“Sure thing.” Nick hunkered down and crawled beneath the lip of the instrument panel. “Poor kids have already seen too much, what with their mother being killed in front of them earlier tonight.”
“I hope maybe they were asleep at the actual moment of impact.” Mara cleared off a bare patch on the deck, kicking stuff aside with one foot. Sitting cross-legged, leaning on the bottom panel of the console, she was ready to hand Nick tools or whatever else he might require to finish his task. “Seems odd you know how to fix an AI interface. I mean, your being a soldier, not a tech.”
“Well, if you’ll pardon my saying so, I’m not just a soldier.” Nick stuck his head out, giving her an exaggerated frown and then a grin as he emphasized the last three words. “You’re dealing with the Special Forces here, lady.”
She laughed. “Well, excuse me, sir. I knew there were different branches of the service –”
“Special Forces operators work behind enemy lines, blow things up, commit acts of sabotage. Other miscellaneous jobs I can’t tell you about. We don’t publicize ourselves.” His voice was muffled as he tugged at something. Sparks flew and he cursed luridly for a minute, nursing a singed finger. “Have to know how things are put together to blow them apart. Hand me a reverse grav clamp, would you?”
She slapped the indicated item into his outstretched palm. “I guess it’s logical, when you explain it. I never thought about it before. The adventure vids make blowing things up appear pretty easy.” Now she was teasing him.
“Yeah, the entertainment folks leave out a lot of the boring details in those vids. I think we’re ready for a status briefing now.” Nick wriggled out from under the equipment and stood, brushing futilely at his clothes. “Let’s get the others.”
Mara took his hand and they walked across the bridge.
Reaching the door of the wardroom, Nick beckoned to Khevan and Twilka. Gianna was asleep in Paolo’s lap, clutching her teddy bear, snoring softly. Her face was flushed. Nick hoped she wasn’t coming down with something. Things were tricky enough already without a sick child on my hands.
“We’ll be right out there, on the bridge, if you need us, okay, trooper?” Nick said softly to Paolo, who looked as if he never planned to close his eyes again. Kid is definitely running on nervous energy. “We’ll leave the door open. I promise, we’re not going anywhere on this ship without you and your sister. Officer’s word of honor.”
Satisfied by Paolo’s silent, small nod, he walked to the center of the bridge, the other adults trailing after him, an apprehensive audience.
Over his shoulder, he said, “I have bad news. It’s probably the worst thing you’ve ever heard. And then we’ll get to my personal worst nightmare, come true on this damn ship.” He stopped at the captain’s chair and faced them. “Which do you want first?”
“Could you kind of lead up to the last part gradually?” Twilka requested. “I think I’m scared of your nightmares, soldier. One tranq didn’t do much good for my nerves. And there aren’t anymore tranqs in the medkit, which is the first piece of bad news, in my opinion, even before you start broadcasting!”
Nick chuckled.
Then he straightened, his tone growing even more flat and matter of fact, as if he was briefing a Special Forces squad prior to a mission. “All right, here’s the deal. Night before last, Number Four engine dropped out of sync and the crew had to shut the engines off most of the night. Eventually they got three units burning again.”
“But Captain Bonlors said it was routine maintenance!” Twilka protested. “I mean, he told me personally!”
Guess Bonlors fooled someone. “Lying through his teeth,” Nick said. “The engine breakdown cost SMT any chance at setting a new speed record. The failure left us so far behind schedule to Sector Hub we were going to be about a week late, in fact. SMT was facing loss of prestige, and as for proving the new engine concept –”
“Screw prestige, speed records, and engine concepts. SMT was facing heavy financial penalties.” Mara cut into his discussion, her tone crisp and all business. “The company gave me outrageous guarantees on the cargo Loxton was shipping. Triple damages, free freight forwarding, all kinds of incentive clauses. I bet SMT provided the other cargo owners the same kinds of deals.” Her voice trailed off. “So much confidence about their new engines.”
“Well, now you have the context for the plain bad news.” Nick sat on the captain’s chair, rubbing at his shoulder again. “We ran into an uncharted asteroid field tonight, folks. No distress call was sent. None. As of this moment, not only is there no rescue ship coming, no one even knows we’re in trouble.”
Nick waited through their appalled reaction.
Mara was the spokesperson. “How can there have been an uncharted asteroid field? This route through Sector Sixteen is well known, cleared regularly, traveled all the time by dozens of vessels –” She stopped, her eyes growing wide.
“But if you’re actually in Sector Seventeen, instead of where you belong, you might run into things like uncharted asteroids.” Nick coughed, lungs still congested from the close call on Level Two. “We’re in Seventeen, not Sixteen.”
“But Seventeen is Mawreg occupied,” Mara said, wrapping her arms around her stomach and leaning on the chair. “Not even military traffic goes into Sector Seventeen.”
“Right,” Nick said. “But these SMT idiots took a luxury liner with eight thousand Sectors citizens on board right across the line, in an attempt to take a shortcut.”
Shaking her head, Mara argued, “Not even SMT would be so criminally stupid. You must be misunderstanding the AI’s data. How did Yankuri and Bonlors think all this could be covered up? The AI’s logs would show we took a different course to Hub.”
“Bonlors could doctor the logs.” Nick raised his hands and gestured for quiet. “I know it’s impossible to believe, but I’ve been talking to the AI for half an hour. According to the Nebula Dream, the company’s president ordered Captain Bonlors to find a way to succeed or be fired. Stripped of his pension. So Bonlors plotted a course to make up the time. He promised his command staff huge bonuses and promotions to keep the secret. Bonlors had the First Officer reenter the logs, corrupt the nav data, block the AI from overriding the manual entries. He was the ship’s interface officer and damn good, from what I see.”
“This is a young AI,” Mara said. “Not sure of itself yet. I was surprised how often I had to tell it things about dealing with passengers it should have known.”
“There was no shakedown cruise.” Nick shook his head. “The First Officer was so skillful at accomplishing this illegal activity, it makes me suspicious SMT may have pulled other similar stunts on voyages in the past. I’m guessing shortcuts through forbidden space may have been tried elsewhere. If the trick worked, I could see Yankuri doing it again.”
“How do you know all this?” Upset now, Twilka waved her hands at the wanton destruction. “I didn’t hear the AI talking to you. Are you sure you’re not making this up to scare us?”
Nick answered Twilka readily enough. “I’d rather be wrong, believe me. I only know how to reroute an AI through the special interface because I watched it done once, on a battleship under heavy fire, drifting out of control. Without talking to the AI through the backdoor interface like I did tonight, I couldn’t prove my suspicions. No one could.”
Khevan rubbed his jaw. “So, Bonlors and Yankuri figured the passengers wouldn’t question what Sector we were in?”
Nodding, Nick shrugged. “I think the plan was to scrub the AI’s memory once we docked, make sure the ruse was never uncovered. Plug in a new AI for future runs. Hey, you know the media would have been fawning all over SMT and Bonlors for breaking the speed record. The Yeatter engine people weren’t going to expose the fraud. Too much at stake for them. And for the few – like myself – who would have been damn disbelieving, SMT was going to say laypeople didn’t understand what immense speed the new engines were capable of. I would have let it go. I’ve got other pr
oblems waiting for me on Sector Hub.”
“Sector Seventeen means we’re in trouble.” Mara narrowed her eyes, thinking hard, putting pieces together. “You mentioned there was no distress call?”
He shook his head. “According to the AI, once we plowed into the asteroid field, damaging the ship, Captain Bonlors and Yankuri wrote her off. Wrote off all of us. Bonlors killed the three officers who weren’t personally loyal to him. He, Yankuri, and the others cut their losses here, took a sizable chunk of credits from the ship’s safe, grabbed a few passengers he encountered on the way, and departed hours ago on the same shuttle we took from Glideon.”
“Wait, wait, stop.” Twilka held her head for a minute. “How do you know all this? Why would the captain take anyone along?”
“The AI isn’t dead, just disconnected. It’s still observing conditions on the ship.” Nick pointed over his shoulder at the one console now lit and humming. “The data’s all there, in the backup log. I’m guessing Yankuri and Bonlors plan to show up at Hub as the heroes of the moment, with the handful of passengers they managed to save, who will be nothing but grateful.”
“Telling what story?” Face set in angry lines, eyes hard, Khevan speculated. “A tale of the new, untested engines blowing up? In Sector Sixteen somewhere?”
“Oh yeah.” Nick nodded.
“Leaving no other survivors? No debris on the space lanes?” Khevan probed for weaknesses.
“We’ll be the biggest mystery of all time. What was the true fate of the Nebula Dream? Where is her final orbit?” Nick mimicked the hushed delivery favored by reporters all over the Sectors. “Treasure hunters will die for the next few centuries, searching for our blasted hulk, all the time in the wrong goddamn Sector.”
“And the passengers Bonlors rescued will testify the lifeboats were safely away before he left,” Mara realized bitterly. “Including, of course, those phantom LBs SMT never stowed in half the davits.”
“Man. Oh, man. I can’t be hearing this,” Twilka whined brokenly. “My father knows Yankuri. Personally, not business. He’s been to one of our homes. Are you saying the bastard will lie to my father about what happened to me?”
“In a heartbeat.” Nick walked over to the battered console he’d been working under for so long and keyed in some instructions. As he did, he asked a question over his shoulder. “Mara, as a Loxton agent, what’s your guess? Will the insurance pay off on the ship? And on the lost cargo and passengers?”
Reluctantly, she nodded. “It’ll take years of lawsuits and countersuits. Generations of lawyers will get rich before the case ends in the Sectors Supreme Court. The underwriters will pay. SMT will probably come out ahead financially, in fact, versus the state their general ledger would have been after the ship arrived at Hub a week late.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” Nick said. “Okay, all of you come and watch this. It’s pretty unstable, but it’s the best the AI and I can do.”
A flickering, small hologram sprang up in the center of the bridge, displaying coded information and symbols Nick interpreted as the others drew close. “This is us.” Next, he pointed at a cluster of winking green dots not too far away. “These are the launched LBs. The AI, realizing we were in Sector Seventeen, deduced there were no safe planets to head for. Not within reach of an LB’s fuel. The LBs can’t even make it into Sector Sixteen. So the AI retreated to the next set of standard safety instructions, reprogramming the LB navcomps to pod up, stay together, on the off chance someone might come and find us. Their transmitters can’t reach all the way to the Sector border. Their onboard automatic distress beacons aren’t going to do any good.”
“Is this ship going to explode?” Twilka asked.
“No, the remaining three engines are stable at the moment, as far as I can tell, but inoperable. One of the asteroids plowed into the primary engineering command center. The AI had no authority over the engines, and the destruction of the local controls in Engineering means we can’t start this hulk moving again. I don’t begin to know enough tech stuff to try rerouting the AI where it never ran before. The Ship tried on its own, in fact, and had no luck. Speaking of the Ship, large portions of the hull are breached, but the AI says the blast doors are preserving what air is left.”
“For now,” Mara said flatly.
Nick nodded.
“We’re going to suffocate?” Twilka moved on to a new terror, hand going to her throat as if the breathable air was already thinning.
Mara swallowed hard. “No, I think Nick’s worried about something even worse. Right?”
“Right. Sector Seventeen, people. Think about it.” Will any of them get my drift?
“Lords of Space.” Mara caught up with where he was going. Clueless Twilka was still worrying about the air supply. “Twilka, Sector Seventeen is Mawreg territory. They rule here.”
The Mawreg were the worst enemies the peoples of the Sectors had ever faced, unknowable and implacable, dedicated to wiping out all members of any race failing to submit completely to them. Nick stared at the tiny cluster of winking green lights. Which includes all of us standing here on the bridge, and the hundreds drifting out there in the lifeboats. The Mawreg delighted in conducting horrific experiments of unfathomable purpose on all other living creatures.
“I helped to liberate a Mawreg experimentation camp once.” Nausea roiled his gut as he brought up the experience. “The only set of memories I ever had to have completely scrubbed. Even the faint echoes left at the molecular level in my brain give me screaming nightmares about twice a year.”
“So is there anything hopeful, some crumb you can toss us?” Mara asked.
“We’re not too deep in Seventeen. Bonlors was trying to shortcut across an arm of the Sector. I’m hoping we haven’t attracted enemy attention yet. Large swaths of Seventeen are deserted or blasted systems, you know. The Mawreg were pretty ruthless in exterminating the dominant space-going sentients in this area.”
“But if no emergency calls have been transmitted, as you say,” Khevan ventured, “then how will anyone know to come rescue us? I think you must have a plan?”
“Yeah.” Nick rotated his sore shoulder, rubbing at the ache. “I pray to the Lords of Space to grant us enough time to carry it out.”
“Tell us what you have in mind.” Mara smiled wanly. “I’m trying not to abandon hope.”
“We’re getting off the bridge, for starters. There’s nothing the AI can do, or I can do, to send any messages from the ship itself. Bonlors was too thorough about the destruction. So we’re heading for the hold, to the bonded stores to retrieve my gear.”
“Weapons?” Khevan’s eyebrows were drawn together in a puzzled frown. “I also have a blaster in my stored luggage. How do blasters help?”
“Yeah, I have a pair of Mark 27 blasters down there, but what I want, well, it’s top secret, but you’ve got the need to know.” Nick’s smile was a bit crooked. “There are a lot of tall tales about us Special Forces guys. Have any of you heard the one about our being able to communicate interstellar, from anywhere, at any time?”
“I have,” Mara said, her gaze never leaving Nick’s face. “It’s called fastlink, isn’t it?”
“Got it in one.” He pointed at her with his index finger then tapped his nose.
“Loxton supplies some of the critical components.” Mara smiled slightly. “I have a high security clearance.”
“The transmitter’s here.” He tapped the back of his skull lightly. “It’s an implant. Hush hush. Only certain SF operators get one. Only those of us who do the black ops behind enemy lines. But I have to have the booster to get the signal out of my brain, off across the Sectors. The piece of classified hardware, ladies and Brother, is in the hold.”
“So, as you say then, we go to the hold,” Khevan finished calmly. “And we pray – you to your Lords of Space and I to my Red Lady – we find your gear, undamaged.”
“AI says the main hold was partially breached, but the bonded stores are in a
secure area, accessible by us. It told me roughly where to search for our stuff, yours and mine.” Nick threw a glance at the Brother. “Figured you might have a few useful items in your bags, too.”
Khevan bowed. “A wise assumption. A blaster or two will definitely come in handy. One must survive to be rescued.”
“If we get a call out on your fastlink, how long before a ship comes?” Mara asked. She revised her question as soon as she had asked it. “Will anyone come, do you think?”
Nick eyed the display again, calculating. “A matter of hours, I hope. Six or seven thousand helpless Sectors citizens, at the mercy of the Mawreg, ought to inspire fast action once the authorities realize we’re out here.”
“We have no alternatives. At least we can be doing something, not sitting passively, right?” Mara walked over to him, resting her hand on his arm.
He folded his fingers around hers and squeezed gently. “Right. It’s actually pure luck I even have the booster with me at all. They’re only issued on certain missions. No one asked me to return it after the last trip I made into Seventeen. I was rushed off Glideon so fast on my last day, I didn’t have a chance to check it in. Those of us who have the implant are always more comfortable keeping a booster on hand at all times, but the technology is strictly controlled. So, one good omen. Things will be okay.”
“Oh yeah, things will be like happy comets in orbit.” Twilka rolled her eyes, her tone sarcastic. “So, shall we go wake the girl and her teddy bear thing and get going? The sooner those rescue ships arrive, the happier I’ll be.”
“Your happiness is, of course, a major concern for us.” Khevan frowned at her.
“No bickering, you two.” Mara sighed impatiently. “Twilka’s right – the sooner a rescue vessel gets here, the better. I don’t even care what colors it’s cruising under – Loxton, Frayser...”
Wreck of the Nebula Dream Page 11