"Aye, sir," Celesta said, still chastising and directing the hapless tactical officer.
"Commander Wright, relieve your tactical officer and call someone up who is more familiar with the station," Jackson said. He was becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation and Tactical wasn't a station he wanted such an amateur at. He knew the station was normally manned with a "space filler" since the tactical officer was rarely called upon to do anything but assist the other stations, so he had no plans to reprimand his operator. The other spacers in that section would most likely take care of that for him.
While the shamefaced junior officer slunk off the bridge, Celesta slid into the seat and began bringing the tactical array online while they waited for an actual tactical officer from the bullpen. Despite the higher power, physics were physics and they would not have any new data on the system for several hours. The radio waves from the radars would take hours to reach the far side of the system, bounce back to be collected by the receiver, and interpreted by the computer so that it could be displayed on the bridge.
"Let's all take a deep breath and relax, everyone," Jackson said. "We're just going to sit here at the edge of the system and gather as much data as we can before charging in blind. I don't want any rumors or jumping to conclusions. Commander Wright, you have the bridge. Maintain normal watch intervals."
Jackson refilled his coffee mug and then rode the lifts down to the lower decks. Celesta was more than capable of monitoring things on the bridge and he wanted to get a firsthand account from the other departments, specifically Communications and Engineering.
"Captain on deck!" a spacer second class yelled as soon as Jackson entered the hatch to the Com section.
"As you were," he said automatically. "Is Lieutenant Yu in the shop?"
"No, sir," the spacer said. "He's with Specialist Harper in the forward avionics bays. He said he wanted to personally inspect all the transmission lines for the primary com array."
"Good man," Jackson said, looking around the com shop area. It was mildly cluttered, but it seemed to be the result of recent, hectic activity during the recent crisis so he ignored it. "I'll go forward and check in with him myself. Carry on."
The trip forward was slow going. Most of the crew wasn't used to seeing him patrolling the lower decks unattended and unannounced so they were unsure what to do. Some snapped to attention, others froze like prey animals, and more still dove through any open hatch to escape. The Raptor-class ship had two main arteries, one port, the other starboard, that gave the crew access fore and aft. The starboard corridor was for moving forward, the port corridor was for moving aft. The need for this distinction became apparent during drills, ports of call in which the crew was allowed to disembark, or when moving heavy equipment around inside the ship.
He could see he needed to have Commander Wright crack down on general cleanliness of the ship, but he had to admit it didn't look as bad as it had in the past when Stevenson would swear he was keeping up on it and the backshops looked like refuse storage. The com shop was located on deck four directly under the superstructure, so it was in the aft half of the ship. Most of the equipment for the primary communications system was located in the forwardmost avionics bay to keep the transmission lines as short as possible. There was so much high-energy equipment towards the prow that most of the forward section of the ship was unmanned due to health hazards.
"Lieutenant Yu," Jackson said as he stepped through the small hatch into the avionics bay. "What can you tell me?"
"The com array is fully functional, Captain," Yu said. He was a short, lean man of obvious Chinese descent. "As far as we've been able to tell, it's never been inactive since we transitioned back to real space. I wish I had a better answer for you."
"It's hardly your fault," Jackson said. "We'll be sitting here for another couple of hours at least. Let me know if anything turns up."
"Of course, Captain," Yu said, turning back to the panel he'd been half inside of when Jackson had walked in.
When he walked out of the avionics bay Jackson nearly collided with a flush-faced master chief petty officer who looked like he'd run the entire length of the access tube.
"Chief Kazenski," Jackson said. "Fancy meeting you here." Kazenski was the senior enlisted spacer on the Blue Jacket and was supposed to serve as a conduit between Jackson and the enlisted ranks.
"Captain, I would have appreciated a heads up before you came down and started inspecting the shops," Kazenski said, barely able to hide his dislike for his captain while he still gasped for air.
"I'll bet you would," Jackson said, eyeing the disheveled chief with thinly veiled disgust. "Unfortunately, time was short in our current crisis and I had neither the time nor inclination to hunt you down."
"My comlink is active," Kazenski insisted. "If you're going to be coming down to the lower decks and harassing—"
"This is my ship, Kazenski, and I'll damn well go anywhere I please whenever it pleases me," Jackson said, looking around before continuing. "Your connected family has protected you from actually performing your job function up to now, but things are always fluid in Starfleet and they just changed again."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that starting now if I don't see you in a clean uniform, at your post, and clear headed, I will put you in the brig for the remainder of this cruise," Jackson said, his face inching closer to Kazenski's. "You've been useless ballast on this vessel for two years. That stops today." The chief's eyes were slowly widening as the captain dressed him down.
"Have you lost your mind?" he asked incredulously.
"You're wasting time, Chief," Jackson said. "You don't have much time to get yourself cleaned up and on the command deck."
He turned and strode away from the gaping Kazenski, his hands still clenched into fists. Ever since the lazy slug had been dumped on his ship he'd been wanting to do that, but the man's family connections made it impossible. His father, Senator Walter Kazenski, Sr., was a powerful, connected politician who could make life miserable for a lowly starship captain with a single message to CENTCOM. The younger Kazenski had been put in Black Fleet as a long-term storage solution for a son that was mostly an embarrassment to an ambitious father.
But now Jackson had nothing to lose. As long as everything he did was in accordance to Fleet policy and procedure, the slovenly chief could lodge any complaints he wanted and it wouldn't affect his career whatsoever. As he walked along the corridor he realized Admiral Winters had given him a great gift. For at least one cruise, he could run his ship how he saw fit without fear of damaging his career by ruffling the wrong political feathers.
****
"This makes even less sense than the nav radar picture did," Jackson said as he paced in front of the main display. "Xi'an had two heavy construction platforms. I'm not seeing enough debris tonnage to account for even one of them, let alone every other satellite and ship that would have been in orbit."
"Two separate computers have compiled the data, so this is accurate," Celesta said, standing beside him. "Still no response to our hails, automated or otherwise."
"OPS, send the debris field data to Nav," Jackson said, walking back to his seat. "Nav, plot us a safe course down the well and put us in orbit over Xi'an. We need to find out what the hell has happened here."
"Aye, sir," the specialist at the nav station reported. "Course plotted and entered. Helm is clear to engage at will."
"Very well," Jackson said. "Helm, ahead one-half and coordinate with OPS and Tactical to make sure the debris doesn't drift onto our course."
"Ahead one-half, aye," the helmsman said, pushing the throttles up to fifty percent, telling the computers to engage the mains at half power. The telltale rumble and surge of inertia told Jackson they were on their way. He still held out the irrational hope that somehow this was all a series of bizarre errors within his own equipment, but he knew that was the least likely scenario.
"We have a flight time of over thirty hours until we re
ach Xi'an," Jackson told Celesta. "Rotate the watches as you see fit, but I want the first watch bridge crew on duty as we make our approach to the planet. Find an actual tactical officer while you're at it. Unfortunately we only have two onboard. Also, make sure Master Chief Kazenski is presentable and on duty. If he fails to report, notify me immediately." Celesta had to look up Kazenski to even see what position he held on the ship. When she realized he'd been missing the entire time they'd been underway, her eyes widened a bit.
"It's complicated," Jacksons said simply. "Just know that things have changed a bit since we departed Jericho Station. You have free reign to make sure everyone is doing their jobs. I'm going to take the first down time. Feel free to have Ensign Davis take the watch if you need to leave the bridge."
"Yes, sir," she said, sliding into his seat as he moved to leave the bridge. Once he had gone, she pulled up Chief Kazenski's personnel record and began reading. After ten minutes she wondered how many more cases like him were roaming around the ship and, if so, did she really want to know?
****
Jackson sat down at his desk and began pulling up any information on Xi'an the servers had that might begin to explain what had happened to make the system appear deserted. He also requested the latest com logs from the planet's com drone platform, a massive, automated construct that was now apparently gone.
The information was sparse. Xi'an was a fairly unimportant world in the AU save for the fact that it had a naturally stable environment that could support humans. In recent years they had begun to move some ship construction projects to the planet to encourage their citizens to move to the remote world and to take advantage of the slightly lower gravity. There wasn't any sort of political discord as the planet had less than two million people total and most of them were temporary workers setting up the shipbuilding facilities.
The com logs were equally unhelpful as the last drone from the planet had been captured and downloaded only a week ago. Nothing in the package it carried would indicate the planet was suffering some sort of calamity. As best as he could tell, everything on Xi'an was normal as of eight days ago.
On a whim he pulled up a local area star chart and began looking at the corridor that ran between the Asianic Union and the Warsaw Alliance. There was certainly no love lost between the two enclaves, but an overt and unprovoked act of war seemed almost unthinkable. He saw that Xi'an was close to the accepted border, but still well within AU space. Besides, after centuries of relative peace would the Warsaw Alliance really launch such a devastating attack without even approaching the Confederate Senate first?
Following that line of thought, he pulled up the nearest Alliance planet: Oplotom. Like most Alliance worlds, this one showed evidence of heavy industrialization and resource mining. The CIS synopsis he had on Oplotom said that it was a world that developed most of the weaponry for the Eight Fleet and, more disturbingly, weapons for another fleet of warships that the Alliance had begun to field with no affiliation to the Confederacy or any ties to CENTCOM's command structure. Many of the enclaves had small defense forces for internal security, but the class of ships coming out of the Alliance shipyards would give anyone pause. What in the hell were they arming up for?
Jackson had stretched out on the couch in his office with the intent of only resting his eyes for a few minutes, but the stress of the day caught up with him and the next thing he knew his comlink was chirping to let him know he would be needed back on the bridge in an hour. He stood up with a groan, irritated at himself for falling asleep for hours when the ship was in potentially hostile space. Straightening his uniform, he hustled down to his quarters to get cleaned up and change uniforms so he could make it to the officer's mess before being stuck on the bridge for what would likely be a very long watch.
****
It was six hours after Jackson walked onto the bridge when they began to get their first view of Xi'an on the long-range optics. Unfortunately they couldn't garner any real details from that distance. There looked to be increased cloud cover, but nothing wildly out of place.
"We're close enough that preliminary sensor sweeps are indicating that the atmosphere is ten degrees above normal on average," Ensign Davis said. "The surface temperature appears to be more uniform than normal, even at the polar regions."
"Whatever it is that’s creating that cloud cover could explain that," Jackson said. "Our sensors can't see past that down to the surface. Tactical, begin another series of high-res sweeps. Map out the debris field and then start trying to figure out what it's all from."
"Aye, sir."
"We'll be entering our first transfer orbit in three hours," Celesta said. "Decel burn will begin in ten minutes."
"Understood," Jackson said. "Ensign Davis, you have ten minutes to finish collecting thermal data before the mains reverse thrust and distort your optics."
"Yes, sir," Davis said, seemingly unconcerned.
Each MPD nacelle actually housed two engines, a forward and reverse thrust motor capable of equal amounts of power. While most starships simply spun around and used their aft-mounted main engines to decelerate, a warship had to be able to keep her sensors and weapons on a target no matter their acceleration profile. To accomplish this the designers gave the Raptor-class four engines that could direct their thrust fore or aft, the plasma being routed to whichever magnetic constrictor and nozzle that was needed to provide power. One drawback was that when slowing down to make orbit the hot exhaust coming forward from the mains could distort the thermal sensors on the nose if the engines were run up past thirty percent power. Anything above eighty percent would completely wash them out.
"Ten seconds to decel burn," Celesta called over the shipwide intercom. "All crew brace for reverse thrust." Shortly afterwards the rumble of the mains died away for a second before building again, increasing in pitch and intensity as the massive engines began to slow the Blue Jacket's descent towards Xi'an. The sensation of being thrown forward was fleeting as the gravimetric generator adjusted to compensate.
They had now gotten close enough to the planet to see that the cloud coverage was actually made of particulate matter, not water droplets. Jackson's mouth formed a thin line as he considered the possibilities. Something had either exploded on the surface with tremendous force, or something had struck the planet from orbit. As he looked through the revised data from Tactical he could almost postulate that maybe both the orbital construction platforms had fallen to the surface simultaneously, but even that astronomically unlikely event didn't explain the disappearance of all the other orbital constructs nor the com drone platform deeper into the system.
"Standard orbital insertion," Jackson ordered. "The debris appears to be sparse enough that we shouldn't have any issues. I want us at an altitude of six hundred and thirty kilometers with an orbital inclination of forty-six degrees. Nav, get the necessary adjustments to the helm."
"Aye, sir."
"OPS, that's going to give us a full orbit approximately every two hours," Jackson said. "I want to be recording the entire time, full spectrum."
"We're still not receiving any transmissions from the surface and we're not detecting any power sources," Celesta said quietly. "Could this possibly have been a natural disaster?"
"No," Jackson said mostly to himself, ignoring the looks from his crew. "Xi'an was attacked. I'm certain of it."
"Attacked? By whom?" Celesta asked. Jackson ignored her and continued looking at the main display as the planet began to grow in size and detail and the horror of the situation began to sink in.
"Sergeant!" he barked without warning. "Lock down the bridge! Ensign Davis, cut all telemetry and sensor data streams to the lower decks, all data comes here and only here. I want all the servers locked out and local terminals disabled in the data center. Coms, disconnect all internal links to the bridge and deactivate all bridge personnel comlinks."
"Captain?" Celesta said, seemingly in shock as the heavy blast doors to the bridge entrance slammed shut.
<
br /> "We are on lockdown until further notice," Jackson said to his stunned crew.
Chapter 8
"Xi'an had four major cities in the northern hemisphere and dozens of smaller support settlements in the south tied to their new manufacturing and production facilities," Ensign Davis said, reading off her screen after the Blue Jacket had completed her second orbit.
"Had?" Jackson asked.
"Yes, Captain," Davis said, swallowing hard. "They're gone. There's no trace of them left on the surface."
"That's impossible," Chief Kazenski scoffed. Jackson turned to glare at him, but had to admit he agreed with the man.
"One would think so, Chief," Davis said, still pale and her voice unsteady. "But the images we've captured from orbit don't lie. There is no trace that this planet was ever inhabited."
"Put the images up on the main display," Jackson said, climbing out of his chair and walking towards the front of the bridge. "See here, and here," he said, pointing to two separate images. "Look at the scarring on the surface. This isn't consistent with any type of known weapon. It's as if someone simply scraped the cities from the crust."
"Radiation levels in the atmosphere are normal," Davis said. "We're unable to determine if a biological agent was used from this altitude, but we can say with certainty that nukes weren't the cause of the damage."
"Recommendations?" Jackson asked.
"Send a drone down to the surface," Celesta said without hesitation. "We're carrying ten fully equipped recon drones capable of dropping into the atmosphere from orbit. I think we should collect as much data as we can while we're here."
"Agreed," Jackson said. "OPS, coordinate with Commander Juarez and prepare two recon drones for immediate deployment. Tell him I want them loaded with a full sensor suite. We're still on lockdown protocol. The drone data stream will be encrypted and routed directly to the bridge. We'll bring up additional analysts as we need them. This is a standing order until further notice."
Black Fleet Trilogy 1: Warship Page 8