ADVENTURER: T-MINUS 22 HOURS
Ty sat alone at a table in the Adventurer's wardroom pondering his fate and wondering how to tell his wife that he’d gone through with quitting.
The wardroom was empty. The rest of the ship's crew was standing at alert station. I should be with them, he thought. The Skipper, Commander Roper offered to bend rules a bit and let Ty watch the imminent engagement from the Adventurer's command center. But Ty had declined, not wanting the Skipper to get in any trouble on his account.
Roper readily agreed to Ty's counter request, to allow Ty's program, Junior to tap into the Adventurer's data-net. He grabbed his local desk and pulled it to him so he could use it. He tapped the power key, the screen came to life immediately.
“Launch junior,” he said to the machine's built in speaker.
The program launched, showing him a small duplicate of his duty station's tactical display. He was proud of this program. It represented the culmination of all of his spare time while on active duty in the Space Force. With a twinge of sadness he realized, with his new status, Junior belonged to the Space Force and that he would never get to actually use it after today.
The engagement was nearing its climax. The two ships, LongBows, had headed for Jupiter shortly after they’d transitioned into the system. With the jamming they were doing, there was no way for certain the ship could tell the fleet what was happening. The only indication of trouble would be when the Adventurer failed to check in on the hour as it transited the system. Drucker had chosen to go with a blink attack wherein the Adventurer would execute a short range jump behind the two LongBows then attack each simultaneously, jumping away before they could return fire to assess the results of the attack. Drucker had asked him for advice on how to engage the two ships. Ty was happy to help, but he had to bite his lip to make a recommendation that went counter to what Drucker was trying to do. So he spent most of the hours watching the two ships approach Jupiter from monitors in the wardroom. Drucker had programmed in the attack nearly an hour earlier and had spent the remainder of the time configuring the main weapon and aligning the ship for the fraction of a second that it would be in firing position behind the two ships.
Ty set the miniature tactical display to show what the sensors were showing Drucker. The Adventurer was still high above the systems ecliptic headed “down” toward the turning point for the Beta Hydri jump. The convoy was strung out behind them. The Adventurer was programmed to jump in a few seconds before the light from the convoy ship’s deceleration reached the two LongBows. Ty had started a stop watch on his computer to count down to the time the ship jumped. It was down to less than a minute. He watched as each second ticked away.
At ten-seconds, the commander announced over the intercom, “Jump to attack in ten-seconds.” He counted down to zero and the ship jumped.
Without warning, the lights in the wardroom went out and the gravity field shut off. An instant later a powerful unseen force slammed into the Adventurer from above. It threw him out of the chair he was sitting in and up into the overhead bulkhead. The shock-wave of the impact reverberated through the ship like a titanic thunderclap. He could feel, even see the ship begin rolling clockwise. He saw briefly before he slammed into the overhead, that his local desk was still on and floating in the air in front of him. It had bounced harmlessly off of the overhead and was now tumbling in midair. Seeing Junior frozen caused a momentary twinge of sadness, then horror as the reality of the situation registered, Adventurer's controller was off-line.
Ty knew that without it, the crew could do nothing to deal with this situation. He fended off the overhead without any trouble and pushed himself towards his tablet. He grabbed it and headed for the door.
Emergency glow panels were on now, giving enough illumination to see. Weaker blasts began hitting the Adventurer, accelerating the ship''s rolling tumble. The epicenter of the first blast had come from the direction of the ship's control center three decks above him. Ty headed for the engineering center down below.
In the semi-darkness he could hear the muffled shouts of crewmen calling out to each other through the air circulation conduits and trying to deal with powered doors that wouldn't open. Ty grabbed at his comm-card and pulled it out of his jump suit's right breast pocket. He glanced at it to see if it was still on. It was.
He checked the command circuit, it was dead silent. He switched to the damage control circuit. There was some traffic on it. Seconds passed, still no one came up on the command circuit.
Finally, he spoke into it, “All hands, this is Tactical One. We've had a main systems controller failure.”
Instinctively he'd used his old call sign. He berated himself for the lapse for a second before the repair teams began reporting in.
“Red Three team aye, sir.”
Ty knew from memory that the team was in the aft section of the ship near the Dragon Launch Bay. He recognized the voice. It belonged to Specialist Grover.
In all, five teams out of seven responded. The two nearest the command center hadn't responded. The five reported no internal damage to the Adventurer in their areas. Ty had to pause a moment to recall which damage control team, that had responded, was closest to the command center.
"Red Two Team, Tactical One."
"Yes, sir."
"Send two runners up to the command center. Report to me what they find."
"Right away. Red Two out.”
Ty kept working down towards the Engineering center. He had to hand pump the doors open. It was a slow process. All the while he could feel the Adventurer shudder from the hits she was taking. The intensity of the hits gave him the impression they were little more than small caliber cannon rounds. Just the same, he knew it was only a matter of time before the hits started blasting through her thin armor.
Finally, Ty got to the Engineering doors. They were locked shut. He switched his card to engineering's circuit.
"Engineering, Tactical One."
Senior Chief Anderson answered immediately, “About time you guys talked to me. What happened?"
“What?” Ty asked. “I don't know. I'm out side door three."
"Hang on, I’ll let you in.”
He could hear the door's locks disengage. The door slid open just wide enough for him to squeeze through. Anderson, a wiry wizened lady floated over to him.
"What happened?" she asked, raising her voice over the sound of the power generator.
It was running at combat output with nowhere to send the power it was generating. Ty noticed the engineers were trying to bring up dead consoles and opening up access panels to restore the control system. Even in here, the gravity was still out.
Ty shrugged his shoulders, "I don't know. I was down in the wardroom. The lights went out and then the gravity failed and then POW."
Anderson shook her head. Once Ty was inside, she pumped the door shut and they pushed off towards her station.
“That about describes what we experienced too. The controller dropped off line right before that first hit. I see you brought your computer. Is it working?"
Ty glanced down at his tablet before answering. "Yes, I was running Junior when this happened. I looked down and saw Junior had crashed hard. That's what clued me into the controller failure."
"We've got to get it up so command can get back in control," said Anderson.
Ty nodded.
She pointed to the alternate control center. "Let's go here. I got an idea."
He figured she might. She knew as much about Junior as he did, more in fact, on its inner workings.
She spoke as they floated to the area, "I want to connect your computer to the data-net and see if there's enough to Junior to help me run the Adventurer until we can get the controller back on line."
Ty immediately grasped what she wanted to do.
"I'll need to reboot Junior.”
His card beeped with an incoming message, "Just a sec..."
Anderson nodded.
A nervous voice came over the card. "Tactical, Red Two lead."
Anderson raised an eyebrow at the use of the call sign but kept quiet. "Go Red Two."
"Sir, all the pressure locks on B-deck from the two-ring in are closed. Safety valves are popped too."
Anderson's face blanched at the words. Ty's jaw muscles tightened. The voice continued. "We can't get any further into the center of the deck."
Ty cut him off, "Thanks Red Two. Standby." He turned to Anderson, "Command is gone. At the very least, they're not in any condition to fly the ship."
She nodded wordlessly. Her face stricken with grief and terror. She spoke softly but with increasing firmness, "Ty, you have more command time than me. I know the results of the board and technically you are just a passenger now. But, under the circumstances, I say we try to survive first and then work out the details of who's the boss later. As far as I'm concerned, you should be the commander."
Ty nodded and felt the heavy weight of responsibility settle on his shoulders. He paused briefly to consider the turn of events. What he'd always dreamt of having was now his, command of a warship in the Republic Fleet. He thought there might be some satisfaction, but all there was, was fear. Fear of what happened, what was happening and what was about to happen.
He commanded a ship, barely. Barely because the ship was barely alive and because he commanded on the barest of pretexts. Yet he knew the consequences of failure on his part meant certain death for him as well as everyone else on the ship just as surely as if he were the captain. It began to grip him with a paralyzing wave of nausea. And then, when he felt he would slide into the terror and oblivion, a feeling of sublime peace settled over him. Words from a song his mother had taught him years ago came to his mind.
"Just as above the darkest clouds, the sun shines in skies of blue.
"During your darkest hours, God is watching over you."
"You OK Ty?" Anderson stared at him intently.
As he focused in on her, he felt wrapped in a blanket of peace that almost detached him from the noise and confusion of the engineering room and the muffled booms of the hits the Adventurer was taking.
"Yeah, I"m fine. Let's get to work,” he said.
He smiled and lightly touched her shoulder. The blanket of peacefulness he felt evaporated, but an inner core of peace lingered within him. He felt an acute sense of awareness as if the world around him had shifted into slow motion. Everything was crystal clear to him, from the motes of dust dancing in the air to the minutest detail of the panels around him. They ran to the alternate command station.
"I'll start setting up the networking,” said Anderson. "You get your tablet rebooted."
He started the process. As he waited for her, he called out on his card, "All hands. Alternate command now has the ship, all communications need to be sent there on damage control circuits."
The damage control teams began reporting off, along with the stations throughout the ship. Only the command center failed to acknowledge the order.
Ty's notebook finished rebooting. It was ready by the time she got back. She pulled an access panel off of a comm station and put a small disk on one of the data conduits.
She turned to Ty, "That's a low-bandwidth sending unit we can use to bootstrap the rest of the system."
"Let me have the receiver?" Ty asked.
She handed the unit to him. He checked the connector and then plugged it into the local desk. He went to setup the controls of Junior. He set it to command and online. For an instant nothing happened. Ty wondered if it was going to fail, then the lights in the room blinked and came on. He felt himself sink into the floor. Gravity was back on. There were whoops of joy in the room.
Anderson went to her station and called out to him, “Your sensor routines have crashed, probably because it can't talk to the sensors. It means we don't have combat sensors. Plus, we don't have any data links with the command center."
Ty powered up the alternate control station displays. They worked. He studied the displays. They were still blind and tumbling and taking hits.
"Do we have enough power to jump?" he asked.
Anderson looked at him from her station and paused before answering. "Yes, but..."
"We can’t stay here. We'll die if we don't move and they can follow us anywhere if we don’t jump away."
"We'll die if we jump into a rock or run into something else,” Anderson answered.
"Yeah, well, we'd better not jump where there are a lot of rocks,” Ty said with a grin.
Anderson jogged to him from her station.
"Fine. You make the call,” she said. "But get us out of here. Our navigation sensors are off line too. So whether we jump into a rock or stay here, the result will be the same."
She ran back to her station. Ty programmed the jump.
"Jump engine is on line,” said Anderson.
Ty commanded the jump. There was a slight tremor through the ship as they jumped.
"What was that?" Anderson asked.
"Don't know. This isn't a full blown controller we're running on. But have you felt that happen before?"
"Not really, where did you put us?" Anderson asked.
Ty said, “I just commanded the second jump of the attack, about a light minute away.”
With the Adventurer damaged the way it was, Ty hoped to use the one Dragon fighter the Adventurer carried to evaluate the Adventurer’s condition and see what the LongBows were doing.
Ty called out to the console. "Dragon Ops, Alternate command.”
"Dragon Ops… What happened?" Ty's friend Vince answered.
Ty ignored the question. "Is the Dragon ready to launch?”
"You can't tell?" There was surprised pause in his voice. "Yes, she's ready and loaded with six Heli-arcs and one plasma-arc on the centerline."
Ty outlined his plan of action with Vince. A Dragon, looked like a barbell with two teardrop shaped weights on each end. The pointy ends of the teardrops pointed in the same direction. The pilot sat in the front barbell and the other housed the drive. Strung along the central cylinder were numerous attach points. Weapons, extra power cells and the like were hung on them. Dragons usually looked ungainly, but they were incredibly agile and fast. This one was loaded with seven missiles. A large missile capable of destroying a capital ship, and six anti-fighter missiles.
The Dragon launched immediately. Vince was driving it. He swung around to look at the Adventurer.
”Alternate. Dragon.”
"Go Dragon."
”Command center's completely gone. There's a crater where it was. I can see down to B-deck through the debris.”
For an instant Ty thought again of Commander Roper and the rest of the command team. Eight good friends had been killed in an instant.
“Copy that Dragon. How does the outer hull look away from the crater?"
There was a pause.
”A scattering of low-energy blast marks and some craters from small caliber cannon rounds pock the surface. Aside from the crater though, the hull looks OK.”
“Thanks for the report. Using just passive sensors, look back where we were. Can you see the LongBows?”
Ty imagined the Dragon pirouetting in space to turn towards their earlier location. While that was going on, he punched the intercom.
"Red Two and Red Four. Check the emergency bulkheads on Bravo deck. Clear out Charlie deck and set emergency barriers on Charlie deck in case the Bravo deck bulkheads fail."
He switched back to the command circuit, "All hands, command. All personnel implement pressure loss protocols immediately. Repeat, implement Code Blue.”
Everyone in the engineering center began donning emergency pressure suits. Dragon called in.
”Command, Dragon.”
"Go."
”The two LongBows are pursuing us. ETA is about twenty minutes. They're doing a level five acceleration. No drive plume though.”
A nagging thought bothered Ty about the report, but he couldn't put his finger on a specific reason to be alarmed. He thought about the report and turned to Anderson. She glanced back at him. Ty's eyebrows popped up.
"They're awfully confident,” he commented.
"Yeah, like they think they've got us?"
Ty nodded.
"Do they?" she asked.
"Depends on if we have weapons." Ty held up a hand. "Red Five, Command."
"Red Five."
"I need you to check the circuit and data-link bays from the forward sensors to the master interlink."
"We're on it."
"Red Seven, Command."
"Red Seven."
"Check the power conduits from the main projectors back to engineering. Be quick."
"Right away sir."
Ty turned to the Tactical display. He noticed as he did that the generator began dropping to a lower power output. Anderson lowered the generator's output to match the ship's current need.
“Anderson,” he called out.
She shouted back, "What?"
"How long can the generator run the way it was?"
“It can run forever that way, I just think it’s a waste to keep it up."
"Leave it up."
"What? Why?"
"Energy output is a good indicator of what the ship is doing. They saw it running at full power and it didn't phase them earlier. Bounce it back up like we lost control again. I want them to think we're still hurt."
"We are still hurt."
Before he could answer, Red Seven called in, "Sir, both power conduits are good to go. Each channel shows it can take a full power flow."
"Good, I want you to reposition to the fantail and replace Red Five's position."
"Red Seven, Aye."
"Dragon, Command."
"Dragon."
"I want you to go stealthy and move to two red one-twenty about seven or eight kay-clicks out. Then go silent, laser link only. Ping me every five minutes with a sensor feed. If I want more, I'll ping back."
The Dragon double-clicked his microphone in acknowledgment of the message.
"Dragon-Ops, Command."
"Dragon Ops."
"Can you make it look like the Dragon's still in the bay?"
"You want us to fake a Dragon sir?"
"Yeah, as real as you can make it. But be fast. You've got maybe five minutes before the LongBows can tell what's in the bay."
"We can do that."
Ty switched his display to check on the ship’s position in the Solar System. He noticed they were still tumbling. He fired a nose thruster just enough to accelerate the pitching the ship was doing. By now, she was pointing nose down. She'd be pointing back at the LongBows in a few minutes.
Red Five called, "Sir, the navigation conduits run through the depressurized portion of b-deck and are severed in there. But on both sides of the break they look good. We could run a wireless bridge to get them back."
"Can you get into the depressurized area to see if it can be fixed?"
"Yes, We've got a couple of porta-walls…"
Ty cut him off, "Good, do it."
Ty punched up a schematic of the ship only to have a gray screen appear. Junior didn't have the data. Ty let out an exasperated sigh. He glanced at the clock in the display. If the LongBows were still coming, they were ten minutes away. A flashing light caught his attention. He heard Anderson talking into her card.
"Dragon Ops, Engineering."
"Dragon Ops."
"You're depressurizing the bay?"
"Yes, chief, we’ve pulled the circuit breakers on the door and we're hand cranking it open."
Ty noticed the questioning look on her face. It dissolved into a grin and grinned himself as he listened in on the report.
"Ma'am, we pulled the loader mock up into the launch cradle and we have a Jersey generator giving it power. I've got Wally sittin' in the cockpit of the thing. And we're hangin' live ones on the rails and a plasma cannon on the center line. I’ve also pulled an engine calibration rig out and fired it up, so it's pumping gravitons like a real Mark Eight drive that's being readied for a launch."
"Good job Dragon Ops,” Anderson answered with a chuckle.
Ty shook his head in wonder.
"Kid deserves a medal," she said. "I'd be fooled and I know what to look for."
A sensor feed came in from the Dragon. Ty studied it. The LongBows were still coming. They were in a tighter formation, only a couple hundred clicks apart. No shields were up. No defensive jinks. They were approaching this like they were headed out to a range for target practice. Maybe they think they are, Ty mused to himself.
"Well, you keep coming that way," he said out-loud to himself.
He tweaked the pitch rate just enough to have the approaching ships in his main projector's aiming cone before they got close enough to really hurt the Adventurer with their cannons.
"Come to Daddy boys, I've got some good stuff waiting for you."
A couple of minutes later, Red Five called, "Sir, we've got the navigation signal conduits patched, spliced and degaussed. It was already depressurized so we didn't need to evacuate it."
Ty acknowledged, “Great work. Deploy to Charlie deck forward and assume a standby posture there."
"Rog."
Ty resisted the urge to power up the navigation system. He knew that would be a dead giveaway, that they weren't hurt as bad as they appeared. He stood away from the sensor panel for a moment and rubbed his eyes. Thoughts of his last conversation with Commander Roper came flooding back to him. He couldn't accept that he was dead now and that his old station on the command center had been vaporized along with Commander Roper. Yet, the inner peace was still there.
Another five minutes passed. Another sensor feed came in from the Dragon. The LongBows were within range of the Adventurer's main weapons, yet they still hadn't fired on the Adventurer nor were they taking any kind of evasive action.
"You're curious?” Ty asked himself outloud. "You want to know how we moved and yet appear so dead now. Well, better you than us."
They were decelerating to inspect his ship. He could tell that their sensors were all aimed at the Adventurer. They'd taken the bait of the Dragon decoy in the bay. Anderson came over to him so she could talk without shouting.
"We've checked the controller circuitry. I think we can reload the controller and use the real thing in a couple of minutes if you want."
Ty shook his head, "Not yet, I do need weapon control though. Can we load that and hook it into Junior?"
"It's possible, I'll see what I can do. What are the LongBows up to?"
"They're matching velocity with us. They'll be along side in about six minutes. They're a little further out than the Dragon right now at two-eighty red six. Our pitch rate will put them in the primary's cone of fire in forty-six seconds."
A wry smile crossed Anderson's face. "I can give you manual aiming using the calibration scopes on the main projectors,” she offered.
"Really? I didn't know you could manually aim a primary."
"Yeah, it's a technique used to calibrate the targeting mirrors and deflector. It's pretty effective at short ranges. Svenson over there on the power panel has popped ship-sized asteroids from two kay clicks with it."
"Get him over here."
“Her,” Anderson corrected.
"Whatever,” said Ty.
Anderson pushed off and floated across the room to the woman and spoke in her ear. A smile flickered across her face. Then the two of them pushed off from the panel and came floating over to Ty. Svenson began taking off her pressure suit as she floated across the room. Anderson introduced her to Ty.
She defended her actions simply, "I need my arms free to shoot, sir."
By the time Anderson had the calibration station up, Svenson had stripped off the top half of her jumpsuit. It flopped around her waist. She was wearing a white tee-shirt under it. She pulled up her sleeves so her arms were completely uncovered. Her yellow blond hair was pulled back in a tight bun. She had the petite features of a porcelain doll Ty thought. Yet her eyes were steely gray and as hard as ice at the moment.
She locked her boots into the foot locks on the deck and leaned into the console so she wouldn't drift around when she grasped the grip of the calibrator. The screen over the console lit up. A star field appeared with an aiming reticle superimposed over the image. Anderson worked a couple of knobs to bring into view two white dots. She zoomed in on them. The dots never resolved to anything more than white specs of light. Anderson glanced down at Svenson and gave a curt nod.
Svenson began moving the calibrator with deft nearly imperceptible movements. The aiming reticle began to move slowly across the screen until it rested on one of the dots. She had to constantly move the reticle to keep it on top of the dot as it slowly moved across the screen.
Without glancing up at Ty, she asked, "Those the LongBows?"
Ty glanced at the aiming coordinates on the screen and back at the tactical display. The LongBows were just a thousand clicks away now. Point blank range for the primaries.
"Yes, they're the LongBows."
"When do you want me to shoot?"
"When can you shoot?"
She glanced at him and gave him a pitying stare as if he were the most clueless person alive.
"Now, sir. How much power in the shot?” she asked deadpan.
Ty thought for a second as he considered the energy absorption capacity of the LongBow shields.
“Make it two hundred mega-joules condensed to a pico-second burst. Then fire."
She gave him a cheesy grin and looked back at the screen. He moved to watch the screen over her shoulder.
Without turning away from the screen, she said, "Would you mind, sir. Please,” as she dialed in the energy settings on the shot.
He backed away, "Sure."
Soon after, in quick succession, she pointed the aiming reticle on one dot and pulled the trigger on the calibrator. The Adventurer gave a slight shudder from the recoil of firing the energy at the ship.
“That's one," she said.
In a deft movement, she moved the reticle over the second dot in little more than a second and pulled the trigger again. The ship shuddered again.
“That's two,” she said as she watched the screen for a moment before backing away from it. "There you go, sir,” she said as she raised her head to face him before continuing, “Two powdered LongBows."
On the screen, the two dots had been replaced with two coin-sized disks of light that slowly expanded and faded to black.
"Command, Dragon." The transmission snapped them out of their revere.
"Command."
"Nice shots! Flashed them both. There's nothing out there but plasma. I didn't detect any emission from the second LongBow before it was flashed."
Ty let out a big breath. He felt the tension drain out of him.
"That was sure anti-climactic. Anderson, let's get this ship, ship-shape,” he said with a grin. "I relinquish command, to you."
She nodded, "All hands, command." She paused just a second as she heard her voice reverberate through the engineering space over the sound of the generator. "Engineering Specialist First Class Amber Svenson just destroyed two LongBows. The solar system is clear of Alliance forces. Command out."
Ty could hear whoops of joy over the intercom and in the engineering room as the generators dropped down to virtual silence. In a matter of minutes, they'd collected the Dragon, repaired the sensors and rebooted the controller. He turned to Anderson as they contemplated what happened.
Anderson nodded in approval. She paused a moment before speaking, “Ty. For the duration, I’m going to announce to the crew that you are acting commander. You’re actual status is between you and me. Ok?”
Ty nodded, “Fair enough.”
“So, Mr. Weiss,” Anderson said with a twinkle in her eye. “What do you want us do to?”
“I suggest we take up a picket position sunward of Jupiter. We should stay here till the convoy jumps away. We’re also going to need someone to run weapons, defense and sensors. We also need to recover and relaunch the Dragon. I don’t think we’re done with the Alliance yet.”
She nodded, “I think you’re right on that account.”
They continued their discussion as they sorted out who would do what on the ship.
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