The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (33 page)

“Get Dinah at the tactical station,” Staples yelled at Templeton as she darted forward to the coms panel at what she still thought of as Yegor’s station. As she did so, she heard Bethany climb into the cockpit behind her. She desperately worked the controls to broadcast on a general hailing frequency. Simultaneously, she heard Templeton speaking into his watch to summon the engineer to the cockpit. Even in the midst of her panic, she had the presence of mind to keep the transmission tight band; she didn’t want to tell the whole system that
Gringolet
had just fired missiles without provocation at another ship.

“Unidentified vessel, this is Captain Staples of commuter vessel
Gringolet
. We did not intend to fire at you. Please do not return fire. We want to help. Please respond.” Several seconds passed in silence as the crew in the cockpit looked up through the windows. All trace of light from the other ship had vanished, the vacuum sucking the fire into nothingness, and a thousand pieces of wreckage drifted away from the vessel. The majority of it looked intact; enough, Staples thought, to still be a threat if the crew decided to put up a fight. It was still moving towards them, spinning lazily on its axis from the missile impact. Staples realized that they were going to pass each other at a considerable clip.

“Cut thrust,” she snapped at Charis. “Turn us over, slow us down at one G,” she said to Bethany as the girl took her seat and gathered her hair in a ponytail behind her head. Instinctively, she grabbed the bar in front of her to secure herself against the loss of gravity. Templeton quickly made a shipwide coms announcement to expect loss of thrust in thirty seconds. She hated to give so little notice. Quick transitions of gravity without warning were a great way to injure people, but it couldn’t be helped. As fast as they were going, it would take hours to come to a full stop, and the other ship was moving in the other direction. Getting to a position to render aid to them could take several hours, and by then it could be far too late.

The sound of another person climbing into the cockpit drew Staples’ attention reluctantly away from the window. She expected to see John gaining his feet, but instead she saw Dinah moving for the tactical station. “How-” she began.

“Felt the missiles launch, sir. I figured you’d need me up here.” She strapped herself into the chair at her new station. “I took the liberty of telling Park to take the engine room; hope that’s all right, sir.”

Staples processed this for a second, then nodded. “No, that was the right thing to do.” She wondered if Dinah was the only person on the ship who would have recognized the sensation of a vessel launching missiles. As she reflected that she would have been happy to go her whole life without experiencing the feeling, she reached for the safety harness on the coms chair.

Dinah was already working the controls. “I’m bringing the flak guns online and reloading the missile bays, sir.”

As she finished, Charis looked at Bethany and said, “Now.” The sound of the engines, so constant on their journeys as to go unnoticed, like the droning of a fan on a hot summer day, died away. The silence that followed seemed absolute.

“Dinah, I don’t want to fight them. I don’t know why we fired missiles at them, but we need to help them if we can.” She pushed a stray strand of her blonde hair out of her face.

“Appreciated, sir, but they may not feel the same way. It’s only prudent to prepare for retaliation,” Dinah said grimly, and Staples couldn’t argue with her logic.

“Don, once we get under thrust again, tell Jang to search the computer core and the missile bay. We need to make sure whoever fired those missiles doesn’t do it again.” Templeton nodded and began to relay the orders to the security chief. The ship was moving end over end as Bethany brought them around, and Charis was poised to ramp up the engines to begin the process of slowing the ship down. Staples repeated her hail to the other vessel.

              “Why don’t they answer?” came Bethany’s high voice.

              “I don’t know,” Staples replied. “Either their coms are damaged, they’re planning on attacking, or the crew is too injured to reply.”

              “Or…” Bethany whispered.

              Staples nodded. “Or they’re all dead. God, I hope it’s the first one.”

              “They’re firing, Captain!” Charis nearly shouted. Staples glanced up through the window, looking for the other ship, but of course it was behind them now as Bethany completed their turn. Instead, she glanced down at the coms panel and shuffled her way quickly through the menus to get an aft view of the ship. “I make three missiles just launched and gaining speed. Twenty seconds to impact!” The fear in the navigator’s voice was plain.

              Dinah didn’t wait for orders. “Bethany, don’t kick in thrust. Put our port side on them.” Even as she spoke, Staples could feel the sharp drag of the turn; it strained her neck. Bethany quickly rotated the port side of the ship to the other vessel, and then a sound they all hoped never to hear filled the cockpit. The anti-missile flak guns along side of the ship, armed and extended by the chief engineer only a minute before, began their barrage. The drumbeat of the cannons echoed through the room and reverberated throughout the entire ship, shuddering all of them in their seats. Dozens of explosive rounds were fired into space as Dinah did her best to coordinate their trajectory with that of the incoming missiles.

              They could see the explosions now through the windows to their left, brief flashes of light as the shells erupted. The air and explosive in each shell was burned up and each resulted in a cloud of shrapnel. Dinah worked to coordinate the fire of ten different guns into three groups, each focused on the computer’s calculated incoming trajectory of one of the missiles. A second later, she keyed a sequence on another panel without looking away from her surface, and flares erupted from the side of the ship, burning bright against the pinprick stars. The sound of the flak guns firing filled the room, but it felt oddly distant to Staples, disconnected from the silent explosions she could see through the window.

              “Suggest we fire back, Captain,” Dinah managed through gritted teeth. A second later, there was the bloom brighter than Sol as the shrapnel caught one of the incoming missiles. Another detonated a second later, and Staples caught herself holding her breath. When the third missile exploded, lured off by a flare and caught by a needle sized piece of shrapnel, she let out a huge breath. The firing stopped abruptly, and in the silence, Staples could hear the faintest tinkling of errant pieces of shrapnel and the missiles bouncing off the hull.

              Instead of ordering Dinah to return fire, Staples leaned to the coms speaker again. “Repeat, this is
Gringolet
. We did not open fire; we have a saboteur. Please cease your attack!” There was no sound in the cockpit for several seconds, and Staples willed the other ship to respond.

              “Captain, they’ll be reloading right now,” Templeton cautioned. She knew he was probably right, but the idea of destroying this ship and the crew on board just because their coms might be down was abhorrent to her.

              “Dinah, can you stop another attack?” she asked, sweat showing on her forehead.

              “I think so, sir, but I would not advise waiting.”

              “Captain, I’m looking over the data from the ship’s log. That ship decelerated towards us at nearly six Gs,” Charis said, stunned.

              “What?” Templeton barked. “That’s impossible. No crew could-”

              This made things very clear for Staples, who interrupted him to say, “Launch missiles, Dinah. Everything you’ve got.”

              Again, the ripples that they had felt earlier vibrated the ship as half a dozen more warheads left their launch tubes and began accelerating madly towards their target. The other ship, now visible through the port side windows, was still spinning slowly.

              “I think they’re trying to regain control, Captain.” Charis’ voice was tense and loud in the moment after their missiles launched. “But they’re having difficulty. I’ve got erratic movements. They’re… they’re firing again. Three more missiles!  And something else… UteVs maybe. Two of them.”

              “They can’t possibly be trying to conduct repairs right now,” the dubious voice was Templeton’s.

              “Fighters, sir. Have to be.” Dinah was focused on her screens and preparing to stop the missiles.

              “Fighters…” Charis said in disbelief, and then the cockpit was full of the sound of the flak guns again. They sounded like some nearby tom-toms of war, and Staples wondered in the second that followed how many people had died to that staccato rhythm through the ages. Millions, she suspected. She desperately hoped that her crew would not join them.

              Dinah worked her controls, and Bethany watched the screens in front of her like a hawk while a mix of data from Charis and Dinah’s stations flowed by. The bursts of anti-missile flak and flares created brief glows that cast strange shadows on the cockpit. Suddenly, the shadows grew deeper and Staples squinted as one of the incoming warheads was destroyed, followed by a second. She waited for the third, but then she forgot all about it in the second she was wrenched down and to the side. It felt as though someone had snapped her entire body to the floor with a rubber band, and her neck screamed out in pain. Before she could recover from this, she heard the loudest sound she had ever heard on her ship. It was louder than the flak guns, louder than she imagined possible. She put her hands over her ears and screamed in an attempt to drown it out. Her body wanted to fly out of the seat, to smash itself to pieces against the coms panel in front of her, but the safety harness held it back from its suicide mission.

              A second later all was silent again, and for a moment the captain thought that the noise had simply made her deaf, but then she heard someone speaking. She looked through the window in front of her, and someone had spun the stars around her ship. She watched them fly by and wondered for a moment who could have moved them all so quickly. As she looked at them and the voice droned on meaninglessly in the background, she saw the remains of a ship float by, pieces of it moving in different directions like the cinders from some great grey firework expanding in a slow sphere.

              The voice began to come into focus, and Staples realized that she recognized it. “Sir, can you hear me?” It was Dinah. She glanced around at the rest of the crew on the bridge, and they mostly seemed as bad or worse off than her. Charis was unconscious, as far as she could tell, her hair floating about her in the null gravity, and Templeton was looking about him confusedly, blinking rapidly. Bethany was curled up in her chair, her knees to her chest, her arms wrapped around her head. Only Dinah seemed to be fully in command of her senses. “Sir, can you hear me?” she repeated.

              “Yes, I can hear you,” Staples said numbly, though it was only partially true. “Report.” Her voice sounded as though it echoed down a cavernous tunnel.

              “We were hit, sir, but I don’t think it’s bad. Our missiles destroyed the other ship. We still have two fighters coming in.” The voice was soothing, but it carried an air of the imperative. Staples needed to shake this off and get functioning. Her crew needed her. She became abruptly aware of an acute pain in her neck.

              “Don,” she said. When he didn’t respond, she shouted it. “Don!” He looked at her, his eyes coming into focus. “Get on the shipwide coms. Tell everyone that we’re hit, but we’re okay. Tell them we’ve got two fighters coming in, and to remain at combat positions.”

              Templeton nodded dumbly, then gazed across his control panel until he found the right buttons. As he began his announcement, Staples unstrapped herself.

              “Don’t think that’s wise, sir. We’re floating free with hostiles incoming.”

              “Can’t be helped,” she muttered, and pushed herself the few feet over to Bethany. The woman was conscious, but Staples could see that every muscle in her body was tensed. When she touched her arm, some of that tension eased, and the dark eyes looked up at her. “We’re okay, Bethany. You’re okay.”

              “Captain.” Tears threatened to ruin her makeup, but she wiped them on her dark sleeve.

              “I need you right now, Bethany.” Gently, she took the woman’s hands and placed them on the controls in front of her. “Can you still pilot?” Bethany nodded and seemed to regain some measure of composure.

              “Captain, those fighters will be here in less than a minute,” Dinah cautioned. “They’re not going to be as easy as missiles to shoot down.” Staples nodded in understanding. Pilots had an aversion to flak and tended to fly around it rather than through it whenever possible. She pushed herself over to Charis and looked her in the face.

              The woman was unconscious, but otherwise seemed unhurt. Strands of her hair floated about haphazardly, and her head lolled and her arms drifted in the air. Staples pushed her right arm down to the armrest and shook it. “Charis,” she said, loudly and clearly. The navigator moaned and grunted, and a second later her eyes fluttered open. “Charis, it’s Clea. Are you all right?”

              “I think so, Captain.” She looked around, then seemed to come fully to herself. “Gwen? John?” She asked desperately.

              “Listen, we’re okay,” Staples replied. “Don,” she raised her voice and glanced over her shoulder, her neck muscles spasming in protest, “please try to get a report from everyone on the ship, starting with Gwen and John. I need to know that everyone is okay.”