Swords and Saddles (18 page)

“CRT?”

“Cathode ray tube. Really primitive video. The back-up circuits require humans in the loop, but they’ll work for the most basic functions once we do restarts. Anyway, right now everything is routed to redundant secondary control locations scattered through other parts of the station. If the station loses one of those or connectivity to one of them, then we’ll have to run part of things through the back-ups in there. It won’t be pretty, but we can do it.” They trained for working with minimal automated support, scrolling text reporting basic data, ancient circuitry designs getting the necessary information to human brains making decisions and inputting commands, trying to substitute their own training, experience and intuition for the precise, lightning fast calculations of modern circuitry. It did work. In an ugly, headache-and-sweat inducing, close-enough-for-government-work way. People had first gone to the moon using that kind of computing power, the training manuals said. Or, as the saying went, “it was good enough for Apollo, wasn’t it?” In popular use that saying usually ended up being sarcastic, though, and applied to everything from food quality to the amount of area in living accommodations.

None of that mattered to the Marine, of course. All he cared about was that Jen had said the Navy could live without those circuits for a while. “Okay. Get your people away from the hatch, ma’am.”

Jen gathered her sailors in the far corner of the compartment, watching as the Marines resealed the hatch they’d entered through and then prepared to retake engineering central. “Fire in the hole,” she heard someone warn, and lowered her head to shield herself. A dull thump echoed through the compartment, then Jen raised her eyes to see the hatch blowing in towards engineering central in several large fragments. To her surprise, no atmosphere vented behind the hatch, revealing that the spaces beyond weren’t in vacuum. She was still wincing at the thought of what those hatch fragments might do to the equipment inside when one of the Marines fired a stubby weapon through the ruined hatch, then huddled back.

Jen’s survival suited blared warnings as it picked up the edges of the electro-magnetic pulse the Marines had detonated inside engineering central. She heard Chief Carreras’s sigh, and knew he was thinking about all of the transistors, integrated circuits and processor arrays which had just been fried by that EMP burst. But at least the vacuum tubes would have been unaffected by it, and any electrical systems on the attackers or their weapons would have been fried as well.

The Marines stormed through the hatch, firing as they went. Jen couldn’t tell how many shots the attackers got off, but after a couple of minutes a Marine reappeared and waved her forward. “Ma’am, we’ve secured this compartment.”

Jen brought the sailors with her back into engineering central, fighting down a gust of despair as she saw the damage inside. Three figures in survival suits lay splayed about the compartment, the suits marred by charred holes where Marine rounds had punched through. The Marines were already moving down the passageway as Jen directed the watch standers to assess the damage. She tried to ignore the dead attackers, focusing resolutely on her job.

A hand on her shoulder shocked her. Jen jumped back to see more figures in survival suits, these unarmed. “Easy, Jen. It’s Bob Nuevos.”

“Nice seeing you, commander.” Jen got control of herself, waving around the compartment. “It’s a mess.”

“Yeah. Listen, I’ve been ordered to take charge here until Captain Dila arrives. The sensor grids inside the damaged parts of the station have been blown to hell. We have to know what the damage is like in there.”

And you want me to volunteer
. “There’s still fighting going on, and the bad guys are wearing survival suits that look like ours.”

“You’ll have a Marine escort.”

So much for that excuse. “Fine. I’ll go.”

“Run a comm line behind you so we can receive your reports. There’s no telling how badly damaged the comm relays are inside that area.”

“Got it.” Jen paused. “I don’t know why there’s atmosphere in here. I know there was venting going on when I first sighted the attackers. Maybe from breaches they blew to get inside the station. But they must have sealed any holes in the outer structure after that.”

Commander Nuevos didn’t answer for a moment. “That’s odd. They wouldn’t need atmosphere since they’re wearing survival suits and vacuum would’ve complicated our repair efforts. See if you can find out why they restored airtight integrity.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” She wouldn’t explain the true reason for her reluctance, wouldn’t admit that the idea of struggling through wrecked compartments made her break into a cold sweat as images of the damage done to
Maury
came back to her.

Two Marines waited just outside of engineering central, somehow conveying by their postures how unhappy they were at being saddled with escorting a Navy officer instead of being on the front lines of the fight. “Let’s go,” Jen ordered.

She hadn’t made it to the ladder leading up to the next hatch when she realized water was trickling down the ladder and pooling beneath it. Looking up, Jen saw water splashing over the coaming of the hatch the attackers had blown. At least one of the pressurized water tanks serving Franklin had been breeched.

Stepping through the hatch, Jen tried to survey the damage, seeing holes blown in bulkheads and walls at floor level. As she moved forward, the water grew deeper, then shallower, as if it were rolling back and forth inside the damaged area. Jen tried to assess how much water was involved, then staggered as a particularly high surge swirled up above her shins. At the same time, she heard another one of those eerie groans from the structure of the station. “Oh my God.”

“Lieutenant?” one of the Marines asked.

“I just figured out what’s going on.” She keyed the circuit back to engineering central. “Commander Nuevos!”

“This is Captain Dila. What’d you find, lieutenant?”

“A lot of water and passages blown for it to move freely in these spaces, captain. They blew at least two main water tanks, and it’s surging back and forth already.”

“Surging?”

Jen remembered that Captain Dila didn’t have much shipboard experience back on Earth. “Free surface effect, captain. If we don’t get this water pumped and corralled it’ll keep picking up energy and magnifying its force as it rushes back and forth in here.”

Dila might not have served on many ships, but he was a good engineer. “That amount of mass running free? It could tear this entire section of the station apart.”

“Yes, sir. We need pumps rigged to secure the water and we need damage control teams to seal the holes that are letting the water move about, and we need them half an hour ago.”

She heard Dila issuing orders, then his voice came back clearly to her. “Lieutenant Shen, where exactly are you now?”

“Passageway Seven Alpha Frame Ninety-two.”

“Is there any fighting in the area?”

“No, sir. I can hear fighting but it seems a few compartments away.”

“Try to establish how far forward our damage control teams can move to deal with the damage. I’ll be sending them in as fast as I can.”

Jen exhaled, listening to explosions and shots which already seemed far too close. “Aye, aye, sir.” She turned to the Marines. “I need to get as close to the fighting as possible.”

Both of the Marines seemed to radiate joy at the chance to get closer to the fight. “Yes, ma’am! Follow us!”

The Marines advanced, crouching down, splashing through the water, their weapons constantly on the move for threats. One of the Marines halted, holding up a warning hand, then slunk forward a meter and examined something on the deck. “Got some fallen sailors here.”

Jen pushed forward past the other Marine, who was still standing alert for threats. She knelt in the water, gazing at the two figures in survival suits. Both wore Navy insignia and one still had a sidearm clenched in her fist. Both had been riddled with metal slugs from the attackers’ weapons. “Masters-at-arms. They were part of the emergency reaction force.” Jacking into their suits, Jen called up the readouts from any systems still functioning. Health status readings were all zero. “They’re both dead.” Her emotions seemed to have frozen, going back to the day when she had picked her way through the remnants of
Maury
’s engineering spaces and the remnants of the officers and sailors who had been in those spaces.

“They had guts,” one of the Marines observed. “Going up against these guys in just those suits and carrying light arms like that.”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

The sounds of shots came ever closer, punctuated by rolling vibrations in the bulkheads and deck as more explosions rattled the station. Jen caught a glimpse of other Marines, all of them facing in the other direction, then a small detonation echoed through the station’s frame and the Marines charged forward, firing. “That’s the front line, ma’am,” one of her Marines reported.

Jen crouched against a torn bulkhead, holding herself together by sheer willpower. “Captain Dila, I’m at frame forty-one. The fighting is about three meters farther inboard, at frame thirty-eight.”

“
Three meters
? Dammit, Shen, get back.”

“It’s moving away from me, sir.” Jen paused as one of her Marine escorts waved for attention.

“Looks like that was the last active resistance, ma’am,” the Marine reported. “Our command net is breaking the assault forces into fire teams to search for any attackers lying low.” The water rolled up higher around Jen’s legs and the station shivered again. “What the hell is that, ma’am?”

“Wave action,” she explained. “The Navy’s on it.” At least, she hoped so. “Captain Dila, my Marines report that active resistance appears to have ceased.”

“Thank God. Stay where you are and monitor conditions until the damage control teams reach you. Then I want you to move into the rest of the damaged areas and give us as good a report as you can.”

Jen leaned against the bulkhead, listening to and feeling Franklin’s structure complain at the unfamiliar stresses, wondering how much progress the damage control teams were making. Finally she heard and then saw a team wading through the passageway toward her, carrying panels which they were hastily tacking into place over the worst holes in the walls to hinder the movement of the water. “Okay, Marines. I’ve got orders to check out more compartments. You can rejoin your unit.”

“Wait, ma’am.” The Marine paused to check with his superiors, then somehow shrugged through the combat armor. “We’re to stick with you for now, ma’am. The major says we can’t afford to lose you.”

“It’s nice to be appreciated.” Jen led the Marines this time, moving into compartments she thought needed to be checked, evaluating damage and calling it back to engineering central so damage control efforts could be prioritized. The water levels were definitely going down now, and the surges back and forth diminishing rapidly in intensity. The noticeable fluctuations in gravity had almost totally ceased. Reaching a bulkhead near the water tanks, Jen frowned down at large holes the attackers had blown near deck level. She crouched to look inside them, confirming that these holes gave onto nothing but a series of spare parts lockers. The identifying information on the bulkheads was up to date as well, but seemed new. She moved several meters to the left, reaching a sturdy bulkhead freshly labeled with warnings in large letters.
Danger. Pressurized Liquid On Other Side Of Bulkhead
. “Why the hell?”

“Ma’am?” one of the Marines asked.

“They blew the holes in the wrong places. If they’d vented this tank, too, they might have wrecked the station. It’s impossible to miss these labels. But they blew the wrong bulkhead.”

The Marines looked at each other, then one faced Jen again. “Maybe they had orders to blow that bulkhead, ma’am.”

“But it was the
wrong
bulkhead.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time orders were wrong, ma’am. Good thing for us, huh?”

“Yeah. Good thing.”

At some point the area was declared clear and the Marines were finally withdrawn back to the
Belleau Wood
. Jen kept up her examination of the damaged areas, sometimes directing damage control teams she came across, until temporary sensor grids were strung in the compartments and she was called back to engineering central. The place was crowded with every available engineer and systems tech, all trying to get full systems capability back online. Fried circuit boards, black boxes and motherboards littered the deck as everyone working on repairs cursed the attackers, the Marines and their motherboarding EMP weapon, and the designers of the control consoles. Jen jumped in on one console, eventually helping get it working at close to one hundred percent again, then volunteered to lead one of the next shift of damage control teams heading into the damaged areas.

No one had yet heard who the attackers were. Aside from the Marines and the surviving masters-at-arms, few had even caught a glimpse of the attackers. “I don’t know,” Jen kept repeating to everyone who asked her. “I didn’t see any identifying markings on them. I’ll lay you odds there’s nothing on them that ties them to anyone.”

At some point in the endless hours of labor, Jen sat down for a moment to eat a ration bar and didn’t so much fall asleep as pass out from exhaustion. She was awakened by the sound of her name and bolted upright, staring around in confusion as she tried to shake the fatigue clouding her mind. Focusing, Jen saw a man wearing admiral’s stars standing in front of her. But as she tried to spring to attention, the man held out his hands to almost hold her down.

“Relax, lieutenant. You’re Shen?”

“Yes, sir.” It just felt wrong to sit down while an admiral stood looking at her, but Jen couldn’t very well ignore his order to remain seated.

“From all I hear we owe you a great deal, lieutenant. You did one hell of a job, and your quick reactions kept things from being worse. Maybe a lot worse.” The admiral gazed soberly at her for a long moment. “Maybe you don’t know, but I signed the charge sheet for your court-martial after the accident on the
Maury
. I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my time, Lieutenant Shen, but today proved that was by far the worst. They teach us never to apologize, but I’m doing it now. I deeply regret what the Navy put you through, and I’ll do what I can to make it right. Thank you, lieutenant.” The admiral extended his hand and Jen shook it reflexively, feeling even more stunned than before. Then the admiral nodded and moved off with his aide trailing.