He shook his head, sourly. The water had done an effective job of sobering him up, leaving him grimly aware of just how badly he'd played the fool. If he had realised that the alcohol he'd consumed before the call to war had worked its way out of his system, he might have realised that he couldn't drink freely any longer. And to think he was meant to be in command! What a fool he'd been, he told himself. How could he really blame the XO for considering relieving him of command?
Maybe he should relieve himself, part of his mind suggested. But regulations, which declined to offer many acceptable reasons for relieving a commanding officer, flatly forbade the commanding officer from surrendering command while underway. He could put the XO or another officer on the bridge, in position to act rapidly if necessary, but he could never give them the full weight of his authority. No matter what he did, he — Captain Sir Theodore Smith — was the commanding officer, master under God. He could not shirk that responsibility for a second time.
He walked back into the main room and scooped up a dressing gown, pulling it on to cover his bare chest. The XO was seated in one of the chairs, a cup of steaming coffee in front of him. Another was positioned on Ted’s desk, waiting for him. Ted wasn't fond of coffee — he strongly preferred tea — but he had to admit that it would be good for him. Sitting down, he wondered who’d made it — and what they knew about his situation.
“I made it,” Fitzwilliam said, answering the unspoken question. “No one else has come here… ah, I think I broke your door.”
Ted smiled at the sudden uncertainty in his XO’s voice, then glanced over at the hatch. It was pinned open, barely wide enough to allow someone as skinny as Fitzwilliam to slip through the gap. He shook his head in droll amusement; apart from himself, only Midshipwoman Lopez had access to his cabin. It had never occurred to him that the XO would need to enter too without breaking the locks. He’d acquired too many bad habits when his ship had been drifting at anchor, with no hope of ever returning to active service.
“Yes, you did,” he said. He couldn't help a sudden laugh. Under the circumstances, a broken door was the least of their worries. “A court-martial offense if I ever saw one.”
He hesitated, looking at the younger man's uncertain face. “I’m sorry,” he said, quietly. He found himself struggling for words, then realised he was trying to excuse the inexcusable. It would be better to take his punishment like a man, except there was no one who could punish him. “Thank you.”
Commander Fitzwilliam seemed to understand, thankfully. Ted cursed himself under his breath, wondering just how much of the younger man’s respect he’d lost when he’d tried to crawl back into a bottle. There was no point in deluding himself, he told himself savagely. He’d probably lost all of it. The belief that he’d led his crew into a trap didn't excuse abandoning them now…
He took a sip of his coffee, weighing up the options. Getting back through the tramline would mean confronting the alien battlecruiser… and it would be a very close-run thing. He didn't have the starfighter numbers to take her down without closing to engagement range, which would expose his carrier’s hull to her plasma cannons. One shot, assuming the analysts were right, would be enough to melt the carrier’s armour and ravage her innards. The second would blow them apart…
No, he thought. We cannot allow them to close to point-blank range.
Mass driver projectiles would work, he knew, if they succeeded in scoring a hit. Maybe they could snipe at the battlecruiser. But the alien battlecruiser was watching for incoming projectiles, he was sure. They might just give away their position for nothing. And, even if they did manage to sneak around the battlecruiser and enter the tramline, they’d still have to crawl past Alien-Two, then Alien-One. They would encounter the alien reinforcements on their way.
And there was no hope of modifying their Puller Drive to work like an alien drive…
A thought occurred to him. For a moment, he dismissed it as the last vestiges of the alcohol, then he started to take it seriously. It was insane, but it might just be workable. And besides, they were trapped. Thinking inside the box would only lead to a suicidal direct confrontation with the alien ship. But thinking outside it…
He swallowed the rest of his coffee, then jumped to his feet. “Come on,” he said. The XO stood up, looking confused. “We have an operation to plan.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
James followed the Captain, not to the bridge but down to the engineering compartment. It was heartening to see the confident looks many of the crew had as their commander passed, even though James knew just how close the Captain had come to betraying their trust. Maybe he should have chewed the Captain out more, James told himself, even if it cost him his career. But at least the Captain had an idea…
They stepped into Main Engineering, then straight into one of the side compartments. Anderson was sitting on a stool in front of a table, slowly dismantling one of the alien plasma guns. James wondered, angrily, why the Chief Engineer wasn't working on the drives or replacing destroyed weapons, then realised that those tasks could be passed to subordinates while unlocking the mysteries of alien tech was something for an older man.
“Interesting piece of technology,” Anderson said, as the hatch closed behind them. “Do you realise that an EMP-bomb wouldn't just disarm the aliens, it would cause their weapons to blow up in their faces?”
James smiled at the mental image. “Seems like an odd choice of weapons, then.”
“Not too odd, unfortunately,” Anderson said. “The Yanks issued a laser rifle for their troops a couple of decades ago. It turned out that the power packs couldn't hold a charge for longer than a few days, while localised interference and jammers could interfere with the weapon’s subsystems. Nor could they really be repaired in the field. Luckily, they didn't have to take them into combat before the weapons were withdrawn from service.”
He shrugged. “In this case, the weapons are devastating while they work,” he added. “Their plasma pulses can and do burn through our best personal armour. They could probably shoot through anything short of starship or tank armour. I wouldn't care to take a tank up against an infantry platoon armed with these weapons. But I suspect they have a very real danger of overheating if fired for more than a few minutes.”
“Good,” the Captain said. “What progress have you made with the rest of the recovered alien technology?”
“Most of it isn't that different from ours,” Anderson said. “I've got one of our supercomputers trying to hack the recovered alien computer, but all its producing is gibberish. We will need to ship it to a proper geek on Earth, sir, although in all honesty I think the aliens corrupted the files before we captured the system.”
James nodded. Standard human precautions called for wiping the files, then destroying the computers physically to render the date hopelessly beyond recovery. There was no reason to assume the aliens couldn’t or wouldn't do the same themselves. Indeed, he was mildly surprised that the Marines had managed to take the computer at all. Had the aliens been careless… or had the Marines captured alien civilians rather than military personnel?
The Captain sat down and rested his elbows on the table. “If we took the alien ship,” he said, “could you operate it?”
James and Anderson both stared at him. The Captain met their gaze evenly. James wondered, absurdly, if the Captain had drunk far too much… and then wondered if he should relieve him of command at once. No one had managed to board and capture a military starship in all of humanity’s exploration of space. But then, no one had really tried.
“…Maybe,” Anderson said. “If they had the time to purge and destroy the computer systems, it would probably become impossible.”
James hesitated, then looked at the engineer. “Could someone operate Ark Royal without the computers?”
Anderson smiled. “They’d have to run their own control systems through the drives,” he said, “but it might be possible. Our security protocols purge the local control networks
too, sir. We didn't want to take the risk of the datanet collapsing at an inappropriate moment.”
“I see,” James said. Unlike more modern carriers, Ark Royal’s datanet was largely decentralised. Normally, it would prevent battle damage to one section taking down the entire system, but it might also regard a self-destruct command as a network failure and ignore it, particularly if the system was already damaged. It was why there were backup systems worked into the fusion cores as well as the main computer nodes. “Captain, do you seriously intend to capture the alien ship?”
The Captain smiled. “If we get past them, we go back to Alien-Two,” he reminded him, dryly. “But if we take the alien tramline…”
James swallowed. It sounded like a recipe for disaster. But the more he thought about it, the more he realised the Captain was right. They were trapped. Why not place gamble on one last throw of the dice?
“We know nothing about the interior of the alien ship,” Anderson warned. “The Marines have never gone into an alien ship.”
“No,” the Captain agreed. “But we have to try.”
“If nothing else,” James said slowly, “we can take out the alien ship and sneak back into Alien-Two. We might just avoid detection without that bastard chasing us.”
“We’d still have to crawl all the way to New Russia,” the Captain said. He shrugged. “But it’s workable as a backup plan.”
James sighed. “Then the sooner the better,” he said. “Before more alien ships arrive.”
The Captain nodded. “Call Major Parnell and the CAG,” he ordered. “And don’t say a word to the reporters. They don’t need to know the truth.”
“Understood,” James said. “I won’t say a word.”
He wondered, absently, just how many of the reporters knew that they were trapped. Yang probably understood the implications of only one tramline leaving the system — and the alien battlecruiser blocking their retreat — but how many of the others had guessed the truth? Perhaps, by now, they were so used to coming to the brink of disaster that they didn't really have the capacity to feel alarm any longer.
“Sir,” he said, “whatever happens, we know the aliens have been hurt.”
The Captain smiled. Ark Royal had inflicted colossal damage on the aliens, even though no one knew just how badly they’d weakened the alien navy. And the aliens had had to devote a vast amount of firepower to hunting the carrier down, buying time for Earth to organise her defences. Ark Royal might be lost, but she might have ensured that humanity won the war.
If we have time to build more armoured carriers and a few new battleships, he thought. But will the Admiralty have enough time?
“Yes,” the Captain said. The smile he gave James was the smile of a true predator. “We know we hurt the bastards.”
* * *
There had been no discussion when Rose came to his office, Kurt recalled, through a post-orgasmic haze. She’d pushed him to the deck and straddled him, her hands hastily unsnapping his uniform trousers and pushing them down to his knees. Moments later, she’d impaled herself on Kurt and ridden him savagely, panting out loud as she moved up and down on his cock. He came so quickly that, for a long moment, he thought he’d left her unsatisfied. But it was clear from the mewling noises she made that she’d come too.
“I’m sorry,” she said, afterwards. She lay on top of him, still clutching his penis within her. “I just wanted to…”
She shook her head. “I think Gladys and Tom went to find a private place of their own too,” she added. “How naughty of them.”
“Hypocrite,” Kurt said, without heat. Just what sort of reputation was Ark Royal going to have when she returned home? The media, if they ever caught wind of it, would turn her into a regular pleasure cruise. “What are you and I doing?”
Rose coloured, then straightened up. His limp cock fell out of her as she rolled off him and onto the deck. Kurt sighed, pushed his trousers all the way off and then stood up to go to the washroom. Whatever happened, he knew they had no time to just relax and enjoy the aftermath. The aliens might attack at any moment.
She followed him into the shower, carefully removing her own clothes. Kurt hesitated, then allowed her to climb into the small cubicle with him. She washed his back, her breasts pressing into his body, then turned so he could do the same to her. Kurt was struck by the sheer perfection of her young body, almost completely unscarred by age or experience, and felt a pang of guilt. He was cheating on his wife with a girl almost young enough to be his daughter. The guilt grew stronger as he washed her, then stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. What was he doing?
“Do you think,” Rose said, “that the other CAGs have fun with their pilots?”
Kurt flushed, angrily. “I think they have the shower because they’re not meant to fly or sleep with the pilots,” he retorted. Ideally, the CAG wasn't meant to identify with any of the squadrons under his command. The Royal Navy worked hard to encourage a certain rivalry between squadrons, but the CAG was meant to be above it. “And because they’re important people.”
“Don’t get too big-headed,” Rose warned him. “You’ll never be able to leave your office.”
“How true,” Kurt mused. He turned to look at her, then looked away, embarrassed, as she slid her panties back over her knees. Those weren't regulation panties, he noted… but who was going to know? It wasn't as if even the most stringent inspection included ordering pilots to lower their trousers long enough for their underwear to be checked. The very thought was absurd. “And I wouldn't be able to fit in the cockpit either.”
He looked over at his terminal, feeling another pang of guilt. Part of his duty as a CAG was to analyse the alien starfighter tactics and propose countermeasures. He hadn't been doing it, first because he’d been too busy being a Squadron Leader as well as CAG, then because he’d reasoned they were trapped and about to die when the aliens caught them. There was no point in doing paperwork when no one would ever read it, even the XO. But if he returned home, he could look forward to a year or two on the beach, helping the tutors at the Academy to prepare new starfighter pilot trainees for combat.
I could see Molly and the kids every day, he thought. He might not have to take up a teaching post — and, if he did, his family could come with them to the moon. And then…
The communicator bleeped, pulling him out of his thoughts. “CAG, report to the briefing compartment,” the XO ordered. “I say again, report to the briefing compartment.”
“Good luck,” Rose said.
She straightened up her jacket, glanced down at herself to make sure she looked decent, then strode out of the office without a backwards glance. Kurt glared after her, then hastily finished pulling on his uniform and stepped out of the hatch. One way or another, he was sure, their affair couldn't continue for much longer. Sooner or later, someone was bound to notice and then…
He shook his head, tiredly. If they didn't make it home, it didn't matter. And it certainly didn't look like they were going to make it home. But if they did…
Idiot, he told himself, as he made his way to the briefing room. Concentrate on the here and now. The future can take care of itself.
* * *
Charles hadn't expected the summons to the briefing compartment — or, when he entered, to discover that only the XO and the CAG had also been invited. Technically, the Marine contingent reported directly to the Captain; he’d been on ships where the Marine CO had refused to even talk formally to the XO. But with no task for the Marines apart from monitoring the captives — and the humans they’d liberated from the aliens — he hadn't expected to do anything other than keep his Marines busy.
“We have a plan,” the Captain explained. He outlined the plan, piece by piece. “We have to take that ship or destroy it without risking ourselves.”
He had the grace to look embarrassed, Charles noted. Traditionally, the commander of any Royal Navy squadron would ride into danger alongside his subordinates, even if he was often on the
most heavily armoured ship in the navy. But the Captain couldn't abandon his ship and join the Marines as they boarded the alien ship, even if he'd been trained for the job. The Marines would be going into action alone… and if the first part of the operation failed, they were all dead. They’d detonate a nuke inside the alien hull to make sure of it.
But he couldn’t help feeling a thrill at the mere concept of the operation. The Royal Marines had a long and illustrious history of death-defying stunts, but no one had ever tried to board an alien starship before. One way or another, they would go down in history.
If the carrier makes it home, he thought.
“I understand,” he said, finally. His subordinates would love it, if only for the bragging rights when they finally made it home. The SAS, SBS or SRS claimed most of the bragging rights in Britain, while operations with Western Alliance partners exposed the Royal Marines to bragging from American or European operatives. But none of them had ever boarded an alien ship. “We won’t let you down.”
He pushed the exultation aside and began to think, mentally outlining the operational plan for the deployment. There were too many unknowns for him to be entirely comfortable, even though he relished the challenge. They knew nothing about the interior of the alien starship or how the aliens would respond to a boarding party. The Royal Navy’s protocols called for the compromised compartments to be sealed off, then counterattacks mounted by the Marines and armed crewmen. But no one had ever tried to handle a counterattack outside drills few took very seriously. Did the aliens take their drills seriously?
“They're sweeping space for threats,” he said, after a moment. “How do you intend to get the shuttles though their defences?”
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