[Ark Royal 04] - Warspite

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Understood,” John said. “Inform the crew we will be departing in twenty minutes and, if they want to send any final messages, they have to do so before we leave orbit.”

  “Yes, sir,” Richards said. “I believe they are already aware of our departure time.”

  John’s lips twitched. Richards was reminding him, politely, that such matters were the XO’s job. But then, he had been trying to do what he could to take some of the weight off Commander Watson ...

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll be on the bridge momentarily.”

  He rose, then glanced at his terminal. A private message had appeared, sent directly from the planet. Commodore Sivula had attached copies of long-range sensor logs charting the movements of non-American starships in the system, including - John was amused to see - Warspite’s arrival. But he was right; there were an unusual number of foreign starships making their way through the system, heading further up the chain towards Cromwell.

  They could be using the third tramline from Troyon, he thought. There might be an unclaimed Earth-like world up there.

  He shrugged. That too made no sense. If the Indians or the Turks had stumbled across an inhabited world, logically they would have filed the discovery with the World Court in order to stake a claim. Or was there something about the world that made it unlikely their claim would be upheld? The only realistic excuse for not accepting their claim was the presence of an alien race, but they had treaty obligations to report the presence of another alien race to the Earth Defence Organisation. Who knew how dangerous the newcomers were likely to be?

  And you’re imagining things, he told himself, firmly. All you really know is that Vesper disappeared somewhere between Boston and Cromwell. You have no proof of outside involvement in any of this, save for the Indians and Turks. And all they sent through Boston were freighters ...

  Shaking his head, he stepped through the hatch and onto the bridge.

  “Course laid in, sir,” Armstrong chirped, as if Richards hadn't already told John. “We’re ready to depart.”

  “Then take us out of orbit,” John ordered. It would have been nice to spend a couple of days in orbit - the crew could do with some proper shore leave - but there was no time. “And take us right to Pegasus, best possible speed.”

  “Aye, sir,” Armstrong said.

  John settled back in his command chair and forced himself to think. Nothing about the whole affair made sense, which meant ... what? A disaster, a misunderstanding ... or a foreign plot?

  You’ll find out, he promised himself. And then you will know what you are facing.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “We should be able to claim a record, sir,” Armstrong said. “From Boston to Pegasus and then to Troyon, in less than a week.”

  “So we shall,” John said. It had helped that they hadn't stayed at Pegasus any longer than it had taken to send orders to Captain Minion, but Armstrong was right. It was a record. “And now we’re here, commence the search pattern.”

  He settled back in his command chair and reviewed, once again, the barren nothingness of Troyon. Part of him wanted to head directly to Spire, to start the search there, as it was possible there was a hidden colony on the rocky world. But Troyon did have the third, unexplored tramline ... and it was where the mystery ship had been sighted. It was, he felt, the best place to start the search.

  “Aye, sir,” Armstrong said. “We’re focusing on the asteroids first.”

  “Good,” John said. If someone wanted to hide the missing ship, they could simply have depowered her, then left the hulk to drift among the asteroid cluster. There would be no way for someone to separate her from the asteroids unless they made a visual inspection. “Lieutenant Forbes?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Start broadcasting our IFF code and trigger signals,” John ordered. “If there’s an emergency beacon somewhere in this system, I want to find it.”

  “Aye, sir,” Forbes said. She tapped a switch on her console. “Transmitting now.”

  John forced himself to relax, knowing it would be hours before they picked up a response ... if, of course, there was an emergency beacon out there. Standard beacons didn't broadcast continually, knowing there was a risk of running out of power before a SAR team arrived, even in the Solar System. Instead, they waited for a signal from a rescue mission and then responded, summoning the rescuers to their precise location. Even a half-second transmission would be enough to draw Warspite’s attention. The system had been tested and retested often enough, as well as proving effective in real life.

  But they would have been lost for over a month, John thought, coldly. There were ways to freeze people until they could be rescued, but a freighter like Vesper wouldn't have carried the right equipment. He'd heard of a case where a stranded crew had tried to set up a makeshift cryogenic tank, but all four of the stricken miners had wound up with brain damage when they’d been recovered. It was hard to imagine a freighter crew running the same risk, even if they had had the tools on hand.

  The asteroids grew closer on the display. John studied them carefully, noting the small collection of nickel-iron and water asteroids, enough to sustain a tiny population for years, if necessary. But none of the asteroids seemed to have been touched by human hands, let alone spun to produce gravity and turned into habitats. John hadn't expected to encounter survivalists here, not where there were only a few places they could hide, but it was still disappointing. It would have been nice to solve the mystery so quickly.

  “Captain,” Howard said. “I think you should see this. It's the live feed from Probe #4.”

  “Show me,” John ordered.

  The holographic display changed, showing a close-up image of a giant water-ice asteroid. It looked as random as any other such asteroid, until the probe focused on a relatively small area and revealed that human tools had been used to chip ice from the asteroid. There were contingency plans to mine water-ice asteroids for fuel - it would damage drives, John recalled, but it was doable - yet this was on a very small scale. It looked more like someone had wanted drinking water, but hadn't dared go to Cromwell or Boston for supplies.

  “They could have come here for supplies,” Forbes whispered. “If they cracked the water, they could produce oxygen to keep themselves alive.”

  “But if that's true,” Richards said, “where are they?”

  Good question, John thought. Vesper would have had enough supplies to get from Earth to Cromwell, but how much further could she have gone? Given the number of passengers, her life support had to be pushed to the limit even before she ran into trouble. If she was still intact, here and now, wouldn't she have signalled us when we first entered the system?

  Howard put his concerns into words. “We passed through this system twice,” he said, “both times screaming our IFF at the universe. If they were here, and still alive, wouldn’t they have called us back?”

  “They could have lost radio,” Armstrong pointed out.

  “There are plenty of ways to attract our attention, if they failed to rig up a radio transmitter,” Forbes said, bitterly. “Even a drive flare would be detectable.”

  “But if they had lost their radios, they might not know we were here,” Armstrong offered. “If they didn't hear our signal, they wouldn't have known to respond ...”

  “Save the speculation for later,” John said, curtly. He keyed his terminal. “Major Hadfield, your evaluation please?”

  “Someone took a reasonable amount of water, presumably to keep the crew alive,” the Marine said. “There are ways to date the mining, sir.”

  “Use them,” John ordered.

  It was nearly an hour before they had their answer. The mining had taken place six months before the end of the war.

  “It couldn't have been Vesper,” John said, “although it does raise another question. Who mined the asteroid in the first place?”

  “Humans,” Hadfield said, bluntly. “We checked the tools. They were standard-issue mining tools,
of the kind provided to almost all starship crews.”

  John swore under his breath. That proved nothing. The major interstellar powers had worked hard to standardise everything in the years before the war, apart from a handful of components that were considered highly classified. There was no way to know if the tools had originally been manufactured in Britain, America or Russia, at least not from the scars they’d left on the asteroid ... or if they hadn't been traded to someone else after they’d been produced.

  But who had it been? There hadn’t been any major push towards the sector before the war; Cromwell was the only known colony past Boston, and the CDC hadn't had the resources to fund a major settlement program. Survivalists might have come out so far, during the war itself, but they had to have known there was little past Cromwell ... unless the third tramline led somewhere interesting. His gaze swept back to the system display, showing the tramline marked in yellow for unexplored. They would have to survey it when - if - they located Vesper or declared her lost to causes unknown.

  And see if the Turks or Indians found anything interesting, John thought. But why wouldn't they tell us about it?

  A dull chime echoed through the compartment. “Captain,” Forbes said, her voice high with sudden excitement. “I’m picking up something.”

  “Ah,” Richards said, with heavy sarcasm. “Underling’s Inability Descriptive Syndrome.”

  “As you were,” John said, as Forbes flushed brightly. He hadn't known Richards watched Jackie Spring. But then, the joke had been old before Jackie Spring had been more than a gleam in a horny old producer’s eye. “What are you picking up?”

  “An emergency beacon,” Forbes said. A blue light blinked to life on the system display, showing a location several million kilometres from the asteroid cluster. It was right along the projected least-time course from Tramline One to Tramline Two. “Her IFF reads out as Vesper!”

  “Mr. Armstrong, take us there,” John snapped. The Marines had returned to the ship, thankfully. “Flank speed!”

  “Aye, sir,” Armstrong said. A dull thrumming echoed through the hull as he yanked her away from the asteroids, then up to full speed. “ETA, thirty-seven minutes.”

  “I could try to trigger a core download,” Forbes offered. “It would save time.”

  John considered it, then shook his head. There was no way to know just how Vesper’s crew had set up their emergency beacons. A core dump might wipe the beacon completely, if they’d activated those settings, even though it was technically against regulations. And the beacon itself could have easily been damaged by whatever had disabled or destroyed its mothership. Better not to take chances, he told himself, when they would be ready to scoop the beacon out of space in less than an hour.

  “We can wait,” he said. He keyed his terminal. “Mr. Johnston, prepare for a beacon recovery operation. I want to know everything that beacon saw before it switched itself into sleep mode.”

  “Aye, sir,” Johnston said. The Chief Engineer sounded relieved. “I’ll have a team ready to pick it up once we’re there.”

  ***

  Forty minutes after detection, once the beacon had been given a careful examination, the Chief Engineer and his team went EVA to inspect the beacon, then prepare to bring it onboard Warspite. To John’s relief, the car-sized beacon showed no signs of tampering, let alone sabotage that might have caused it to explode, once it was onboard his ship. The Chief Engineer carefully inserted a lead into the databanks, then copied everything to a remote datacore., which was then flown back to Warspite. They left the beacon itself drifting in space.

  “There’s no sign of anything going wrong until they reach this system,” the Chief Engineer said, once the datacore had been analysed. He’d brought it into the briefing room to show the senior crew. “Most of the entries are mind-numbingly boring; there’s only one interesting note, a statement that Lieutenant Higgins was reprimanded by the Captain for spending too much time seducing the colonists. However, matters change rapidly once the starship enters the Troyon System. Shortly after leaving the tramline, she comes under attack.”

  John sucked in his breath. “Under attack? By whom?”

  “Unknown,” Johnston said. “The first hit took out her civilian-grade sensor nodes and disrupted the entire network. I don't think there's any hope of recovering anything more from the beacon, sir, although we will certainly try. However, the ship was ordered to surrender immediately afterwards and boarded. The Captain released the beacon with orders to continue receiving updates until the whole affair was over. Apparently, the boarding party never noticed the beacon was gone.”

  Or they did notice, too late, John thought. And spaced the Captain when they discovered that he’d left clues behind for any searchers.

  “Pirates,” Richards said, in disbelief. “Real fucking pirates.”

  “So it would seem,” Johnston said, grimly. “But sir ... how the hell can piracy be made economical?”

  John shrugged. Maintaining a warship was costly. The beancounters had bitched and moaned about the cost of the pre-war Royal Navy, although that had stopped in short order when the Tadpoles attacked Vera Cruz. Even if someone had produced an armed freighter, it would be impossible to obtain supplies from tiny colonies like Cromwell, even if the crew was prepared to bombard the colony into submission. And it would definitely attract attention from genuine militaries, who would do whatever it took to take out the pirate ship.

  “I think we may have to ask them,” he said. Could the Turks or the Indians be supplying the pirates? It was possible, but it would be an act of war. And they couldn't keep their involvement a secret indefinitely. “Until then ...”

  He turned to look at the Chief Engineer. “Mike,” he said, “where did they go?”

  “The last signal the beacon recorded noted the ship was being taken towards Tramline Three,” Johnston said. “And from there, into unexplored space.”

  “So we go after them,” Howard said.

  “We could be travelling along that tramline within an hour,” Armstrong added, eagerly.

  John thought quickly, weighing up the problem. Cold logic said he should report the whole affair to Pegasus and Boston, then send a message to the Admiralty. There was no way of knowing what was lurking at the far side of the tramline, from a single pirate ship - he was still having problems wrapping his head around that concept - to an entire rogue planet of survivalists. He had no idea if the pirates had known what Vesper had been carrying ...

  But those are British citizens in enemy hands, he thought. It was a rule that had been established during the Troubles, when it had become less important to appease public opinion by not launching punitive strikes against terrorist states. We can’t leave them there to their fate.

  He turned to Richards. “Have copies of our logs and the beacon records transferred to a drone, then prep it for departure,” he ordered. “When the freighter comes through this system” - he briefly considered waiting, but he knew it would take too long - “the drone can upload its contents to the ship, which can take the files to Boston. The Americans can forward them to the Admiralty.”

  “Aye, sir,” Richards said.

  “Mr. Armstrong, I want you to plot us a course that will take us through the tramline and out at the edge of the unexplored star system,” John continued. “I do not want to jump in on a predictable least-time course. We have no idea what we may be facing.”

  “Aye, sir,” Armstrong said. If he was disappointed at not charging through the tramline, guns blazing, he didn't show it. “I’ll plot the course now.”

  John nodded. “Mr. Howard, study the beacon logs as best as you can and try to determine what we may be facing,” he continued. “Look for any clues as to the ship’s origin, weapons load and anything else you may consider important. Run your conclusions past Mr. Richards, then be ready to brief me once we’re underway.”

  “There may be little more from the beacon,” Johnston warned. “I can try to model out the last mome
nts of Vesper, but her internal network was badly damaged. Her final recordings may not be reliable.”

  “You can do the best you can,” John said, addressing Howard. “I will understand if you find nothing useful.”

  He nodded to the younger man, then motioned to the datacore. Johnston was right; there might be little left to recover, but they had to try. Besides, it would keep Howard busy. He didn't need time to brood on women and children in pirate hands. They'd all seen the Jackie Spring movie where Jackie had infiltrated a pirate crew, slept her way to the top and then handed the pirates over to the authorities. The script had been appalling, the acting hideously over the top, but no one had watched it for the words. They’d been more interested in watching Jackie Spring - and a hundred supporting actresses - falling out of their clothes time and time again. Maybe it was exciting, when everyone was an actress and the deaths were staged, but there was nothing erotic about it in real life. How could there be?