Fatal Boarding (8 page)

"Gossip is a necessary part of social
intercourse. To a degree it is very healthy. It's like spice, a
little bit can be very good, too much ruins the food. There is some
privacy aboard the Electra, though. For instance, I doubt many
people know about the bourbon."

"I don't believe it!"

"Don't worry, as your doctor, I'm sworn to
secrecy. As a matter of fact, I'd like to stop by your place for a
drink sometime, if you wouldn't mind."

"Doc, if I did have such a thing, you'd be
welcome anytime."

"Great. In that case, please accept a
standing invitation to my place for the best gin and tonic this
side of B-deck."

I shook my head in exasperation and stood to
leave.

"Don't forget, 09:00 tomorrow, Adrian. It'll
only take a few minutes."

"Doc, how did you know about the
bourbon?"

"Adrian, I'm disappointed in you. A question
like that coming from a lead security officer? It showed up in
Frank Parker's blood work. He mentioned he had talked to you last
night. It didn’t take much to put two and two together. The junior
EVA types don't dare sneak that stuff on board yet. They worry
about careers and such. They don't quite know the ins and outs.
Only veterans like you and I know we can get away with it. And
since I've answered your question, how about answering one for me.
Your profile shows that you are thirty-seven years old. Women seem
to like you quite a bit. Nice women. So why haven't you ever been
married? It's a personal question. You don't have to answer
it."

"I haven't learned the ins and outs, Doc. I
don't know what I could get away with and when."

"Well, I hate to be the one to break it to
you, but you never will.”

Chapter 8

It was no secret that everyone on board was
anxious for the 17:00 jump to light. There was a very definite
get-out-of-here, and get-on-with-it sentiment throughout the ship.
When 17:00 came and went with no change to our starlight, I was
thankful I had bridge access.

The bridge occupies a hemispherical, forward
section of the ship. It's similar to a small version of Mission
Control. When things are going well, everyone remains seated at
their assigned consoles. The Jump Director watches from the command
balcony, and calls out the necessary procedural steps over the net.
When the doors to the bridge opened, that was the scene unfolding
in front of me. It is extremely prudent to always be careful of
what you say on the Command Network. Everything is recorded and
stored neatly away, and when you screw up, they come and play it
back to you. You wind up testifying against yourself at your own
trial.

I waited for someone else to enter and
followed them in to draw less attention, then quickly moved a few
steps to the right to get out of the way. There are no observation
windows on the Bridge. Instead, there are three two-story view
screens mounted against the curving front bulkhead. On the right, a
reduced image displayed the alien craft in its entirety. There was
something wrong with the left-hand display. The image was
flickering, interrupted by thin, white, horizontal lines. It was a
full panel of stars. I guessed it to be our destination coordinates
for the jump we didn’t seem to be making. The center screen had
been set to display the current test data.

A few inches above my head was the low
ceiling formed by the Command Officer's Control balcony and just to
my right the guide rails for one of the circular elevators that
provided access to it. I knew that Captain Grey, Commander Tolson,
and one of the Jump Directors were up there doing their best to
unravel whatever was wrong. I looked out across the controlled
hysteria for a place I could view a data display monitor. On the
opposite side of the room, the ugly-yellow three-bay Range-Safety
console stuck out above the Engineering Stations. Chief Safety
Officer Ray Tolson was standing alongside it. Only one of the three
seats at the position was taken. I weaved my way as inconspicuously
as possible through the busy traffic and stood beside him. He
nodded a brief greeting and turned his attention back to the
monitors. At the back of the room, on the raised Command Platform,
Grey, Tolson and Jump Director Terry Osterly were huddled together
in a discussion. Tolson looked up for a moment and caught my eye,
his only acknowledgement that I had arrived.

I scanned the range safety monitors. There
was not much to see. The printouts on the screens had stopped
during an Initiation Subsystems Test of the main engines. The
displays read ‘Auto Termination, step 10056789-1003, 400 No Gos,
000 SE-Data No Gos’.

Grey's voice broke in over the net speakers,
barely audible over the room noise. "Cap to MECO, did we, or did we
not pass this initiation test only thirty minutes ago?"

"MECO, that's affirmative, sir."

"And you're certain the test had the same
checksum?"

"Sir, inspection has the header printout in
their hand right now."

"So, from All-Go, to four hundred No-Gos, in
thirty minutes with no changes?"

"That's the way we read it, Captain."

Grey moved out from behind the director’s
console and came up to the protective waist-high barrier at the
edge of the platform. He looked out over the bridge and rested his
hands on the railing. He pushed his headset microphone away from
his face and spoke so loudly it wasn't needed. "Alright everyone,
quiet please... I said quiet!"

The crowd noise stopped abruptly. Everyone
stared up at him and waited.

"Alright, this is what we're going to do.
We're going to secure the main engines and come back to them later.
Then we're going to use maneuvering thrusters to back us at least a
kilometer away from that piece of junk out there. We're going to
bring her around to the jump heading and go to station keeping.
We're going to do that right now! Does anyone not understand?"

Stunned silence. People began scooting back
to their stations. Grey returned to his position behind the
director’s console.

“Helm, please call up manual mode and input
five seconds of the aft starboard thrusters. You will execute on my
command.”

“Five seconds of aft starboard thrusters,
Captain. Ready to engage.”

“Execute.”

We all watched the center display, expecting
it to swing away from the alien ship. Nothing happened.

Captain’s Grey’s voice sounded more than
annoyed. “MECO, we see error code ast03. What happened?”

MECO responded nervously. “That’s loss of
handshake with the thruster assembly, Captain. We’ll have to run
diagnostics to analyze it.”

We all heard the Captain’s long exhale over
the com. “Alright then people, we shall go the other way. Helm,
input five seconds of one hundred percent to the aft port thruster.
Execute on my command.”

“Five seconds of the aft port thrusters
ready, Captain.”

“Execute.”

Once again, nothing happened. This time the
Captain sounded genuinely frustrated. “MECO, we see error code
apt03. Do you concur?”

“Yes, Captain. It’s the same failure.”

Grey paused a moment to collect himself.
“All jump personnel, please stand down and secure the bridge while
we evaluate these error codes.”

A nervous tone filled the bridge as people
attended to their shut down duties. Captain Grey and his staff
quietly exited. There would be no jumping this evening.

I was unexpectedly called to the bridge
briefing room about an hour later. Grey and Tolson were the only
ones there. They had been debating for some time. I was entering in
the middle of it.

“It was bad enough with the nav computer
fiasco, and now that, for Christ’s sake. We'll manufacture bumpers
and attach them to the scouts if we have to. You'd better get them
running simulations on it right now, because if we can't get
thruster control back it'll be all we've got. We'll be shootin'
from the hip, god-damn it."

"Jean, we may not even have that."

"What are you talking about?"

“Those scout ships aren’t tugs. They’re
light-weights, thin-skinned. I’m not sure there is structural
integrity enough to attach bumpers much less push a large mass
object. And, you know better than I, Electra wasn’t designed to be
pushed. Tugs would use tractor beams to distribute the stress
evenly. We’ll have to either find some structure in the right place
or reinforce somehow. It’ll take hours. We'd have to depressurize
the high bay and then put men in spacesuits out there to bring out
the reinforcement gear, and guide the scouts in. The pilots would
have to sit in their pressurized cockpits the whole time the EVA
guys were setting up."

"Look Carl, you get the engineering teams
together and tell them they get one more shot at making their
systems work. Then we try something else. We're not going to keep
bringing the teams up to the line and then not snapping the ball.
You work the engineering end, I'll see if I can find out anything
else useful from the Emissary. Meet me in my office at 21:00."

Grey shook his head as he exited through the
door. Tolson turned to me with a touch of worry in his eye,
something not often seen.

"Adrian, There is another possibility the
Captain and I have been discussing. It's why your here."

"I am dying to help, Commander."

Tolson exhaled deeply and rubbed one hand
across his mouth. He straightened up and tugged at the bottom of
his uniform jacket to clear the wrinkles. "How would you feel about
taking another look inside that ship out there?"

"Really?"

“It’s not a done deal, but it needs to be in
our back pocket. The doctor wants some of that organic material
pretty bad, but that wouldn’t be the primary mission.”

“I can’t wait to hear what that would
be.”

“It would be their power systems. We would
want them all shut down. It would be a search and secure mission.
If we must remain here longer than planned, we’d like to know that
ship is inert, completely dead.”

“I understand that part.”

“Think about whom you’d like to have along
on that kind of EVA, and what you’d want to bring with you, if you
know what I mean. Work it all out yourself quietly, and if this
gets stepped up to the next level, I’ll give you plenty of
warning.”

“I have one question.”

“What’s that?”

“Who’s the Emissary?”

“That’s a need-to-know basis. You don’t need
to know.”

Chapter 9

There are cunning little tricks that
experienced captains sometimes play on their crews. With help from
the rumor mill, they will, on occasion, allow trite problems to be
exaggerated into monumental ones. A simple pressure leak in a
plasma conduit, for example, can easily grow into impending doom.
Throughout the escalating ordeal, the captain will make himself
appear only casually concerned, even indifferent, to the ongoing
crisis. And when all around him have reached a point that they are
teetering on the brink of hysteria, he will coolly instruct a
mechanic to go to the proper junction point and tighten the loose
coupling, thus miraculously implementing a solution to the near
disaster. In this way, a ship's crew can come to believe that no
matter how bad it gets, if the captain is cool, things probably are
not all that bad.

I had just seen our Captain, not so cool. It
set off little alarms in my head. The Adrian Tarn rule-number-four
of self preservation had come streaming out of the mental ticker
tape machine. 'When conditions conducive to mortal danger first
become apparent, do not wait to see if they will go away.' It was
time to string the tin cans around base camp and listen for
anything that might set them clanging. And, it was time to learn
everything there was to know about the enemy. Most of my evening
was spent going over everything we had, and reviewing which SWAT
members were best suited for this particular unknown. By morning, I
had a good idea of the type of EVA that would need to be set
up.

I squeezed the communications button on my
watch and spoke into it. "Taurin to R.J. Smith.”

The tiny screen read, ‘please wait.’ There
was an unusually long delay. Finally a very scraggling image of
R.J. came into view. He needed a shave. His hair was sticking up in
a cowlick that reminded me of ‘Our Gang’. His eyes were rebelling
against the command to open. I could tell he had gotten up and was
sitting at his computer terminal, leaning too close to the
monitor.

"God R.J., you look bad even on a little
screen!"

"No, no, don't give it a second thought,
Adrian. It's perfectly okay. I had to get up anyway."

"I didn’t see you at the jump we didn't
make."

"I was going to ask you not to remind me of
that. What time is it?"

"It's 07:00. Meet me in the mess. I'll fix
you a coffee, and tell you more things you don't want to hear."

"Okay, give me thirty. But I bet my news is
worse than yours."

"I don't see how."

"I'll meet you in the mess."

"I'll try for a window seat."

"Keep your humor while you can, Mr.
Tarn."

The lack of patrons in the Mess hall left an
ominous air about the place. Earlier in the day, when the place
should have been deserted, it had been packed. Now at this time of
day, when the first shift people should have been celebrating their
normal time off, there were only a few groups, scattered around the
hall. The mood had changed. Instead of the casual cheeriness that
had been so apparent this morning, the tone of the conversations
was subdued. There were a few casual glances my way as I took a
table by the observation windows. No jovial greetings accompanied
them. I placed the coffee server by R.J.'s seat, and sipped the ice
water I had made for myself.

R.J. came striding in a few minutes later,
his prided flower-child mug swinging along in his left hand. His
off-duty wear consisted of an aging gray sweatshirt with the
collars and sleeves cut off, washed out jeans, and dirty, high top
athletic shoes. He sat down across from me and reached for the
coffee. His usual flippant stare was missing. He looked tired, and
unamused.