Merkiaari Wars: 04 - Operation Breakout

by Mark E. Cooper

  “Let’s get all of them open,” Colgan said to the mustered marines. I want an inventory and vid of everything we have here.” The marines moved to obey, using the crane to remove the containers from the stacks. Colgan and Perry watched the progress together. “Are we certain there are no more like this somewhere aboard?”

  “Bay Two is being used for its intended purpose. The shuttles are still there minus the two still aboard Astron. The cargo pods and containers in Bay One that you saw seem to be full of machine parts, electronics, medicines, and bulk metals. No organics found yet. We’re still checking, but these were stored separately and treated differently. The cryo units were a big clue that Tait considered them special.”

  Colgan nodded. “You realise what this could mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll have the Chief rig a tow. He’ll have to beef up our tractors for certain.” He frowned at the time that would take, but tractors designed to tow one hundred ton decoys did not have the power to tow eighty thousand tons of broken destroyer. “This is a mess. Even getting this hulk to Helios Station isn’t enough. It will have to remain sealed and under guard until someone comes to study it. I’m afraid you’ll have to provide the guards, Captain.”

  “I assumed so, sir. You want me to stay behind with them?”

  “Hell no! What if I have another Jean de Vienne to capture?”

  Perry grinned.

  “No, you’ll have to assign someone. One of your LTs I suppose. I leave the decision to you. Major Appleford might have assigned you to do it, but no, I need you with me.”

  “Understood...” Perry hesitated. “About the Major, sir. I don’t know if you know. I mean we, the marines were aware...”

  “Spit it out.”

  “I was wondering if you knew Commodore Walder, sir?”

  “I met her for the first time when she handed me the keys to Warrior. What about her?”

  Commodore Walder had been Warrior’s first skipper and had commanded her for five years until her recent promotion to commodore. Colgan had no idea where Perry was going, or what it had to do with Appleford.

  “When the news of her promotion came through, Major Appleford was very upset—”

  Colgan’s puzzlement turned to temper. “Don’t say another word! Not another bloody word!”

  Perry fell silent, his face flushed.

  Colgan seethed, but he couldn’t leave it alone now. “Are you telling me they were involved? That a ship’s captain was involved, romantically, with a subordinate?”

  Perry nodded but quickly added, “Nothing inappropriate occurred, sir, I swear. We would have known. There’s no way it could have happened. The Commodore... well, she would never have let it happen, but I believe they had an understanding. The news of her promotion changed things. I think they were planning to retire and get married someday, but she changed her mind. The bad blood between you and the Major wasn’t personal, sir. He was a good man and a damn good marine. I wanted you to know that. He wouldn’t have liked anyone who replaced the Commodore. It was nothing you did.”

  Colgan nodded. “I knew he was a good officer. I read his bio when I took command.” He’d read all of his crew’s records. “Thank you.”

  Perry looked relieved until one of his men shouted in surprise. He hurried to see what new disaster had befallen. Colgan was right beside him.

  “What have we got, Sergeant?” Colgan asked.

  Deacon stepped aside by way of answering and revealed the pitiful contents of the container.

  “Oh no,” he whispered. There were dead soldiers piled up like logs. Frozen and awful. He stared at those uniforms in shock. How could anyone treat the dead like cargo? “God damn Tait!”

  “Can we learn where they died from the uniforms?” Perry said, leaning into the cargo pod to see them better.

  “Good thought. Sergeant, see if they have any identification, and get the rest of these damn boxes open!”

  “Aye, aye.”

  Colgan stepped away seething, and tried to pace away his anger. The dead Merki he could understand. Macabre yes, but it would have scientific interest and was therefore saleable. But Human remains treated the same way? Disgusting! It was worse that they’d been soldiers, at least in his eyes. They had died in battle. Their wounds were obvious. They should have been treated with respect and received military funerals and honours. Instead they had been tossed inside refrigerated boxes like so much meat.

  “What do you want us to do with them?” Perry said trying to see if any of the corpses were in marine uniform. There was at least one.

  He grimaced. “I want to do right by them. I want to give them the honours they deserve, but what I want doesn’t matter. This is an unusual situation. Whoever is sent out here will need to see all this for themselves.” He sighed and made the decision he knew was necessary, but it grated on him. “Seal the containers and double check the cryo units. It could be six months or longer before anyone opens them again.”

  “Sir!”

  “Now what?” he muttered and went to see what Deacon had found.

  This time the sergeant was grinning. “Does first contact with a dead alien trump first contact with a live one?”

  Colgan stared into the container, and the alien being inside stared back at him, its huge eyes dull with frost. It was humanoid in shape. One head, two arms, two legs. It had no hair, and its face was very flat with two tiny slits in place of nostrils. The grey tone of its skin could be its natural colour, but also could be a result of death and its frozen state. There was no doubt it had been sentient. It was wearing clothes. He regarded the poor thing sadly, wondering what could have been. His recent discovery of the Shan made this discovery a poignant one. He sighed and looked away at the containers yet to be opened.

  “Double and triple check the cryo units when you reseal all this. We can’t afford any failures. Not now.”

  Perry studied the alien. “Nothing like us or the Shan. I’ve seen pictures.”

  “No, nothing like the Shan, or the Merkiaari either,” Colgan said looking the alien over again. “Infinite diversity, infinite combinations.”

  He wanted to go up to the bridge and discover where Tait might have found his cargo, but with one discovery after another right here to be made, he didn’t dare leave just yet. Those first shocks had dulled his senses for more, but his anger could and did grow when another container revealed more Human and Merkiaari remains. This time the uniform was instantly recognisable.

  “A viper,” he said dully. The soldier was wearing the distinctive black battle dress that all vipers, even to this day, wore. “General Burgton will be hot to have him back when he hears about this.”

  A half hour later they had an inventory of the cargo that included five Merkiaari, both males and females. Three different races of unknown alien. Three! Colgan was still in shock from that discovery. The Merkiaari had been humanity’s first experience of aliens, and two hundred years later his discovery of the Shan represented the second. Now within the space of a few years the number had jumped to five known alien races. They didn’t know anything other than that they existed, but even that was huge. He wondered if James and Brenda Wilder would be asked to head a team out here, or perhaps Professor Bristow. No matter. He was leaping ahead of himself. Along with the aliens there were a dozen Human cadavers. All had been soldiers. One had been a viper.

  He left Perry and his men to reseal the containers and went to join Anya on the bridge. He found her under the helm controls, head and shoulders inside muttering to herself. She was alone. He stood inside the hatch and grinned. She reminded him of Chief Williams when he had lost himself within a maintenance problem. When he sent her up here, he hadn’t expected she would need to delve into the ship’s guts, but whatever worked he supposed.

  “Oh, Skipper, didn’t see you there.”

  “Lieutenant,” he nodded and entered the bridge more fully. Unlike Warrior, Jean de Vienne wasn’t accessed directly from an elevator but thr
ough a hatch leading to deck one and CIC. “Problems?”

  “They thought they were being clever,” Anya said and rolled her eyes. “Zelda did it better.”

  Colgan wandered the bridge, occasionally trying a control or reading a monitor at random. Nothing worked. “Oh she did?”

  “Yes, sir. It was in Zelda and the Chaos Engine. Her ship was boarded by a corrupt customs officer who tried to shake her down. Of course our piratical heroine wasn’t having any, and told him where to go. When he seized her ship, he couldn’t unlock the helm controls or access anything on the bridge.”

  “Aha, go on.”

  “Passwords weren’t sneaky enough for Zelda. She’d hard wired a cut-out!”

  Colgan chuckled. “That’s actually pretty good.”

  Anya grinned. “Tait thought so. When I broke through his passwords and nothing happened, it was pretty obvious what he’d done.”

  “Are you there now?”

  “Nearly. I’ve traced the circuit. The switch should be...” Anya crossed to the command chair and studied the controls. She depressed one of the many controls, holding it down until a readout changed. The station’s monitors lit and filled with data. “This one.”

  A brief glance told Colgan normal bridge operations had resumed. “Tait probably did it so his crew couldn’t stop him scuttling the ship.”

  “Probably didn’t expect one of them to just shoot him in the back.”

  “Yeah, lucky for us. Captain Perry was certainly grateful to him. He recommended the man be given a separate cell and extra food at mealtimes. He still wants him mind-wiped after his trial with the rest of course, but good treatment as a reward until then.”

  Mind-wipe was the standard punishment for murder and other violent crime. Personality death was the closest thing the Alliance permitted within its sphere of influence to the archaic death penalty still observed by some worlds within the Border Zone. It was actually considered worse than death, a fitting punishment then for pirates and raiders who routinely killed those they stole from. They were actually mass murderers, worse by far than any serial killer in scale because of the numbers involved. Merchant ships rarely had crews numbering less than twenty, and many had double or triple that depending upon the class of ship.

  “I’m contacting Warrior, Anya. Get me those logs would you?”

  “Aye, sir, on it.”

  Colgan seated himself at the comm shack and quickly studied the controls. He didn’t often get the opportunity to be hands on, but he remembered his days as ensign when he had stood watches as damage control officer or communications officer. That old training came back to him as he ran his fingers over the controls and punched a key.

  “Warrior, this is Jean de Vienne. Respond please.”

  “Jean de Vienne, this is Warrior. Lieutenant Ricks stepped out for a minute, Captain.”

  “Sheridan?” Colgan asked as she finally leaned within range of the visual pickup and appeared on his screen.

  “Aye, Sir.”

  “Put me through to the Chief would you?”

  “Aye sir,” Sheridan said again and there was a brief silence. The monitor blinked and the Chief appeared. “Williams.”

  “Chief, I’m on the bridge of Jean de Vienne. We have a change of plans here and I’m going to need your expertise.”

  “I’m yours, sir. Repairs here are done.”

  “Good to know. I need you to rig a tow. We have to bring this tub into Helios Station. My guess is you’ll need to rig multiple tractors and beef them up somehow.”

  “No kidding. You realise that hunk of junk weighs like a thousand times more than our tractors are designed to haul?”

  “I do, but no choice, Chief. There’s some stuff here that will need investigation. I’m going to dock her at Helios and leave her under marine guard.”

  “Hmmm. Warrior is no tug, but if we keep her speed down we should be able to do it.”

  Colgan winced. He had guessed it would come to this. The bloody trip to Helios was going to take ages. “How far down?”

  “A guess for now, but if we use around 20% of standard accel we shouldn’t stress anything too badly. It’s not the speed, sir. As long as we accelerate slowly we could tow her at flank, well almost,” Williams suddenly sounded worried that Colgan would take him at his word and try that. Colgan grinned. “It’s not how fast we can go. It’s about how long to slow down. Tractors don’t make good inertial dampeners. I think we’ll have to do this old school with a proper turnover to slow down.”

  Colgan nodded at William’s worried face on the monitor. “Lieutenant Wesley will enjoy that. It will test her skills. I bet she hasn’t had to pull a turnover manoeuvre while towing an eighty thousand ton wreck before.”

  Williams grinned.

  “Okay, Chief. Get your spanners out and do whatever is needed. Let me know when you’re ready.”

  “Aye, sir, but it won’t be quick. A couple of days would be my guess.”

  Colgan nodded and broke the connection. A couple of days to set things up and probably over a week to cover a distance to Helios that would normally take a fifth the time. Bloody marvellous. He needed to remember this situation wasn’t even part of his mission. He had places to be, systems to check, and pirates to harass. He did want to do things right, however, and that meant extensive reports. Detailed reports to ensure all parties realised just how significant Jean de Vienne was to the Alliance. Three new alien races. Three! Talk about an embarrassment of riches. When the admiralty read his name attached to the reports they would have apoplexy. His name and that of poor old Canada had barely left the headlines, and now this. He was glad he was out of contact from the newsies. They would howl when they heard and couldn’t reach him!

  He grinned nastily, but then considered the practicalities of the situation. His mission was such that as long as he visited each of the systems he was responsible for, he could write his own schedule. He had in fact been doing that already in an effort to make it seem like his single ship could do the impossible—be everywhere at once. Random jumps at random times to random systems, sometimes back to a previous system in a sort of spin about and look over the shoulder sort of thing, had worked so far. Ask Tait. He snorted. He would continue the strategy.

  He owed a speedy response from the admiralty to the men that Perry assigned to stay behind, and the only way he had of affecting that was how quickly he could get the news back to Sol. Drones were slow, there was just no help for that barring the use of jump capable courier ships. Helios didn’t have one of course, being a nothing system only here for the convenience of ships like Warrior that needed refuelling. He had to use a drone. Setting its drive parameters to the recommended 80% of max would mean a delay of approximately... he quickly did the calculation in his head... seven weeks give or take a day. The recommended setting gave the drone the best chance to reach its destination in what was considered a reasonable time frame. Drive failures increased exponentially the closer to max the drive was pushed. That didn’t mean a drone flying at max would always fail, but the probability it would fail would be high.

  He could and would jump back to Helios as his mission progressed; just as he would visit the other systems he had responsibility for multiple times over the coming months. He could take Perry’s men back aboard during one of his visits. Perhaps if the delay was extended, he could have Perry switch them out so that they weren’t left hanging? Yes, he liked that. Still, the communications delay was as always damn annoying. He could buck the odds and set the drone’s drive to 100% and pray, not that prayer had ever worked for him before, or he could send multiple drones with different drive settings. Costly that was, despite drones being routinely collected at their destinations and reused after refurbishment. Captains were discouraged from burning through their stock of drones, just as they could catch hell for using up their decoys and missile loads frivolously. They had price tags in the millions. Still, he was due to send a drone soon anyway. If he sent three now, and didn’t send his ne
xt scheduled drone, he could keep the cost down. He would have to warn the admiralty of his intentions or risk them raising an alarm when he failed to report at the usual time interval. He didn’t need the embarrassment of another ship coming out to check on him.

  So three drones with drives set at 80, 90, and 100% would be his answer. With luck the fastest drone would not fail. The admiralty would learn of matters here in Helios in about four and a half weeks in that lucky case. A month after that should see a team here ready to investigate... if they had one on hand. How long would it take to scrape one together? He had no idea. He could only help matters by expediting things at his end.

  “How are we going with those logs, Anya?”

  “I’ve dumped everything to Warrior, sir. Not sure what use we might have for it, but maybe we can figure out where Tait was based. There must be others like him using it for fencing loot and buying stores.”

  “Good thought.” That had actually been one of his earlier reasons for bringing Anya with him to collect the data, but he had other reasons now. “The jump logs are all there?”

  “About that. If I’m reading this right, it looks as if Tait got into a little spat with one of our ships a while ago and performed an emergency jump.”

  “Oh really?”

  “Yes. The thing is he caused a mis-jump by activating his drive before it was fully charged.”

  Colgan winced. He was surprised the ship hadn’t been ripped apart. Tait had been a lucky bastard to get away with it. His ship hadn’t been destroyed, and he hadn’t blown his jump capacitors to flaming flinders either. Amazing.

  “Do we know where he came out?”

  “Well that’s the thing. He dropped into an unexplored system by the looks of it. I wonder what the black boxes and bridge recorders show...” Anya grimaced. “Not likely they’re even connected anymore, Skipper. What pirate would want a witness to his crimes like that?”

  “Check anyway. Never underestimate the cleverness or stupidity of the enemy, Anya. Still, sensor logs might tell us something.”

  Anya nodded.

  “Tell you what, you stay here and mine every byte of data you can, and dump it all to Warrior. I’m heading back there now to start my reports on all of this. Can you catch a ride back with the marines?”