by Tony Healey
A lot of different puzzle pieces that when whole made something called JESSICA KING moved toward one another. They connected. They became one thing, one being, one mind.
“Now it is your turn to do as much as you can with the time you have …”
His words, again, in the darkness.
” … with the time you have …”
She opened her eyes. “With the time you have,” she said.
14.
The bridge lay in darkness save for sparse pools of emergency lighting that fell in misty bars from the ceiling. Every console was dark. The front viewscreen dead. But the Defiant was in one piece. That much she was sure of.
Jessica tried to move. Her whole body felt as though it’d been beaten with a very hard stick. She groaned as she shifted in the captain’s chair. The rest of the crew were stirring now too. Lieutenant Banks lifted his head from the helm console, wiped drool from the side of his mouth. They all looked about, dazed and wide-eyed with disbelief. Jessica cleared her throat. “Everyone okay?”
They each reported back to her in turn, mostly in grunts and murmurs to let her know they were all still alive.
“Chang … patch into the emergency power grid. Get a status report from all departments. Injuries, death toll, damage to critical systems, the works,” King said groggily.
Chang nodded, said “Aye” and set to work, albeit slowly. She got down from her chair, and removed the panel beneath her console. It would take her a little bit of time to locate the emergency power, but once she had her station rerouted they’d at least know how the rest of the ship was feeling.
“What the bloody hell happened?” Commander Greene asked aloud. He rubbed the ball of his hand into his forehead, as if it were going to cave in.
“Did we go through the black hole, sir?” Ensign Rayne asked her.
King shrugged. “Olivia, your guess is as good as mine. Whatever happened, we’re obviously still alive.” She unclipped the safety harness around her waist and got up, stretched. She walked around the bridge slowly, easing the knots from her legs and the bottom of her back. “Ensign Boi, contact engineering,” she said.
Boi tried his panel. “No power, sir. Shall I access emergency power too?”
“No. I don’t want to overload it,” she said. She turned to Greene, “Commander, get to engineering for me and assist the Chief in getting us some power. Tell her that control and thrust are her priorities. Other functions will have to wait. We need to be able to move about and see where we’re going.”
He nodded, got up and left the bridge. The deck plating in the corridor clanged under his feet. That was how quiet and lifeless the Defiant was at that moment. A seemingly hollow shell with ants scurrying under its skin.
“I’ve made contact. It’s going to take a few minutes for department heads to assess, sir,” Chang said. She held an earpiece up to her ear with one hand and worked the controls at her station with the other.
“Okay. Everyone else, in the meantime let’s huddle together and try to come up with a game plan,” King said.
Ensign Boi, Ensign Rayne and Lieutenant Banks formed a group around the Captain. She leaned back against a lifeless console, her arms crossed and looked from one to the other. “It’s been a hell of a day, hasn’t it?”
“Could say that,” Banks said.
“But we’re still here. We’re still alive and kicking. We’re survivors, and we will survive this I promise you all.”
“What about the Draxx ship? What about Sepix? He has to be out here too …” Rayne said.
King nodded in agreement. “True. All the more reason to give this ship her heartbeat back, as quickly as possible.”
“You say here,” Ensign Boi said to Rayne, “But we don’t even know where here is.”
“Good point,” King said. “As soon as we have power, we must stabilise the ship. She’s no doubt adrift. Then I want you two to work together to ascertain our position. Our last location was the Koenig-Prime system … perhaps work from there.”
They both nodded.
“And if Sepix is floating around nearby?” Banks asked her.
King blew a puff of air. It made her fringe fluff up momentarily.
“I can’t answer that. I hope he’s not. I hope he was destroyed. But I can’t go on hope alone. Chances are he pulled through with us. So I think once we have the ship back under some degree of control, we must work on our weapons system. They’ll be down from the power outage, and I have a feeling we’ll need them,” King said.
The notion suddenly struck her of the Defiant, utterly defenceless and vulnerable to Draxx attack. The Defiant, afloat, with Sepix aiming his guns at her.
She didn’t share her fears with the crew. She knew they were probably thinking the same thing. With the power out for who-knew-how-long, the battery guns would take time to charge enough to fire. The firing tubes were damaged anyway from the fire and resultant explosion beforehand. There were only a handful of them still functioning.
The Defiant was pretty much a sitting duck.
This day goes from bad to worse, King thought.
* * *
Prince Sepix drank green fluid from a flask on his hip. The swamp water dribbled down the sides of his mouth and he wiped it away.
“Report!” he shouted. The Inflictor was without power. All systems were down apart from the photovoltaic cells embedded in the walls and ceilings, and the organic rebreathers that recycled the atmosphere, albeit with a sulphur taint.
His first officer looked about in confusion. “I do not know …”
Sepix strode forward, grabbed him by the throat, and lifted him from his seat. He pinned him up against the wall and squeezed until the officer gasped for breath.
“Then find out before I make you an entree for my Grivnak!” he shouted. He threw him to one side.
The Prince stood several feet higher than the other Draxx on board the Inflictor. It was his royal stock. His purity. He was superior in strength and intelligence, attributes that had served him well in convincing the Queen to grant him control of the entire Draxx fleet.
The crew scurried to get the ship operational again.
“He will be the entree and the rest of you the main course!” he yelled at them all.
Sepix formed a fist. It closed around an imaginary Defiant. In his mind’s eye he saw the other ship spinning on its axis in space like a revolving target.
He broke into a wide grin, full of pointy teeth. “We will crush them …”
* * *
Commander Greene helped Chief Gunn organise the repair teams. Something had happened to the ship when it went through the black hole. Whatever that something was, it had deactivated the reactor entirely. Even a cold start was out of the question.
“We don’t have anything to cold start the bloody thing with!” Gunn answered Greene when he asked.
He held up his hands in defence. “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Greene said.
Gunn wasted little time in ordering him about, and he was happy to help.
Now, with his assistance, they were making headway.
“Bypass that system, we don’t need it,” the Chief ordered a young Ensign, who nodded and did as she was told. She turned to another member of engineering. “You! Don’t put that there. Like I said, divert that to section G.”
“Yes Chief,” he said.
Greene watched what was going on with a look of mild amusement on his face. He couldn’t help it. The Chief caught him looking. “What are you smiling about?”
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
She huffed, irritated as she worked to reroute the auxiliary power controllers to the engine buffers. “Don’t mess me about, Del.”
“Just the way you organise things down here,” Commander Greene said. “It’s like a regime …”
“It has to be. It’s my regime,” she said defensively. “It’s why it works.”
All of a sudden there was the unmistakable sound of the engines humming in
to life, power finally flowing through them. The reactor started to tick over. “Aaaah,” Greene said.
“Method to the madness, Commander. Method to the madness,” Chief Gunn said with a wink.
* * *
Every station came back to life around her. King heard the comm. unit crackle into life followed by the sound of the Chief’s proud voice.
“Nominal power to engines, sir. Twenty-five percent,” Chief Gunn said. “And you should find that life support, inter-ship comms and short-range sensors should now be operational.”
King couldn’t stop herself from breaking into a big grin. “Thanks Chief. You’ve all done great. Please continue to make your repairs.”
“Aye Captain,” Gunn said.
“There she is,” Chang said, nodding toward the viewscreen as the camera cycled to show the surrounding space in all directions. It was an aft view, from the stern. The first thing they’d seen when the screen reappeared was empty space, followed by a huge blue nebula to the right hand side of them. King had hoped, naively, that the Inflictor hadn’t made it through. But it had. It was there, on the aft camera.
“Lieutenant Banks, please stabilise the Defiant. Fire up the engines, twenty-percent thrust. Get us away from that Draxx ship,” she ordered. She sat in the captain’s chair. On the front viewscreen the Inflictor spun, a darkened goliath.
“Aye sir,” Banks said. He keyed the controls, piloted them out into open space.
“Chang, monitor that ship for any activity,” King said. She looked across at Rayne and Boi, hard at work trying to figure out where in the hell they were.
“Reports are coming back in, Captain,” Chang said. “Three hundred confirmed from our crew of five hundred. I can only assume that …”
“It’s okay, Lieutenant. I’ll see the full report later for myself,” King said.
Chang nodded and got back on with her work. King looked after her sympathetically but decided that it wouldn’t do to have the others see her concern.
Sure, they’d left people behind. And the ship had suffered heavy losses. But there was nothing she could do about it now.
King was starting to realise the curse of the Captain’s pin she wore on her breast pocket. “Do we have enough power for the hull plating?” she asked aloud.
Banks turned around. “Not by the looks of it. Not yet.”
Helpless. No way of defending itself apart from running away. It went against everything Singh had ever taught her. He’d always said, “Never back down because you feel you have to. Only do so because you’re unable to do anything else. There’s always an answer to any impossible problem, even if it means bruising your own pride.” In this situation there really was nothing else they could do but run. Or try to run. Do something to gain an upper hand on the inevitable. King knew that the Inflictor would probably regain power shortly. And she knew they wouldn’t be too far away when it did.
But I’m buying us time, she thought. And we need every second.
15.
“Any luck you two in figuring out where the hell we are?” King asked Ensign Boi and Ensign Rayne.
“Not at present sir,” Ensign Rayne said. “Nothing matches any of the star charts on file.”
King swallowed. “Okay. So now what?”
They both looked at each other. “We’ll try a few different things, see what we come up with,” Boi said.
King nodded, looked away in thought. If nothing matched the star charts then they really were lost. When they had time, she would have the ships logs checked so that they could get a feel for what had happened exactly when they went through the black hole. It went against every scientific principle to survive such a thing. But here they were. Lost.
She turned back to them. “You’re not detecting any signs of a singularity nearby?”
Ensign Boi shook his head. “Negative.”
King looked ahead. The Draxx ship was receding into the distance, although she knew that meant diddlysquat. When the dragon woke they’d soon feel its fire at their tail.
“Captain, I am detecting sensor pings. If I’m not mistaken, the Inflictor is getting a bearing on us,” Chang said.
Banks shook his head. “But it’s dead in the water …”
King buckled herself in, her face a frozen slab of ice. “Everybody, battle stations.”
“Captain -” Banks went to say.
“Don’t you get it, Lieutenant? They want you to believe they’re still without power. Hence the stealth pings,” she explained.
“Right,” Banks said in agreement.
The dragon’s sleeping with its eyes half-open, King thought.
She jabbed the comm. panel. “Chief, we need that hull plating …”
“We’re going as fast as we can, Captain,” Gunn said.
* * *
Sepix smiled. The Defiant limped away like a wounded Grivnak. It gave him pleasure to see the human scum try to run for their lives. That was all they had done since their first meeting. Run.
Now he would bring an end to the chase. His crew had no idea where the singularity had spat them out, but it was of no matter. The Draxx Dominion would do what it did best, wherever it was.
Dominate.
He, Prince Sepix, heir to the throne of the Draxx Dominion, would see to it that his people had a foothold wherever they found themselves. “Lock on weapons,” he ordered.
He was reminded of his people’s motto: Dominate the Weak. Destroy the Strong.
“Maintain stealth status,” he said. “And when I give the word, open fire.”
* * *
“They are locking weapons,” Lieutenant Chang said.
“Banks, I want you to push the engines to fifty percent,” King ordered with a grimace.
“I’ll try,” Banks said. He brought the Defiant’s engines to thirty-five percent power but could take them no further. “That’s it. All I can get out of her. Thirty-five percent.”
“Keep your heading. Don’t try to out-manoeuvre. Show no sign we’ve detected their lock-on,” King ordered.
“What are we going to do?” Rayne asked her.
The Captain found herself unable to answer.
* * *
“The enemy has increased speed.”
Sepix slammed his fists down on the front console. “Fire!”
The helmsman let loose a burst of warheads. They flared away from the Inflictor on a direct collision course with the Defiant.
Sepix watched in anticipation of the coming explosion, salivating.
* * *
King saw the warheads tear away from the Inflictor. She unbuckled herself and stood, arms straight at her sides in defiance. She didn’t need to tell them all to brace for impact. When the warheads hit they’d blow the Defiant out of the sky. They wouldn’t feel a thing before death swept them away.
Everything would be for nothing …
Bogie on the screen!” Chang reported in shock.
A small fighter appeared on screen, firing streams of energy at the incoming warheads. They erupted like fireworks. Not a single one of them hit. The bridge crew cheered.
King turned on her heel. “Ensign Boi, open a channel.” She sat back down.
“Open, sir,” Boi reported.
She could hear the relief in the boy’s voice.
“This is the Union starship Defiant,” King said.
The line crackled. The pilot of the fighter came in weak and almost inaudible. “Wow am I glad to see you!”
His voice had a distinctly Texan flavour to it. Southern. Jessica’s jaw dropped before she caught herself. “Chang, is that fighter one of ours?” she asked as the fighter shot down another swarm of Draxx warheads. As she watched it on the viewscreen, Jessica realised she knew that ship. It was a variant of the old Zenith-class fighter.
It can’t be, she thought, her stomach churning. It can’t be …
“Head for the nebula,” the pilot said over the comm. “I’ll hold ‘em off ‘til y’all get there.”
Now s
he was sure. There could be no doubt. “Lieutenant Banks, you heard the man. Head for that nebula and give it everything you’ve got,” she ordered.
* * *
Sepix watched as the little ship picked off the last warhead with a burst of fire.
“Target that little ship! NOW!” he roared, furious. A few heartbeats later a single warhead shot toward the fighter. It was set to track and follow it until it caught up.
The small craft ducked and dove, but the warhead stayed on its tail, inching closer and closer.
At first Sepix chuckled.
His expression changed to one of confusion, then surprise as the fighter headed straight for the Inflictor. He cocked his head to one side.
“What is he doing - ?”
The little ship waited till the last minute, then ducked sharp beneath the Inflictor. The warhead slammed directly into the front of her. The huge hull took the full force of the hit. Sepix was thrown backward. The bridge burst into flame. The Inflictor shook as if riding a tectonic plate.
Sepix had time to look up at the viewscreen and see the fighter heading away. Then the viewscreen went blank, overloaded.
He scrambled to his feet, looked around him at the destruction the warhead had done. Now the Inflictor was crippled. The Defiant would be long gone by the time they were operational again. His rage boiled over. He lifted his arms into the air and screamed.
16.
They navigated slowly through the dense blue mist of the nebula. King slapped a hand on Banks’s shoulder.
“You’ve done well today, Lieutenant. I want you to get someone to relieve you and go get some rest. You’ve more than earned it,” she said.
“Thanks Captain,” Banks said. “I’ve got a splitting headache.”
“From the booze or the black hole?” King asked with a wink.
Banks laughed. Rubbed his eye. “Both I think.”
“The pilot of the small fighter is requesting permission to come aboard,” Ensign Boi reported.
King had expected it … and dreaded it. If she was right about the owner of the little ship, then there was a lot of explaining to do. A lot of questions to be asked.