Chapter 11
Run Silent
Traci entered the auxiliary control hatch at a run and found everything in working order. That was a relief. The bridge and CIC were hopelessly dysfunctional. She was glad she had arranged for an atmospheric bay to be installed here for the Valdi FCO. He wasted no time walking to his own station and reading the dials. He turned back to Traci and flashed a few words of confirmation that his area was functional. Taking off his breather, he started trying to establish communications with his flight crew on the hangar deck. The device maintaining the nitrogen curtain separating his area from the rest of the auxiliary control room hissed gently.
Traci looked at the rolling status reports and assigned Commander Lazarus to help Michael coordinate the damage control teams and establish a central command node for processing the field reports. Many of her teams were fighting fires belowdecks, but she also knew there were still sections of the ship where there was no communication at all. She started checking the displays for what parts of her ship were still working as her secondary bridge crew settled into their stations. She turned as Colonel Magnus entered AuxCon. He stationed two of his marines at the entrance hatch and walked over to Captain Ganner.
“Captain, we’ve secured the control sections and armory. I’ve asked the rest of my men to help with trapped crewmen and traffic control. I’ll be over at the tactical station if you need me.”
“Thank you, Reginald,” Traci said absently. She was trying to find out why she couldn’t connect with the engineering deck. She could see that Michael was still talking to Commander Kenaniah, but it looked like he was having no better luck from where he was.
“Bridge, this is the captain. I’m switching main asset controls to AuxCon. Commander, complete the evacuation of the bridge and get the fires under control. Join me when you can.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. That meant a communication failure… or worse.
“Wallace,” she said to her helmsman, “what’s our heading?”
“As near as I can tell, ma’am,” he said, taking his seat at the navigation console, “we’re heading away from the battle site on course one-oh-nine on plane.”
“Get us off the plane immediately. Send us on new vector eighty-seven degrees, minus forty-one off the plane.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
“Captain,” Magnus said calmly, “they’re fanning out in a search pattern. And it looks like they are sending a squadron of battle cruisers back to the Regulus hyperspace limit. I think they’re looking for us.”
Traci thought a moment. “So the Terran commanders have learned to work together quicker than I thought. Does it look like they’ve spotted us?”
Magnus looked at the instruments a few seconds longer. “No, Captain. Our last course change did not induce a corresponding change in any of the units I can see. Unfortunately, there is a power fluctuation somewhere. My sensor readings keep resetting.”
“Understood. Helm, keep us moving away from the battle site at one-quarter tactical speed. Change our vector every fourteen to sixteen minutes.”
“Captain Zuarit,” she said, talking distinctly into her translation collar. Do you have contact with your flight crews?”
“No, Traci Ganner,” came his response from her collar. The ship’s repeaters picked up his flashes at his station and routed them to her translator. “I will keep trying.”
“Alright, people. We’re hurt pretty bad, but by some miracle, our cloak appears to still be functional. The fighters can survive on life support for nine hours if they conserve. Captain Zuarit, once we get the ship back under control, I want you to prepare for secondary protocols.”
“Yes, Traci Ganner. I understand.”
Lieutenant Junior Grade Shawna Davidson climbed the ladder to the AuxCon side hatch and came inside. As the junior damage control officer, she had been sent as a runner to update the conn.
“Captain, we’ve got power problems running up to this part of the ship, but we should have communications working in another ten minutes. In the meantime, we’ve got four teams down below, working fires and trying to reestablish communication with engineering and the hangar deck. We took some serious damage aft of frame twenty-two. The scrubbers are working overtime, ma’am. We estimate that we will have to start venting smoke in another fifteen minutes if we can’t stop the fires.”
“Alright, Lieutenant. I want priority on engineering. We’ve got to get confirmed status on our shields and cloaking system. We seem to have propulsion for now, but I don’t know for how long. Make your way forward to the bridge and meet up with Commander McKenzie. Instruct him to go back with you to coordinate efforts in main engineering. Send one team to work on the hangar deck, but no more than that until we have control and power restored. Do not vent smoke without my express order. Use personal breathers first.”
Captain Zuarit turned to look at Captain Ganner and stared at her for some time before she glanced up at him.
“Captain, we will get to your people, but right now I need to make sure the ship is safe,” Traci said.
Captain Zuarit said nothing. He turned and resumed his efforts to communicate with his men.
* * *
“Admiral, we have a rudimentary communications net in place, sir. We’re sending a scrambled code to each of the ships in our part of the net using a broad transmission pattern. Anywhere we find that the signal is attenuated or weakened, we’ll shift the net.”
Admiral Charleton was leaning over the plotting tank, which now showed lines criss-crossing its globular representation of the Altair system. His ships, along with a few of the faster units of the now much larger Third Fleet, had divided up the system into eight quadrants. Each quadrant was a slice of the system, defined by a fan of ships radiating out from the star and a picket at the slice’s hyper limit. Each ship transmitted a coded loop to the other ships in its pattern. The concept was to create a “net” that could be swept along as the ships fanned outward. Any interference with the signal between ships could be an indication that something invisible was blocking the signal. That would be their hidden Orion battle cruiser.
It was Charleton that had first figured out how the Orion vessel knew which dreadnought in Fourth Fleet to attack. Since the tight beam transmission between the two fleet commands had originated from their command ships, the Orion vessel had brazenly tacked directly between the two fleets until the signal was interrupted. That must have allowed it to pinpoint the terminal points of the transmission.
“Thank you, Mr. Haskell. I’ll inform the first marshal that our cruiser squadron is ready. Let me know if you detect even the slightest interruption in the net.”
“Yes, sir,” the rating said.
* * *
Blood splattered against Doctor Godsman’s gloved arm. His nurse passed him another sponge, but the ensign he was working on was in bad shape, and he couldn’t spare the seconds to clean his uniform. Bodies had been steadily flowing into the medical bay, which, thankfully, was buried in the bowels of the ship and had not been hit—yet.
“I need a retractor over here! Where is that felgarcarping retractor?” Godsman bellowed, craning his neck to see if anyone was looking for the tool he desperately needed to stop the flow of blood.
“Our only working retractor is being used in the other operating theater, Doctor,” Nurse Hathaway said, adding her own sour invective to match the doctor’s.
Godsman reached across and grabbed the laser suture tool to seal the ruptured organ swimming in a pool of blood in the patient in front of him.
In spite of his earlier outburst, the doctor worked quickly and thoroughly. Hathaway knew that it was the stress of battle that had him on edge. Godsman continued his running diatribe as he worked. It was his way of releasing steam.
“Alright then, clamp it here. We do still have hemostats, right?”
Nurse Janice Hathaway was already ahead of him, locking the instrument down on the artery and using liquisponge to soak up what she could. As they worked quickly to try to stabilize this woman’s life, two corpsmen carried another seriously wounded man into the operating room.
“Doctor, we have another one. Trauma to chest and left leg. We’ve got him on an autobreather, but he needs some attention. Where do you want him?”
The doctor spared a brief glance at the wounded marine corporal. The man’s uniform shirt was soaked with blood from a nasty wound; He looked like he had been impaled. The corpsman was applying pressure to the wound, but the corporal wasn’t going to make it without surgery.
“Will he make it three more minutes?” Godsman asked.
“I can take him over here,” said Marcus Hemmil, one of the junior medical officers. He had worked hard to close the abdominal wound on his own patient, but the young man had been too far gone when he arrived. Hemmil called the time of death and motioned for the young man to be removed from the table as he rushed to inspect the new arrival. He appraised the wounds as the men loaded the new patient onto his table.
One of the nurses came and mopped Godsman’s brow with a cloth and then placed the virtual spatial retractor inside the sterilized force field surrounding the patient. Dr. Godsman was looking through a monitor at the view returned by a microscopic set of cameras crawling through the inside of his patient. He had already increased the magnification of his view of the inside of the woman’s chest cavity, and was now in the process of reconnecting very small and delicate blood vessels. As his hand moved the micro-waldo manipulators, a very tiny robotic instrument translated his larger, more articulated movements into their tiny, precise equivalents.
“Oh, thanks. I don’t need it now. Where were you thirty seconds ago?” he asked.
“Trying to save lives, Doctor,” she said. All of the nurses on his staff knew not to take his remarks personally when they were performing triage.
As they all continued to work on the growing list of wounded crewmen, one of the damage control officers ran in.
“Damage control check. Everyone alright in here?” the man shouted.
“We’re fine,” Godsman shouted. “But we’d be better if you could manage to stop blasting holes in the crew.”
“I’ll take that as an affirmative, Doctor. Be advised, communications are out, and we had to shut down the environmental systems on decks seven and eight forward of the inertial generator rooms due to hard vacuum.”
“Oh great,” Godsman said. “Now I know what happened to the other sickbay. Nurse, put a stat on this and give me more suction…”
The damage control officer confirmed that the medical bay was still operational before he ran to the next section.
* * *
The smoke was so dense he could hardly see the twisted wreckage in front of him. Michael McKenzie worked with the damage control crew to clear the beams and girders. They had to make a path to the central power junction. His tunic carried streaks of soot and oil, and he felt like his lungs would never be free of the cloud of smoke that hung in the air. The search and rescue teams were already combing the wreckage for trapped and missing crewmen. He could see one enlisted crewman being carried over to where a stretcher waited for him. The smoke was too dense to get a good feel for his injuries.
“I need a torch over here,” Petty Officer Enretti called. Two crewmen carried the large cutting tank over to a section of the wall that would allow them to bypass the twisted metal blocking their path. As they began to cut through the bulkhead, Michael moved over to look at the schematic with Benjamin Kenaniah. Both men reviewed the schematic and then looked again at the area where the crewmen were making their cut.
“Enretti, more to the left, son,” Benjamin said. He raised his eyebrows at Michael, who returned a brief smile. These men were so young, practically just boys in uniforms. If they were lucky enough to survive this mission, they would age a few years in a matter of hours.
“Commander, we’re ready to breach, sir,” Enretti said.
“Alright, everyone, we don’t know what conditions we have on the other side of this bulkhead, so brace yourselves. Go ahead, son,” Benjamin said.
As the damage control, or DamCon, team completed their cut, the smoke began to clear around the hole as it was sucked into the slowly growing crease forming on the wall. The men worked quickly as the officers held palm lights on their work. Within a few minutes, the bulkhead section fell toward them with a loud thump.
“We have a mild hull breach on the other side, sir.”
“Alright, Stellson, Foster, you go through the cut with your breathers and see if you can seal the breach,” Michael said.
“Enretti, give me a read on the other side.”
PO Enretti climbed up on some overturned equipment and poked his head through the opening his team had just cut. He shone his emergency light around the compartment and scanned for any other dangers. There were some creaks and groans from the overhead supports in the next compartment, but it seemed stable enough. There was also a loud hiss as the atmosphere continued to leak out of a nasty gash on the far wall.
He poked his head back through the hole and helped crewman Stellson climb through. As the smoke continued to clear, crewman Foster followed him through. Benjamin and Michael passed some webbing seals through the hole that they would use to try to seal the breach.
Enretti had his face seal in place and was clambering through the hole as Michael started passing lights and equipment through to the men on the other side. They were in some kind of storage closet, and the impact had jostled all of the gear into untidy piles on the floor. The men worked hard to seal the webbing onto the wall with the leak. Michael looked again at the schematic on his tablet and frowned as he considered how many compartments must have been opened to space for the damage to reach this closet.
As the men finished sealing the breach, the smoke began once again to swirl about their heads, casting ghastly beams of light around as they moved to check the door. They looked at each other, then at Enretti, as they checked the door toggle.
“It’s okay, mates,” he said. “The door opens into this compartment, so give it a go. We should have crawlway five-alpha on the far side.”
The compartment and bracing on the far side of the closet must have been breached badly to make it all the way to a storage area. Stellson swung the door toggle handle up and gave the door a good pull. Mountains of smoke poured into the compartment from a fire on the far side. They shone their lights at the source of the fire and then moved through the door. Enretti looked through and saw that the entire crawlway was clouded in smoke. There was a nasty fire burning below the crawlway grate.
The crawlway was a circular metal mesh floor high above the engine access bays some twenty meters below. The entire compartment was circular, and had doors that led to various compartments and sections all around its circumference. Several support pylons had torn from the wall and fallen over. The result was a twisted mess of power junction boxes and conduits that had been ripped from the walls. One of the overhead power runs had been severed and was swinging across the metal flooring, sending sparks and smoke out in its wake as it worked back and forth like the menacing arm of a giant squid.
Enretti looked at his crewmates as he stepped out onto the crawlway. Benjamin came forward through the closet, followed by Michael, who was still climbing through the hole.
Benjamin took a power meter from the damage control bag Foster was carrying and checked the flooring outside the compartment. The instrument indicated green, which was good. If one of the power cables was in contact with the metal grates, they could have been electrified up to several million volts. One step onto such a floor would be enough to kill.
Benjamin squeezed by and walked along the metal crawlway, stooped over slightly to avoid the pipes and conduits that ran overhead. He made his way over to the far wall and scanned for the source of the power running to the severed cable. He checked his data tablet once more and then instructed Stellson to kill the power to one of the junction panels on the far wall. The breaker bar was large enough to require two men to throw it. Once they did, the sparking stopped, signaling that they had killed the right one.
Benjamin and Michael made their way over to the far side of the crawlway, where a hatch would open to the corridor leading to main engineering. As they tried to pull open the hatch, they found that it would not budge. That was a sign that the far side might be open to the vacuum of space.
The team made their way over to a stairway leading to the subdeck below. Carefully avoiding the raging fire and the down electrical boxes, they found a display station along one wall that was still functional. Benjamin began to page through the various readouts and displays, using his fingertips to move pages onto and off of the visual display.
“Blast!” Benjamin swore. “There’s no atmosphere between us and main engineering—we’re cut off.”
“Okay, one problem at a time,” Michael replied. “What about power connections?”
Benjamin scrolled through more displays as the other members of the DamCon team spread out and checked the doors they could access without being burned. One of the doors led to some power calibration supplies. Enretti took out some of the heavy power cable and safety equipment and began distributing it to the other two.
“The starboard side power runs are cut here, between frames eight and twelve. It looks like we’ve got a partial short here in frame seventeen on the port side.”
“Can we reroute main power?”
“Yes, but we’ll have to access it here, on the far side of accessway seven-beta.”
“Okay,” Michael said. He tapped the communication key on his tablet. “Team seven—Robert, I need your status report.”
“This is Robert. We have the fire on deck four contained, sir. We are starting to sweep for crewmen.”
“Team five is wrapping up as well. I’ll instruct them to do the crew sweep. I need you to make your way to accessway seven-beta; we’ll meet you there. Bring type AA conduit if can secure some on the way.”
“Aye, sir. We’re on our way.”
* * *
Sorting out the new task force arrangements was taking more time than Scott would have liked. He assigned Commodore Santos the task of putting command crews on some of the ships with shady commanders. General Fernando had quickly landed several companies of shock troopers on some of the key starships, which had helped. Now that most of the ships at least had trustworthy personnel, he was able to begin organizing them into mobile task groups. Pairing up his own commanders with those of Fourth Fleet had created some interesting logistical problems, but overall it merely enlarged many of his existing organizations. He turned his mind once again to his chief concern.
He considered the problem once more. If Nagao had intended to refuse him help, then why send in a cloaked Orion task group? And if he had not authorized the cloaked ships, then what was the true objective of the rogue commander? No, Nagao had to have authorized the incursion. Scott was only pleased the target had been Mihialovich and not himself. He shuddered to think what he would have done if a cloaked task force had suddenly appeared behind his own ship. He would have to consider that when it came time to engage the Orion fleet.
Actually, he now had a golden opportunity. With the only exits out of the system plugged by minefields, the Orion ship would be forced to hide and wait until it was safe to rejoin its comrades in Alpha Centauri. But it couldn’t hide here forever. And it had yielded the clue to a brilliant strategy to counteract its main strength. If it passed any of the coded communication signals between the Terran ships, it would leave a momentary trail.
In fact, it was better than that, Scott thought. Before getting back under the cover of its cloaking device, the battle carrier had taken some damage. If the damage was severe enough, it could be easily captured. That would mean a significant shift in the technological balance toward the Empire. Cloaking device, strike fighter technology—it would be a priceless find.
“Sir, Admiral Charleton reports a possible sensor contact in sector four,” the officer of the watch reported.
“Excellent. Send TF-32 and task groups TG-331 and TG-332 to help seal the edges of the contact area.”
“First Marshal, we are receiving his data now,” Pirelli announced. The communication officer put the data on the main plot as both men walked over to stand before the screen. As they watched, a small waver, like a vapor, appeared to blur the star field on the screen. It only lasted for a second, and did not reappear.
“Captain Veiga, take us into the contact area.”
“Yes, First Marshal. Shall I ask General Fernando to have his troops standing by?”
Scott thought a moment and glanced at Pirelli. “Yes, Captain. Inform the general. Also pass along this order. Cripple or capture only. Under no circumstances do I want that ship destroyed.”
Scott walked over and stood next to Admiral Pirelli. Technically, Pirelli was in command of the dreadnoughts, but Scott also found his advice particularly helpful, so he insisted on having the admiral on his staff.
“Bernard, I’m concerned about the strike fighter attack we saw.”
“Yes, I had thought of that also. The design of the Orion battle carrier suggests that it was specifically built to launch fighters. How convenient that the Valdi just happen to have some.”
“My thoughts exactly. If the Orions have been building carriers all this time, then the Valdi invasion may be part of a much larger plot to take over the Empire. Are we still to believe it was simply coincidence that Nagao and Frano happened to be available to help repel the Valdi invaders? And now, with our combined Third and Fourth Fleets conveniently bottled up here in a single star system, the Orions are spread throughout the Empire, possibly preparing to launch a combined Valdi-Orion attack against us. That would be a very pretty ending to the Orion conflict.”
“Then the emperor was right, sir. The Orions are a threat to the Empire.”
“I am beginning to believe so. We will need to prepare our own strategy from this point forward, to separate the Orions and Valdi forces. Whatever their endgame strategy is, we can’t let them achieve it. This Orion policy of non-interference was merely a ploy to lure our entire fleet into this one system. They may be planning even now to close the jaws of their trap.”
“Yes, sir. But it still doesn’t explain this attack on Mihialovich. Wouldn’t it make sense to have our two fleets annihilate each other?”
“Bernard, I’m so glad I have you as a sounding board.” Scott scratched his head and thought for a moment. “Alright, two possibilities I see. One, the carrier commander is acting on orders to take the duke out of the equation. That gives us a combined fleet under a single command. Perhaps they still believe they can force us into some kind of congress of worlds. They would need us to maintain order throughout the Empire to prevent further destabilization.”
“And two, sir?”
“The other possibility is that this carrier commander is acting against orders, and decided to take a side. That tells me a bit about who he might be. Or she.”
“Do you think she wants some sort of redemption, sir?”
Scott winked at the admiral. “You believe it’s her also, don’t you?”
Pirelli leaned back against the railing around the plotting screen. “They don’t put inferior commanders in charge of a new battle carrier. So whoever we’re dealing with is someone sharp. I, for one, hope we’re right.”
Scott Pearson took a deep breath. “I do too, somehow.”
* * *
“How close are we to the hyperspace limit, Mr. Wallace?”
“We should be coming into range in another three minutes, Captain.”
“Very well. Slow to one-quarter speed. We’ll wait for the fighters to—”
At that moment, Commander Lazarus broke the near silence on the auxiliary control deck. “Contact with an encoded tight-beam. The code is scrambled.”
“Course correction. Come to forty-seven degrees, eighty-seven off the stellar plane. Hard over!” Traci managed as fresh alarms began to wail on the ship, indicating evasive maneuvering. With some of the fires still out of control, it was a miracle that they were not trailing a wisp of smoke that said, “Come get me. Here I am.”
“Here come the beaters,” Commander Lazarus announced. The plot showed several heavy cruisers zeroing in on their position. “They’ll have their own tight beam nets. The rest of the fleet is still holding positions to keep us from evading the master net.”
“Understood. All stop!” Traci stared at the plot while her mind worked furiously with the spatial puzzle. The Terrans were learning how to hunt a cloaked ship much more quickly than she would have guessed. They had started by projecting tight beam coded messages between each ship. But instead of broadcasting to all ships, they had chosen a pattern of ships to cast the net. Then, as her ship carefully wove through the net, they changed the pattern. Ships that were only broadcasting to a few others began signaling different ships. Some took on more, some less. The result was a complete change in the communication net. And she had the bad fortune to be crossing the path of a new beam when they made their seemingly random switch.
“Helm, back us away from the new comm net signals. Then set a new course toward the most densely populated portion of the net—carefully. If they continue their pattern, they will change the net again, and the more dense sections will be less so with the next change.”
This game went on for hours, with Traci and her bridge crew trying to guess when and where the net would change. The changes appeared to be random, which didn’t particularly help, and the outer globe of ships continued to tighten the net, making the spaces between comm beams that much smaller. If she didn’t find something fast, they would soon have her. In the meantime, she continued to play hide and seek with the Terran heavy cruisers tasked as “beaters,” sent in with a very tight broadcast net to locations that she appeared to cross. Occasionally, a small piece of space debris would cross the net and send them in the wrong direction, but that didn’t happen very often.
“Skipper, there looks to be a change in the data,” Commander Lazarus remarked. Captain Ganner walked over to the master plot to see what he saw. He pointed to one of the dreadnoughts on the outside of the network of comm signals.
“Dreadnought four-oh-four keeps drifting in and out of the net. It looks like his spatial stabilizer is having trouble for some reason. He may be having a technical breakdown.”
“Don’t pretend you believe that, Commander,” Traci said, a slight smile on her face. “They’re baiting a trap.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He stretched his aching back before adding, “But they baited it in the worst possible spot. It’s right next to the hyper limit and inside a minefield. Do we take the bait?”
She looked up at him and raised her cup of coffee to take a careful sip. “I think it’s time we gave them what they’ve been looking for.”