“I’ll let you know when the first shift is over, but you can bet your ass that it’s not going to happen before this ship can participate in a fight. From where I sit, that looks like it’ll probably take longer than eight hours, so I suggest you get a move on.”
***
An eternity—or perhaps it just seemed that way to her—later, the foreman was back on the bridge.
Dark circles had formed under his eyes. “Nothing works.”
“That’s not what I want to hear,” Melina told him. But the edge was gone from her voice. After his initial resistance, the man had proved to be an incredible asset. He seemed to be in ten places at once, chivvying, cajoling and, when necessary, bullying his people to do what needed to be done.
And she’d also remembered that, like everyone else on the vessel, everyone in the fleet, the man was a volunteer.
He sighed. “But it’s what you need to hear. Every sensor antenna is worn to a nubbin. We have only one EVA suit, which we cobbled together from the two dozen we were supposed to have. Even the wiring is worn out. There’s something really, really wrong with this ship.”
“Do you think we were attacked?”
He hesitated. “No… I don’t, actually. Other than the impact damage to the crew quarters, there’s no other sign of major violence. If I had to guess, I’d say that the ship was built wrong. There’s no way it should be looking like this after this flight. Four hundred years? It should be able to do that trip fifty times before even starting to look this way.”
Was it possible? Could someone be selling the substandard military equipment to make a quick profit in the middle of a fight for humanity’s survival? Or had the shipyards been infiltrated and sabotaged? Both possibilities made her stomach churn.
“So, is there any good news?”
“We should have forward-looking sensors up and running in about five minutes.”
“Thank you.” She hesitated for a second. “What’s your name, anyway? I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I should have asked.”
“I’m Frederic. Just call me Fred.”
“Melina.” She held out her hand and the man shook it.
“Ready, chief.” The voice came from below the console in the center of the bridge. “Try it now.”
Fred walked over to the console as one of his techs emerged. He hit the biggest button and it came to life. “That’s probably the only piece of delicate electronics working on this ship, Commander. Please take care of it.”
Melina sat on the chair in front of the console. It groaned and swayed alarmingly, but held. She began entering commands into the holographic space above the console, calling up views and high-res imagery.
She called back to the other pilots who’d been trickling up from the fighter levels. “Does anyone remember their Fleet Instruments classes? I’m way too old for this.”
A couple of the pilots stood behind her and began to point at the commands she needed before Xsu finally lost patience.
“Maybe it might be best if I took over, Commander.”
“Good idea, although you’ll need to be careful with that chair.”
He sat down gingerly and the display began to dance. “What am I looking for?”
“Whatever you can find. Enemy fleet formations, electromagnetic signatures. Any radiation not coming from the star, basically. Also, planets. Tell me where we are.”
The foreman stepped forward. “You only have passive capabilities. We don’t have any of the active systems running yet.”
“That’s all right. We can’t use the active systems anyway. We want to see them before they see us… and the active systems are extremely easy to detect. They’re great for looking through planets, but terrible for hiding. We’re definitely trying to hide right now, at least until you give me some guns to play with.”
“I’d feel much better about that if the Lapland didn’t have all its lights blazing.”
Xsu held up a hand. “All right. Two planets on this side of the star. One is an ice giant with a boatload of moons, the other is much further in and seems to be a superearth type. Emissions coming from at least three of the giant’s moons and also from the inner planet and its moon. There’s definitely something here.”
Melina turned to Fred. “Can I add another task to your list of priorities?”
The man sighed. “How? You’ve already got us working on everything at once.”
“I need you to get the recorders up and running, and some of the processing and translation mainframes. I want to see if we can run these signals through them and find out if they correspond to standard blob military frequencies, or if we’re seeing something else. Our intel is four hundred years old. God only knows if someone else might have hit this system while we were in transit. It might be the Brillans sitting there waiting for us. Hell, it might be a human fleet no one told us about or even the Uploaders. I need to know what we’re heading into.”
The man looked nervous when Melina mentioned the Uploaders. They were another faction in the four-way war; sometimes a friend and sometimes a foe. They were the only ones that had once been human, until they decided to abandon their bodies and live in a simulated world. It was a strange thing: tens of thousands of people had volunteered for this mission, knowing that they were going to an almost certain death in the frozen wastes of space, but mention the possibility of having your mind forcibly transferred to a giant computer and they turned very quiet.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to get navigation up and running next?”
“Who needs navigation? All I need to do is to avoid running into any planets or the star. I can navigate manually. Recorders first. And if a fleet appears anywhere, I’ll fly at that and shoot it with the weapons you’ll have repaired for me.” She turned back to Xsu. “Any sign of a fleet?”
“No. The only radiation is coming from the sources I mentioned. Unless they knew we were coming and hid behind some massive body, there are no other ships in this system.”
“That’s the first piece of good news I’ve heard all day. If any of our generals or admirals survived, they’ll be delighted to hear it.”
Chapter 3
The bridge of the flagship wasn’t designed to give the general staff a direct look at space through a glass dome. This room was an armored and radiation-hardened bunker buried deep within the bowels of the vessel.
The flagship itself wasn’t really a ship, either. Although it sported the name Heavy Gunship IV, it was actually a mobile battle station designed to sit at the vanguard of any action and to draw fire away from less well-armored troop transports and fighter carriers.
In consequence, it was only after the electronic viewscreens had been put back online that the bridge began to fill up with people.
Lieutenant Ian Centauri Perez knew he’d only been invited because the two people above him on the Recon staff had failed to survive the trip. Though he would have preferred to have every able-bodied person available to fight the enemy, he didn’t really mourn his superiors too much. His wing commander and her own superior had both been humorless harridans. He suspected that his unit, which had been signed up wholesale, was one of the few consisting of troops who hadn’t volunteered to be there.
And now, he’d been field promoted to CO, and the issues that were inevitably going to come up were his to deal with. Great. Those two shrews hadn’t even had the decency to die at a convenient time.
At least the admiral seemed to be discussing high-level stuff with the upper command of the fighter wings and ground troops, and they probably wouldn’t need him to participate much.
“So the fleet is completely out of formation, but mostly accounted for?” the admiral asked. He was an old man, balding and liver-spotted, who looked like he’d volunteered because being killed in a suicide mission would likely only shorten his life by a few minutes.
“Yes, sir. Only the Troubadour is missing.”
“That’s twelve thousand troops less than we set out with. And I suppose
we still haven’t got an accurate count of how many troops didn’t make it out of stasis on the Minstrel and Bard.”
“Not yet, sir. They’re still counting. The good news is that they overestimated the dead in the first reports. Seems like a lot of troops were alive, but caught behind sealed doors. They’re finding more and more able-bodied soldiers as they get their systems back online.”
The admiral nodded. “All right. How about the fighter wings?”
“Dart and Centauri’s Courage report that their fighters need extensive repairs. They estimate that in the best of cases, they can build a single fighter with the parts from four others. They want the factory to build them more.” The aide giving the report paused, checked with a small man seated beside him with headphones on, and continued. “We still haven’t been able to reach the Ismala, but they’re probably all right. They’ve got their engines up and running and have closed formation with the Lapland.”
“Well, somebody is looking alive at least. They’re the only ship in the fleet that has engines right now.”
“Banshee says that they should have power to the drive pretty soon, maybe in a couple more hours, and the captain wants to know if he has permission to range ahead once the engines are up.”
“No. Not yet. I know she’s our scout ship, but I don’t want him to move out until he has his cloaking working. Without that, it’s better to do the scouting with a ship that can defend itself.”
The aide relayed the order as the admiral turned his attention to the other side of the room where a knot of senior officers was conversing. “So, what’s the plan?”
The general in command of the fleet’s complement of ground troops responded. “We think the best idea is to go after the two moons on the ice giant which have been emitting radiation. There’s a couple of reasons for this: the first is that I don’t want to leave anyone behind me, not even automated systems. The second reason has to do with securing resources for the Lapland. From what I hear, they’re going to need a lot of raw materials for the nanofactories to repair our ships and suits, and the giant and its moons are a good place to get them: they’re on our way and probably less heavily defended than the inner system.”
“I like it, plus they’ll probably be less well-defended than places further in. Do we have enough working suits to take both of those moon-based installations?”
“No. We’re planning to disable one from the air and only send ground troops to take the other.”
The admiral nodded. “Good. When do we start?”
“Whenever the fleet can move and we have enough suits and fighters.”
“Okay. I’ll keep you posted on the repairs.” He turned to another aide. “Any sign of the enemy fleet?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. We got here before them. The spies weren’t sure, but they did say that they thought we might have a few days’ window before the blobs arrived, based on their departure date and the speed we’d seen from their ships. We were lucky there.” He stood straight and surveyed his audience.
Ian knew the admiral was now speaking for the benefit of everyone in the room. He leaned forward to listen. “I know that each and every one of you signed up for this mission in the expectation that it would be a suicide job.”
Not me, thought Ian. I was press-ganged.
The admiral continued. “But for once, luck seems to be with us. Maybe, if we can remove their ground support and hit them by surprise, we just might be able to destroy the enemy fleet.”
“It’s ten times bigger than ours, sir,” someone pointed out from the shadows in the back.
“True,” the admiral responded, unfazed. “But they think they’re arriving at a staging position that’s secure. As far as we know, they’re unaware that we can send spy probes through space folds and get information about their movements faster than light—or at least when they left, they weren’t aware of that. The enemy definitely won’t be expecting us to be here before them—all the warning they’ll get will be whatever time they have from the moment any message sent from here reaches them and the time they arrive. With luck, they’ll all be in stasis, and no one will read the info until it’s much too late.”
“Still a pretty tall order.”
“That’s what you signed up for. To give your life to buy the people of Tau Ceti a little more time.”
“They’ve had four hundred years. How much more time do they need?”
“Well, as much as we can give them, plus any damage we can do to the blob’s fleet. Reinforcements scrambled from all over, and retreating fleets have been diverted to Tau… but some of them will take another ten years to get there, some of them a hundred.”
“Sounds like Tau is pretty much screwed.”
Silence met this pronouncement. Even the guy who spoke seemed uncomfortable with what he’d said.
The admiral sighed. “I hope not. Tau Ceti is the last stand before the enemy reaches Earth. Even a slow fleet can cross that gap in forty years. If we lose Tau, we’ll have to bring everything back in to defend the Motherworld.” He slapped a hand against a console. “We have to hold Tau, no matter what the cost.”
The talk made Ian dizzy. How anyone could plan a war in which the battles happened hundreds of years after they’d been planned, and it was nearly impossible to communicate with the commanders once they set off, was beyond him. What if peace was declared, but the commanders didn’t know? Entire systems might be destroyed, millions killed before word reached them that the war was over.
Of course, from what he’d gleaned listening to the admiral, it seemed that mankind now had access to some kind of fold technology which allowed electronics to move through space more efficiently… but how many of them were there? And how reliable? They’d all heard of the research being done, and dreamed of putting fleets wherever they wanted to instantly. That would change the course of the war, obviously. You could attack unprotected systems while the enemy fleets were in transit.
He was glad he didn’t have to coordinate any of it. If it was up to him, he’d probably just order the entire fleet to find a nice empty system with a nice empty planet to colonize, turn off all its electronics, and hide from the galaxy until it all blew over.
The admiral was still speaking. “If we manage to inflict significant damage here, even if we all die doing it, it might mean the difference between Tau’s defenses holding against this fleet or not holding. It might be the difference between Tau being reinforced before the enemy can send another fleet in its direction and Tau falling. That’s why we’re here.”
He pointed at the screen, empty of markers denoting enemy ships. “And we’ve been lucky so far. The installations here are undefended from space. We know the blobs are always tough to kill on the ground, but if worse comes to worst, we’ll hit them from orbit. At minimum, that should make it tough for them to refit and refuel.” He let them think about it a few minutes. “We have had a very lucky break, and now it’s time for us to take utmost advantage of it.”
Heads nodded around the table.
“Who’s in charge of Recon?”
Ian started, but tried to cover his surprise. “I am, sir.”
“Maintenance tells me they have one of your flyers ready for action. It’s the only space-worthy smallcraft in the fleet, which means that you just got volunteered for some flying.”
“Yes, sir.” But his mood darkened. He felt that he was getting volunteered for stuff more often than he would have preferred.
“We need someone to fly out to the Ismala and see what their status is. Can you get there?”
“In a Recon Flyer? Of course.”
“Good. Tina here will… where’s Tina?”
“Over here, sir.”
“Don’t hide from me like that.” He shook his head in anger. “As I was saying, Tina will get you down to the hangar. She can get you anything you need from the maintenance crew. If she doesn’t, let me know about it and I’ll have her tossed out of an airlock or something.”
“The old man sure was hard on you.”
“Well, someone needs to run messages. I guess he just wants me to understand how important this job is.”
“I’m sure there are other ways of doing so.”
“Possibly. Come this way. The lifts are still out of order, and we don’t have time for the main stairs.”
She led him into a small service corridor which alternated short drops via pole from level to level with metal rungs set into the walls.
“Going down seems easy enough, but I’d hate to have to come up this way.”
“It can be a pain,” she replied. And then maintained a stubborn silence all the way to the hangar.
“Here you go. The maintenance people don’t like me, but the admiral’s probably told them to give you anything you need. Still, I’d better come with you just in case.”
“Seems like the admiral’s message got through to you. You’re treating this as an important task.”
“Hell, I think everyone here knows how important everything we do is, even the small stuff. Why volunteer if you didn’t?”
“What makes you think I volunteered?”
“Because the only people who were forced to come along were the crew of the factory ship. And they were only obligated because they have expertise which the fleet couldn’t get elsewhere. Nanotechnicians don’t exactly grow on trees.”
“That’s not quite right. My entire unit was volunteered by our CO. No one asked us whether we wanted to come.”
“What? That’s impossible.”
“Not particularly. I’m here, and I most definitely didn’t volunteer for this. I had a wife and child, who are both probably dead hundreds of years ago now. We were told that not coming meant court martial, and that the whole concept of everyone volunteering was just something the military was saying to keep the civilian population from panicking. I only found out that the volunteers were real when I woke up here.”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 3