"How are you feeling?"
"Good, Captain," Daya Singh said. "They're just keeping me here as a precaution. I heard you lost one of my engines?"
"I'll get you a new one," Jackson promised.
"So what's the plan?" Singh asked, trying to prop himself up.
"Right now we're simply trying to staunch the bleeding," Jackson admitted. "We're beaten up, missing an engine, and streaming atmosphere from about a hundred places. Currently we should be back on course for Podere to check on the population there."
"Starships are always leaking atmosphere," Daya said, waving him off. "That's why we carry so much oxygen and nitrogen on every cruise to replace it. I heard a rumor that ship may have jumped to FTL heading for another Alliance planet."
"How the hell are you hearing all these rumors?" Jackson asked, only half-joking.
"I still have my comlink," Daya said. "You gave me access to the ship's log last year and I've been reading the entries. That's not the point. What are we going to do about that ship going after another human planet?"
"I don't know what we can do at this point," Jackson said, spreading his hands helplessly.
"The warp drive is still functional, isn't it?" Owens said, speaking up for the first time.
"I'm under the assumption it is," Jackson said.
"Then I think you know what has to be done," Singh said. "We need to loop back around and hit the Nuovo Patria jump point and try to get there before this thing does."
"So you two called me in here for a pep talk and to encourage me to continue on with this suicide mission?" Jackson said, rising from the seat. "I'll keep what you've said in mind. When we pass by Podere and are lined up for a run, assuming the Blue Jacket can even achieve transition velocity at this point, I'll make my decision." He nodded to them both and walked out of Sick Bay.
As he walked down the corridors, his utilities caked with dried blood, he passed a score of crewman hustling about their duties. Each gave him a respectful nod as they rushed off to perform some task to keep the destroyer flying. He didn't see panic or sullenness. He didn't even really see much fear. If he had to put a name on it he would have to say the faces of his crew were set with a grim determination as he passed them.
He felt his resolve begin to harden as he watched them, nodding back to each in turn but offering no empty words of encouragement. They didn't need it. They may have started this cruise as a collection of castaways that were just waiting out their time or looking for the easy road, but now they were the most battle-hardened crew in the Fleet. A cynic would point out that fact was true when the first shots were fired in anger, but Jackson could see the truth of it while walking through the lower decks. Despite the mutiny and the horrific damage the Blue Jacket had suffered, the crew would follow him no matter what he decided. As the lift doors closed to whisk him back up to the bridge he knew exactly what it was he had to do.
Chapter 18
"OPS, give me a status on the warp drive," Jackson said as he strode onto the bridge.
"Ordering a diagnostic on the drive components now," Davis said, yawning hugely. "But I can say for certain the starboard hatches are welded shut over the emitters. Also, Commander Juarez confirms all our remaining com drones are damaged beyond repair."
"Get Engineering to put a detail on it," Jackson said, ignoring the news about the drones. "It doesn't have to be pretty, just cut the damn hatches off and jettison them if they have to. Just free up the emitters."
"Yes, sir."
"The warp drive, sir?" Celesta said. "Are we taking a trip to Nuovo Patria?"
"We are," Jackson said.
"It would probably help if you addressed the crew now," she said.
"I was thinking the same thing, Commander."
****
"Hello." Captain Wolfe's face appeared on every non-essential monitor shipwide, prompting everyone to pause what they were doing and pay attention.
"As you all are well aware, we have been in a prolonged and costly battle with an unknown alien ship that has invaded the Terran Confederacy, leaving a path of unimaginable destruction through the Asianic Union and into the Warsaw Alliance.
"We've lost crewmates along the way. Friends. The Blue Jacket has been battered and is limping across the Podere system now, barely able to defend herself. The logical thing to do would be to make orbit over Podere and wait for help, or possibly push on to Haven ourselves, but there's a problem with that. The enemy ship has left the system on a course that will almost certainly take it to Nuovo Patria, an Alliance planet with over thirty million people living on it. It might run into the Eighth Fleet there, it might not, and we have no way of warning them what's coming.
"Things have not gone our way in this battle. We've had to fight outdated systems, fight poorly maintained weaponry, and even fight ourselves. But I've watched this crew rise to the occasion in spite of all that. I've watched spacers swallow their fear and do their duty in the face of an implacable and terrifying enemy. I have no right to ask any more from you than what you've already given. But I'm not asking. The people of Nuovo Patria are asking. The people of Podere are screaming for justice as they pick through the ruins, and the memories of Xi'an and Oplotom are demanding vengeance.
"It doesn't matter that we've had more than two centuries without armed conflict. It doesn't matter that most of you joined with no expectation or desire to see combat. Despite all of that ... this is still a warship, a ship of the line, and the fight has been brought to us. We will not shrink from our duty and we will not fail in our mission." His voice had been rising as he spoke, and every officer, every enlisted spacer could feel the will of their captain emanating from the monitors and speakers.
"We will be coming around for a pass of Podere to gain velocity for a warp transition," Jackson said, calming down as he began the details portion of his briefing. "We'll hit the Nuovo Patria jump point and hopefully get there in time to stop the enemy. We've already done significant damage and I'm fully confident we can disable or destroy it during the next engagement. Listen to your officers. Get the ship, and yourselves, ready to finish this mission. Your names will be talked about for generations ... the crew of the TCS Blue Jacket, the destroyer that stood alone against an alien juggernaut. Let's get to it. CO, out."
****
"How was that?" Jackson asked after the camera light winked off.
"Very good, sir," Celesta said. "It set the right tone, I think."
"We'll see," he groused. "If they storm the bridge again we'll know it wasn't all that inspirational."
"Coms has been pulling in messages from Podere," she said, steering the conversation into a different direction. "Three cities are a total loss, but they've gotten some good data on what it was that turned all those other cities into the slicks we found on Xi'an."
"That's something I suppose. That was beyond luck that the aliens pulled their ground troops before breaking orbit. We have nothing onboard to try and rout out an enemy on the surface, and Podere has no standing army."
"Luck had to break our way sometime," she shrugged. "Do you want to respond to Podere?"
"No," Jackson said after a moment. "We've got enough problems as it is without trying to deflect some regional governor's plea for aid. If they have a smart one he'll invoke a little know treaty clause that would more or less force us to stay and help out."
"I think we're well beyond playing by the rules at this point," she reminded him.
"True," he conceded. "Even if the Blue Jacket survives the two of us are screwed."
"That's the way I see it as well."
"Go get some sleep, Commander," Jackson said. "You can relieve me in four and then we'll both be fresh for the transition. After that we have a fifty-two-hour warp flight, assuming the drive and powerplant can sustain our highest velocity."
****
"The crews are almost done cutting the hatches off the starboard drive emitters," Singh said, slowly stirring his tea. "The emitters themselves along with t
he deployment arms look completely undamaged. I had been worried that heat great enough to liquefy our hull armor would have fused the joints on the arms, but we appear to be in business."
"How much longer?" Jackson asked, his eyes feeling gritty from being up so long. He was on the bridge by himself until Celesta and Barrett came back on duty. He had ordered Davis to her quarters despite her strident protests that she was fine. With Peters in the brig she had been on shift for nearly thirty-six hours.
"A few hours," Singh shrugged. "We're not even near the jump point yet. What's the hurry?"
"I can't begin to accelerate to transition velocity until they're off the hull," Jackson said.
"Why are you accelerating so soon?"
"We're missing an engine, in case you forgot," Jackson said, slightly exasperated.
"Three main engines is more than enough," Singh said, still unconcerned. "Even if another drops off we have the auxiliary boosters."
"I'm not sure I trust a fifty-year-old rocket booster to fire when I need it," Jackson said, his vision beginning to blur from the fatigue. "How shorthanded are you after we rounded up that mutiny?"
"Unfortunately there were a lot of my people involved," Singh said, wincing as he did. "That doesn't say much for my ability as a Starfleet officer I'm afraid. You really shot Chief Cullen in the head with that 1911?"
"Yes," Jackson said. "That's not something I'm especially proud of, but I'd have been less proud to have millions die because I let six traitors bludgeon me to death in the corridor."
"True," Singh said. "Well ... as much as I'd love to keep you company I'm afraid this is where I must leave you. I'd like to at least get a few hours of sleep before we see if the warp drive will transition us or shred the ship to individual molecules."
"I'm not really sure which is the worse option there."
"Goodnight, Jack."
"Sleep well, Daya."
****
"Here goes nothing," Jackson said, settling into his seat and feeling immensely better after a shower and a hot meal despite only getting a couple hours of sleep. As Singh had said, the Blue Jacket easily surged to transition velocity on her three remaining engines. The warp emitters had successfully deployed and were beginning to glow a bright blue, going on pure white.
"Five seconds to transition!" the chief at Nav said far more loudly than necessary. Jackson watched as the distortion ring began to form around the front of the ship and a few seconds later he felt the violent buffeting as the Blue Jacket transitioned out of the Podere system.
"We're on our way, everyone," Jackson said, standing up. "Continue what repairs you can while we're at warp. XO, let the department heads know that I favor resting the crew over any heavy maintenance or repairs they may want to make. I'd like to be on normal watches by the time we hit Nuovo Patria."
"I'll let them know, Captain," Celesta said.
"Captain, I don't have a relief watch anymore," Lieutenant Davis said.
"You and Lieutenant Barrett will alternate watches with each other until we're ready to transition back into real-space," Jackson said. "When we arrive I obviously need you both on duty. You have first watch, Davis. Barrett, take a walk with me. XO, you have the bridge."
Lieutenant Barrett rose out of his seat with a concerned look on his face and hustled off the bridge to catch up with the captain.
"Yes, sir?" he said, falling in beside Jackson.
"I just wanted you to know that your performance after our last talk has been exceptional," Jackson said. "I held off entering the previous incident into your record since you accepted full responsibility, and I figured that alone earned you a shot to prove me wrong. You've done that and then some." He stopped in the hallway and held out his hand to the young lieutenant. Barrett shook it with a bit of a shocked look on his face.
"I've never been so happy to be wrong about a junior officer," Jackson said. "If we make it through this I'll be putting you in for a promotion."
"Thank you, sir," Barrett said. "When this is over, I hope I have the opportunity to continue to serve under you."
"I would like nothing more myself, Lieutenant," Jackson said, keeping his face neutral. "Carry on."
Chapter 19
"... the devastation is simply indescribable. We have no landing craft aboard so we have no way to verify that there are no survivors, but the damage looks absolute. As of right now I'm declaring Xi'an a complete loss. There are no signs of any other ship in the area and the debris in orbit is inconsistent with a Raptor-class destroyer. We will continue our survey before moving on to Oplotom. We are using our only com drone to send this message so we will be out of contact until we reach a world with a drone platform still intact. Captain Jegg of the TCS Constantine, out."
The ball of ice that had been forming in Admiral Alyson Winters' stomach did a slow roll as the images from the cutter, Constantine, scrolled across her monitor after the captain had signed off his communiqué. With shaking hands she pulled up the operational reports filed by the Blue Jacket over a week ago and compared the images.
Unsurprisingly, they were an exact match. The only difference was that Captain Wolfe had been much, much more thorough in his investigation than Captain Jegg had been. The bile rose in her throat and she felt her temples throb with the fast onset of a tension headache. She would like to say it was because of the magnitude of the tragedy she was looking at, but that would mostly be a lie.
She was fucked. Truly and properly fucked.
So confident that Wolfe had either gone completely off the reservation and lost his mind, or was playing some sort of bizarre game, she hadn't even thought to look more carefully through the Blue Jacket's reports before filing them away. She'd saved them in a hidden file on her personal computer, relishing the fact that the damning documents would be all she'd need to make sure the disgusting Earther would never step foot on a starship again and would likely be sent back to Earth with a no-travel restriction hanging around his neck.
Now ... Now it looked like she would be the one answering some uncomfortable questions as evidence of an attack on no less than two Terran planets had been covered up by her hold order on any communications from the destroyer. Now that the Constantine had verified that something had likely attacked and wiped out Xi'an there would be no way to keep a lid on it since the Senate Intelligence Committee was waiting on word from the frontier regarding rumors of unrest along the AU/Alliance corridor.
But ... what were the odds Wolfe would emerge victorious against such an overmatched opponent? She scrolled through the reports and saw how much damage the old Raptor-class ship had taken in a single pass against the alien ship. The damn fool appeared to be pursuing it across the Alliance. In fact, she hadn't heard from the ship for nearly five days. It was possible, even likely, that the Blue Jacket was nothing but wreckage by now.
She closed all of Wolfe's reports, purged the data from her machine, and then quickly went into the data archives and removed all the exceptions she had put in when the Blue Jacket had departed. Winters had been a data clerk herself, never having actually left Haven her entire career. She'd never commanded a starship nor had she served as an actual mission analyst, but she did know exactly how to retrace her footsteps and eliminate any evidence she'd ever been in there. In fact, she was accessing the system using generic administrative credentials that would be difficult to trace. When everything came to light after the Constantine returned it would simply look like Wolfe had neglected to file regular operational reports. Given the man's past, it wouldn't be much of a stretch for an inquiry board to conclude it had been negligence on his part.
****
Jackson walked the corridors of the Blue Jacket, stopping to talk to crew or look in on a department that seemed to be having a particularly rough time under the circumstances. Even though the mutiny had been quashed he still felt a bit exposed, even with the Marine sentry tailing along behind him. He was still carrying the .45 under his utility top since the weapon's thin profile was
easily concealable. The modern sidearm in his office was a bit more unwieldy, would have to be worn in an external holster, and could be disabled in the same way he'd deactivated the weapons the mutineers had been using.
From what he could see, the ship was in bad shape. The fact she was still flying and had a little bit of fight left in her was a testament to the designers at the Sierra Shipyards and the builders who'd put her together. They were less than a day from arriving in the Nuovo Patria system and he knew that if they met the alien again there it would be the last time, one way or another. The destroyer simply couldn't survive another beating, and if their high-explosive shells failed to disable or destroy the enemy they were out of ammunition anyway.
"So the port-side lasers are completely inoperable?" he asked as he walked alongside Daya Singh. They were in a large chamber that housed reactor three while the chief engineer inspected some maintenance that had been done to the fuel system.
"Total loss," Singh confirmed. "At least not without being in a shipyard with months of down time."
"That's unfortunate."
"We were actually lucky that when the power trunk exploded it didn't cause serious damage to the MUX and the subsystems located in that area," Singh shrugged. "As it is we don't even have enough raw material to try and effect repairs on the system, and even if we did there's no guarantee it wouldn't just happen again."
"Do we know what caused it?" Jackson asked.
"Design flaw," Singh said confidently. "For the laser projectors on our flanks the power is distributed in such a way that if the main feed breaks it kills power to the entire side. My guess is that, other than in testing, the system has never been up past ten percent capacity for the entire life of the ship."
"So we're down to a single salvo with the mag-cannons," Jackson said, shaking his head. "Not a scenario I had envisioned when I thought about deep space battles."
Black Fleet Trilogy 1: Warship Page 19