Icarus

by Stephen A. Fender

  Roslyn jumped in before Nova could continue. “With the only thing he could: his emergency weapon. It’s designed to use all available power to launch an attack that—in theory—is a last resort.”

  “Well, it was definitely that, I can tell you,” Jerry examined. “The explosion lit him up so bright, it left his shadow etched onto the side of the carrier.”

  “What was your emergency weapon?”

  “A phillium missile,” Roslyn all but snorted.

  The coffee that Shawn had just drunk nearly came out of his mouth in shock. “You’re not serious!”

  “It was all I had left,” Jerry said in his defense. “Anyway, it did the job.”

  “It did the job, all right,” Roslyn injected. “The concussive shockwave knocked out the Totonagra’s long-range radar, and their short-range sensors. There was structural damage to several decks, and numerous casualties.”

  “None of them serious,” Jerry added quickly.

  Shawn shook his head in amazement. “How close to the carrier were you?”

  Jerry gave Melissa a brief smile, as if the impending answer was one he was extremely proud of. “Three hundred yards.”

  Shawn smiled at the younger man’s brashness. “On the one hand, I can respect your quick thinking.”

  Nova smiled broadly. “Thank you, sir.”

  Shawn set his cup down. “But,” he continued, leveling his eyes at the lieutenant, “if you ever try something like that while I’m in command, you might as well turn in your commission, because you’ll never fly a fighter again.”

  “Well, sir, when the rubber hits the road out there, sometimes we have to make those last-minute decisions.”

  “That’s exactly why you need to make sure your head is in the right place all the time. That way, when you need to make those same decisions, you’ll choose the best one possible. I don’t want to see you putting other people at risk just so you can save your own ass.”

  Jerry looked at him scornfully. “So you’re saying I should have just given up and died out there.”

  “I’m saying that you need to make sure you don’t put yourself ahead of everyone else.”

  Knowing when to quit, Jerry nodded his head, but the cheeriness he normally carried around with him had long since departed.

  For his own part, Shawn didn’t mind dressing Nova down. Impertinence was dangerous, and he didn’t want to see anyone killed over hotdog antics.

  Least of all, himself.

  Chapter 8

  Once they’d finished eating in relative silence with the rest of the officers, Shawn and Melissa retired to a private lounge a few compartments down from the pilots’ wardroom. The compartment had two long couches lining the farthest corner from the doors, and a single-pane view port looking out into space on the opposite wall. Melissa sat on one of the couches, her head back and her long red hair draped over the back cushions, while Shawn rummaged through some cabinets looking for a glass.

  “Are you going to tell me why you were so rude to the Lieutenant?” she asked, her eyes staring up to the overhead.

  “What do you mean?” he replied, opening and closing cupboards with endless abandon.

  “One moment you were complimenting him, the next thing you were shutting him down in front of his friends. It seemed…quite rude.”

  Shawn had finally found the item he was looking for and, once it was filled with water, he returned to sit by Melissa’s side. “He seemed a little too cocky about the whole thing.”

  “He’s a pilot. I’m sure it’s commonplace.”

  “Sometimes,” he conceded. “However, sometimes it can be dangerous, to him and to his teammates. There’s very little margin for error in space, and even less for hotdog heroics.”

  Melissa crossed one leg casually over the other. “As I recall, Commander, you’ve displayed a fair amount of ‘hotdog heroics,’ as you call them.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “Is it?” She was trying to lure him, but he wasn’t going to bite.

  Shawn sighed heavily. “As long as I’m wearing this uniform, I need to act the part. Those pilots in there, especially the younger ones, expect it. In fact, I’d go so far as to say they need it. I wouldn’t be doing anyone a service by letting them down, even if I’m guilty of the same frailties.”

  Melissa turned her emerald eyes to him and smiled. “You really are sounding more and more like an officer every day.”

  “Right now, I have little choice in the matter. If I’m going to play the part, then I’ll be doing it the best I can. Jerry will be fine. You’ll see.”

  She turned away from him, her eyes focusing once again on the compartment’s overhead.

  Shawn looked at her with apprehension. “So are you going to tell me what you and Krif talked about after I was dismissed?”

  “Oh, it was nothing,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand.

  “It’s never ‘nothing’ when it comes to Dick.”

  She scowled as she turned to face him once again. “You know, he really hates that you call him that.”

  Once more filling his glass with water, Shawn plopped down on the couch, close to her. “Good.”

  “What is it with you two, anyway?”

  Shawn shrugged. “Typical pilot stuff.”

  Melissa was unconvinced. “You’re being evasive.”

  “Then I’m in good company,” he retorted.

  She sighed lightly. “Look, I’m really…sorry. I am. It’s just that I’m not used to explaining myself to others, let alone answering questions.”

  “Because of your job with the OSI?”

  Melissa looked deeply into his eyes. “Because of who I am.”

  “Now that you mention it, I’m still having a hard time figuring that one out.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Who you are. I mean, one minute you’re angry with me, the next you’re friendly, and then you’re…well…”

  “Kissing you?”

  “I was going to say affectionate, but yes.”

  “I suppose I owe you an explanation.”

  “I should think you do.” His tone was soft, but the inflection was far from genial.

  “I’ve been…out of sorts lately. I haven’t been acting like myself.”

  “Because of your father?”

  She nodded grandly. “Because of a lot of things.”

  “Are you saying you regret some of the things you’ve done?”

  She laughed lightly, throwing her head back. “That’s a loaded question.”

  “In what way?”

  “Shawn, I could think of a great number of things I’ve done in my career that I’m not proud of.”

  “Would you like to talk about it? I don’t mind listening.”

  Melissa thought back to their time on Sylvia’s Delight as they traveled to see Toyotomi Katashi. She thought of the brief moment she’d had to talk with Shawn about personal things, and how instantly comfortable she’d felt when she had. There was something about him she trusted implicitly, more so than any other person she had met in recent years. Perhaps it was because this man had been on good terms with her father—maybe even better terms than she was. After all, the two had flown together, fought together, and had grieved together in a time of great suffering.

  “I suppose I could start at the beginning…”

  “It would make things a lot easier.”

  “Okay, but first you have to agree that everything I tell you, you promise not to repeat to anyone.”

  Shawn held up three fingers in the traditional Boy Scout salute. “On my honor.”

  She smiled at the overhead. “I’m not sure that’s saying much.”

  “Hey!”

  She playfully backhanded his shoulder. “I was just kidding. And, as payment, you have to tell me some things about you in return.”

  “We tried this before on Darus Station, remember?”

  Melissa cast her eyes to the deck briefly before returning them
to Shawn. “I promise to do less interrogating and more listening this time.”

  Shawn nodded slowly. “Then it looks like we’re all out of excuses.”

  “It would seem so.” She let a silence fall between them before she began speaking again. “When I was a little girl, my father would tell me stories about—”

  The door to the lounge swung open abruptly and Roslyn Brunel came in quickly with Drake fast behind her. Shawn jumped to his feet in surprise, as if his own father had just caught him kissing a girl on the family couch. “What is it, Raven?”

  “Captain Krif wants you in CIC immediately. Both of you.” Roslyn’s eyes moved from Shawn to Melissa and back. There was something in her voice that told Shawn it wasn’t good news. “You need to see this.”

  “Why didn’t he pass it over the ship’s intercom?” Melissa asked with haste.

  “Trust me,” Raven said with an almost-shocked expression. “When you see it, you’ll know why.”

  Melissa’s thoughts ran instantly to her missing father, Admiral Graves. What else would be so important that Shawn and I would need to see it together? She quickly grabbed her discarded coat from the side of the couch and raced toward the combat information center, with Shawn, Raven, and Drake running to catch up.

  *

  The combat information center on the Rhea was a dimly lit space, punctuated by the occasional flash of a computer terminal or the sound of one of the many technicians relaying orders to various parts of the ship. The overhead lights of the space let off a dull blue hue, bathing the occupants as if they were in a surreal underwater scene. During combat operations, the heart of the ship moved from the bridge to this space. This was where all the tactical, astrometric, gravitic, and associated sensor data was fed directly to the dozens of technicians whose job it was to sort through the chaos of information and turn it into order. The captain would then use that data to relay orders to any number of components on the ship, including pilots and weapons systems.

  Captain Krif, his large arms folded defiantly, was standing near a glowing readout table when the Shawn, Melissa, Raven, and Drake entered the space. “Come over here,” he said in their direction, beckoning them with a three-fingered wave.

  The table was little more than a large, standard display that had been placed flat on its back and was supported by a single metal beam that ran the length of the eight-foot-long surface. The top was both touch-and sound-sensitive, capable of displaying limited three-dimensional interactive graphics across its entire surface. The table was currently displaying a long-range sensor graphic of the sector the Rhea was currently traversing. As Melissa and the three pilots neared the table, they could hear Krif give orders to the technician standing nearest to him.

  “Bring up grid 2-2-7 and magnify to level four.”

  “Aye, Captain,” the young man said. At the terminal beside the table, the specialist waved his hand over a small sensor and a glowing, holographic keyboard appeared an inch or so from the surface. The technician inputted the commands Krif had given him, and the image on the display table shifted from a topographical view of the sector to an area of space about a light-year forward of the Rhea’s current position.

  “Agent Graves, I thought you might want to see this,” Krif said, nodding to the image.

  Melissa stepped toward the table and watched as the image of a planet materialized in the space above the table, its statistics displayed in a small chart beside it. The world was small by galactic standards, only slightly too large to be considered a moon. The surface was a mottled mix of browns and greens, with nearly every color in between swirling across the partially obscured surface. The planetoid had its own series of satellites orbiting it, each a barren wasteland of unremarkable gray sand and craters.

  “What am I looking at, Captain?” she asked, leaning over the table with perked curiosity. Shawn was doing the same over her shoulder.

  “This is Tamar, and the smaller moons are Chaka, Skron, and Refa.”

  Not immediately noticing anything out of the ordinary, she studied the image once more before speaking. “It looks very uninteresting, Captain.”

  “It isn’t the planet itself I wanted to show you: it’s what our patrol wing found.” Krif looked back to the young technician at the side of the table and gave him a nod. “Go ahead, Mister Thursat. Bring it up.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The glowing outline of a square appeared, then centered itself at the midway point between Tamar’s northern pole and the surrounding space. With a fizzle of the pixels, the selected area panned it at breakneck speed and filled the projected area above the table. Everyone noticed a black, undefined shape spinning end-over-end near the pole.

  “Bring it to full magnification, Thursat.”

  “Aye, sir.” The young man pressed another series of controls on the holographic keypad, and a three-dimensional representation of the sensor readings erupted from the tabletop.

  Melissa leaned toward the tumbling shape, now nearly two feet long and at eye level with her. It was still an unbelievably dark and ill-defined mass. “I still can’t make it out, but it looks like a ship.”

  Krif’s tone was ominous. “It’s a cruiser, actually. Or what’s left of one.”

  “One of ours?” Shawn turned and asked as the remaining officers continued to gaze at the form.

  Krif nodded solemnly. “Correct. She was part of the fleet that was dispatched with the Valley Forge.” The captain leaned over, entering a command into the table’s control panel. This time, the three-dimensional image was enhanced with simulated lighting and information from the Rhea’s library computer. The hulking ship turned over itself as it rotated in the center of the table. “Sensor scans show that it’s the USCS fleet cruiser Icarus, sir.”

  The normally sleek cigar shape of the hull was pitted and scored with numerous battle scars. Near the aft end of the ship, where the bridge and communications tower should have been, there was only a mass of twisted and holed-through metal plating. The dorsal sensor pallets lining the spine looked as if they had been turned into Swiss cheese, and the entire, bulbous forward hull was nearly gone—a gaping hole now opened where several thousand tons of hardened, three-foot-thick tellurium armor plating had once been.

  “What happened to her?” Raven asked, nearly breathless at the scope of the destruction.

  “It’s hard to tell. Visual scans are only giving us so much information. There was an ion storm in the system two days ago, and its leftovers are playing hell with the ELINT’s sensors.”

  “Survivors?” Drake asked nervously. He had never seen destruction of a warship of this size and on this scale.

  “Doubtful,” Krif replied sharply, yet somberly. “But we can’t say for sure. There may be pockets of habitable spaces on board, but considering that this ship has been missing for over six months, I doubt anyone could have survived that long. The food and water requirement would make it extremely untenable.”

  “But you said yourself you aren’t positive,” Shawn replied.

  “That I did, Commander Kestrel. That I did,” Richard nodded slowly. “I’d very much like to be proven wrong.”

  “You want us to go over there?” Melissa asked.

  The captain turned sharply to Melissa. “You must think I’m out of my mind. Go over there? I don’t want anyone going over there! That thing is a death trap, not to mention a hazard to navigation. We can’t even get detailed readings on the ship’s jump core. If containment has been breached in any way, the ship could explode; or worse, it could vanish altogether and take whoever’s on board to God knows where.” He shook his head emphatically at her, then turned his attention back to the lifeless hulk of the once-proud cruiser. “Nonetheless, I need to figure out what’s happened here. Since you’re the reigning intelligence officer, you’re hereby drafted to render your services in that regard.”

  “Well, like it or not, I’ll need to get over there to perform a thorough investigation.” When Krif turned his eyes b
ack to her, she finished with “sir.”

  Krif knew an order when he heard one, even one as subtle as hers. He nodded reticently in agreement.

  “I’ll need someone who knows the layout of the ship.”

  Richard turned to Shawn. “As I recall, you served on the Daedalus as a junior communications officer.”

  Shawn’s eyes never left the decrepit Icarus. “I did.”

  “Then, I’m sure you can handle this without too much difficulty I assume, Commander?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “You’ll do better than ‘manage,’ hotshot. You will be Agent Graves’ guide and, should she get into any trouble, her insurance policy. Meaning you’ll be required to put your life on the line to make sure she gets back to the Rhea safe and sound. Is that clear enough for you, or do I need to draw you a picture?”

  Shawn looked to Melissa, who only looked at him briefly before returning her eyes to the dead destroyer. Why do I always have to be the one to rescue her? “It’s clear, Captain. But I thought you said we weren’t allowed to go out alone and—”

  “And you’re not. One of the Marines from the 92nd Expeditionary Unit will meet you in the hangar.” Krif’s tone was slathered with condescension. “He’ll be my eyes and ears over there. Is that all right with you?”

  “Peachy, sir.” There was a muffled laugh, probably from Brunel. It was hard for Shawn to tell.

  Krif’s eye narrowed. “Good. Then I expect you not to screw it up. Commander Brunel?”

  Raven snapped to attention. “Yes, sir?”

  “Raven, I need you and Drake to fly guard for the good Commander here. You’ll radio for assistance if there is any sign of trouble. I’ll also have someone from the Skulls on standby-alert, ready to launch in less than five seconds, should you need them.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “I’m going to scramble a recovery craft, just in case we need to haul back anything bigger than what the Commander can carry in our Mark-IV.”

  Shawn looked at the captain dubiously. “You mean my Mark-IV.”

  “No, I mean my Mark-IV. As long as that craft is in my bay, and as long as you are under my command, that ship is under my jurisdiction. It goes where I want it to go, when I want it to go there, and I don’t really care who’s at the helm.”