Ghosts from the Past (The Wandering engineer Book 7)

by Chris Hechtl

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Sprite came up from her record research to find the Admiral elbow deep in another minor repair project. She was concerned he was back sliding, forgetting his duty to the big picture. She would have to do something about it she thought. First she pinged Lobsterman for a quick status update on the fleet and ship. When it was complete she scanned it, integrating it in her short term memory before she then made an ahem sound.

  “Yes, what is it, Commander,” the Admiral asked, clearly distracted.

  “Admiral, a moment.”

  “I'm a bit busy here,” he said, pointing out the control runs to the tech. “Can it wait?”

  “I'd actually like to talk to you about what you are currently doing,” she said.

  “See this ODN cable with the green and white fittings? It has a candy cane stripe. That's a data line. Part of the subnet actually. If you plug your tester here into this port ...” He plugged a tester into a junction. Red LEDs began to flicker madly. “Okay, we have activity, but it is unstable. If it was stable, we'd see the top light, which is the net light, be constantly on and green. Since it is not that means something is hinky here. It could be software related or hardware. Now, we push diagnose on the tablet, and the tester probe links to the tablet in your hand and will give you a reading.”

  The Veraxin looked down at the tablet and then up. “It is hash.”

  “That's the code sample,” Irons frowned, looking over the bug's shoulder to see it. He could always access the WiFi signal directly but he wanted his student to learn to interpret code for himself. He recognized the code string. It wasn't jumbled, but if you weren't a native coder you wouldn't understand it. “Okay, I'm guessing you aren't a coder?”

  “No, sir. I took the basic course, but I barely passed it. I was planning on taking another when I was transferred to Firefly ... and well ...” The Veraxin shrugged and motioned third level chagrin and embarrassment with both sets of upper arms.

  “Okay. Well, you can call a coder in or we can do a test run of the line with someone else. Basically they hook up another probe to their end of the Optical Data Network line and then you hit test. Your probe would send a series of pulses down the line to their kit and then you would pool the results. But we've got a clean line here, so either something is hashed up in the code or in the hardware.”

  “Okay. And how do we figure that out, sir?” The Veraxin asked, turning several eye stalks to the senior officer.

  Irons pursed his lips. His estimation of the Veraxin's experience, abilities, and training were going down fast. He was honest though; he had to give him credit for that at least. “Well, since you aren't a coder, you have two choices, pull in someone who is or pull hardware, swap it, and then put it on a bench and check it later. But since someone might be using this computer node, say, an AI, we don't know what is going on. So ...”

  “So call an expert in, sir.”

  “Got it. You do that, I'll just check in with the Commander for a moment,” Irons said. He got up and patted the Veraxin on the upper shoulder and then went off to the corner for a modicum of relative privacy.”

  “All right, Commander. What is it?”

  “Admiral, you should be focused on the big picture not doing grunt work.”

  Irons frowned thoughtfully but didn't reply.

  “You have to delegate situations like this. Not just the basic repair, which by the way is code, the line is fine we're using it, but also the training.”

  “He lacks confidence. He's young. He's getting it.”

  “I know that, sir, but you shouldn't be the one to have to deal with it. We need you doing your job. There are people to make certain he does his.”

  “And I seem to recall the chain of command is a bit messed up right now,” Irons replied.

  “True. And yes, this ship is damaged … but …”

  Irons held up a hand. “Status of the fleet?”

  “Unchanged since last update four hours ago.”

  “And the same can be said for the past day and week correct? There isn't a lot I can do as an Admiral in hyper.”

  “There is paperwork.”

  “Which you should be handling as my chief of staff, you and the AI. I'm currently acting captain until we find someone to fill the slot, so my responsibility is to this ship and crew too, Commander.”

  “What about planning for the future, Admiral?” Sprite pointed out. “And yes, I am the chief of staff, so my job is to keep you on task and on the mission.”

  “Okay, first of all, I refuse to plan any more than we already have. The basic outline is there, I don't need another endless meeting rehashing the same old dog and pony show again. Been there, done that. There is only so far you can take planning.”

  “Admiral, Prior Planning ...”

  “Yeah yeah, prevents piss poor performance. But I can't coordinate with the other ships in hyper right now, so we can't be on the same page.”

  “True.”

  “They are each taking their course heading and speed from Maine, which means Maine needs to be functional.”

  “Yes sir, but ...”

  “My ass, your ass, is riding on the line here. I can do a lot getting this ship functional again while also bonding with the crew and assessing them.”

  “I see ...”

  “I want to make certain this is done correctly, Commander. I don't want someone snipping a line to oh, say, the hyperdrive.”

  “Um, okay, good point.”

  The Admiral smiled sourly. “So we're good?”

  “Yes, you can go play hooky as long as you eat your veggies and attend at least the morning meetings,” Sprite replied, clearly exasperated.

  The Admiral exhaled noisily and ran a hand through his hair. “Glad we've cleared the air.”

  “I just thought you were backsliding. Going back to old habits, burying yourself in small problems, and leaving the big picture alone.”

  “I can't do much about the big picture while in hyper. I refuse to worry about it anymore than I already have, some things are just out of my hands right now. I can't change that until we get Maine sorted out. One problem at a time, Commander.”

  “Aye, sir. Don't rub it in,” she growled, “... Admiral.”

  He snorted and went back to work. After a moment Sprite flipped back into the net and decided a check with Lobsterman on the other work parties might be in order.

  Maine had a lot of damage to repair, and unfortunately, her chain of command left a lot to be desired. It was something they had attempted to work out prior to leaving B101a1, but Firefly had been tasked to return to Pyrax in a certain window, and the Admiral had wanted to clear out to B100 omega in order to facilitate repairs better there, refuel the fleet with his automated refinery he had left in orbit, and to send a relief force to Hidoshi's World to follow up the one led by Lieutenant Lewis.

  Maine had a navigator, OPS officer, tactical officer, and some very junior officers, but she lacked a properly trained chief engineer, captain, and XO. To be fair, most of the ships in their fleet had similar manning issues. For the time being, the admiral was trying to not only be the flag officer but also fill those other three roles until he got a better feel for the people involved. The problem was all four roles were pulling him all over the ship. Just getting the systems back online was troublesome, let alone keeping the systems that were on line running smoothly.

  The fleet had a dedicated core of former slaves turns sailors and marines as well as transferred personnel from Firefly. To thicken things up they had two hundred former slaves from the Horathian fleet, many still on the ships they had been enslaved on. Each and everyone had volunteered for the posting. The Admiral had taken the most experienced of these to thicken the ship's companies, but each ship was still undermanned with what was barely a skeleton crew on many.

  Things were definitely going to be interesting, the AI thought. Now that they had gotten over the emotional high of liberation, many were starting to strain under the p
ressure of the workload. Oh, many of the organics had dealt with living and working on a damaged ship for most of their lives, but in this case they had to deal with training along with residual psychological trauma issues. It was only a matter of time before someone somewhere broke. She just hoped it wouldn't be too bad.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Lieutenant Irina Nobeki frowned as she came into engineering country. She had liked being on the bridge, but the admiral was right. They needed help in engineering and other than him she was the only qualified officer to fit the role. So, chief engineer she would be. It wasn't like they needed a tactical officer while in transit right now anyway. And if the shit did hit the fan, she could do double duty or the admiral could. Or he could train someone like Lobsterman up to take some of the load off.

  As she entered she saw Chief Behr trying to get a couple people to work on an EPS conduit while also dealing with a power room issue. She stood there nearby, watching with hooded eyes, drinking it all in. She wanted to see what was wrong before she stepped in to fix it.

  When the chief finished with the work crew they took off. They weren't moving out smartly, Irina noted, just sort of slacking. One or two weren't thrilled about the job so they were slacking off in order to pass it off on the next shift she thought. And that attitude was infecting others around them. Something else to fix. Her head turned to watch them go.

  “Can I help you, Lieutenant?” the chief asked.

  She turned back to him. “Yes, Chief, in the office?” She said, pointing to the chief engineer's domain.

  He looked at the open hatch then nodded reluctantly. “In a moment, ma'am, if you will,” he said, leaning over to instruct a young canine on how to monitor the EPS for additional kicks while smoothing out the flow of plasma to prevent it from becoming a standing wave further down the line.

  Irina met the chief in the office. He noted her taking a seat behind the cluttered desk and paused in the doorway.

  “Close the door, Chief,” she said mildly.

  “Um, okay ...”

  “I'm taking over engineering. The admiral is right; we don't need a tactical officer for the moment. And you need commissioned support,” she said, watching his reaction.

  “Oh, thank the gods,” he said, shaking his head. “Ma'am, you are a life saver. I know when I'm in over my head.”

  “I thought as much, Chief. She's a big ship,” Irina admitted.

  Behr nodded earnestly. “That she is. A big battered ship and I am ... well, now you are in over your head. We've got a lot of problems and only so many hands to deal with them. Everything seems like it needs to be a priority. I keep pulling people from one project to deal with something else. Running the ship is also a pain in the ass.”

  “I see that,” the woman said, indicating the pile of encrusted coffee cups, food containers and tablets festooning the desk and guest chairs. There were a couple soiled work uniforms and a coverall mixed in too. She tried to breathe through her mouth, the smell was appalling. No wonder the man just used it to store shit in. He was either nose blind to it all or just threw stuff in and went back to whatever he was doing.

  “All right. You are acting bosun I believe. I'm not sure; you'll have to check with the admiral or Commander Sprite on that one. But I'll still need you as an assistant chief engineer. Any problems with taking orders from me?”

  “No, ma'am. Where do we start?” Behr said.

  “I picked up a sitrep from OPS while I was doing bridge duty. Why don't you tell me the priorities you assigned for today to get me up to speed and then we'll go on from there?”

  He nodded. “Aye aye, ma'am. We're having trouble with the deck 8 EPS conduit. Junction 4 has a turbulence problem that is throwing things off downstream. “I have to reroute around it each time, let the plasma settle, then use it again when the subsystem becomes overloaded.”

  “That's a problem,” Irina mused, getting to her feet. She went over to the ship's blueprint on the wall. She studied it then nodded. “Okay. We need the data from upstream and downstream of the problem. You narrowed it down to the junction so I take it you ordered that work crew to swap it out?”

  “To check the control software first, ma'am. There might be something hinky there. We had that problem in another junction a couple of days ago.”

  “I see. Okay, good call, it's easier to check first before just pulling it. But I'll get on the admiral to see if he can replicate another junction just in case. In the meantime, we'll prep the team to route around the junction then drain it so it can be pulled next shift.”

  “It's going to be tricky, ma'am.”

  “I know. So you are going to get some rest and then report back here after you finish my in-brief. You get to tackle that.”

  The chief hesitated then nodded. “Aye aye, ma'am.”

  “Good man. Now, next problem ...”

  ...*...*...*...*...

  John set the report he'd been reading down on the desk and then sat there for a long moment. Sprite may want him to spend more time planning, but there was only so much planning he could do while in transit and with little or no Intel about what they were about to encounter. His mind wandered briefly as he stared off into space.

  In many ways he was in a situation similar to what could have happened after the battle of Pyrax. He knew there was still some agitation to take the fleet in, but he ignored it. When he'd taken control of Pyrax he'd put a lot of effort in the first six months to not only train the volunteers that had stepped up but also in the infrastructure to support, maintain, and expand the fleet. Mainly the yard.

  He'd planned carefully; his intent at the time was to build small hulls, gunships, frigates, and corvettes for the first year. Each hull would only take a month to construct once they had the subassemblies built. The gunships were even faster, under two weeks since they had much smaller power plants and lacked a hyperdrive.

  That plan would have allowed the yard dogs to get up to speed on construction practices, let them expand on the infrastructure investment, and allowed his crews to gain critical real world experience in space.

  The small hulls would have been great for that, he thought. He had planned to use them to not only defend the star system in quantity but also shotgun them out as pickets to neighboring systems as more and more ships were constructed. They could build many small hulls for the time, resource, and manning of a larger hull. Since the pirates were mainly concentrated in small hulls, he'd reasoned it would give his people much needed seasoning. He could then cherry pick the best and brightest to man the larger hulls as they came online one by one.

  By picketing the outer systems he would have a distant early warning network as well as additional systems to draw manpower and resources from. They would have continued establishing pickets further and further afield until they had made contact ... or so he'd hoped.

  Making repairs to the existing ships had taken a bit longer than planned; he hadn't even gotten very deep into repairing the salvaged Tauren battleship Bismark when he'd had to leave the star system. By the time of his exile, they'd laid down dozens of hulls though, the first flight of smaller picket ships as well as started the logistical pipeline to lay down destroyers, cruisers, and even a couple of battle cruisers in the building slips. He'd stuck to a single hull form for each class to simplify the logistics involved. He'd also skimped on the fortresses and carriers at the time, reasoning that he didn't have the trained manpower.

  It hadn't worked out as planned however, he thought with a frown. He twisted back and forth in the chair as he mentally faced the past and his broken plans. It was all for the best; time had shown him that the enemy was much more dangerous and more advanced than he'd anticipated.

  Horatio's changes to the plan were also well thought out. The former yeoman turned officer had built a block of each of the ship's taking their construction as far as he could in the pipeline before he'd mothballed them into storage and started over. Then there were his other projects.

  N
ot only had Horatio used what limited resources he could to build the forts to defend the system's jump points, but he'd also laid down the first of several escort carriers. With the care packages John had managed to send him, he'd not only expanded a few things, but he'd taken Kittyhawk all the way to a mobile hull. Granted she was little more than a fighter barge, but Irons anticipated that would change once Firefly's brood returned to Pyrax with the presents he'd tucked away in their holds.

  Now that he knew more about the threat they faced he agreed with Captain Logan's decisions. The Horathians were a lot more dangerous than he'd expected. They were also fielding larger ships than he'd expected. He'd thought with his small hull plan he'd have time ... years to work up the larger hulls. Now though ... he shook his head. All wasn't lost, but they had a lot of work ahead of themselves. A lot of blood, sweat, and probably all too many tears before the campaign would be finished. But they would finish it he vowed. He exhaled slowly and then went back to his report.

  ...*...*...*...*...

  Now that things were slowing down, Sprite took the time to process the files Firefly had sent along. Most of the briefs were dry, facts and figures in data form easily for her to log for future reference. But when her mind turned to the intelligence and news files she quickly scanned the reports with interest. A ship name fairly leapt out of the bare data at her. She immediately called it to the Admiral's attention.

  "Admiral, do you remember the ship that delivered the sleepers to Epsilon?"

  "Yes," he said, still reading a different report. There were a lot of things to do on each ship, trying to get things organized in a more efficient manner was a pain.

  "The Prinz Zir?" Sprite asked.

  He snapped his fingers. "Yes. That's the one," he said. "What's this about?"

  "Well, it turns out loose lips may not of been the only thing that happened in Protodon."

  "Oh?" he paused, looking up and focusing on her avatar. "All this hinting about have a reason, Commander?" He asked, voice cooling a bit.