by Damon Alan
Sarah listened as Seto talked to the fleet, advising them of the impending termination of the inclusion sphere.
“All fleet ships, acknowledge receipt.” Seto put the responses on the bridge PA system.
“Schein, jump termination in less than ten.”
“Hinden copies.”
“Fyurigan. Realspace in less than ten.”
“Palino copies.”
“EF2358 acknowledges receipt.”
“Amalli, drop before ten.”
Seto waited a moment. “Yascurra, acknowledge drop to realspace.”
Silence.
“Yascurra, Stennis, over.” Seto's voice carried an edge of desperation. Sarah empathised with her. The young officer hailed from a pacifist society. A planet founded by anti-military, anti-force refugees. It was hard for her to stomach the deaths of so many. Yet with the Hive threat, nobody was safe. There was no option for the pacifist.
“We're all warriors now,” Sarah whispered to herself.
Gilbert looked at her funny, then at Seto. Recognition dawned in his eyes, and he smiled a comforting smile.
“Hinden is standing by with two shuttles of marines suited for EVA if you need boarding parties for the Yascurra, Stennis.”
“Captain Dayson has her executive shuttle ready to deploy, Hinden, but I'll pass along your offer.” Seto was extremely diplomatic. An excellent comm officer. She looked questioningly at Sarah.
Sarah shook her head no, but to add to the diplomacy, Sarah suggested the Hinden be ready. “Thank Captain Malveaux and have him stand by, Lieutenant. We will send our boys in first, then get help if it's needed. Let's control the discovery process.”
“Hinden, Stennis. Have your shuttles stand by, but first boarding will be one shuttle only, from the Stennis.”
“Hinden acknowledges and understands.”
Seto sighed in frustration. “The fleet is ready for drop to realspace, Captain, except, of course, the Yascurra.”
“Lieutenant, you've done what you can. Check to make sure you're secure in your grav couch,” Sarah said. “Just in case.”
Seto idly checked her straps. “Maybe the nuke destroyed their communication equipment.”
“Let's hope. But until we board keep speculation under wraps.” Sarah's look conveyed her desire to stop the guessing game, and Seto got the message. Sarah turned her attention to the matter at hand. “Commander Gilbert, is the shuttle ready to go? I want men on board that ship right away.”
“I have eight marines standing by, Captain, the shuttle is ready. The pilot will dock at the rear of the hangar deck, at a personnel transfer airlock. It can be powered by the shuttle if required. I handpicked these marines, they've all seen boarding combat at least once.”
“Why would that matter?” Sarah asked.
Gilbert frowned, something he didn't often do. “It's not going to be a pretty sight on the Yascurra, Captain. You know, you've seen this yourself. Those people got handed a grisly way to go if they survived very long. That sort of trauma will make almost anyone who hasn't seen it before… less effective.”
He's right. I've seen it, but most here haven't.
“I get your meaning,” Sarah replied. “Good thinking.”
Sarah listened to Seto fend off an incoming call from medical. Commander Thea Jennis. “It's okay, put her on screen, Mr. Seto.”
Seto transferred the call to the main display. “Captain, finally. I thought you were avoiding me like usual. These boys going on board the Yascurra need to be told what they might face. The crew over there may be in horrible shape. You should have my medics with your insertion team.”
Why does this woman grate on my nerves like she does?
“We're on top of that, doctor. We have marine medics on the shuttle. We'll know soon enough. Get to your grav couch for the drop to realspace,” Sarah said. “Quickly. That's an order.”
The doctor scowled her displeasure. “Yes, Captain. Jennis out.” The part of the view screen occupied by the doctor's face returned to the black of FTL space.
Sarah paused to ground herself. Memories of the Chimera flooded back into her. Nightmares, more accurately. She pushed it from her mind.
I am the Captain. Everyone depends on me. A strong commander will keep people focused.
Sarah took a deep breath and assumed her command voice. “We have a jump to end, people. Status of the singularity, Mr. Corriea?”
Corriea checked his display. “Spin down in just over five minutes, sir.”
“Very well.” Sarah marked her holographic checklist. “Mr. Harmeen, extend the radiators. Advise Engineering to be ready to blow coolant on my command.”
Lieutenant Harmeen spoke to Engineering, then passed a caution back to her. “I still can't make any promises on the reactor, Captain.”
“Understood. It lit and kept running, so that's a start.”
“The only way to know the peak power output is to put the load on it. It's iffy.”
Irritation crept into her voice. “Lieutenant, we're about to find out. Until then we have a job to do. Let's worry about the things we can control, and stop wasting my time with the things we can't.”
“Yes ma'am. Sorry, ma'am. I'll check the purging system for the coolant vanes again.”
Her first officer smiled at her when she looked at him. “It's jitters, Captain. We took quite a beating and survived. That reactor is now our weak link.”
“I suppose so,” she replied. “We should be concentrating on what we can actually control. We can't do anything about external damage or the reactor until we drop to realspace.”
“I agree, but human nature is what it is,” Gilbert said before returning to his duties.
“The radiators are fully extended, Captain. We're as ready as we get,” Lieutenant Harmeen said. “Initial pressure check indicates only minor leaks.”
“The damage control crews are ready?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
“Then you've done your job, Mr. Harmeen. Say your prayers, because the next few minutes... well, now is the time to say them if I understand religion right.”
Lieutenant Harmeen smiled. “Sure, Captain. I'll send one on its way.”
Her eyes flitted from screen to screen taking in telemetry from the ship's systems. Despite the detonation of a nuclear weapon in close proximity, three months later the Michael Stennis reported green in nearly all areas. The ship wasn't pretty inside, he was a patchwork of hacked equipment and hacked repair jobs. But he was working reasonably well, regardless.
“Mr. Harmeen, your crews did an amazing job. The old boy is battered, but you and your crews have him in far better shape than I'd hoped for.”
“Thank you, ma'am. The entire crew... well, they kicked butt and took names to be quite honest. I've never seen teamwork on this level.”
“This is the best crew in the Alliance Fleet. Captains always say it, but I mean it.”
“We've survived quite a few battles,” Harmeen said as he broke into a smile, “but I guess my prayers are responsible for that.”
Sarah laughed.
The bridge was silent for a minute as the countdown clock rolled off the time until spin out. Sarah listened to her bridge crew, and she was certain nobody breathed in the last twenty seconds.
Harmeen had the power output gauge for reactor two on the main screen.
“Singularity spin out,” Corriea said as the timer reached zero. The Stennis shuddered as the immense forces in the drive core unraveled. Sarah stared at the readout, tense and hoping the massive vessel would hold together. The reactor output spiked to eighty percent.
No explosion.
Sarah breathed again at the same time as everyone else.
“The Schein is in front of us, right?” Sarah asked. “Give me a view from her aft camera.”
The main view screen switched to an image of the Stennis from the starboard front. The ship was battle scarred, with holes blasted in armor plates, faded markings, and scorch marks streaking across his
hull.
Despite the blemishes, it stirred Sarah's soul to see the Stennis poised majestically from the Schein's point of view. Her ship floated in the blackness of FTL space, a valiant warrior in a sea of black. Radiator fins jutted outward from the Stennis like the ruffled tail feathers of a peacock.
Sarah patted the metal of her grav couch. You strut, old man.
Indicators on Sarah's displays reported their status as the massive coolant pumps flooded the radiators with superheated liquid metal. The feathery fins began to glow red, then orange, yellow, then a brilliant white as the titanium vanes struggled to vent energy into space. To the right of the screen, half a kilometer from the main body of the Stennis, a jet of high pressure sodium burst from a broken conduit, spraying outward in a cone.
“How significant is that leak, Lieutenant Harmeen?”
“It shouldn't impact this cooling cycle much, Captain. There is nothing to be done at the moment. We'll patch it when we idle.”
The riskiest moments vanished into the past, particularly regarding reactor two. The radiant feathers of the battlecruiser began to head back down the spectrum, from white, through dull red, then finally dark again.
“We get to live another day,” Gilbert said happily.
Sarah loosened her death grip on her acceleration harness. “Good, I'm not done yet.” She breathed a couple of deep breaths to collect her thoughts. “Stop the pumps as soon as we can, Mr. Harmeen, I don't want to lose any more coolant into space than necessary or push reactor two past its limit.”
“Shutting down now, Captain. The remaining heat can be handled by the passive fins.” Harmeen pushed the telemetry from the drive core onto the main screen, erasing the majestic view from the Schein.
“Thirty seconds until realspace,” Mr. Corriea announced via fleet intercom. He must have noticed Sarah's eyebrows furrow, because he released the intercom and spoke directly to her. “Our increased speed over c means longer for space to return to its normal shape and for us to drop to realspace, sir.”
“You're the physicist, Mr. Corriea,” Sarah replied. “I just kill the enemy.”
“As you say, sir,” Corriea answered. The navigator returned his attention to his displays and counted down the time until the drop to realspace over the fleet intercom. “Ten seconds... five, four, three, two, one...” The rippling of space created by the spinning black hole smoothed out and the fleet dropped out of FTL.
“Status?” Sarah demanded.
Corriea worked to calculate the position of the fleet relative to Hamor.
“Captain, ummm... you're going to want to look at this.” Corriea put the forward view on the main screen. The view screen was filled with total blackness, except for the Schein which drifted a few kilometers ahead, its navlights blinking.
“It looks like we're still in FTL. Where are the stars?” Sarah asked.
“That's nothing. Look behind us, sir,” Corriea said.
The scene switched to the aft view, which was as spectacular as it was alarming. An arm of the Milky Way galaxy stretched across the sky behind them, majestic in blazing glory. Globular clusters, nebulae, and a carpet of stars were not what Sarah expected to see. The Palino floated lazily at the edge of the vista.
Sarah's stomach crawled.
Shit. What the hell has gone wrong now?
“Sir, we're approximately nineteen thousand light-years above the galaxy, give or take a thousand. The nuke seems to have knocked us off course as well as pushed us halfway across the universe.”
Sarah threw her arms upward. “We can't catch a break.” Sarah watched as Seto's comm panel lit up with incoming calls from the ships of the fleet.
“Commander Gilbert, you and Lieutenant Seto get on visual with the fleet captains. Calm them down. They're seeing this too, and they're going to want answers. We don't have any, so let them know we're working on it.”
Gilbert stared at her a moment, pensively, as if he wasn't sure what to say. “Umm, on it, sir. I'll delay them for now.”
“Mr. Corriea, put some positive spin on this for me.”
“I'd love too, Captain. And I would if I could, but I can't get a navlock. There aren't any reference points. Even if I could, it's not like we can jump back nineteen thousand light-years.”
Sarah's stomach twisted harder. “You're saying we're stuck here?
“That's exactly what I'm saying, Captain. We're stranded in intergalactic space.”
“I refuse to accept that,” she said stiffly. Captain Dayson stared at her navigation officer. “Find me another answer, mister.”
Corriea exhaled slowly, venting his frustration. “We only have fuel for a one hundred and forty light-year jump, Captain. I don't think there are any other answers.”
“So when our supplies run—” Sarah stopped speaking with her mouth open.
We're dead.
She immediately pushed that thought from her mind.
I've been dead before. It didn't stick.
“Normal ops for now. Commander Gilbert, have the captains bring the fleet close and tether them to the Stennis. I want every inch of all seven hulls gone over, inside and out. We don't have a space dock, so we'll be our own.”
“Yes, sir, right away Captain.”
“Mr. Harmeen, how's the Stennis doing?”
“Almost all internals green, ma'am. Numerous external thrusters and sensors are offline. The starboard railguns are down.” Harmeen reported.
“Get the railguns up first, Lieutenant. Other ships can cover us with the sensor outage, but no captain ever complained about having too many railguns.”
“If we have the parts, Captain, we'll get them operational.”
Have the other ships start planning EVAs for hull repairs on the fleet. Let's get in fighting order.”
“We'll do what we can, Captain, but this isn't a drydock. That's what we need.”
“I know what we need, Mr. Harmeen, and I know what we have. It's your job to make me forget what we need, and impress me with what you've done. Get to it.”
Harmeen smiled enthusiastically. “Aye, Captain.”
“Mr. Corriea, call Science and get them working on something for us as a destination. A star, a brown dwarf, whatever. At this point I'll take a rogue planet. We need a place with fuel and resources.”
“On it, sir.”
Sarah listened to her first officer as he spoke to one of her ships.
“Roger, EF2358. We'll see what we can do about getting some coffee rations over there,” Gilbert said.
She almost laughed at how normal that sounded. “Good news, Commander?”
“I am auditing my casualty list, Captain.”
“Shouldn't Dr. Jannis be taking care of this?”
“She's got a lot of wounded to deal with, from the collision and the nuke. I took it off her hands.”
Sarah was impressed. “Excellent, Commander. I assumed the doctor would handle it. Way to step up. What else have you got?”
“The number of dead is pretty high, but the good news is the increase in that number has slowed down to a trickle. Other complications from radiation exposure are a different story.”
“What about the Yascurra?”
“The onboard computers are in reset mode, and she responds to hails with a standby code. There appears to be some EMP damage and most of the ship computers just keep rebooting. The fusion reactors are offline, she's been running on batteries for the entire jump. In a way it's good that nearly all her systems are down, otherwise the ship batteries wouldn't have lasted this long. The autopilot is functional, and kept the ship in the bubble during the jump.”
“Silver lining to the cloud, Commander?” Sarah asked.
“It's something,” he replied.
“That it is,” Sarah confirmed. “We don't have the parts to fix an entire ship. Hopefully she just shut down and isn't completely destroyed.”
“The marines will be on board in,” Gilbert looked at the ship chronometer, “ten minutes. We'll see the level
of damage then.”
Sarah untethered herself from her command console. “Let's get her under our control. Reboot her from here if you need too, then get the Yascurra in line with the rest of the fleet and tethered to us. If we need to recrew her, we at least have that plan in place.”
“Aren't you assuming the worst, sir?”
“Assume the worst, hope for the best. The ship is lightly shielded, and they were as close to the blast as we were. The best we can hope for is a crew that is highly dosed but alive, Commander. But if they were alive, they would have found some way to signal us during the jump. A flashing navlight, an airlock opening and closing, anything would have alerted us.”
“If it's okay with you, Captain, I'm going to hope you're wrong,” Gilbert said.
Sarah nodded, but looked away from him toward her station displays. “It's more than okay, I'm glad to see it. I hope I'm wrong. Let's get back to work, we need the Yascurra in fighting order.”
Corriea looked confused. “Not to question orders, but who are we going to fight, Captain?”
“Until we figure out a plan to deal with our location issues, we will act as if we're still in the fight, Lieutenant. The Yascurra may be the most important ship we have left after the Fyurigan if we find a source of resources. She carries several special operations shuttles in addition to grapplers and G-Ks, and I didn't deploy any of them at Hamor so we still have a full complement. Normal ops, for now, means getting her into fighting status.”
Gilbert nodded. “I understand, Captain. She'll be ready ASAP.”
“I'm headed to Supply. I need to see what we have. Thinking of that, Commander Gilbert, send a few of your marines down to stand guard on supply. Armed marines. You have the conn.”
“Guards, sir?”
“We'll need people to know their interests are safe, Mr. Gilbert. If we can't resupply, we need people to know that what we have will be distributed fairly.”
“Yes, sir. I have the conn.”
Sarah floated through the bridge hatch to the deck below. Using handrails, she pulled herself aft toward the cargo areas. She heard Lieutenant Corriea page her on the ship intercom.