The Verdun was closer now. Much closer.
Too close.
“Helm, translate up, maximum!” ordered the Captain. “Seal bulkheads!”
Without deflectors, there wasn't much else that could be done. The emergency blast door slammed shut in his face. Stuck on the bridge, at least for the time being.
The deck jumped under his feet, and the hull rang with a subsonic boom that shook his bones. By the sound of it, that was right on top—
The blast door buckled inwards, the overpressure threatening to shatter Klaus' eardrums. The Marine sentry next to it flinched away, holding his ears. That was fifty centimeters of alloyed steel, and it had deformed at least ten centimeters inwards.
“Reactors two and six offline, ma'am!” reported the engineering officer.
Klaus ignored them. His attention was drawn to the sentry by the hatch, who was frantically pounding at the blast door's manual controls. The Marine had no success, and pounded the door with his fist. “We're locked in!”
Klaus swore under his breath. Now he wouldn't be able to get down to the labs in time. He ran through his options. He couldn't do the necessary programming by himself from the bridge — the QMP test computers were isolated from the rest of the ship's systems.
But who could he trust to get it right, of the people that were available? It had to be someone who was familiar with the QMP software. Obviously not Johann. That left...
Klaus brought his communicator online. They had gambled absolutely everything on one person when they had jumped to rescue the Tannenberg, and that person had come through. “James, are you up for some programming work?”
“Yeah, sorta. Gimme a moment.” A low groan punctuated his statement. “What do you need?”
“I need you to re-program the QMP trigger to slave it to a torpedo warhead's detonation signal.”
“Okay — wait, we're setting what off?”
“You're the most competent person available. Get to the lab. Johann's there. Just get it done.” Klaus ended the call, and turned to the Captain. “Ma’am, I’ve got the best programmer on-board en-route.”
“I heard. O'Rourke, yes?” She fixed Klaus with a stare. “Are you sure about trusting him? He's from the same group where the rebels' support comes from.”
Technically true, admitted Klaus. The rebels’ main power base was among the Oort Cloud miners. Supposedly, at least. After talking to a number of the local civilians, though, Klaus was beginning to have his doubts about that.
It hadn't really been within his authority to entrust James with the top secret program in the first place, but he hoped that the Captain would continue to overlook that. After all, it had worked. And the miner had proved himself. “If he was a threat, he would have sabotaged the QMP jump earlier. He's trustworthy, I’d bet my life on it.”
Her lips parted in what could not quite be called a smile. “'Bet your life?' That’s exactly what you’re doing, Mr. Ericsson. All of our lives. Keep it in mind.”
“Aye, ma’am.” Damn! She had said it. Maybe the Captain didn't believe in Murphy. Of course! That was the answer. Murphy.
His communicator pinged. Johann. “Klaus, I’ve got the QMP rig warmed up!”
“Damn good job, Johann. James should be finishing the code soon. Have Murphy double-check everything. And keep your mouth shut about it.” Klaus breathed a sigh of relief. That had been the biggest worry he’d had about the plan. Murphy would ensure the plan wouldn't fail because of, well, Murphy. “There’s a Navy crew on the way. They should be there any moment. Help them get the warhead ready to ‘port, and then your job is done.”
“Aye. Ah, here they — bloody hell, that little thing is a warhead?”
There was a murmur in the background. An answer, Klaus supposed. Johann continued, “If you say so. This'll be easier than I thought! Now, let's get this done!”
Klaus smiled. Of all the people he’d heard during this fight, the only person who actually sounded happy was the ivory-tower academic. Maybe Johann should get out into the field more often. Klaus looked at the holo-display in the center of the bridge. Then again, maybe Johann was happy because he wasn't paying enough attention to anything outside the academics of it all. Maybe he was taking notes right now for some journal article. Klaus could almost envy him that level of focus.
As if on cue, the Verdun’s icon again pulsed a brighter red, as another salvo of railgun shells closed on the Overlord.
“Impact six seconds!” shouted the tactical officer.
Too close to maneuver out of the way. Klaus scanned the engineering readout: the forward-quadrant deflectors were largely burned out. They’d be little help here.
This was going to hurt. Klaus quickly ducked under the QMP console. It wasn’t exactly armored, but it was better than nothing.
The hull rang once more. The lights flickered. Another of the reactors must have been hit. The deformed blast door cracked and flew apart into a shower of debris. Someone screamed as they were hit.
He winced and clapped his hands to his head as the over-pressure hit his eardrums. Jagged shards of ice-hot pain sliced through his head, and he fought to stay conscious. The bridge crew wore only basic vacuum suits. No armor to speak of: any near hit would deal terrible damage to a soft human body. He grabbed the edge of the console and pulled himself to his feet. One of the crew — rather, half of him — was pinned by a meter-wide disc of metal to the bulkhead opposite the hatch. Klaus gulped. The lower-half of the deceased crewman was still vomiting blood all over the sensor console. The sensor officer sat staring, mouth open and frozen in shock.
The Marine guard rushed over and shoved the half-a-corpse onto the floor. He pulled the stock-still sensor officer away from the sight, and laid him flat along the wall. Figures that a Marine would keep his head — their training was the best for staying calm under intense, personal danger.
The Captain drummed her fingers on the command chair, her eyes fixed on Klaus. “How much longer?”
“Any minute now.” Klaus barely heard the question. He swiped at his right ear to hear better, and his fingers came away red. Klaus grinned, a bit self-conscious, and turned to the monitor to confirm that he hadn't lied. A chunk of debris had smashed right through the screen projector. The computer itself was not in the console, of course, so it should still work properly. All the same, now Klaus really had little more that he could do. He couldn't even monitor what was going on — his personal datapad had been melted in the fire from the QMP jump, and he had lost its remains sometime during the attacks. Nothing to do but wait.
His communicator chirped again. James. “Almost done here. Ready in under a minute.”
“Good. Will your programming work?”
"I'm risking my life on it, so it'll damn well work." There was a pause, keys clattering in the background. "At any rate, I'm done now. Flagged the system as ready. Here's hoping this works." He cut the connection.
A moment later, the weapons officer called out "Ma'am, we've got the Verdun targeted! QMP auxiliary crew reports green to fire!" At least that part was working well. Now if only the rest of it worked—
"Fire." came the instant command.
Klaus held his breath. He was dying to actually see the Verdun, to see with his own eyes the instant that their tactic worked. He wanted a viewscreen, an optical image, hell, even a window. At least he was still breathing, which meant the fusion warhead had not exploded onboard the Overlord. So far, so—
He bit back the thought. It did not pay to tempt fate. The holo-display showed the Verdun's red glowing bright, closing swiftly on the Overlord. This was going to be close...
A bead of sweat stung his eye. If this first try didn't work, they wouldn't have time for a second.
Without so much as a sound, the Verdun's icon simply...vanished.
“Is that it?” asked one of the bridge crew.
The tactical officer whooped loudly, his voice excited. “Ma'am! Energy spike from the Verdun! She's burned from the inside-o
ut, destroyed!”
“Hoo-yah!” exploded the bridge crew. They were going to live. Their cheer died as quickly as it had come, and even Klaus could see why. They were going to live, to be sure. But only because hundreds of others had died.
Commodore Petrakov stared at the holo-display, jaw hanging slightly open. He pounded the arm of his chair once, smiled, and then closed his eyes as he leaned back into his chair. Blood dripped from a red gash down his leg, but he seemed to pay it no attention. The Marine guard — doing a damn fine job as a medic — knelt by the Commodore, and opened his first-aid kit.
Chapter 21: Withdrawal
“All right.” The Captain's voice sounded tired. Klaus could certainly empathize with that. “Helm, get us the hell out of here.” She highlighted a trajectory in the bridge holo-display. Heading almost directly away from the planetoid, it kept the two warships shielded behind the station for the maximum amount of time.
Klaus nodded. No sense in taking risks they didn't have to – it was almost certain that no enemy weapons emplacements remained, and the rock-slingers posed little danger without the Verdun, but there was no way to be sure. The Captain continued, “What's our acceleration?”
“Twelve point four gees, ma'am.”
She nodded. "Very well. Divert available crew to repair and medical teams."
Without the Verdun to chase down the fleeing Overlord and Tannenberg, the battle was over. The rock-slingers couldn't accelerate enough to catch up with the federal squadron, even as damaged as they were.
“Time to MSD?” Conagher asked. The minimum safe distance from the nearby gravity well for the two ships to activate their faster-than-light drives.
“Sixteen minutes, ma'am.”
In the meantime, Klaus had to stay busy, even as exhausted as he was. He was too keyed-up — trying to 'relax' now would be impossible. His hands shook, and he collapsed into his chair. He glanced over at the bridge's small spare-parts cache. Located near the destroyed hatchway — at least they weren't trapped on the bridge anymore, a corner of his mind noticed — it was surprisingly intact. He checked the mounting for the QMP console's display. Just a standard holographic projector. Should take no time at all to fix.
What the hell was he thinking, repairing the holo-mount on his console? Just look at the bridge! The blue and green paint of the bridge was now covered with pockmarks and gashes, portions missing where smaller fragments of the hatch had impacted. The Captain's chair had a twenty-centimeter-long shard of metal jammed right through the back — by some miracle, it had missed the Captain herself.
The wounded had already been transferred to sick bay. He imagined Lt. Baker running himself ragged, arms red to the elbows. He tried his best to ignore the unmoving bodies, and parts of bodies, that remained on the floor of the bridge. Given the physical damage he saw, it was a wonder so many of them had survived.
The sensor console was covered in blood. The engineering console was halfway-detached from the floor. A large piece of debris wedged underneath it must have barely missed the crew. The tactical console seemed undamaged, except that one of the two seats in front of it was missing. The stump of the chair column — and the two stumps of feet, still in their boots, nearby — showed where a sizable shard of steel had cut through.
The helm console was hit hardest. Only half of it was still in working condition. The other half — and the former helmsman — was a crumpled mass of steel and flesh leaking blood in the corner of the bridge. A large chunk of metal, glistening with red, was embedded in the weapons console. On the floor behind the console lay half a body. Its nametag read Billings.
Klaus swallowed hard. He was hollow inside. He would live, sure. Hell, most of the crew would live. At some level, it all must have been worth the cost, but right now he couldn't see how. He would either be rewarded for getting the jump drive working, or jailed for revealing Navy secrets. He didn't care. He could have done better. If only he had worked faster. Even five minutes would have made the difference.
Commodore Petrakov had been laid unconscious on the floor next to his chair, blood soaking through the bandages wrapped around his leg. Whatever hit him must have nicked an artery, but he had demanded to stay on the bridge, and not be evacuated with the other wounded. He looked pale, but least now he had an IV running and the medic treating him didn't look too worried.
Thankfully, the ventilation system was functional, pulling smoke — and the stench of blood and internal organs — out of the air. Klaus could see just how few of the bridge crew had come through the fight unscathed.
The open nature of the bridge, designed to ease communication between crew meant that the blast door had been the only real impediment protecting the compartment from critical damage if the hull was breached this deeply. When it had failed, the crew had paid the price. But at least the hatch was open now — trained medics and corpsmen flowed through, seeing to the casualties.
Klaus turned toward the parts cache but tripped, catching himself against the bulkhead. One of the medics braced him up, holding him under one arm. “Where are you hit?”
Klaus waved the man away. “I'm alright, haven't been hit.” With his suit burned all the way through in places, he must have looked like one of the casualties. But he felt fine, just weak and a bit dizzy.
Klaus shook his head, watching the medics go to work on people that he had written off as corpses. Any machine could be put back together, sure. He knew that. But it still amazed him how true that was becoming for the human body. Remembering the amazing machines in the ship's sickbay, he gave a silent prayer that they would do their job.
He really should go to his quarters and lie down, but he couldn't muster the energy. For all he knew, his room was gone, anyway. But the bridge stank like Hell itself, and his charred suit wasn't helping. His sense of smell was finally returning, which he decided was not a good thing. There was no escaping the sickly-sweet smell of charred flesh.
His hip throbbed, and he noticed, with mild surprise, that his suit had a large hole over the epicenter of the pain. The edges of the hole were cracked and blackened, and the material crumbled away when he brushed it.
Huh. So he had been hit, after all. Funny that he hadn't noticed it earlier. He probably needed a medic, but saw they were all busy.
The pain grew stronger as he stared at the wound, and his stomach heaved, so he turned away. But the more he stared at the broken bodies around him, the queasier he became. A tight knot formed above his stomach, rising and burning up his throat. He did the only thing he could think of.
He opened the spare-parts cache, and picked through the tools. That would take his mind off of the...mess.
The overhead light dimmed slightly. Someone standing behind him. He tried to ignore whomever it was. “Sir, can you lend a hand with the repairs out here?” Hell, just when he was losing himself. With a sigh, he turned to see the Marine sentry who had greeted him when he had entered the bridge, hours – fifteen minutes ago? The soldier gestured toward the blasted-open hatchway.
“What's the — oh, hell. Thank you, son.” The hallway beyond was absolutely filled with debris. There was no way that an injured crewman headed for sickbay could get through that. “This'll take some time.” But the sentry's request was much better than his idea. It would get him off the bridge, and give him something meaningful to do, something that might actually help those casualties he was trying so hard to ignore. Better than tinkering with the damn display. He grabbed his tools and limped through the doorway. “Grab anybody on the bridge who isn't needed. We'll need all the hands we can get.”
Klaus grabbed a piece of debris to clear it, whistling softly to himself. Then it all went black.
Chapter 22: Denouement
Within an hour, the Overlord and the Tannenberg jumped away from the battlefield at Podera. Within a day, the Overlord's engine was repaired enough for her to move under her own power. Within a week, they hoped to reach Andromeda station. Most of the miners had been interrogated and then
released from the brig, but were confined to the civilian sector.
It all passed in a blur for Klaus. He had woken up late this morning on a cot outside sickbay, apparently too low on their list to warrant a real bed. The nurse had told him that they had patched up some kind of internal bleeding, and urged him to rest. Klaus had left as soon as she turned her back. They probably needed the cot space, anyway.
He had limped his way onto the nearest repair team, where he tried to make himself useful. He didn't remember much, but he just hoped that he hadn't committed any irreversible mistakes.
Ignoring the insistent ache in his hip, he sat in a crew mess hall, picking at a plate of sausages and sauerkraut that he barely recalled ordering. Maybe he hadn't. He scowled at his plate. It could just as easily have been the chef's idea of a joke. He pushed the rest away, most of it untouched. He feared he would fall asleep in his chair if he finished it, and he still had his evening shift to go.
Opposite the hall sat Johann, his food piled in front of him, untouched. He was bent over his datapad, furiously typing away. Every so often he would look up, wink at Klaus, then go back to his work. A brilliant journal article, no doubt. One that might even earn the physicist the Nobel Prize. Klaus shook his head slowly. Sure, in twenty years' time. He didn't have the heart to tell the old Scot about the Navy Secrets Act. Out of kindness, or out of vindictiveness, he wasn't even sure himself.
Klaus had his own problems. He had tried to contact Murphy, to make sure she was all right, to hear her voice again, whatever. But he hadn't reached her. Most likely, he told himself, she was just as busy as he was. James, too, probably. After all, his duty log was full, when he had pinged it earlier in the day. Johann was Johann; he would be fine on his own, as long as he stayed away from moving machinery. And Antoniy had emerged as the hero of the Tannenberg. He shook his head, recalling the stories he had heard, some of which might even have been true. That must have been some piece of work.
All in all, a pretty decent outcome, given what they had all just been through. He grinned tiredly. Maybe he had made some good choices, after all, despite his history stepping on the wrong toes.
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