“Two hull breaches,” Ardoin announced from Damage Control 1, “frames two and eight, azimuths unknown due to internal sensor failures. Integrity failures and unspecified internal damage to twelve compartments, including main engineering, main fire control, and auxiliary fire control. Complete list displayed on your emergency display. Compartments open to space at this time. Remaining compartments intact. Ship has retained airtight integrity and is not, repeat, NOT venting atmosphere. Fusion reactor just scrammed, propulsion by maneuvering thrusters only, power being supplied by the Rickover. Negative fire control on any weapons at this time. Negative function on all deflectors. Negative function on any forward sensors at this time. Lateral arrays functioning at one-quarter resolution due to computer limitations. Attitude control is functional on all three axes. There’s a lot more, sir, but it would take me all week to list. It’s on everyone’s board.”
“Thank you, Ardoin,” Max said. “Order all litter bearers to search for wounded and to carry Cat III or IV to the assault shuttle. Cat I and II wounded will have to make their own way with the rest of us. Category V . . . well, they know what to do with Category V.” The last group were those who would die even with treatment. They would be given painkillers and allowed to meet their ends where they were.
Max punched open a channel, knowing whose voice he would hear.
“This is Engineering. What’s left of it, at any rate.”
“Wernher, what’s your status?”
“We’re dead in space, that’s what, and no prospect of that changing without a trip to the yard. The fusion reactor itself is intact, you understand, but all of the computers and high-energy transfer conduits used to route power generated by the reactor to run the graviton generators that compress and contain the hydrogen are totally gone. There’s just a big hole where the main components used to be. I’ve got the spares, but there’s no place to put them and nothing with which to connect them—I can’t get the mains up no matter what I do.”
“I suppose that the graviton generators can’t be powered by the Rickover?”
“It’s pence to pounds. The Rickover’s total power output is only 2 or 3 percent of what it takes to run them. That’s how we start the reactor, by running power from the Rickover into the accumulators for several minutes, but that’s just enough to start the reactor and run it and the main sublight for fifteen, maybe twenty, seconds.”
Max sighed heavily. “But you can start the reactor and run it for that long with what you’ve got now?”
“Affirmative, sir. It’ll take a few minor reroutes. Give me three or four minutes.”
“Get started, Wernher. I think I’m going to need that fifteen seconds from the sublight. Bartoli, any idea what our friends out there are doing?”
“Sensors are not nearly up to snuff, sir, but here’s the best I’ve got. The admiral’s transport is toast: a piece of debris from the tanker ruptured her hull and hit the fusion reactor. Nothing left but plasma and tiny pieces. The tanker is gone, too. We got her reactor. The freighter is intact. It’s looking like she took a hit from some debris in her aft section. Her main sublight is out and her main power is down, but we’re getting power readings indicating that she’s putting her fusion reactor through a restart. She’ll be up and running in ten or fifteen minutes, maybe a bit longer. And when she is . . .”
“She turns, comes back toward us, gets within pulse-cannon range, and blows us to flaming atoms, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Max said.
“Aye, sir,” Bartoli said solemnly. “Nothing that I can think of, at any rate.”
Well, there is one thing.
Max punched a circuit open. “Wernher, don’t stop what you’re doing; just listen.”
“I fairly relish the opportunity to multitask, sir.”
The bloody-minded Englishman jokes in the face of almost certain death. Good man.
“Ignore the next announcement, good fellow, you and your lads. Keep doing what you’re doing until it’s done, and then you can go. Can I count on you to do that?”
“Aye, sir. England expects that every man will do his duty.”
“Damn straight.” He closed the circuit.
“You too, Levy. I need you with me rather than obeying the announcement. We’ve got a little mission of our own.” Max ignored the look on Levy’s face that fairly cried out, “What announcement?”
Max turned to Chin. “I need to speak to Chief Tanaka, this second.”
The fastest way to do that was to signal his percom, which Chin did. It took three seconds. “You got him, Skipper.”
Max opened the circuit. “Chief, this is the skipper. I’m going to ask you to do something for me even though I’m sure you would do it in any event. Take care of the squeakers.”
“Aye, sir. With my very life.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. Out.”
Back to Chin. “Mr. Chin, send CODE VERMILION to all Union vessels in this sector. That’s CODE VERMILION. Get a confirmation that they received it from at least two ships. Then you’re released.”
“Released, sir?”
“You’ll see.” Max turned to Tufeld. The grizzled, senior noncom met his eyes soberly. Max could see him bracing for what he knew Max was about to say. Max said it. Two words, like death.
“Abandon ship.”
Max’s voice left him for a moment, and he felt a sudden tightness in his chest. And then, a cold emptiness, as though his heart had been ripped out of his body and the void filled with ice. Another abandonment. “Condition Violet, Tufeld. Repeating the order, all hands abandon ship.”
Tufeld nodded gravely, punched up MC1, drew a breath, and said what no one with his job ever wanted to say. “Abandon ship. This is a Condition Violet order. Repeat, all hands, all decks, abandon ship. This is not a drill, repeat, this is not a drill. All hands, all decks, abandon ship.” Tufeld paused for a second, looked at the skipper to see if there was anything further. Max shook his head slowly. “Final announcement, all hands, abandon ship.” Long pause. “That is all.” He closed the circuit with finality, shut down his console, and stepped back.
Max looked around CIC and made a circling motion over his head, followed by a distinct gesture toward the hatch. Max hit the hatch cycle override, causing the CIC hatch to open and stay open. Everyone but Levy strode out of the compartment, briskly but calmly.
Max stepped over to Levy’s console and gave the young weapons officer a few quick instructions. He then returned to his own console, slipped his finger into a small notch on the back, and popped off one of the rear panels. He let the panel fall to the deck, where it clattered jarringly in the sudden quiet. Behind the panel was a numeric keypad, a thumbprint scanner, and an old-fashioned key-operated mechanical lock. Max put his thumb on the scanner and entered an eight-digit code. He then reached around his neck and removed a chain, on which were his titanium dog tags, a backup to the q-chip buried in his thigh, and a key that hung from the chain on a small metal loop. He pulled at the key, breaking the loop, and inserted the key in the lock, giving it a sharp turn ninety degrees to the right. A red light above the keypad blinked three times. Max put the chain back around his neck and pressed sharply down on the head of the key with his thumb, breaking it off just inside the lock. The key wasn’t coming out absent special tools and a locksmith. Then he allowed himself a quick look around the compartment. A moment ago he thought that he was about to kill his ship, but he was wrong.
Without men to give her life, the Cumberland was already dead.
Their absence brought the memory of his crew to him, suddenly and vividly.
God, I’m proud of these men.
Suddenly he allowed himself a flicker of a smile as he took a few steps over to the Operations console, quickly called up a control interface, and punched in two commands.
He took a deep breath, stood up straight, and pulled his shoulders back. He had come on board this ship with his head held high, and by God, he was going to leave the same way.
“Levy, you about done?”
“Closing out the sequence now, Skipper. There. The deed is done.”
“Then let’s get to the assault shuttle and see if we can save our asses to fight another day.”
“I’m all in favor of that, sir.”
Without a backward glance, Max strode out of CIC with Levy at his heels. The two men jogged through the empty corridors, feeling jolt after jolt under their feet as escape pods launched. They reached the hangar deck in under two minutes and jumped into the crowded assault shuttle. Max noted that Dr. Sahin was sitting in one of the seats near the front. He turned to DeCosta. “XO, status of the evacuation.”
“Of the 182 souls on board at the beginning of watch, twenty-five are confirmed dead, leaving 157 to be evacuated. All 157 are now confirmed on board escape pods, which are confirmed as launched; the Clover microfreighter, which launched three minutes ago; or this shuttle. I might add that the compliment on board the shuttle includes one enormous, overweight black feline.”
“Outstanding. Mr. Mori, get us out of here. Take up a position 1348 kilometers away from the destroyer’s present position.” Max couldn’t bring himself to say Cumberland. “Directly away from the freighter. XO, signal the pods and the microfreighter to form up around us, standard evac formation.”
Mori keyed the controls that opened the bay in which the assault shuttle was stored and nudged the drive to take it out. Out of habit, he keyed the commands to close the bay doors behind him, knowing that it didn’t matter.
“Captain,” the doctor said hesitantly, “I hate to say anything, but in a few minutes when that ammunition ship carrier freighter vessel ship out there gets its drive running, isn’t it going to come over here and blast this shuttle and all those little escape pots to tiny bits?”
Escape pots?
“It would, Doctor, if we did nothing, which is not the plan. We’ll do something. In fact, this is as good a time as any to start doing something.” Max turned to Levy. “Ensign, you know what I need.”
“Aye, sir.” Levy got up from his seat and went to one of the equipment bays, retrieving an ordinary-looking carry-and-stow box, which he handed to Max. Max opened the box and pulled out another box, this one apparently some kind of piece of equipment wrapped in translucent plastic. He pulled out his utility knife, cut the plastic open, and removed the box, revealing some sort of rudimentary control panel.
“Mr. Mori, kindly bring the ship around so that the destroyer and the enemy are visible in the forward window.”
As the destroyer came into view through the window, DeCosta took in a quick breath. A few of the men who had been looking in the right direction nudged their neighbors and pointed. A low murmur of approval ran through the shuttle.
Max turned to Sahin before the latter could ask. “There’s no need to be inconspicuous now. So I turned on all her running lights and illuminated her battle stars and her ‘E’ for ‘Excellence,’ which the admiral awarded. I want her to go down with her colors flying.”
Max heard a few murmurs of “damn straight” and “you’re goddamn right.”
With a courteous gesture, Max indicated to DeCosta that he needed to sit in the copilot’s seat, which the XO promptly yielded. Max sat down and hit a few keys, causing the panel to light up. He hit a few more keys and got a green light to blink three times.
“What is that?” Sahin asked while standing over Max’s shoulder.
“Remote control for the ship,” Max answered.
“That’s insane,” Sahin blurted. “If the ship can be controlled remotely, what’s to keep an enemy from doing it?”
“It doesn’t work unless the receiver unit is first manually enabled with a physical key, a thumbprint, and a security code input from CIC or Main Engineering, the most securely guarded compartments on the ship.”
“Oh. Never mind. Proceed.”
“Thank you.” Max adopted a formal but quiet tone, almost as though he were uttering a solemn benediction. Although his voice was low, Max knew that he could be heard throughout the shuttle. “The Union Space Ship Cumberland, Registry Number DPA-0004, has one last duty to perform for her crew and her country.”
Max manipulated some controls and squinted at a tiny display at the top of the unit. “I’m having the computer reorient the ship so that it is pointed at the enemy, which it is doing. There. That’s done. Now I’m keying the restart sequence for the fusion reactor. A cold start would take about five minutes, but since the British have brought the start sequence right up to the final initiation, we will need less than a minute.”
Everyone in the assault shuttle sat still and silent while the time passed. Except Clouseau, who pranced up to the copilot’s station and laid down with his legs in the air and his head resting on Max’s foot. His purring could be heard through most of the shuttle. What could have been a very, very long minute passed more easily.
“Okay, reactor’s running. Now let’s kick in the drive.”
The destroyer’s main sublight drive came online. The damaged systems were able to provide only about 8 percent thrust, but it was enough. Aided by small corrections from computer guidance, the Cumberland gradually accelerated straight toward the Krag vessel. The Krag, seeing their doom coming, tried to evade on maneuvering thrusters. The destroyer’s computer compensated easily for the feeble acceleration thus imparted. Less than a minute and a half after Max had put the Cumberland into motion, it rammed the Krag freighter at a relatively sedate 1959 kilometers per hour.
Bram was disappointed at the collision, as he was expecting something more spectacular. He could see that the enemy ship was damaged, but that its cargo—which was likely a real cargo of real munitions bound for the real front—was mostly intact. Just as he was about to point out this fact to Max, he saw Levy’s lips moving. It took him a second to figure out what the young man was saying. He was counting. In Hebrew. Backward.
“Shalosh. Schtayim. Achat. Now.”
At that moment the cabin of the shuttle was flooded with a blue-white glare that seemed to come from every direction—from the bulkheads, the seats, the control panels, and most powerfully, through the window. Levy had manually overridden the safety protocols inside two Talon missiles, the ones that prevented the warheads from detonating unless the missiles were actually launched, and programmed them to detonate six seconds after the destroyer hit the enemy ship. Two warheads, each packing 150 kilotons, went off simultaneously. The fireball completely encompassed the freighter. One moment it existed. The next, it did not.
The glare of the thermonuclear explosion slowly dimmed. In less than a minute, it was gone, leaving only the blackness of space and its scattering of distant stars.
There was no trace of the Cumberland.
The silence in the shuttle was deadly.
“She was a good ship,” Finnegan said from the back of the shuttle. His voice was low, but it still carried.
“Aye,” murmured many voices, like the call and response of a liturgy.
“It was only near the end that we were worthy of her,” said Sanders.
“Aye,” they said again.
“She died to save us all,” said Greenlee.
“Aye,” was the response.
The men fell silent. This silence, however, was not deadly. The men were silent, not because they were too downhearted to speak. It was simply that there was nothing else to say.
Dr. Sahin, who had left his former seat to position himself in a squatting position between Mori and Max, looked up at his skipper. “Max,” he said softly, “our ship is gone, and we’re dozens of light-years behind enemy lines with practically the whole Krag navy between us and Union space. Presumably, as is your wont, you have some convoluted, improbably dangerous, and laughably unorthodox plan to extricate us from this precarious predicament and allow us to fight another day to save the Union from defeat at the hands of its implacable enemies.”
“I’m afraid not,” Max said. “In fact, I don’t know what I’m
going to do.” Max had been looking out the window. Now he turned to meet Bram’s eyes. “But I can tell you absolutely that there’s one thing we’re not going to do, my friend.”
“What, my friend, is that?”
“Give up. This crew and I are never giving up.”
He looked back at the stars.
“Never.”
* * *
GLOSSARY AND GUIDE TO ABBREVIATIONS
* * *
Excerpted from The USS Cumberland Midshipmen’s Introduction to Naval Terminology and to Expressions Used by Ship’s Senior Officers, Ship’s database article by Menachem Levy, ENSN USN, April 2315.
4-hydroxycoumarin: A class of organic compounds, many of which are powerful vitamin K antagonists, some of which are used as anticoagulant medications. One chemical in this class, warfarin, is used not only as a pharmaceutical but also as a primary ingredient in rat and mouse poison.
Alphacen: Alpha Centauri, as viewed from Earth, the brightest star in the constellation Centaurus (the Centaur), a trinary star system and the star system nearest to the Sol System. Primary Star, Alpha Centauri A, a type G2V main sequence star.
AU: Astronomical Unit. A unit of length or distance, defined as the mean distance between Earth and the Sun, most commonly used in measuring distances on an interplanetary rather than an interstellar scale because it yields manageable numbers for such distances. For example, Mercury is about .35 AU from the Sun, while Neptune is about 30 AU from the sun. One AU is equal to 149,597,870.7 kilometers or 92,955,807.3 miles.
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