Solfleet: The Call of Duty (12 page)

“Caesar, get
the hell outta there!” O’Donnell shouted, knowing that his friend couldn’t hear
him but helpless to do anything more.

Caesar must
have had the same thought at the same moment, because he quickly hit the
appropriate buttons on his left forearm to seal and pressurize his flight suit,
then reached for the emergency levers directly above his shoulders and blew the
canopy. Denied their fuel, the flames quickly flickered and died, and the smoke
dispersed into the vacuum of space. Small bursts of sparks continued to erupt
for the next several seconds, but soon they ceased as well.

Elementary school
science class thought everyone that for every action there was always an equal and
opposite reaction. That basic law of physics held especially true in the gravity-free
vacuum of deep space. So when his friend’s wrecked plane began to drift slowly
away as a result of his having blown the canopy, O’Donnell simply made a very slight
but necessary adjustment to his own course and speed to match its new
trajectory. Then he carefully maneuvered closer to the wreckage, almost close
enough to reach out and touch it, and matched its adjusted pitch.

The rest was
easy. He fired his towline at the side of Caesar’s plane, then pressurized his
suit and depressurized his cockpit, opened his canopy, and simply waited for
his friend to evacuate his own plane and pull himself over.

“I’m in,”
Caesar told him over the internal link as soon as he’d strapped himself into
the rescue seat and plugged in.

“So what
brings you out here so far?” O’Donnell asked him as the canopy closed them in.

“Very funny.”

O’Donnell
grinned, then asked, “Seriously, what hit you?”

“I have no...”
Gazing out the side while O’Donnell concentrated on safely moving away from the
wreckage and turning back toward the
Victory
, Caesar saw it first. “Oh
my God.”

“Oh my God,
what?” O’Donnell asked, suddenly very concerned. “What is it, Caesar? What’s
wrong?”

“Check the
Victory
,
Tom.”

“Check the...”
Then he saw it. “Aw hell.”

All they
could do was watch in horror as the huge burning mass of battlecruiser wreckage
crashed into their mother ship’s lower portside jump nacelle and ripped it and
most of its dual support structures away from the main hull as she tried
unsuccessfully to pitch downward and roll out of the way. One small section
broke away and smashed into the
Victory
’s lower scanner array, which
then ignited into a brilliant but short-lived web of spastic, electric-blue energy
bolts. Then, deflected by the sheer mass of the dismembered nacelle, the
wreckage crashed into the rear of the upper nacelle as well, twisted it and
tore it away from its aft support structure, and then tumbled off into space.

O’Donnell
could only imagine what the whole thing would have sounded like, if sound could
travel through space. He could only imagine what terrifying hell his shipmates
were going through at that very moment. Miraculously though, despite being
severely wounded and scarred, pitching and yawing and rolling out of control,
with fires breaking out through the hull in at least a dozen different places,
the
Victory
didn’t explode.

“
Jesus
Christ!
” one of the other pilots exclaimed.

“
What the
hell are we supposed to do now?
” another asked.

“
We are
totally f...
”

“
Stand
by, Star Hawks,
” the squadron commander instructed. “
Give them a chance
to bring her under control. They’ll issue instructions as soon as they can.
”

O’Donnell
could only hope the major was right—that someone remained alive onboard their
mother vessel. Onboard their home.

* * *

Still lying
on the deck beside the helm station where he’d come to rest, Rawlins looked up
at the viewscreen and saw the stars racing by in an upward arch. They were
pitching forward again and rolling at the same time—tumbling completely out of
control. But at least they were alive. Some of them, anyway.

“How bad is
it, Ensign?” he asked, quickly surveying the entire bridge as he picked himself
up. Somehow, with the exception of one of Lieutenant Irons’ scanner displays,
which had shorted out when the array was hit—she’d put the fire out quickly and
saved the rest of her instruments—the bridge appeared to have been spared any
further serious damage.

“Don’t ask
me how, sir, but we’ve still got our high-speed and maneuvering thrusters,”
LaRocca answered as he wiped a small trickle of blood from his chin. “Give me a
minute or two and I’ll have us under control again.”

“Life
support is fluctuating, Commander,” the engineer added, holding his hand over a
small bleeding cut on his forehead. “We’ve got fires breaking out all along the
port side. Damage control and medical teams are responding, but the damage is pretty
extensive. Port gun emplacements have all been knocked out and initial reports
indicate we’ve lost both port nacelles and the entire lower scanner array.”

“
Bridge,
this is the CAG.
”

Good,
Rawlins thought as he moved to the front of the command station. They still had
at least partial internal communications. “Rawlins here,” he answered. “Go
ahead.”

“
Status
report from Flight Operations, sir. There’s some minor buckling across the
width of the portside landing deck near the threshold, but our interceptors
should be able to overfly it and land without a problem. Soon as the equipment
that broke free and fell all over the place is cleaned up, that is. Starboard
deck is in good shape.
”

“Does Chief
Simmons know how long it’ll be before the port deck is operational again?”
Rawlins asked.

A brief
moment of silence on the CAG’s end spoke volumes. Rawlins knew immediately that
they had lost the chief.

“
Master
Sergeant Rosas tells me they’ll be ready to recover the interceptors in ten or fifteen
minutes,
” the CAG reported solemnly.

“Confirm
that with him, Commander,” Rawlins ordered emotionlessly, even though as one of
several officers in the fleet who had actually learned a thing or two from the
chief when they were all much,
much
younger men, he felt this particular
loss most acutely. As the acting captain, he reminded himself, he couldn’t let
the crew see any signs weakness in him. “I want our pilots back aboard as soon
as possible.”

“
Aye,
sir. CAG out.
”

Rawlins
faced the engineer again and asked, “How bad are our main drive systems?”

“Reactors
are offline and cooling down quickly, sir,” the young man reluctantly reported.
“Mister LaRocca’s thrusters are all we’re going to have for a while.”

“How much
time to bring them back online?”

The engineer
turned and faced his superior officer with a grim expression. “Commander
Marshall says they’ll need about three months repair at a proper shipyard
before we can even
try
to bring them back online, Commander.”

Rawlins
sighed. Three months. And that was just for the reactors. Much of the ship had
sustained substantially worse damage. He snickered and shook his head. First
time in complete command and he’d broken his captain’s ship. He’d broken it but
good. “That’s it then,” he finally said. “We’re out of this one for good.
Mister Noonian, call some medics up here to... No, belay that,” he amended,
realizing that the Medbay probably couldn’t afford to spare anyone. “Call
another engineer and a helmsman up here.”

“They’re on
their way, sir,” the cyberclone advised him almost immediately.

Rawlins then
turned to LaRocca and the engineer in turn and said, “As soon as your relief
shows up, I want you two to head down to Medbay and get patched up.”

“Yes, sir,”
they answered in unison.

Rawlins
turned back to the helmsman and asked, “Mister LaRocca, how soon can we make it
to the jumpstation on high-speed thrusters?”

LaRocca did
his best to lick the fresh blood from his chin as he entered the query into his
nav-comp. “About three and a half days, sir,” he answered. Then he looked up at
the commander and added, “Maybe three flat if we can cut down on the course changes
significantly enough.”

“All right.
We’ll do that, as long as we don’t pick up any signs of...” He looked over at
Tactical. “Do we have sensors and scanners, Miss Irons?”

“The Z-minus
forward array is a total loss, sir,” she answered. “And the Z-minus aft has
sensors only. No active scanners. Other than that, we’re good, sir.”

“All right,”
he said as he turned back to the helmsman. “Direct course, as long as we don’t
pick up any signs of pursuit, Mister LaRocca. But under no circumstances will
we lead the Veshtonn toward the jumpstation. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly,
sir.”

“Make sure
your relief understands it just as clearly when he gets here, too. Initiate as
soon as the last of our fighters has landed.”

“Aye, sir.”

Three and a
half days, Rawlins reflected as he stepped around the command console and
finally sat back down. Perhaps three, if they were extremely lucky. About four
hours for station personnel to outfit the ship with two emergency nacelles for
the jump home, provided they had them on hand and waiting for them when they
arrived—two days work for that prep. Three at the most. All right. They’d send
the request to the station immediately. Then they’d maintain strict
communications silence and hope—and
pray
—that the Veshtonn didn’t spot
them enroute.

And that the
jumpstation would still be there when they finally arrived.

“I want
casualty and damage reports as you get them, people,” he advised the bridge
crew in general. “Sergeant Noonian, send a request for two emergency nacelles
to the station and give them our E-T-A. Tell them not to respond, and maintain
strict communications silence after you send that message.”

“Aye, sir.”

The next
three days were going to be three very long days indeed.

Rather than
go through the trouble of shaving—beard retardant made him break out like a
teenager with a bad case of acne, so he never used it—pulling on a uniform, and
going into the office to work like he’d done every other Saturday for the last
several months, Admiral Hansen had decided to work from home to ensure Heather
didn’t try to sneak out again. As it turned out, his plan worked
too
well.
Not only had she not tried to sneak out of their quarters, she hadn’t even come
out of her room once all day. She’d even refused to open her door long enough
for him to pass her a plate of food at lunch time. As one of the lucky ones, one
of those people who could eat all they wanted of whatever they wanted and still
not gain any weight, it wasn’t like her to skip a meal. She must
really
have
been upset. Was that movie she’d wanted to go see, or more precisely that
actor, really that big a deal?

Given a
choice, of course, he would have preferred to let her go. Or even better, to
have spent at least part of the day with her himself,
outside
their quarters,
doing something fun at one of the station’s recreational facilities—when was
the last time they’d done
anything
together?—instead of playing warden
to her. Then again, she probably wouldn’t have been very pleasant company on
this particular day. But Earth and the Coalition were still very much at war
with the Veshtonn Empire, and the resultant workload hadn’t allowed him that
luxury in a very long time.

Using a
secret back door password that he’d written into the programming himself, back
when he first assumed command of the agency, the admiral had tied his home
terminal through Hal into the fleet intelligence net and had spent the day
looking into the
Excalibur
situation and all that related to it. To his
surprise he’d discovered that working from home had actually enabled him to get
much more than his typical amount of work done a lot faster than usual. Just
why that was the case, he couldn’t guess. After all, it was Saturday. If he’d
gone into the office like he usually did, he still would have been alone and
undistracted. Well, except for Vicky, that is...and the duty officer, whoever
that might have been. Vicky would have shown up a few minutes before him and made
a pot of coffee—how she always knew exactly what time to be there was a mystery
unto itself—then left him alone to work, and whoever the D.O. happened to be
would have bid him a good morning and then done his or her best to avoid him
like the plague for the rest of the day. Beyond that there would still have
been nothing to distract him.

Oh well. It had
worked out well, regardless, and working barefoot in shorts and a tee shirt was
no unpleasant benefit either. In fact, the only downside he’d noticed at all
was that his coffee tasted noticeably inferior to Vicky’s. He used the same blend
at home as she did in the office, but for some reason it just didn’t taste as
good.

Apparently,
he lacked her magic touch.

“
Excuse
me, Nick,
” Hal’s voice said through the terminal speakers, startling him.

“What is it,
Hal?” Hansen asked.

“
You have
just received an encrypted and scrambled transmission burst from Lieutenant
Commander Quinn of the Europan field office.
”

“What does
she say?”

“
She has
forwarded an enhanced copy of the same transmission record she sent earlier.
”

“Oh, good,”
he commented as he straightened slightly in his chair. “Download it to my home
terminal and play it for me, please.”

“
Certainly.
”

The playback
began almost immediately.