“All ships are unarmed,” he said.
“Yes, but the Jakob Waltz has ten crewmembers and of those only four have fleet training at all. They don’t even have anybody to give a good hand-to-hand defense.”
“When we began planning the mission charter, we didn’t know there was a ghost fleet, nor did we suspect this might be its location,” he said, his usual condescending tone sounding defensive. “None of the previous missions to the Trojan Cluster gave us any indication of encountering anything other than a natural phenomenon.”
“But you acknowledge that you sent this ship out there with the knowledge that they could turn these TICS units they’re carrying into warheads?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “Those are part of the ice return technology. They are nothing more than thermonuclear heaters with a steam vent that produces thrust. They are engines, not warheads.”
“I looked at the design,” she said. “It would take almost zero effort to reconfigure those into bombs.” She tossed a thinpad at him and watched as he scanned the design specs of the TICS unit.
“How do you know they can be reconfigured?” he challenged.
“I was posted on one of the old Explorer Class nuke-engine vessels before we decommissioned the last of them. The reactors in those ships were larger versions of the same thing. If we pulled the control rods all the way out of the piles, they would melt down and we could push the smaller core elements together to reach critical mass.”
“A self-destruct mechanism?” he snorted. “How paranoid of you.”
She shook her head. “We transported live specimens of the Burroughs Virus to labs in LEO for study. If we’d lost containment, we needed to make sure it never got free, so they were a last line of defense. After we completed those missions, we removed that class of ship from service.”
She got up, walked over to the bar and poured herself another scotch. “But you’re not answering my question. Did you know it was possible to modify the TICS units to explode?”
“Honestly, Katryna, I did not.” He set the thinpad down on the table beside his drink and frowned. She could see how troubled he was with the implication that he’d missed this potential danger. “Sixty of these were on the ship, but they have used several already.”
“That would be enough plutonium to make thirty 10-kiloton warheads,” she said. “Give or take.”
“I did not consider the potential for this,” he said, his voice sounding hollow, like he’d lost a chunk of his soul. She’d never heard him sound helpless, but she’d also never seen him outmaneuvered before.
She walked back over and sat down, leaning forward and resting her arms on her legs. “I still don’t know if I should believe you. What troubles me is that if you didn’t know, you got played the fool.”
His eyes flashed. “Excuse me, I take offense—”
“Park it Arun,” she said, relieved that he hadn’t lost his will to fight back. “This answers the one thing that didn’t add up. It made no sense to me why Source would risk sending a mission out there.”
“You are saying it was their intent to use this mission to deliver nuclear ordnance to their fleet,” he said, nodding.
“Do you know whose idea it was to put those things on the ship in the first place?”
“A mission planner at SourceCartel I assume,” he said. “The whole ice harvesting side of the charter was their responsibility. I supervised the process to make sure we met our science interests, but our cartel interface team handled the rest. I am sure I could find the records of the charter negotiations if it is important.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I pulled the mission records this morning. An engineer who had just transferred to SourceCartel from Dev did that portion of the planning.”
“So that provides the connection we expected to find back to DevCartel,” he said. “That’s good news.”
“Oh it is indeed,” she said. “The engineer’s name is Tamir bin Ariqat.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
“It certainly sounds like a signal,” the commander said as he listened to the recording from the pod’s receiver. “It’s damned hard to hear.” The slow, steady pinging was almost lost in background radio noise. He tapped his finger on the galley table in sync to the pulses.
“A pulsar is almost directly behind it,” Kiro said. “That’s why we didn’t catch it when we did our first looksee. It’s that whistling sound you can hear whooping like a siren.”
Jeph nodded. “Can we get it with one of our antenna and maybe clean it up some?”
“Phase array antenna is inadequate,” Rocky said. “High gain antenna is jammed in position, so unless we want to move entire ship, we cannot point it at source.”
“We could get it with our low band dish, but the engine housing blocks it from getting a line of sight directly to the stern,” Kiro said. “We’d need to swing the ship almost eight degrees to get a good shot at it.”
“Is very weak,” Rocky added. “Would be best to shut down all sources of RF interference while we listened.”
“What do you think it is?” Seva asked.
“It sounds like a locator beacon from a marker buoy,” Jeph said.
“But nobody’s been here before us,” Anju said. Cori was watching her patients, so she was raiding the galley like a teenager.
“That’s what we were told,” he said. It wouldn’t be the first time FleetCom has lied to me. He bit down on his feelings before they leaked into his thinking. He had other things to worry about and his festering mistrust of the chain of command wasn’t something he could let get in the way of doing his job.
“Could it be from a probe?” Danel asked. “They sent one of those through here before us, didn’t they?”
“Not according to the background on the mission charter,” Jeph said. “The only thing that explored this region of the solar system was a mission from the old American space agency and that was over two hundred years ago.”
“Could it be that?” Seva asked.
“Not likely,” Rocky said, shaking her head. “Would have no power. This far out, solar collectors would be useless and reactor would have died a century ago.”
“And it won’t be a newer probe either, because they don’t carry marker buoys,” Kiro said. “It would have to be from a manned charter.”
Jeph nodded. The pilot was right and that was the crux of the matter in his mind. If it was a crewed ship, that should have been in their background dossier.
“Is it possible that someone else is out here and it’s a distress call?” Anju asked.
“There’s no way to tell from this,” he said. “The locator pulse is the strongest part of the signal, because it’s designed to attract attention.” He pushed away from the table and paced in a slow circle around the deck.
“We’re in no position to render aid, but I think we need to at least try to confirm what it is,” he said. He stopped and looked at the chrono in the galley. “Kiro, bring us to a heading where we can get the small dish on it and then let’s go silent and listen. I want us back in position long before the next waves hit.”
FleetCartel Executive Offices: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
Chancellor Roja sat at her desk, wishing that her admirals weren’t scattered all over the system. For now, she had to make do with secure com, but she didn’t trust that to be safe for much longer. If it still was.
Admiral Nakamiru’s face appeared as the com connected and the encryption synced. The red border on her comscreen did little to alleviate her concerns.
“We’ve got a problem to deal with,” she said, drumming her fingers on her desktop as she waited for him to respond.
“Anything I can do, I will,” he said, his eyes showing a trace of concern as he picked up his tea and took a sip.
“The situation regarding the ghost fleet has become much more dangerous than we knew going in,” she said. “I suspect that they’r
e outfitting these ships for a fight.” She looked around and realized she should have remembered to bring something to drink herself. Her throat was dry, but that might be because of what she needed to discuss.
“A fight?” His veneer of composure cracked around the edges and she saw a flash of disbelief before he restored his mask.
“It’s possible,” she said, nodding. “Maybe even probable. Regardless, we need to expose this ghost fleet and neutralize it before they can use it.”
“How do we do that, if we don’t know where they are hiding it?” he asked.
“I’ve got some evidence to support the idea that they’re somewhere in the Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster,” she opened the files on the Jakob Waltz and tapped the icon to send them to him.
“What makes you think that?” He picked up a thinpad and thumbed the screen.
“When you can, read the background I just sent you,” she said. “There is an odd charter working out there. I think it was set up. They filed a Situation Alert.”
“A Sit-Al is a pretty low-level problem,” he said.
“Ordinarily I’d say yes, but several days later the ship went offline,” she said. “As in completely dark.”
“So it has gone missing,” he said. “That is unfortunate, but it does not tell me why you think this is where the ghost fleet is hiding.”
“There’s strong evidence that says Source planned to use this ship to transport weapons-grade plutonium to what may be the fleet base,” she said. “I don’t know if the crew knew that’s what they were doing either.”
“What?” Shock flashed across his normally stoic face.
“The Jakob Waltz is an experimental ice harvesting mission. It’s carrying miniature nuclear reactors that it uses like engines to move an entire iceberg rather than processing the water on site.” She watched as he scanned down the file. “Altogether the Waltz is carrying enough radiological materials to build something like thirty 10-kiloton warheads.”
“They are out there alone?”
“Exactly. They first reported a problem that sounded like they lost guidance control or navcom. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I can’t access the reports to find out if they’re back online. The charter still belongs to SourceCartel and until the commander ups the Sit-Al to a distress call or we do a Charter Intervention there’s not much I can do. With the current lay of the land, this is a touchy time for me to be doing anything unusual,” she said.
“I can see that, but if this ship is smuggling nuclear materials, we need to get control of it.”
She sighed heavily. He was right, but it wasn’t that simple. “Arun was part of the charter, so I have to be careful. He didn’t realize the ghost fleet was real until recently. Of course we didn’t either, until we confirmed the hole in the logistics chain.”
“It doesn’t matter Katy,” he said, fixing her with his eyes like her father used to do when she’d pulled a dumb stunt. “Thirty nukes is a substantial block of firepower. We need to neutralize that before it gets out of reach. Doing nothing lets them bury the bombs where we can’t dig them out.”
“I’m not arguing that, but the situational topography is in flux. I’m getting the documents in place for an intervention, but if politics go sidewise before I can make that happen, you need do whatever it takes to get that ship under control. We need to eliminate the threat this ghost fleet represents.” She reached out and touched the red border on the screen and drew in a deep breath before adding, “By force if necessary.”
He sat there blinking for several seconds longer than the propagation delay. She watched him stiffen his back and sit up straighter in his chair. “Let me clarify that I understand what you are saying. It sounds like you want us to weaponize our assets.”
“I don’t want it,” she said. “But wouldn’t you call it a policy of prudent preparation?”
“Yes, but we have not had capital class weapons on a multicruiser in a hundred years,” he said.
She nodded. He was right. It felt a thin justification for preemptively risking the peace of the Union.
“And you are willing to base this entirely on a Sit-Al from an icebarge?” he asked.
“I am,” she said. “Start getting your assets collated.”
“Then perhaps we need to have an eyeball meeting?” he said, tapping the edge of the screen to let her know he also thought the com was not secure enough to go on with this discussion.
“I think we should,” she said. “I can be on a shuttle to Tsiolkovskiy later today.”
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
“There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a beacon,” Jeph said as Anju ran a diagnostic scanner over his forehead. She’d pinned him down and dragged him into the MedBay, while Rocky and Kiro teased the signal out of the noise. It was tedious work and they didn’t need him watching over their shoulder, so he knew she used that as an excuse to get him alone to talk.
“You seem pretty sure of that,” she said, nodding and grinning at whatever the display on her scanner was telling her.
“There isn’t much else it can be,” he said. “It means we were sent out here without all the information we should have, and that pisses me off in ways I can’t even describe.”
“I understand,” she said, tossing the scanner aside. She watched it float onto the counter and lock down against the magnetic surface.
He slipped off the bed, pushed over to the porthole, and stared out into the darkness. He could hear her moving around behind him and after several seconds, she floated up holding out a small capped vial with a drinking tube.
“What’s this?”
“Ethanol … pretending to be vodka.” She smiled as he took it from her. She held another one in her other hand and clinked it against his. They both drank down their shot. He gasped, his eyes blurring as it hit bottom.
“You need to relax and I figured you’d refuse something stronger,” she said, laughing at his reaction.
“Maybe not,” he hissed. “Is it explosive?”
“Probably,” she said. “Just don’t tell Rocky I can make it. She’ll want it as a cleaning solution if she finds out.”
He held the vial out and looked at it, blinking tears from his eyes and imagining that it would make a better disinfectant than a beverage.
“Want another?” she asked, taking the glass tube from his hand.
He thought about it for about a millisecond before he shook his head. “You actually have a supply of this stuff?”
“Some,” she said. “A few liters. I figure in a pinch it makes a fair anesthetic too. It’s about eighty percent ethanol—”
“And twenty percent corrosive,” he finished.
“It’s not that bad, you big baby,” she said. “It’s just been a long time since you’ve had a real drink.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said.
“So do you want another?” she offered again.
An alarm tone pinged on her console and she glanced at the screen. “Shona is waking up!” She pushed off toward the door to go check on her patient.
“That’s good news. I need her on deck,” he said, spinning to follow her. “If the beacon turns out to be from a ship, we’re obligated to investigate.”
“I didn’t say she would be ready to go back on duty,” she said, stopping herself in the doorway. “She will be very weak.”
“We’re all weak. It’s part of being an ectomorph,” he said, snagging the other side of the door to stop himself. “She’ll be a lot tougher than I am. You printed her most of a new skeleton didn’t you?”
“It’s not the bones I’m talking about and you damned well know it,” Anju said, fire leaping from her eyes.
“It doesn’t matter, I’ll need her at her station,” he said. He could tell he was heading for a fight as she shook her head.
“We’re in no shape to help anyone,” she said. “Until we figure out what’s hammering us, I think it’s stupid to get any closer. For all we know it’s an e
xtrasolar signal.”
“Aliens?” he snorted. “That’s not even worth considering. It’s an RF signal that sounds like a transponder. That’s a stranded ship and we have to investigate.”
“You don’t know that’s what it is,” she challenged.
“No I don’t, but it’s a shit-ton more likely to be a ship than it is to be aliens.”
“Maybe, but I think it’s an unnecessary risk. Especially when you consider you still have at least one critically injured crew member and the commander is barely out of MedBay himself.”
“Are you saying I’m too weak to do this, doctor?” he asked, following her.
“No, depending on how hard you intend to push, but we’re an ice harvesting mission and not a rescue ship,” she said as she grabbed her aug-arm from the locker beside the door and slung it over her broken shoulder. “Even if you’re right, there’s no guarantee we can do anything to help. All I see is a lot of potential danger in getting closer.”
“It doesn’t matter. If this is what I think it is, I will give the order and we will do this,” he said.
“Have you talked to the rest of the crew about it?” she asked.
“This isn’t a democracy,” he said, controlling his tone to keep his rising anger in check. “I am in charge.”
“Yes sir,” she sneered. “But I am the ship’s doctor and I can—”
“No, you cannot. And you will not,” he growled through clenched teeth.
“Excuse me?” she hissed.
“You heard me very clearly Anju. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
He knew she could file a formal action to relieve him of duty. He also knew she would think long and hard before she considered it.
She floated above the deck, reaching back and grabbing her arm’s controller plug and snapping it into place over her implant. He pushed back out of the way as it extended and rotated through several warm up cycles. After several seconds, she drew in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let it out.
“Jeph, wait a second. Please,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking I don’t support you, but I want you to consider what you’re asking us to do. Why are you so determined to do it right now? If you give this order, make sure it’s because it’s the right thing and not as a reaction to them excluding things from the background dossier.”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 14