Call to Arms (Black Fleet Trilogy, Book 2) (26 page)

“We’re going to have some low grade leakage on the receivers from the local oscillators, sir,” Hayashi said.

“Understood,” Jackson said. “But that would be almost impossible to pick out of the cosmic background noise.”

“Do we risk flying in for a closer look?” Davis asked.

“Not yet,” Jackson said. “OPS, have a recon drone prepped. If they can quick turn a Jacobson, go ahead and do that. I’ll send you over the load out instructions momentarily.”

“Aye, sir.”

A little over two hours later, a specially prepared Jacobson drone fired out of the starboard launch tube on a blast of compressed nitrogen, drifting away from the destroyer until a predetermined time had elapsed, and it engaged an auxiliary, low-power ionic jet motor.

“Drone is away, Captain,” Hayashi said. “It checked in once with a com laser to confirm that it was operating correctly before going silent. There will be two opportunities along its course for it to engage its main engine and perform a long burn as it approaches the planet.”

“Very good.” Jackson stood. “Maintain standard watches, no special alerts for now. Tactical, keep a sharp eye for anyone trying a stealth intercept. We can’t be guaranteed that our transition went unnoticed. Lieutenant Davis, you have the bridge. I’ll be back to relieve you shortly.”

“Of course, sir.”

Jackson nodded to the Marine sentry and walked quickly off the bridge. He made his way to the set of lifts near the aft section of the command deck by way of the wardroom to top off his coffee. He absently nodded to spacers and officers as he walked the corridors, deeply troubled by what they’d found so far.

A backup plan to keep and protect humanity’s treasures and knowledge was one thing, but from the grainy images he’d seen on Barrett’s display, this “Ark” looked like a full-fledged colony planet. Why waste the resources building something so extensive? And when did they start? The Phage had only been a known threat for a little over four years. There was no way in hell they propped a whole colony planet up that quickly.

That left a few possibilities, and none of them were particularly pleasant. It was possible the planet had been colonized for some innocent purpose years ago, but why the secrecy? The unnamed star system didn’t even appear on the official Fleet registry, a fact that was quite suspicious by itself. If it had been built up after the appearance of the Phage, even counting when the Asianic Union first began losing planets and ships, it still represented an unfathomable diversion of critical resources needed on the Frontier. Either way, the fact they were obviously using such stringent emission security protocols meant that whatever was going on down on that planet likely had little to do with defending the Confederate citizens with their asses hanging out in the breeze along the Frontier.

“You look like a man lost in his own head, sir,” Chief Green said from a hatchway as Jackson strolled down the port access tube toward Engineering.

“Just making an unannounced inspection, Chief.”

“Uh huh,” Green said. “It might be more effective if you were looking at the ship and not out at something in front of you with that glazed look in your eye… sir.”

“What brings you down here, Chief?”

“Inspections, sir.” Green shrugged. “These fucking sewer maggots think that a couple calls for general quarters is some sort of excuse not to clean the goddamn decks.”

His last comment was directed loudly at a pair of junior enlisted spacers who happened to be walking by. They’d slowed in order to greet their captain, but at the sight of Master Chief Green, they averted their eyes and hustled down the tube.

“You heading to Engineering, sir?”

“I am. Care to join me, Chief? They usually have decent coffee and pastries down there,” Jackson said.

“I’d be delighted, sir,” Green said.

“Maybe you could spring a surprise inspection on the drive techs,” Jackson said half-jokingly.

“Not a chance, Cap,” Green said seriously. “Commander Singh runs a tight ship down there. He doesn’t need me coming in and disrupting his people.”

Jackson made a mental note to pass the compliment on to Daya as they were very, very rare from the salty chief. Triply rare when it came to compliments for officers.

During the brief visit in Engineering, Jackson took a perfunctory look at the twin deuterium fusion reactors that powered the
Ares
as well as a host of other systems. He complimented all the spacers in the section, made a fuss about the ship breaking a speed record from the Frontier to Haven and outrunning a CIS Broadhead during the process, and then quietly slunk out of the area as Daya and Chief Green had a friendly conversation that he couldn’t quite make out.

The starboard access tube was nearly deserted as he hustled over to the set of lifts that would take him directly back to the command deck. He had to relieve Davis so she could get some rest before second watch started, and he wanted to make sure Barrett wasn’t pulling his usual game of lying about how long he’d been on duty so he didn’t have to leave the bridge.

As the doors to the lift slid shut, he was momentarily overcome with sadness at the thought of the two young officers. They’d already been through so much ,and he had a bad feeling much more sacrifice would be required before the fight was over.

****

“The drone is now twelve hours overdue, Captain,” Lieutenant Davis informed Jackson as he walked onto the bridge just ahead of first watch.

“Overdue for a check in,” Jackson corrected. “That could be a host of issues, especially using a tight beam com laser.”

“Sir, I have our forward optical sensor’s bandwidth filtered and looking specifically for the beam’s wavelength,” Barrett said.

“We’re in space, Lieutenant Commander.” Jackson tried to hide his irritation. “If the beam doesn’t hit us or refract off something else, it could pass within a few hundred meters of this ship, and you’d never see it.”

“Understood, sir,” Barrett said, unruffled. “But if we don’t respond, the drone has been programmed to sweep the com laser in a grid pattern until we acquire each other. In twelve hours, I have to think that we’d have seen some trace of it.”

“What’s your working theory right now, Mr. Barrett?” Jackson asked.

“I’m picking up a lot of residual light from that planet that fits the bill for short-range LIDAR,” Barrett said, referring to a detection system that worked on the same principle of radar but utilized reflected laser energy rather than radio waves. “I think they’ve got a detection grid in place, and they saw the drone as it came in for a close pass.”

“You think they took out a Jacobson drone that very obviously belongs to a Fleet ship?” Jackson pressed.

“Yes, sir.”

“And you agree with his assessment, Lieutenant Davis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well then.” Jackson sat. “Let’s go see if we can find the pieces. OPS, reconfigure main engines for normal flight. Nav, plot a course down into the system. Give me the most direct route to the fourth planet. Don’t worry about getting cute with any grav assists or bother trying to save propellant.”

“Course is plotted and sent to the helm, sir,” the specialist at nav reported.

“Helm, engage on new course,” Jackson ordered. “Ahead one half with a target velocity of .10c.”

“Ahead one half, aye,” the helmsman said.

“Nav, how long until we make orbit with our current acceleration profile?” Jackson asked.

“Just over forty hours, sir,” Specialist Accari said. “Give me a moment to account for the initial acceleration curve.”

“Don’t bother, Specialist,” Jackson said. “Helm, ahead three quarters until you reach .35c. Nav, we’ll need a more aggressive decel profile to make orbit. Make sure the helm has that as soon as possible.”

“Working it now, sir. Time to target has been reduced to just over twelve hours,” Accari said.

“Lieutenant Davis, you’re relieved,” Jackson told her. “Bridge crew is now on split shifts. I want the full first watch crew in their seats an hour before we begin decel.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Davis checked to see how much time she had to get some rest and practically ran off the bridge.

“If any of you need to call your reliefs up from your work centers, don’t be shy about it,” Jackson said. “I expect everyone to be at their very best when we begin braking for orbit.”

A few operators looked at each other and then back to the captain as if to see if they were about to walk into a trap. When Jackson only looked over some reports on his terminal and mostly ignored them, a few grabbed their comlinks and called for relief so they could get some rack time before any potential engagements over the mysterious planet.

Jackson continued reading over the very dry technical bulletins his department heads had sent up as well as the equally mind-numbing readiness and training reports on the crew. Couple that with the steady, soft rumble of the mains throttled up to seventy-five percent, and he was ready for the first coffee of his watch before the second hour had passed.

He had barely made it back to the chair from the coffee machine at the back of the bridge when the ensign sitting at the com station turned to him, her face a mask of confusion. “Captain, I’m getting a video channel request for you personally via tight-beam laser. It’s classified ‘eyes-only.’”

Jackson frowned at that. They were certainly close enough to the planet for them to reach out with a com beam if they really boosted the power. Maybe they had a relay drone somewhere in the system they couldn’t detect with the passive sensors.

“Lock the channel down, and send it to my office,” Jackson said. “Lieutenant Commander Barrett, you have the bridge.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jackson jogged the short span to the small office and activated his terminal, not bothering to close the hatch. He wasn’t prepared for the face on the other end.

“Wolfe, what in the fuck are you doing in this system?” CENTCOM Chief of Staff Joseph Marcum asked, his face a reddish purple.

“I was about to ask something similar, sir.” Jackson refused to wilt under his superior’s glare. “This system seems to not exist on any Fleet survey I can find. Imagine my surprise when I found a fully developed colony world here.”

“I’m not even going to ask how you found out about this,” Marcum said with disgust. “It was that idiot, Allrest… had to be.”

“What’s going on here, sir?” Jackson asked. “What is this place?”

“Do you need everything spelled out for you, Wolfe?” Marcum asked, his voice dripping with scorn. “I can never tell if you’re the smartest person I’ve ever met or just another dumbass, lucky-as-hell Earther who doesn’t have a damn clue what’s going on around him. What do you
think
this is?”

“It looks to me like a lot of resources wasted while two more Frontier worlds are ready to fall, sir.” Jackson watched carefully for a reaction from Marcum. He counted until he saw the chief of staff roll his eyes, wrote the number of seconds down on the tile in front of him, divided it in half, and then multiplied it by the constant. It wasn’t exact, but it was good enough to roughly range the source of the signal.

“So I guess it’s the latter,” Marcum said. “You can’t possibly be this naive. You know as well as I do that Podere and Nuovo Patria are as good as gone. The Phage will rush into those systems and take them with overwhelming numbers. What good does it do us if half of Starfleet is wiped out with them?”

“So we don’t even mount a defense?” Jackson checked his numbers once again and then discreetly keyed in a general alert. He typed in a message to Barrett to signal general quarters but to silence the alarms on the command deck. “Sir, I can’t accept that we’re just going to abandon tens of millions of people.”

“We’re playing the long game, Wolfe,” Marcum said. “This planet is meant as the final holdout for our species. By now you must have come to the same conclusions we have. We cannot win against the Phage with our current technology and numbers. It takes us half a year to build a destroyer and takes them four weeks to grow an Alpha. We lose a ship, and we’re out an entire well-trained crew. They lose a construct and use the remains to build more in a few days. We have no answer for this enemy. Does it really make sense to waste our entire military might in a futile effort to defend a single planet? Or does it make more sense to accept the fact that there will be terrible losses in this war and try to ensure humanity survives at all?”

Jackson hated to admit it, but Marcum had a point. If there was simply no possible way to win, why sacrifice the entire species? But there was also the part of him that knew the Phage weren’t invulnerable, and that if Allrest was right, and they were highly intelligent, there must be some threshold after which they decide a fight isn’t worth the cost of winning.

“I almost see what you’re thinking,” Marcum said. “Yes, you’ve killed a lot of Phage… Has it made a difference? Before you transitioned in, we received word that they were massing in the Podere system in greater numbers than we’d ever seen before in one place.”

“I’m not arguing that your point is invalid, sir.” Jackson looked at his tile as a message popped up, telling him the crew was at their stations and ready. “But you still haven’t answered my question about what this planet is. Allrest called it the Ark, and I can see you’re taking special care not to risk radio emissions… so is this an elaborate contingency plan… or a lifeboat for the rich and powerful?”

“Call it both.” Marcum shrugged. “When we see how the Phage act after they’ve taken Nuovo Patria, we’ll know for certain what this planet’s ultimate purpose will be. We’d always planned on brining the Ninth Squadron here before any real fighting began. Wasting five
Starwolf
-class ships in a blaze of glory made little sense. I tried to have you held up at New Sierra, but you managed to defuse that one far quicker than I would have thought.”

Jackson frowned, but not at the thinly veiled insult. Marcum was stalling him.

“You are so easy to read, Captain.” Marcum chuckled humorlessly. “Yes, I’m trying to tie you up for a few more minutes, and yes, I’m very close. I can already tell that you won’t see reason. You’re full of righteous anger and, unfortunately, have maybe begun to believe in your own inflated legend. I’m sorry, but we can’t risk you leaving here.”