Strike Battleship Engineers (The Ithis Campaign Book 2)

by Shane Lochlann Black

  Zony’s hearing woke her up, as it often did. What she saw when she opened her eyes, however, didn’t help explain what was going on. She was wearing operational power-armor and a fully functioning tac suit. However, all she could see outside her faceplate was murky blackness. It was like she was submerged in some kind of viscous oil. She tried to move her arms and found she was immobilized by some kind of weight or pressure.

  The sound she had heard was her suit’s emergency subsystem. Although she still had nearly 80% reserve power, her life support system’s gas mixture was down to only nine percent oxygen reserves remaining. The calm, low tone of the emergency system was sounding at three second intervals. It was trying to alert her to the fact she had roughly 20 minutes left before her powersuit would be unable to maintain a breathable atmosphere. If she didn’t find a source of oxygen somewhere, she would start to suffer from hypoxia within a half-hour at the most.

  “Position and orientation display.”

  The heads-up display on her faceplate told a fascinating story. Her suit’s portable sensors were reporting her position at a depth of 44 feet relative to the planet surface. She was also apparently oriented with her head at a position of 191 degrees mark 35 on a true sphere. According to her instruments, she was upside-down and underground.

  “Tac suit integrity diagnostic.”

  A systems report scrolled serenely on her heads-up display. Her suit was in perfect working order except for the lack of available oxygen. Zony wondered how she could possibly be where she was without any damage to her suit. She had one more option to get the easiest clues as to where she was and what had happened.

  “Surface condition analysis.”

  This was the key command. Skywatch powered tac-suits were renowned throughout the galaxy for their formidable materials technology. The surface of an environmental or combat suit could be manufactured or equipped with anti-static shielding, anti-temperature reactive and haptic fields and could use its element-ionizing capabilities to perform rudimentary analysis of whatever atmosphere, liquid, surface or energy was in contact with any of its outer surfaces.

  Another series of results scrolled past on Zony’s heads-up display. Even though she wasn’t a scientist per se, the Argent’s Signals Officer could tell by the element analysis she was underwater. The submerged temperature was 34.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and whatever body of water she was in seemed to be mixed with dangerously high levels of sulfur dioxide, which wouldn’t normally be a problem except for the fact it was gradually causing whatever substance she was in to become a vat of gradually more and more concentrated sulfuric acid. She concluded there had to be heavy metal content in some land feature nearby: Possibly mountains or fissures in a rock formation.

  Even though her powersuit’s shielding was more than capable of neutralizing acids at the molecular level, there was little to be gained by staying submerged in an acid bath for any longer than was necessary.

  She tried to pull her hands free again and quickly realized just how firmly she was stuck.

  “Exterior lights. All directions.”

  The murky water got brighter, but it was still difficult for Zony to see very far through her faceplate. Her head didn’t seem to be affected by whatever had immobilized her arms. She also discovered one foot was free, but it wasn’t entirely clear what she would be able to do until she figured out why she couldn’t move. Zony keyed her commlink.

  “Tixia to Copernicus One. Come in.”

  She waited the regulation ten seconds, then keyed her transmitter again.

  “Tixia to Copernicus One, acknowledge.”

  Nothing. Zony reconfigured her transmitter to activate all fleet-standard hailing frequencies.

  “Landing party to Argent. Come in.”

  Transmitting through forty feet of water wasn’t the problem. It was as if there was nobody there to hear the message.

  “Landing party to Argent.”

  Zony remembered jettisoning with the rest of the crew when their corvette had lost power. There were times when she really disliked standard procedures. Jumping out of a struggling spacecraft was never Tixia’s first choice. Everyone had been wearing the same powersuits, since they would provide individual crew members with the option for a soft landing regardless of the ground terrain or conditions. Yili and Able Crewman Tackett had stayed with the boat, believing they would be able to perform an emergency landing and at least try to keep the vessel intact.

  The realization had left her with a couple of new problems to go with the existing set. There were several other people out there with the same or worse problems as she had, not counting Yili and Tackett.

  There was also a 200,000-ton warship in orbit with a crew of more than a thousand Skywatch personnel that should have answered her hail, and didn’t.

  Zony wasn’t sure which problem was more daunting.

  Four

  Yili peered over the edge of the control station she was resting on and saw the only practical way she was going to get to the floor of the aft section of her corvette was to either climb down or jump. The light was too dim to be sure, but based on her knowledge of the vessel’s internal geometry, she estimated the drop would be roughly fifteen feet, which wasn’t lethal by any stretch, but it wasn’t going to do much for the injuries to her shoulder, side and hip, to say nothing of the ice cubes she had for feet.

  The good news was she wasn’t bleeding badly. At least not yet. The cold temperatures were very effective in slowing her metabolism. Her flight suit had apparently helped to blunt the sharp edges of whatever had scraped her side. The wounds weren’t critical, but there was likely at least one cracked bone somewhere in her right arm and an open wound on the back of her neck. Some quick mental calculations told her if she could hang by one hand, she might cut the drop to roughly ten feet and be able to roll away from landing too hard.

  A furious blast of wind howled past the narrow hull breach Curtiss had navigated to squeeze her way inside. The interior of the corvette wasn’t in any better condition than the crater wreckage. Yili couldn’t find any mechanisms that had power. Every control panel was dark. Every light fixture was inoperative. It was like pawing her way through an abandoned house. The deck of the corvette even looked haunted, and the wind outside only added to the spooky atmosphere.

  Curtiss slid across the control console and tried to steady herself by planting one foot against the nearest bulkhead. Cargo harnesses made from strips of graphene-reinforced polymer fabric hung down from the overhead storage compartments. Yili briefly considered tying them together and using them as a ladder, but quickly discarded the idea after realizing there were no non-powered blades aboard that could cut or puncture the material. She held her breath as she worked her feet off the edge. More and more pressure settled into the material of her her tac-suit’s glove. She gripped the edge of the control unit, still unwilling to put all her weight at the mercy of only four fingers. The slightest slip on the icy surface would send her straight into a dense metal floor at a painful speed. As she imagined the distance to the deck, she made a mental note to rig some kind of line or rope gadget into her standard gear loadout at the earliest opportunity. At this point, pennies worth of nylon rope could be the difference between a concussion and a five second trip from one place to the next.

  Finally she started letting real weight settle on her grip. Only her foot was distributing any of the pressure on her gloved hand. She took one more look down, desperately trying to get some kind of idea just how far away the corner junction of the floor and bulkhead were. Unfortunately there was just no way to tell. Yili gritted her teeth, frustrated by her lack of proper equipment. She gently let her foot slip a little more and then a little more. Finally, she dangled by one hand. Miraculously, her grip held as her feet swayed back and forth in the dark void between the bulkhead and the floor. She closed her eyes and silently hoped her feet wouldn’t hurt too much when she landed.

  She let go.

  Five

  Mud.<
br />
  Senior Lieutenant Zony Tixia knew if the story of how she got to the surface of Bayone Three ever got out, she would never live it down. After using practically every piece of equipment installed in her tac-suit to figure out where exactly she had landed, her best working theory was she was submerged and lodged in a wall of nearly frozen mud.

  By performing a regressive element test on the deepest layer of sediment and comparing the results to the analysis of the surrounding water she had performed earlier, Zony had determined the changes to the chemical composition of the water were quite recent. In fact, it was likely her arrival had precipitated the sudden introduction of sulfur dioxide into the water. Not only was the deeply submerged pool turning into sulfuric acid, it was gradually getting hotter the longer she stayed there. Her working theory was that somewhere above her current position, an impact had caused some kind of landslide or break in a rock formation, and that whatever bubbled up from inside the rocks had drained into the fissure the Argent signals officer currently occupied.

  In six hours, the frozen mud problem would be solved naturally, as the water temperature would be a relatively balmy 40 degrees and would simply melt whatever had frozen around her arms and leg. Unfortunately, her oxygen timer was down to 12 minutes, so although she would be free, she would have long since run out of air.

  What Zony did have was a 79% power reserve, and that gave her numerous options. A quick mental calculation told her raising the temperature of the entire pool was physically impossible without several orders of magnitude more power. The good news was she didn’t need to raise the temperature of the entire body of water. All she needed to do was break free from the ice embedded in the mud.

  Tixia thought back to her survival training and remembered the best way to break an ice buildup on any surface with gravity was by shearing forces rather than directing brute force at the thickest concentrations, which tended to accumulate in the direction opposite the most prevalent gravity field. Her suit didn’t have a complete flight pack, but it did have pressure jets, which had provided her a soft landing, such as it was. By configuring the exhaust from her jets to produce alternating lateral thrust, unless the ice was reinforced with tempered steel, she should be able to weaken the lattice enough to let increasing water temperature and gravity do the rest.

  Eleven minutes of oxygen remained.

  Zony laboriously entered the commands necessary to produce a series of millisecond-long blasts from her suit’s jets and alternate thrust and counter-thrust to produce movement first in one direction and then the other. She established a moderately powerful kinetic shield on the haptic surfaces of her suit in case something came loose and decided to rocket off in some inconvenient direction, like through her faceplate. She ran a quick simulation to monitor how the system would operate, using a local area thermal map to analyze the changes in pressure and temperature. It looked good on paper, but as an experienced Skywatch line officer, Zony was well aware of the limitations of perfect plans drawn up in meetings.

  Practical considerations meant she really didn’t have time to submit her idea to a committee. Once she activated her jets, either she was going to become the first subterranean bridge officer, or she was going to be able to climb or swim back to the surface.

  Zony took a deep breath and checked all systems again. She could feel the activation controls in her palms.

  She clenched her fists and promptly disappeared in a frenzied tornado of bubbles and debris.

  Six

  “It isn’t the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end.”

  Yili remembered the old joke, and while it was funny when you were sitting around a table in the officer’s mess, it wasn’t quite as reassuring when you were trying to get your breath back after falling nearly twenty feet.

  The one thing Yili could be thankful for was the fact she apparently hadn’t done any further physical damage. If her feet or ankles were broken, she couldn’t feel them. She could move. She could use her hands and for whatever reason, it was a little easier to see while laying on the opposite bulkhead. Above, she could see the breach in the corvette hull. The boat had apparently hit the surface at about a seventy degree roll to port. The starboard hull was above ground. The rest of the ship was beneath the surface. The structure appeared to be intact, but Yili knew she couldn’t rely on assumptions.

  The engineer knew something had to be done about her feet or she wasn’t going to survive. Crawling from bulkhead to bulkhead in near freezing temperatures wasn’t going to do anything except hasten her oxygen deficiency and fatigue.

  Yili needed heat and air, and she needed to re-establish some kind of structural integrity for Copernicus One. From there, she could work towards a solution to the bigger problems, like the location of her crew.

  Then it hit her.

  If her commlink was simply drained of power, she had a solution. She drew one of her blasters and laid it on the lower bulkhead so it was within her field of view. She slid the baselock out from under the primary energy transfer unit and pulled the grip loose. After a few more switches, locks and frameworks were detached, her weapon’s energy pack clattered to the floor. Yili was once again thankful, as she had something to focus on that didn’t remind her how much her right side hurt. She picked up the energy pack and examined it. Sure enough, it had a universal conduit at its base. Yili detached her commlink from her uniform, turned it over and connected it to the weapon’s energy pack.

  The commlink’s indicator lights cycled three times, signaling the unit was now drawing a new charge directly from the weapon’s pack. Yili did some quick calculations, recalling the capacity of the standard Skywatch commlink and her twin Mustang Mark Fifteen heavy blasters. It wasn’t likely to take more than ten minutes to restore enough power to the commlink to transmit and monitor local area communications channels. Subspace was going to take more work. Yili decided the best approach was to just take her time. To be fair, she didn’t have much else to do anyway.

  The next priorities were heat and air. The engineer drew her other blaster and examined the nearby bulkhead, looking for the closest primary hull support. She knew the structure as well as anyone else aboard DSS Argent. The main supports were constructed out of an alloy dense enough to resist disruption from something as small as a hand-held weapon, but also constructed such that they would absorb most of the latent heat from blaster fire.

  In other words, they would make fine heating elements if combined with an energy source like the one in the engineer’s hand.

  Yili rolled back so the shoulder she was using to support herself could steady her firing hand. She aimed at the nearest bulkhead support, rested her knuckles against the wall and opened fire. Each yellow-white bolt of energy filled the relatively dark chamber with a flash of stark light. Impact points superheated the solid metal column only a few feet away. Sparks and unstable energy exploded from the painted surface again and again, each time leaving a larger and larger scorch mark. After a half-dozen shots, the underlying alloy began to glow dimly, first with a burnt orange hue, and then with a more intense orange-yellow glow. It took Yili sixteen shots, but finally the metal was energized enough to not only be emitting a soothing orange light in the aft chamber, but also to be radiating a comforting heat.

  Chief Engineer Curtiss hadn’t realized how cold she was until the sustained heat from the bulkhead began to warm her extremities. She shivered involuntarily and tried to inch closer to the heated metal. It wasn’t exactly a campfire, but it was a lot better than gradually freezing in the darkness of the corvette’s aft chamber.

  She reached back to find her energy pack and recharging commlink. According to the readout, she would be back on the air in less than four minutes.

  Now all she needed was an oxygen supply and she would be able to sustain herself long enough to wait for a rescue from Argent.

  Seven

  Zony Tixia stood on the surface of Bayone Three and watched the overhead star pattern closely. Her o
xygen monitor began to climb as the suit began to separate the atmosphere around her and distill the breathable elements.

  She was at the base of a large complex of rocky foothills which stretched for miles to the north. She had guessed correctly about the source of the sulfur and other compounds in the pool. Water had apparently trickled down from the top of the ridge and gathered in a deep basin where a lack of sunlight had lowered the underground temperatures to below freezing. It was possible she had “landed” against the side of the ridge and simply slid down the rocks into the pool and sank into the mud. It sounded like fun, which made Zony a little sad she hadn’t been awake to enjoy it.

  A vast plain decorated with the occasional short tree and shrub stretched to the southern horizon. Approximately 100 miles south of Zony’s location loomed a shadowy mountain range.

  She knew her ship was in orbit and should be visible unaided from the ground. Unlike the old sport of satellite spotting she and her classmates practiced long into the night back at Skywatch Academy, where relatively tiny dots of light had to be picked out from the numerous stationary stars behind them, a Citadel-class strike battleship was rather obvious in orbit, day or night.

  Still, the Argent signals officer wanted to be sure. So she activated her orbital rangefinding scanners and used them to drive the heads-up display inside her helmet. One by one her tac-suit’s systems picked out every moving object larger than a baseball in space over the planet, cataloged it, plotted its course and speed and added it to a trajectory schedule so it would be possible to arbitrarily predict its position in the future.