Twilight Serenade, page 17
part #6 of Earth Song Series
“There is damage to the computer that needs to be dealt with,” Lilith added. “The damage that was done can be fixed later, once the ship is manned. Core computer parts are something we have in abundance from previous salvage.”
“Tomorrow,” Minu said, “we board the Kiile.”
* * *
First thing in the morning, Minu and Aaron, wearing spacesuits, were aboard one of the Kaatan’s shuttles. Two dozen crystalline bots crowded the rear. A Kiile was only half the size of an Ibeen but had many more interior spaces to be searched. Four shuttles from the Ibeen flew in formation behind theirs. Each carried a crew of two experienced and two inexperienced Beezer. They didn’t have enough to only send in experienced personnel. This had to be an all-in-one salvage operation and learning experience.
Minu watched the video feed as they approached the Kiile with interest. It was both familiar and foreign in design. It resembled an Ibeen from one direction, a Fiisk from another, and neither from a third. As they closed, it loomed massively, like all the People’s big ships.
“They used the Eseel to tow the carriers away from the battle site,” Lilith explained. “The People’s ships were not equipped with self-destruct.”
“Do we know why the two were disabled?” Minu asked.
“From preliminary scans, it appears both took critical hits to their drives. Due to the mission of the Kiile, their maneuverability was considerably less than other ships such as the Fiisk.”
“Though more than the Ibeen?” Bakook asked.
“Only in speed, not general maneuverability. If they were both fully loaded, the Ibeen was slightly more maneuverable. The Kiile counted on support ships for defense and avoided direct combat. Its shields were better than the Ibeen’s, but it had only point defenses.”
As they got closer, the damage became visible. The five cylindrical spines down the center of the ship were shattered where they emerged from the aft section, as was one of the four huge balls clustered there, its structure exploded and exposed like the skeleton of a long-rotted corpse.
Scorch marks marred the mirrored hull in hundreds of places, and that became more noticeable the closer they got. Short of ships from the previous ghost fleet which were completely destroyed, this was the most damage Minu had ever seen. Only from the midpoint forward did the ship appear nearly undamaged.
“The damage is all aft,” Minu noted.
“They were fleeing when attacked,” Lilith told her. The Fiisk’s CI had given her as much detail on the battle as it possessed. “The other ships tried to protect them but were unable to.”
“What about the fighters on board?” Minu asked.
“I don’t have that information.”
The entire center of the ship, a vast open structure with equipment, bays, and smaller cargo balls, contained the carrier’s flight decks, where it housed, serviced, and launched the fighters. Those areas were almost untouched. Minu wondered why the fighters hadn’t defended the ship.
“Lilith, are the traps disarmed?”
“Confirmed, Mom.”
“Good. Aaron, take us into the main flight deck.”
The Kiile had four flight decks that ran all the way through both sides of the ship, allowing launch and recovery from either direction. In the center were blast doors for accessing the hangars.
Aaron flew the shuttle in at a few meters per second, giving his passengers a good view of the interior of the deck. Like the ship itself, the space was titanic. Compared to the cavernous bays of the Fiisk, these flight decks were many times larger.
“These are big enough for a Kaatan, aren’t they?” Minu asked her daughter.
“Yes,” Lilith agreed. “The Kiile’s facilities could handle larger ships; they were used as fleet service craft.”
Minu and Aaron exchanged looks. He grinned. This operation was looking better and better.
They passed the last of the Eseel which floated less than a hundred meters from the hulk. The dozen dualloy cables that attached it to the Kiile seemed far too insubstantial to allow it to tow the carrier, which was a million times its weight.
“The cables helped create a gravitic continuity between the towing craft and the carrier,” Lilith explained. When it came to gravitic theory, Minu’s knowledge fell far short. Only Aaron’s understanding came close to Lilith’s. Ever since he’d rejoined them, he’d spent every available moment working with gravitics. She knew he had a plan, and she had a glimmer of what it was.
“How many Eseel?” Minu asked her daughter.
“Twelve rigged to tow, thirty-two on board each Kiile. All seem intact and have responded to basic network hails, though they are critically low on power and unable to come out of safe mode.”
“Even if there are no fighters, that is quite a complement of gunboats,” Aaron pointed out. “Eighty Eseel in addition to the Fiisk we’ve salvaged? It’s a fleet.”
“A far underpowered fleet,” Lilith said, “and it lacks depth. The Eseel have some good short-range energy weapons but lack shield capacity to absorb a single shipkiller. And they don’t have the maneuverability of the People’s fighters.”
As the shuttle passed into the flight deck, the light from the surrounding stars that had been outside immediately disappeared. Since there was no atmosphere, there was no reflected light. Aaron activated the shuttle’s recessed lighting which threw everything into stark relief. He slid his finger on a control point, and a powerful beam illuminated, highlighting points of interest as he gestured toward them.
Minu examined one of the huge hangar blast doors as they approached the center of the flight deck. “What kind of fighters can we expect?”
“I can’t say. I have details on more than a dozen kinds in the database. However, there is no data on how many were constructed, deployed, or built. The details of this battle fleet are unclear. It could be anything.”
Minu nodded as they came to a stop, their small flotilla of shuttles floating in the middle of the massive flight deck. The massive blast doors that protected the hangars of this deck were forward and aft. “Any idea how we get in?” Aaron asked.
“Knocking is out of the question,” Bakook said.
If Minu hadn’t known better, she’d have thought the Beezer made a joke.
“The internal controls were probably handled via radio,” Lilith told them. “The signal would be tight beam, aimed at the door control area to the lower left, for security. I sent you a series of code groups to try.”
Aaron grunted as the radio chimed that it had received a data transmission. Minu configured the radio transmitter from the copilot seat, bringing up a display that allowed her to aim the transmitter.
Once it was ready, she sent the codes her daughter gave them. On the third group, a blue line raced around the perimeter of the blast door three times, and it began to slide open.
“We’re in,” Minu told Lilith over the transmitter, “code group three.”
“Very well, Mom. Proceed with caution. The People could have used additional security for such a prize.”
Behind them, in the cargo area, Minu could hear the Beezer finalizing their spacesuit checks. They barely had enough for all the recruits. Lilith’s ship had fabricated a dozen, and, back on Serengeti, they had contracted with a company to make them as quickly as they could. But there were few spare parts and no spare suits. That was item one thousand on Minu’s ‘Stuff that Needs a Solution’ list.
The massive blast door, easily ten meters tall and thirty meters wide, finished its slow slide to the right. As soon as the door stopped, Aaron nudged the reaction controls, and the shuttle side-slipped into the bay. Abandoning the floodlight, he stabbed a control and additional lighting came on along the shuttle’s sides. The other pilots followed suit, and the hangar was awash in brilliant light.
When she learned there were carriers to salvage, Minu had accessed her species’ database, looking for information on such craft from old Earth. She found detailed schematics of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, including data on how they handled, stored and repaired fighters.
Once inside the hangar bay, she could see she had completely wasted her time. And worse, she should have known better. What would a space carrier have in common with a terrestrial wet-navy carrier, other than the transport of fighters and such? Even the flight decks weren’t decks in the traditional sense. They were more like tubes, staging areas where craft would wait, held in place by gravitic tractors, until they were flung out into space.
The interior was circular, like many such spaces on the People’s ships. The walls were a honeycomb of spaces for storing craft. In the center were three pylons projecting outward from the walls, one below and one above to each side. The heads up display on the shuttle showed deck plans from the Kaatan. On the diagram, the pylons were labeled, ‘handling boom.’ They were used to move ships from storage into the central bay to be launched.
The bay had a half-dozen exits. Four, large enough to accommodate the shuttle, were roughly arranged at the cardinal points, with north being the one they’d just come through. Two were larger and went up and down from their orientation. They were for transferring ships between the hangars. The space also sported a dozen small personnel- and equipment-sized locks that led elsewhere in the ship.
Aaron maneuvered them near where the three handling booms almost met. The space was easily 100 meters across. The Eseel’s 30-meter length fit easily, and Aaron maneuvered to allow room for the other four shuttles. Once they were all in, Minu contacted them.
“We’re going to run operations from here. Beezer teams, disembark and meet outside by my shuttle where I will assign you bots.”
“You really think we should all go?” Aaron asked as he climbed out of the pilot’s seat and followed her aft.
“Lilith can handle the shuttles if anything happens,” Minu said as she unpacked her alarmingly thin helmet from the pouch on her suit’s belt and slipped it over her head. She pressed a button on a box not much bigger than a sandwich on her belt, and she felt the suit stiffen and a blast of cool air as the helmet self-sealed and inflated to a hard bubble. Its interior shimmered as the built-in polarization and the heads up display activated. A line of blue lights indicated the suit was functioning properly and a row of data indicated the suit would sustain her for the next twelve hours. Gloves from the same pouch completed the suit’s integrity.
Minu gestured, and four crystalline bots moved over and wrapped around each of her limbs. She glanced at Aaron who was looking skeptically at the other bots. “You’ve seen me do this a dozen times.”
“It’s not the same thing,” he complained.
“You have two alien-manufactured cybernetic legs, and I have a cybernetic arm and cybernetic musculature in both legs, yet you’re squeamish about a couple of bots shepherding you into space?”
“The difference is that I can take my legs or your arm apart and understand how they work. Hell, I could reproduce all that tech. Or most of it,” he added half under his breath. “Those things are piles of minerals that can absorb enough power to cut through a half meter of dualloy, can exert enough force to travel a half million kilometers, and can communicate across the galaxy instantaneously. So yeah, they weird me out a bit.”
Minu looked at the bot wrapped around her right arm. She moved the limb around. The bot mimicked her movements so perfectly, she couldn’t feel it at all. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”
She moved her hand closer to her face, turning it to examine the three fingers through the alien-made suit glove. Maybe alien technology had been part of her body for so long, she didn’t have it in herself to wonder how it worked. The optronics processors in her gray-skinned arm had little Azure chips in them.
Every tablet on Bellatrix, every vehicle computer, every miniature communicator, every kid’s speaking toy, every farmer’s crop monitor, every tradesman’s point-of-sale terminal, every housewife’s television, every school student’s classroom computer had an Azure-based optronics processor. Was there a word beyond ubiquitous? Universal.
“Do we have a choice other than to trust them?” Minu asked her husband. “Mindy will be one-month old tomorrow. She’s being watched by a bot like these.”
The bot extruded its limbs, wrapping around her wrist and elbow, and stretched its body along the back of her right arm, running one limb under her armpit and across her back to connect with the one on her left arm. It vaguely reminded her of the exoskeletons used in some freight operations. She didn’t want to admit it bothered her a little bit, too.
Aaron spent almost a minute securing his suit, twice as long as it should have taken. He glanced at Minu out of the corner of his eye, and she gave him ‘that look.’ He sighed and held his hand out toward the collection of bots in the rear of the passenger cabin. Four of them separated from the others and flew to Aaron.
“This is so strange,” he said as he flexed and moved, first slowly then quickly, looking for resistance. “It’s almost as if they’re not there.”
“It’s pretty amazing when you remember they appear to be living crystal,” Minu pointed out.
“I didn’t need to hear that.”
A minute later, the cargo bay decompressed, and Minu and Aaron flew out to meet the 16 Beezer. Even though the eight rookies had spent some time in space, the excitement in their body language still gave them away. They turned this way and that, looking at everything, flying about on their suits’ thrusters. Their leaders had to caution them not to overuse the thruster packs. Unlike the Azure bots that allowed Minu and Aaron to move, the thrusters were only good for so long.
“Let’s split into two teams,” she told Bakook. “I’ll head one group, Aaron the other. Divide your experienced and inexperienced people so they are equally spread.”
“I have done this in advance,” Bakook said. He issued an order, and the Beezer split into two groups. Aaron took charge of one group, and the other followed Minu.
“Keep in regular contact,” Minu told them. “We can’t be 100% certain we’ve found and deactivated all the traps.”
* * *
Minu’s suit had less than two hours of life support left when she flew into the shuttle with Aaron right behind her, and the door slid closed, pressurizing the crew compartment.
“I’m never going to get used to pissing in my pants in space,” Aaron grumbled as he pulled the hood off with a grateful sigh.
“The suit absorbs it.”
“I can still smell the piss,” he insisted.
Minu didn’t remind him there were far worse things to smell in your suit.
“I wouldn’t mind if the entire operation wasn’t a bust.”
“It wasn’t a complete loss,” Minu said. She didn’t agree with him; not completely.
“It doesn’t make sense that there were no fighters on the carrier,” Aaron complained.
“Lilith thinks the carriers burned through their complement in the battles leading up to their disabling.” Minu stowed her suit and clambered into the copilot seat. “Lilith, how’s your sister?”
“She is extremely unhappy,” Lilith replied. Minu could hear screaming over the transmitter. She hurt in ways she didn’t know she could.
“Bakook, is your team okay?”
“We are boarding our shuttles,” came the grumbling reply.
“I need to go. We’ll meet at 08:00 ship time tomorrow, on the Kaatan, to discuss what we found.” She turned to her husband. “Get me back to our baby.”
A short time later, Minu walked through the door to the cabin she shared with Aaron, into a wall of anguish and anger put out by one Mindy Groves. Lilith floated there, holding Mindy in her arms, rocking her back and forth and making shushing sounds. Her eyes were wide in consternation. As Minu walked in, Lilith looked up with an expression of mixed relief and horror. Minu didn’t know if she wanted to cry or laugh.
“I am…glad you are here,” Lilith said over the caterwauling. She unceremoniously held out Mindy for Minu to take.
Minu accepted her daughter, unlatching her uniform front and sitting on her bed. At the sight of Minu’s breast Mindy coughed, gasped a few times and latched on. It took her almost an entire minute to wind down and seriously begin nursing.
“I…it was overwhelming,” Lilith admitted.
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I thought I could handle it.”
Minu looked at her older daughter. Lilith’s hair was a little wild looking, and she had a dazed look on her face. “Maybe you should get some rest.”
“That would be a good idea,” Lilith admitted, and she swam out of the compartment.
“I think motherhood might be a long way off for our oldest,” Aaron said, “but she needs to develop an interest in boys, first, anyway.”
“Not with this ship,” Minu reminded him. The look of horror on his face told her he hadn’t considered that possibility.
“Maybe she should babysit more often.”
Minu chuckled and watched as the still red-faced infant fed voraciously.
“I think we need to figure out some way of feeding her if I’m not here,” Minu said, a bit later. She was changing the baby with Aaron’s help. Lilith, in her ignorance, hadn’t realized that part of Mindy’s problem was a sizeable load in her diaper. “I don’t suppose the babysitter could change diapers…”
“I don’t trust them,” Aaron said. “I don’t like letting the crystal enigmas handle our baby.”
Minu sighed and nodded.
“With what we’ve learned about them, I’m getting more nervous, not less.”
“Agreed.” Minu said. “Let’s get some rest, and we can formulate a strategy in the morning.”
With Mindy in her crib and Aaron snuggled up behind her, an arm around her midsection, Minu fought sleep for more than an hour. Far too many unanswered questions swirled through the back of her mind and answers that were even more disquieting around the front.
