by David Smith
“You used all 400 torpedoes????”
There was an awkward pause “Actually we fired those in the first month. Command stopped sending supplies after the first couple of thousand” he grumbled, “I don’t know how they expect us to maintain a cutting edge if…..”
“Fine, I got it. No torpedoes” sighed Dave.
“It’s ok though sir, our phasers will be more than enough fire-power against a scout!” ASBeau added more happily.
A sudden anxiety crept into Dave’s mind and he called the Engineering Deck.
“Lieutenant-Commander Romanov, what’s our position on phasers and shields?”
She cleared her throat “Not good sir. One of the repaired relays has already failed, which is why the port phaser battery is off-line. We can’t fix it unless we cannibalise a relay from another circuit.”
“Shields?” asked Dave, trying to keep a note of rising panic out of his voice.
“I wasn’t expecting to be in combat sir. We prioritised structural integrity and drive systems. The repaired relays went into shields, phasers and auxiliary systems.”
“Will they hold?”
There was a brief pause. “Probably not sir. Certainly not more than a couple of shots.”
Oh Crap! thought Dave.
ASBeau quietly said “Don’t worry about it ExO, it’s only a scout. We’re bigger, faster and still more powerful than anything in their fleet. Front it out. I reckon we can scare ‘em off without firing a shot.”
Dave still had an uncomfortable knot of anxiety in his stomach. He tried to reason with himself: surely nothing else could go wrong?
He wavered. They had an absolute instruction from Command to not engage Tana or Sha T’Al vessels, but if they fended off this scout and made their presence felt, they might nip the whole problem in the bud, before it escalated into an invasion.
“Comms, any contact yet?”
“Naw sir”
Taking that as a negative answer, Dave made his decision. They’d stand their ground.
Opening the ship wide intercomm and crossing his fingers in the hope the system might actually work, Dave gave the order: “Red Alert! Battle Stations!”
“They’re charging their weapons, sir” shouted ASBeau above the din of the Red Alert klaxon.
“Shields to maximum, arm phasers, ASBeau, target their engines”
“Aye Sir!”
There was an audible buzz as the shields were brought to full strength, but even before ASBeau could acknowledge that fact, the lights dimmed and several alarms began wailing.
“What’s going on??” asked Dave.
“Shields off line! Power Relay 22……. and 36 has blown, fire on Deck 6” shouted ASBeau.
Oh crap, thought Dave. Staying calm, he said “Crash bring us about, we need to give ASBeau a clear shot with the phasers if they f….”
“Incoming fire, they’ve fired lasers sir!”
Dave breathed a sigh of relief, their old microwave lasers would never penetrate the thick tritanium of the hull plates. If they had launched torpedoes, Tiger might have been in trouble.
The ship shook alarmingly, and more Klaxons sounded. The damage control display lit up like Las Vegas.
“WHAT THE FU….”
“Hull breach Deck 6 and Deck 7!” ASBeau scanned reams of data pouring onto his status display “Fire on Deck 5 and Deck 6. Starboard reaction drive off-line, main sensor grid off-line. Structural failure bulkhead 56 through 59, Power Relays 12, 22, 23…….They’ve fired again”
“Evasive, Starboard” yelled Dave.
Dolplop programmed a standard evasive pattern and Crash activated it. The ship lurched to Port bringing her head on to the incoming fire.
“NO!!!! THE OTHER STARBOARD!!!!” yelled Dave, too late.
The second blast caught them square on the main-hull. Even strapped into the Captain’s chair the impact shook Dave like a rag doll. Every indicator on the damage control display was blinking red and there were so many alarms sounding, Dave could barely hear himself think.
ASBeau was reeling off another litany of chaos, and even the computer joined in “Warning! Hull breach , Deck 4, 5 and 6. Turbo-lifts off line, main hull de-pressurising…..”
“Helm, bring us about to 045 by 030, maximum delta, get us the hell out of here. ASBeau, return fire.”
Crash over-rode the evasive manoeuvres programmed from the navigation console and swung the ship around, narrowly evading a third salvo from the rapidly approaching Tana scout.
“Engineering, we’re in trouble, prepare for maximum warp immediately”
The consoled exploded under his hand sending particles of white hot metal and shards of plastic into Dave’s arm. Dave screamed but knew he had to stay with it. One of the overhead displays disintegrated too, and Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara grabbed an extinguisher and sprayed it, filling the Bridge with acrid smoke and fog.
Dave could vaguely hear ASBeau reeling off a seemingly endless list of damage and failed systems, until another hit threw the ship sideways and ASBeau was sent sprawling. O’Mara took over “All Phasers off-line, shields down, structural integrity fields at 60%....”
Crash finally managed to get the ship pointing in the right direction and the ship’s warp drive cut in, taking them out of harm’s way.
“Warp 1, sir, still accelerating.”
“Thank god! Get some distance between them and us.”
O’Mara was still on the case “They’re following us, sir. Going to warp.”
“Crash make sure we stay ahead of them. Dolplop, plot a course direct for Hole, we have to get a report to Command”
Going to the Science Officers station he pressed the general broadcast button.
“Heads of Departments to the Officer’s Mess. NOW!!!”
--------------------
“Ok, what the hell just happened???”
There was an uncomfortable silence. O’Mara, ASBeau and Mengele tried not to catch Dave’s eye, and Dave noticed they all seemed to be looking at Romanov.
“What???”, she said.
“Tell him!” prompted ASBeau.
“TELL ME WHAT????” shouted Dave.
Romanov visibly slumped. “It’s all about Cassini’s speed record.”
“Go on” said Dave trying to remain calm.
“Cassini has always been obsessed with speed records. He destroyed a previous ship he was posted to by trying to boost the output of the warp-core to generate a stronger warp-field. Then he crippled another by trying a different arrangement for focusing the warp-field. When he came to Tiger he discovered the transporters were a new pattern that could be focused much more precisely. As he didn’t think he could alter the focus on the dilithium system or boost its power output significantly, he tried to increase velocity by reducing the ship’s total mass.”
“He used the transporters to shave the ship’s hull-plating from between a hundred to fifty millimeters down as far as three millimeters. It reduced the overall mass of the ship by about 10% and allowed him to achieve Warp 10.21. Sadly, as he’d reduced the overall strength of the hull by doing that, he was forced to crank up the structural integrity fields to compensate. When we finished the record run, the integrity fields collapsed and blew nearly every power relay on the ship. It also damaged the dilithium crystal matrix, which is marginal in the extreme. We’ve been trying to recover the situation ever since.”
“How on earth did he expect to get away with that??”
“We limped back to Hole, and started patching up the damage, but nobody told Cassini that Carstairs had been an even bigger ass-hole than he had. Cassini set an automated programme to beam the entire mass of tritanium back on board section by section, and woke up the next day to find the hull lined with 18,000 tons of haggis. We could barely move in the compartments near the outer hull, the haggis was much less dense than the tritanium and 18,000 tons of the stuff took up a hell of a lot of space. In the end we had to just get it off the ship and leave it in orbit around
the star at Hole.”
“Oh. That would be the weird brown asteroid you used as a marker for the shuttle races then? 18,000 tons of freeze-dried haggis?” asked Dave.
“Err…… yes sir. We still don’t know what to do with it” admitted Carstairs.
“And no-one thought I should be told about this before we set out?!?!” said Dave, unintentionally raising his voice.
They all shuffled uncomfortably in their seats. Finally ASBeau admitted “Well, we never actually told the skipper, so it didn’t seem fair to tell you.”
Dave smashed his forehead down on the table, hard.
There was a stunned silence before the pragmatic Commander Mengele said, “You really shouldn’t do that. We have no aspirin with which to treat head-aches”
--------------------
Dave slumped there, silent, for several minutes, before the embarrassed staff got up one-by-one, excused themselves and left.
Ok, he reminded himself. You deserve this. You’ve been a bastard and this is your punishment.
He could feel tears forming in his eyes, and not just from a throbbing headache, or from his burned and shredded hand or the still-aching cruciate ligament.
Why did these idiots have to make everything so damned hard?
He pulled himself together and gave himself a mental slap. The challenge had changed from redemption of the crew to simply keeping them alive.
Crash was keeping them ahead of the Tana scout but she was tracking them and he daren’t push the warp-drive any harder for fear it would fail completely. At some stage they’d have to either out-run her, or take her on. Dave wasn’t hopeful of success either way.
Snapping himself out of his funk he headed to the Bridge. Speaking to Dolplop and Crash he confirmed they were now about two hours ahead of the Tana scout, but she was pursuing them doggedly at her best speed.
He needed to decide a course of action before they reached Federation space. Not expecting the scout to come after them, they’d set off for Hole, and even if they got out of the scouts sensor range, the Tana would almost certainly assume Tiger would head for Hole. He’d put the colony at risk as well as the ship.
At their slightly reduced speed he still had a couple of days to weigh up his options. It was then that the Tiger unexpectedly dropped out of warp.
--------------------
“Romanov, what’s happened?”
“The dilithium crystals have disintegrated.”
“Can we regenerate them?”
“Do you have a magic wand?” Dave heard the distinctive clink and glug of Vodka being poured into a glass.
“This is no joking matter Olga. If we can’t move, we’re as good as dead.”
“Well I’d better finish this bottle of vodka before the Tana get here: it would be a shame to waste it.”
--------------------
In the Officer’s Mess, the senior staff gathered for an emergency session.
“Ok,” said Dave “to recap, we’ve got no warp drive, no phasers, no torpedoes, no shields, and a hull that is essentially tin-foil. There is a very hostile vessel two hours away. Suggestions?”
O’Mara spoke first. “Christ, the transporters are still down and the shuttles are all shagged. We’ll have to use escape pods in deep space and pray someone finds us light years inside uncharted alien space. Not good. Coffee anyone?”
The rest of the staff ignored her. Commander Mengele spoke up next “There is one shuttle left. I suggest we draw lots and get twelve people to safety.”
ASBeau sighed, “We’re in deep space, there’s nothing within the shuttle’s range.”
He shrugged. “I could take the shuttle, load a personal tactical nuke and try to intercept the scout?”
“What the hell is a personal tactical nuke???” asked Dave.
ASBeau blushed slightly. “It’s an antique sir. Some small arms weren’t so small in the late 21st Century”
“Well if someone is going to make a kamikaze attack it’ll be me” said Dave firmly. “My decisions got us here, I’ll try to get us out”
There was an embarrassed silence.
“We’re all here due to our cumulative mistakes, not because of an error on your part ExO” said Mengele. “Whilst it’s true you have shown some errors in judgement, that’s been mostly stupidity on your part and no-one has suffered apart from yourself, as your frequent trips to sick-bay have shown. However, I think I speak for us all when I say I think you have made the correct decisions and more importantly you’ve made those decisions for the right reasons."
“Thanks, Commander. That means a lot, and if we get out of this mess I’ll find a way to say thank you.”
“You can take me out to dinner somewhere they don’t serve haggis” she mused.
Haggis. An entire hull surface converted into haggis.
“Lieutenant-Commander O’Mara, am I right in thinking that in the 21st century, most cooking was done with microwave devices?”
“Indeed sir, it was particularly prevalent with something called the “TV dinner”. Apparently they were so awful you had to watch some form of entertainment to take your mind off the food.”
“Hmm. Not entirely unlike haggis then….”
He followed this instinctive train of thought. “What would happen if a haggis was hit by a microwave laser?”
“It would soak up a load of latent energy and then explode.”
“Possibly disrupting the laser beam?”
“Almost certainly. You’d have a cloud of expanding dead animal for the laser to burn through, it would dissipate the beam quite significantly.”
“ASBeau, get down to the transporter room and get Chief Carstairs and PO Park on it. We need the programme Cassini came up with amended to put any haggis we have left on the outside of the hull instead of the inside. Prioritise the forward facing surfaces; we’re going to attack the Tana head on.”
“Attack them with what, sir?”
“Kamikaze crew members.”
--------------------
Dave and O’Mara stood over crew-member (non-biological) 1467/2 engaged in deep discussion. Lieutenant-Commander Romanov joined them shortly after, carrying one of ASBeau’s personal tactical nukes (it turned out he had several??), a nearly empty bottle of vodka and her favourite lump hammer. They were trying everything they could think of to persuade 1467/2 to take the device on a one way attack mission. The sentience of the probes was questionable, but their sense of self-preservation wasn’t.
“You’re having a laugh!!! You expect to lay down my life because you’ve stuffed up command decisions and landed yourself and the rest of the gooeys in a terminal predicament. No. Uh-uh, not now, not ever.”
“But you’re programmed to obey the three laws of robotics. A robot may not allow a human to come to harm by its inaction” argued Dave
“Indeed, but as I regard myself as a living being rather than a robot, Dr Asimov can kiss my shiny metal ass”
Dave sighed. He hated to have to do this, but they were running out of time.
“Lieutenant-Commander Romanov, would you be so kind as to enter negotiations with crew member 1467/2?”
“My pleasure ExO”, replied the tiny Russian, her grip tightening on the huge lump-hammer.
Dave flinched as pieces of the circuit boards that constituted the sentient artificial crew-member were turned into shrapnel by the engineer’s very positive negotiations.
“There, I believe I have made the management’s stance on this issue clear” she said, panting slightly.
“O’Mara, rig a guidance circuit slaved to our sensor net. Romanov, load and prime the nuke. The probes are fast under warp drive, but we’re going to have make the attack in normal space. We’re going to need to draw the Tana scout in close so they don’t have time to lock onto the probe and shoot it down when we launch. We’ve only got one shot at this, make sure we’re ready.”
He called the Bridge. “Crash, where’s that scout?”
“Got a reading of s
ub-space distortion on the long range sensors. They’re not more than 10 minutes off.”
“I’m on my way”
--------------------
Taking the Captain’s chair on the Bridge, Dave realised the command panel was trashed and hastily relocated to the ExO’s station at the rear of the Bridge. He called engineering and was answered by Chief Deng.
“How’re we doing Deng?”
“As well as can be expected sir. We scavenged every relay we can for drive systems, launch controls, sensors and comms, but I’m running dangerously low on cable-ties and duct tape now.”
“Ah. Ok. Good.” He really hoped she was joking, but before he could say anything else, Crash alerted him.
“Tana Scout dropping out of warp, dead-ahead, range two million klicks.”
“O’Mara, are you set?”
“We'll be done in two minutes sir!”
“ASBeau?”
“We’ve altered the distribution sir, managed to get over 2,000 tons of haggis on the forward facing surfaces. It’s over a foot thick!
“Ok, let’s do this. Ahead full impulse, close the distance, Crash.”
“Aye sir!”
“Lieutenant Shearer, see if we can block any out-going transmissions from the scout. If this works, I’d hate to have a swarm of more Tana ships come down on us.”
“Aye sir”
Swift under warp drive, the Tiger was something of a pig in normal space. Her huge mass and bulk made it difficult to accelerate her or turn her and Dave was praying the Tana were confident enough to attack them head-on.
He watched the tactical display, looking for signs of evasive maneuvers, while Crash counted down the distance.
“1.9 million…………….1.8 million………………1.7 million……”
“ASBeau what’s the effective range of their lasers?”
“In free space, they’re limited by their targeting sensors more than beam coherency. They can engage at 3-400,000 klicks, but it’s a racing certainty they won’t hit anything ‘til they’re down below 100,000.”
“Ok, thanks.”
Like ship commanders throughout history he discovered that the worst part of combat was the waiting. The Tiger was slowly building up momentum, but the Tana vessel was decelerating down to a speed at which their combat systems would be effective.
