Till the Conflict Is Over

by Michael A. Hooten

  Captain Butler hated me most. He called me to his cabin a few hours after the big meeting, and I expected to be reamed, but he just sat behind his desk and looked at me like I was some especially repellent bug.

  “I am going to patch us through to Admiral Duffy on a special channel,” he said. “But before I do, I want you to know that if I had my way, I'd throw you in the brig for jumping the chain of command. And that's just to start.”

  “I'm sorry, sir, I—”

  He slammed his hand down on the desk. “You're going to kill us all, you know that, right? You have to know that!”

  I just nodded.

  He sat back and got himself back under control. “Damn you for playing hero at Juno, and damn you for being on my ship.” He punched his screen a few times and when it beeped, he said, “Captain Harold Butler, USN.”

  I heard Admiral Duffy's voice. “Captain Butler, stand by. We're setting things up on this end and connecting to Wright's tablet.”

  Sure enough, I felt a buzzing and heard a beeping, and I pulled it up to see a bunch of flashing pages with a progress bar overlaid over it all. It filled up quickly, then the whole thing went blank for a moment before coming up with a blank email already addressed to Katy.

  The captain had turned his screen so that I could see it, and the Admiral could see me. “This is pretty simple, Wright. All you have to say is that it looks like you'll reach the enemy first. Anything else is up to you.”

  I stared at the blank page for a few minutes. Captain Butler sighed noisily, but the admiral just waited patiently.

  Finally, I wrote, “Katy my love, it looks like we'll reach the enemy first. I don't know what might happen to us. Remember that I love you no matter what. I hope that we can be together again someday. Peter.” And then hit the send button.

  Admiral Duffy got it shortly thereafter, and he scanned it. “Good job, Peter. Just what we needed.”

  Captain Butler said, “What about the rest of the crew, Admiral? Do we get to send out last messages to our loved ones?”

  “Standard protocol, Captain.”

  “Yessir,” the Captain said. “How long do you think it will take to know if this works?”

  “I have no idea,” Admiral Duffy said. “We're going to make it look like he snuck this out, so give it at least a day.”

  “Aye sir.” Captain Butler wiped his screen and put his head in his hands. His shoulders shook a bit, and I wasn't sure what to do.

  “Permission to leave sir?” I said softly.

  He just waved me away, and I got the hell out of there, and almost ran over Cmdr. Tatum. “How'd it go?” He asked.

  “That was worse than just about anything I've seen,” I said.

  He whistled. “That's got to be pretty bad.” He looked around and gestured for me to follow. We went up to O country, which I had never been to before. He ushered me into a little cabin about half the size of the captain's office, though it had a similar desk and a single bunk along the wall. Pictures of an attractive woman with six kids at various ages decorated the walls. Only a few had the commander in them.

  “My family,” he said. “I don't get to see them very often, of course, but they have handled it like champs.”

  He sat behind the desk and gestured for me to sit in the chair across from him. “You wanted to talk to me, sir?” I said.

  He grimaced. “You're not in trouble or anything. Sit.”

  I did. And waited.

  Cmdr. Tatum drummed his fingers on his desk. “I looked you up when I heard what happened. You've had quite the naval career.”

  “Yessir.”

  “What I want you to understand is that Captain Butler has not.”

  “Sir?”

  The commander leaned forward. “He's old school, politically connected, trying to get his admiral's star by not making too many waves. He took this command because it's thankless, meaning he took one for the team, but he also took it because it was supposed to quiet and without any of this drama.”

  “I'm not exactly thrilled to be headed into battle again, sir,” I said.

  “No one is,” the commander said. “But it's not your job to lead your ship into harm's way. That's literally the job of every CO on every warship in the navy, no matter where it is.”

  “And Captain Butler blames me for that?”

  Cmdr Tatum sighed. “Never underestimate what fear can cause a man to do.”

  “Excuse me sir, but the Admiral said something about standard protocol for the crew sending messages. What is that?”

  He smiled ruefully. “It's not surprising you wouldn't know, but it was one of the first changes after Juno. Any ship headed into a hot zone allows the crew to record final messages, as many as they like, and it's all uploaded to an off-board server. That way if something happens...” He looked up at the smiling faces on his wall.

  “Why didn't we do it when we headed for Port Jackson?”

  Cmdr Tatum shook his head. “Most of us have something stored already. Ever since Juno.”

  “I understand, sir. Thank you.” I stood up. “I should probably go do my own.”

  “Good luck, Wright.”

  “Luck to us all, sir.”

  Whatever his personal feelings, Captain Butler showed none of it when he sent out an all hands message later that day. I looked at his face on my tablet and didn't see anything but resolve. “Gentlemen, we will be meeting the enemy soon. I'd like everyone to take some time and record any final words you may have for your loved ones if you haven't already. We will upload them at midnight, and hopefully they'll never be seen. Just make sure that you say what you need to in case they are.”

  Owens was sitting with me in the work center when I watched it, and he whistled. “Hell of a pep talk.”

  “Yeah, well.” I cleared the screen and thought about what I might say to my grandpa. But a glance at Owens drove it from my mind. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to make us a target.”

  He barked a laugh. “We're on a warship, and we're at war. The whole bloody thing makes us a target.”

  “I guess.”

  “Buck up, man!” Owens said, slapping me on the back. “Even if we die, we might save Port Washington, and that would be no small feat.”

  “And we might die and not save them,” I said.

  “Yah, always conceivable,” he said. “Then again, maybe the miners will have a change of heart and just go home.”

  “Riiight.”

  He shrugged. “Space is a strange place. Pretty much anything is possible out here. You're proof.”

  I recorded just a handful of messages. One for my Grandpa, one for Meyers to share with our group of survivors, one for Meyers personally... and one more for Katy that was rather longer and more emotional than the one I had written for the Admiral's plan.

  When I finished, I sat in my radar room, just trying not to worry about our plan working, or not working. I don't know how long I was there, but the beeping on my tablet roused me. Volley stared back at me, with the red light of CIC behind him. “Pull up the fire control computer screen,” he said.

  “Hang on,” I said, sitting down at the computer. We had access to all the stuff CIC did essentially, but it wasn't a very large screen. Still, I could see the plot of the swarm. All the vectors pointed at us now. “Damn,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Volley said. “I guess they do hate your guts more than anything else.”

  Chapter 11

  We closed the distance faster than most of us wished, and still at an agonizingly slow pace. Four days is a lot of time to sit and think about hell headed towards you. We checked everything we could, made sure all the equipment was in tip top shape, and prayed, every damn one of us, including the hard-core atheists. The Captain kept us on modified General Quarters, and we ate battle rations and talked over the various nets.

  No one knew the range of the swarm's weapons, but we knew ours. We had a countdown on every screen after the first day, and we watched it count away the hour
s. Our hours. No one was hopeful we would survive unscathed. We just didn't want to be among the casualties. The first couple of days, you'd hear jokes about who you wouldn't mind losing. By the third day, it was serious talk of who we could afford to lose.

  The fourth morning, the countdown showed six hours to engagement, and no one wanted to lose anyone.

  Dilly manned the console in CIC. I watched the main screen in Radar 3 and checked every status of every piece of equipment obsessively. All our calculations had been run hundreds of times against dozens of scenarios. The countdown turned yellow in the last hour, and the nets all went silent while we watched those minutes slip away. When it got to the last ten, the numbers turned red.

  The fear and stress made my stomach flip and roll. The last sixty seconds, and I heaved up everything from the last pack of rations I had eaten some twelve hours earlier. It wasn't much, and I caught it all in a barf bag.

  Ten seconds. No one counted along.

  The last three. No avoiding it.

  The last second disappeared. The countdown flashed all zeros. The swarm on the screen went from red to green in a wave. I heard someone say on the command net, “Targets confirmed. Missiles ready.”

  The countdown still flashed all zeros, but the clock still showed the minutes passing. On the weapons net, Volley said, “What're we waiting for?”

  “Captain wants them to fire first,” Dilly said.

  “What the hell for?” Owens demanded.

  “Who the hell knows?” Chief Hammerdale said. “He's the captain, not you bozos, so pipe down!”

  We did. My jaw hurt from clenching. The minutes continued to slip by.

  I have often wondered if they waited so long to see what we were going to do, just like we were doing. Whatever the reason, though, it wasn't until we had been in the zone for almost four hours that the first shots happened.

  “Holy hell!” yelled Gunny Bob. “They just fired from all barrels! We've got a wall coming towards us!”

  After that, there was plenty of cursing, and the Captain called for evasive maneuvers. It was a good thing we were all strapped in, because we hit some serious G's trying to get around the rail gun shells. The problem is that every move we made was countered by another volley.

  “Away the missiles!” I heard someone calling. “Why aren't we firing the missiles?”

  We were flying into the teeth of a storm. The problem is, you almost have to. Rail gun shells can't turn, and you want to provide them with as little surface to hit as possible. We were looking for a pinhole in an avalanche.

  The shells kept coming, faster than anything else man-made in the solar system. And still it felt like slow motion, just because of the distance. When we were seconds away from the first ones, the Captain fired from every missile tube on board, and almost a hundred Pulverizers shot away, dodging the shells better than we could, and headed for the heart of the swarm.

  Except one. The first missile detonated barely a thousand klicks straight ahead of us, and the shock wave opened a hole for us—and the other missiles. But we hit the edge of it before it had a chance to dissipate.

  The ship shook like an earthquake.

  “Reactor 1 has a coolant leak!”

  A calm voice on the command net directed damage control, but pipes had burst all over the ship. Volley yelled that the number one signal processor had gone off line, and sure enough, the screen showing the swarm flickered before the backup came on. Owens in Radar 2 said something about a cabinet, but I didn't catch it.

  I had my own problems. Six cabinets kept the aft radar going, and two blinked off without warning. I added my report to the cacophony even as I started running diagnostics.

  Nothing conclusive. “Shit,” I said, and started unbuckling my straps. I didn't even bothering putting my boots on the floor, just pushed off from my chair straight though the space.

  Big mistake. The ship shuddered, and me, without any attachment, got slammed to the deck hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Another shake, and I was rattled about the radar room, bouncing off of every surface, and getting highly disoriented. It didn't help when the lights flickered and went out. The emergency lights came on almost immediately, but I was lucky I had already puked. I was dry heaving uncontrollably. And through it all, I heard station after station report failures.

  I finally caught myself on the workbench and got my feet under me. My relief was short-lived however, when I realized that my boots weren’t sticking—and that the nets had fallen silent. Both very bad signs.

  I keyed the weapons net. “Radar 3 reporting. Is anyone there?”

  The silence made me feel relive Juno all over. I keyed the command net. “This is FC2 Wright. Is anyone else online?”

  I heard some crackling, and then, “Wright, it's commander Tatum. Switch to channel zero fife niner.”

  I made the switch, and I heard voices. Some were in pain, some barely audible, but I wasn't alone. Relief washed over me, and I thought I could handle anything. And then I started hearing how bad off we were.

  Everything had been damaged. Two of the engines had been jettisoned due to the risk of explosion, and the main reactor was off line. Multiple hull breaches from the shells, sporadic life support systems, and two thirds of the crew were unaccounted for. Of those that were accounted, two thirds had died, including the captain.

  We had about 30 people reporting, and we were blind, deaf, and dumb.

  I heard the XO call my name. “Here, sir.”

  “How's your space?”

  I looked around. My nice, solid cabinets looked like drunken sailors leaning on each other for support. A jagged crack ran up the port bulkhead, and the hatch had been knocked out of alignment with the frame, which wasn't even supposed to be possible. “Somewhat whole,” I said. “But no longer square.”

  “Yeah, nothing is anymore,” he said. “Anything we can use for comms? And do you have air bottles?”

  “Wait one, sir.” The emergency cabinet took a pry bar to open, but fortunately the tool drawers came open fairly easily. I looked through it. “Six bottles, rations for about a week, and a few other supplies.”

  “No comm box?”

  “Not that I see, sir.”

  “Damn.”

  “There is one in Radar 2, and another in Computer 1. I'm pretty sure we have one in the supply area as well,” I said.

  There was a brief pause. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes sir.” It was my turn to pause. “After Juno, I tend to be aware of that kind of thing.”

  “Understood,” the XO replied, and that was all we ever said of that. “I'm in Computer 2, and I don’t think I've heard from any of the spaces you mentioned. We're trying to figure out what's safe and what's not right now. I have everyone holding in place unless there's a reason not to.”

  “What's the plan long term?”

  “Wait one.”

  My tablet buzzed, and I looked at it, surprised it was still intact. I swiped it, and the commander's face appeared, looking worn and tired. “I'd rather talk on a private connection,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Yessir?”

  “This is not something that anyone can prepare for, and I could use your help.” He ran his hand over his helmet. “I'm know I'm in shock. No one I've talked to seems much better.”

  “Sir, I...” I hesitated, not sure how to proceed. Officers did not ask enlisted for help. They certainly didn't confess their weakness to them. “Okay, do we have any idea what's going on outside?”

  “Last report said none of the swarm was firing at us. But that could mean anything.”

  “True.” I tapped my fingers on the workbench. “Okay, do we have any power besides battery?”

  “Auxiliary reactor looks to be online,” the XO said. “But so much has been damaged...”

  I sighed. “We're just going to have to start going through the ship, putting eyes on things... and people. How are the comms holding up?”

  “So far, so good.” He sighed in
return. “I wish I knew for how long.”

  “Understood.” I pulled up my layout of the ship. “I'd try moving aft to the shuttle hangar. It's a large space, and if we can get in, we can gather supplies, personnel, and maybe some equipment.”

  “And the dead?”

  “If we can.” I tried not to flashback to stacking row upon row of stiff bodies. And failed miserably. “We have a responsibility to them.”

  “Agreed. I'll make the announcement on the net.”

  “You should wait on that until I can give you a heads up on what to expect.” I looked at my hatch. “Or if I can even get there.”

  “Roger that. XO out.”

  My tablet screen went blank. I started towards the door, started shaking uncontrollably. I could hear the XO issuing commands on the net, but I couldn’t move, and the tears streamed down my face while I struggled to take a breath. When he called my name, I answered in the affirmative, keeping my voice as even as possible. I gripped the door lever as hard as I could, waiting for the panic to subside.

  It finally did, retreating to a knot in my stomach. I took a few deep breaths, and pulled up on the hatch handle.

  It didn't open smoothly, but it did open. The passage looked like my space, all off kilter. The emergency lights made strange shadows, but I forced myself to start moving. I turned on my helmet lights, but I did not try any of the hatches I passed. I wanted to get to the hangar.

  Two levels down, and aft. I saw no one in the passages but followed along with the reports on the emergency net. Some of the better off guys were moving, gathering the living and the dead, and anything they could to keep us alive.

  Getting in the hangar required going through a full-on airlock, and of course it did not work. The manual override allowed me to crank it open, and I kept excepting to hear warnings or sirens, but the ship was evidently smart enough to know it wouldn’t make a difference.

  I got the inner door open and looked into what I expected to be an empty space like the one on the Rosy Roads. But that shuttle had been left behind due to needed repairs. This hangar had not one, but two shuttles. And one looked to be sized for cargo.