The Veritian Derelict (Junkyard Dogs)

by Nolte, Phillip

  ***

  On board the renegade destroyer Skorpios, somewhere in the Heard's World Star System, December 11, 2598

  The first pulse bolt fired by the Greyhound punched a hole through the hull of the totally unprepared Skorpios. Fortunately for the crew of the stolen vessel, the bolt missed the bridge and penetrated into the forward cargo hold which, at the time, was both unpressurized and unmanned.

  "For the love of Allah," cried out the weapons tech. "That cargo ship has a twin beam pulse projector!"

  "Shields up!" shouted the Captain, "Now!"

  The inexperienced crew of the Skorpios, mostly untrained and unfamiliar with the workings of the old warship, barely managed to get the shield powered up in time. WHOOOOMP! The old destroyer reeled and the lights dimmed from the impact of the Greyhound's second pulse bolt. A few seconds later they were hit by another bolt, again the ship lurched and the lights dimmed.

  "Those hits have reduced our shield strength to only sixty percent, Sir, we must do something!"

  Ten seconds later, the fourth hit nearly knocked the leader off from his feet.

  "Shield now at forty-five percent, Captain."

  With his main batteries down, a hull breach in the cargo area and repairs to the secondary armament on the Skorpios having been overlooked in the rush to restore the main batteries, the Captain of the Skorpios deduced that he had little choice. He and his ship were helpless under the present circumstances.

  "Curse them! Jump, Helmsman, Jump!"

  The Skorpios took two additional hits from the Greyhound's pulse beams and her shields were down to twenty-five percent before the destroyer was able to jump out of danger. Each impact had severely rattled the destroyer and dimmed the lights. Bedlam reigned onboard. In their inexperience and near panic, the crew of the Skorpios took much longer than they should have to program and execute a simple, short microjump. Finally, the Skorpios appeared to swell slightly and glowed pure white before disappearing into the safety of Whitney jumpspace.

  ***

  Onboard UTFN Auxiliary Ship Greyhound, somewhere in the Heard's World star system, December 11, 2598.

  The crew on the bridge of the Greyhound saw an old destroyer one second and, after a bright, silent flash, nothing. Their seventh and next to last pulse bolt flashed through the cold, dark vacuum formerly occupied by the stolen destroyer. Against an inexperienced enemy totally disoriented by the unexpectedly stiff defense the Greyhound had put up, they had somehow won the engagement! What would have happened if the seventh pulse had scored, followed by an additional impact from an eighth, no one would ever know.

  Perhaps things were better that way.

  Using emergency power, the bridge crew on the Greyhound consulted their instruments. The destroyer, programmed hastily for a microjump of indeterminate distance, flashed back into normal space a good two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers away.

  Hawkins, Murdock and Harris all went down to the engineering section of the Greyhound to see what it was going to take to get power back online, meanwhile praying that that whatever damage they had taken wasn't serious. Like the previous power failure, some of the critical systems needed about a half hour to cool down before they could power the system back up. Used to the routine after all of their recent experience, the crew had the Greyhound's power plant back up and running within forty-five minutes. They had waited impatiently, one eye on the enemy ships, until the instruments indicated sufficient cooling had occurred and then they had efficiently powered the systems back on. Shortly after, with the crew of the Greyhound back at their normal stations, Helen Murdock followed up on the weak radio signals coming from the small moon from someone's suit radios.

  "Caleb and Hanna Jordan?" asked Murdock, from the bridge of the Greyhound. "Is it really you?"

  "Helen Murdock?" replied Hanna. "Praise the Lord! Yes, Caleb is here with me as well."

  "Are you both okay?"

  "We are for now," replied Caleb. "They left us with only about twenty-four hours of air. I was going to see if we could find some air tanks and maybe hole up somewhere in the wreck for a while but, naturally, I'd feel a lot better if you could take us off from here sometime in the next few hours."

  "We're gonna try to do that, though we do have a bit of a situation here. "

  "We overheard their ultimatum. What have you done to that cargo ship?"

  "I don't want to broadcast the details, Caleb, we can talk more when we have you on board. Let's just say that we've made some modifications. What can you tell us about that destroyer?"

  "It's under the control of a terrorist group led by someone who calls himself the Sheik of Barsoom," replied Caleb. "I don't know where they got a destroyer but they told me that one of their people had accidentally disabled the weapons. They needed us to get the big guns working again."

  "That's not the story we heard, Caleb. Rumor has it that they captured the ship by sneaking a small strike force on board but the former crew managed to disable the weapons before they were killed."

  "That makes a lot more sense," said Caleb.

  "No more details, Caleb," said Murdock, "they might be listening. We don't want you to give anything away either. Hang on, we're getting our cutter ready right now. We should be able to microjump in real close. See you in an hour or so?"

  Chapter 43.

  Onboard UTFN Auxiliary Ship Greyhound, somewhere in the Heard's World star system, December 11, 2598.

  Murdock and the crew microjumped the Greyhound as closely as they dared to the tiny moon and the wreck marooned there. As soon as the jump was completed, Harris and Carlisle, in command of the shuttle, accompanied by Sergeant Kelly and several heavily-armed members of his Marine contingent, headed as quickly as they could for the surface of the moon. With the suit radios of their two friends to home in on, Harris had no trouble finding the correct crater on the small moon. He began to search for a suitable spot to land the cutter. In the meantime, everyone onboard the cutter and the Greyhound kept a wary eye out for the telltale flashes of light that would signal microjump activity if either of the two terrorist ships still in the system used their Whitney drives.

  Like so many of the tiny worldlets that populate the universe, this particular moon was roughly potato-shaped, rather than round like a ball and was pockmarked with thousands of craters of various sizes and various ages.

  Over fifty years ago, the crew of the stricken vessel had set their ship down on the moon because they had wanted to hide it and preserve it for some future conflict. With the exception of a few ships especially designed for exploration, practically no one ever landed deep-space ships anywhere. Due to the location and the depth of the crater and the tidal-locked orbit of the tiny moon, the spot that the Brotherhood had chosen to park the derelict was in shadow except for a few brief periods during each of the moon's orbits around the planet. With the ship's systems powered down for more than five decades and the anti-reflective coating that had originally been applied to her hull she would have been difficult for the sensors on even a modern military ship to find. The addition of a stealth camouflage net by the former crew or by some later custodian of the old ship completed the task of rendering the wreck all but invisible.

  Harris knew from his discussions with Caleb Jordan that the old enemy cruiser had sustained heavy damage in the final battle of the Succession War over fifty years ago. He had also seen plenty of badly damaged ships from that same battle; there were thousands of them out in the Scrapyard. None of it really prepared him for the shocking levels of damage that had been inflicted on the ancient Veritian Cruiser. He and Carlisle both surveyed the wreck for the first time as they maneuvered the shuttle over the rim of the crater. They came in over the cruiser from the stern, shining the cutter's landing lights down the length of the old warship as they flew over it.

  During this initial observation, there didn't appear to be a single compartment on the old cruiser that had escaped having at least some kind of damage. There were jagged holes from enemy
fire that revealed torn bulkheads and twisted corridors. Here and there Harris could see evidence of how the former crew had managed to survive long enough to escape; many smaller breaches in the internal compartments had been plugged by globs of sealant. For some of the larger holes, the former crew had used whatever they could find to fashion patches and then had coated or ringed the makeshift patches with the same sealant before applying them to some of the larger openings.

  Harris shook his head in wonder, with all the damage, no one was going to have any trouble getting into the wreck. He had the answer to how some of the crew of the vessel had managed to survive but how they had been able to perform several microjumps and a macrojump to escape from the fighting all those years ago remained unknown. From any perspective, the escape had been an impressive, almost impossible feat.

  "Hard to believe they could still operate this ship," said Harris. "I'll get some video."

  "...Hull damage...drive damage...," said Carlisle, as she scanned the wreck with her own video pickup on the helmet of her special suit. "Yeah, it's pretty damned amazing, isn't it?" She spotted a couple of figures waving to them from near the old cruiser. "There's Hanna and Caleb."

  Harris carefully set the little craft down in front of the derelict a good one hundred meters away from the two figures. In the miniscule gravity of the tiny moon, the landing occurred in agonizingly slow motion and was a great deal trickier to accomplish than it might have appeared. The Jordans grabbed a small pack and held hands as they began running towards the shuttle. Harris cut the engines.

  The two Federation officers, having piloted the shuttle in their spacesuits, prepared to venture out onto the moon. Not knowing if or when the destroyer they had just faced off with would return, everyone continued to keep a wary eye on the sky for any visible evidence of enemy ship movements. Carlisle, Harris and the Marine contingent met the Jordans in a small cleared area between the shuttle and the old cruiser. Following strict protocol, the marines took up defensive positions around them.

  "I like your attitude Sergeant," said Caleb, "but there is no danger. My wife and I are the only ones down here."

  "Hanna, Caleb!" said Harris. "Are you two alright? We've been really worried."

  "Indeed, we are," said Caleb, "Praise the lord and the Federation Navy."

  "Amen!" said Hanna.

  "Tell us what you can about these terrorists, Caleb," said Harris.

  "There's not a lot to tell," said the little man. "They put down on the landing site just outside the village. They lured Hanna and me onto their shuttle by faking some serious injuries to one of their crewmen and then threatened to hurt my wife if I didn't help them repair their beam weapons."

  "It was a woman named Fahada who pretended to be wounded," said Hanna.

  "A woman you say?" asked Harris.

  "A young woman," Hanna replied, "with black hair and black eyes. She'd be a real beauty except for the fact that she's got some of the meanest eyes you've ever seen!"

  "You think they hijacked the ship?" asked Caleb.

  "That's what we heard," replied Harris. "The information is sketchy but apparently the former crew had just enough time to scuttle the weapons before the terrorists killed them all."

  "Lieutenant Harris is right, Caleb," said Hanna, "I overheard several of them talking out in the corridor and they were saying that this Fahada woman killed half of that crew all by herself! Watch yourself around that one; she's a natural born killer!"

  "Fahada?" said Carlisle, "I'll remember that."

  "This is starting to make a lot more sense," said Caleb. "Somehow they must have figured out that the secondary armament on these old Opposition cruisers was the same as the main batteries on their destroyer. I wonder if it was that blasted Ezra Brimstone again?"

  "It's certainly possible, but we don't know, Caleb," said Harris. "You must not have done all that good a job fixing the weapons, thank goodness. They fired one shot from each gun and then retreated."

  "Yeah, I saw that. I fooled them."

  "Fooled them? How?"

  "Something I remembered from gunnery school. Those old guns have a 'training' protocol programed into the operating system."

  "A training protocol?" asked Carlisle.

  "Yeah," replied Caleb. "When you switch the operating system over to that protocol, the guns won't charge until an instructor or gunnery sergeant has approved the next round of shots. It was very useful when working with raw gunnery personnel, kept them from shooting accidentally during live fire drills and such."

  "You mean those guns haven't been permanently disabled?"

  "Sorry, Lieutenant," said Caleb, shaking his head. "I couldn't figure out how to do that without getting caught. One of their engineers is really pretty sharp. In fact, he should be able to figure out what I did when he gets a chance to really look things over. It's just a subroutine in the gun programming."

  "So they could be back at any time with fully operational weapons?"

  "I'm afraid so, Lieutenant," said Caleb. "As long as I was still in charge of the guns, I could keep it a secret. We took a few practice shots, after we replaced the capacitors, to make sure the guns were working. They weren't exactly sure how to operate the systems, so they left me at the control console. I would just approve the next round of shots and they were none the wiser. As soon as I was gone and they tried to fire more than one consecutive pulse from either gun, the guns stopped firing. The way I have it set up, the system is waiting for approval by the gunnery officer before the capacitors will even recharge. Unless they have someone who really knows his stuff and can totally reprogram the weapons computers, they'll need someone to approve a capacitor recharge for every shot they take."

  "That was good thinking, Caleb," said Harris.

  "Well...thanks," said Caleb. "It isn't much but I did what I could. I also messed around with the targeting systems so they'll have a hard time hitting anything they aim at unless they thoroughly check the computer and recalibrate the sighting-in protocols. Especially if they try to take any long distance shots."

  "Well done, Caleb!" said Carlisle. "A tenth of a degree off at a thousand kilometers means they'd miss by several kilometers."

  "You do know that they managed to score a hit on the Greyhound, don't you?" asked Harris.

  "Unless they recalibrated the targeting systems, that had to have been pure luck," replied Jordan. "Or were they were really close?"

  "They were really close," said Harris. "They were intending to board us."

  "Oh..." was all that Caleb could come up with.

  "It seems you didn't lose your head," said Harris.

  "Thank you," said Caleb, "but they'll probably figure it all out soon enough. I think we'd better get out of here as soon as we can.

  "Are there more working weapons on this old cruiser?"

  "Probably," said Caleb. "All these guys were interested in was salvaging the capacitor systems from two of the cruiser's secondary batteries. We looked at several emplacements before we found two capacitor banks that weren't damaged. There were another four or so that we didn't take time to look at."

  Caleb turned around to look back at the old cruiser. "This was one tough old ship!" he said, respect in his tone. "As for the main batteries, you can see that most of the heavier weapons took pretty heavy damage. When I was here with Ezra Brimstone a couple of months ago, they had already checked out the big guns and knew which ones they wanted. I haven't had a chance to look at the status of the rest of the main batteries though."

  "To be absolutely clear, you're saying there's still a good chance that someone could salvage useable weapons from this wreck?"

  "I certainly can't rule it out, Lieutenant."

  "There's more, Lieutenant," said Hanna. "I overheard several other terrorists out in the corridor while they thought I was asleep. The Sheik was really upset that Ambassador Saladin was able to escape some kind of attack on the Santana Nexus. I wasn't able to find out how they got the information, but for some reaso
n they seemed pretty sure that the Ambassador is hiding out in the New Ceylon system. This group plans to rendezvous with several other ships and head over there to finish the job, I suppose."

  "That has to be one of the reasons that they attacked the Nexus in the first place. The entire affair was aimed at the Ambassador. That means…" began Harris.

  "...That there is probably at least one informant onboard the Ambassador's ship," Carlisle finished for him.

  "Exactly," said Harris. "We'd better get back to the Scrapyard as soon as we can. But first..."

  Harris turned his attention back to the wreck and attempted to make a count of which of the remaining weapons might still be operational. The wreck had originally carried twelve of the massive Tesla Mark I heavy beam weapons as her main batteries. Ezra Brimstone and the Veritian Brotherhood had taken two of the units.

  "While we're here, we should try to disable some of those weapons if we can, before we go," said Harris. "Any idea of how we go about doing that?"

  "We'd have to go back on board and destroy or remove some of the vital parts," said Caleb. "Do you have any explosives? If we destroy the capacitors for those guns, they'd never work again."

  "Sergeant Kelly?" asked Harris

  "We have grenades," said Kelly. "Would that do the trick?"

  "You bet, especially if they were placed properly," replied Caleb.

  "Captain Murdock?" asked Harris, over his suit radio. "What's that enemy ship doing?"

  There was pause while Murdock rechecked with Allen on the sensors on the Greyhound before she replied.

  "It looks like they did that single microjump after the battle and stopped," she radioed back. "I don't know if we did any damage to them or not. If we did, I can't believe we did very much."