Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 30
I was currently fitted with a solid holographic prosthetic that allowed me to walk without a crutch. Technically, I could walk anywhere there were phased photonic holo-emitters. The problem was there were plenty of gaps in phased photonic coverage. I could have been fitted with a physical prosthetic, but that would have put excessive stress on the remaining tissues and ultimately slowed down my recovery.
“We have just shy of twenty kilometers worth of ship to work with. Surely there is a breach point somewhere we can use?” Uncle Max grumbled.
We had spent the better part of the last hour discussing our plan to recover Survey One’s massive drive module. We had the what to do once we got into the ship nailed down. It was the how to gain access to the ship that was our stumbling block.
Both Cochrans shook their heads in response to Max’s suggestion. “Most of the length is exotic-matter-containment generators, coils, the EM containment modules themselves, and the reactors that drive the Skip drive. We could theoretically break into any one of those areas, but it wouldn’t do us a bit of good.”
“Why the hell not?” Max continued, unwilling to concede the point.
I continued to pace on my photonic leg. It felt good to stretch the muscles in the leg that was still part of a meat sack.
“None of those areas are designed to access any of the others. They’re all physically separate modules, designed to be replaced as discrete units,” I explained.
“There are six central turbolift shafts the run the length of the ship,” Major Boseman interjected. “Could we…”
“Nope! Not happening, sonny,” Bernice piped in before the major could finish. “As you said, those shafts run the length of the ship. They represent the single greatest structural compromise to be found on the ship. As such, the central core is protected by sixty meters of structural nano-foam. Any attempt to cut through would trigger an immediate repair effort that would seal the breach.”
“Including sealing in any Marines unlucky enough to be caught in the breach,” my first officer added.
“Including sealing in any Marines unlucky enough to be caught in the breach,” Bernice echoed by way of agreement.
“So that leaves the shuttle bays, escape pod mount points, and a few dozen airlocks,” I mused.
Max pushed his chair back and joined me in my pacing. “All of which will be guarded by TMI Marines and/or a plethora of bots under the control of a maniacal AI,” he said while lightly tapping his toe against a chair leg. It was a habit he had while lost in thought.
He looked over to me. “If we can’t breach, can we get them to invite us in?”
* * *
Two weeks and one freshly regrown leg later, the habitation dome had positioned itself one point three light-seconds from the drive module. This was roughly the same distance as the moon from the earth. Our new position served several purposes.
First, there was a real possibility the mercs would attempt to pay us a visit. The drive module was damaged and none of us were sure they were going to be able to repair it on their own. Since it was a completely self-contained Skip-Space-capable spaceship that didn’t need the habitation dome to operate, they would be highly motivated to get it working. Especially given that we had kind of wrecked the ship that had brought them.
Of course, there was the whole unresolved issue of the Jabesh artifacts that had started our entire adversarial relationship.
That meant the habitation dome might well contain people and resources they would need. It was a good bet they would be paying us a visit. One point three light-seconds gave us plenty of time to see them coming. In point of fact, our plan to recapture the drive module depended on this.
The second reason we had moved the habitation dome to its current location involved our immediate neighbors. The dome was now within a few hundred kilometers of several iron-ore-rich asteroids. While the iron itself would be valuable to the mercs in their repair efforts, the vanadium and titanium often co-located with the ferrous ore was the real find. Both were critical materials used in Skip drives.
Our plan was to use the aforementioned asteroids as Trojan horses. The mining equipment stored for use by the colony could easily be adapted to hollow out big rocks floating in space. With a little creativity, several dozen fully armored Marines could fit in one. Unfortunately, someone forgot to pass the memo on to Admiral Hollingsworth. We weren’t two days into hollowing out our Trojan horse when the drive module winked out of existence. It had made the jump to Skip Space.
I was in the Habitat dome’s command center which served as its bridge. Normally it operated with a partial staff consisting of engineering and environmental types. Now however, the navigation and sensor stations were occupied as well.
“There she goes!” Matt said from the sensor station.
“She” in this case was the drive section of Survey One. Apparently, Hollingsworth’s people had been able to fix the Skip drive on their own. The first bit of bad news was the drive section of Survey One was officially gone. The second bit of bad news was I was absolutely sure it would be back… this time with the resources to overwhelm us.
Bernice snorted in disgust. “Well, ain’t that a kick in the pants. Somebody over there has more than a grade school education.”
I hit the ship-to-ship comms. There was no point in continuing to prep the Trojan. It was time to explore other options.
“Major Boseman.”
“Boseman here. We’ve got our hands full setting charges, Captain. We’re still probably a day away from being ready if you’re calling for an update.”
“Stand down your demolition teams, Major. The fox has flown the coop.”
There was a brief pause. “Understood. Give me a couple of hours to safe the charges we’ve set, and we’ll return home. Unless you need us sooner?” he added.
“Negative that, Major. Go ahead and recover your ordnance. Heaven only knows when we’ll be able to reprovision in the future.”
* * *
Three hours later we were in the mayor’s executive conference room. The mayor herself, a woman named Madalyn Gregory, graciously surrendered her entire office suite, including the conference room. The surrender was temporary while new facilities were built for what would serve as our CIC.
Teddy Cochran leaned forward. The man seemed a decade older than the last time I had seen him. I felt bad for the nonagenarian. He and his wife should have been sipping mai-tais on a white sandy beach somewhere… enjoying a well-deserved retirement and spoiling their great grandchildren. Instead, they were here in the middle of God-knows-where.
Teddy’s wife was our chief engineer. She was in charge of our day-to-day operation. He, on the other hand, was primarily a design engineer. He was the brilliant mind behind many of the systems that had been developed and deployed on the Survey-class ships. Between the two of them they had managed to keep the great ship operational despite the grueling abuse the ship had suffered over the last several months—abuse it had never been designed to handle. The pressure was taking its toll.
“The best we can manage is 0.5C. For the sub-light engines to get a mass as big as Survey One’s habitation dome up to that speed will take the better part of a year. In other words, the nearest star system is probably more than a hundred years away.”
“Can’t we beef up the engines and cut some time off that?”
The engineer looked across the table. The speaker had been DeAndre Papus.
“The problem is not the power of our engines. The problem is the habitation dome. It was not designed for those types of acceleration and it was not designed to handle speed beyond about 1/3 C. Going beyond that will tax the navigational deflectors to their limit. If we hit anything larger than a pea, we could lose the entire dome to a RUD.”
“RUD?”
“Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly,” the engineer explained. “The bottom line is the dome’s sub-lights were designed to work within a star system. They were built to handle the habitat after it had separated from the drive module and to assist it in establishing orbital insertion around a planet. To go where we want to go, we need a Skip drive, and the dome doesn’t have one.”
I sipped my coffee. It had gotten cold, but I didn’t care. “Our problem is greater than the power of our sub-light engines.”
“They’re coming back, aren’t they,” Jack Carter guessed. “That’s why you included me in this meeting.”
“Correct on both counts,” I agreed. The “they” was Admiral Hollingsworth and the TMI goons he was leading.
I put my cup down. I was rethinking my stance on the coffee being cold.
“Unless we can jump out of here, we are going to be facing a well-planned invasion force in the not-too-distant future. Doctor Carter has information they want. I can’t imagine them giving up now that they have the upper hand.”
“What are the chances we could fabricate a Skip drive?” Matt Dekker asked. My first officer had been uncharacteristically quiet up to this point.
I turned to face my two engineers, Bernice and Teddy.
“Somewhere between nil and nonexistent,” Bernice answered.
“Oh, we could build a Skip drive. No problem,” Teddy offered. “The problem is the exotic matter that it requires to operate. If we had a big enough sample, we could build a regenerator to produce more than enough to meet our needs. The problem is Dome City doesn’t store any and the small amount we could harvest from our jump-capable shuttles wouldn’t begin to be enough to run a regenerator. The drive module was the only section of Survey One designed to handle the stuff in any quantity. If we want some now, we’ll need to harvest it from a solar body.”
“And the last I checked,” Bernice continued, “we’re about a hundred years from the nearest star.”
“And besides,” Bernice continued. “Do you have any idea the amount of power it would take to pull a mass the size of the habitation dome into Skip Space? There’s a reason the drive module is as big as it is… or was… or no, I guess is. It’s still around. Just not around us.”
I smiled at the two engineers. “What if I could get you a working Skip drive? One quite a bit larger than what you’d find on a shuttle?”
Teddy and Bernice turned to look at one another for a second. No words passed their lips, but six decades had apparently given them a near-psychic ability to read each other’s thoughts.
“You’re talking about stealing the one sitting on the Trans-Mashuta wreak out there,” Bernice said finally after turning back to me. She waved her hand towards the nearest wall. “It would be a start, but we would still need a power source to operate it.”
“Unless I’m mistaken, we already have one,” I said while looking directly at Jack Carter. His only response was to smile.
6
TMS CONFIDENT
William Hollingsworth strolled onto the bridge of the newly rechristened TMS Vengeance. He sat in his new command chair. It was new because he’d had the previous chair removed and flushed out an airlock. In his words “that infuriating woman” had sat in that chair and the admiral was damned if he was going to use a secondhand chair whose previous owner had been “that woman.”
The door to the bridge swished open and his chief engineer, a man barely competent enough to hold a fork from the right end, much less repair a starship, entered. The admiral had already decided to send the man out the same airlock as the command chair if he wasn’t bringing good news. Fortunately for the engineer, he was. The ship was now jump-capable.
Five minutes later the Vengeance entered Skip Space. Soon enough, Hollingsworth thought to himself, they would be back to make manifest the ship’s new name.
* * *
The USS Crichton was as big a shuttle as I had ever seen. To call it a shuttle seemed grossly inaccurate. It was more of a runabout than a shuttle. In point of fact, it was as large as my old ship the Fitzgerald.
There were smaller shuttles that could have carried the engineering and security team over to the abandoned remnant of the TMS Confident, but the Crichton was uniquely suited for the task at hand. She was going to be the tugboat that guided the rear end of the Confident over to the habitation dome.
We were going to weld the back end of the Confident to the bottom of the habitation dome and adapt the small, but perfectly functional, Skip drive to work with Survey One’s massive dome. We wouldn’t be able to run enough power through the drive to carry us far, but several light-years per jump was a far sight better than what we were going to accomplish on impulse engines alone. More importantly, it would reduce the likelihood of being discovered by Admiral Hollingsworth and his TMI mercs.
I shifted in my seat. We were only a few minutes from docking with the wreck. It felt strange to be on the bridge of a starship and not be the ship’s master. That honor belonged to a captain serving in the Dome City guard named Pike. The Crichton was part of the city’s home guard and would be part of the settler’s exploration and defense force once a new colony was established on some distant shore.
“ETA, Chris?”
“We’re about five minutes out, Commodore. I’m just matching the Confidents’ spin.”
“Very good. I’m going to head down to the main airlock then. Keep the engines warm for us.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll leave the lights on and the coffee pot full.”
I nodded as I headed to the turbo lift. “Good man.”
For those of you that might be confused by Chris Pike calling me “Commodore,” it wasn’t because I had been officially promoted. It was because by long-standing Earth force tradition there could only be one captain of a ship.
Let me try to explain the convoluted thinking here. Captain is both a rank and a title. The title “captain” refers to the master of the ship. Their word was the law. The rank “captain,” on the other hand, simply refers to how much shoulder candy they are authorized to wear.
Just to confuse things more, depending on the branch of the service, captain can refer to both O-3 and O-6 ranks. The person in command of a ship is always called by the title “captain” and any other persons with the rank of captain (O-3 or O-6) are given an honorary promotion to major or commodore while they are on the bridge or in the presence of the ship’s captain or anyplace else where there might be confusion between rank and title.
A few minutes later I was standing next to Major Boseman and my XO, Colonel Dekker. Both of the Cochrans were standing behind us. They were wearing BDUs kitted out with salvage tools rather than weapons. The rest of us were dressed in battle armor. All of us had our visors set to fully transparent… a decision some of us would come to regret shortly.
We were waiting by the airlock door for the go-ahead from the bridge. I felt a small tremble in the deck plating as the two ships established a hard dock. A moment later we got the word that the docking was secure and we could disembark.
We sandwiched the engineers between us with my XO and I bringing up the rear and the major taking the lead. The adjacent cargo bay held a squad of SAR types that would be joining us. The search and rescue team would be accessing the wreck through a less glamourous point of entry… namely a frigate-sized hole made when the front and back halves of the ship literally parted company.
As we entered the ship, I was struck by the sheer volume of debris floating through the passages. The gravity plating was down. I had been on ships that had lost power before… hell, I had skippered them… but rarely had I seen a ship in this state, and then only from the vantage point of a starfighter.
Fortunately, Colonel Dekker and Major Boseman had already made sure most of the bodies had been secured in the cargo hold. That said, the occasional disembodied finger or foot still floated about. I did my best not to think about them. Teddy was not as successful. As a point of general information, try not to become ill while in a sealed helmet in a vacuum environment. It only serves to make a bad situation worse. One of the major’s people guided the suffering engineer back to the shuttle so he could get cleaned up and swap out his now thoroughly soiled EVA suit.
Unlike her husband, Bernice had no problem with the carnage… or I suppose more to the point, if she did, she was able to control her reaction to it.
We made our way towards main Engineering. It was a bit spooky. Like the gravity plating, the lighting was out across the ship. Only a handful of indictors still glowed weakly. Those tended to be powered by localized emergency power sources that were pretty much exhausted. The lights on our helmets provided the only real illumination.
Frozen fluids, the exact nature and origins of which I refused to speculate on, as well as gently tumbling pieces of wire, metal, plastic, and assorted small devices blocked the view ahead. It was like looking through a macabre fog of flotsam. I found myself pushing the larger pieces out of my way as we walked. It reminded me of my brief exposure to jungle warfare on Rua Pentaine during my academy days… only rather than clearing our way through dense tropical foliage with a machete, we were making our way through floating debris.
Our boots made a clicking sound as we shuffled forward. The magnetic soles kept us anchored to the floor and provided a limited sense of up versus down.
After what seemed like hours, but which in reality was probably only a few minutes, we made it to main Engineering.
Bernice began to wander around the large room, inspecting equipment as she moved. She stopped occasionally to take notes which she dictated into a small portable data pad. Finally, she motioned one of the Marines forward. The woman was lugging a portable fusion power unit in a pack strapped to her back.
Bernice worked on a power coupling for a few minutes. My guess was she was isolating a few select systems from the ship’s main power grid. If she didn’t, the portable power unit would have been overwhelmed trying to provide juice to the remaining sections of the ship.
