Command Authority, page 7
part #5 of Last Hunter Series
She found herself chuckling. That’s just because you like the taste of roast beef. Still, I can see some merit in that suggestion, so let’s go make some sandwiches before we call it a day. Tomorrow will be a lot of fun, and I want to be at the top of my game. One way or the other, we’re going to get the information we need so Commodore Romanoff can take the fight to the enemy.
8
Derek arrived on the bridge feeling refreshed but a little disappointed. He and Amanda had worn some of the edges off of their new relationship and weren’t always spending the nights together now. On days where there was a lot to do, or some type of ticklish operations to perform, they’d made an early evening of it last night so they could be well rested.
Today he’d relocate all the strange warships and wrecks they wanted to examine to New Copenhagen. There’d been discussions about moving everything to Port Royale, but Commodore Romanoff didn’t trust his smuggler associate that much. Derek couldn’t blame him. Mark Connor would be fun to have a drink with, but you’d want to check the family silver once he left for the evening.
The Novarite warship that had survived the fight partially intact had already been dragged into orbit around the liberated world, but it was time to use Hunter’s independent quantum drive to move the wrecked colony ship and the Novarite warship that had been captured after the first invasion.
Commander Danek insisted there was enough leeway to pull both of the ships simultaneously, the same way they’d moved the wrecked colony vessel by itself, but Commodore Romanoff had decided it would be prudent to move them separately, so that’s what they’d do.
Derek had gone over the engineer’s data about how the independent quantum drive could move other vessels with the modifications she’d made. He thought she had the right of it, but it never hurt to play things carefully when the opportunity presented itself. As the commodore liked to say, risks don’t always pay off.
Once they had the ships in the New Copenhagen system, they could use cables the engineering team had designed to start moving them toward the planet. Inserting them into orbit would be a navigational challenge, but he thought they’d manage it without too much difficulty.
“Are you ready, Derek?” the commodore asked from his command chair.
He turned to face his commander. “We’re ready, sir. The colony vessel is positioned right where we want it. Once we arrive, I’ll set up some acceleration, and we can cut it loose and come back for the Novarite ship.”
“Then you are go to proceed.”
Derek double-checked everything one final time and initiated the jump. There was a bit of a twitch, and they were in the New Copenhagen system. The sensors revealed that the colony vessel had made it without issues, and he began slowly accelerating the wreck. It took them an hour to get it up to the speed they wanted, but once it was done, he cut the cables and maneuvered the battleship away from the wreck.
The jump back to Port Royale went without issue, and they were quickly secured to the Novarite wreck with fresh cables. A jump back and a little more acceleration, and it was following the colony vessel toward the planet. Everything had gone without a hitch, and he was happy to cut the cables and maneuver clear.
“We’re done, sir,” he said. “Orders?”
“Take us into New Copenhagen orbit. I want to give Commander Danek another opportunity to go over the newer Novarite wreck and see if there’s anything we can salvage from it. She’s been focusing on Hunter—rightly so—but it’s time to take another look. I want you to give her a hand.”
“Me, sir? I’m not sure what I’d bring to the party.”
“Another set of eyes to look over everything while you’re crawling through the ship,” Romanoff said with a grin. “We tore it up pretty good, so a lot of it is still inaccessible. The engineers have been opening it up, but it’s time to get eyes on every single compartment. You’re trained in vacuum operations, and I think you’ll be a good fit. Besides, you need the experience.”
“I’ll give it everything I have, sir.”
“That’s all a commanding officer can really expect,” the older man said in a dry tone.
Leaving the wrecked vessels to make their way in without an escort, they could make orbit in half a shift. That would mean a long day for Derek, but that’s how the cookie crumbled sometimes.
Once Romanoff released him from his console, he headed to engineering and found that Commander Danek was already prepared to head over to the wreck. She and her people were outfitted in vacuum suits and hefting equipment.
She frowned as he approached. “I hope you’re not looking for me to do something, Derek. We’re about to head over to the Novarite wreck.”
“Commodore Romanoff ordered me to give you a hand, ma’am. Said I needed the seasoning.”
She grinned. “That you do. You can fly us over, and I’ll give you a team to start looking around. I’ve got some experienced damage control people, and one of them will make sure you don’t do anything wrong. They won’t tell you what to do, but you can always ask questions.”
“I live to ask questions, ma’am.”
She laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s get to it, then. I’m not sure what we’re expecting to find, but we’ve already begun salvaging some of the weapons that weren’t destroyed. In the great scheme of things, those phased packet plasma guns won’t make a big difference, but waste not, want not. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find something interesting.”
“Something different from the first Novarite wreck? That was gone over pretty thoroughly.”
His words soured her expression. “Maybe so, but they didn’t leave any computer records that could tell us about them. There was obviously some equipment taken, too, and we have no idea what it was. It’s a shame that our resident hacker isn’t able to pull some data off its computer.”
The group made its way down to one of the small craft bays, and he gestured toward one of the pinnaces. “That’s the one I’ve been using, and it’s ready to go. Get your people settled, and I’ll climb into my vacuum suit.”
He went to the control area and put on his vacuum suit. Once he was done, he returned to the back and let one of the engineers double-check him. Extra eyes were better on something he’d be betting his life on.
As soon as everyone was strapped in, he returned to the control area and took them out of the battleship. He loved flying the big ship, but small craft were much more fun. They’d parked near the crippled Novarite warship, so it was a simple matter to get them over to the airless wreck and latch on to the hull.
By the time he’d finished shutting everything down, the engineers had drained the atmosphere from the rear compartment and had the ramp down. They made their way onto the Novarite ship’s hull as a group.
Amanda had torn it apart in the fighting. One side of the ship had taken several missile hits, but most of the damage came from the lasers that had cut it to ribbons. Deep gouges exposed the interior. They’d made a pass through the readily accessible areas and recovered the bodies while they were doing search and rescue, but there were still areas of the ship that had been impossible to reach in time to save their occupants.
He knew that meant he’d run into corpses, and he couldn’t say he was excited about that. However nasty these aliens were, they’d been alive at one time and had their own dreams of what the future might hold. Dreams he and his comrades had ended when they’d refused to surrender.
That wasn’t to say that they were wrong to have defended themselves. They had humanity to think about. There were a lot of things wrong with the Novarites, and they didn’t sound like the kind of people one wanted to give their home address. In fact, they were the kind of people you locked your doors to keep out, and that’s very much what Commodore Romanoff had done.
Well, almost done. There was the Novarite warship that would pop out in about five days. Once that happened, they could hopefully stop this particular problem from recurring for the rest of his life.
It was sad that humanity had to fight for their place in the stars, but it looked like their free ride was over. Even though the Tardans weren’t necessarily evil, their military had proven that one couldn’t trust appearances. It was better to be prepared and not need to use the weapons and tactics they were developing now.
The team went through a hole in the hull that led to the engineering compartment. It had taken several hits, and most of the equipment was mangled. They might find something useful here, but it didn’t look promising.
Danek made sure her magnetic boots were clamped to one of the bulkheads and started separating the teams and assigning them areas to search. She saved Derek for last and had him work his way through the central corridor as far as he could. The goal would be to cut through any obstacles and make his way to the bow.
Once everyone was on their way, he turned to the half-dozen men and women assigned to him. “Who’s going to make sure I don’t make an idiot out of myself?”
“All of us,” a woman said. “But if you mean who’s going to be acting as your senior noncommissioned officer, that would be me, sir. Chief Petty Officer Sarah Yoo.”
“Well, it’s probably going to take all of you to keep me out of trouble, so don’t feel shy about telling me I’m about to screw something up. At this point, we’re not doing search and rescue, so there’s no need to rush things, and I want to do everything right. Whatever equipment we find might be irreplaceable.”
“We’ll see about that, sir. Personally, I think everything’s going to be junk.”
“If it is, it is. I suppose you and your people will be the ones to tell me if something is worth salvaging. Let’s go.”
The group made their way up the central corridor. As he’d known they would, they ran into an obstruction about halfway to the vessel’s bow. It looked like a missile explosion had shoved a bulkhead across the corridor. Someone had attempted to cut their way through, no doubt looking for survivors, but had been unsuccessful, probably due to time constraints. He was grateful his suit provided protection from the radiation. Even after a month, it was still significant, and anything they salvaged would need to be decontaminated.
At his gesture, Yoo had the engineering team break out their cutting tools and get to work. Derek watched for a minute and then began sticking his head through the open hatches that dotted the corridor. The compartments’ contents were thoroughly trashed, and there weren’t any bodies. It looked as if someone had already been through and taken anything of interest, though a thorough search by people from New Copenhagen might turn up something later.
Getting through the ruined bulkhead took almost half an hour, but once they were on the other side, progress going forward was quicker. There were still obstacles, but nothing that completely blocked the corridor.
They took their time, opening all the hatches and exploring a little. The contents of many compartments didn’t make sense without context, but they took images so someone could figure it all out later. When they came across a body—or worse, parts of the body—they bagged everything up and moved it to the central corridor.
He briefly wondered what religious ceremonies the Novarites might prefer, if any. He hadn’t asked if the Tardans had religions. Maybe that was only something humans did. He briefly chuckled to himself as he thought of missionaries trying to convert the Novarites. They’d probably get eaten.
About three hours into the search, they found the bridge. Surprisingly, it was intact. It looked like it had lost pressure during the fighting and killed the Novarites at their stations. A couple of warriors must’ve been near the main hatch when the fighting started because two corpses were armed with Gauss rifles. He made sure that those got set aside for Colonel Turner. He and his people were looking for more of the weapons so they could try to reverse engineer them.
The central command chair was on a dais in the middle of the compartment with all the consoles facing it. That meant the woman strapped into the seat would be the ship’s commander.
Derek floated over and anchored his boots on the deck as he examined her. She was enormous—more than three meters tall—and heavily built. Her fur was a mixture of dark brown and gray. Her uniform looked like everyone else’s, but there was one difference. She had a holstered pistol.
Moving slowly and carefully, he removed the pistol from its holster. It was a Gauss weapon. Thus far, they’d only found rifles. He hadn’t thought they could build something with that technology so small, but he’d been wrong.
Derek put the weapon back in its holster and figured out how to undo the belt holding it. Once it was free, he wrapped the belt around the weapon and secured it in a bag he carried. It then took them twenty minutes to corral the bodies, bag them, and move them to the central corridor.
He sent the engineering team looking forward while he and Yoo searched the captain’s office and quarters adjacent to the bridge. Much like the previous set, there were a lot of pillows and what looked like delicate fabrics in use. That had to be something of a status symbol for the Novarites.
Also, like the other office and quarters, a safe was built into the wall. Unlike the first, this one was still sealed, whatever treasures it contained intact.
He turned to Yoo. “How can we get into this without damaging its contents?”
“The same way we get into everything. We cut our way in. I’ve seen pictures of what the other safe looked like, and if this is anything like it, there will be hinges on the left-hand side. If we focus our attention there, we should be able to burn them out and drag the door off. It may still have air inside, and that might help. If there’s anything sensitive inside, we’ll do our best to make sure it’s not damaged.”
“I’m not a safecracker, so I’ll leave that to you,” he said. “I’d imagine Commander Danek will call us back before much longer, so let’s focus on searching the rest of the bow and digging into the safe. If we can get its contents back to Hunter, it might have critical information the commodore needs.”
“Yes, sir.”
She called a few of her people back, and they set up one of the cutting torches. Once they began working on the safe, he wandered out to accompany the people going forward.
There was a lot of equipment up here, including the sensors. He was interested in those, so he made sure everything was marked for later retrieval. Adjacent to that equipment was something he didn’t recognize at first. There were three large spheres attached to a triangular array pointing toward the front of the ship.
“Does this look familiar to any of you?” he asked as he floated around it.
None of the engineers was familiar with it, so he took some pictures and opened a channel to Commander Danek.
“I figure no news is good news,” Danek said, “so what went wrong?”
“Surprisingly, nothing. We found a piece of equipment I don’t recognize. I wanted to send you one of the images to see if you can tell me what it might be, Commander.”
He sent an image, and she spoke a few seconds later. “It looks like the hyperspace detector we recovered. That only had a single sphere, but I think they’re related. Make sure and mark the compartment so another team can extract it. If it’s a more advanced version of the hyperspace detector, it might be able to give us more information than we’d otherwise get. Or, it could be something completely different, and we’ll never figure it out.”
Derek hoped that wouldn’t be the case, but that was an engineering issue, so he’d leave that to the professionals. “We should be just about done searching the bow. Once everything is finished, we’ll head back.”
“Sounds good. See you then.”
With that done, he instructed the engineers to mark everything so it could be removed later. Then he headed back for the captain’s quarters and office. Chief Petty Officer Yoo was almost done cutting the safe open.
Rather than interrupting her, he stood by the hatch and waited, watching the process with interest. It looked like she’d already burned her way through the first set of hinges and was well on her way to wrapping up the second.
Two minutes later, a puff of gas came from around the edge of the safe, and the hinges came out a little. With the door now apparently released on that side, the engineers inserted a crowbar and quickly levered it out of the way. The problem was that things in motion in microgravity tended to stay in motion. The decapitated door tumbled through the vacuum directly toward him.
Thankfully, it wasn’t difficult to get out of the way, though it crashed into the hatch and rebounded. The engineers shepherded it into a portion of the compartment where it wouldn’t pose a danger.
Only once that was done did he allow himself to focus on the contents of the safe. There was quite a haul inside, including some data chips and another Gauss pistol. Those went into the bag with the first pistol.
There were plenty of other things in the safe, so he got another bag and emptied it. They’d have plenty of time to review the contents and see if anything was worth exploring in more detail later.
After he finished, he made a circuit of the quarters to be sure they left nothing important behind. Attached to the headboard of a bed that would embarrass anyone with its size and color scheme, he found what was probably a knife for the Novarites. To his hand, it was a short sword and looked razor-sharp. It joined everything else in the treasure bags.
“Is that it, sir?” Yoo asked.
“I think so. Let’s head back to engineering. If Commander Danek is done, we can head back over to Hunter and see about getting something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
