“Aye, sir,” Hastings said.
Percy shivered as he floated out into the corridor. If main power was offline, everything from sensors to life support would also be offline. An asteroid colony would have bioengineered grass serving as carpets, ensuring a fresh supply of air whatever happened, but the grass would have been a liability onboard ship. Without life support, the crew would eventually run out of air and suffocate in a largely unexplored system.
His radio buzzed. “Corporal Schneider, respond,” Corporal Hastings said. “I say again, respond.”
“This is Schneider, responding,” Percy said. Their radios worked too, which was a definite relief. Internal communication would also be down, at least until the engineers managed to rig up a separate system. Wristcom units were dependent on the ship’s internal network to work, he recalled, an oversight that might prove lethal. “I confirm receipt, over.”
“Proceed to Main Engineering,” Hadfield said. “Remain in touch - and stay low. The gravity might come back at any moment.”
Percy gritted his teeth as he pulled himself down the corridor, towards a hatch that remained firmly closed. He’d had training in zero-gee - it was a must for anyone who wanted to serve in the Royal Marines - but there was no escaping the fact that it was one of the most awkward environments to handle. A single breath could send someone tumbling head over heels, or straight up into the ceiling. And space-sickness was also a very real threat.
“The hatch is depowered,” Peerce reported. He opened a panel and peered inside. “I’m going to have to disconnect the system from the main power network and try to power it directly from my battery pack.”
“Do it,” Percy ordered. He motioned the section to take up positions as Peerce worked on the hatch, his mind frantically reminding him that they weren't on a hostile vessel. “Let me know when the hatch is about to open ...”
“Now, I think,” Peerce said, cutting Percy off. “I just connected it to the battery ...”
There was a hiss from the hatch, which opened to reveal a darkened corridor and a handful of crewmen, working on the hatch at the far end. They spun around, then looked relieved when they saw the Marines. Percy pulled himself forward, located the senior crewman, and briefly compared notes. The crew, uncertain of just what had happened, were also trying to make their way to engineering.
“Proceed with them,” Hadfield ordered, when Percy reported the meeting. “But take care at all times.”
Percy nodded. He’d explored Warspite thoroughly since he'd assumed command of 2 Section, both on his own and with his men, and he knew the ship like the back of his hand, but that hadn't been in the dark. Corridors looked dark and sinister in the shadows; he nearly grabbed for his weapon and loosed a round when he saw a scary face in the darkness, only to realise, as his flashlight shone brighter, that it was a depiction of a weeping angel someone had stencilled on a hatch leading into a set of crew quarters. Cursing in the privacy of his own mind, he pulled himself past the picture and down the corridor. Yet another sealed hatch lay at the far end ...
This could take a while, he told himself. But it has to be done.
***
“Report,” John snapped, as half of the consoles shimmered back to life. The emergency lighting activated a second later, bathing the bridge in eerie shimmering light. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure,” Commander Watson said. She sounded dispassionate, even when the gravity failed. “Main power collapsed, just after we made it through the tramline. Half of our monitoring systems are down.”
John cursed under his breath. The designers had anticipated losing power, but losing all three fusion reactors at once was disastrous. He doubted the ship’s batteries could power even the emergency systems for more than an hour before they too ran out of power. And life support, too, would be offline. The crew was at very real risk of suffocation.
“Right,” he said. “Do we have a link to engineering?”
“No, sir,” Forbes said. “Internal communications are down right across the board.”
Then we should have insisted on including separate communicators, John thought. Hindsight was such a wonderful thing. He’d do it, once they survived the disaster and restored main power. And then something else will happen we didn’t anticipate ...
“Get a crew down to the storage pods and recover away team gear,” he ordered. There was no time for recriminations. “Pick up radios and flashlights, then get them back here. We’ll decide what to do next once we see what we have on hand.”
“Aye, sir,” Richards said. “Do you want a second team to start making their way through the tubes?”
John shook his head. The internal tubes would be sealed and breaking through the hatches, one by one, would take hours, perhaps more time than the ship had. Instead, the team would have to go EVA and walk over the hull to the airlock closest to Main Engineering. It would still be a challenge, he knew, but there was no alternative.
“There are other stations with radios,” Howard offered. “We might be able to raise them.”
“Good thought,” John agreed. “Lieutenant Forbes, do we have any links with the rest of the squadron?”
“Yes, sir,” Forbes said. “Captain Minion is attempting to raise us. The others seem unsure of what to do.”
Civilians, John thought. Even so, he was disappointed. Merchant skippers would have seen their fair share of emergencies in space. But at least he and his crew weren't trying to cope with the disaster on their own.
He pushed the thought to one side and leaned forward. “Tell Captain Minion I want him to put together an away team with radios, oxygen cylinders and space suits,” he said. “They are to prepare themselves to deploy to our hull.”
“Aye, sir,” Forbes said.
Richards and his team forced open the hatch and headed down towards the store at the far end of Officer Country. John wasn't sure why anyone would place the store there, but it was lucky for them that it was there. Moments later, Richards returned, carrying a handful of radio sets and a pair of emergency spacesuits. Forbes took one of the radios and began to cycle through the frequencies.
“Captain,” she said. “I have Major Hadfield for you.”
John took the radio, smiling inwardly. The senior Marine on a starship was given a courtesy promotion to Major, as the senior Marine was almost always a Captain and there could only ever be one Captain on a starship. But Hadfield was a Lieutenant, not a Captain. What did he think of being jumped several ranks at once? It wasn’t as if he needed the courtesy ...
“Major,” he said, dismissing the thought. “Report.”
“I have one section making its way towards the bridge and another heading down to Main Engineering,” Hadfield reported. “The crewmen we have encountered have been assisting us in opening hatches, but it’s still a slow process.”
“Understood,” John said. “I’m sending two of my officers EVA. They can link up with your Marines in Main Engineering.”
He looked up at Richards, then Commander Watson. “Take the suits and go over the hull to Main Engineering,” he ordered. “And take at least two of the radios with you, just in case.”
“Aye, sir,” Richards said. “Commander?”
Commander Watson was already donning her suit. “We’ll sort this out, somehow,” she promised. “The problem may be very simple.”
John gritted his teeth. They’d recalibrated the drive shortly before the jump - and, moments after the jump, main power had been lost. That could not be a coincidence. Something had gone badly wrong and, he knew from bitter experience, that it might be impossible to fix without a shipyard. And if they did need a shipyard, getting back to Earth would be tricky.
“I hope so,” he said, tersely.
He turned back to Forbes as Watson and Richards left the bridge, heading for the nearest airlock. “Is the away team ready?”
“Yes, sir,” Forbes said. “Captain Minion has shuttles ready to go too.”
“Then tell hi
m to send them over as quickly as possible,” John ordered. “We need to put the communications back together before we can start repairing the damage.”
He pulled himself back to the command chair and sat down, buckling himself in. He’d never had to buckle himself in before, not even during a battle. The memory made him think dark thoughts as he waited, knowing there was nothing else he could do. Once, he could have reached out his hand, tapped his console and linked to any part of the ship. Now, he was practically isolated on his own bridge, powerless to affect whatever was happening on the lower decks. His crew was slowly suffocating to death and there was nothing he could do about it.
There has to be something I can do to make it better, he thought. But all he could do was wait and pray.
“Captain,” Forbes said. “The XO has just reached the airlock to Main Engineering.”
“Good,” John said, although he had his doubts. Had Commander Watson, quite by accident, laid the groundwork for the disaster? “Keep me informed.”
***
Main Engineering wasn't dark, Percy discovered, as the Marines forced their way through the hatch. The Chief Engineer had ordered his men to rig up emergency lighting, then had started grappling with the problem at once. For Percy, who had been anticipating everything from a destroyed engineering section to the death of everyone assigned to the compartment, it was something of a relief.
“We’re here to help,” he said, as the Chief Engineer turned to look at him. “What can we do?”
“You have radios, I assume,” the Chief Engineer said. “Pass me one so I can call the bridge.”
“Aye, sir,” Percy said, and passed the officer his headset. “Just key it with your hand to speak.”
The Chief Engineer nodded, impatiently. “Captain, this is Johnston,” he said. “We had a major failure in the power nodes, sir; technically, a cascade of failures. The fusion reactors automatically shut down to prevent further damage to the ship.”
There was a pause as the Captain answered. Percy couldn't hear the reply; the headset was designed to prevent anyone apart from the wearer hearing anything. They tended to be hard to use in combat zones, if only because it was far too easy to get distracted, but they were reliable. Perhaps, he thought, as he looked around the darkened compartment, using largely untested cutting edge technology on an important mission hadn't been the best idea anyone ever had.
“We’re replacing the damaged components now, sir,” the Chief Engineer said. “Yes, I’m putting them aside for later inspection. I’d buy one failure, sir, but not four in quick succession. The components are rated for much greater power surges than they had to handle, Captain. Someone deliberately sabotaged the ship.”
Percy felt his blood run cold. Sabotage was something every starship crewman feared, if only because it could be very hard to catch before it was too late. And that wasn't the worst problem. Starship crews had to trust one another to survive - and, if someone was believed untrustworthy, it could tear the crew apart. A witch-hunt would put morale in the drain and nothing, perhaps not even a major victory, could repair it.
And if someone is believed to have sabotaged the ship, he thought numbly, it will be us who will have to track him down.
“I’ll keep you informed, sir,” the Chief Engineer said. He looked up as two new people floated into the compartment. “The XO has just arrived.”
He passed the headset to Percy, then pulled himself over to the XO and motioned her towards the rear section of the compartment. Percy waited, unsure of what to do, until an engineering crewwoman called him over and asked the Marines to help float ruined components into a side room. It was interesting to see some of the starship’s innards, Percy decided, even though he didn't really understand what he was seeing. He could strip down a BAR-56 in less than a minute, but handling the inner workings of a starship was beyond him. All he could really do was transfer the burned components into the side room and hope the engineers could make head or tails of whatever had happened to them.
“Corporal,” Richards said, after speaking with the Chief Engineer. He was all business, now there was a serious problem at hand. “Detail two men to guard the components at all times. I don’t want them left unguarded for even a second or two.”
“Yes, sir,” Percy said. He wasn't entirely sure if Richards could give him orders, but he understood the logic behind them. If someone had sabotaged the components, the only way to find out who had carried it out was to study the components and see who had planted them there. The bastard might try to destroy them before they could be studied. “I’ll keep the door sealed at all times.”
“I think we have it,” the Chief Engineer called. “If we do this ...”
A low hum spread through the compartment. Percy watched, feeling a flicker of awe, as darkened consoles came to life, followed by the main lights. He blinked, hard, as his eyes started to water, then forced himself to look around Main Engineering. No one looked suspicious, but he didn't really have the training to tell. He hoped Sergeant Peerce or Lieutenant Hadfield knew how to interrogate suspects, because he didn’t. The closest thing he’d done along those lines was the dreaded Conduct After Capture course, which had included everything from drugs to sleep deprivation and outright torture.
“Now hear this,” the Chief Engineer said, his voice echoing through the ship as the internal communications system came back online. “Gravity will resume in five minutes; I say again, gravity will resume in five minutes. Get down to the floor and brace yourself.”
Percy obeyed as the engineer counted down the seconds to zero. Moments later, gravity slowly began to reassert itself; he heard a number of crashes in the distance as objects, which had been floating freely in the air, hit the deck. He wondered, absently, who would clean up the mess as the gravity field stabilised, then stood up as soon as it was Earth-normal. The remainder of his Marines and the engineering crew did likewise.
“Lieutenant,” he said, keying his radio. “I’ve had to detail two men to serve as guards, sir, but the remainder of the section is intact. Do you have any orders for us?”
“Search the lower decks for wounded personnel,” Hadfield said. “There have already been some injuries reported. If you find any, provide basic medical attention and contact sickbay.”
“Aye, sir,” Percy said. It wasn't as glamorous as fighting the enemies of the British Crown, but it was necessary. His father, he suspected, would have approved. “We’re on our way.”
***
Two hours later, John stood in sickbay, feeling a wave of bitter helplessness as he looked at the handful of wounded crewmen. One officer had been trapped in his cabin and nearly run out of atmosphere before the life support came back online; a handful of crewmen and women had been injured when the gravity reasserted itself. One woman in particular had been very unlucky. An object, sent floating up to the ceiling, had fallen on her head when gravity had suddenly pulled it back down to the deck.
“They will survive,” Doctor Thomas Stewart said. “I had to perform emergency surgery on a couple of crewmen, but they will all survive.”
“Thank God,” John said. He’d lost comrades before - his last memory of Colin drifted in front of his eyes, mocking him - but it was worse when he was in command. “Do any of them require emergency transport to a naval base?”
“Probably not,” Stewart assured him. “There's nothing they can do for them that I haven’t already done. A couple probably should be transferred to Argus for long-term care, but the others will be ready to return to duty within the week.”
“I’ll let the Senior Chief know,” John said. It was another duty Commander Watson had shirked. Richards would have to handle the duty roster for her. “And thank you, Doctor.”
“You’re welcome,” Stewart said, dryly. “Just try to avoid a repeat of that disaster, Captain.”
John scowled. “I’ll do my best,” he said. He took one last look at the sleeping forms, then looked back at Stewart. “And you may be needed, Docto
r, when we have someone to blame.”
He nodded to the older man, then turned and strode out of the compartment. Whatever else happened, he resolved, he was going to find the person responsible for damaging his ship and wounding his crew. It had been sheer luck, he knew all too well, that no one had actually been killed.
Next time, it might be different.
Chapter Eleven
“Tell me some good news,” John said, as he stepped into the briefing room. “Do we have someone to blame yet?”
“I think so,” Johnston said. There was a bitter tone to his voice. “But the person who should have caught it was me.”
John glowered at him. “Explain.”
“In layman’s terms, the power conduits failed,” Johnston said. “The drive recalibration needed additional power from the fusion reactors to handle the transit down the tramline, which overloaded the conduits. As the first one failed, the emergency systems activated and demanded power from the other conduits, which triggered a catastrophic series of failures and left most of the ship powerless.”
[Ark Royal 04] - Warspite Page 11