The Deadly Pact

by Michael Freeport

  “What’s our current status, Lieutenant,” Stokes asked.

  “We have local gravity plating up, and we’ve bypassed several power distribution nodes. I’m trying to get a fabricator up and running so I can make more advanced versions of the hack jobs we’ve been using so far.”

  “Show me,” Stokes ordered.

  Murphy nodded. “Follow me, sir.” Murphy led Stokes to the primary power bus, where the reactor fed power into the rest of the ship. At the end of the bus was a large black box that had been cut open and most of its internal structure removed. Six gleaming superconductors led from the bus to other panels in engineering. “This is a standard distribution model, taken from the Aeternum design database. This is the type that has completely failed.”

  “The Woduur must have designed these to stop functioning whenever they want.” Stokes sat down at an unoccupied seat. He pondered the possible motivations the Woduur could have from the information he currently had.

  Murphy turned his attention to the ongoing work around him while Stokes considered the situation. He turned back to Stokes and said, “Sir, is there something else you need?”

  “No, Lieutenant. I was just trying to figure out what kind of people the Woduur are. It’s obvious from what we’ve already observed that they allow their technology to be used under some circumstances by other races.” Stokes rubbed his chin with his fingers for a moment while he thought. “That being the case, we can say it’s likely they maintain control of their tech by using standard designs that can disable anything manufactured by their tech and by being able to recall their manufacturing vessels.”

  Murphy nodded. “That makes sense, sir. I haven’t heard much, but I did hear the Aeternum left on its own and the systems shut down after we got some kind of signal from the Aeternum.”

  “That’s essentially correct. Before we headed out, Aeternum gave us the opportunity to use a code to maintain control. We didn’t have it, so it left.” Stokes shook his head. He was going to string Cobb up by his toenails if he ever got his hands on him. “Keep up your efforts here and work up a new design for a power distribution module that will function normally. If you need help with theoretical modeling, get together with Miss Woodard.”

  “Aye, sir,” Murphy said.

  A few minutes later, Stokes drifted into the bridge. “Welcome back, sir. What's the story in engineering?” Bendel asked when he saw Stokes.

  “Lieutenant Murphy has restored gravity to the area around engineering. He has had to bypass the standard power modules.”

  Bendel nodded. “That would explain total power loss. What's our next step, sir?”

  Stokes extended one finger on his right hand. “First, I want Miss Woodard to head to engineering and assist in designing a new power module that will function whether the Woduur want it to or not.” He extended a second finger. “Next, I want you to prioritize life support then sensors and then navigation. We are leaving the Lashmere system at a high rate of speed, and it is possible we could collide with something in the cometary shield unless we can maneuver the ship.” He extended a third finger. “Next will be communications. After that, we can concentrate on defensive systems and weapons.”

  Bendel was nodding and taking notes on his datapad while Stokes spoke. As he tapped the last entry in, he glanced up at the admiral and said, “Aye, sir. I'll oversee the repair efforts. With luck, we won't need our vacuum suits.”

  Stokes smiled and nodded. “With luck,” he replied.

  Stokes passed the time by fiddling with his wrist comp and listening to the common channel. The officer channel was mostly quiet except for routine status checks on engineering's progress. More than four hours after they initially lost power, Murphy came onto the bridge.

  “Admiral, I have a report for you.”

  Stokes turned from his wrist comp and said, “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  Murphy drifted to Stokes and pulled a datapad from his belt. “The problem we’re having is our power is being interrupted. These distribution nodes are just not passing power along to the rest of the ship. If I replace them with a device that works similarly but isn’t subject to Woduur control, then we’ll regain control of Victorious.”

  Stokes nodded. “Agreed, Lieutenant. I assume you’ve devised a replacement?”

  “Yes, sir. The problem is in the internal control mechanism of the current design. This is how the Woduur are disabling us. I’ve devised a new electromechanical system that isolates each power distribution node on a separate control network. The whole thing is cumbersome and involves running an entirely new control structure for the power distribution but it guarantees we can maintain control of our primary systems. The previously integrated system was using the power network as a data path that was also preventing us from regaining control at any one point. The only reason I had any systems still running was that I was able to directly hardwire them from the reactor.”

  “Excellent work, Lieutenant. What do you need from me to make this happen?”

  “I need to restore power to one of the manufacturing bays so we can start turning out new nodes. I have the basic designs for the three different types used aboard Victorious. Once the maintenance plant is up and running, I can produce them in job lots. What I need most is bodies to help in setting up a power run from engineering to the closest maintenance bay. It’s not far, only about twenty-five meters but the cable I’m using is stripped from a weapon control run, and it’s a lot of heavy, cumbersome work.”

  “Very well. Coordinate with Mister Bendel and use whomever you feel is needed.”

  “Aye, sir,” Murphy said, and he went to the executive officer. A few seconds later, a call was put out on the general channel for anyone close to engineering to report there and assist in the effort.

  Rigging the control run took less than an hour and soon systems aboard Victorious began coming back online. Life support hummed and very soon after, artificial gravity was restored throughout the ship. Murphy reported inter-ship comms were restored about half an hour later.

  “Mister Bendel sent a message to Lashmere. Report our status and request instructions from Naval Command.”

  “Aye, sir,” Bendel replied. He turned to his console and started composing the message.

  “Admiral,” Woodard said.

  “Yes, Miss Woodard?”

  “I Have a message from Rampart. Apparently, they are close to us and are preparing to match our vector.”

  “Ah, put their message through.” A few seconds later, the main plot came on and displayed Captain Morris, who had replaced Stokes in command of Rampart.

  “Admiral, I’m relieved to see your ship functional. No other ship has responded to our signals.”

  “It’s a complex situation, Captain. Right now, I am going to send out a new communications protocol that will allow wrist comps to create ad-hoc comm nets. I’m also sending out a new power distribution node design that will bypass the current ones. They can be made at any manufacturing bay on any of the ships. Dispatch this data by way of all your small boats. Get to as many of the ships drifting out of the system as possible. We have to get the fleet back under our control as soon as possible.”

  Captain Morris nodded. “Aye, sir.”

  “We have to hurry; I’m worried the crabs or the Alliance or these mysterious Woduur will choose this moment to strike. We must recover immediately so we can defend Lashmere. We also have to send a ship to Xalcek to help Captain Patho. If his ship has been disabled, he’s going to need help.”

  Chapter 9

  Marli Simmons watched as Kri’s face vanished from her plot. The display shifted back to show an exterior view of Damocles. The jump ring was ahead and Loki began passing through it. As the ship moved through the artificial distortion, it started to shake violently. Simmons gripped the arms of the command chair and watched the energy readings. The mass nullification field emitter was drawing twice as much energy as her simulations had predicted.

  The field generator st
arted making a shrieking sound, and the odor of burning electronics began to filter into the bridge. The ship bucked wildly, and Simmons was thrown from her chair. She crashed headlong into the base of the tactical station chair and felt blackness close in around her.

  She came to an indeterminate amount of time later. Her throat was burning, and the air was filled with acrid smoke. There was a quiet hum under her right ear, which was pressed awkwardly against the tactical console. She realized her head was throbbing. She slowly forced herself into an upright position and rubbed her face in her hands.

  She looked around, and moved towards one of the lockers on the far side of the bridge that contained emergency vacuum suits. They weren’t as good as the fitted suits that were issued to naval personnel, but she had left hers in her cabin. The locker sprang open, and she got herself into the suit as quickly as possible. As soon as fresh air was supplied, her headache began to subside, although it did not go away completely.

  She stood and walked to the operations console. The ship’s status display was lit up, showing damage or destruction to every section of the ship. She tapped out the commands to check the status of all systems. There was no response from any part of the ship a few meters forward from the bridge and from about fifteen meters aft of the bridge. The manufacturing ring also seemed to have suffered significant damage.

  She tapped into visual pickups and saw that these parts of the ship had been torn completely away from the ship. All three decks were open to space beyond emergency bulkheads. Her air supply was limited to what was still trapped behind single emergency doors and in the emergency air canisters, one of which she would use each day she remained in the emergency vacuum suit. “This is bad. Really, really bad. So much for putting theory into practice. Something must have affected the nullification field,” she muttered to herself. There were no drones left in the launch bay, and there was no propulsion remaining on the intact portion of the ship. Her only chance lay in getting the one remaining maintenance bay functional and rebuilding the damaged portion of the manufacturing ring.

  The task would take days at best if it was even possible. “I did not go through all this only to die out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  She went down three decks to the auxiliary engineering space and looked over the small manufacturing system. The machine was sized so that it could produce the damaged portions of the manufacturing ring. The status display indicated the unit was functional and could produce new sections of the ring. She would have to drag the new sections out and bring the damaged pieces back in to be repurposed for other sections of the ship.

  Simmons sighed. This was not the kind of work she was accustomed to. She needed help. She tapped a bulkhead mounted console. The ship had massive structural damage, even in the portions that were still intact. Repairs were needed throughout the craft. An automated repair system was part of the ship, but it was currently damaged to the point that it was not functioning. She checked the systems and found damaged modules and noted that repair robots were needed.

  Pausing as she scrolled through the minimum needed supplies to make the system functional again, she decided she would repair the damage control robots and their control system rather than rebuilding the manufacturing ring first.

  She tapped out a series of commands on the maintenance bay console and waited patiently while it fabricated a pair of robots and several control modules. Once the bay opened, she retrieved and installed the modules. Power flowed through the system from a backup battery, and the robots opened and began stalking across the deck. The repair robots were small, hemispherical units that had a variety of built-in manipulators and a tiny version of the manufacturing technology. This allowed them to gather destroyed components, break them down into useful raw materials and rebuild new, functional parts.

  Simmons watched with bored curiosity as the robot worked slowly and methodically in an ever-widening pattern from the maintenance bay. Their simplistic programming only allowed them to rebuild the ship from a central point. It was a less than optimally efficient design, but it would save her the effort of heavy labor.

  Simmons went back up to the bridge and waited impatiently while the robots worked. Several hours passed and Simmons drifted off to sleep.

  She awoke with a start when her emergency suit began beeping at her that it needed a new oxygen canister. Sighing, she pulled one from the locker and swapped it into the chest mounted rebreather. She sat at the operations console and tapped at the status display. The robots had been busy over the last several hours. The area surrounding the engineering bay had been completely repaired, and most of the damage to life support was repaired. She would have to stay in the emergency suit for a while until new bulkheads were built and mounted forward of the current boundaries.

  She tapped out the computer estimate of how much could be repaired. The system estimated the entire ring would be fixed, and two drones could be built along with a rudimentary propulsion system mounted along the edges of the ring. That would give her at least some propulsion until the gravity slope drive could be rebuilt. She would use the ring to capture and consume anything in the area that could be used to build new sections of the ship. The drones could be used as well to assist in gathering materials.

  Sighing, she set herself to the task of carefully managing the pair of robots carrying out system repairs. The computer recommended a third drone be built and she agreed. The area where the robots were working was now larger and a damaged area two decks down was ready to be repressurised. The section included a berthing cabin, a welcome development. Simmons had been afraid she would have to sleep on the bridge again.

  Simmons passed the time by working with the computer, which was, fortunately, completely intact, thanks to its massively redundant design. Her thoughts wandered as her hands worked almost of their own accord, programming various modules within the computer. Since the ship was hers alone to control, she would need an even more robust automation system than was originally intended. It would also be advantageous to program an artificial intelligence that would help her use the ship’s tactical systems.

  Programming code was almost a kind of trance-like activity for Simmons. She rarely knew exactly how she convinced a computer to do what she wanted, but once she’d finished a program, it usually worked the first time. Something about the way computers worked just made sense to her.

  She watched as a tactical program took shape in the display in front of her. Using rules she barely understood about ship to ship combat and drone deployment, she carefully provided the newly formed tactical computer module with all of the available options and decisions that any trained tactical officer would make.

  Simmons was still pondering how to implement sufficient control and data networks to make the ship respond to her as though it was fully crewed when she realized she was ravenously hungry. She cast about and realized there was no food available. The galley and all of the food stores were blown completely off of the ship.

  The only place emergency rations were stored was on board the escape pods. Unfortunately, all of the pods had been ejected from Loki when she’d engineered the false emergency that had allowed her to take control of the ship. Giving her mind a moment to wander without direction, the answer came to her. Surely, food could be created by the maintenance bay. She stepped off the bridge and, a moment later, was standing in the now completely restored engineering bay two decks down.

  She tapped through a variety of menus on the machine and found no way to produce food. No pattern had been programmed into the system and, even if there was a pattern, her supply of materials did not include those needed to make food. “Dammit. I am not going to starve to death out here.”

  Simmons checked the computer and found it had been more than a full day since she’d arrived in the system. It was surprising that Damocles hadn’t caught her. A two hundred light year trip was certainly possible within a day, even if they’d needed to stop off for refueling twice. In any event, there was no
real possibility for her to fight or evade Damocles if it did show up, so she concentrated on what she could do.

  Fortunately, water was readily available. While she might be hungry, she would at least be able to survive for several days before she lost her optimal ability for rational thought. The idea of slowly losing her ability to think clearly was terrifying to her. Of the many abilities she possessed, she valued her intellect above all others.

  If the section of Loki that contained the galley was still intact, she could have it towed and reattached to the ship easily enough, but she would have to locate it, and that meant she needed sensors and at least one drone. She input new priorities for the automated repair system to carry out.

  Estimates of newly prioritized repairs came up a few seconds later. She had another day to pass until she would know if she would live or if she would die of slow starvation.

  The day passed slowly with various minor tasks and adjustments to the repairs in the intervening time. A drone was finally built in the repaired manufacturing ring. Internal resources were nearly depleted. Without a new supply of raw materials, the ship would run out of backup battery power in less than two days. Simmons was ravenously hungry and was drinking water at a tremendous pace. Her thoughts were beginning to obsess about food and she found herself daydreaming about eating.

  She sat in the command chair as the newly built drone came out of the manufacturing ring. Onboard sensors quickly located tumbling portions of the Loki. She dispatched the drone to recover the next aft section. It was much larger than the section she currently occupied., stretching from the area aft of where she sat to just forward of the aft boat bay. The reactor and galley would be contained in that section.

  The plot flickered to life as the drone began moving towards the tumbling section of the ship. Simmons plotted a course to follow up behind and linked her navigational data to the drone. Slowly, the drone maneuvered in close and then attached itself to the length of the ship. The tumbling stopped and then the two pieces of the ship started moving closer to one another.