Black Box

by Ivan Turner

  In Control, the captain stood. There was no specific station for him as he was technically master of all stations. Ted Beckett had risen through the ranks as a foot soldier, eventually making Lieutenant, and then the command crew at various stages. Someone in the Admiralty, the old Admiralty, had recognized his skill and his intuition because it was very rare for an infantry man to reach captain.

  For no reason, the pilot’s station was toward the front of the ship. There were port holes circling the Control Room in easy view and, though the pilot could see outside the ship through these and several cameras, piloting was done based on data and a graphical readout. Of all the stations, the pilot’s was the most advanced technologically. It was equipped with two touch screens, one on either side of the seat. The controls were customizable for a left or right handed pilot. In addition, there were two control sticks designed for maneuvering in a three dimensional environment. Finally, the pilot had a keyboard screen, just like everyone else. Pilots often had exceptional programming skills and United Earth Space Force Navigational Systems were designed to accept macros (mini computer programs) for complex maneuvers. The better pilots wrote the better macros. The pilot’s chair could recline into any position and the entire station rotated and swiveled.

  The walls on either side of the pilot were slightly recessed in order to make room for two small consoles. Each had a touch screen, keyboard screen, and chair only, although the chair was a simple plastic job. It was nothing compared to the pilot’s chair. One station was the radar and weapons station. This station was commonly manned by another pilot or a foot soldier. Foot soldiers would often seek other skills while in service of the infantry. It was how they advanced. A large number of UESF foot soldiers had opted for ships weapons or engineering. And so the other station, used to monitor and control engine power, was either occupied by an engineer or, infrequently, also by a foot soldier.

  At all times, there was at least one officer in Control. Sometimes he or she would occupy one of the three stations. Other times, the officer would take up the position in which the captain stood at the moment. The Crew Chief also took irregular shifts in Control and could serve as the Chief of the Watch if no other officers were present. Right now, in fact, the Crew Chief was present.

  The pilot on duty was a rookie by the name of Roger Winkler. Beckett knew little about the young man except that his grades were excellent and his performance reviews on his training assignments had also been top shelf. Peer reviews were ridiculously good. This kid was headed for command, which was probably why he had chosen navigation. Navigators seemed to have an easy road to the top. Take Lara Tedesco for example… As Winkler moved the ship into a landing trajectory and found the outer atmosphere, Beckett thought he was a pretty uninspired pilot.

  They dropped a tracking satellite, which could record their movements in space as well as on the ground, into orbit and then headed into a landing trajectory.

  “Whoa!”

  Beckett cocked his head toward the radar console. From his vantage point, he could only see the back of William Boone’s head.

  “Mr. Boone?” Beckett asked.

  “Sorry, sir,” Boone said. “Something just popped up on my scope.”

  Beckett went right to the station and looked at the screen. A small window on the bottom gave him a video view aft, but there was nothing there except outer space and the flutter of air molecules in the stratosphere. In another window, the radar screen showed an approaching blip.

  “It just appeared there, sir.”

  Beckett could feel Hardy’s eyes on him. More than that, though, he noticed a difference in the movement of the ship.

  “Mr. Winkler, have you adjusted your course?”

  “Slowing, sir.” Winkler sounded nervous. “Just in case.” It sounded more like a question. Beckett ignored it. A random radar blip could be anything in the vast reaches of outer space. But he was a cautious man and an experienced captain. By the looks of this particular blip, it was steered. Though its course had seemed erratic at first glance, it was now making steady progress in their direction.

  “Abort the landing,” Beckett ordered quickly. “Take us out of the atmosphere and…” he glanced at the screen and the approaching blip. They would not be able to hide themselves behind the planet. There was not enough time or space. With quick decisiveness, he read off a course reading that would take them into direct contact with the newcomer.

  “You think it’s a Ghost ship,” Hardy mumbled under his breath, but still loud enough for the captain, and everyone else in Control, to hear.

  Beckett nodded.

  In all of its time in space, humanity had only encountered two alien races. The first was the eXchengue, who had discovered and conquered the Earth for a brief period of time. The second was the Ghosts, so named for their ability to appear and disappear at will. Ghost technology was beyond the scope of human and eXchengue understanding. Sometimes their technology seemed vastly superior to anything either race had ever seen. Other times, they were easily outwitted and overmatched. Their early campaigns had met with great success. Both Earth and eXchengue ships had been armed with energy weapons, which had proven effective against each other, but against the Ghosts, they did no harm. In fact, it was theorized that the Ghost ships absorbed the energy from the weapons and used it to power their own ships. Earth and eXchengue ships were looted and their crews destroyed in multiple, yet random encounters, across occupied space.

  The two races turned their attention away from each other and more toward the imminent threat of Ghost attacks.

  “Get those cameras lined up,” Beckett ordered Boone impatiently. He quickly adjusted the view so that two windows showed space off the bow. “There it is.”

  As he had suspected, Beckett was looking at a Ghost ship. In his gut, he felt nothing. He had encountered them six times in his career and successfully driven them off all six times, although the first encounter had left him with a badly damaged ship and more casualties than he cared to remember. Though the technology and weaponry on Ghost vessels varied from ship to ship, the general shape was always the same. Ghost ships were oblong in appearance, with jointed sections so that the ship could literally fold itself into other shapes. Jutting out from the main sections in all areas were what looked like antennae. Some of them were needle thin, while others were as thick as Habitrails. For all any human being knew, there could be crew or devices or both in any one of them. No one had ever seen any of the occupants of the Ghost ships. They were either destroyed or they disappeared. Anyone defeated by a Ghost ship was never seen alive again.

  Beckett called for battle stations.

  “They’re using a heat ray, captain,” said the young lady, McCallum, at the Engineering station with distaste and disbelief.

  Nodding his head, Beckett ordered Winkler to take the ship into a roll. Heat rays could be very damaging and very destructive, but they often required a very narrow beam and a prolonged focal point. They were also very inefficient in outer space, where heat energy was sucked out of the beam at a ludicrous rate. He then ordered Boone to load a weapon firing program that he had written for the Valor himself. The program cycled through the guns mounted on the top, sides, and belly of the ship. It readjusted the angle when the guns were silent and fired each gun for a prolonged period while they were facing the target, whose point of reference was passed into the program as a parameter. At close range, it afforded each gun a six second cooling period while maintaining a steady rate of fire.

  It was brilliant, really.

  And yet William Boone hesitated.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “The guns are powered by an electric generator,” Boone informed him. This, of course, he already knew. “With the sustained fire of that program, the generator won’t be able to cool itself quickly enough. It’ll burn out.”

  “Mr. Tunsley?”

  “Yo,” came Jack Tunsley’s cheery voice over the intercom.

  “Can the weapons genera
tor keep up with the rFireBeckett17 program?”

  “Sure thing, Skip? You know that.”

  “It’s true. I do.” Beckett seemed unconcerned with the Ghost ship looming closer into the cameras.

  “With all due respect, sirs,” Boone said through gritted teeth. “I have studied many generators that are similar to the ones installed on this ship…”

  “But not the ones on this particular ship, right?” Tunsley’s disembodied voice asked him. “Know your own ship, man!”

  “Thank you, Mr. Tunsley.” Beckett cut him off. “That’ll be all.”

  Boone reddened from his neck to the tops of his ears. He was no stranger to reprimand, but public humiliation was something else entirely. Without another word, he ran the program.

  All around them, they could feel the roll of the ship and the thrumming of the guns. Since energy weapons were ineffective against Ghost ships, most United Earth vessels used simple ballistic weapons. Heavy repeating guns were the norm, with torpedoes and nuclear missiles installed on war ships. The Valor was not a war ship, though she could hold her own in a fight because of her sleek design and speed.

  As the two ships approached each other, the guns probed the alien enemy for weaknesses, pinging off of its unprotected hull. Many of the shells went awry, missing the Ghost ship entirely. They would drift off into space, inertia carrying them at the same speed on the same course until they collided with something. As the guns fired, the computer was recording the trajectory of every bullet, logging it so that other ships coming into the area would be aware of the danger.

  A small white flare showed up on the camera.

  “Capture,” Beckett ordered.

  Boone’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he checked the screen and the read-outs. The seconds ticked by. The distance between the two ships grew short.

  “The computer’s narrowed it to about two hundred shots.”

  Damn. That wasn’t nearly a small enough sample. Boone’s capture had been competent, but Beckett wanted more out of his program. He’d always known he would need to automate the capture, but had yet to figure out a way to make the computer understand that a critical hit had been recorded without human intervention. Well, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it now. With a two hundred shot margin for error, he was better off continuing the program. For all he knew, the white flare meant nothing anyway. They may have hit a light bulb.

  Stepping over to Winkler’s station, he ordered them into a mock orbit around the Ghost ship. This was a tricky maneuver. Winkler could program the helm to use the enemy as a focal point, but since its motion didn’t follow a mathematical pattern, there was no way to maintain the program. The pilot would have to do it manually.

  “You may need to wrap this up, Captain,” Jack Tunsley said from over the intercom.

  “What’s the problem?”

  The Engineering Officer snorted. “We’re just getting a little cooked, that’s all.”

  There was another white flare.

  “I got a better capture that time,” Boone reported before Beckett could ask. “About half the shots and…” he was looking over the screen, making some adjustments, “with a cross-reference…” he made one final check, “I’ve got a decent target lock.”

  “Feed it to navigation. Mr. Winkler, you keep that position in our sights.”

  Maybe it was Beckett’s imagination, but it looked as if the young man was beginning to sweat. He tried to remember the first time he’d been in a control room during ship to ship combat. That had been a long time ago. He’d been manning the Engineering station and the captain had pressed him for updates every fifteen seconds. He’d used the words no change so many times in just eight minutes that they still echoed queerly through his skull.

  But this was nothing. Of all of the Ghost ships Beckett had encountered in the service of the United Earth Space Force, this one was proving to be the most ineffective. Despite Jack Tunsley’s assertion that they were getting “cooked”, he could see on the display that hull temperature was only slightly elevated. At this rate, he estimated they had another eighty or ninety minutes before there would be any noticeable damage.

  The ship moved into position.

  “Cut the firing program, Mr. Boone. Target the capture point. Mr. Winkler, run an unsteady back and forth pattern and continue to roll. We don’t want that heat ray to get a bead on us.”

  The ship responded efficiently and Beckett could see that Boone’s skills had improved since before their leave. For once, he’d used his time wisely instead of sitting out in the hayfields of his parents’ farm with old sports magazines. Beckett blanched. Were his hobbies any better? Maybe not. But his skills certainly were.

  Before long, a trail of vapor began to run from the Ghost ship. It brought a smile to the captain’s face. He only wished he had some idea what it was he was disabling. If he could shut down their drive, he could maybe capture one of the bastards.

  And then it was over. There was a flash and a pop and the Ghost ship vanished from space.

  “Did we destroy it?” Winkler asked before he could stop himself.

  Beckett shook his head. “They ran.”

  To date, no one had been able to figure out Ghost wormholes. They opened within an instant, taking the Ghost ship away from an enemy, but they closed slowly. Once, during the early days, an eXchengue captain had worked up the nerve to follow an opponent. That captain and his ship were never heard from again. UESF captains were under standing orders to log the positions. So far, no Ghost ship had ever emerged from the wormhole of an escaping ship.

  With the battle over, Beckett’s crew was now without orders. Winkler, as uninspired as he appeared to be, was moving the ship back into position for a landing. But to Beckett, the attack seemed too coincidental. Another failed landing would burn too much fuel and they would be unable to complete the assignment. He ordered Winkler to program a course that would take them on a patrol about the planet and its satellites. Then he ordered all of his officers into an immediate conference, leaving the Crew Chief in charge of Control.

  The Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla

  The largest and most luxurious room on the Valor was neither large nor luxurious. The short corridor that ended in the door leading to the Control Room had a conference room that paralleled it in shape and length. Two doors led from the corridor into the conference room, one in the front and one in the back. The setup allowed officers to enter and exit in a steady flow and reach the control room in seconds. Inside, the room was narrow, just enough space for a thin conference table and ten chairs. The table was so thin, in fact, that officers could actually reach across and touch each other if that was part of the protocol. Built into the table, at an interval that forced two people to share, were computer monitors and keyboard screens. There was one setup at the head and another at the foot of the table so that the captain and his first officer had one each to him or herself.

  Beckett, having been in Control, was the first to arrive at his briefing. He took the chair at the head of the table. He could literally exit the room and spill himself into the hatchway back into the control room. He sat for almost five minutes, drumming his fingers absently on the table in front of him, considering his options. It seemed obvious, what his officers would say. Ghost attacks were random and unpredictable. This one had nothing to do with the assignment itself. It seemed unlikely that Ghosts were involved in the massacre of Walker and his crew. This was no reason to abort the mission.

  And yet, something nagged at him. Beckett was an experienced captain. He’d successfully relied on his sense of a situation before and his gut was now telling him that the Valor was ill equipped to handle this job. It was supposed to be a historical mission, a gathering of the past. But they had seen combat. Call it a bad omen.

  Lawrence Rollins entered through the back door, as they all should. Only William Boone would be coming from the Control Room so only William Boone should enter by Beckett. Rollins was a quiet man. He’d been in t
he Space Force for thirty two years, ever since he was nineteen years old. According to his record, during his second year of college, his parents had both been killed in a traffic accident. The blow to his psyche had been irreversible and his aunt, his only surviving relative, had pushed him into the Space Force as a way of straightening him out. Leaving school and academics behind, Rollins’ mind had reconstructed itself to understand and apply only mathematical and problem solving concepts. He had made computers do things of which their designers could never even dream. And yet, he could not form personal relationships, nor was he able to act on a feeling. Four years before, he had inexplicably asked to be transferred to the Valor under the command of Ted Beckett. He’d phrased it just like that in his request. “I would like to be transferred to the UES Valor under the command of Ted Beckett.” The two had never met prior, but Beckett was short a Computer Operations Officer so there was no objection. In those four years, the two had never had a conversation that did not revolve around professional subject matter. Beckett knew as much about Rollins now as he had then and that was just fine with him. Sometimes, pure competence was just what he needed.

  On Rollins’ heels came Samantha Cabrera, his Medical Officer. On his last trip out, she had been his lieutenant, and a damned good one at that no matter what other people thought. When Paul Royce had gone on to the Noble, Cabrera had been made a command officer. She was a little immature and not too professional. In spite of, or perhaps because of their brief encounter at the end of their last mission, Beckett would have been very relieved to have seen her transferred off ship. But the Admiralty, he realized, had wanted to make room for Tedesco, and moving Royce had been easier since the Noble’s MO had died of cancer a couple of months prior.

  The two sat apart, Rollins choosing the seat on Beckett’s right. It was the seat furthest from the door and, therefore, the most logical choice. If he had chosen any other seat, others would have had to climb over him. Cabrera, on the other hand, sat two seats away from Beckett, right next to the door that led out to the Control hatchway.