“Any sign of those mission files unlocking?” asked Aston.
“Not yet, Commander.”
“Check out the forward feed, sir,” said Burner with sudden excitement.
One of the screens on the bulkhead was locked onto a huge spaceship with square edges and flat sides. The angle was such that Recker could spot the multiple laser housings and the twin rows of enormous inverted chutes which ran along the vessel’s underside.
“Planetary dredger,” he said.
“That one’s the Atlas. Seven klicks from nose to tail and a fifty-billion-ton load capacity. The Daklan aren’t the ones who can build them big,” said Eastwood.
“What’s it doing here?” asked Burner. “We’ve got no major ore processing plants on this side of Lustre.”
“I think I can guess,” said Recker. “They’re going to use those rock-cutting lasers to make a new trench for the shipyard. Hell, they’ve got room for two new ones if Admiral Telar thinks he can fill them with warships.”
“Damn,” said Eastwood. “If you’re right, that’s taking a big gamble. Those dredgers aren’t made to draw fine lines.”
“I could be wrong, Lieutenant. If I’m not, all that dredger needs to do is cut a rough hole and suck up the debris. It’ll save the teams on the ground a couple of months at least.”
“That would be interesting to watch,” said Eastwood.
The opportunity never came.
“We’ve received coordinates and orders to reach them at the earliest opportunity, sir,” said Burner.
“So much for twenty-four hours,” said Recker under his breath. “Acknowledge the order.” He checked the Expectation’s distance from Lustre. The spaceship was far enough away to activate the ternium drive. “Lieutenant Eastwood, program in those coordinates and then tell me where we’re going.”
“All done, sir. This is to be a three-hour journey and the arrival point is nowhere in particular. On the plus side, we’re fitted with a high-spec processing core and the warmup calculations will be done in twelve minutes.”
“Any improvement’s welcome,” said Recker, and he meant it.
“Sounds like we’re going to a rendezvous,” said Aston.
Recker checked the mission files again and gritted his teeth when he found they were still locked. He resisted the temptation to request a comms channel to Admiral Telar and decided to wait it out. The files would unlock soon enough.
Twelve minutes later, the Expectation entered lightspeed.
Chapter Three
The nausea of the transition seemed muted, as if the size of the warship – or a more capable life support unit - offered a buffer against the physical stresses placed on the human body by the abrupt shift into the semi-theoretical realms of high-speed cosmic travel.
Shrugging off the clenching in his stomach, Recker checked the status panel and discovered that it was uniformly green.
“Whoever is responsible for ensuring new active duty spaceships are genuinely safe to fly, they’re doing a good job,” he said.
“Amen to that,” said Eastwood. “Everything’s holding together. We got another good one, just like the Punisher.”
“Three hours until rendezvous,” said Recker. He didn’t bother checking the mission files again – they were locked in the moments leading to the transition and the comms system was unable to receive unlock codes during lightspeed travel. “Anything you need to test or investigate, now is the time to do it.”
“There’s nothing new with the comms hardware, sir,” said Burner. “While the sensor arrays are bigger, better and more than what we’ve had before.”
“Commander?” said Recker. “Give me a run down.”
“Nothing you don’t already know, sir. We’re packing eight clusters of ten Ilstroms, six Type 1 Railers, disruptor drones and twin ass kickers,” she finished, giving the colloquial term for the Hellburner missiles.
“350 thousand klick lock range, eight thousand klicks per second non-boost and twelve thousand on-boost velocity,” intoned Eastwood. “Just waiting to smash open the side door of a desolator and ruin the enemy’s day.”
Despite the bold words and the huge payload of the Hellburners, they weren’t nearly so effective against the Daklan’s newest warships. Even so, Recker felt much better now that he was piloting a warship that had some real firepower. Watching a dozen Ilstom’s detonate fruitlessly against the armour of a heavy cruiser was one of the most frustrating experiences he’d ever dealt with.
“Have you found out what that device on the floor is there for, Lieutenant Eastwood?” he asked.
“No, sir. I got distracted talking about Hellburners.”
“Check it out as a priority.”
“On it, sir.”
“Any idea who we’re meeting up with?” said Aston.
“None,” Recker confessed. “Admiral Telar sprung news of some big changes on me. Last I heard, the fleet was on guard duty only and now we’re on a mission to a planet that’s ten days out from Lustre.”
“Think we’ll be joining a big fleet?”
“I don’t know,” said Recker. “I think these are the baby steps, so I’m not anticipating too much.”
“Better than sitting on our hands,” said Burner.
“Got bored over these last two weeks, did you?” said Aston.
“I’ve got no family there, Commander, just like the rest of us. And all FTL comms bandwidth was reserved for military use, so I couldn’t even phone home.”
“Yeah, that was bad,” said Eastwood with real bitterness. He fished in his pocket and pulled out the frayed photo of his family and stared at it. “One day – if it ever happens – I’m going to turn up on my doorstep and Elsa’s going to look at me like I’m a stranger.” He shook his head and tucked the photo away again. “Even if we turn this war around, I’ll be asking myself if it was all worthwhile.”
“No you won’t, Lieutenant,” said Aston quietly. “You know it’s worth it.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” he said. “It’s just you expect victory to be a good thing and all I’m seeing is separate roads leading to the same place.”
“You can’t let yourself think that, Lieutenant. None of this is decided yet.”
“I know. Doesn’t make it any easier.”
“And this is what you signed up for, right? To keep your family safe from species like the Daklan?”
“That I did, Captain. Sometimes I like to let off a bit of steam, that’s all.”
“Just find out what that device does, Lieutenant. Sometimes it’s best to think about the now, rather than the future.”
The conversation ended and Recker tried to shake off his own dark thoughts which had been given strength by Eastwood’s low mood. Recker had no wife and no children, but he had family on Earth and he missed them. He couldn’t remember – had stopped trying – when he’d last seen any of them.
As a distraction, he opened a channel on the internal comms to Staff Sergeant James Vance.
“Glad to have you onboard, Sergeant,” he said.
“Glad to be back, sir,” said Vance, his tone offering Recker the perfect degree of uncertainty about whether he meant it.
Recker smiled. “Another mission. We’re on our way to a rendezvous. After that, expect ten days of boredom, followed by the high possibility of death and then – if we make it through – another ten days of boredom on the way back.”
“Nothing changes, sir. The squad got reinforced to fifteen. Maybe you could stop by and make the introductions at some point.”
“I’ll do that, Sergeant,” Recker promised.
He cut the channel and turned just in time to see enlightenment cross Lieutenant Eastwood’s craggy features.
“You figured it out,” said Recker.
“I did, sir. This box is an overstress toggle.”
Recker had more than a passing interest and he left his seat in order to stand at Eastwood’s console.
“How does it work?”
“The butt
ons on this top keypad allow me to switch all six of our propulsion modules into an immediate but limited overstressed state for a short duration, and then it switches them back to unstressed.”
“Sounds straightforward.”
“Not so much. It’s definitely experimental and from the time stamps on the code, they only finished writing the control system addon a couple of days ago. There are plenty of warnings and disclaimers about potential module failures, like the programmers didn’t want anything coming back to bite them. I don’t think this was ever intended to be hard-wired into an on-duty warship.”
“Admiral Telar must want to fast track it,” said Recker. Even though he was being used as a guinea pig, his admiration for the speed of implementation was genuine. “What limits are on the overstress?”
Eastwood gave one of his noncommittal grunts. “The answer isn’t simple.”
“Sure it is,” said Burner. “You’re just buying thinking time.”
“That’s not helping,” said Eastwood.
“You have ideas,” said Recker.
Eastwood nodded. “The programmers added explanatory text to each section of code. The intended outcome of the overstress activation is for the processing unit in this box…” he gave it another nudge with his foot, “…to judge the atomic health of the ternium modules, at which point it will decide what level of overstress they can handle and for how long.”
“Atomic health?” asked Burner.
“It was the most appropriate phrase I could come up with,” said Eastwood testily. “So when this overstress unit decides the engines have had enough, it shunts them back into their normal state. Or that’s what it’s meant to do.”
“That’s a lot of uncertainty, Lieutenant,” said Recker. “From what you’ve said, this new feature is nothing we can rely on.”
“I think that’s an excellent summation of the tech, sir. It’s an option that may or may not help in a pinch situation. There’s something else.”
“Which is?”
“This new unit is now the only way to set the engines into overstress. They’ve deleted the option from these main consoles.” Eastwood absently patted the top of his station.
“I’m not surprised,” said Recker. “If word gets out what you did on the Finality, sooner or later every captain in the fleet will be testing the method.”
“It’s not ready for prime time,” Eastwood agreed. “And the military doesn’t intend its warships to be single-use.”
Recker remembered something else. “The propulsion output is 99%. Does this overstress module have something to do with that?”
“Yes, sir. Part of how it works involves reserving a fraction of each propulsion module for ongoing monitoring of the atomic health. That monitoring helps determine how much overstress the engines will handle.”
“One percent,” said Recker. “It sounds insignificant, but I’d rather have it available.”
“Maybe the designers thought it was a price worth paying,” said Eastwood. “Though it’s more likely they didn’t have time to figure out a more elegant solution.”
“Do some more poking around, Lieutenant,” said Recker. “If we’re field testing the experimental kit, I’d like to learn everything about it.”
“Will do, sir, but I don’t think there’s much left to find. The coding is only a few thousand lines – like a really cut-down version of a full control system - and the processing unit is the same as we install in some of our sensor arrays.”
Recker didn’t immediately return to his seat. Instead, he stopped at the food replicator, which was a slightly more advanced model than the one found on his last ship, the Punisher. Without much enthusiasm, he ordered it to vend. An acrid-smelling coffee and a sorry-looking sandwich appeared, which he carried back to his station and promptly forgot about.
The three hours passed without incident and Lieutenant Eastwood declared himself certain that the overstress box held no further secrets. Recker accepted the man’s judgement and hoped he wouldn’t be required to activate a device with so many associated maybes.
“Prepare for re-entry to local space,” said Lieutenant Eastwood as the scheduled arrival time approached. “Ten seconds.”
“Everyone ready,” Recker warned.
The ternium engine cut out exactly on time and the Expectation entered local space. Without prompting, the crew got to work scanning the area and Recker took the precaution of pushing the warship to maximum acceleration, in case the Daklan had a presence in this part of space.
“You can let up on the controls, sir,” said Burner. “We’re joining a local battle network.”
In front of Recker’s eyes, the tactical populated with the HPA warships which had arrived first.
“Battleship Trojan leads,” he said. “Plus two cruisers and three destroyers, including the Expectation.”
“And the heavy lifter Titan,” said Burner. “Vice Admiral Fraser commands the Trojan, sir. I’ve got him on the comms.”
Recker held in a sigh. He’d dealt with Fraser twice before and on both occasions the dislike had been one-sided, palpable and demonstrated, though Recker hadn’t done anything to anger the other man. “Bring him through.”
Fraser’s voice was cool. “Captain Recker. Going up in the world, I see.”
“Yes, sir.” Recker wasn’t in the mood to provoke a confrontation so he determined to keep this as brief as possible.
“Your mission files have unlocked. Make sure you read and understand them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Fraser’s voice suddenly became angry, like he’d been waiting for an opportunity to get something off his chest.
“And I won’t have any of your pissing about, do you hear me, Recker? This will be a professionally-run mission and I will not tolerate dissent from my officers!”
Recker’s own anger came in a surge and with it, a cold calmness that he usually only felt during combat. “That’s Captain Recker, sir.”
“What?” spluttered Fraser, caught off guard.
“You will do me the courtesy of referring to me by name and rank. Sir.”
“Very well, Captain Recker. This mission will run smoothly and you will dance to my tune, do you understand? We’ve lost enough good officers already without losing others because some personnel don’t know how to play by the rules.”
“Sir, I will do what it takes to ensure this mission is a success.”
“Make sure that you do, Captain.”
The comms went dead and Recker shrugged. “You heard the admiral.”
“That we did, sir,” said Aston.
Recker shook his head at the absurdity of the situation. The HPA was on the brink of losing a war and he was still having to deal with crap like this. Vice Admiral Fraser was rumoured to be one of Admiral Solan’s drinking buddies, but he should learn how to do his damn duty, whatever he believed about Recker.
“We’re expecting one more spaceship, sir,” said Burner. “The Shock and Awe is inbound from Hope. ETA: ten minutes.”
“Just time to read the mission briefing,” said Recker, sitting down and accessing the files.
Some mission documentation was so detailed it ran into dozens of pages when two would have been enough. The files for this mission were distinctly light on specifics and Recker had no idea why high command felt the need for them to remain locked down for so long.
“Fly to Pinvos, recover any alien artifacts we find. Engage the Daklan only as a last resort,” he told his crew in summary.
“Last resort?” said Aston incredulously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Recker didn’t like it either, since it gave Admiral Fraser the opportunity to find the easy way out of any situation. If he caught wind of something - even a Daklan destroyer - he could order the task force to turn tail and run on the basis that he suspected larger numbers of enemy warships were on their way. Maybe Fraser was made of sterner stuff. Recker hoped so.
With several minutes to kill before the Shock and
Awe’s arrival, Recker accessed the sensor controls and focused the arrays on each warship in turn. The two destroyers – Barbarian and Claymore - were parked side-by-side, approximately eight thousand kilometres from the Expectation. They were older models with fewer angles and a higher profile, though they carried equivalent armaments.
The 1800-metre Teron class cruiser Harken looked mean and with enough minor damage to its armour to suggest it had come through a multitude of engagements. As the war progressed, the veterans – meaning both spaceships and crews - were becoming increasingly hard to find and it seemed that hardly any of the older members of the fleet remained.
The battleship Trojan – four thousand metres in length and with a thirty-five-billion-ton mass – first rose from its construction trench five years ago, according to Recker’s memory. Fraser had been its first and only commanding officer, which probably explained why the warship looked clean enough to eat a twenty-course admiral’s banquet off the plating. And it seemed to Recker that a thousand or more ground crew must be kept permanently occupied polishing the hull.
That aside, the Trojan looked like a real bruiser. HPA battleships had plating so thick it was occasionally speculated that you could fly one clean through a small moon without realising it. Alongside that, they carried enough missiles to wipe out a hundred cities, as well as two charge cannons that could put an enormous crater in the surface of a planet and cause real problems for any opponents too slow to get out of the line of fire.
The Trojan was the type of warship that could go head-to-head with a Daklan annihilator and stand a chance of coming out on top. In Recker’s mind, the military needed to push a few of those engagements in order to learn how best to combat the enemy. More than anything, they needed victories. Personnel wanted to see human warships slug it out with the best of the Daklan fleet, rather than hide away in fear of defeat.
“I bet even the ceilings have carpet,” said Aston mischievously. “Probably leopard skin.”
“Yeah, and there’ll more chefs onboard than soldiers and crew combined,” Burner added.
“Enough,” said Recker. He could tolerate the minor insubordination but thinking about the situation made him feel tired and angry in equal measures.
Fractured Horizons (Savage Stars Book 2) Page 3