Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  A few minutes after Dave went out through the airlock with the injured Datha and a cadet, Perkins was playing with the new command features of her zPhone, when she found a way to track the lifesigns of everyone aboard. It was also a way to compare the lifesigns against the crew roster, giving her an unwelcome confirmation of how many Ruhar were dead, including all of the adult crew other than Datha. Twenty four Ruhar cadets were also among the dead, including the senior engineering cadet. After giving her a sense of the damage that made her feel sick, the list then made her heart soar. Irene and Derek’s lifesigns were strong! And Nert! The young hamster was doing well except for an elevated heartrate, which was expected under the circumstances. She clicked on the icon for Captain Striebich, and a comm channel opened. “Captain Striebich?”

  “Colonel Perkins! Ohhhhh, it is good to hear from you, Ma’am!” Irene’s voice trembled with relief. “We are in the auxiliary control center, we’re kind of trapped here.”

  “The Ruhar can’t get you out?”

  “We’re alone, Ma’am. There’s vacuum outside the hatch, I think we have a slow leak in here somewhere, my ears have been popping and it’s getting harder to breathe. We have flightsuits and helmets, so we can go on internal oxygen when we have to.”

  “You and Bonsu are alone? Then,” she thought back. The nose of the Toaster had been blown away several minutes before the ship jumped away from the battlespace. “Who jumped the ship?”

  “Uh, that was us, Ma’am. We did the best we could, I don’t think we had a choice at the time. We were tracking two missiles running straight at us, our shields were knocked back and the proximity sensors could barely see anything.”

  “When did the two of you get trained on jump procedures?”

  “We, uh, kinda didn’t,” Perkins heard Derek join the conversation, and Irene put her phone on speaker. “We had to wing it based on training briefs we studied. Ma’am, it was either risk the jump drive blowing up in our faces, or let those missiles kill us for certain. I figured, if the drive coils blew, that would at least confuse enemy sensors for a while, maybe help the star carrier get away.”

  “That was a ballsy call, you two. A good call.”

  “Colonel? The rest of the team?” Irene asked anxiously.

  “They’re all fine. And Nert, he’s fine, too. The Ruhar crew, ah, they’re not so good. The entire crew is dead, except for one badly wounded engineering officer.”

  “All of the crew?” Derek’s tone was shocked. “Oh shit. The cadets are in charge now?”

  “No, Bonsu, I am.”

  “Um, sorry, Ma’am, what did you say?”

  “The injured officer transferred command authority to me.”

  “They can do that? We’re aliens to them,” Derek mused aloud.

  “Apparently they can,” Perkins said without humor. “Right now I’ve got cadets trying to get the reactor restarted, that tells you our situation. We’re dead in the water, and that Bosphuraq battlecruiser might jump our asses before we know it.”

  “Ma’am? I don’t think that’s very likely,” Irene stated hopefully. “We made a bad jump, really dirty because we caught the edge of the damping field, so the resonance of our jump field must have been really chaotic. And the battlespace was full of high-energy particles and spatial distortion. I don’t think that enemy ship could track our jump endpoint, not easily.”

  “Christ, Striebich, that’s the first good news I’ve heard all day! We may be safe because we screwed up the jump?”

  “Colonel, right now, even we have no idea where we jumped to,” Derek admitted. “Until we get the nav system back online, we’re blind. Although,” the wheels in his head began spinning with an idea, “we could launch a dropship, if any of them are still spaceworthy. Their nav gear will fix our position for us.”

  “A dropship’s sensors can establish our position with enough accuracy for us to program a jump?” Perkins asked hopefully, before realizing she had gotten ahead of herself. “Oh, forget it, we can’t jump anyway without the reactors.”

  “That’s not true, Ma’am,” Irene reported, cringing as she looked at Derek who was worried she had gotten their CO’s hopes up for nothing. “The reactors provide juice to the jump drive capacitors, but our capacitor banks still have a seventy two percent charge. We’re good for another jump. Except we don’t know where we are. And the drive control system is offline.”

  “And, we have no idea how to program a jump,” Derek added helpfully. “Sorry, Ma’am.”

  “That’s all right, Bonsu, I sure as hell don’t need people trying to put a good spin on things for me. The two of you will be all right in there for a while?”

  “Affirmative,” Irene replied with her voice sounding distinctly unhappy. “We’re sure you have other priorities.”

  “You got that right. I’ll see if a cadet crew can get you out of there, but we need pilots anyway, and that aux station is the only place the ship can be flown from?”

  “It is,” Irene agreed.

  “Then sit tight. Ah, Striebich, Bonsu? I can’t tell you how good it is to hear you’re both still with us.”

  Perkins had no sooner ended the call when Dave pinged her.

  “Colonel? We have a problem. I think Datha is dead. He’s not responding at all now, and the pulse indicator on his wristpad is reading zero. It could be a glitch, but I shined a light in his faceplate and it looks like he’s not breathing.”

  “Shit.” She clicked the icon for Datha on her phone, and it showed his lifesigns had ceased. “Where are you?”

  “Still outside the ship, about halfway. We had to take a different route, looks like a power relay under the hull blew after you and I went past, it’s arcing real bad.”

  Perkins paused to think, though Cadet Garnor was waving for her attention. “Czajka, keep going. Datha may still be alive and we’ve got to try to save him. Ruhar can go longer without oxygen than we can. And we need you to round up engineering cadets to send back here. Oh, also,” she tried to snap her fingers but the suit gloves muffled the sound. “See if you can find a route back here that stays inside the ship. There must be some passageways that aren’t blocked.”

  “Obstructions aren’t the only problem, Ma’am. A lot of the interior is exposed to vacuum, or there’s power relays blowing.”

  “Yeah, yeah. We’ll need to get a crew working on disconnecting relays and plugging holes. I’ll have Jarrett and Colter organize something.” Damn it! What else did she need to think about, before a disaster overwhelmed them? She turned her focus back to the immediate engineering problem. “Garnor, what is it?”

  Urmat Datha indeed had died while being transported to the medical station, which anyway had no qualified doctor to assist the many wounded, and the medical bot was operating on reduced capacity. Irene and Derek had been strapped into pilot couches, and the other Mavericks had dutifully secured themselves into their beds when the maneuvering alarm sounded. The cadets did not have the luxury of strapping in and waiting, most of them had designated action stations, so many had been moving through the ship when it got hit. A dozen young people had been killed or severely injured when the ship lost its nose, because they hadn’t yet reached their action stations; others were lost when masers or railguns or missiles tore open their section of the ship. Emily Perkins considered it ironic that the uselessness of humans aboard an alien ship is what had saved their lives.

  She also considered that a training ship full of teenage cadets had no business being dragged into action with a real battlegroup. If it had been her decision, she would have jumped the star carrier to a safe location and dropped off the Ruh Tostella, before taking the battlegroup into harm’s way. As it had not been her decision, she needed to focus on what she could affect, right then. Jinn Garnor was overwhelmed with the task of first stabilizing backup power, then trying to determine if it was safe to restart the reactor. She begged Perkins for more cadets who specialized in engineering field, particularly power generation systems.


  It was time for Perkins to speak to the cadets, to speak to the crew, she reminded herself, for cadets were the only crew the ship had. How to do that? She fumbled with her phone, not wanting to distract Jinn from her work, and not wanting to show how unfamiliar she was with basic ship systems.

  Ok, there it is, she found after four minutes of almost random clicking around the screens. The entire communications system was not offline due to lack of power, it had been simply been disabled and needed to be rebooted. Her command codes allowed Perkins to call individual people, but otherwise comms were squelched. That was, she vaguely recalled, standard procedure in combat when a ship’s stealth field was inactive. Internal comms posed a risk of electromagnetic radiation leaking beyond the ship and betraying it to enemy sensors. That procedure was great in most conditions, but while outside the ship, Perkins had seen so many power conduits arcing that the ship was lit up like a Christmas tree. She found the codes to re-enable the shipwide comm system, took a breath, and spoke to the crew. Her crew.

  “Attention, all hands, this is Lieutenant Colonel Perkins-”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “-that is all,” said the voice of the alien, and Bifft stared in utter astonishment at the speaker in the wall panel. The alien had spoken in heavily-accented Ruhar, but instead of appreciating the endless hours of effort she had devoted to mastering a completely foreign language, Bifft was insulted by how her primitive tongue butchered the words.

  “An alien? In command of our ship?” Bifft raged, spitting in his fury. Perkins was not only an alien, she was from a backward species that barely had spaceflight when the Ruhar arrived at their disgusting planet. A species that had come to Gehtanu as an enemy occupation force, and only recently had renounced their allegiance to the Kristang coalition. As natural-born cowards, the humans would switch sides again as soon as it was convenient, Bifft declared. This Perkins woman had only been aboard the Ruh Tostella for a month, how could she possibly be so insufferably arrogant to think she was qualified to command a Ruhar cruiser? A ship where every piece of technology was far beyond her understanding?

  Bifft raged and railed against the injustice, to the point of battering an innocent wall panel with a wrench. The action only caused a scratch on the panel and sent Bifft spinning off across the compartment out of control in the zero gravity, injuring his dignity. His companions did their best to quell their leader’s spiteful temper. They assured him that Urmat Datha must not have known Bifft was alive when command was transferred to the alien. Or, the alien had somehow coerced Datha, it was well known the humans were desperate for recognition, desperate for any opportunity to show they could be equal to the clearly-superior Ruhar. Bifft should be in command, only he could save them. Was that not why Bifft already commanded the cadet corps aboard the ship?

  After soaking up enough praise to soothe his outraged ego, Bifft made an angry cutting motion with one hand, to end the babbling of his underlings. “Datha was injured and not competent to transfer command. He was a good man, a good officer, but he had no authority to give this warship,” he emphasized that word, “to an alien. A first-year cadet,” he thought of the traitorous Nert, “knows more about this ship than the human Perkins does. Do you know she was a staff assistant, not a line officer?” His friends nodded vigorous agreement, pleased that Bifft was back to his old self. “This ship is disabled, in deep space, on our own. Life support is failing, the reactors are offline. Backup power will be strained by providing life support to the aliens,” he fairly spat in disgust. “In desperate times, hard decisions must be made. That is the nature of leadership.” His followers gazed at him with rapt attention, knowing Bifft was the person they needed to make the tough decisions, the unpleasant decisions, the necessary decisions. The decisions that had to be made, soon, or they would all die.

  “Datha was not competent when he acted, and he was never authorized to appoint Perkins to command, so his action is invalid,” Bifft declared, and his followers looked at each other and nodded with grim expressions. “We need to act, or the ship is doomed. We need to act now. It is our duty.” Bifft picked up the wrench again, tapping the head forcefully into a palm. “Who is with me?”

  With the help of cadets who knew the ship much better than he did, Dave found a way to the engineering compartment using passageways inside the ship. Where the way was not clear, the cadets sliced away obstructions with plasma torches, cut power to relays that were sparking and restored emergency power to stuck bulkhead doors. Shortly after testing that the way was indeed as safe as it could be made, Dave led a group of engineering cadets back to speak with Jinn Garnor, and most of them went back up the passageway with Dave, to begin making repairs as directed by Jinn, with a few cadets remaining to work on the puzzling task of determining if it was safe to restart a reactor. Perkins visibly relaxed, or at least visibly was no longer feeling the weight of an entire planet was on her shoulders.

  Another group of cadets came to get instructions, accompanied by the other Verd-Kris aboard, a male with the rank of ‘Surgun’ named Krok-aus-tal Jates. He was older than Dave and naturally assumed authority, although he deferred to Perkins without apparent resentment. The Mavericks had trained with Jates only three times, as he was already fully qualified for spaceborne duty, and his role aboard the ship was to train Ruhar cadets in real-life space infantry tactics, whether they liked it or not. When the cadets were leaving to go perform whatever critical tasks were needed elsewhere in the ship, Jates lingered behind.

  Perkins was huddled with Jinn Garnor, providing moral support and encouragement since she had no idea how most systems aboard the ship worked, when with the corner of her eye she saw more cadets come floating in through the open hatch. She ignored them until she could not.

  “Nobody move!” The shout rang out in the compartment.

  Perkins spun to see who had spoken, her mind flashing to scenarios of someone warning of a dangerous condition with a power relay or some other technical problem. She was astonished to see a group of three Ruhar cadets pointing weapons at her. Bifft held a rifle and his two friends had sidearms. The ranking cadet made a show of holding the rifle in dramatic fashion at his hip, keeping the muzzle trained on Perkins. “I said, nobody move! That means all of you,” he glared angrily around the compartment, sounding like a bank robber in an old movie.

  “Everyone, stay where you are,” Perkins ordered. “Cadet Colhsoon, what do you think you are doing?”

  “I don’t have to think anything, I am taking control of this ship back from you. I am assuming command, effective immediately. No alien should be in command of our warships.” He shot a look of hatred at Jates, who had made a fool of Bifft during several training exercises. “No alien should be aboard one of our ships, unless they are in the brig.”

  Perkins took a breath to keep the fear from her voice. It didn’t work. “Where did you get those weapons? The armory is locked down!” It was locked down, she knew that for certain because her initial tour of the ship had included the armory, or technically the heavy door of the armory. Even the executive officer giving her the tour did not have authorization to open the armory door. Perkins had been surprised by that bit of information, she was even more surprised to learn the Toaster had an armory. Why did a training ship need live weapons, she had asked. The XO had explained the armory was left over from when the cruiser was a frontline warship, and it had been kept in case the Ruh Tostella needed to quickly be returned to fleet service.

  “It was locked,” Bifft replied with a smirk. “You are as ignorant as you are stupid and primitive. This is our ship, we know how to bypass security measures,” he winked at his friends, who grinned back, pleased at his cleverness.

  “That would take an impressive level of skill,” Jates said in an admiring tone, while with his eyes he gave Perkins a look she could not interpret. Was the Kristang going to join the mutiny, to save himself and Tutula? Or, was something else going on? “Let me guess, you cut through the power circuits beh
ind the bulkhead to the armory?”

  “Good guess, Surgun Jates,” Bifft replied with a frown, unhappy about a member of an enemy species knowing such dangerous secrets about a Ruhar warship, even a ship as obsolete as the Ruh Tostella. “I suggest you forget such knowledge.”

  “What next?” Perkins had used the time to regain her courage. She was determined to defy the little shit cadet, and not let him see her sweat. “You kill us, throw us out an airlock?”

  “No, although as you are an enemy species, and you unlawfully took control of a warship, I would be within my rights under combat conditions to kill all of you,” Bifft bluffed, knowing that was a lie.

  “We’re not in combat now!” Dave pushed himself forward and Perkins restrained him with one hand.

  “Do not be afraid, little fool. I don’t plan to kill you, not directly. We will put your kind and the two Kristang into a dropship with its flight controls disabled. You will float away,” the cadet leader made a mocking gesture miming an object spinning slowly through space. “Once you are beyond communications range, the ship will deactivate your command authority,” he glared at Perkins. “Command will then fall to the next senior officer,” he gloated, pointing to his chest.

  “That is an interesting plan, a good plan,” Jates said.

  “Thank-” Bifft reacted to the praise before he could remind himself that he didn’t care what an enemy species thought of him.

  “Too bad,” Jates made a honking sound and sent a thick wad of spit spinning through the air toward the three armed cadets. “You won’t ever get to put your plan into action, you dumb little shit.”

  “What?” Bifft’s aim wavered as he flailed his legs awkwardly to avoid being splattered with the disgusting projectile. Held steady by his two friends, he regained his composure and pointed the rifle at the Verd-Kris. “I could shoot you!”