[Ark Royal 04] - Warspite

by Christopher Nuttall

  “One of the sensor blisters failed when we tried to power it up,” Howard reported. He sounded irked - and well he might. This failure could be laid at his door, if his commander decided he wanted someone to blame. “I’ve earmarked it for replacement.”

  John glanced at his terminal. “Have it replaced now,” he ordered. An engineering team could go EVA and replace the sensor blister now, while the ships of the squadron gathered around Warspite. “And then run checks to make sure the rest of the network is fully functional.”

  “Aye, sir,” Howard said.

  “The remaining blisters can pick up the strain, if necessary,” Commander Watson said. “I designed a considerable degree of redundancy into the system.”

  John scowled, inwardly. Clearly, Richards’s lessons hadn't gone very far.

  “I prefer to have everything in working order,” he said, tightly. Didn’t Commander Watson know it was unwise to question her commander on his own bridge? John had disagreed with his CO, from time to time, but he’d always done it in private. In public, in front of the junior officers and crew, the Captain and his XO had to provide a united front. “And besides, we won’t be departing for another hour.”

  He settled back in his chair as department after department checked in, reporting that almost all of their systems were functioning within acceptable parameters. John ordered a handful of systems replaced, then checked again. Even if they’d been assigned to Home Fleet and kept within the Sol System, he would have insisted the systems be replaced. War could come at any moment, he had learned, and it was much harder to make repairs while under fire. He’d even read reports that speculated the First Battle of New Russia wouldn't have gone so badly if the human ships had been at full readiness.

  But it wouldn't have made any difference, he told himself, as the endless checks went on and on. The Tadpoles had us bang to rights the moment they jumped into the system.

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Gillian Forbes said. “The squadron is transmitting its readiness details to you.”

  “Transfer it to my terminal,” John ordered. “And then inform the commanding officers that we will leave on schedule.”

  “Aye, sir,” Gillian said.

  John smiled to himself. He wasn't sure he approved of keeping the communications officer, when a sensor officer might be more useful if they ran into trouble, but he knew the Admiralty’s thinking. Three years ago, the prospect of running into aliens had seemed a pipe dream, at best. No one thought that now. Opening communications with aliens as fast as possible was a priority, before another war broke out over a misunderstanding. The last thing humanity needed was to be pushed to the wall - again.

  He checked the reports, one by one. Captain Minion - he smirked at the name, even though he knew it was unfair of him - had reported with military efficiency, while the other four commanders had been considerably more lax. John wasn't surprised - they were merchant skippers, rather than military officers - but it was annoying. All five commanders reported that they were ready to move on his command, then follow Warspite through the tramline to Terra Nova.

  And then they will want to go home, he thought, ruefully. RFA Argus might be designed as a giant Colony Support Vessel, intended to transport and then assist the settlers as they carved out a new home, but the other three were nothing more than glorified freighters. They would reach Pegasus, unload their cargo, and then find themselves surplus to requirements. Their commanders would want to go home and find themselves a more rewarding contract shipping goods from Sol to one of the better-established colonies.

  He smiled, sardonically. Anyone would think they were ungrateful for the Royal Navy’s contribution to the running costs of their ships.

  “Captain,” Commander Watson said, breaking into John’s thoughts. “All systems are fully functional.”

  There was a hint of annoyance in her voice. John understood, but it was still bad for discipline. He took a moment to check the reports for himself - the EVA crews had plenty of experience in replacing or repairing damaged components on the ship’s hull - then smiled, tiredly. The ship had barely left the shipyard and he was already feeling the strain.

  Maybe I should have stuck with starfighters after all, he thought, mournfully. But without Colin, it wouldn't have been the same.

  “Lieutenant Forbes, record,” John said. He waited for the communications officer to give him the thumbs up, then continued. “From Captain John Naiser, CO HMS Warspite, to Admiral Percy Finnegan, First Space Lord. Sir. I certify that HMS Warspite is ready to depart the Sol System on schedule. We will commence our mission to Pegasus immediately and pass through the tramline in two hours, forty minutes from this message. God save the King.”

  He drew a finger across his throat. Lieutenant Forbes stopped recording and looked at him, expectantly. He couldn't help thinking that she looked too young and too inexperienced to be an officer, but that seemed to be par for the course on Warspite. The experienced officers would simply have to carry the load themselves until their newer comrades were brought up to speed. But Gillian Forbes ... if her file hadn't stated she was twenty-three, he would have wondered if the Admiralty had resorted to conscripting Secondary School-age children. He wouldn't have placed her as any older than seventeen.

  “Encrypt the message, then transmit it to Nelson Base,” he ordered, silently calculating the time it would take for the message to reach the First Space Lord. It was unlikely the mission would be scrubbed on short notice, but the First Space Lord would have barely an hour to respond before it was too late. “And then signal the other ships to assume formation.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Forbes said.

  John sighed, inwardly. On Earth, the speed of light - and radio transmissions - was effectively immediate. There was no time delay in sending an email or v-mail from London to Kuala Lumpur, from one side of the world to the other. But spacers knew the speed of light was far from infinite. It took seconds to signal from Earth to the Moon, minutes to signal Mars at closest approach and hours to send a signal to Jupiter and the planets beyond. And even that didn't include sending messages through the tramlines. It could take weeks to send a message from Earth to Britannia, even longer to Vera Cruz or Heinlein. During the war, entire fleets had gone to the wrong destinations because their orders had changed after their departure, but their commanders hadn't known until it was too late.

  The boffins keep promising FTL communications, he thought. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

  “The squadron has responded,” Lieutenant Forbes said. “They’re standing by.”

  John rose to his feet, his eyes fixed on the holographic display. “Mr. Armstrong, set course for Tramline One,” he ordered. “Best possible squadron speed.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Carlos Armstrong said. He tapped a switch on his console. The course would have been laid in as soon as Warspite cleared the shipyard. Moments later, the background noise of the ship’s drives grew louder, an omnipresent thrumming echoing through the entire ship. “ETA Tramline One; two hours, thirty-nine minutes.”

  John smiled to himself as he sat down, then monitored the readings from the ship’s drives. Everything seemed to be fine, much to his relief. Johnston wouldn't let matters get out of hand, he was sure, but Warspite was new, utterly untested. The tactical department ran tracking exercise after tracking exercise, locking the ship’s sensors on the other starships in the squadron, then asteroid miners and transport ships some distance from the small convoy.

  “Fools,” Howard muttered, as his sensors locked - briefly - onto Message Bearer. “They don’t have a hope.”

  “The technology is solid,” Commander Watson disagreed. “But it is slow.”

  John smiled, inwardly. Message Bearer had been built before the tramlines, a giant starship intended to crawl from Sol to the nearest system with life-bearing worlds. The consortium of libertarians who’d built the ship had declared their intention to leave Earth and her many governments behind altogether ... mere ye
ars before the first tramline had been discovered. And at that point, they’d abandoned their planned starship and moved en masse to one of the newly discovered systems. Message Bearer had been left, utterly abandoned, until the war, where her current owners had hastily readied her for departure. There were systems that were free of tramlines, after all, systems where some remnant of the human race could survive.

  But we survived the war, he thought. And yet they’re launching the mission anyway.

  He pushed the thought aside, then turned his attention to the next set of reports from various intelligence departments. The Indians, Turks and Brazilians were all showing interest in the worlds near Pegasus - and Cromwell. They would have to be crazy to risk challenging the pre-war Royal Navy, but post-war he knew the odds were a great deal more even. Besides, the newer powers had learned from the war ... and the mistakes made by the older spacefaring powers. And they could build a modern fleet without worrying about hulls that had been modern only twenty years ago.

  And they’re signed up to the Solar Treaty, he reminded himself. They could send more of their fleet out of the Sol System than we could countenance.

  “Captain,” Lieutenant Forbes said. “The Admiralty has acknowledged our message and sends us its best wishes. They’ve also included an encrypted packet for you.”

  “Good,” John said. “Transfer it to my console, then dump it into the secure data store.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Forbes said.

  John pressed his hand against the scanner, allowing it to read the implant buried in his palm and check it against the secure database. Moments later, the message decompressed itself and demanded a second security check. John snorted, inwardly, at the cloak and dagger precautions, but complied without argument. Every year, it seemed the intelligence officers came up with a new and unbreakable code ... and, every following year, enemy intelligence services succeeded in breaking it. There were times when John felt it would make more sense to agree that everyone would send messages in the clear, but he knew it would never happen. Even a delay of a few short days between receiving the message and cracking it through brute force decryption could mean the difference between victory or defeat.

  And we assume the Tadpoles are still watching us, he reminded himself tartly. We might go back to war with them one day - and this time, we won’t have Ark Royal.

  The message unfolded itself in front of him, divided into three sections. One was a précis on known human activity in the region - the diplomats would have to come up with a name for the entire region, John thought - while the second was a warning that two starships had been reported lost by their insurers. Both were old, dating from the early days of tramline exploration, which suggested there was nothing particularly sinister about their disappearance, but the Admiralty would prefer to know what, if anything, had happened to them. They weren't British ships, John noted, yet that hardly mattered. Spacers in distress were spacers in distress, regardless of their nationality.

  But the search would be futile, John suspected. Space was incomprehensibly vast. A powered-down starship was almost completely invisible, unless it happened to drift close to a planet or another starship using active sensors. By now, months had passed before the owners had requested the insurance companies pay up - and the companies, unsurprisingly, were dragging their heels about payment. After all, it could be part of a scam ...

  He shrugged, then moved to the third section - and froze. It was written permission to relieve Commander Watson of duty, if he felt it necessary, and promote either Howard or Richards to take her place. John wasn't blind to the politics behind the appointment - or the political risk the First Space Lord had taken by sending him the message. Commander Watson herself might not complain if she was relieved of duty - John suspected she wasn't keen on the position - but her patrons definitely would. There would be hard questions to be answered when they returned, with Richards or Howard inspected closely for signs of undue influence over their commander. It might well ensure they never saw another promotion for the rest of their careers.

  Damn it, he thought, darkly.

  “Captain,” Armstrong said, suddenly. “We are approaching the tramline.”

  “Signal the squadron,” John ordered. “We will proceed through the tramline in the order discussed.”

  He looked up at the holographic display, noting the green line that marked the location of the tramline. There was nothing to see, at least not with the naked eye; it took finely-tuned gravimetric sensors to pick out the corridor of gravity linking one star to another. Some reports suggested there were greater quantities of space dust within the tramline, as if the gravity field was slowly drawing tiny particles into its grip, but it didn't seem to be a consistent pattern. But then, there was a great deal about the tramlines that no one, human or Tadpole, truly understood.

  A shame we can't establish battlestations along the tramline, he thought, as Warspite moved closer to the tramline. But the enemy could jump out anywhere and leave the defenders to wither on the vine.

  “The squadron has responded, sir,” Forbes said. “They’re standing by.”

  John sucked in a breath. “Then take us through the tramline,” he ordered.

  “Aye, sir,” Armstrong said. “Reducing speed. Transit in ten seconds ... nine ...”

  John braced himself as the countdown reached zero. Only a desperate fool would try to jump through the tramline at high speed, knowing it would have half of his crew throwing up on the deck. A faint shudder ran through the ship, followed by sensation of indescribable wrongness, then the display snapped out of existence and hastily rebooted itself, sucking in data from the Terra Nova system. It wasn't anything like Earth.

  “Transit complete, sir,” Armstrong reported.

  “The Puller Drive was poorly tuned,” Commander Watson said. “Unfortunately, we could not calibrate properly without making a jump,”

  “Then I suggest you recalibrate the drive now,” John said, harshly. He hadn't thrown up, but his head hurt. Was it a problem caused by poor calibration, he wondered, or the attempt to merge human and alien technology into a single unit. Did the Tadpoles suffer from jumping through tramlines? No one actually knew. “Did we make it through without serious problems?”

  “Yes, sir,” Commander Watson said. “Our drives and other systems are undamaged.”

  “Then set course for Tramline Seven,” John ordered. “The sooner we are out of this system, the better.”

  “Aye, sir,” Armstrong said.

  John rubbed the side of his head, feeling the pain slowly fading into a dull throbbing that didn't seem disposed to disappear anytime soon. He was tempted to reach for a painkiller, but he knew he didn't dare use any kind of drug in front of the crew. Instead, he watched as the reports came in from all over the ship. Headaches, it seemed, were very common. It had to be a problem with the drive.

  And we need to fix it, he told himself, firmly. Because if we’re going to fight, we can't afford to be distracted.

  Chapter Nine

  “They say we’re going to be fighting there, one day,” Sergeant Peerce said. “What do you make of that?”

  Percy winced, inwardly. “Not much,” he said. “Terra Nova is a mess.”

  He rubbed the side of his head, cursing the Puller Drive under his breath. A third of the Marines had reported headaches, while - from what he’d heard - nearly half the ship’s crew had had the same problem. There was nothing to separate the affected Marines from the unaffected Marines, as far as he could tell. It didn't seem to matter if they’d spent years in space or if this was their first deployment; the headaches seemed totally random. And he had one himself.

  “How true,” Peerce agreed. “I hear tell that the shore-leave facilities on the planet are nothing more than armed fortresses, with hardly any locals permitted to enter.”

  He shrugged. “But if you had to intervene,” he added, “how would you go about it?”

  Percy gritted his teeth and tried to think.
Peerce seemed to like tossing questions at him, forcing Percy to consider everything from an enemy boarding party to a crash-landing on a hostile planet. He’d done his best to answer, but he couldn't help feeling as though he’d let the older man down more than once. Peerce had a long enough career to deserve respect, even if he had stayed a Sergeant for longer than Percy cared to contemplate. The Royal Marines had found a round peg for a round hole and had no intention of sending Peerce anywhere else.

  “I would try to separate the warring factions,” he said, finally. His experience on Earth had showed that the only way to end factional warfare was to separate the two sides, but the political will to intervene so boldly had been lacking ever since the Troubles - and the move into space. “But I would need much more manpower.”

  “True,” Peerce said. “The entire complement on this ship would vanish without trace on Terra Nova. And if you were forced to intervene with the forces at your disposal?”

  Percy considered it, slowly. “Assassinate the leaders,” he said, knowing it was an unsatisfactory answer. It seemed good enough - brilliant, even - until one considered the dangers involved in killing the only people who could surrender. Killing their foot soldiers was much less kind - he’d seen enough armies in the Third World to know that most of their manpower was composed of hapless conscripts - but there was little choice. “Kill the ones who refuse to make peace until their replacements start giving peace a chance.”