Not only a stowaway, but a smart-assed one at that. How was she ever going to avoid the brig after this? Max felt tears welling up in her eyes.
“And how did you get on my ship, sir?” Haad said, playing along. In the corner of his eye he saw Yorn pacing nervously in front of the weapons alcove.
“Sir, I’ve got IFF on the Pearl,” Washoe said. “I make her about three seven mikes out. Coming in at a high angle, sir.”
“Very good. Commander Yorn, give the Pearl my best and have her stand ready. Apprise her of our situation and see if that tender boat she’s got following can help us with our electrical problems. It’ll be good to get the Dyson back on-line.”
Yorn acknowledged the orders and headed for the communications console. He motioned Ensign Corman to keep the chair and he plugged his headset directly into the comm stack.
“In the meantime, Admiral, ah, Hansen you said?”
The boy expanded his chest. “Yeah, pops. That’s right, isn’t it? You’ve got eagles on your shirt, that means you’re the old man. My mom told me that. She’s sitting over there. She’s an officer, too.”
“Mister Sully, please take the ‘admiral’ to my ready room and clean him up. Show him every courtesy you can think is appropriate for an officer of his high standing. Do it by the book,” he said, “and make sure you bring that book back to my bridge so I can have it to throw at Lieutenant Hansen!”
Har’s face showed a mixture of bewilderment and pride when he was escorted from the bridge. Max buried her face in her hands and wept.
Chapter 40
The Milky Way was divided into sixteen segments like an enormous pizza pie; those wedges were divided into tracks, with the first track being close to the massive black hole at the galaxy’s center and radiating outward in concentric circles each 100 parsecs in width; the tracks were divided vertically into zones or layers 100 parsecs deep; thus, when the Casco Bay unfolded at S14/T1644/Z12/444.787 Captain Robi Zane was confused.
He double-checked his astrogation readouts and looked at his forward blister. Nothing. A thin veil of interstellar gas and dust. He punched at his console. The nearest star was twelve light-years away and the charts identified it as Gideon-32, a dim M-class star with no planets. Out of 640,000 possibilities he was in the wrong sector.
Zane cursed to himself and hailed his navigation shack on the comm. “Where are we?” was his only question.
After five minutes of back-and-forth with his quartermasters and their operations specialists he determined that they were way off target.
How could this have happened?
Zane made the appropriate entries into his log and demanded a recalc on the supplied coordinates. He re-read the orders from Fleet and cursed. He had punched in the wrong figures, he had screwed up the course given to the helm.
Oh well, he thought, at worst it had cost him a few hours’ transit time. Now he had to wait for his following tender and then proceed to the correct place for the rendezvous. He contemplated deleting his previous log entry but the electronic trail of his error would be easy enough to find if his delay should launch an investigation. And there was no way to re-do the data in the ship’s master control computer. A second-level child could find it. Nothing else to do but wait, double-check his fitness assessments and prepare the Casco Bay for the short jump to Track 1604. By now the Pearl should be on station and Pax Curton should be organizing and supervising and making a general nuisance of himself.
He felt sorry for Uri Haad.
* * *
After finding nothing of interest in the navigation shack, Young and Cott made their way aft and down. A report from the bridge had confirmed the demise of the last of the renegade alien worms. In effect, her mission was finished. Young decided to head on down to the armory and divest herself of all the body armor and the side arm. Even though the battle alarms were still wailing, she knew that a UAW would be of no significant use if the Christi came under attack. It would just slow her down if she had to seek out a safe compartment or dive under a closing hangar hatch. She expressed those sentiments to Cott.
“Well, you can dump your gear if you want, but I’m keeping my shit right on me. What if we get boarded? A hoard of those worms breach the Higgs Field and make it on the ship? More hand-to-hand with those things? I’m keeping my stuff,” the chief said.
“Suit yourself,” Young replied. The chances of the aliens boarding the ship were remote. After all, those worms were easily dispatched with a simple five- or six-amp blast and they seemed to be all flesh and guts inside. No skeletal structure, no bones. Easy pickings.
“So where’re you going from the armory, lieutenant?”
She stopped walking and looked at the chief. He had a slight smile on his lips and a little glint in his eye. The fact that he was covered in worm goo and parts of his uniform were filthy beyond recognition did little to hide his implied offer. She had bedded him in the past and found him to be adequate but not inspiring enough to warrant a repeat encounter.
“To bed, chief. Alone.”
He got the message. Maybe it was time to look elsewhere. A cold shower would probably help him bring his testosterone and adrenalin levels back into the green zone. He told her goodbye and headed for the crew quarters.
When the first lance from the alien ship pierced the Christi’s hull an hour later, Lieutenant Val Young was one of the first to die.
* * *
“New message coming in, sir,” Niki Mols said. Since the captain had sent his reply to the first alien transmission the original “prepare to be boarded” message had repeated on a continuous loop. The lieutenant’s portable had cleared up more of the text but the message was still basically the same.
“Put it on my screen.”
Captain Haad ignored most of the activity around him and concentrated on what he read. A contingent of damage controlmen had descended on the bridge and started making repairs almost as soon as the last worm was hauled away. Haad had also confined Lieutenant Hansen to her quarters and he’d posted a sentry at her hatch. As per his instructions, her son was living the good life down on deck two with two yeomen waiting on him hand and foot. Distracting as it was at the time, Haad secretly admired the way the kid had jumped that worm. He knew the details of Harold’s activities would explain a lot of recent mysteries: disappearing food, missing weapons and the like. While the new alien message firmed up on his console, he wondered what he would be forced to do to handle the supreme dereliction of duties and conduct unbecoming an officer charges that needed to be leveled at Harold’s mother. That decision would just have to wait for awhile. The looming hulk of a new worm ship, active and threatening, occupied most of his current thoughts.
. . . ignore this warning. Attention attention attention. While ?we? find it possible to mate with ?ourselves? the inadequate reply to the request is not (garbled). The ?nursery? transport ship had been lost and under (garbled) outdated propulsion mode. The markers allowed ?us? tracking to location on the ?course? to intersect you. You have destroy with no ?reason? this transport. You have one last chance. Do not reply with insult and do not ignore this warning. Attention attention attention. . .
“Same old thing, Number One. Do you think these guys are serious or just blowing off some worm steam? I can see the new worm ship is quite a bit sleeker and larger than the derelect. What do you think her weapons profile is?”
“Don’t rightly know, Uri, somehow they’ve blocked our scans. I would say they at least have projectile weapons and perhaps an array of plasma or photon missiles. That little cylinder we took from that last worm had the capability of breaking weak force bonds. I’m sure they have more exotic shit than that by now. We do know they have some form of jump technology even though their fold signatures are significantly different than ours.”
Haad nodded. Everything he just heard was true. “Well, I don’t care what they might have, Davi, I just can’t capitulate to an unknown force without seeing what they shoot at me first.”
> “Agreed. I have sent a dispatch to the Pearl advising them of our situation. Captain Curton sends his regards and promises to send a boat over with new Dyson circuits as soon as his tender arrives. Should be within the hour.”
“Well, that’s some comfort,” the captain said.
“What’ll you make your reply? I think you pissed them off, sir. It would be better if we could have a face-to-face with these things instead of that getup back there,” Yorn said, pointing to the interface with Mols’s computer.
“That thing beats nothing. If it wasn’t for that crypto program we’d have no idea what these tube steaks have in mind. You know, I think I’ve heard just about all of the threats I want to hear from them. A pre-emptive strike would be well within our operational guidelines.”
“But, if I can point out the obvious, Uri, the new threat must be separated from the original one. The derelict and the ensuing mayhem has nothing to do with this new ship. Maybe they’re just doing some ceremonial clean-up, some saber-rattling, just to get our attention and let us know that they know what we did to their transport.”
Haad looked at the repeating message on his console. “That may be true, but remember who we’re squaring off with. Those worms are dealing in trafficking of a sentient species. The birds. You saw the feeds from the hold of that derelict. How can those visions go so quickly into the dust of our collective memories? If these guys are slavers and we turn tail and run, how long will it take for them to discover Elber? There are over two million souls on that planet. Worse still, that original ship was plotted directly to Sol. If these new worms realize that there are seven new worlds populated by us between Elber and Earth, this poses a bigger threat than the Varson Empire.”
Yorn had to admit the captain made a lot of sense. This confrontation had to end here. It was unfortunate that the first worm had been destroyed by an act of stupidity, but at least the surviving entities on that ship had been rescued. An effort had been made.
“Give me the comm link, lieutenant,” Haad said over his shoulder. “I need to reply to these threats.”
“If you’ll allow me, sir,” Yorn said firmly. “I think —”
Captain Haad held up a hand. He would not allow Yorn to reply. This duty was his.
“This is Captain Uri Haad of the Colonial Navy Ship Corpus Christi out of Elber Prime. Perhaps my first reply was garbled in translation or transmission so I will repeat it. Go fuck yourself. The Colonial Navy does not heel to idle threats. You, sir, or madam, or your wormness, are intruding into our sovereign space and it is my sworn duty to defend that space against any and all intruders. You must vacate this space immediately.”
Haad hoped his harsh tone would buy him more time. He looked at his chronometer. The other destroyer was an hour overdue.
Chapter 41
For a ship’s captain these quarters were not too impressive. Har had been forced to strip and bathe and his treatment thus far had left him sensitive and critical of the Colonial Navy. Geez, they could have at least thanked him for saving the ship from that mealy-mouthed worm up on the bridge. Now they had a stupid guard both inside and outside this spartan berth. He thought back to some of the books he’d read about life in space and this harsh reality lesson put a damper on his fond memories.
Where were all the high-tech and ultra-modern stuff? He looked but couldn’t find any kind of food processor that he only had to speak into to get a juicy hamburger or some macaroni and cheese. No disposal disintegrator to deal with his confiscated filthy clothes either. Someone had scrounged him up a uniform with a shirt that had a hem down to his knees. One of his guards had laughed at him when he came out of the captain’s private washroom. His shoes were too big, his pants had to be rolled up a million times to keep them from dragging the floor. He didn’t even want to think of where the underwear had come from. It could have belonged to a girl for Christ’s sake!
Instead of fancy shelves with space junk and memorabilia and three dimensional chess sets and strange alien artifacts encased in Lucite, this room was just a plain disappointment. A wall full of shelves, an old gray desk and a sturdy metal chair that weighed a ton. He hoped the captain was satisfied with his digs even though he couldn’t fathom how that could be.
“Hey, guard guy, what’s your name? I need something to put in my report.”
The sentry looked at him and closed his eyes.
There was a knock on the hatch and the guard opened it a crack.
“The damage guys found this up in the overhead. MA’s say it’s safe. Yorn said to bring it down here.” Har looked at the hatch but only saw an arm extending through the crack. It was his backpack. Great. Now at least he could read something instead of those old musty Navy books the captain kept on his shelves. For the first time since his unceremonious ejection from the bridge, he started to perk up. He could also have access to his store of games and could wile away the hours absorbed in that activity.
He had no idea how long they were going to keep him incommunicado but now he had something to do. He wondered how he was going to get a message to his mom. That was one of his priorities. He was sure she would understand why he had left his container, why he had pursued the alien worm onto the deck of the bridge. She had to.
He was a hero but deep inside a little sprout of doubt was growing, turning into a blooming plant with horrible fruit. Hero or not, he felt that he had screwed the pooch for himself and possibly killed the freakin’ dog for his mom.
Sheesh.
* * *
At that same moment Maxine Hansen was sitting on her bunk and staring into space. Not the space that surrounded the ship, but that awful void that encapsulated every fiber of her being.
The space that contained her dishonorable separation from the Colonial Navy. The space that did not lead to a promotion and training to become an officer of the line, but a space filled with hearings, boards of inquiry, possible jail time, and surely separation from her son.
But deep in her heart she did not fault Har. He was an active boy with a vivid imagination and a strong sense of adventure. She knew about his stash of old-school comics and those horrible space-opera books that he read incessantly. But what else had she been able to offer him? Three years’ worth of forced hiding, deception on the highest level, and her constant nagging about what he should have been reading or doing. Some mother she had become.
The waves of dread swept over her again and again and she thought back to the nightmare she’d had about Harold just hours — could it have been days? — ago, before this madness careened out of control. She couldn’t even remember the last time she hugged him or what the last thing she had said to him. Had she told him that she loved him?
Sooner or later, after this thing with the new worm threat was over, the captain would send for her. Or Commander Yorn would probably come down to her cabin and, flanked by two burly masters-at-arms, would escort her to the captain’s wardroom. Then the whole story would come out. She had to tell the truth, there was no hiding from the fact of her deceit any longer. Max gritted her teeth and pulled out her reader.
She activated the device and punched at the tiny keyboard.
The UCCMJ — Unified Code of Colonial Military Justice — filled her screen and she ran her finger down the index until she found the section she was looking for: Penalties and Sanctions.
She pulled up the indicated section and was just beginning to read the various articles when the ship rocked.
Max put the reader down and stood. A mighty rumble was building below decks.
Oh, my God, she thought, we’re under attack!
Her thoughts turned to her son as she desperately tugged at the locked compartment hatch.
She was pounding on the hatch when the second explosion rocked the Christi and threw her off her feet and down to the metal deck. A trickle of blood leaked from a gash over her left eye but she was not aware of it. She had hit her head so hard that she wasn’t aware of anything.
* * *
&
nbsp; “They’re powering up weapons, sir!” Cain Washoe yelled.
“Give me a reading, Mister Washoe,” Captain Haad said calmly.
“Best guess, some kind of energy weapons, sir. Electrical power reading off the grid along her port flank,” he said.
“Mister Gant, hard to port, down angle ten degrees,” the captain said.
No-no Gant repeated the order and his hands worked the controls. The Christi was a bit sluggish but soon she responded.
“Captain, portside missile batteries exposing on her aft quarter. Looks like ten or twelve tubes, sir,” the weapons officer said. “Estimate less than one mike on possible attack. Less than a minute.”
“Steady as she goes, Mister Gant. Mister Washoe arm your torpedoes and prepare to return fire. Ensign Corman, notify the Pearl that attack is imminent and they should make ready supressive fire to cover our starboard flank.”
“On my mark, batteries one through nine active and ready, captain, in three, two, one. . . mark.”
“Incoming fire,” Davi Yorn said. “Pulse weapons, sir, phase and frequency shifted for maximum effect.”
“Mister Washoe, do your targeting solutions. If that thing is anything like its dead predecessor, you’ll want to take off the nose of that ship,” Haad instructed.
“Brace for impact,” Yorn said.
The ship rocked. Far below and aft a disturbing grinding and metal-on-metal screeching sound echoed through the entire ship.
“Mister Washoe, fire at will.”
Cain Washoe ran the edge of his hand down the side of the weapons console. In a matter of one second he had launched two volleys of heliospasm torpedoes at the bow of the alien ship. The torpedoes were designed to explode before impact and release a brilliant white light and a 20,000 degree fireball. The spasm of electrical energy generated at the core of the explosion was usually enough to knock out any kind of protective shield and leave the optics and targeting radars neutralized.
The Belt Loop _Book One Page 25
