by Lewis Dually
“Stop! Hold still a minute.” Then he grabbed me by the belt and pulled up the back of my shirt. “Hand me that tape.” He called to his nurse.
I twisted trying to see what he was doing but he pushed me back around.
“Hold still. You got something stuck in your back here.”
Then I felt a sharp twinge of pain in my right side just under my shoulder blade as Hirsch proclaimed, “Got it. Did you lose something?”
Turning I saw Hirsch holding the bloody stump of my ink pen.
“You’ll be alright. It went in at an angle. Just under the skin.” He slapped a piece of tape on the wound as he said’ “We may put a stitch in it later but you’re fine right now. Now go get me some power.”
“Come on Sprite, we got work to do.” We left sick bay and headed for engineering. Gale had been busy handing out coms badges and we were starting to get status reports from all sections. Finally the chief engineer came on the coms.
“Engineering here, do you have a copy skipper?”
“You got me. What’s our status?”
“We’re reloading the reactor cells with a fresh GUT charge Sir. Should take about forty minutes to set the mix but we have no battery power to operate the control panels for startup. Any suggestions?”
I thought for a second. I didn’t know where we were but I hadn’t seen any light coming in through the port windows so we were probably too far from the Sun for a solar charge and the replacement batteries would be dead.
“We’ll have to use a hand crank generator to power the console. We’re on our way down to give you a hand. Are there any casualties down there?”
“Yes Sir. Seaman Blair. I didn’t call sick bay because there was no use. We secured his body to the battery room bulk head for now.”
“Ok” I said. “We’ll take care of him after we get power restored. I’ll be there shortly.”
The thought of a dead sailor hanging from the battery room bulkhead sent shivers down my spine. Under normal circumstances that would be just down right wrong. But this wasn’t a normal circumstance. With no gravity and no light we couldn’t have a dead body floating around the ship and our current fight for survival didn’t allow time for niceties like respectful care of a dead comrade. I tried to bring Blair’s face to mind but simply could not pull up a mental image of the young spaceman. He was a new transfer that came on board while I was playing space trucker and I only saw him a few times after taking back command. Always in a crowd, he just seemed to blend in to the group. Now that I was aware of his death I gravely regretted not calling him into my office for a face to face. How could I write a condolence letter to the family of a man I simply did not know? There were three other new sailors on board and I made a mental note to have a one on one with each of them as soon as possible.
“I was starting to think we would get through this without any losses.” I said to Sprite.
Sprite was silent for a second and then said. “As hard as we got hit it’s a wonder we didn’t lose eight or ten. Just one is pretty lucky. What happened anyway?”
I had forgotten that Sprite wasn’t on the bridge when the Wade blew up so I explained our situation.
“The Wade started firing at us again and I lost my temper. I ordered the gunner to fire the railgun. One shot in her stern with an AP round. He hit her dead center between the thruster nozzles. It should have caused moderate damage but the whole tail end of the ship went off. I think we hit a hold full of compressed gas or oxygen maybe. Next thing I know her reactor is going critical and we jumped to escape damage but the EM pulse followed us through the warp bubble. Now we’re deaf, mute, blind and adrift. I don’t know where we are, where we’re going or how fast we’re getting there. It won’t matter much if we don’t get this reactor started and get some heat going. We’ll all freeze to death in about an hour.”
Sprite blew out a frosty line of breath in front of us. “You sure about that one hour calculation? Feels pretty cold in here to me. Why do you suppose the Wade fired on us?”
“I have no idea!”
We entered the engineering section and passed by the open hatch to the battery room. Looking through the hatch I caught site of Seaman Blair’s body strapped to the wall. The eerie green glow of a chemlight revealed a massive head wound and I could see why the Cob didn’t call for a corpsmen. Blair never knew what hit him. Maybe it was better that I didn’t know him. We moved on down the corridor to the reactor room where we got to work. In forty five minutes we were ready to start the reactor and Engineer Owens had brought out a generator rigged with a crank handle.
“I need three strong backs on this genny” He bellowed. “We got to maintain three thousand watts for one minute to get this beast operating.”
Sprite, Seaman Sails and I grabbed the crank handle and got ready as Owens flipped the react switches on the reactor control panel and bellowed. “Crank boys, crank for all your worth.”
And crank we did. Faster and faster the generator turned until it started to make a whining sound and the power meter began to climb.
Owens cheered us on as we cranked the genny. “Two thousand….twenty five hundred…. You’re getting there boys. Twenty eight….a little more…..three thousand! You’re there, keep cranking. We need about a minute of this to start the reactor.”
“Easy for him to say.” Sprite gasped.
After what seemed like an eternity I saw the control panel lights come on. A few seconds more and the reactor started to hum and the frost on the reactor shielding began melting.
“You done it boys, we got power!” Owens proclaimed.
“Good work” I said as I released the crank handle and floated back against the wall trying to catch my breath. “Now let’s see what works.”
Just then the gravity plates powered up and we found something that worked. In one startling moment all seven wide eyed men in the reactor room crashed to the floor along with anything else that was floating amongst us. Tools and tool chests that were weightless just a second ago suddenly weighed hundreds of pounds. There was a great cacophony of crashes and clangs echoing down the corridors and reverberating off the deck plates.
“I hate space!” Sprite moaned. He had landed upside down on top of me.
CHAPTER 8: Alien Bullets.
For the next fifteen hours we worked feverishly to get the systems back on line. Dr. Hirsch preformed three surgeries, set fourteen broken bones and stitched or bandaged nearly every member of the forty six member crew. We lost only one, Seaman Alex Blair from Fontana California. Dr. Shaw was awake and trying to breath on his own but Hirsch decided to leave him on the ventilator for a few more hours. Walters was recovering from her concussion and Master Chief Logan was resting in his quarters after taking another hard hit when the gravity was restored. We had restored all power, the life support was up and running and the propulsion systems were just coming on line. The only thing that wasn’t working were the sensor arrays. Chief Engineer Owens called me on the coms.
“Skipper, we can’t get the sensor array on line from inside the ship. Someone has to go out and replace the array antennas. Dr. Hirsch has grounded everyone with a concussion so I don’t have anyone left who is EVA certified. Any suggestions Sir?”
“Why don’t you use the remote external repair bot?” I asked.
“It took a direct hit from the Wade’s guns. We’ll have to do this in person Sir.”
I looked at Sprite. “Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t all Seals EVA certified?”
“Yes Sir. It’s part of our new charter. Sea, air, land and space. Extra Vehicular Actives are our specialty.” Sprite replied with a grin.
“Well then let’s get suited up and go for a stroll.” I said as I grinned back at him.
Stepping out into space in a one hundred thirty pound suit is not an easy thing to do. In some ways it’s like jumping out of an airplane except when you leave the door you don’t start falling down. Instead you just float weightlessly away from the ship. If you don�
�t have a tether or a jet pack you just keep going farther and farther until you’re gone. It can be a heart stopping experience that I both hated and loved. We suited up and had climbed in the forward airlock.
“Here goes nothing.” Sprite remarked.
The airlock door sealed and the pumps starting sucking out the atmosphere until the light tree showed blue. Then Sprite pulled the airlock release handle and swung the door open to the black star speckled vastness of deep space. I stepped forward first and kicked off from the edge of the open hatch. As I cleared the air lock the confines of the ship disappeared from my peripheral vision and I suddenly felt very small.
“Wow!” I said. “I’ll never get tired of this.”
Sprites voice blasted in my ears from the helmets coms speakers. “Quit your sightseeing and let’s get started. How are your vitals?”
Checking my suits display pad I replied. “Green across the board. I got power, heat and air. Let’s get busy.”
Using the suit’s thruster pack, I turned and eased myself down on the ship’s hull plating while Sprite touched down on my left side. We landed, turned on our mag boots and started walking down the side of the ship slowly making our way to the bow. About one hundred feet from the bow we saw the first shell crater and went to investigate. The projectile hit and ricocheted where the bottom curves up to the starboard side of the ship. The impact crater was about two feet wide, five feet long and nearly a foot deep and I was surprised it hadn’t penetrated. Dr. Shaw told me they upgraded the hull plating but I hadn’t appreciated that fact until now.
Sprite came on the coms again. “You wanted to know what they were shooting at us. There you go, ahead at your two o’clock.”
I looked to my right and found the second impact crater complete with the protruding end of the shell.
“Good Lord.” Sprite remarked. “That’s a lot bigger than I expected. That’s what, a five hundred millimeter round?”
“Every bit of it.” I said. “It’s a good twenty inches wide. This new hull plating is something else. That thing should have gone clean through us. I don’t think the Wade was trying to blind us, she was trying to blow us out of the sky.”
“What’s this new hull made of?” Sprite asked.
“Shaw said they made it with the new alloy developed from the Black ship” I said as I bent down and peered closer at the shell. The hull had deformed when the shell hit, bending inward almost two feet. The metal stretched rather than rupturing and captured the shell the way a trampoline stretches to catch a person only it didn’t rebound after. The thing that was really interesting was the shell itself. It had deformed also, which would be expected, but at the point where the shell and hull met, the two metals had melded into one piece to the point that it looked like they were one continuous piece of steal.
Sprite bent down and looked at it too. “The way those melded together like that, I would think they are made of the same stuff.”
“I think so too. If this hull is an Alien alloy, was the Wade shooting at us with Alien bullets?”
Sprite pulled a mini saw from his belt and cut a piece of the shell off. “We’ll test this to see.” He said.
After stowing the saw and the sliver of steel cut from the shell we made our way to the front of the ship. The forward array wasn’t just damaged, it was gone. The mounting base for the array was sheared off by a shell impact. I looked at Sprite. “Can you weld in zero atmosphere?”
“I can, I’m not very good at it, it won’t be pretty.”
“It don’t need to be pretty, just functional.” I replied. “Let’s go get the welder.”
We made our way to the forward cargo port, retrieved a welding rack and the spare array and pulled them back to the front of the ship where we spent the next five hours cutting, welding and wiring until we succeeded in attaching the new array. I was beat by the time we made it back to the air lock. My three hour nap sometime yesterday had lost its power and I dozed off waiting for the air lock to pressurize. Sprite woke me up with a punch as he pulled his helmet off.
“Mission accomplished, I’m hitting the rack.” He shouted at my still attached helmet.
I unlatched the heavy awkward hunk of steel and lexan and leaned forward letting it slide off my head and thump on the floor.
“Me to.” I lied.
Upon leaving the air lock I stopped by sick bay and found Dr. Shaw sitting up in bed and talking to our nurse. He saw me coming and shouted across the room. “Where’s Commander Sprite? I owe him a thank you. That man saved my life.”
“He just hit the rack. We’ve been outside fixing the sensor array for six hours and he’s beat.”
Handing Shaw the metal sample we cut from the shell I asked. “Is this the same metal that our hull is made of?”
Shaw held the inch long sliver of metal up and peered at it closely. “It could be. We’d need to put it in a mass-spectrometer to know for sure. Where did you get it?”
“We cut it from one of the shells the Wade fired at us.”
Shaw motioned to Dr. Hirsch. “Put this in your mass spec and see what it gives us please.”
Hirsch looked at the piece of metal for a second and then walked over to the lab with me close on his heels.
“Where did this come from?” He asked as he put it in the mass spec and closed the door.
“It’s a piece of a shell the Wade fired at us. We think it’s made with Alien metal.”
Hirsch started the machine and then turned to me and quietly said. “Dr. Shaw is most likely paralyzed from the waist down. I think the EM pulse combined with the warp jump has done permanent damage to his spinal nerves.”
I looked over toward Shaw and asked. “Does he know?”
“Yes. I told him. He seems to be taking it well.”
“What happens to him if we jump again?”
“If it don’t kill him it will likely put him in a comma.”
Hirsch reached out and grabbed my arm to get my full attention and then said. “You need to get some sleep. You’re running on fumes.”
“That makes two of us.” I said. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I’ll get some rack time soon. I need to check on the sensor array and talk to Owens about these shells. Then I’ll catch a nap. If we’re where I think we are I’ll have plenty of sleep. If we can’t do a warp jump then it’s going to take three days to get back to the U E One. How long before that fancy microscope gives you a reading?”
“Anytime now.” Hirsch said.
As if on cue the mass spec beeped and spit out a page of results. Hirsch pulled it out, looked at it for a second and handed it to me. I looked at the graphs and numbers but couldn’t make heads or tails of it so I walked it back over to Shaw.
“What’s it say?” I asked as Shaw studied the report.
“It’s the same metal. Are you sure this came from the shell and not the hull?”
“Sprite cut it off the butt end of the shell.” I said.
Shaw scratched his head. “How did a cargo ship get shells made from this metal?”
“Good question. If these shells can’t penetrate our hull then how do we get our shells to penetrate an enemy ship made from the same stuff?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a weapons expert or a metallurgist. You’ll need to take that up with someone more knowledgeable about projectiles.”
Taking the page of numbers from Shaw I said. “I think I know someone that might fit the bill.”
I left sick bay and headed back to engineering because Engineer Owens had spent three years in the Navy’s testing and research division. Maybe he could shed some light on our weapon design needs.
“Owens, I need your expertise.” I said as I entered the engine room.
“Sure thing skipper, Watcha need?”
“Look at this mass spec reading.” Owens took the page and turned it upright. After reading it for a second he handed it back and said. “This is a sample of our new hull.”
“No. It’s a sample f
rom one of the shells the Wade shot at us.”
Owens looked surprised. “They were shooting at us with Alien weapons?”
“Looks that way. The hull plating deformed and captured the shells instead of bursting open. What I want to know is how we can make our shells penetrate the hull of an enemy ship that is made of this same stuff.”
Owens studied on that for a few seconds and then said. “Well you need small, very hard, high velocity rounds.”
“Smaller?” I asked.
“Sure. You’re dealing with a material that flexes and stretches without breaking. What you need is a small bullet. Think about a balloon. If you push on it with your finger it just stretches but if you push on it with a pencil point it will pop. If you throw big rounds the hull will catch them. Throw a dart and you’ll punch right through. If you’re shooting at a real big ship you’ll have to punch a lot of holes but it will work.”
I thought for a second. “That explains why the Black ship in Peru could be shot down by a fifty caliber bullet. What about those tungsten steel rods we have in the cargo hold. They’re about two inches across. Could we fix them up to use in the railguns?”
“Sure.” Owens replied. “We just cut them to lengths of about five feet and turn new barrels for the railguns. They won’t be explosive tipped but they should penetrate maybe fifteen inches of armor. Once you punch a couple holes in a tight pattern you could follow up with one of our five hundred millimeter APX rounds. The holes should weaken the armor enough for the APX to penetrate and do some real damage.”
I looked down at the deck as I considered all the ramifications of retooling our biggest guns. Not a good idea.
Looking back up at Owens I said. “Instead of making smaller barrels for our guns can we do this? Put twenty or so of the tungsten rods in a wad kind of like a shot gun shell. Fire one shot and put twenty rounds down range. Then we still have all guns capable of firing five hundred millimeter rounds.”
Owens shook his head. “That won’t work. With a wad of projectiles hitting in one spot you’re still spreading the impact out over a large surface area. It has to be a single small projectile. I could wrap a sleeve around the rod to guide it down the barrel and then break away on impact which would allow the rod to penetrate by itself. Four or five shots and follow them with an APX. The holes from the rods would weaken the armor and allow the APX to penetrate through and blow the innards out. That should work. I’ll get started on it Sir.”