Ep.#5 - "Rise of the Corinari" (25 page)

“No, they have been powered down for weeks now,” Vladimir assured him.

“You’re probably going to have to gut most of this,” he commented as he worked his way forward.

“The Karuzari technicians already removed a lot of the heavier stuff,” Vladimir told him. “They had to in order to put in new bracing across the top quarter there,” he explained, pointing upward to the port side. “You can see where they cut through some of the wreckage just to get it out of the way.”

“We’re not all the way forward yet, though, are we?” Nathan observed.

“No, not quite. There’s still a little more beyond this, but it’s probably all smashed in just like this.”

Nathan climbed carefully through the debris, pushing wires and conduits aside and stepping over twisted ducting that had fallen to the floor. “There’s no way the SAR teams could’ve gone beyond this,” Nathan observed. “Not in full pressure suits, that’s for sure.”

Nathan continued forward with Vladimir following behind as they snaked their way forward.

“I think we might be better off to just gut all of this and turn it into a big storage area,” Vladimir observed. “Most of these are just storage bays and maintenance lockers anyway.”

They got past the forward-most point in the bow where the corridor cut back across to the starboard side. The central corridor was completely blocked off by a collapsed bulkhead, and more twisted wreckage blocked the starboard corridor. “We’re never going to get through that,” Nathan said. “We’ll have to circle back around.”

“Wait,” Vladimir said, moving past Nathan. “This panel is just hanging by a thread…” He yanked on the large panel and it came crashing down to the deck. Behind it was more open corridor. Only this corridor had something else inside of it: the frozen, deformed bodies of several dead Ta’Akar soldiers. Their faces and hands were swollen and bluish, and their eyes had burst forth from their sockets, the swollen, ruptured eyeballs hanging by their optic nerves. Most of them had also suffered other trauma. Their limbs and torso had been snagged on jagged pieces of metal when they were being pulled down the corridor by the escaping atmosphere. One of the soldiers had his entire shoulder torn off by a twisted shard of a bulkhead that stuck out like a massive dagger. The bodies were beginning to smell a bit as well, as they had begun to thaw since the forward compartment had been pressurized. There were four of them altogether, all still dressed in their combat armor, except for one that looked more like an officer.

“Boarding party,” Vladimir commented.

“Or what’s left of them,” Nathan added. “The rest probably got sucked out into space when we backed away.”

“I’ll get someone to start cleaning up the bodies,” Vladimir said.

“Better notify Jessica first,” Nathan cautioned. “She may want to go over them first.”

“Nathan, they were fighting to survive and then died in a vacuum. I doubt they are booby trapped,” Vladimir said.

“I was thinking more along the lines of intelligence, not booby-traps,” Nathan told him. “Although, now that you mention it, it wouldn’t hurt to check them for booby-traps first. You never know.”

Nathan continued forward as Vladimir passed instructions on to one of his technicians to notify security and medical about the bodies. Beyond another bunch of wires dangling from the overhead, Nathan noticed something blinking. It was a red light of some type. He continued forward, pushing debris and dangling panels out of his way, trying to make it to the area from where the red light was flashing. “Vlad,” Nathan called out as he moved closer to the source of the light. A sinking feeling began to form in his gut. “Vlad! I’ve got a SAR light flashing up ahead!”

Nathan continued to push through the debris, nearly getting tangled in the cabling himself as he rushed forward. Finally, he broke past the main bulk of the debris and reached a small part of the corridor that was clear. There, directly above the hatch to a maintenance compartment was the blinking red light that served to alert search and rescue teams that someone had taken refuge in the compartment and was waiting for help.

Nathan’s mind swirled with the idea of a member of his crew trapped in that small compartment for over a month, waiting for rescue. As he wrestled with the door mechanism, trying to force it open, he could almost imagine someone in there, having long given up hope. He knew it was impossible, that no one could have survived in such a space for that long. Not even the cabins, which were designed to become emergency shelters in the case of sudden depressurization and could sustain someone for a month.

The latch finally gave and the door swung open. The smell hit him first—a mixture of spilled chemicals, burnt fabrics, and melted plastics… and the smell of rotting flesh. In the corner there were four bodies huddled together, buried under everything they could find in the compartment to try and insulate themselves from the freezing cold vacuum of space that had been just outside their hatch.

“Oh God,” Nathan whispered as he peeled away the pile of debris that covered the huddled bodies. There were three men and a woman. Two of the men and the woman were members of the fleet, all ensigns just as he had been at the time of the collision. The fourth man wasn’t even in the fleet. He was a civilian technical specialist. Nathan imagined how they must have gotten cut off from the rest of the ship during the boarding attempt. The damage around them would’ve made it impossible to get further aft. This compartment had been the only place they could hide from the men with guns that had come aboard through the hole in the bow. It had to have been the absolute worst scenario anyone could have imagined, and they had lived it.

“
Oh, bozhe moi,
” Vladimir exclaimed as he came through the hatch. He looked at Nathan, who was reading something from a data pad he had taken off one of the dead crewmen.

“They were waiting for us to rescue them the whole time,” Nathan mumbled. “They were in here for three days, Vlad. Three days, waiting and hoping… praying for help. They could probably hear the SAR teams searching…”

“It was a vacuum, Nathan,” Vladimir interrupted. “They would not have heard…”

“They suffocated in here, alone and freezing. And where was I? Sitting in my ready room, eating lunch with some green-eyed alien woman, cozy and warm.”

“Nathan,” Vladimir began, trying to assuage his guilt, “you could not have known. The SAR teams could not have gotten this far. We barely made it this far now.”

“I should have known,” Nathan insisted. “I should have known what had happened to every member of my crew.”

“There are still many of our original crew unaccounted for, Nathan.”

“I need to take care of them,” Nathan decided, rising to head for the hatch.

“Nathan,” Vladimir said, putting out his hand to stop him, “go back to your drills. Let us take care of this.”

“Get back to your repairs, Lieutenant Commander. That’s an order,” Nathan said as he pushed Vladimir’s hand aside and headed out the hatch. “I’m going for some body bags.”

Vladimir stood silently as Nathan stepped through the hatch and back into the corridor. He stared at the bodies, grotesquely deformed by the effects of hard vacuum and extreme temperatures, as he listened to Nathan make his way back through the debris. He reached up and tapped his comm-set, somberly speaking into the wire-thin microphone that hung down from his left ear along his cheek. “Comms, Cheng. Connect me to Karuzara command, please.”

* * *

Other than his first two days, during which Lieutenant Commander Nash questioned him endlessly about his knowledge of Ta’Akar tactics, Travon Dumar had spent most of his first week on the Aurora cooped up in the intelligence shack. A large, dimly lit room, it was filled with workstations and displays that seemed constantly manned. Most of the work consisted of studying old communications traffic and past arrival and departure logs of Ta’Akar ships from both the Darvano system and her nearest neighbor, Savoy, only a light year away.

Other than the intel shack, his quarters, the galley, and the head were the only other spaces he regularly visited. So when Lieutenant Commander Nash asked him to inspect the dead Ta’Akar bodies found in the forward section of the ship, he welcomed the opportunity for a change of scenery. After ten days aboard the Aurora, he still had no idea if or when he might have an opportunity to get a good look at Redmond Tugwell in person, which had been his sole reason for volunteering in the first place.

The original hull breach had affected only the main deck, so his journey would be a short one. After traveling down the main ramp from the command deck on which the intel shack was located, to the main deck directly below, he made a U-turn and headed forward down the central corridor. As he approached the previously sealed off entrance to the forward section, he could see two men standing off to one side, talking. He recognized the man facing him as the Aurora’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Commander Kamenetskiy, whom the crew normally referred to using the acronym ‘Cheng’. However, the other man had his back to him. The second man was not wearing an Aurora uniform nor that of the Corinari, although the man’s pants were of Corinari issue.

As he closed the distance between them, the unknown man’s features became recognizable, even from behind. It was the same hair, the same build, the same mannerisms. It was the man he had been seeking, Redmond Tugwell, the leader of the Karuzari, the rebels who had plagued the Ta’Akar Empire for the last thirty years. He could not help but stare at the man’s face as he walked by. He was older than Dumar remembered, much older, and his facial features had changed somewhat. It was possible they had been altered by whatever injuries he had sustained on that day thirty-seven years ago. The explosion Dumar had witnessed had been so immense, that there had never been any doubt that it had taken the life of this man. Yet here he stood, alive and talking.

“Gentlemen,” Dumar greeted politely as he passed the two men in the corridor. Lieutenant Commander Kamenetskiy nodded acknowledgment of Dumar’s greeting, but no reply was offered by the man going by the name of Redmond Tugwell. Their eyes did meet, however, even if only for a moment, before Dumar stepped through the hatch into the forward section.

Dumar kept his concentration, kept his composure, as he continued down the main corridor and to the left. The man he had just seen looked more like the father of the man he had once known. The father was deceased, of that he was sure. He had attended the father’s funeral himself, as had countless others.

The man’s eyes were what bothered him most. They were the same as he remembered, yet there was something unusual about them, something that he did not remember being present all those years ago. Dumar had seen it before in the eyes of men that had witnessed more pain and suffering than any one man should in his lifetime. It changed them. It took the magic and hope from their souls, replacing it with single minded purpose—usually survival.

Everything told Dumar that this man’s name was not Redmond Tugwell. He was the man he had seen perish in a nuclear blast back in the Palee system nearly four decades ago. If he was that man, there was much that Travon Dumar was required to do, but he had to be sure. There was too much at stake now to risk making even the slightest of errors. The entire future of the Ta’Akar Empire and the worlds of the Pentaurus Cluster could rest on what Travon Dumar did in the very near future. He had to move carefully. He had to be cautious. Now was not the time to charge into action. Now was the time for careful planning, subtlety, and discretion. Action would come later, when he was certain beyond all doubt of the true identity of Redmond Tugwell.

* * *

Nathan had said nothing to the staff in medical when he came in to get the body bags; he had simply marched up to Doctor Chen and asked where they were stored. Everyone in the department had been smart enough not to inquire further. He expected they could all read it on his face, as could those he passed in the corridors on his return trip forward. They all simply assumed the appropriate position of attention as he passed and said nothing. Everyone except for Tug.

“Captain, a word?” Tug asked politely, cutting him off not ten meters from the entrance to the forward section.

“Can it wait, Tug?” Nathan asked. His tone of voice inferred that it was not a question, but more of a statement. “I’m a little busy right now.”

“I am afraid it cannot,” Tug insisted. He gestured to a nearby compartment, one of the empty offices that would eventually be used by the Corinari Aerospace Wing once it was officially assigned to the Aurora. Nathan glared defiantly at him. “I promise, it will not take long,” Tug added.

Nathan knew enough about Tug to know that it would be hard to deny him his request. The man had a way about him, the ability to get others to do his bidding without having to issue direct orders. Nathan, however, was in no mood to be lectured, not by Tug or anyone else for that matter… not now.

Nathan turned and stepped into the compartment. Tug followed him through the hatch, closing it behind him to ensure privacy. When he did so, Nathan knew he was not going to like what the old man had to say.

“Is there something bothering you, Nathan?” Tug began.

“Yeah, you might say that,” Nathan answered. “But you probably already know about the four half-frozen members of my crew lying in my bow right now. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

“Yes, but I am not here about the four bodies you discovered,” Tug explained, “I am here because of the way you are handling it.”

“The way I’m handling it?” Nathan repeated, his irritation beginning to show. “I’m handling it by respectfully packaging up the bodies of my fallen crew. That’s how I’m handling it!”

“You are handling it like a scrub ensign straight out of training!”

“I
am
a scrub ensign straight out of training! Remember?!” Nathan shouted back.

“Not anymore!” Tug shouted. “You are the captain of a warship, and on warships people die! You may not like it, and you certainly cannot change it, but you do have to deal with it.”