“Cori, we need to find their suits,” the commander said, pushing away from the door and twisting to launch toward the chute.
“No Jeph,” Anju said, raising her voice to call after him. “You need to get into a diagnostic bay.”
“Later,” he said. “Them first.” He heard her say something else as he curled around the upper hand rail and sailed feet first toward the nose of the ship.
“Dutch, where are their suits?” he asked, rocketing past the Computer Deck. He slowed himself by dragging his free hand against the lift rail in the center of the chute. He clutched the bloody shirt against his face with the other one.
Silence. Dutch is still down.
“I think Shona’s is up on EVAOps,” Kiro said. “But I’ve got—”
Jeph saw Alyx’s PSE fly over the railing on the ConDeck, followed a split second later by the pilot. He was twisting around the center of the lift rail before he realized they were moving sidewise and that Kiro was falling across the opening. He gripped the steel beam with his fingers and held on as tight as his suit-augmented grip allowed.
“Frag me!” Kiro shouted as he snatched at the opposite side railing and swung like a human pendulum.
For an instant everything felt like it stood still, and then the sidewise lurch started again, sending Kiro off to crash against the opposite side of the deck.
“Collision Alert! Collision Alert!” the claxon bellowed once more.
“What the hell is going on?” Jeph shouted, feeling weightlessness return in the moment his fingers lost their grip. The bloody shirt had somehow disappeared from his other hand and he was back to spraying streamers of blood.
He glanced down the chute toward the CrewDeck and saw Seva rebounding off the railing. She was holding something messy and at least partly flesh colored in her arms. It was Shona. As he watched, she launched herself up two decks and over the railing into the MedBay.
Gotta get the suits, he reminded himself, trying not to think about how broken Shona’s body looked. Reaching the edge of the chute with his feet, he sprung up one more deck, fighting to shake off the darkness that dragged at his mind.
On the EVAOpsDeck his hand slipped off the railing, leaving a bloody smear on the smooth metal and he crashed into the ceiling with the flat of his back. He ricocheted across the overhead, his suit keeping the impact from knocking the air out of him. He lashed out with a hand toward a support strut for one of the suit-up stands and swung around, stopping. Streaks and splatters of blood marked the trail of his progress.
Twisting his body over, he wedged a foot against the opposite leg of the stand and anchored himself so he could get his bearings. A helmet bounced off the wall in front of him and drifted through his vision. He tracked it for a few seconds. All around him, things clattered as everything still tumbled. Nothing sat still long enough for him to focus.
He watched globules of blood floating away from his face and wondered why he was still bleeding. It didn’t feel like he was hurt, but he knew he had to be. The droplets trailed across the room and splattered against the wall. The number four on the wall held his eyes like a beacon. It was the same color as his blood.
The helmet floated into view again and he stared at it. A pressure suit helmet. No, that isn’t right. A PSE doesn’t have a helmet. He looked down at the front of his own suit and thought about the red smears on it. Then he thought about the blood on Shona’s skin.
Shona. Blood. Suit.
His eyes focused again on the number four. On the deck below it, Shona’s PSE was a pile of random pieces and he remembered. She needed it.
He had to get it for her.
Just as he was about to turn loose of the stand and push across to get it, everything floating in the room launched toward him. He brought his free arm up to protect his face and pushed his legs out to brace himself in place. Shona’s suit didn’t move, even though everything else felt like hammers pounding into him. Then for a moment, they were bouncing away, only to launch again toward the wall behind him. Fortunately, he was stuck in place by the strength of his suit.
The familiar sensation of weightlessness washed over him and he relaxed his legs. A third blast of motion jerked him loose and tossed him backward.
“Collision Alert!” the claxon roared. “Collision Alert!”
He pulled his hands up in front of his face, but this time when he hit the wall there was no rebound. He crumpled down into blackness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Executive Council Chamber: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
If this was how the daily Executive Council sessions would run until the Sealed Docket Session, they were a complete waste of time and Katryna wanted no part of them. Paulson Lassiter had apparently decided the agenda must be contention free, so he’d filled this first session after the declaration with trivial garbage-level rulings. Obviously, he wanted to keep the peace until the actual fight commenced. An enforced, ritualistic tranquility before the typhoon.
Chancellor Roja’s com chirped. Stifling a yawn, she glanced down at her personal thinpad.
Irregularities in shipment detected. Contact me, earliest. Quintana.
The message said almost nothing, but Katryna had to fight the urge to dance across the room. “I got you now, bastard.” Unfortunately, her desk mic was on and her comment echoed in the silence.
“Excuse me?” Paulson Lassiter said, spinning to face her. He was stepping down from the podium after presenting the agenda for the afternoon session. For a brief instant fire leapt from his eyes, but his normal expression of placid calm reasserted itself almost as quickly. She caught the flash, but was too elated to care.
“Excuse me for the outburst,” she said, standing up and not waiting for him to yield the floor. “Madam Prime Minister, I request that I be released from this session as I have an emergency to which I must attend. I would graciously defer on all matters of the agenda and proffer my proxy vote for the duration of this session, to Chancellor Dr. Tana Drake in my absence.”
“This is highly irregular,” Lassiter said.
“I agree,” Prime Minister Ambrose said. “But given that the agenda this session is mostly a formality, I’m inclined to grant Chancellor Roja’s request. Are there any objections to releasing the FleetCartel Chancellor from her obligations for the duration of the afternoon?”
Ariqat and Tomlinson leaned close to each other and whispered rapidly between themselves.
“Gentlemen?” the Prime Minister asked.
Tomlinson leveled his gaze on Katryna and she almost flinched at his intensity. After several seconds, he shook his head. “No objections.”
“And you Chancellor Ariqat?” Ambrose asked.
He looked around the room clearing his throat before he spoke. “I am personally offended by her lack of commitment to the business of the Chancellery, but as I do not feel there is sufficient support for an objection, I abstain.”
“If Chancellor Dr. Drake accepts your proxy?” She glanced over at the WellCartel Chancellor, who nodded. “Then the Chair releases Chancellor Roja from this session.”
“Thank you,” Katryna said, glancing at Arun Markhas and nodding.
She gathered her stack of thinpads, pivoted, and marched toward the door.
As soon as she was in the hall, she tapped into her com. “Graison, I just walked out on a session. I want Jaxton Quintana on com when I get to my office.”
“Actually ma’am, he’s requested you meet him in his office at L-2,” he said. “We received notification that he’s arranged a shuttle for you and has it waiting at Farside Docking.”
“Not FleetCom Terminal?”
“No ma’am,” he said. “He was specific about wanting to keep this down low.”
She glanced at her chrono and did the math. L-2 Shipyard and back was about six hours roundtrip. “Clear my schedule until tomorrow morning. I’ll layover in Tsiolkovskiy and meet with Nakamiru on the way back. Let him know I’ll be there late and I expect a dinner meeting with
him.”
“Yes ma’am,” Graison said. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” she said. “Get me an appointment with Aryk Rasmussen for tomorrow afternoon. Let him know I might have come up with the evidence we need to end this charade. He’ll know what that means.”
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
The chain of command on most small crewed ships was only one or two layers deep. The Jakob Waltz was no exception. After the commander, came the chief engineer. After that chaos.
Fortunately, Rocky came through unscathed.
She and Kiro were the only uninjured crewmembers who also had emergency ship operations training, so it fell on them to get the Waltz back in working order. With the doctor among the casualties, Rocky assigned Danel and Seva to help tend to the three crewmembers with critical injuries and tried to focus on her own emergency priorities.
Despite how everyone perceived her, it wasn’t easy ignoring her concerns for the commander and the girls, but she forced herself to accept the things she couldn’t control and work on the ones she could.
Her first decision was to station the pilot on ConDeck duty. Since the ship could not run on automatic systems with Dutch down, Kiro would have to get the exterior optics and proximity radar system reconfigured in order to do anything. When she left to head down to the Power Distribution Node, he was pulling panels apart to reroute both systems to his workstation.
Until he finished, they would have no idea what additional hazards might come at them, and no warning of another impact until it happened. In the back of her mind, it troubled her that whatever hit them the first time, took Dutch by surprise. She had no reason to hope that the pilot would do any better in protecting them from another occurrence.
The engineer found Chei and Cori waiting outside MedBay and assigned them to assess and report on other ship’s systems. She sent Cori to Life Support and put Chei in an EVA suit to verify the exterior hull, and specifically to make sure the cargo racks that carried his TICS were still intact. While they headed to their respective areas, she worked on verifying that the power grid was intact. It could be useless and downright dangerous to punch the breakers back online and let the HCF Reactors restart, but the idea tempted her despite safety procedures.
“Focus on confirming critical aspects of your assigned areas first,” she said over the com. “We will sort details later. Broad brush strokes only.”
“Life support is a mess,” Cori said. “The oxygen regen system seems to be operational and we have steady pressure, but food production is offline until we can clean it up and restart. The protein synthesis vats are dumped and floating. Most of the plant beds are smashed too. The hardware looks to be unbroken, but we’ve lost several weeks of production.”
“Understood,” she said. “Food rations will be short. Please move now to Automated Processing Bay and report in once you have assessed status.”
“Copy,” he said.
“I will have main power online momentarily,” she said as the last low voltage test completed and she had green lights across the board. She threw the breakers and the overhead lights came on, showing her that most of her usually spotless workstations were tumbled around the deck. Fighting the urge to clean up, she sighed and pushed on to the main reactor and engine control station on the next deck down.
Priorities. Cleaning was low on that list.
“I’m outside the mid-deck lock near the number three work cage,” Chei reported. “Don’t see anything major out here, although one of the manipulator arms looks badly bent. I’ll stow it and then move down to look at the racks.”
“Copy,” she said. “Maintain tether connection protocols. Would be bad to lose you if we get hit again.”
“Yah, cando,” he said. She could hear his breathing in the mic and then a heavy grunt. “I’m swinging wide out here, and it looks like several of the TICS storage racks are misaligned, but nothing has come loose. Will take a bar to get some of them out, but Seva and I can do with some brute meso.”
“Is good news,” Rocky said. “When done with racks, please inspect main hull for damage. Would be nice to know where impact occurred.”
“On it,” Chei said. “Moving forward now.”
“Rocky, can you report to MedBay,” Danel said, cutting in on the channel.
“Is problem?” she asked, picking up on his tone and launching herself before he could reply.
“Just get up here,” he said.
FleetCom Lunar L-2 Shipyard: Lunar Lagrange Two:
It was a long time since Chancellor Roja had been in a casual weightless environment and she’d almost forgotten how much effort it took to remain seated without gravity to help. Quintana’s office was obviously not where he worked, because it only had a desk console and several pieces of uselessly plush furniture. Unfortunately, for her sense of focus, it also had a huge window that overlooked the primary shipyard and assembly dock. A fleet of tenders was pushing the Armstrong out of its berth. It was the first time she’d seen the immense supercruiser in person.
“She’s a beast isn’t she?” he said. “We just finished the last of her space trials and the final outfitting.”
“She’s spectacular,” Katryna said. “Honestly, it doesn’t look like she’d move under her own power.”
“She’s surprisingly fast, straight out,” he said. “Doesn’t maneuver too well, but we ran a four-g test on the primary engines.” He pointed at the nose section of the ship. “See the steering thrusters?”
The chancellor nodded, rising from her seat to get a better view. They were visible as a small cluster of nozzles sticking out of a bulging section just below what had to be the bridge.
“Look close and you can see two crew transfer shuttles docked beside them,” he said. They sat almost hidden behind the bell shaped engines. “The steering thrusters are the same size as the primary engines on a standard D-class keel.”
“No wonder the Armstrong damned near bankrupted us,” she said, shaking her head.
“Indeed,” he said. “Unfortunately, she’s destined to be a unique vessel in the Fleet.”
“So has Nakamiru announced who gets the big seat?” she asked.
“Officially, no. But he told me it’ll be Elayne Jeffers,” he said. “It’s still quiet, so she doesn’t even know yet.”
“Good choice,” she said. “I knew she was on the shortlist.”
She pulled herself back down onto the couch. “I’m sure you didn’t call me out here to ogle the pretty boat, so let’s talk about what you discovered.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, turning to face her and anchoring his maglocks to the deck. “We ordered 500 kilo of recycled beryllium oxide for a reactor core test. When we got it in for analysis, it tested with a specific ratio of oxygen-18 isotope in the alloy.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “And this made it identifiable?”
He looked at her strangely. It was obvious that he expected his discovery to upset her. “To our knowledge, there’s only one ore processing facility that would produce a compound with this specific isotopic ratio. It’s a small SourceCartel facility in the Cybele Cluster. What makes this particularly interesting is that this specific mine went into production less than ten years ago. And in that time, we haven’t decommissioned a ship that was less than twenty-two years old.”
“I assume that means there’s no possibility that this could be recycled materials?” she asked.
“None,” he said. “We even checked to make sure none of the scrapped ships had been in for repairs that might have used any of it since that particular mine began producing. None of them could have included materials from this mine.”
“Would you call this evidence irrefutable?”
“Very close,” he said. “It would be hard to convince anyone that the materials we ordered were not newly mined.”
“Who knows you are looking into this?” she asked.
“Only the staff of our metallurgical lab here,” he said. “I told t
hem it was a quality control test to evaluate the suitability of recycled materials for an experimental project. I put a reactor design team on the task and then used their new concept to hide that we were looking at a problem in supply. It turns out we needed a high output miniaturized reactor for the Sparrowhawk.”
“The Sparrowhawk?”
“It’s Nakamiru’s ultra high-g transport project. It’s been limping along for several years, so I goosed it to make the order look legit.”
She nodded, vaguely remembering the name in a report she read somewhere.
“There weren’t a lot of places where I had something working that was at a point where we needed beryllium oxide,” he said. “It’s only used in Helium-Cycle Fusion Reactors.”
“Do you think there’s any chance SourceCartel will know we’re looking?” she asked.
“The requisition went through normal channels,” he said. “I expedited the order, since you made it sound urgent, but otherwise I didn’t do anything that might have tripped somebody’s wire.”
“Excellent,” she said, pulling out her thinpad. “I’ll need the full documentation on this, if you can send it to me.”
“Of course.” He grabbed his thinpad out of his pocket and linked direct to hers.
“One last thing,” she said as she watched the file delivery on her screen. “Do you have the name of the person who handled the requisition on their end? It would be good to know how high up the food chain we are with this.”
He scrolled down through the file. “It was someone by the name of Zora Murphy in SourceCartel Materials Reprocessing. She signed off on the original order and they shipped it from the stock depot at Lunar L-5. The same woman filed the remittance service request yesterday and we paid it this morning.”
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
Rocky grabbed the doorjamb to stop herself from making a hard landing on the MedBay desk. She twisted and planted her boots on the deck plating. It looked like a bomb had exploded and no one had bothered to wipe down the walls yet. There were still droplets of blood floating around the room. “Is air filtration offline?”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 7