when he got flustered.

  And she knew she did that to him. If they didn’t serve on the same ship, she might have considered flustering him more. Personally.

  Instead, she dropped into the seat across from him. The slightly-more-formal one, as opposed to sitting right next to him where they might brush an arm.

  He would probably explode with embarrassment, if she did that.

  Keep it simple, today. Don’t flirt with him any more than usual. Maybe less. Don’t think about maybe being captured or killed without talking to him about things first.

  “I wanted to talk to you about food stocks, Centurion,” Siobhan replied, keeping things at least apparently formal for now. “What is our current status?”

  Rather than reply, he pushed his slab across the table and spun it around so she could see the numbers. Like they would make any sense, listing tonnages and consumption rate calculations, from her quick glance down.

  “As you can see,” he apparently assumed she could absorb his chef’s magic by smell, or something. “We can maintain current consumption for seventeen days until we have to break out the emergency meal packs stowed forward and on the flight deck.”

  Flight deck. Where you could, if you were lucky, be called on to stuff the meal packs into the administrative shuttle and send them off to some other poor bastard, somewhere else, and make him eat them, instead of you.

  Siobhan had no interest in ever consuming oatmeal again. Going down a uniform size, from sexy to scarecrow might rate higher.

  “How much do we have in emergency rations?” she asked anyway, suspecting that much of the rest of the crew would feel the same way about stretching those stocks even further, by avoiding them altogether.

  “Eleven days, assuming normal consumption,” his sudden grin at her was a surprise. “I suspect this particular crew would probably manage sixteen without much complaining, as long as I didn’t pay too close attention to the waste system overloads.”

  Oh My God. Did he just tell a joke? In public? Without blushing?

  There’s hope for you yet, Jules.

  Siobhan smiled at his humor. The man was always too formal, but she knew that it was his introversion, rather than her presence. Anybody getting too close caused his walls to come up. She was just one of the few with the patience to use a version of Chinese-water-torture to bore a hole.

  “So we could go roughly twenty-two to twenty-three days if we reduced caloric intake to three-quarters?” she asked.

  “Twenty-seven, if we over-graze the hydroponics for vegetables and shrimp, and then reduce standards for unsafe food,” he said, a smile suddenly lighting his face. “I would just have to add a bunch of cayenne to the diet, at that point. Teach you barbarians about real cooking. Maybe even make a jambalaya when you poor philistines are facing true starvation as an alternative.”

  Food was one of the few things that broke Julius out of his shell. Committing magic in the kitchen. She smiled back. His jambalaya was pretty-damned-good, but some of the folks on this crew might think they were supposed to strip industrial equipment with it, once they took a bite.

  Plus, if they refused, she could have their share, and stay that much farther away from the oatmeal. At least until starvation took hold. Anything but oatmeal.

  “As Second Officer, you are hereby approved to make those choices necessary to stretch our food supplies as far as possible, Centurion,” Siobhan said with a grin as she stood. “And maybe jambalaya.”

  He surprised her by standing as well and holding out a hand to shake.

  Suddenly, she felt like she was part of a tiny conspiracy in the kitchen as they shook hands. Maybe it took the end of the world to bring Jules out of his shell?

  She could live with that.

  Anything, but oatmeal.

  Visitors (April 4, 402)

  “Alert,” the voice came out of the speaker and had Phil halfway out of his seat, even as the lights turned red. “Emergence signature detected. All hands to battle stations.”

  Two steps and Phil was on the bridge itself, his paperwork on repair stocks already forgotten. Somewhere, Heather and Siobhan would be racing to their stations as well.

  “How far away?” Phil asked as he threw himself into the station at the center of the room.

  Old designs for destroyers had the command centurion at the aft end of the bridge, looking at the backs of heads. Phil liked this new thing, where everyone looked inward towards him from pairs of stations. He could see faces now.

  The Yeoman on duty, Weston Lovisone, checked the boards and looked up again.

  �
��Forty-nine light minutes, Commander,” the man replied. “Looks like a small freighter from the signature, rather than a warship.”

  Phil said a small prayer of thanks to the god of JumpSails and the various goddesses of navigation systems. At that distance, anybody but another scout like them would be hard pressed to even spot CS-405, running as silent as possible in the night, let alone identify them. On the other hand, whoever it was might still see something and run, and there was nothing Phil could do about it right now.

  “Engineering, this is the bridge,” Phil called out, letting the systems route the call.

  “Tuason here,” a man’s voice replied. “Chief Engineer and Boatswain are in the middle of something.”

  “Good enough, Galin,” Phil said. “What’s the status of jump?”

  “That’s what they’re doing, sir,” the engineering watch yeoman explained. “Primary’s down until further notice. Backup is being taken apart now.”

  Inwardly, Phil cursed. Just about the worst timing he could imagine. Even those piss-poor excuses for starships that Buran used could outrun him right now.

  “What about engines?” he asked.

  “Stand by, Commander,” Tuason said.

  The line went silent.

  Phil looked up as Siobhan came barreling through the hatch and almost jumped into the station next to Yeoman Lovisone.

  “How are my engines?” she asked between heavy breaths. Must have run here from the forward end of the ship.

  “Waiting to hear now,” Phil replied.

  She nodded and looked down, ignoring him while she got everything set up the way she wanted, and probably made sure nobody had touched anything. The woman was a perfectionist about her flying, even dead in space.

  “Commander, this is Tuason,” the engineer was back. “Kam says, and I quote ‘Tell them they can start the engines, but don’t let Siobhan do anything crazy yet.’ Unquote.”

  Phil chuckled at the sour look that drew from his pilot. She kept her opinions to herself, though, which was good.