Ep.#6 - "Head of the Dragon" (The Frontiers Saga) (29 page)

“No good,” Cameron objected. “It would take twice as long to cycle the shuttles in and out of the Aurora’s flight deck to load troops. Plus, you would have to keep jumping back to the staging area every so often. Every minute the Aurora is not engaging imperial warships is another minute the distress call from Takara has to reach her ships in the system. You need to hit those ships before they can head back to Takara. Besides, if something happened to the Aurora and she wasn’t able to jump back, or worse yet the ship was lost with all hands, the ground assault would automatically fail. It’s just too risky, sir. We need the entire staging package.”

“Could we leave the FTL-KKVs behind?” Major Prechitt wondered.

“Negative,” Nathan stated coldly. “That’s our ace in the hole. If the Aurora was lost, Commander Taylor could still task the KKVs as needed. All she needs is one ship with a mini-jump drive to jump out and transmit a launch directive.”

“Captain,” Tug began, “the use of KKVs within the Takaran system is extremely risky. If one of them was to strike an inhabited planet or moon…”

“I am well aware of the risks involved, Mister Tugwell,” Nathan reminded him. “The KKVs will remain in our arsenal for this engagement.”

“Of course,” Tug conceded.

“Let’s get on it, everyone,” Nathan ordered. “Commander, I want our first jump to happen as soon as possible. Let’s start with the cargo shuttles. We’ll save the staging platform for last so those men don’t have to sit around in deep space any longer than necessary.”

“Yes, sir,” Cameron promised.

“Dismissed,” Nathan announced. “Commander, a moment?”

Cameron waited as the others left the room. “Yes, sir?”

“How are you doing?” Nathan asked as the last of them filed out. “Are you up for this?”

“Are any of us?”

“You know what I mean,” Nathan reminded her.

“I’ll be fine, sir.”

“You know, there isn’t really anyone to backstop you on this. I’d ask Lieutenant Waddell to give you one of his officers, but I don’t think he has enough of them as it is.”

“It’s Captain Waddell now,” Cameron answered. “Major Prechitt agreed with you and promoted him an hour ago. And you’re right, he doesn’t have any officers to spare.” Cameron got up to leave. “It would help if I could take Ensign Yosef with me.”

“Kaylah?” Nathan wondered. “She’s not a combat officer. She’s a sensor operator.”

“Actually, she’s a science officer, remember?” Cameron reminded him. “She can help keep me straight on the time delays and such. Besides, she’s got as much combat experience as any of us at the moment… just not the actual training. And you’ve got two more sensor operators.”

“Three.”

“Two, I’m taking another one,” Cameron told him, cracking a smile.

“I see.” Nathan smiled back. “Try to slip in some rack time soon,” he reminded her.

“You, too, sir.”

Nathan watched her leave the command briefing room. Her original confident and purposeful stride that had been so off-putting to him when they had first met had long left her. He wasn’t sure if it was fatigue or if her recent brush with death and subsequent recovery had stripped it from her. They had all been through a lot, but the rest of them had been too busy to think about it. Cameron had been given a couple months to dwell on it while she had been in the hospital on Corinair with nanites crawling through her the entire time.

She still had a few thousand of the little microscopic robots finishing up their repairs, and she still had to report to medical so that the Corinairan nanite tech could scan her progress and issue new commands to the nanites. He knew she had another week or so of nanite therapy left, and he wondered if those last few thousand nanites would present a problem during their attack on Takara.

She was right; he also needed some rack time. He had been surviving on cat naps of a few hours here and there for the last few days, ever since the raid on Ancot.
This is no way to fight a war
, he thought,
being forced to act in haste instead of being given the time to plan and prepare.

Nathan placed his face in his hands and leaned forward onto his elbows for a moment, rubbing his eyes and his face, before pulling back. Surprisingly, when he opened his eyes again, Jalea was standing at the hatchway.

“You look as though you carry the weight of the galaxy on your shoulders,” she told him.

“That obvious, huh?”

Jalea moved into the room, coming around the briefing table. “To those who have seen all sides of you, yes.” She moved to the chair to his left and took a seat, facing him across the shared corner of the table. “Command is difficult for you; I know.”

“Also obvious, huh?”

“Being a legend makes it even more difficult, does it not?”

“You could say that, yes.”

Jalea looked down at her hands. “I am sorry that the role was thrust upon you. It was never my intent to burden you so.”

Nathan’s eyes squinted slightly as he tried to figure out Jalea’s angle. She was not one to offer words of compassion or understanding. Both her words and her actions always had purpose. This time, however, her purpose eluded him. “Funny you should say that, since you always seem to be the one throwing around the Na-Tan thing.”

“True enough,” she admitted. “But how can you deny the truth? Anyone can see that you are Na-Tan.”

“I’m pretty sure
Na-Tan
was nowhere on my birth certificate,” he mused. “I think my parents would’ve mentioned it.”

“Most of us are not aware of our destiny until it is right in front of us,” she told him. “What makes you
Na-Tan
is more than the resemblance in your name or the fact that you command great power and are from Earth. It is your actions that make you a legend. Hanging the moniker of Na-Tan on you is nothing more than a play on the hopes and dreams of the oppressed. If your Captain Roberts were still alive, he would be playing the role of Na-Tan instead of you.”

“I wish,” Nathan laughed. “So you don’t believe I’m Na-Tan after all?”

“I believe you are as much Na-Tan as any man can be,” she told him.

“Then you lied to all the people of Corinair and Ancot?”

“I told them what they needed to hear,” Jalea admitted. “It is easier for the oppressed to rise up and fight for their freedom when a legend leads them.” Jalea reached out and placed her hand on Nathan’s. “They need Na-Tan to lead them.”

Nathan recoiled from her touch, pulling his hands away and picking up his data pad as he rose. “I think my XO is right; I need to get some rack time,” Nathan told her. “But thanks for the pep talk,” he added as he headed out the door. As he made his way across the room and into the corridor, he remembered how captivated he had been by Jalea’s eyes and her mysterious features when she had first come aboard back in the Taroa system. Back then, he would’ve believed just about anything she told him. Although he had never admitted it to anyone but Vladimir, his judgment had been clouded by her seductive beauty, just as Cameron had suspected. That, however, was a long time ago, and a lot had happened since then. Things were different now. His ship had changed, his crew had changed, and he had changed. He smiled.

* * *

Nathan entered the main hangar bay and strode out across what little open deck there still was. He had never seen the bay so cramped. Even though the cargo deck directly below had been mostly emptied and turned into another hangar deck, there was still almost no room left through which to receive an incoming ship. Yet somehow, Senior Chief Taggart and his Corinari deck crews kept finding room for them, which was a feat unto itself.

As he walked down the only empty section of the main hangar deck—the center aisle—he surveyed the ships that were on board. Most of them were fighters configured for orbital and atmospheric missions. These were lined up in neat, compact rows on either side of the center aisle. They were as far forward as they could go without blocking the forward transfer airlocks that led into the side fighter allies which contained elevators that traveled from the cargo deck below up through the top of the hull to become a launch/landing pad. Under normal circumstances, these pads were not used for flight operations. They were originally designed to act as an alternate means of moving smaller ships in and out of the Aurora should something happen to disable her flight apron aft of the main hangar deck. Currently, while the hangar deck was too full to allow normal traffic in and out through the rear transfer airlocks, smaller craft were being launched and recovered via the elevator pads. Using this alternate path to and from the hangar deck, they were able to keep up with the smaller shuttles that were constantly coming and going to and from the Aurora despite the crowded nature of her main hangar deck. It was especially important that they were not in orbit over Corinair.

Behind the rows of atmospheric fighters were the two comm-drone platforms, each carrying eight of the fifteen-meter-long drones tightly packed against the platform framework in two rows of four. Technicians worked frantically on the last two drones on each platform as they made the final programming changes that would convert the drones from communication relay tools into deadly, faster-than-light kinetic-kill-vehicles that could destroy an imperial battleship in a single blow. Although they had not been designed for such a purpose, they had an ominous look to them, as if their designers had known all along what they were capable of doing if used with ill intent. Just looking at the things gave Nathan an eerie feeling, as if he knew he would someday be forced to use them for just that purpose.

Aft of the comm-drone platforms were a few of the OMUs or ‘space tugs’ as Nathan liked to call them. After tractors lifted the drone platforms and carried them out onto the flight apron, the OMUs would lift them off the deck and maneuver them into position where they would await a launch directive at some later time. Nathan knew that, if the devices ever received such orders, it would mean that the battle was not going well at all.

As he moved farther aft, he saw a man in a very odd-looking flight suit. He was being escorted to a small shuttle that was powered up and waiting near the number one transfer airlock located at the port side of the main hanger deck’s aft end.

“Senior Chief?” Nathan called to Marcus who was giving instructions to some men nearby.

“Yes, Captain?”

“What is that guy wearing?” Nathan asked, pointing to the oddly dressed fellow now being helped into the small shuttle.

“He’s testing the new space jump rig,” Marcus explained, “the one with the auto-nav chute system.”

“Really?” Nathan exclaimed. “It’s not what I pictured it to be.”

“They had to add more protective layers to the drogue chute pack,” Marcus added. “The auto-nav rig made it stick out too much and it got damaged during reentry. Killed the first guy that tried it.”

“He died?”

“Yes, sir… drogue failed, and all the other chutes got torn up because of his speed. He slammed into the ground something terrible, he did.”

“Why wasn’t I informed?”

“Don’t know, sir,” Marcus admitted. “Figure the XO must’ve thought you had enough on your mind. But don’t worry, sir, they’ve got the bugs figured out this time, I’m sure. How do you Earth boys say it? Third time’s the charm?”

“Third time?” Nathan was almost afraid to ask.

“Uh, yeah,” the senior chief stumbled. “The second one didn’t work out so good either. The heat fucked up the auto-nav system and it bounced him off a building before he could override it.”

“Did he…”

“Oh, no, sir,” Marcus interrupted. “He’s fine. A few broken bones and such, but he’ll live. Probably even walk again, what with them nanites and all.”

“Thanks, Senior Chief,” Nathan said. “Carry on.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nathan returned the senior chief’s slightly unorthodox salute and continued on to the opposite aft corner of the bay where the Corinari mobile command post was being integrated into one of the medium-sized Corinairan cargo shuttles. The model was the largest one used by the Corinairans that could fit through the larger, number two transfer airlock at the center of the aft end of the main hanger deck. The first thing that Nathan noticed as he ascended the shuttles aft cargo loading ramp was that, despite the shuttle’s respectable size, there was barely enough room for the mobile command post to open its two side bays to their fully extended position. In fact, anyone wishing to traverse from the shuttle’s cockpit to her aft end would be forced to duck and walk under the protruding command post bays on either side in order to get past them.

The mobile command post itself was rather menacing looking in its own right. Built upon what appeared to be an over-sized, multi-axle flat bed truck, the command post itself looked as if it could have been simply placed onto the back of the truck’s cargo bed. The command post was somewhat wider than the truck it rode on, even if its two side bays were not extended. The nose of the vehicle was pointing toward the aft end of the shuttle as if it expected to be driven out the rear and down the loading ramp in a hurry. As Nathan entered the shuttle and moved forward, he noticed that the height of the command post itself was too low for it to be sitting on top of the truck’s cargo bed, but rather the entire unit was built from the ground up.

Laying on the command post’s roof were several Corinari technicians, working in what little space there was between the top of the command post and the shuttle’s ceiling. There was a ladder leaning against the front of the command post’s cab, which was connected to the cab by a couple pieces of short rope. It seemed an odd thing to do, until Nathan realized that directly overhead of the cab was the shuttle’s overhead escape hatch. Nathan quickly realized that the ladder was not just for the technicians working on top of the command post; it also led to the overhead hatch that, in turn, led to the transfer airlock that another crew was busy installing on the shuttle’s topside.

Nathan crouched low, bending over and squatting down slightly to pass under the side bays. Like most Corinairan vehicles and flying craft, this vehicle also had its main door located at the rear of the vehicle. Nathan made his way up the short personnel ramp and into the back of the vehicle, working his way forward toward the command center’s front end. After passing through a short, narrow corridor, he stepped into the main area. Although a fraction of its size, it appeared similar in design to the Combat Information Center on the Aurora. Just like their CIC, it had a center plotting table complete with holographic display systems. There was a row of six workstations on either side of the main room, each located along the outermost wall of the expandable side bays. On the forward end, there was another short passageway that led to the driver’s cab.