On the bridge of the Tempestas, they were monitoring the energy buildup. Slone was not sure what it was, but surmised it could not be good. “Paul, increase to flank speed. I want us as far away from that hulk as possible.”
“Yes, captain.”
Slone could feel the vibrations as the ship sped up. The big problem was that she had a lot of mass and that meant acceleration was slow. In this case, too slow and Slone regretted pulling close ahead of the enemy. Something told him he was never meant to bring the Saltic harvester ship back with him. As the distance between the ships started to increase, there was a sudden bulge near the front of the Saltic ship and it began to come apart. As soon as Slone saw this, he ordered the bridge and flight deck armor up.
“Project the rear view.”
The rear cameras showed the Saltic ship breaking into pieces. However, there was a lot of pressure build up in the enemy ship. Pressure forces things away from the center of that which is generating the pressure. Since the nuclear detonation was under the bridge in the front of the vessel, the majority of the ship debris was propelled backwards. Large fragments of the bow were propelled forward in the direction of the Tempestas. It looked like at least one of the fragments was going to hit them.
“Close all gun ports,” Slone ordered.
As the gun ports closed, some of the smaller debris reached the ship and most was taken out by the point defenses. However, the larger fragments were made of a solid hull material and were too big to be taken out. Slone was wrong about only one fragment hitting them, three managed to make contact with the ship. In the frictionless medium of space, they were propelled by the force of the explosion at a high speed. They also had very sharp edges. Had the Tempestas been sideways to the enemy vessel, the pieces would have punched holes into an area of the hull. However, the battleship had its tail pointed to the enemy. Human ships were designed to appear similar to an old Earth torpedo, with a cylindrical taper of the last quarter of the cylindrical body. There were no fins but a push sail would come out from the back and engines were mounted just past the beginning of the taper. As the large pieces of debris came in, the point defenses fired on them but they were made of hull material and Gatling guns could not damage them. The two smaller ones were the size of shuttlecraft. One struck a glancing blow on the hull and bounced off, leaving a large dent. The second small fragment followed the top of the hull and made a beeline for the bridge.
“Evacuate the bridge,” Slone said as the bridge guards opened the blast door at the bottom of the ramp and the bridge crew ran down the ramp and into the bridge corridor below. Half the crew was off the bridge when the piece hit and took the armor and the roof off the bridge bubble. The built in force fields immediately activated but not before Slone, who was helping people off the bridge, saw the forward station personnel sucked out of the temporary opening. This was a horror and Tom McMann was holding onto his station and trying to keep Roger Umgabe from being sucked out. However, he could not hold on to him and Roger disappeared into the void of surrounding space. The force field shield formed and the rest of the crew left the bridge but Alaya and Christopher could see Paul McMann still at his station, despondent. Alaya ran over to him.
“Paul, we have to leave. The damage is too great and the patch won’t hold. Let’s move.”
“Alaya, I couldn’t hold on to him. I... I... tried but the force was too great.”
“It’s not your fault. Now let’s move before we end up out there with him and the others,” Alaya could see he was not moving so she slapped him hard across the face to bring him back to reality. It worked and Paul moved to the blast doors and left the bridge, not a moment too soon. The patch dissipated and the bridge opened to vacuum. What wasn’t nailed down was sucked out. The blast doors shut automatically when the system detected the vacuum on the bridge.
While the Slones were getting as many people as they could off of the bridge, Christopher felt a shutter throughout the ship and wondered if the largest shard had hit. Indeed, it had. The final piece was the size of a yacht with very sharp edges. As luck would have it, one of the sharp edges sliced along the hull and made a gash that opened the hull through several decks. As the area suffered explosive decompression, humans and serpents were pulled into the vacuum of space. The damage continued until the piece hit the starboard engine housing and cut into the engine. The explosion blew the hull fragment away, but the resultant fire moved through the engine fuel pipe, into the hydrogen bunkers and ignited the gas. This caused an explosion that blew the starboard engine into space and started a fire that progressed into the adjacent compartments. The damage control crews went right to work and put chemicals on the fire, but it was still being fed by the hydrogen tanks and the cutoff valve control was fried. Someone had to go in and do a manual shutdown. As chief engineer, Diana Gardner was ready to do her duty, and she was about to put on her fire suit when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She turned and it was Captain Arabella Shegai, already suited up with her helmet in her hand.
“Please allow me, Commander Gardner,” Captain Shegai requested. “I feel like a fifth wheel around here and am still not sure why I was sent. Sometimes I wish we had never picked up that transmission.”
“You’re not the only one, captain. Do you even know how to manually shut off the valve?”
“We flew a class B freighter. Unless I’m mistaken, it should have the same manual cut off mechanisms.”
“It does,” Diana responded. “Be careful, it’s hot as hell in there and if you get any damage to your fire suit, you won’t last more than a few minutes.”
Captain Shegai put on her helmet and walked towards the fire. The damage control team doused her with foam, back and front, before she entered the flames. The foam was transparent so it did not block her view. As she moved through the flames, she was surrounded by the pale blue hydrogen flames with flares of orange/white. Though hydrogen flames were virtually invisible, they did produce heat when inside them and the external temperature was moving up to 2000 degrees Celsius. The suit’s cooling systems were working but there were limits to the technology and Arabella knew she had to get the job done fast. Had this been a fire with red or orange flames, visibility would have been a problem, but the blue flames kept everything visible. She could make out the manual controls and went over to the panel. Shutting down the system manually required her to reach into an opening and pull down a lever. It was a simple problem and she reached in and started to pull down the lever when the area was rocked by another explosion that started to fling debris around. A sharp piece of debris hit Captain Shegai, tore her suit and then went on to enter her side. The explosion also threw her backwards and forced her to let go of the lever, half closed. She held onto a pipe, pulled herself back to the hole as the residual heat and flame from the explosion found the tear in her suit, and began to enter it. The freighter captain was in agony and she could feel the internal damage from the fragment. She was not getting out of the fire, but she did intend to do her mission. She made it back to the hole and pulled the lever all the way down, cutting off the fire’s fuel supply. She then dropped to the floor as the flames continued to enter her suit and burn into her body. She died regretting ever having found the Sakkara.
It still took close to a half hour to get the fires under control, but with the liquid hydrogen shut off, the fuel ran out and the fires died. They found the body of Captain Shegai where she died, but she managed to save the ship. She was taken with full honors to the crematorium. After the fire was out, Slone went to the flight deck and ordered the armor down. Diana joined the group on the flight deck. She looked around and noticed that Roger Umgabe was missing.
“Where’s Roger?”
Since this was originally Alaya’s crew, she felt she should be the one to tell her. “Diana, when the bridge took a hit and decompressed, Roger was sucked out.”
There was an expression of disbelief and then acceptance on Diana’s face. They all knew the risks and the last decade had been
a gift, since they were all supposed to have died with the Hayden. However, it was hard nonetheless and she started to feel the tears welling up in her eyes. Her husband came over and held her. Commander Hammond was also there and Slone turned to her.
“Commander is the drive charged yet. If we can’t get out of here we will not survive another run in with one of their capital ships.”
“Captain the drive is charged and the coordinates are set, at least I think they are. Just say the word.”
“Do it.”
The Commander went over to the intact captured drive and pressed some buttons. Within a few minutes, a wormhole opened in front of the ship and the severely damaged Tempestas drifted into it and left the unknown system that had cost them so much.
Chapter 12 – Out of the Wormhole
The wormhole spit out the Tempestas, as the humans and serpents pulled themselves together after the transit. The EMP weapon may not have affected the serpents, but the passage through the wormhole did, though to a lesser extent than the humans were. As Slone came back to his senses, he saw that Julia Hammond was also back in control of her faculties. “Commander Hammond, close the wormhole to prevent any Saltic ship from knowing where we went.”
“Yes, captain,” The commander responded and went over to the drive console and pressed a few buttons. The wormhole vanished and the Tempestas was alone in the system.
The Tempestas was not actually alone in the system, but there was no habitation. There was a planetoid located in an asteroid belt that contained an early warning station. As soon as the battleship appeared in the system, a message capsule was sent, on its way, from the automated station to the nearest picket station, three jumps away. Aboard the battleship, Slone ordered the bridge crew and scout crew to enter the Mary Rose and ordered Diana and her engineering techs to set up a bridge of some kind on the flight deck. Diana ordered her techs to do that and contact her if they needed anything. She then also boarded the scout vessel.
On the bridge of the Mary Rose, the bridge crew of both ships was present. Since they had lost Roger Umgabe, Raul Cortega filled in on his usual sensor station. Slone needed to know where they were and what the condition of the ship and personnel was.
“Ok, first things first. Where did we end up?”
Paul McMann along with Blue Scale checked the location separately to make sure they had two opinions. Blue was the first to report, “Sss. Captain Slone, we are in the MR427 system in the Matsua Rim.”
“Commander McMann?”
“I agree. We are where we wanted to be,” Paul McMann reported.
Slone looked over to Julia Hammond, “Well done, Commander Hammond.”
Raul Cortega reported, “Captain, the automated warning station sent a message capsule.”
“Good, someone will come and investigate then. We need to see what is working. Diana, what is the condition of the ship?”
Diana Gardner had remained in touch with the techs setting up a temporary bridge on the flight deck. “The temporary bridge will be finished in about a half hour. As far as damage is concerned, the self-destruction of the enemy ship did more damage than the entire battle. We lost the external components of the starboard drive and the resultant fire destroyed a major part of the engine works inside the hull. That engine is down for the duration. We can get the other three working again, once we have the rerouting of the hydrogen fuel taken care of. We have a 50 to 60 meter tear in the starboard hull from the fragment that took out the engine. The compartments beneath have been opened to vacuum and we lost a lot of humans and serpents from that damage. Those areas have been isolated and we can’t repair without a shipyard. We can patch the holes made by the Saltic energy weapons. They are surprisingly less damaging than our cannons. All cannons and missiles are operational. Once the temporary bridge is set up, captain, we should be able to get underway within an hour, but we are unable to take the slipstream. The fragment was stopped by the rear sail collar, but in stopping it, the collar was damaged.”
“Thank you for the complete report. I would have thought Captain Shegai would have been here with us.”
Diana now turned even more serious. “Captain Shegai volunteered to shut down the hydrogen line to the fire. She succeeded but didn’t make it out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Slone responded. “We lost a lot of good men and women on this mission. Centurion Marshal, what is the status of the legion?”
“Captain, some of our troops were helping with damage control and have not reported back yet. If I had to guess, we are probably down 20 percent from the two boarding actions. If needed we are ready to do our duty.”
Slone now looked at the centurion and said, personally, “Bill, when you have a chance, send Astrid Umgabe to me. We lost Roger.”
“Captain, Astrid was critically wounded in defending the ship from the Saltic boarding party. The doctor is still not certain of her survival.”
Alaya’s heart went out to the family of her friends. “What will happen to poor little Nubia if she doesn’t make it?”
“Tavia and Astrid have become close since she and Roger spent a lot of time at the lake house and at our house. Central registry notified us that before we left on this mission, they put us in as guardians for any children should something happen to them.”
“I’m glad Roger thought of that, but I hope Astrid will be the one to raise little Nubia.”
“I as well, captain.”
Diana reported that the temporary bridge was set up and they all moved out of the scout ship and on to the flight deck. The engineering techs did a quick job setting up the bridge in the flight control room at the bottom of the bridge ramp where it leads up from the flight deck. The room was spacious and already had all of the electronics needed. It was just a matter of rerouting the computer control nodes to the flight consoles, which were repurposed, as bridge stations. The ship systems that were not too badly damaged came online and it became evident that the starboard side of the vessel had received some significant damage. Slone ordered one of the serpent ships to fly around the battleship and give them a scan of the exterior that the cameras could not see. This was done and it was evident there was a gaping hole in the ship.
“There is nothing we can do and we cannot take the slipstream. We will have to wait until the rear sail collar is repaired. Until then, I want the damage control crews to patch what they can and everybody get some rest. Keep a full watch until there is a response to the automated message pod. I think it will be a few days until a ship gets here. We will have to wait to send any messages until a ship comes to check on us. We are still under strict orders not to divulge the fact that we have the Sakkara aboard. Set the ship to rest mode for a full 24 hours and keep a full watch,” Slone ordered.
All departments acknowledged and the Slones took a tour of the damaged areas of the vessel and picked up their daughter from the children’s area. The boarding action by the Saltic was a near thing and it was almost necessary for the children to be armed in case they broke through the legionary defenses. Olivia had her eighth birthday while on this mission, as Allen had his ninth. Alaya did not like to admit it, but they were growing up and excelling in their military training. She wondered what the outcome of this mission would do to the balance of power in the galaxy. The ship settled down for the wait until a Romani ship came to check on the system. The Slones hoped it would be soon. They had been gone for well over a year and they wanted nothing more than to reconnect with their home world.
The Slones went down to sickbay. As captain, Christopher felt an obligation to visit those whose wounds were gotten defending his ship. The sickbay was full with only the most critically wounded, both human and serpent. The Romani made no distinction between the two species, since no Romani had ever lived in a universe without serpents. Alaya and Christopher visited Astrid Umgabe to tell her about the loss of her husband, but she was still on life support and the doctors were not sure she would ever regain consciousness. She had been hit in the
head by a Saltic energy bolt from their infantry weapon. There was no treatment for that and, even if she survived, there would be deficits that could not be overcome. The Marshals were also there and they praised the bravery of Astrid. Perhaps, she was blessed not to learn of her husband’s fate. Two days after the visit to the sickbay, Astrid Umgabe joined her husband and Tavia and Bill Marshal suddenly became parents.
A week after their arrival in system MR427, Raul Cortega, who took over Roger Umgabe’s sensor station, reported, “Captain Slone, there is a ship coming into the system. The mass displacement is consistent with a destroyer.”
They waited the fifteen minutes it took from the time the displacement is detected to the time the ship enters the system. “Telemetry is coming in now. The ship is Romani.”
Tom Gardner reported, “Incoming message, captain.”
“Put it on speaker.”
“Attention Romani vessel. This is the NR Alpha Decimanus of the 28th legion. Telemetry indicates that you are the battleship NR Tempestas but there is no indication of your mission. We will rendezvous with you in six hours, 22 minutes.”
“Tom, acknowledge and indicate that our mission is classified by Senatorial order and send them the file number if they wish to verify it.”
The Sakkara Page 22
