The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One

by James Wilks

  Dinah didn’t wait for orders. “Bethany, don’t kick in thrust. Put our port side on them.” Even as she spoke, Staples could feel the sharp drag of the turn; it strained her neck. Bethany quickly rotated the port side of the ship to the other vessel, and then a sound they all hoped never to hear filled the cockpit. The anti-missile flak guns along side of the ship, armed and extended by the chief engineer only a minute before, began their barrage. The drumbeat of the cannons echoed through the room and reverberated throughout the entire ship, shuddering all of them in their seats. Dozens of explosive rounds were fired into space as Dinah did her best to coordinate their trajectory with that of the incoming missiles.

  They could see the explosions now through the windows to their left, brief flashes of light as the shells erupted. The air and explosive in each shell was burned up and each resulted in a cloud of shrapnel. Dinah worked to coordinate the fire of ten different guns into three groups, each focused on the computer’s calculated incoming trajectory of one of the missiles. A second later, she keyed a sequence on another panel without looking away from her surface, and flares erupted from the side of the ship, burning bright against the pinprick stars. The sound of the flak guns firing filled the room, but it felt oddly distant to Staples, disconnected from the silent explosions she could see through the window.

  “Suggest we fire back, Captain,” Dinah managed through gritted teeth. A second later, there was the bloom brighter than Sol as the shrapnel caught one of the incoming missiles. Another detonated a second later, and Staples caught herself holding her breath. When the third missile exploded, lured off by a flare and caught by a needle sized piece of shrapnel, she let out a huge breath. The firing stopped abruptly, and in the silence, Staples could hear the faintest tinkling of errant pieces of shrapnel and the missiles bouncing off the hull.

  Instead of ordering Dinah to return fire, Staples leaned to the coms speaker again. “Repeat, this is Gringolet. We did not open fire; we have a saboteur. Please cease your attack!” There was no sound in the cockpit for several seconds, and Staples willed the other ship to respond.

  “Captain, they’ll be reloading right now,” Templeton cautioned. She knew he was probably right, but the idea of destroying this ship and the crew on board just because their coms might be down was abhorrent to her.

  “Dinah, can you stop another attack?” she asked, sweat showing on her forehead.

  “I think so, sir, but I would not advise waiting.”

  “Captain, I’m looking over the data from the ship’s log. That ship decelerated towards us at nearly six Gs,” Charis said, stunned.

  “What?” Templeton barked. “That’s impossible. No crew could-”

  This made things very clear for Staples, who interrupted him to say, “Launch missiles, Dinah. Everything you’ve got.”

  Again, the ripples that they had felt earlier vibrated the ship as half a dozen more warheads left their launch tubes and began accelerating madly towards their target. The other ship, now visible through the port side windows, was still spinning slowly.

  “I think they’re trying to regain control, Captain.” Charis’ voice was tense and loud in the moment after their missiles launched. “But they’re having difficulty. I’ve got erratic movements. They’re… they’re firing again. Three more missiles! And something else… UteVs maybe. Two of them.”

  “They can’t possibly be trying to conduct repairs right now,” the dubious voice was Templeton’s.

  “Fighters, sir. Have to be.” Dinah was focused on her screens and preparing to stop the missiles.

  “Fighters…” Charis said in disbelief, and then the cockpit was full of the sound of the flak guns again. They sounded like some nearby tom-toms of war, and Staples wondered in the second that followed how many people had died to that staccato rhythm through the ages. Millions, she suspected. She desperately hoped that her crew would not join them.

  Dinah worked her controls, and Bethany watched the screens in front of her like a hawk while a mix of data from Charis and Dinah’s stations flowed by. The bursts of anti-missile flak and flares created brief glows that cast strange shadows on the cockpit. Suddenly, the shadows grew deeper and Staples squinted as one of the incoming warheads was destroyed, followed by a second. She waited for the third, but then she forgot all about it in the second she was wrenched down and to the side. It felt as though someone had snapped her entire body to the floor with a rubber band, and her neck screamed out in pain. Before she could recover from this, she heard the loudest sound she had ever heard on her ship. It was louder than the flak guns, louder than she imagined possible. She put her hands over her ears and screamed in an attempt to drown it out. Her body wanted to fly out of the seat, to smash itself to pieces against the coms panel in front of her, but the safety harness held it back from its suicide mission.

  A second later all was silent again, and for a moment the captain thought that the noise had simply made her deaf, but then she heard someone speaking. She looked through the window in front of her, and someone had spun the stars around her ship. She watched them fly by and wondered for a moment who could have moved them all so quickly. As she looked at them and the voice droned on meaninglessly in the background, she saw the remains of a ship float by, pieces of it moving in different directions like the cinders from some great grey firework expanding in a slow sphere.

  The voice began to come into focus, and Staples realized that she recognized it. “Sir, can you hear me?” It was Dinah. She glanced around at the rest of the crew on the bridge, and they mostly seemed as bad or worse off than her. Charis was unconscious, as far as she could tell, her hair floating about her in the null gravity, and Templeton was looking about him confusedly, blinking rapidly. Bethany was curled up in her chair, her knees to her chest, her arms wrapped around her head. Only Dinah seemed to be fully in command of her senses. “Sir, can you hear me?” she repeated.

  “Yes, I can hear you,” Staples said numbly, though it was only partially true. “Report.” Her voice sounded as though it echoed down a cavernous tunnel.

  “We were hit, sir, but I don’t think it’s bad. Our missiles destroyed the other ship. We still have two fighters coming in.” The voice was soothing, but it carried an air of the imperative. Staples needed to shake this off and get functioning. Her crew needed her. She became abruptly aware of an acute pain in her neck.

  “Don,” she said. When he didn’t respond, she shouted it. “Don!” He looked at her, his eyes coming into focus. “Get on the shipwide coms. Tell everyone that we’re hit, but we’re okay. Tell them we’ve got two fighters coming in, and to remain at combat positions.”

  Templeton nodded dumbly, then gazed across his control panel until he found the right buttons. As he began his announcement, Staples unstrapped herself.

  “Don’t think that’s wise, sir. We’re floating free with hostiles incoming.”

  “Can’t be helped,” she muttered, and pushed herself the few feet over to Bethany. The woman was conscious, but Staples could see that every muscle in her body was tensed. When she touched her arm, some of that tension eased, and the dark eyes looked up at her. “We’re okay, Bethany. You’re okay.”

  “Captain.” Tears threatened to ruin her makeup, but she wiped them on her dark sleeve.

  “I need you right now, Bethany.” Gently, she took the woman’s hands and placed them on the controls in front of her. “Can you still pilot?” Bethany nodded and seemed to regain some measure of composure.

  “Captain, those fighters will be here in less than a minute,” Dinah cautioned. “They’re not going to be as easy as missiles to shoot down.” Staples nodded in understanding. Pilots had an aversion to flak and tended to fly around it rather than through it whenever possible. She pushed herself over to Charis and looked her in the face.

  The woman was unconscious, but otherwise seemed unhurt. Strands of her hair floated about haphazardly, and her head lolled and her arms drifted in the air. Staples pushed her right arm down
to the armrest and shook it. “Charis,” she said, loudly and clearly. The navigator moaned and grunted, and a second later her eyes fluttered open. “Charis, it’s Clea. Are you all right?”

  “I think so, Captain.” She looked around, then seemed to come fully to herself. “Gwen? John?” She asked desperately.

  “Listen, we’re okay,” Staples replied. “Don,” she raised her voice and glanced over her shoulder, her neck muscles spasming in protest, “please try to get a report from everyone on the ship, starting with Gwen and John. I need to know that everyone is okay.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Templeton said and promptly set about it on his coms panel.

  “Twenty seconds, sir.” The warning in Dinah’s voice was compelling.

  “Charis, Don will verify that everyone’s okay, but right now, I need you to do your job. Do you understand?” Charis nodded, and Staples pushed herself as quickly as she could past Bethany and back to the coms panel. Just as she strapped herself in, she heard and felt the vibrations of slugs slamming against the hull. “Dinah, it’s your show.”

  The engineer did not waste time. “Bethany, take us out of this spin, but don’t stop us moving. The slugs those fighters are shooting can’t puncture the hull, but they can damage the weapons and portholes, including these.” She nodded at the window in front of her.

  Staples had a sudden picture of slugs rupturing the windscreen in the cockpit, of the air rushing out into space in a second, and of dying, frozen and decompressed, strapped to her chair. She shook it from her mind.

  “I need Gringolet’s movements to be unpredictable to them, but you need to tell me constantly what you’re going to do. It’s the only way I’ll be able to bring the guns to bear. We should be ready for missiles too. Fighters usually carry them, but they’re a fraction of the yield of the one that hit us a minute ago.” Dinah’s voice was calm. She might have been giving directions to the mall. Not for the first time, Staples considered that hiring her had probably been the best decision she had ever made.

  Bethany uncurled her legs, took a deep breath, and her hands went to work. “Left twenty degrees, thirty degree axis rotation to port in three seconds.” Her high voice carried a confidence the rest of the crew rarely heard when she wasn’t in the pilot’s seat.

  “Copy that.” The engineer’s reply was curt. Bethany’s maneuvers went into action, and Staples’ neck became very cross with her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Templeton put a bracing hand on his as well, and wondered how much experience her expensive doctor had with strained muscles. Dinah’s dark hands manipulated the gunner’s controls, and a moment later, the flak cannons sounded again.

  Over the din, Templeton yelled to Charis, “Gwen says she’s fine, but scared. John is okay too. I told Gwen we’d be down as soon as we can.” She absorbed his information silently, and though it was clear that she wanted to rush to her daughter’s side, she held her post and began running damage diagnostics. More slugs thudded into the hull, some of them sounding quite close to the cockpit.

  Bethany raised her voice even more to be heard. “One quarter G thrust forward, forty-five degree pitch up, thirty degree axis rotation to starboard in three, two, one.” They all felt the thrust as the ship surged forward briefly, at least from their perspective, and the stars and wreckage beyond rolled through their collective vision. Templeton cursed softly and fixed his eyes on his coms panel, where he was accumulating reports from the various remaining crew members.

  “Got one, sir,” Dinah reported, uncharacteristic triumph creeping into her voice. A second later, there was a lurching turn followed by a shudder and a loud roar.

  “Missile strike, Captain,” Charis stated. “I think they were aiming for a starboard porthole, but Bethany put it on our ventral-”

  The young pilot spoke over her. “Thirty degree yaw to port, one hundred and eighty axis rotation to port in three, two, one.” Again, the ship turned and spun as Bethany sought to trap the evasive fighter in Dinah’s field of fire, and again, the flak cannons sounded, the flashes showing against the control panels and chairs around them.

  Abruptly, and without climax, Dinah said, “Got it.” There was no accompanying explosion, just silence as the guns ceased. Staples heard her engineer-come-tactical officer take a deep sigh. “I think we’re in the clear, sir, but request Charis do a long range scan for more ships.”

  Staples locked eyes with her frightened navigator, then shook her head. “I think I can do it. You go see to your daughter.” With relief, Charis unstrapped herself and pushed for the corridor at the back of the cockpit. “Don, tell everyone we’re safe. Anyone with injuries should report to Medical. After that, we need a damage assessment.” She thought for a moment. “And get Jang looking for our saboteur. I want to know what the hell happened.”

  Chapter 18

  Five minutes later, Bethany, Templeton, and Staples were the only remaining crew members in the cockpit. The captain was working the astrogation radar to the best of her ability, and Templeton was collecting data from crew members and tabulating it on his surface. Bethany sat in her seat, her eyes gazing through the window in front of her. She was in part keeping an eye out for stray wreckage, but mostly she was staring into space. Dinah had gone down to the ReC to relieve John so he could be with his wife and daughter.

  “I’m not very good at this, but I don’t see anything too close to us. I read a few other ships at distance, but they seem to be commuter flights between Mars and other places,” Staples stated. “I think we can relax for now.” She attempted to slouch back in the chair to relax, but instead she drifted an inch away from the seat until the safety harness restrained her.

  “I think I’ve got it all, Captain.” The man’s fingers continued working as he spoke. “Crew status, ship status, then after-action assessment?”

  As she rotated around in her chair to face her first mate, she said, “Please.”

  “Okay.” He made a few more keystrokes, then began. “No serious injuries reported. Lots of strained necks, some sore muscles, headaches, bruises, but we made out really well. Nothing even so bad as Yoli’s injured arm from the pirate attack.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.” Staples wondered how many more of these close calls her ship had in him. “Anyone in Medical?”

  “Doc says most of the crew stopped by for some pain meds and muscle relaxers. He gave ‘em out and sent ‘em on their way. No one down there right now but the Doc himself.”

  “Well, tell him to stay there. I’m going to make a stop myself before too long.” She rubbed her own neck, feeling the tender strained muscle under the skin.

  “Will do. The ship is about in the same shape as far as we can tell. We won’t know the full extent until we take a UteV out to survey the damage, but most of it seems to be concentrated in the ventral aft section of the ship. Bethany,” he looked pointedly at the young pilot who continued her search of the stars, “managed to put the least vulnerable part of the ship in the path of the missile. If it had hit the engines, the cockpit, or half a dozen other places, we might be in really bad shape.”

  Indeed, Staples thought, we might not be here at all. “That’s why our necks all hurt so badly, I’ll wager.” Bethany looked over at her, and to Staples’ great surprise, she did not offer an apology. “That was a good move, Bethany. You may have saved the ship.” She smiled at her warmly. “I’d much rather be sore than dead.” Bethany smiled back at her and then returned her gaze to the window. “Do we have primary thrust?”

  “Dinah is working on that. She thinks we do, but she wants to run some diagnostics.”

  “How long?”

  “Three, four hours maybe. We’ve got minor hull breaches in the aft section, and an entire cargo bay is exposed to naked space, but pressure doors are holding. We’re going to need to spend some time on repairs. Dinah also thinks some of those maneuvers our superstar pilot pulled might have overloaded some of the steering thrusters, and so those are going to need some diagn
ostic and repair work. All things considered, we’re hurt, but mobile. Probably much better off than we deserve to be.”

  Staples nodded. She was desperate to hear about Jang’s search for their saboteur, but at this point, she wasn’t sure that she shouldn’t thank whoever was responsible. “All right. What about our assessment of that other ship?”

  “Charis sent up some data,” Templeton stated, looking over the surface in front of him. “She said that the ship would have stopped just as they reached us. There’s no reasonable doubt that they were going to stop alongside us. She’s also confirmed the other ship’s deceleration at five point nine two Gs.”

  “It’s hard to imagine any crew dealing with that, especially going into a combat situation. Who would do that to their crew?”

  “Charis doesn’t think there was a crew.” Staples wanted to be shocked at Templeton’s statement, but she wasn’t. The idea that the ship had been automated had occurred to her, but the implications of such a thing were complex to say the least.

  She and Templeton stared at each other as she spoke. “A computer controlled vessel? I’ve heard of smaller craft, repair drones and the like with sufficient AI to run themselves, but never ships of that size.”

  “Me neither, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The computer still can’t match the ship type, which means it ain’t in the public registry.”

  “I don’t think there was anyone in the fighters either,” Bethany broke in. They both looked at her, but her gaze was still fixed on the stars. “They didn’t move right, not like people move, and some of their turns would have really hurt a pilot. Maybe killed them.”

  “It’s not unusual for fighters to be automated for that very reason,” Templeton ventured, “but they’re always controlled by someone on a nearby ship, just like the drone the Doris Day sent out when we picked up the satellite. At the very least, they’re controlled by a computer on another ship. You don’t spend all that time programming advanced AI routines into fighters… they tend to get blown up.”