“And about as welcome, too,” adds Brandt. A hint of a smile cracks his face. He shakes it away. “That means he’d try to sneak away at a lesser speed so we couldn’t see his warp—but that doesn’t make sense. He’d be cutting his own lead. We couldn’t catch him with thirteen days of chase.”
“Fourteen,” corrects Barak.
“Fourteen, thirteen, what’s the difference? We’re still too far away.”
“Only if it’s a trick,” puts in Korie. “We’re too far away only if his engines are still in perfect working order. But his only reason for stopping is that he’s in trouble too—and this could be our chance to move in for the kill.”
Brandt nods. “It seems the most likely thing, that he’s in trouble too. . . .”
“If he is,” insists the first officer, “we might be able to get to him before he can recharge his cells.”
The captain looks at him, “That is a possibility—however, that would necessitate that we repair our own engines first. . . .” He drops into his chair again, thumbs a switch. “Engine room, this is Brandt.”
A pause, then, “Leen here.” The chief engineer’s voice comes filtered through the speaker.
“Status report, please.” Brandt leans back in his chair.
“Uh—we’re still searching. It’s definitely something in the second phase circuitry.”
“How long till you fix it?”
“Hard to say, sir—we’ve got to find it first. And then it depends on which component it is. Some of them are damned inaccessible. It could take two or three hours. Then again, maybe not.”
Brandt looks at Korie—the first officer is frowning. “Let’s hope not. Do you know yet how it happened?”
“Yes, sir, but you won’t like it.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Some kind of field interference—focused on the number three function.”
“So?”
“So, the generator tried to compensate for it—introduced a reciprocal vibration.”
Brandt ignores Korie’s impatience. “That shouldn’t have affected the warp.”
“It didn’t, not at first—but the thing was an unstable quantity. The generator couldn’t match it. As it built up, we got a first-level resistance to the secondary fields. The warp was stable, all our fields were stable, but we weren’t getting any push. That’s why our speed started to drop when the vibration hit the red line. And because of resonance, all our other stress-field functions went wild too. Hell, Captain,” Leen mutters, “it’s such a piddling little thing—and it’s practically crippled us! If they’d let us have those Thorsen generators when we asked, this thing’d never have happened. I could have simply cross-phased and out-circuited number three. We could have limped along on five and still maintained speed.”
Brandt smiles, “If it can be done, Chief, I’m sure you can do it.”
“Hell! I could do it with these, if they’d let me put in the override equipment I need—but if they ever found out I could run this ship on five generators, they’d take one out.”
The captain grins at this. He glances up, but Korie is not grinning—he is glaring meaningfully.
Brandt’s grin fades. “Listen, Chief; we still have a chance at that bogie. He’s dropped out of warp. Mr. Korie here is champing a bit—so try and get your repair crew on the ball, will you?”
“Aye, aye, sir. I’ll have the warp up again as soon as possible.”
“Good man.” Brand disconnects; he looks to his pale first officer. “Well, Mr. Korie, I assume you still want to go after that bogie. . . ?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Uh huh.” Brandt turns to his dark-skinned astrogator. “What say, Al?” Can we sneak up on him?”
“Why not just go after him at full speed?” interrupts Korie. Brandt looks back to him.
“He’s got a point there,” puts in Barak. “At top speed we could close with him in eight hours.”
The captain looks at them both, clears his throat gruffly. “I don’t like it,” he says. “I don’t want to give him eight hours’ warning. He’d see our warp all the way in.”
“He wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, though,” counters Korie. “His engines are blown. Your way would only give him time to fix them.”
“We don’t know that his engines are blown,” corrects Brandt. “And if we can fix our engines in the next eight hours, then maybe he can do the same with his. Whatever the trouble is, with eight hours warning, he would certainly be able to jury-rig something. Don’t forget, we stopped because we had to. He stopped voluntarily. Your way, Mr. Korie, we stand a very good chance of picking up the chase right where we left off—in a stalemate. On the other hand, as it is now, he can’t see us at all, any more than we can see him—let’s keep it that way as long as we can and maybe we can get in close enough to attack.”
The first officer is forced to agree; he nods reluctantly.
The captain turns to his astrogator again. “Now. Can you do it, Al?”
Barak frowns distastefully. It is obvious that he’d much rather do it Korie’s way, but he just grimaces and says, “Probably . . . he must be watching for us pretty closely, but we could do it by keeping our warp speed low. The smaller our stress-field disturbance, the closer we can get to him before he can pick us up; but he is fifty-five light days away, Captain, and the slower we go means the longer we take getting there—and more chance he has to escape.”
Brandt nods warily. “But you can do it. . . ?”
Barak shrugs. “Well, we might try to come in as close as we can without getting picked up on his scopes—then when we’re too close to avoid it, we could come down on top of him as fast as we could. Within a certain limit he will pick us up, but this would minimize his warning.”
“And we could come in from an angle that he won’t be expecting us from,” suggests Korie. “It might throw him off balance.”
“For a bit, anyway,” qualifies Brandt. “But it’s not a bad idea.”
Barak shoots Korie a mock-sour look. “That’s right; make it harder for me. That means we’ll have to sneak past his sphere of influence in order to come back down into it—that’s like trying to graze a billiard ball from three miles away, bounce off the side board, and hit it square on the ricochet.”
“What you’re trying to say then is that you can’t do it?” asks Brandt.
“Oh, I can do it all right. I just don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it. All you have to do is do it. And if we’re going after him at all, that course has to be ready and set up to go by the time repairs are finished.”
“Aye, aye.” Barak turns back to his board and his assistant. Brandt hits the chair arm and swivels forward. Korie steps out of his way as the chair swings around.
Ahead, on the screen dominating the forward wall of the bridge, the two space-suited figures have dismantled a large section of the hull at the base of the number two grid. The screen blinks to show a close-up of their work as seen by the helmet camera. Currently, they are checking individual black box components. One of the men is touching a sensor to various key points of the systems analysis network. In theory it should have already pinpointed the location of the malfunction, but so much new equipment and refittings have been added to the Burlingame since she was commissioned that the system has long since collapsed in its own complexity. Now, a malfunction in any part of the ship requires an additional on-the-spot check of the secondary analysis units. The second crewman has plugged into one of these units with a portable scanner. It is a flat plastic device and he watches the readings on it carefully while the other continues to probe.
Brandt glances right, at Korie’s brooding shape. “What’s your guess, Mr. Korie?”
Korie hesitates for a beat. “Multiplex adapter.”
The captain weighs this possibility. “Hm, maybe.”
A second later, the speaker crackles with electric life: “Fowles here—we found it! We’ve burned out one of the phase ada
pters.”
Brandt looks at Korie, mildly surprised. “Good guess.” Korie shrugs it off.
Another voice on the intercom. “All right, bring it in. We’ll uncrate a spare.”
At this, the first officer unclips a hand mike from his belt. “Engine room, this is Korie.”
The same voice, Leen’s voice, “Yes, sir?”
“You seem to be awfully free with the ship’s stores, Chief Leen.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
“Do you know how much one of those adapters costs?”
“Yes, sir, of course.”
“Good. Now let me ask you—why would one of them burn out?”
“I assume that’s a rhetorical question, Mr. Korie. You already know the answer.”
“That’s a very astute observation on your part, Chief.” Korie smiles thinly. “Yes, I do know. Do you?”
“Improper compensation of inherent velocity.” The reply is quick and sure. “Either in the phase alternators or—”
“Or lack of compensation altogether,” Korie says harshly. “It’s an easy thing to overlook.” He continues with staccato precision, “But somebody did overlook it. And because of that we may have lost a kill. From here it looks like somebody in the engine room has very little respect for this ship and its equipment. And that’s something that I absolutely will not allow.”
He becomes suddenly aware of Brandt’s quiet gaze on him, continues quickly, “You’re responsible for that engine room, Leen—and the people in it. Our lives depend on how well you and your crew maintain this ship!”
Leen is making apologetic noises. “It won’t happen again, sir.”
“It had better not.”
“You have my word on it.”
“Hm, we’ll see.” Korie glances at Brandt; the captain is expressionless. “All right, get on with the repairs.”
“Yes, sir.”
Korie disconnects and clips the hand mike back to his belt, grimly unsatisfied.
“Mr. Korie,” says Brandt quietly, firmly. Something in his tone makes the first officer hesitate.
“Sir?”
Brandt gestures him closer; Korie steps up onto the control island. The captain lowers his voice to a whisper. “Try and take it easy on the crew, will you? We’ve all been in space a long time.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brandt lifts one thick hand, “Oh, I’m not chastising you, but I do want you to know that a delegation from the union called on me. They were complaining about your rigid discipline.”
“There were—who?”
“That’s not your concern, don’t worry about it. It’s me that you have to please—not them. And as far as I’m concerned, you’re doing fine. You get results. Uh—it’s just that—well, try to be a little more . . . tactful.”
Korie brushes a wisp of blond hair away from his eyes. “I’ll try.”
“Good.” Brandt leans back in his chair, once more turning this attention forward. It is his signal that the discussion is closed.
On the screen, the bright cyclopes have finished working their destruction—the ruined adapter has been pulled from its moorings. It is a simple black module—a naked piece of electronics. They examine it curiously with dark, expressionless stares.
Brandt drops his hand to the controls. “Quartermaster.”
A voice from the speaker: “Yes, sir?”
“This is the captain. See that the engine room is charged for a multiplex phase adapter.”
“Sir?”
“See that the engine room crew is charged with the cost of it. Take if off their EHD allotment.”
“Yes, sir.” But the voice is puzzled.
Brandt ignores it, cuts him off abruptly—he notices Korie staring at him curiously. “A captain always stands behind his officers,” he explains.
Korie nods. “When they’re right. . . .”
The captain nods. “When they’re right.”
Ahead, two more bright slender figures, this time in green and blue, float up and out of the air lock. One is carrying a duplicate of the burned-out adapter. They activate their gravitors and drop to the hull, the screen blinking to follow them.
The Burlingame hangs unmoving in the night. Or rather, it appears to hang unmoving. What motion there is is too slight to be perceptible.
Within—her crew also appears to be unmoving. They watch their screens in silence.
On the horseshoe, Rogers is staring morosely at this gravity meters—looking at, but not seeing. To his right, a blue-clad crewman is murmuring into a hand mike, “Maintenance? Oxy consumption is up 0.03.”
Farther to the right, another crewman is adjusting the power levels of the ship’s radiation shields. This far out from any star, there is no need for the power drain. To his right, a bored ensign is watching the progress of the repairs on a tiny glowing monitor.
Below them, Barak is sitting before his console, punching out possible interception courses. He looks at his glowing screen, frowns, touches a button, looks again, and sighs with satisfaction. The lines shift and change. Jonesy stands beside him, the ever-present headset pressed against one ear.
To the rear of the bridge, Willis is listening to an ear-piece of his own. He drops his feet off the edge of his console, glances at his screens. “Uh-uh, that’s no good. Try camera hull-six.”
Again on the horseshoe, the left rear, Korie is going over a shimmering graph with a reluctant crewman. Wolfe stands by, glowering. Below them, at the warp control console, an engineer is once more arguing with his counterpart in the engine room. “See,” the speaker cries, tinily triumphant, “I told you it wasn’t our machines.”
“Well, maybe that’s why it burned out. You clowns don’t consider the grids as part of your machines.” He doesn’t wait for the other to answer, disconnects instead.
And at the front, two officers slouch in their seats before the pilot console.
Not so long ago, all was dominated by an angry red glow from the forward wall with a single shimmer of white in it. Now, four bright colored harlequins squat across that same screen, securing a replacement adapter into its moorings. The glittering lattice of the number two grid looms above them.
One of the space-suited figures touches a panel on his chest; his voice comes filtered through the speakers. “This is Crewman Fowles. We’re going to have to degauss the grid.”
The officer at the forward console bends to his mike. “Right.” He turns to face Brandt. “Sir, they say they’ll have to degauss.”
“I know, I heard. Go ahead.”
The officer turns back to his board, glances up to the horseshoe. “Rogers.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Fade to free fall.”
“F-fade to free fall?” he stammers. “But—”
“But what?” the officer demands.
“Uh—nothing, sir.” Rogers swallows nervously. “Fade to free fall.” He turns back to his console. Seconds later the raucous sound of a klaxon vibrates through the ship.
“Secure for free fall. Secure for free fall.” Rogers’ high-pitched voice squeaks loudly from the speakers. Two crewmen exchange a smirk at its adolescent sound.
Brandt shifts in his seat, fastening a safety belt across his wide stomach. Korie, still on the horseshoe, takes hold of a convenient stanchion. Others on the bridge do the same: grab at railings or fasten safety harnesses in anticipation of the gentle falling away of weight.
“Ten seconds. Ten seconds.” The voice quavers with inexperience.
The crew moves hastily to secure a few last styli and terminals. There is a pause, a single bell-like tone—a sudden painful wrenching at the gut—and then the floor drops out. Korie grabs at his stanchion with a sharp, stabbing vertigo.
Brandt gasps at the suddenness of it, finds himself unable to breathe. Half out of his couch, his safety harness binds tightly across his chest. Loosening it with one hand, he pulls himself back into the chair.
On the horseshoe, some of the men are sitting in mid-air and
cursing softly. Others are pulling themselves down into couches and hastily fastening their belts. One man—Wolfe—grabs futilely at a floating stylus, shoots suddenly upwards, a look of annoyance on his face.
Another man—a husky man—doesn’t pull himself back into his couch. Angrily, he seizes the railing on the inner edge of the horseshoe and pulls himself through the air, hand over hand, toward the gravity control board. “Rogers, you damned idiot! Where the hell did you ever learn—”
“Reynolds! Get back to your post!” The captain’s deep voice thunders across the bridge. There is a sudden hushed stillness; silent white faces turn and look. Reynolds hesitates, caught in mid-air, hands still on the railing.
“Dammit, sir! He’s—”
“Did you hear me? I do the disciplining here!” No one moves. Even Wolfe, floating at the ceiling, is motionless. His elusive stylus drifts across the bridge, drifts directly across the captain’s field of vision.
Brandt ignores it; looks only at Reynolds. Abruptly the man realizes where he is. “Yes, sir.”
He turns in mid-air and moves back along the railing to his own console. He grabs at his seat and pulls his big frame down into it. Fumbling with his seat belt he makes a point of fastening it with a loud magnetic click.
The captain glances around at the rest of the bridge; the men turn silently back to their boards. An expressionless ensign reaches up and pulls Wolfe back to deck.
“Thanks.” He starts to add something else, but a cold look from Korie freezes it in his throat. He pulls himself into a couch instead.
Brandt locks eyes with Korie—the first officer is hanging airily off a stanchion, one foot hooked casually through a metal hole—and inclines his head sharply toward the front of the bridge. Find out what happened.
Korie nods, message received, unhooks his leg, launches himself across the bridge toward Rogers. Catching hold of another stanchion, he brings himself to an awkward stop. “All right, Rogers. Start talking.”
Shaking nervously, Rogers stammers out, “I—I don’t know. Mr. Korie, sir—all I did was hit the power cut-off and—well, it was supposed to fade and it didn’t—”
Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel Page 4
