by T J Mott
Durant scowled, and then his face flashed to an expression of outright fear. “If the hyperdrive is struggling that bad, they’ll catch us. Quickly. If we don’t tear ourselves apart on the next jump. And we’re in no shape to fight back.”
“I’m worried, Durant. I’ve never been on a mission that went this badly. On a ship that took this much damage. We’re defenseless now. And Marcell and Reynolds…” He sighed and shook his head, and reduced his voice to a murmur. “Marcell is nuts.”
“I’ve heard stories about him,” Durant said. “Never really met in him person. But it sounds like he isn’t right in the head. Searching for Earth is one thing, but thinking you’re from Earth…” He uncrossed his arms and pulled his comm out of his pocket. “It didn’t bother me much, since he pays so well…but…I just don’t know anymore. We just lost a lot of good men. Because of a…delusion.”
“Yeah. A delusion.” Green nervously scanned around the room, taking note that they were alone. During the flight to Waverly, most of the crew had been talking about Marcell and his questionable mental state in hushed tones. But he didn’t want to get caught doing it. Marcell might make an example of him. “The ship is badly damaged, we can’t fight back, we’re alone, with who knows how many other ships looking for us. And Marcell is not going to back down. I’m afraid he’ll send all of us to the grave just to keep himself in his own little fantasy world.”
“Message from sickbay,” Durant said with flat affect, still looking at his comm’s screen. “Stence didn’t make it.”
Green shouted a string of curses. While his words echoed in their minds, he punched the wall again, and then he stormed out of the room.
***
Thaddeus had finally found a moment to strip off his Marine-issued battle armor and deposit it with the platoon’s quartermaster. He was still drenched with the accumulated sweat and stink from the battle and was more than glad to get rid of the bulky suit.
The frigate was bustling with post-combat activity; the crew scrambled to and fro in order to assess damage and perform temporary repairs. As he made his way through the corridors, trying his best to stay out of the way of his busy crew, he continued to fume over Captain Bennett’s insolent outbursts. I finally have a clue to Earth in my possession. This is a cause for celebration!
He was approaching the Caracal’s sickbay. Perhaps Bennett has gotten too cozy with his Blue Fleet assignment, Thaddeus thought. Guarding Headquarters is the most boring fleet assignment possible. And our last few excursions all went flawlessly.
Most of the doors and hatches throughout the ship, including the main entrance to sickbay, were locked open in order to stay out of the repair crew’s way. He stepped into the medical section’s main corridor. As he walked, he peered into the adjoining wards. The medical department was a busy place in the aftermath of the battle. Both operating rooms were occupied. A dozen corpsmen scrambled about, performing triage and monitoring patients while trying to keep up with the doctors’ requests.
Bennett is just an overcautious coward, he decided. He likes the money, but he has forgotten the risks. Until today.
Thad finally made his way to Commander Janssen’s cramped office and stepped in. The tired-looking Chief Medical Officer glanced up at him as he entered, but then went right back to working at his terminal without saying anything.
“Well, Doctor. Casualty status?”
Janssen looked up and rubbed his eyes. “So far, fifty-eight total. Nineteen fatalities, seventeen of those from the port magazine explosion. Six survivors of the explosion are in critical condition. Other than that, some second-degree burns, minor trauma, vacuum exposure, heat exhaustion, and dehydration. A few of the Marines suffered mild laser burns, and one member of the Deck Department broke an arm by falling off a ladder during that gravity malfunction when we jumped away from Waverly.”
“Fifty-eight,” Thad echoed softly. “A quarter of the crew.”
“More or less.”
Thad sighed. He’d rescued Adelia and may have finally advanced in his search for Earth, but it had happened at a harsh price. His flagship was damaged, with heavy casualties and fatalities among its crew, and he’d lost contact with the rest of his squadron.
But he quickly turned his mind back towards the mission’s objective, which now safely resting aboard his ship. “How is Adelia?” he asked.
“Resting. And confused. Her captors kept her drugged. We’re still running blood tests to determine what drugs and how to treat her.”
Thad recalled his own slave days, and how most of the more uncooperative slaves were kept drugged to remove their fighting spirit and encourage complacency. “Do whatever you have to to treat her. Make it a priority.”
“We’ll know how to proceed once the blood tests are done. But…” He hesitated and tilted his head towards the busy corridor outside. “She’s a minor case, all things considered.”
“All things considered,” Thad growled back with enough intensity that Janssen visibly recoiled, “she’s the whole reason for the mission!”
Janssen held his hands up defensively. “I understand that, Admiral! It will take a few more hours to complete the blood tests and there’s not much we can do for her yet. In the meantime, we have more urgent cases to handle.”
Thad scowled, but resisted the urge to question the doctor’s priorities. He knew the doctor was right, but it still bothered him. “Where is she? Can I talk to her?”
“Ward Three. If she’s sleeping, please don’t wake her. All the stress and anxiety have drained what little energy she had left, and she’s very confused.”
Still scowling, Thad nodded. “Thanks, Doc.”
He left the office and entered Ward Three a few moments later. The room looked to be full of mostly minor cases. Most of the patients were awake and alert. A few Marines stood around one of the beds, laughing and making fun of an injured comrade who sat there. The man wore shorts and his right knee was bruised and swollen. They saluted Thad casually, but he ignored them as he walked past.
There were no staff present to guide him, all hands presumably busy with more serious cases and leaving these patients to fend for themselves for now. Thad stepped from bed to bed as he searched for Adelia. He finally found her at the far end of the room, half a meter away from the bulkhead dividing this section from the next. A curtain was half-pulled around her bed, giving her a bit of privacy from the rest of the ward.
His heart started racing as he remembered his awkward younger days aboard the Lunar Dawn, which, to him, now seemed to be an entire lifetime ago. He hadn’t realized he still harbored any feelings for her, not until he’d seen her image in the Cassandra’s cargo manifest. He hadn’t even thought of her in years. A lump formed in his throat as he approached.
She was awake, sitting on the side of the bed, facing the bulkhead, hunched forward, shivering, and wrapped in a blanket despite the heat. “Adelia,” he said. He spoke her name again when she didn’t respond.
She slowly turned her trembling head, looking for the source of the voice, eventually stopping when she found him. Her face was covered in a thick layer of sweat, her hair soaked and matted. Her eyes were red, puffy, and unfocused, and her skin was sickly and pale. She seemed sedated and only barely aware of her surroundings.
But it was definitely her. He was certain of it. “You’re safe now,” he said. Her eyes eventually found his, but her expression remained passive. He saw absolutely no recognition in her eyes, and his heart sank. She was drugged, though, but would she recognize him later? It had been a long time.
“Where am I?” she asked with a shaky voice.
“You’re aboard my flagship,” he answered matter-of-factly, his voice low so only she would hear. “A frigate called the Caracal. You’re safe here.”
She slowly turned her head back towards the bulkhead. “What are you going to do with me?” she asked, her voice now trembling with fear. She clearly did not recognize him.
“You’re free now,” he reass
ured.
Her shivering intensified. More beads of sweat had accumulated on her forehead and she looked even paler than when he’d arrived. “I’ve been told that before,” she said dejectedly. “It’s always a lie.”
Anger began to rise within him. “Not this time,” he said, wondering what kind of false hopes she had been given before, and wondering how to get her to believe him.
She shook her head. “Just…leave me alone,” she murmured. Her voice was weak and barely more than a whisper. A cold pit began to form in his stomach.
He stood there, desperately searching for words to reassure her somehow, but none came to him. Her mind was too fogged over from drugs and stress, and she was clearly exhausted. As much as he wanted to talk to her, she just wasn’t coherent enough. She needed rest.
She wrapped the blanket tighter around herself, then laid down and curled up into a ball at the head of the bed.
“Get some rest, Adelia. We’ll take care of you. I promise.”
She felt powerless and alone, he knew. Defeated and burned-out, and too cynical to take her new freedom at face value. For now, there was nothing more he could do to help her. And, at that moment, despite being the commander of the largest hidden empire in the Independent Regions, with one of the most well-connected intelligence networks in the galaxy and enough starships to take over any twenty independent star systems, he too felt powerless.
Thad quietly stood nearby and watched her for several long minutes. Her shivering slowly subsided, her breathing became slow and steady, and then she was asleep. He realized that he too was shivering.
Chapter 11
The door before him slid open, and Commodore Cooper stepped into Hangar 7. It was one of the asteroid base’s largest hangars, almost two hundred meters long, with more than enough space for the stolen, experimental hundred-meter-long starship parked within.
The ship’s hull was unfinished and unpainted, covered in a mottled satin alloy with no livery or markings at all to indicate what it was or where it came from. Several hull panels were missing, leaving piping and conduits and trusses exposed. Its thrusters were completely naked, lacking the cowlings and fairings most starships its size used to improve atmospheric performance. Overall, it looked very much like a ship that had somehow escaped its factory before the final touches were completed.
It sat near the center of the hangar, resting on top of its three massive landing legs which held it a couple meters above the hangar deck. Bundles of optical databus cables snaked out of various hatches, panels, and orifices in the hull, leading off to one side of the ship where Cooper’s staff had set up racks and racks worth of test equipment, monitoring hardware, and computer systems. Other equipment and crates full of tools and parts were scattered across the deck seemingly at random. Two forklifts and a small six-seat wheeled personnel transport sat parked near the computers.
About a dozen men were visible in the hangar as Cooper approached the ship. Half of them sat at the computers, the other half were moving equipment and tools up and down the ship’s main ramp or crawling around in the unpaneled portions of the outer hull.
He saw Gray Fleet’s executive officer, Senior Captain Abano, standing near the computers. To his surprise, Senior Captain Covier, the administrator of the Headquarters asteroid, was also present. Covier normally wasn’t one to wander around the base.
“Captain, Captain,” Cooper greeted, welcoming the strange sense of amusement he got whenever he called Covier by his rank. Covier hadn’t come from a military background, but from a business background, where he had once been a high-level manager at a commercial logistics firm which just happened to be secretly owned by Marcell. And he hated being called “Captain.”
Covier looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Ah, Coop. The man who delayed my vacation by at least two whole weeks. The techs are still out there, searching for all the parts the Marines lost after someone ordered them to hand-carry my personal starship out of this hangar, across a low-gravity asteroid surface, and to a different hangar half a klick away.”
Cooper grinned mischievously. “These things sometimes happen.”
Covier shook his head. “Somehow, they only happen when you are involved.” He looked at Abano with an expression of feigned pity. “How do you survive working with this juvenile?”
Abano laughed lightly but didn’t respond, instead turning to Cooper. “Have you heard from Rapp? I haven’t had a chance to check with him in a few days, and he hasn’t answered my messages.”
“Yeah,” Cooper responded. “I actually just visited him. He’s extremely busy, and he still hasn’t figured anything out about Marcell’s mission.”
“Your guys have to be missing something obvious,” Covier said. “He left in such a hurry, there has to be something big in that data.”
“I don’t get it either, Cov. I have forty guys sifting through the Waverly data I brought back. But it’s all bog-standard and boring. News and political reports, market data, fuel refinery quotas and estimates, ship itineraries, cargo manifests. Not a mention of Earth anywhere. No major enemies scheduled to stop there. No mention of high tech shipments, experimental technology, weapons, or any of the usual stuff he likes to raid. It’s a complete mystery.”
“What, no datachip labeled ‘Secret Treasure Map To Earth’? Come on, he took a squadron from Blue Fleet and jumped to hyperspace less than an hour after you arrived.”
Cooper shrugged. “We’ll keep looking, but we just might have to wait for Marcell to return and tell us himself.” He frowned. “And you’re sure he didn’t say anything to you on his way out?”
Covier shook his head. “He left me a message saying he was going to Waverly and that you’re in charge until he returns. It was short and unusual. Normally he leaves detailed mission plans with me, but he obviously didn’t have time for any planning. To be honest, he sounded kind of drunk…”
Abano rolled his eyes. “Marcell is always ‘kind of drunk’ these days,” he muttered.
“He was flustered. This wasn’t like him at all. What did you tell him, Coop?”
Cooper shrugged again. “He met me in the hangar when I landed. Looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. We made some small talk, I showed him the specs on this ship, and that was it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. Wait…” He rubbed his forehead, then pulled his comm from a pocket and made a call. “Commander Rapp. Coop here. Expand your search to include anything about High Prince Saar or the Tor Regency.”
“Aye, Commodore.” The comm channel closed.
“Prince Saar?” asked Abano. “What’s that got to do with Waverly?”
“I don’t know, Abano. But I did tell him about Saar and his newest bounty.” He shrugged once more. “It’s worth a shot.” He waved at the parked ship again. “Anyway, back to the business at hand. She all ready for a flight test?”
“Yes, sir. Lieutenant Maney informed me just before you got here that the flight crew is ready.”
“Well, let’s get her unplugged from all this crap and go for a ride!”
***
Commodore Cooper sat strapped to a chair in the experimental starship’s cockpit and waited for the flight crew to finish their final preflight checks.
“Commodore, just for the record, I officially protest that you’re going on this test,” Captain Abano’s voice said over the comm. “You are the senior ranking member of the organization here right now.”
“Aw, what’s the worst that could happen?” Cooper grinned and imagined his executive officer rolling his eyes.
“You misjump and your molecules get scattered half a light-year apart, and Admiral Marcell returns to a full-blown civil war between me and Covier fighting over what flavor to program the caf dispenser.”
“You guys are weird.”
“Pot, meet kettle. Good luck, sir.” The channel closed.
“So, Maney,” Coop asked the man sitting in the pilot’s seat. “Let’s get this test going. The techs say
the hyperdrive is fixed?”
“Affirmative, Commodore,” Maney responded as he tapped the thrusters to lift the ship above the hangar deck. “They finally found a miscalibrated sensor in the charge accumulator. Nothing major, but it was enough to sometimes lock out the jump controller. Normal hyperdrive operations ought to be fine now.”
“Good. I want to get that tested as quickly as possible. I’m more interested in getting to the helium-assisted hyperdrive tests!”
“You and me both, sir, you and me both. The preliminary data on this drive suggests three light-years-per-hour will be easy to maintain. Hopefully our testing will confirm that.”
Cooper felt a massive grin stretch across his face as Maney piloted the ship through the airlock and into space above Headquarters.
“We just left the artificial gravity field,” one of the other techs in the cockpit reported.
Maney fiddled with the comm controls as they gained altitude. “Control, X-11. How do you copy?”
“Copy five-by-five,” the comm responded. “What are your flight plans? Or are you even allowed to tell me that today?”
Maney laughed. “Hyperdrive tests. We need to make a few jumps and collect some data, then we’ll return to ground. We have our own sensors monitoring our operations, but please forward your own phi-band sensor logs back to us.”
“Copy. You are cleared for hyperdrive tests, proceed as requested. There is no scheduled traffic in the area for the next six hours. We’ll send you a sensor dump when you return.”
“Thanks, Control. X-11 out.” He twisted his head back towards Cooper. “So, Commodore, where do you want to go? I was going to make a few basic jumps but it’s your call since you’re on board for this flight.”
“Go ahead and make a basic jump then. Your pick, Lieutenant. I’m just here for the ride.”
