by Peter Kenson
Situated immediately above the entrance to the inner dock and with its outer wall completely replaced by a "Clear-C" viewing screen from floor to ceiling, was the Wardroom. It was here that Lieutenant Commander Mikael Boronin was enjoying a leisurely breakfast with his long standing friend Surgeon Commander Anton Barasny. They had roomed together at Space Academy when he had been a 21 year old graduate fresh from the Science University at Neilstrom and Anton had been seven years his elder, having already been through Medical School and graduated as a surgeon of some considerable distinction. It had been Anton's older head which had rescued them from some of the more serious scrapes into which Space Cadets inevitably get drawn and they had forged a friendship which had lasted over the years, surviving lengthy periods of separation and renewing itself with a vigour whenever their paths chanced to cross.
It was just such a chance which caused them this morning to be sitting at a table right by the "window" watching the bustle of activity outside. It should not have been a particularly frantic scene with only four of the docking berths occupied: there was the frigate Aurora, the corvettes Circe and Cleopatra and the sloop Solar Wind. However, the reason for all the excitement and the reason he was breakfasting with his old friend, was the arrival less than 12 hours earlier of the cruiser Pushkin straight from the war zone at Rigel.
The Pushkin was too large to manoeuvre onto one of the docking arms but the two friends could see her floating just beyond the reach of the tentacles and surrounded by tenders and other small craft. Even with an entire tail fin missing she still looked fast and powerful; an implacable enforcer of the will of His Imperial Majesty. The loss of the tail fin, however, had drastically reduced her manoeuvrability and so she had been packed with as many of the wounded from the other ships in the fleet as she could carry and sent home for repair.
The last of the wounded were still being ferried across to the Star Base but already some of the more serious cases were being transhipped to shuttles bound for the planet's surface where the Navy maintained a complete Medical Complex with extensive facilities for the treatment of deep space injuries. Already they both knew that repair crews from the Armourer would be crawling over the hull, deciding the best and the quickest way to get the Pushkin operational again.
"So tell me Tony, what's the situation at Rigel really like? We only see the newscasts here and you never know how much of them you can believe. You've brought a hell of a lot of casualties back: are we being hit that badly?"
Anton slowly shook his head. "265 officers and men: 51 of them basket cases and 214 walking wounded. They've given us a couple of bloody noses, Mikky but then we've given them as good as we've got. We've blockaded all of their major bases but most of their fighting ships had got out before we closed them down. They're still getting supplies through from somewhere and they generally fight as independent units, appearing out of nowhere and vanishing again before we can catch them. The biggest blow we've suffered was when they took out the Invincible with all hands. There were no survivors at all from that action: 817 officers and men vaporised."
The loss of the heavy cruiser Invincible had been a severe blow, not just to the fighting power of the Fleet but also to its morale. The trouble was that it was just not possible to track a ship through sub-space but fairly easy to detect a ship in normal space. Using this as a basis the Rebels had developed their own variant of guerilla warfare and raised it to a high level of effectiveness. Without any warning, a warship would suddenly materialise alongside its intended target, rake it with the full power of its pulse lasers and vanish again before its victim could react. Sometimes they would even leave behind a Neutron Bomb on a short delay fuse if they thought the target was particularly sleepy and slow to react.
In the case of the Invincible they had used a three-pronged attack. A frigate had come in first, moving at full attack speed and swinging in a tight spiral around the cruiser. Its lasers had been programmed with the expected position of the Invincible relative to the point of materialisation so that it opened fire almost before the detector alarms had sounded. A second frigate had come in two seconds later moving on a spiral 180 degrees opposed to the first. While the Invincible was busy corkscrewing around after the frigates a heavy destroyer had come in close from a direction at right angles to their spiral path and concentrated all its fire on one small area of the Invincible's hull, breaking down the shields and inflicting massive damage on the power cells. The destroyer planted its Neutron Bomb and all three attackers vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. The whole attack had lasted 58 seconds from start to finish. It was never discovered why the Invincible had not used her sub-space drive to warp out of there: possibly the damage to the power cells had been so severe that there was insufficient power left for a jump or maybe the sub-space system itself had been damaged. What was certain was that there were no survivors of the blast.
The Combat Manual had been revised following that incident. Now it was laid down explicitly that any ship caught in a surprise attack of that type, if it was either outgunned or outnumbered by the attacking craft, had to warp out immediately. The Captain's discretion in that type of engagement was effectively removed as the Chiefs of Naval Staff were not prepared to risk another loss of that magnitude. Or not at least without inflicting some corresponding damage to the enemy.
If the new rules of engagement had applied at the time of the Invincible incident, she would not have been particularly alarmed by the appearance of the first frigate since a cruiser outguns a frigate quite comfortably. However, as soon as the second frigate materialised the Invincible would have gone straight into sub-space before any further support could arrive.
They sat in silence for a minute, watching as another shuttle left the dock bearing some more of the wounded down to the hospital on Runnymede. They had both lost friends on the Invincible.
Anton reached over and helped himself to another cup of coffee. "And you Mikky, how is the Cleopatra coming along?"
Mikael's face lit up with pleasure as he thought of his new command. "She's a good little ship. She would have been ready to go in two days time if the Pushkin hadn't come in. All of the Armourer's resources have been snaffled by your Captain and I have to wait in line. She only needs some final mods to the forward laser firing controls and then I can take her out for trials."
The Cleopatra was in fact his first proper command for he did not really count the Southern Adventurer. He had been First Officer on the frigate Arcturus when they had come across the armed freighter Southern Adventurer running the blockade into the Rigellian base on Naxos. They had given chase and the pursuit which followed was rapidly resembling a marathon game of hide and seek before the blockade runner had finally been cornered with the help of the Aurora and the Ariadne. Even then she had put up some very spirited resistance before a boarding party led by the then Lieutenant Mikael Boronin had finally broken through. As a reward he had been put in charge of the captured freighter which had suffered some fairly substantial damage during the chase and subsequent boarding action, and with a prize crew aboard had eventually limped back to the Star Base on New London. His Captain's report of the action had been very well received by the Admiral of the Fleet who had asked him to dine on several occasions since and who had evidently put in a good word for him.
It was while he was kicking his heels on New London waiting for transport to rejoin the Arcturus that his promotion to Lieutenant Commander had come through and he had received orders directing him to report immediately to Star Base Runnymede and there to take command of the corvette Cleopatra.
He hadn't even minded when he arrived at Runnymede and found that the Cleopatra was little more than a shell with repair crews crawling all over her, both inside and out. She was still his ship: his first command and he could still feel that surge of pride as he went on board her for the first time. That had been over two months ago and in the intervening period the Cleopatra had undergone a transformation. Now she once again resembled a fighting
ship of the Imperial Navy. The external repair crews had all finished and there had only been two gangs still working inside before the Pushkin had come in.
"It's rotten luck, Mikky but I suppose a cruiser like the Pushkin will always take priority over a corvette."
"Yes, I know. But it is hard to have got so close and then have to wait again. Still, it does mean that I'm not overly busy for the next few days. When we've finished here, how about if we wander over to Transport and see if we can cadge a lift down to the planet? My Exec can look after things on board for a while."
"Good idea. We could, maybe, hop down to Agrea in the islands and hire one of those 'Butterfly' yachts for a few days."
The surface of Anton's home planet had been 90% ocean and he had been able to swim almost before he could walk and could handle a sailboat before he went to school. He had grown up surrounded by and able to handle many different types of boat and sailing was still his favourite form of relaxation. All his friends knew that, given half a chance, he would instinctively head towards the nearest stretch of open water whenever his duties let him.
Mikael laughed. "All right, Tony, but we change the rules this time. The last time you got me on one of those boats you did all the sailing and I ended up doing all the cooking. This time I'll do the sailing; those 'Butterflies' are quite simple to handle."
"They'll need to be", he retorted. "I do the sailing because I can tell the difference between a shoal of fish and a sandbank."
There had been one notable occasion when Mikael had been at the helm and had mistaken a shoal of fish directly ahead for some more solid obstacle. Without thinking about the trim of the sails or indeed anything other than an imminent collision he had changed course so violently that the boat had nearly capsized. Anton had lectured him severely at the time about his lack of seamanship and even now could not resist giving him a little dig.
While they were still disputing the allocation of chores on their proposed sailing trip, one of the wardroom orderlies came over to their table.
"Excuse me sir, Lieutenant Commander Boronin?"
"Yes that's me", Mikael replied.
"Admiral Wei presents his compliments, sir, and requests that you report to his office at your earliest convenience."
"Thank you, orderly."
As the orderly moved away Mikael looked at his friend. "Damn. I wonder what the old devil wants now."
The request may have been phrased in terms of 'earliest convenience' but they both knew that what that really meant was 'as fast as he could possibly get there'. There was no help for it but to obey.
"There's only one way to find out, Mikky. You'd better get your skates on. I've a few jobs I could usefully do this morning anyway. I'll meet you in the bar before lunch and then, maybe, we could drop planetside this afternoon."
Mikael collected his cap and left the wardroom at a brisk pace. The Star Base was nearly five kilometres in diameter and the Space Admiral's office was most of that distance from the wardroom. As usual when in a hurry there were none of the scooters nominally available for the use of the officers actually parked outside the wardroom. He dropped down a level to the dock area hoping to pick one up there but the level of activity around the inner dock was such that he could not spot an unoccupied scooter anywhere. He made his way over to the moving walkways instead.
The main horizontal thoroughfares on the Star Base were actually a series of moving walkways, three in each direction. The outer lane moved at a walking pace of 5km/hour so that it was easy to hop on and off at the intersections. The middle and inner lanes each increased the speed by another 5 kph so that the two inner lanes were passing each other at a combined speed of 30 kph, with a force field separating them to prevent accidental crossovers. Mikael hurried down to the nearest intersection, swung onto the outer lane and quickly made his way across to the inside.
At the centre of the Star Base was a shaft maintained at near zero gravity to facilitate vertical transfer to the various levels. The artificial gravity generators which maintained a uniform field throughout the base were situated at the bottom of this shaft. Shaping of the gravity field to restrict it to the sphere of the artificial moon was achieved by embedded interference generators between the inner and outer skins of the base: otherwise approaching spacecraft would be affected by the gravity field. The central shaft was likewise surrounded by interference generators to provide a null gravity environment.
Around the central shaft was the so-called racetrack where the network of moving walkways and the passageways used by the scooters and gravsleds, all terminated in a traffic cop's nightmare. From every tunnel, people were appearing, either on foot or on scooters, to dash around the racetrack and disappear down another tunnel. A proportion of them would make for the edge of the shaft, pause for a moment to align themselves with a tunnel mouth either above or below, and then launch themselves across the intervening space. To an unaccustomed observer it must seem little short of miraculous that so much traffic could negotiate the racetrack and the shaft without causing mortal injury. Accidents did happen, of course, but even in the shaft, it was possible by a slight shift of the body to alter the trajectory sufficiently to make collisions rare events.
Mikael could still remember the first time he had seen the shaft; as one of a group of young cadets on a month's temporary posting to Runnymede. He had gazed at the scene with a mixture of awe and admiration until a word from the officer who was showing them round brought him back to reality. It had taken him most of that month to summon up enough courage to launch himself across the shaft. Now he did not hesitate as he swung off the end of the moving walkway, seized his moment to dash across the racetrack and kicked himself upwards across the shaft.
The Space Admiral's office, he knew, was on the second level from the top of the shaft. Although the gravitational pull within the shaft was virtually nil there was still some drag caused by air resistance and so it was not possible to travel the whole length of the shaft with one kick. Mikael crossed backwards and forwards across the shaft several times to reach the Second Level. Down the passageway he stopped outside the door to the outer office to check his uniform and to set his cap at the correct angle. Then he pressed the stud, waited while the door slid aside, and went in.
"Lieutenant Commander Boronin, reporting as ordered, sir."
He addressed himself to the Captain sitting behind the big desk directly opposite the door. In the room with the Captain were two computer technicians, fiddling with a bank of consoles in the corner, a clerk sitting disconsolately watching them, and the blonde and very shapely lieutenant whose interest he had been unsuccessfully trying to attract in the wardroom for several weeks now. He smiled at her and was ignored for his pains.
The Captain finished speaking into the intercom. "The Admiral is expecting you, Commander. Go straight in."
Mikael knocked on the door and waited for the summons to enter. When the door slid open the old Admiral was standing by a Stellar Display Tank watching with apparent fascination, the twinkling points of light.
"Lieutenant Commander Boronin, reporting..."
"Yes, yes. I know who you are: dammit I sent for you. Now come over here and tell me what you make of this."
As he crossed the huge office towards the tank, Mikael anxiously reviewed in his mind the patterns of the major stellar systems and wondered what sort of a test he was in for. It was with a sense of great relief that he recognised the region around Rigel and concentrated his attention instead on making sense of the movements of the ships.
The objects identified in the tank were colour coded on a very simple basis: naturally occurring stellar objects (stars, planets, even asteroids if the resolution was sufficient) were white; artificial satellites and fixed navigational beacons were yellow; identifiably friendly spacecraft were green; identifiably hostile spacecraft were red; and all other spacecraft were orange. All of the dots representing spacecraft were flashing and additional information about the type and status of these ve
ssels could be displayed by varying the periodicity of the flashes, always providing that there was an appropriate source to supply such information. Normal commercial information providers would not be able to report on the status of Naval warships but the data for the display at which Mikael was looking, was being taken directly from the Fleet Command Ship at Rigel.
The resolution of the tank could be increased if required so that any small cube of space could be expanded to fill the whole tank. At the moment the tank was showing the region for about 100 light years around Rigel and so included most of the rebel bases. Circling around each base was at least one green dot indicating the positions of the blockading ships. Mikael's attention, however, was drawn towards one dot which was much larger than all of the others. It was of indeterminate colour and was flashing rapidly.
"Action," he said feeling the excitement mount within him. "There's some action at Rigel. Judging by the size of that dot it must be Fleet action at least."
The old Admiral nodded and touched the controls. The dot expanded and resolved itself into its constituent parts. All the colours were red and green: there was no neutral orange because in a combat situation the computers were programmed to assume that any ship not continuously transmitting an IFF signal was automatically hostile. It was difficult to count the numbers of ships involved in the action because they were continually flicking into sub-space and reappearing elsewhere on the display but Mikael estimated that there must be about a dozen red dots and maybe half as many again from the Fleet.
"They've finally come out in force. Dammit to hell, why couldn't they have waited for another week?"
He recollected himself. "I'm sorry, sir: it's just that in another week the Cleopatra would have been ready and we could have joined in the action."