I think they nod in response, even though they should know that nodding inside their helmets is not visible to the outside world. I let it pass, and make a hand gesture for them to lead the way.
We use our suit thrusters to get to the hatch, the Marines ready to help us inside. The two Ensigns are in when I hear Bass' voice on the command channel to Shelby.
"Small ship, accelerating away, 4.8 gee."
I call up the grid on the head's up display in my helmet. It must have been hiding in and around the cargo bays, waited until we were in a bad position to pursue, and took off. One of those little symmetric ships with the funny engine pods. Quite a high thrust to weight ratio.
"We've been had, commander, my fault. Please warn Congress that she's coming."
"Roger, Skipper, fooled us all."
"Everyone else is allowed to be fooled, commander, not me."
Bass is back on line. "Course and speed suggest it's heading toward the star to jump."
Shelby is incredulous. "That little ship, going to jump?"
"Affirmative sir, no other reasonable options along their flight path."
I break in. "Shelby, relay to Summerlin, do not intercept, observe and report, every instrument they have, and anything else they can think of."
"Roger, Skipper. Going to comm now."
I try to find it with my mark one eyeballs, but it's too far out, so I let the Marines help me into the ruins below and try not to dwell on another failure.
Aside from some floating garbage, the command cabin is in remarkably good shape. No real damage to the control panels or couches that I can see, human beings strapped into four of the couches, frozen completely white but otherwise undamaged.
I float around for a minute, check that the Marines are their usual skillful selves and are documenting every square inch, then float over to the nearest body. Don't recognize him, but he's definitely a he.
"Mr. Palmer, gender of the bodies?"
"All male, sir, and they all appear to have the same marks on their heads as the dead women from Trump."
"Copy that. Anything else I need to know right away?"
"Nothing unusual besides that. We estimate that four more people were strapped in recently and are now gone. Other couches show no signs of use."
"Thank you. You have 90 minutes to finish up in here. Get with 1st Squad and let them know they need to be docked within that time frame as well. Yorktown is wheels up in 120."
"That should be plenty of time sir."
I find my two Ensigns, McAdams busy with the computer, Marcos trying to help.
"You two understand that the Marines will download and/or bring the storage devices back with them?"
"Aye, Skipper, just curious." McAdams says it, Marcos stays quiet.
"Find anything?"
"Barely, sir. Every camera and recorder on board was disabled, we'll have very limited data to work with. But we did find this." She touches a playback key on the console in front of what would be the captain's couch on my ship.
It sounds like a cat being strangled in a bee hive with a banjo. Maybe five seconds, then the cat must have expired. I don't say anything, I just give her my best why did I have to listen to that look.
"It's a voice message, they transmitted that before they left. I think it's an encrypted analog message."
"Analog encryption. Analog. How many centuries has it been since we generated analog signals between ships? Three? Four?"
"Yes, sir. I'm betting it's serious encryption, maybe beyond what our computers can handle. When I figure out the algorithm, I'm going to be the richest ensign in the history of the Navy."
Gets a laugh out of me.
"Ok, if that's it, you two have 60 minutes more to play tourist. Get out of the Marines' way long before they need you to be. Understood?"
"Aye, Skipper." Both of them that time.
"Sergeant Yeager, let's go home."
We're back on Yorktown 15 minutes later, still more than an hour til the Marines are due back. Shelby reports that 1st Squad has large pieces of the hull, but very little identifiable remains from the weapons. Not unexpected, McAdams is a good shot and the guns were her targets.
"Mr. Garcia, plot a course to Gamma Omicron 6, two gees max, no more than 20 hours thrust outbound."
"Aye, sir, course to planet 6." She sounds a little tired as she says it.
"Shelby, let's go apologize to Lt. Powell, and see where we are."
Together we float down the corridor to engineering, greeted there by a tired looking Emily Powell, I'd estimate four days of hair growth on her head.
"Lieutenant, what damage did I do this time?"
She laughs. "None sir, we're good to go, you cut back in plenty of time. We need to get the D.C. party outside and patch the hull, otherwise, every part of her that was working before the fight is working now, except for cannon number 10, and it will be back on line in about 30 hours. The LS is a piece of junk now though, no chance we can repair."
In other words, we were incredibly lucky.
"We're about to do another long accel, but once we're in freefall, get some rack time, get some personal time, make sure everybody on your crew does the same. If there are more of those monsters in our way, I need you rested and ready."
"Aye, sir." I don't think she's going to take a break, but I will monitor. Might have to order it at some point. The two days in freefall maybe.
Shelby and I float back down to the bridge and monitor the return of our expeditions. The two Ensigns get back as scheduled, then 1st Squad back onto the boat deck, and lastly the main Marine force and their ZR-1.
We're back in our couches living in the world of two gees shortly thereafter, but only for a day, then it's a freefall and a chance to go through all the samples and data we've added to our toy box.
The hull pieces are the most interesting to me. We left all the big pieces, and flew away with a container full of pieces no more than two foot square. The coating is less than a half inch thick, highly reflective, and strong. We don't have the equipment on board to really test it, except that Dr. I'm An Amateur Physicist thinks he can tell us something using his medical gear. We'll see.
Otherwise, we learn nothing from the data files that we didn't already know, course, speed, other ship data, all of which we saw from our end. No internal sensors, no video, no audio other than the dead cat, no communications records, nothing. What were they worried about us seeing? Maybe ex-military and we'd ID them through facial recognition? Don't know.
Second day out and Congress catches up to us, Packard safely jumped back to Earth. Just because we're bored, I get the command crew together to watch the video of the enemy craft in my ready room.
The double pointy craft comes sailing in, making dozens of minor thruster fires and rotations on its pods, and then jumps out to wherever they are going. There's no way we know to follow or track a jumped ship, there are an infinite number of possible vectors. But there's something wrong. I've seen hundreds, maybe thousands of jumps in my life, and something is bothering me about this one.
Then it hits me. It must have hit McAdams too, because she starts.
"Skipper...."
"I see it too Courtney, can we call up the nav data on that ship."
"Already on my pad, sir."
Everyone is staring at us, they should see it, especially Garcia, but maybe we're wrong. I'd actually be happier if we were wrong.
"Put it on the screen, Ensign, when you can." It flashes up immediately, course and speed of the ship, power consumption from the drive, all the data we have.
"Frak. Speculation RISTA? Why?"
"Don't know, Skipper, really unexpected."
Everybody else is looking at us, too polite to interrupt until Shelby can't take it any more.
"Yorktown to Captain Krieger, your crew is lost."
"Sorry, don't you see it?" I pause. "Double sorry, didn't mean for that to come out that way, it's just so bizarre."
Garcia breaks the
ice by doing her best impression of jumping up in zero gee, she almost starts to spin and Ayala grabs her to keep it from happening while she yells at the screen.
"It's a T jump! Good Lord, it's a T jump!" So we're up to three of us. By her second exclamation, all the other light bulbs are on too.
Summerlin says what we are all thinking. "Why would someone use a technology that was out of date 200 years ago? A Tereshkova Jump. That's like finding a living dinosaur."
The other side of my brain clicks into gear. "It does do one thing for us though, doesn't it. They jumped 40 light years or less. Mr. Garcia, you and Mr. McAdams make me a list of every star system within jump range."
Garcia doesn't blink. "Only two sir, Gamma Theta, and Gamma Rho. There aren't a lot of stars in this neighborhood. I'd bet on Theta sir, since that's where the ship came from in the first place. Rho has no planetary bodies of any size, only scattered rocks, nothing useful."
"Roger that. Where can they go from Theta?" I try to visualize this sector in my head.
"That I don't know, Skipper, give me an hour. Certainly to Nu and Upsilon. The pattern of ship disappearances makes more sense now, doesn't it."
"Except why, after you capture ships with CT drives, you would still make T jumps?"
"You've got me there, sir."
"Ok, everybody, research time, on your way. Fill in whatever pieces you can to the puzzle. Lt. Powell, wait a second."
Everybody leaves, lost in small group conversations. Shelby and I corral Powell, head clean shaven now, a good sign. The boat deck crew, pretending to the damage control party, is outside the ship patching the holes in the hull. She tells us they are almost done, nothing unusual, and cannon number 10 is back on line. I should be happy, but my brain hurts.
Chapter 7
From the outside, the processing station at Gamma Omicron 6 looks just like it's pictures, a large globe, bigger than a ship, rough metal exterior without any need for spit and polish. It's in high orbit around the planet where the actual mining occurs, but the ore is transported up for finishing. Seems rather inefficient to me, you'd want to process on the planet to minimize the weight you transport to orbit, but I assume whoever designed this had a reason, maybe zero gee alloys.
I am also sure there's nothing of interest inside, but I decide to go with the Marines anyway to make Shelby spend more time in command.
I keep her happy by riding over with them in the assault ship, instead of taking my own. Yeager is happy to be with his fellow jarheads, so two happy birds with one stone.
My psychic powers must be getting weak. The inside of the station is full of equipment we've never seen before, it literally takes us more than an hour to figure out it's a two machines not one and what they do. The first one is making mirrors for 41.22 inch laser cannons. We get a supply of fresh parts sufficient to make three of them and pack them off to analyze. The second makes the coating on the ships. Plastic 50 gallon barrels that are supposed to be various mining things are full of unidentifiable substances. We pack them off too, and photograph everything. They also find a couple intact hard drives in the station control systems, bag them up for McAdams.
Four hours later, we're docking back on Yorktown, and I find myself floating in the storage space on deck four, deciding which way to turn. My fingers go to the transmit button on my collar.
"Maria, your course, your acceleration not to exceed two gees, your timing. Check with Lt. Palmer everything stowed before executing. Take us home."
"Course to jump point, aye. Thirty minutes to acceleration." There is an audible note in her voice, equal parts happiness and plain bone weary.
She chooses constant acceleration, no free fall time except when the captain's bladder is full. Half the crew loves her, half can't stand her, but I know they will all love her once we make the jump.
During the final break McAdams floats over to my couch as I am trying to get strapped back in, her pad in her hand. She messages something to mine, it gives it's happy beep.
"We programmed the computers two weeks ago to search through the records of Yorktown's construction. We identified three names, one of whom has to be the saboteur. They're listed in that file, with the probability the computer assigned to each and the relevant source data potentially implicating the equipment suppliers are well."
I look at her, stunned. She starts talking again. "Only a fool would try to search and correlate 1.3 million records by hand when they have the most powerful Naval computers ever built within reach, computers that sit idle most of the time." She pauses and looks me in the eye. "Sir."
I give her my best wry smile. "Thank you Ensign."
"No, thank you sir. This has been the greatest month of my life, and I know you didn't have to pick me, you had your choice of anybody."
"Courtney, you did a remarkable job. I can't imagine anyone having done better." I give her a dramatic pause. "But, don't let it go to your head."
Now it's her turn to laugh. "No sir." Acceleration warnings sound, and she floats quickly back to strap herself in. Three hours later, we're within jump range of the star.
"Mr. Garcia, engines to standby."
"Engines to standby, aye." The acceleration disappears, our obvious speed toward a hot sun does not. We are 120 seconds from jumping, I estimate 420 from dying. I'd say that everyone suddenly was floating a little straighter, but I don't know how that's possible.
"Engineering?"
"We're go, Skipper." Powell answers, via intercom.
"Mr. Powell, jump engines to standby." A pause.
"Jump engines one through four report ready."
"Mr. Garcia, set jump coordinates."
"Coordinates set."
"Mr. Grich?" Petty Officer, Garcia's fifth, making his first jump in the co-pilot's seat.
"Coordinates confirmed." Good strong response for a first time.
"Mr. Ayala?"
"Coordinates confirmed."
"Mr. Perez?"
"Coordinates confirmed. Recommend we proceed."
"Mr. Garcia, jump authorized."
"Aye, sir, jump authorized."
I enter my authorization code into the nav computer and press enter. Green lights go on. Each Union star system has a designated parking zone near the station to set as it's jump coordinates. In theory, especially when you know you are the only jump capable ship in the system, it should prevent collisions, though on rare occasions a ship cuts the line at a busy terminal by jumping illegally into the space of a distant system they are sure will be empty. If all goes well, we'll be alone in our grid, 300 clicks off Armstrong Station in few seconds.
"One minute," Garcia keeps to the script, "Systems nominal."
"Twenty seconds, jump fields up." Garcia makes one last confirmation of the panel. Camera screens go black.
"Ten seconds.... Five.... Jump....."
"Jump complete."
The fields drop automatically, and everybody gets to work, the giant bulk of the two mile long station visible in our screens, backed by the blue planet below. Never looked that beautiful before. Congress and the ZR detach and putter off to the other side of the planet, destination the corvette docking area on Shepard Station, another of the four Navy bases in orbit around Earth. We'll dump the remains of the LS when we're closer. Shelby breaks the quiet, the First Officer talks for the ship on its way in, checking with station traffic control for course and docking instructions which leaves the captain free to make sure we don't ram something.
"Armstrong Station, Yorktown, request approach and docking clearance." It's shockingly fast back to us, they're usually out to lunch and you catch them between bites.
"Welcome home Yorktown. Follow Bravo to Echo One, cleared to dock, Bay 4."
"Bravo to Echo One, Bay 4. Yorktown moving," Shelby clicks off, continues to monitor, but plays with her console to change the active frequency. The codes we got are invisible lines in the space around the station, you follow them to get you to where you are going without denting your ship al
ong the way. Bay 4 is directly below where this adventure started, a much bigger dock that Yorktown had before. Maybe it's all they had open.
Shelby makes her second call as Garcia nudges the ship forward to pick up the approach vectors. I watch for course deviations on my screen, but there aren't any.
"NAVCOMM, this is Yorktown, checking in." That's the Naval communications center. Earth is our center of operations. They might want to know we're home.
Yorktown: Katana Krieger #1 Page 12