Of Bravery and Bluster

by Scott Kelemen

  Garam whistled at the impenetrable tangle of wreckage. He was quite sure it couldn’t get more impassable if you had planned it that way. “I’m not a damage control expert, yet, Mak. This’ll take days to clear. Even if we started to dig through it, we could end up being incinerated by a random power spike or get ripped apart by one of those metal support fragments if they shift the wrong way while we’re crawling through.”

  Makaio let slip a curse. “Damn. Didn’t think it would be this bad.”

  Hope boomed on Garam’s face. “Wait a minute. There’s a sort of pattern to these power surges. They might not be random after all. If they’re being powered by a malfunctioning device on a certain cycle, there might be a window we can use.”

  “A window big enough for us to fit through?”

  Garam replied, “Maybe. Just a sec.” He brought up one of his hands and started to move it in time with an unseen count, as if he was going to try and grab hold of one of the seemingly randomly charged lines during a dead period to test his theory.

  Johanna had been silent through the whole conversation, waiting for some unknown mental tripwire. Garam’s intent broke that invisible marker. She broke her calm peace with a strict snap to her voice, preventing him from trying, “Stop! We’re not going in there.”

  Makaio rounded on her, surprise widening his eyes. “What? Jo, there’s at least three people in there alive! Once the life support systems fail, it’ll only be a question of whether they suffocate or freeze to death first, and that’s if the hull doesn’t breach again. We can’t leave them to die!”

  Ashton had not heard Johanna’s firm resistance, but he caught Makaio’s angry retort. He interjected, “She’s right! You’re out of time!”

  Makaio called back, “We’re with you in this, Sir!” He faced Johanna again. “So long as there is a chance, if there might be a way in, there is no way we are just going to walk away!”

  Garam was equally fierce, “Come on Johanna, get onboard with us! We’re going to need you.” There was just the faintest hint of disappointment in his voice. He had never figured her as one who backed away from a challenge. He knew Johanna was terminally sensible and calm, but this! This was just cold hearted.

  Watching Garam and wary that he might try something rash, Johanna spoke quickly. “This is not a good risk. We needed to see it for ourselves, but the truth is staring us in the face. We can’t get them out, and we need to get to the escape pods.” She called out in a suddenly loud, resonant voice which sounded far more powerful than her tiny frame should produce, yet without any overt effort. The impact of her role reversal, switching from passive to leadership with natural flair caused her friends to hesitate. That was all the space she needed. “Lieutenant Commander Ashton! Please give the order, Sir. They won’t leave without it!”

  There was a long pause. Then, Ashton leveled the hard words that would mean his own death. “You heard her, gentlemen. It’s an order! Save yourselves. We’re not getting out of here!”

  Makaio was shaking in angry, stubborn denial. “You can’t be serious, Jo! Whenever it’s a choice between our lives and theirs...theirs are worth more. It’s part of the Navy code. We all believe in it. I know you do! We protect others. You might not understand most traditions, but I damn well know you get that one!”

  Johanna remained calm yet insistent. “Not this time.” She swept past him tapped the button Garam had jiry-rigged. The door into the CCR snapped shut with a second hiss, groaning in the last few centimeters with the mechanical equivalent of a guarantee that it would never willingly open again.

  Johanna decided to make certain. She was still no expert in hand to hand combat, and her light-gravity body was a continuing disadvantage. But she had fought hard to overcome her disadvantages. She delivered a sharp kick with enough force to shatter the fragile control console and smash the fragile components Garam had strung together.

  Garam emitted a short, tortured cry. “What did you do that for? It’ll take - damn it, I might never get that working again!”

  Johanna replied with continuing calm, “Then there is no reason to stay.”

  Makaio wrestled to keep his temper from boiling over, and succeeded only by fractions of a degree, “You’re being ridiculous, Jo! Those people in there are going to die!”

  Johanna insisted, “There is no time to argue over this. I have left you no other option. Unless we intend to stay here and die with them, we need to leave.”

  Garam was wallowing in his own disappointment with her, but admitted, “She’s right. Dammit Jo, I have…no idea what to even say!” Furious, speechless, and out of options, he stormed off down the corridor.

  Makaio grit his teeth. “This was beneath you, Jo. It really was. And now we’re all going to have to live with them dying in there. You’ve put that on all of us. We’re having words later, count on it!” He stomped off after Garam.

  Johanna took a long breath, steadying herself before moving again. That had been almost as bad as she expected. Necessary to protect their careers and keep them alive, but that logic did little to deflect her guilt. She drifted after them, keeping up without trying to get close.

  The next closest pod bay was down a deck, and it took them only a few minutes to arrive. A single pilot was waiting for them. The other pod doors were already closed. A few others were already seated inside the last. The pilot waved them closer, “Come on! You are damn lucky I heard you yelling up there or I would have blasted off without you! Station power is going to fail any second!”

  One after the other, they darted in through the escape pod hatch. With them and the pilot, it brought the total to seven inside, which was still comfortable in the eight-person pod in a way no escape vehicle had any right to be. The pod pilot poked his head out, gave one last look down the corridor desperately hoping to see a couple more he could save, then pulled the hatch closed. “Hang on to your butts!” He slid into his chair, strapped in, and punched the throttle.

  Nothing happened, except the pod went dark.

  Plunged into pure blackness, a minute went by. And another.

  Fears began to climb. Nervous shuffling could be heard all around.

  Garam called out, “Are we clear? I can’t even feel us accelerating!”

  Makaio answered, “We’re not. We never kicked out. You can feel the punch on these things! Their gravity offsets are puny.”

  Garam objected, “It can’t be dead! These pods have their own local batteries to ensure they get away!”

  None of the other crewmen stepped in to explain. They never got the chance.

  A chime sounded in the darkness. The internal station public address system came to life. This time, it was no emergency computer backup voice that spoke. The station announcer was back. “Attention all personnel, Watch officer speaking. This ends focused exercise Carrowdale. All midshipmen under examination have either been designated as having reached escape pods, lost, or dead. Station personnel are thanked for their cooperation. All escape pods remain with the station and did not eject after activation. All station damage was pre-planned and cosmetic. Overall station integrity was never in danger, and all internal services will return now that the exercise is complete.”

  “Pod hatches will be unlocked in 2 minutes. All supervisors are to contact their assigned personnel. Declare any actual injuries to medical personnel as soon as possible.”

  “All midshipmen of the graduating class of 854 are to proceed to the loading bay on deck 5 for transit to ground-side planetary station Q3 for quarters assignments and to await the upcoming debrief sessions. These will occur before you are assigned to your new ships.”

  “All station personnel are to return to their duty stations and conduct 2 hours of all immediate corrective action to restore the station toward full functionality. Larger scale clean-up will occur tomorrow beginning at noon, station time. That is all.”

  Chapter 26

  Captain Ollam came out of his office stationed just off the CCR. He had been purposefull
y left out of the game, controlling the safety cell to ensure nothing got out of hand. “Well, I’d say you played that rather well, Exec. You may have a career in acting.”

  Ashton returned a low chuckle. “Not sure about that, Sir. I couldn’t seem to convince that last set of middies to leave us to our fate.”

  Ollam smiled at the memory. He had followed the whole ordeal on the exercise evaluation cameras hidden throughout the station, including the drama in the corridor outside of the CCR. “Just means you were inspiring loyalty even from those who don’t know you well. I’d say that is impressive. I’ll make a note – people willing to die for him. Sounds pretty good.”

  Knowing when he was being razzed by his boss, Ashton didn’t rise to the bait. “Cool-down time is elapsed, Sir. Permission to unlock the pods and get everyone moving?”

  Deciding to let him escape the teasing, Ollam waved him on. “Go ahead. Last estimate I saw was that it would take three days to get everything reset. Please tell me someone else drew the short straw for the next class coming through?”

  “Yes, Sir. Not sure how they are going to explain the need to divert the students over to the auxiliary orbital supply depot, but they are next on the block. Then the orbital science array gets the next one.”

  Ollam snorted. “They’ll fight that one. They won’t want to interrupt their experiments for that long.”

  “Then it’s back to us, Sir. 18 months before we need to go through this again.”

  Ollam sighed. “Long enough. I won’t be here. They’re moving me ground-side in four months. Ah, well. Punch in the code, Exec. Let’s get people heading in the right direction.”

  “Aye aye, Sir.” He turned to the computer and keyed in the unlock sequence that would cascade the station’s systems back into full working order – at least as much as they could be, with some of the infrastructure torn apart to look like comet damage.

  Almost immediately, flat-toned warning buzzers sounded from the system operations and engineering consoles.

  Ashton was more annoyed than concerned. “We didn’t silence the alarms on the systems we tore apart for this?”

  The operations manager, Lieutenant Tarken answered, “We did, Sir. Nothing planned should be sounding alarms.” He walked over to the unmanned station. There were only three of them in the command room, the full watch not yet having reported back for duty after being scattered for the exercise.

  The whole station bucked hard. An explosion tore through the heart of the central power core as the sabotage of Acting Lieutenant Jona Cradlin and Senior Petty Officer Jerrod Michaels combined in the worst possible way. Neither of them knew the full extent of the danger they had created. Fortunately for everyone, they had not been able to cause an outright meltdown of the fusion plant without being noticed. But their interlinked sabotage was going to end up being just as deadly in a totally different way.

  Captain Ollam ran to the engineering console himself, not waiting for a report. “What was that?”

  Acting Lieutenant Nerris, the last and most junior watch officer present, had raced over to join him. He stabbed the dark console fruitlessly. “There is a major interruption in the power generation system.”

  Ollam spun to face the operations console, “Is the whole core gone?”

  Tarken was working quickly at the ops console. “No, Sir! It wasn’t a core breach. But we’re getting a significant number of error codes. I still have environmental control, artificial gravity, hotel services are still up…no major losses on my end.”

  Ashton was working his way around the CCR, checking the external systems. “PODD is on line, comms are good, orbital thrusters -” He stumbled to a stop. “By the fucking stars, the orbital thrusters are dead!”

  Shock froze them all in place.

  The station was in a low orbit, perfectly placed to minimize the time it took for orbital shuttle runs from visiting ships down to the planet’s surface. The central space dock was higher up in geosynchronous for larger ships, but this station was built for proximity to the surface. Of course, that also meant they couldn’t orbit as fast as was typical for this altitude. The designers didn’t want the hub to be limited by being above the Navy’s central headquarters once every 78 minutes as the orbit time around Proxima would dictate.

  So, the station moved slower, which meant it should have decayed out of orbit and crashed. Except, the continuous burn from the orbital thrusters offset that impetus and kept the station falling just over the horizon as a proper orbit demanded. In this age of efficient fusion power, that sort of power expenditure was a minor demand and well worth the advantages in time savings for senior officials and shipments.

  Without them, the station would fall right out of the sky and strike the offices of the headquarters it had been positioned to serve.

  Ollam gasped out, “There are three redundancies on that system. One explosion took them all out? What are the odds of that?”

  Tarken was bewildered at the very idea. “Astronomical. It can’t happen.”

  ‘But it did.’ Ollam thought. Even now, he didn’t consider sabotage. The Alliance had unified all of humankind, and to think a Miraki had somehow crawled its scaly hide into his station to do something like this was totally unthinkable. Sure, maybe a couple rogue humans might steal a few weapons or supplies or hijack a transport to sell on the black market. Pirates and criminals were an ever-present danger. But the idea that any human would willfully knock a space station out of its orbit was unbelievable to him.

  So, Ollam was still thinking only about system failure, about how to fix what had to be the most catastrophic accident in recent memory. He keyed open the public address to every deck. “All hands, this is the Captain speaking. We have had a full failure of the orbital thruster systems. This is not a drill, I repeat, this is not a drill! All engineering personnel are to report to the machinery control room for priority assignments. The MCR has priority on all comm channels and resources until the problem is resolved. We have less than two hours before we lose enough altitude that our fall will be unrecoverable. All other personnel are to report to their duty stations and stand ready for re-assignment as needed! Captain, clear.”

  It took only seconds before the communications console started to light up with a hundred different red indicators of emergency calls. Ashton pointed at Nerris. “Answer those!”

  Nerris scrambled over the pretend wreckage still strewn about the CCR and searched for call markers. They were all showing as priority one. He saw one that indicated it was coming from the logistics officer. He opened the channel to the department head. “This is the CCR, Ma’am.”

  “Nerris? Why are you – never mind! Can you confirm the Captain gave the order for the escape pods to open? We’re still stuck in here.”

  Nerris froze, trying to speak past the surprise.

  Fortunately, Ashton heard the report. He took the young officer’s place, demanding back, “Are you saying the doors are still locked?”

  “Yes, Sir,” she answered back, sounding worried but not yet panicked. “We thought there might have been a problem interfacing with the station, so we manually cranked open the hatch from the pod’s side. But the station-side hatches are in place, and the manual cranks for those are on the far side. We can’t get out.”

  Ashton went white as he noticed the growing list of priority one calls. He already knew each one would be carrying the same, deadly message. “Do what you can, Wendy. We’ll get someone down to you as soon as we can.” He killed the feed, then raked a hand through his hair. “Sweet mercy from the stars, we’re so dead.”

  Ollam stormed over to him, “What was that?”

  Ashton shook his head. His mind was scrambling to form a plan, but it was all mush that refused to take shape. “Everyone’s trapped in the pods, Sir. We can’t eject them, but they can’t get back onto the station. We have a skeleton crew that were hiding throughout the ship in case things went wrong, but that’s only a few dozen at most.”

  Ollam
clenched his teeth, determination setting in. “Then we will do what we can. Call the engineering officer. He’ll be back in the MCR by now. Tell him we’ll send him more people as soon as possible, but not to stand on any ceremony. Fix what he can with who he has.”

  He turned to Tarken and Nerris, “Both of you, get out there and start cranking open escape pods. Anyone from engineering goes directly there. Anyone else, they help crank open more pods. Get our people out!”

  Watching them run out, Ollam then opened the broadcast again. “All hands, this is the Captain. There is a critical failure in the escape pod doors. We are sending teams to manually override the doors from the station side. If you are trapped, open the pod-side doors and wait for rescue. All personnel not directly involved in engineering repair are to proceed immediately to the nearest pod launch bay and assist in releasing others. We are running out of time. Expedite!”

  Ashton finished his own call to engineering, and met the eyes of his Captain. “What now?”

  “Now? You get out there and free everyone you can find. I’m staying here and calling the Headquarters. They need to start evacuating. Otherwise, we’re going to kill thousands more.”

  ***

  Senior Petty Officer Jerrod Michaels heard the Captain’s speech like everyone else on the station. This particular pod was filled entirely with Trinitian station crewmen. It wasn’t just Academy students who formed cliques who remembered their home planet. He pushed his way up to the escape pod exit point where Acting Lieutenant Jona Cradlin was stewing in abject misery. “Sir, let me get at the hatch panel.”

  Jona scowled at him. “This isn’t the time to panic, SPO. Not much we can do until someone comes to let us out.”

  Jerrod offered, “I might have a work-around. Something I figured out.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me, Sir. I think I can get us out. I don’t want to die in this can, do you?”

  Jona was about to tell him to back off when he noticed a few looks of hope being cast his way. The other crew-members had caught whiff of what the SPO was saying. Not really believing there was any chance of success, Jona gave a little ground and let him in. “Just don’t make it any worse.”