Suddenly sparks flew from the maneuvering panel and the four men and two women monitoring the now shutdown maneuvering jets fell back onto the steel deck and rear consoles, their feet losing grip on the Velcro-accented station. They floated free.
“Keep your harnesses on, people, how many times did we drill for that?” Freemantle said as calmly as he could. The Lee shook and rumbled and was pushed thirty kilometers from her position as more alarms announced a fracture somewhere in the superstructure.
“We have hull breach!” came the voice of the damage control officer below them. As more technical support personnel floated free of their stations, Commodore Freemantle held his temper in check.
“Calmly, people, calmly, now. Shut down the hull breach alarms, Lieutenant Stevens, that is not a hull breach, it’s the bloody venting ports open to space. Now please shut off that damnable noise.”
The young man felt foolish as he did what he had been ordered.
The Lee, to the casual observer from the vantage of the Earth, was upside down, but the crew never realized it. The alarms were slowly being shut down as fires and other small emergencies were brought under control after the men and women in all departments slowly became use to zero-gravity maneuvering in the spaces throughout the ship.
“Gentlemen, I need engine status or we’re going to have Grays sitting in our lap with no engines or weaponry. Radar, enemy fleet status, please?” Freemantle tried his best to be a calming influence to his crew as no men or women in the history of the world had ever faced something as traumatic as this—technology that had gone out of control with no prior testing in the ship’s natural element of outer space.
“Thus far they have not rounded the moon.” The radar officer and his seventeen operators adjusted set and bandwidths. “We are receiving telemetry from Sydney Station; they’re bouncing a signal off of the Mars relay station. The enemy is still being screened by the moon. We are not, I repeat, not being tracked by enemy sensors at this time.”
“That will change as soon as they get in direct line of sight with us.” Freemantle looked over at Lienanov and winked. The captain could not believe he was on this mission in the first place, and was nervously watching men and women who really didn’t know what they were doing. He released his handhold and then went to a standing chair and strapped himself in. “People,” the commodore said, “I need the status on my engines. Without them we have no generators, and without the generators we have no gunnery at all. We will only have the kinetic weapons and the rail guns, and I’m afraid that will fall far short of what we need.”
“Power plant is still offline, Commodore. Engineering is getting assistance from shuttle management, and he is—”
The commodore and everybody else heard the cursing over the intercom as someone below was haranguing the engineering crew to shut the magnetometers down, that they were electrically interfering with the power plant’s flow of energy to the main mixing chambers. Freemantle recognized Professor Jenks immediately—who else would call his engineering officers a bunch of pussies that couldn’t turn a monkey wrench?
“Commodore, we have extraneous personnel interfering with operations down here. We need to—”
Freemantle hit his transmit switch and cut off the engineering commander down below. “What you need to do at the moment is listen to the master chief. He seems to be the only one that has an idea of what to do.”
“Yeah, did you hear that, you limey, snot-nosed little shit? Quit being a tattletale and get your ass over to the mainframe coupling and turn it on. I don’t relish the thought of floating here and being used as fucking target practice. Now move.”
In the background everyone heard the master chief as he took control. They also heard a voice remind Jenks that they were still transmitting to the bridge.
“I don’t give a good goddamn who—”
The command bridge intercom was shut down when Freemantle gave a slice-across-the-throat gesture.
“I particularly do not like that man, but I must say he is one colorful … whatever he is,” the commodore said.
“Permission to join the master chief below?” Lienanov asked.
Freemantle just nodded his head as he studied the motion control board before him. He saw that they had at least 60 percent of their monitors out as the Lee spun crazily out of control.
“Now gentlemen and ladies, I need my eyes back online. Can we do something about that, please?”
* * *
Carl Everett checked Jack’s status as the Delta medic looked him over.
“As far as I can see, Admiral, he’s got one bad concussion and maybe some glass in his side, but other than that, I think he’s just out.” The medic turned to Tram, who was finally sitting up and being held in place by three men as his body wanted to float away. A sergeant walked toward Tram and offered him a pair of Velcro booties to slip over his white combat boots. Everett turned his attention to the small Vietnamese sniper. Another SEAL passed him an environ suit that should fit the small officer. The suit floated in front of Tram, which caused him to get dizzy and almost vomit.
“Pretty bad down there?” He kneeled as best he could next to Tram inside the zero-gravity environment.
Tram held the Velcro boots close to his chest, pulled the clothing down into his lap, and lowered his head.
“Captain Mendenhall? The Frenchman?” Carl hesitated but asked anyway.
Tram shook his head as he finally looked into Everett’s face. The admiral just patted the famed Vietnamese sniper on the shoulder and then gestured for the medic to get that head wound tended to and for others to get him and the knocked-out Collins into spacesuits.
Everett stood with his feet secured by the antigravity boots and looked out into space from the large porthole. The remains of the Black Hawk were now gone as he spied the roll of the battleship.
“Well, things don’t look like they went according to plan in phase one of this operation.” He looked down at Jack as he lay on the plastic deck. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”
* * *
Commodore Freemantle floated to the elongated damage control station and watched his people working the boards. Thus far the fires had all been extinguished without the use of mass venting, thus saving precious O2 that they couldn’t spare or replace. They had lost three of the nitrogen coolant tanks used for the enormous turret guns, and thus far they were lucky as far as deaths and injuries. Twenty-two dead and one hundred and fifty injured. For a launch that had gone off without a hitch the Garrison Lee soon reminded the crew how dangerous this mission was from start to finish. He realized the training they had the past four and a half years told all personnel in no uncertain terms that this was nothing more than a one-way trip to begin with. They all wanted to get at least a chance to prove to the world, and to themselves, that the Lee could make a difference.
“How are the repairs to the power plant? We need at least maneuvering as soon as possible. Right now we wouldn’t even give the bloody Grays a fright, not spinning like this.”
“Professor Jenks said it was nothing more than the arrogant bastards—sorry, sir, his words. The engineers at the Royal Institute of Technology and the techs at General Electric misinterpreting the American asset’s design drawings and installing the twin plasma pumps backward. They said they didn’t look right and changed the specs. It tested well, but when full power to the ion engines was engaged they backed up and shot pure plasma into the cooling system, causing the overload. They are in the process of changing out the lines now. The two plasma pumps have been taken out and reversed.”
Freemantle shook his head. “Awful brave of those engineers who aren’t on this little ride to change the specifications of a being with the intelligence quotient of four hundred of those bloody sots.”
“Yes, sir,” the female American navy motorman said. The twenty-two-year-old had been one of the first volunteers when the assignment was offered to members of the American navy.
Freemantle took ho
ld of the handrail and pulled himself to the radar officer. “Any sign of the bastards?”
“No sign of the large power ship yet, sir. One of the small attack ships nosed over for a look-see and then vanished from the scope in a flash three minutes ago. Gave me a start, I can tell you.”
“Any indication the scout saw us?”
“I don’t see how he could have missed us with the spectacle we’re putting on.”
Freemantle had to smile at his radar officer’s observation. Down the line radar personnel from the Russian, American, and British navies watched their scopes closely. Some of the sets were calibrated at differing wave bands to cover the full spectrum in order to defeat the stealthy design and materials of the alien vessels.
“Well, we have to assume they know we’re here and just don’t know what to make of us as of yet. That time could cost them if we get the damned power plant online,” he said angrily.
“Or maybe they’re just laughing too hard to come at us,” the officer interjected. “I mean, they haven’t had to deal with this class of ship for seven hundred million years.”
Freemantle had to laugh and that broke his momentary spell of anger. He had been too long absent from the real navy and real seamen and knew they joked at the harshest of times. He nodded his head, feeling better about his crew.
His damage control officer joined him as he floated up and took a hold on the same railing, letting his feet secure themselves to the Velcro adherent on the deck.
“Mr. Jenks reports two minutes more will be needed to flush the coolant and plasma lines. He cursed me for not having the foresight to add lengths of ceramic lining to our ship’s stores before takeoff.” The officer looked behind him. “I think he ate all of my behind on that one, sir.”
“Well, he has a point, but it wasn’t your fault, lad. I’m afraid I cut what I thought were all nonessentials from the stores list. Just don’t let on to the master chief, eh? So what did Jenks use for the ceramic lines?”
The officer grimaced. “He bloody well tore out the officer’s zero-gravity toilets. He used the small sections of ceramic tubing, nonconductive duct tape, and aluminum foil.”
Freemantle was stunned.
“He said the officers can shit themselves for getting them into this mess.”
“Very well, I’ll give up my toilet privileges if the damn thing will just work.”
Freemantle let go of the handrail, peeled his boots from the deck, and launched himself up and over the two tiers of battle bridge technicians to grab a firm hold on the captain’s station, where he came to a twirling stop. He would never admit this to his men, or even his wife—if he ever returned home that is—but he had become totally infatuated with the zero-gravity travel from one spot to the other. He settled to the deck and then strapped in. He placed his mic cord into its station and then cleared his throat.
“All hands, this is Commodore Freemantle. I have been informed that we will be testing the power plant repairs in just a few moments. Please take your stations and secure all material.”
The Garrison Lee was still spinning crazily in a wide circle.
* * *
“What do you mean, they’re just gone?” Admiral Everett said to the attack craft commander of the first shuttle.
Five men were floating free in the bay next to the two ships. The locking gear firmly held them to station but they also did not escape damage from the engine meltdown. Everett counted at least ten serious-sized holes that had to be patched on the outer docked attack ship. When three of the large booster rockets attached only a hundred feet from the shuttle bay were jettisoned, the explosive bolts holding them in place blew them off. But there had been an inordinate amount of dry chemical still left in the booster from the countdown misfire that delayed its activation, thus when the bolts exploded the rest of the fuel was redirected from the containment housing into the girder system of the superstructure. That, in turn, was vented directly to the exposed fuel lines attached to the outboard shuttle. The explosion not only knocked holes in the DuPont-designed heat tiles, but also killed the pilot and copilot of shuttle number two who were strapped into their stations nearby—another safety flaw of the hurried design.
“Commander Roberts and Lieutenant Rodriguez were blown out through the deck and into space,” said the Marine pilot of the number one shuttle, Commander Emily Coghagen. The two men had been her friends and she had trained with them on Master Chief Jenks’s design for the past two years.
Everett angrily kicked out at nothing, forgetting he was floating and momentarily throwing himself into a slight spin. Jason Ryan reached out and steadied his friend.
“Can you make two trips?” he asked Coghagen with little hope of a positive answer.
“Not in the time frame we’ll need to get two teams inside. The first will already have found their way deep into the energy ship before we returned with the second assault element.”
“So, you’re short one pilot and copilot and have a damaged ship?” Ryan asked with a brightening smile.
“Forget it, Commander, you’re not qualified,” Everett said angrily, knowing the young aviator would pull something like that.
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t qualified to land the LEM on the moon either, but guess what?”
“What in the hell is he talking about? What is a LEM, and what fucking moon?” the Marine pilot asked astounded at the claim by the cocky naval aviator. “Sir.”
“Landing Excursion Module. Mr. Ryan accidentally landed one on the moon four years ago.” Everett shook his head at the astonished men floating next to the grinning Ryan.
“You see, Commander, the navy doesn’t tell the corps everything it’s up to—we keep some secrets to ourselves,” Ryan said as he returned his attention to Carl. “Now, either you think you can blow that thing up with one assault element, or you allow me to at least try to get your second team over to the opposite side. I’ll even take that asshole friend of yours along to show me the way of things. I’m sure those engine room boys would love for Jenks to get the hell off their ship anyway.”
Everett looked at his watch for no other reason than to see the time, because in reality he didn’t even know if they could get the Lee back into action long enough to find the power ship.
Ryan was watching, no longer concerned with his request as he noticed the thick blood clinging to the admiral’s watch. Without even asking he knew it was the blood of Jack Collins and everything he had learned about the British find came flooding back. He swallowed but refused to point that out to Everett.
“Okay.” Carl turned to the Marine commander and her copilot. “You have until launch time to get this asshole up to speed on the flyby wire control system of that bird, and you make him understand it and understand it good.” He turned to face Ryan. “Pay attention and no smart-ass comments or observations, is that clear, mister?”
Ryan nodded, smiling at last, letting the vision of the blood-covered watch go for the moment.
“Great.” Coghagen looked from the admiral to a cocky Ryan. “No matter if he understands something or not, he’ll say he does. I know these carrier jocks.”
“She’s got you pegged already, flyboy.”
“I love you too, Admiral.” Jason blew the retreating form of Everett good-bye. Ryan soon lost his smile as he turned to face the commander. “Let’s get to it.”
The Marine Corps pilot saw the sudden change in Ryan’s demeanor as soon as the admiral was out of sight. Gone was the man she had seen moments before; now Jason Ryan was all business.
She had no way of knowing that Ryan had just sworn to himself to try and change the destiny the Event Group, Matchstick, and the planners for Overlord had in store for him. Even if it cost him his life, Admiral Everett, his friend, would not die in the Earth’s ancient past if he could help it.
Ryan entered the damaged shuttle without another word.
* * *
“I want the drone launched immediately; I have to know the disposition of the en
emy ships. How many are they, what does their fleet consist of, where are the processing vessels? And most importantly, the number of attack ships protecting the power distribution craft. As soon as the computers are up and propulsion systems restored I want that probe on the way. We’re not getting telemetry from the Earth stations since their jamming started.”
“Probe is ready and in the launch tube, Commodore.”
The lieutenant in charge of torpedo tubes 1–18 answered the commodore from his computer station. Jenks walked behind the kid and slapped him hard on the back. “Son, you take that system off-line while we try to crank this ion pump up; if she blows again it’ll take your torpedo tubes up with it. So safe all your weapons, is that clear?”
“Clear, Master Chief,” the young Royal Navy officer said, just grateful the master chief didn’t yell at him the way he had the commodore earlier when asked for the status of the ion drive.
“Good boy, now all hands strap in.” Jenks paused. “Ah, hell, hide behind something and take those damn Velcro boots off or you’ll break your ankles if we start venting again. Just hang onto your ass or the guy’s next to you. Everyone, helmets on.” The master chief and once proud professor looked at the Royal Navy female ensign standing next to him and raised his brows. “You stay by me, doll face. Okay, let’s start the music, sound the warning alarm, and tell the bridge we’re tryin’ her now.”
The alarm echoed through all eighteen decks of the Garrison Lee. Silent prayers were said and men and women closed their eyes as they waited for the loud sound of rushing coolant, and prayed that the new lines didn’t leak into the plasma containment tanks.
“Tell the computer to start, son, she ain’t going to do it without you.”
The propulsion officer swallowed and turned the switch, thus allowing the computer system to take over.
A loud whoosh sounded in the engine spaces as the coolant flow shot into the lines. Everyone cringed and then waited for the lines to back up into the plasma generator again, but this time the lights all turned green. One by one the plasma containment indicators switched on in the slowest manner possible. All twenty indicator lights were now in the green, or safe mode. Coolant was heard pumping through the lines at a rapid rate.
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