Battlecruiser Alamo: Forbidden Seas

by Richard Tongue

   “Docking in one minute,” Armstrong, the shuttle pilot, said. “Automatic systems are still working over there, so that's a good sign. Externally she looks intact, just a little under-maintained.”

   “After we were captured, they brought us here on our own ship,” Perry said, still staring at the slowly tumbling vessel. “Then they looked all over her, examining every detail. All the officers were taken away, as well as the senior enlisted. After the interrogations, there were only seven of us left.”

   “The others?” Harper asked.

   “Died, one by one, waiting for a rescue that never came.” He patted a pocket, and said, “I've got their letters home, right here, and one day I'm going to hand-deliver them.” Turning to her, he said, “I've lived long enough to see this, and that's enough for me.”

   “Let's hope you live a little longer yet,” the hacker said, with a smile.

   He looked at her for a moment, then said, “Forgive me, but you look a little familiar. Are you related to Colonel Harper? Commander of the Agamemnon?”

   She smiled, and said, “He made General by the end of the war. He's a Senator now. And yes, I'm his daughter.”

   “Following in his footsteps,” he said, nodding. “My son joined the service, you know. Four years, at the end of the war, in logistics. And now my granddaughter, as well.” Shaking his head, he said, “I guess three generations makes it a tradition.”

   “It isn't uncommon,” Harper said. “The Captain's father served in the war, on Hercules.”

   He paused for a moment, then asked, “Do you think she'll bring Daedalus back into service? Get her back into the fight?”

   “If there's any chance at all in the time,” she replied. “We can't afford to spare a ship, especially not under these circumstances. There are older ships still in Triplanetary service, though I don't think there are any others of that class.”

   “And if we can't, she'll blow her up,” he said. “Deny her to the enemy.” He looked down at the deck, and said, “We should have done that the first time. Captain Chambers ordered the magazines detonated, but Lieutenant Fedor stopped him. Said that while there was life, there was hope. I've hated him ever since.” With a sigh that seemed to wrack his body, he continued, “Though I don't know whether he was right nor not.”

   “You're a free man, Sergeant,” she said. “Take hold of that.”

   “And then what?” he replied. “I doubt they'll let me stay in the Fleet. My wife is dead, my son has a family of his own. They don't need me hanging around, not after all this time, a ghost from the past returned to haunt them.” Shaking his head, he said, “Mars must have changed a lot in the last three decades.”

   Pressing her hand on his, she said, “You'll get to see it all, Sergeant. And with thirty years' back pay and retirement benefits, I doubt you'll need to worry about getting a job any time soon. I think we owe you that much. And you're our resident expert on the Collective, remember.”

   “Until they send a formal Ambassador, or you send sociological teams in.” He paused, looked around the shuttle, and said, “Don't take this the wrong way, but aren't you a little young for your rank?”

   “Twenty-three,” she replied, shaking her head. “And damn, that's beginning to catch up with me quickly. I was eighteen when I first reported on board Alamo.”

   “You graduated from the Academy at eighteen?”

   “Never went,” she replied, “and no, it doesn't have anything to do with my father. Not directly, anyway.” With a sigh, she said, “He thought a tour on a warship would do me some good, so he signed me up as a Spaceman Third.”

   “And you ended up as a Lieutenant?”

   “Let's just say I made some friends in low places, and leave it at that. There's a reason I'm Alamo's Intelligence Officer.”

   Shaking his head, he replied, “I never trusted the spooks during the War.”

   “Wise man. I don't, either.”

   “We're on final approach, Lieutenant,” Armstrong said. “Are we still clear to go in?”

   “Are we getting any telemetry yet?”

   “Just the bare minimums, but I guess that's something. Life support is coming on, and there's some power at least.” She paused, then said, “This airlock's been heavily used, Sergeant.”

   “I've no idea when,” he replied. “I haven't been up here in thirty years, not since the last tour.” Shaking his head, he said, “Good God, we told them some wild stories about the systems. Hopefully enough to confuse the hell out of them for years. And we did wipe all of our navigation programs, purged all the databases. They didn't get any software from us, that much I can personally vouch for.” Glancing at Harper, he continued, “I doubled as deputy Sysop. All we left were the basic vessel functions. Life support, power distribution. Nothing that could teach them anything.”

   “I got my start that way as well,” she replied, before turning back to the cockpit, “Take us in, Spaceman, but proceed with caution. Any sign of trouble, bail out, and don't handshake with the Daedalus systems until I've checked it over myself.” Rising from her seat, she said, “Want to give me a hand, Sergeant?”

   “I thought you'd never ask,” he replied, following her to the hatch. With a resounding thud, the two ships mated, and Harper tapped a sequence of commands into the airlock panel, isolating it from the rest of the ship before linking with the other network. “Interesting. Look at that.”

   Alien text streamed down the display, and Perry said, “Xandari. They must have tried to install some of their own systems.”

   “Can you read any of it?”

   “One word in ten, on a good day. They tried to discourage anyone learning their language, but I picked a few words, here and there.” He squinted at the writing, and said, “Something about training, I think. I see the word for simulator, another for testing.”

   “It looks safe enough,” Harper said, tapping for a sensor display. “She hasn't even twitched since we arrived, and no electromagnetic activity other than the telemetry feed and the usual internal systems chatter.” After one last check, she said, “Open her up, Jen. I think we're good to go.”

   “Aye, ma'am,” the pilot replied, cracking the lock. The hatch slid open, a brief whine as the pressure equalized, and Harper kicked inside, drifting into the corridor, Perry following after a second's hesitation. She looked back at him, a smile on his face.

   “Hello, old friend,” he said, patting the wall. “It's good to be back.”

   Before she could reply, her attention was caught by writing, stenciled onto the wall, unfamiliar letters. Beneath the airlock controls, she could see more text, smaller, more complicated, and arrows pointing at some of the buttons.

   “Xandorian?” she asked, and Perry nodded.

   “It's all over the place,” he said. “Interesting. Maybe left over from when they were doing the initial analysis.”

   Shaking her head, she replied, “If that's true, we can learn a lot from their paint technology. That's fresh, as though it was only applied a few months ago, not three decades.” Turning back to the shuttle, she said, “Bartlett, see if you can wake up Ingram and head down to the comm suite. We might need to do a data dump in a hurry. Arkhipov, you and Armstrong take engineering and see what the situation is down there. Specifically the hendecaspace drive. If we can't get that working, we might as well pack up and go home right now.” Glancing at Perry, she continued, “I'm heading for the bridge. Come on, Sergeant.”

   “Yes, ma'am,” he said, pushing after her as she drifted down the corridor. More writing was on the wall, some in large print, short phrases, others more complicated sentences. Belatedly, she pulled out her datapad and took high-resolution shots, recording all evidence of the Xandorian presence.

   “They don't seem to have changed anything,” she said, “and I don't see anything obviously missing.” Shaking her head, she continued, “And for a ship that's been drifting
in free space for thirty years, it's well maintained.”

   Nodding, Perry said, “Strange. I think they've even made some repairs. The air system always had a strange tang to it, one we could never quite pin down, but I can't smell anything now.” He smiled, and said, “Whenever we got back from leave, it always seemed to stink. I remember, back on Sutter's World one time, old LeClerc and I...” He paused, sighed, and said, “He died eight years ago. Strange how the memory plays tricks.”

   “Familiar surroundings,” Harper said, swinging around a corridor, down towards the bridge. “Not surprising that it's bringing back old memories. If you'd rather go back to the shuttle...”

   “Not on your life,” he interrupted. “I've waited a long time for this.” Pointing at a pressure door at the end of the corridor, he continued, “There it is, just ahead. Stuffed in wherever the control sequences could be installed. They were in a hell of a hurry when they built these beauties. Five of them in twelve months.”

   “They did a hell of a job in the first few years of the war, while they were getting the battlecruisers ready. I remember some of the stories my father used to tell me about his missions on Agamemnon, raiding out Procyon, Sirius way. That ship's in the Fleet Museum. The only one to make it through the war.” She caught herself a second too late, and said, “Sorry.”

   “Don't be. You don't have to humor an old man, you know.”

   “You're what, fifty-five? That isn't old. Twenty years from mandatory retirement.”

   “I feel nearer eighty, and I've lived most of my life in heavy gravity. That ages you.” He sighed, and said, “Let's see if my old security code still works.” Reaching to a keypad, underneath more of the scrawled text, he entered a nine-digit sequence, and the door obediently slid open, revealing a cramped control room inside, two couches facing forward, one either side, and a command chair in the middle. Perry floated over to Weapons Control, running his hand over the console, a beaming smile on his face.

   “Damn it, I'm home,” he said. Frowning, he looked down at the panel, and said, “Lieutenant...”

   “For God's sake, call me Kris,” she said.

   “Kris, look at this. There's writing everywhere, the whole console is covered in it.”

   “The whole bridge is. Everything's labeled.” Nodding, she said, “I've got it. This ship wasn't abandoned. They used it as a training vessel.” Waving around, she continued, “They'd send trainees here to familiarize themselves with the layout of a Triplanetary ship, either to get an idea of what the internal layout looked like, or to operate the controls.” She moved to the helm, tapped a button, and the panel lit up, strange text appearing on the viewscreen as the familiar starfield appeared. “You said you deleted all the high-level programming.”

   “Yes. We only left the absolutely critical ship functions.”

   Pulling out her communicator, she said, “Harper to Arkhipov. What's your status?”

   “I'm at the drive room now, and everything appears to be intact. There's some strange sort of writing covering everything.”

   “Take lots of photographs, Spaceman, then have a look at the controls. I'm going to bet you find them essentially ready to go.” She tried another panel, with the same result, and said, “We're not going to have any trouble at all bringing this ship back into service. Those bastards have done all the hard work for us.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “Harper to Alamo,” she said. “Is the Captain there?”

   “I'm here, Kris,” Orlova said. “What's the problem.”

   “You want some good news for a change?”

   “Tell me more.”

   “I'll have Daedalus up and running in six hours. Twelve at the outside, and all I'm going to need is a damage control team and a bridge crew. The Xandari kept everything intact, everything functioning, and all I'll have to do is purge all of their programming from the system and return to factory defaults. We've got the whole suite on Alamo. Thirty minutes to transfer the files, five, six hours to install the programming, then a full systems check, and you've got yourself a second starship, Commodore.”

   “That's excellent, Kris. Fantastic news.”

   “Want the bonus prize?”

   “Sure.”

   “We'll have a full translation of their language as well. They labeled everything on this ship, and I mean everything. From the head to the holoviewer. I've got the team taking all the images they can, and once I've run them through the computer, it'll be like having a flying Rosetta Stone.” She paused, then added, “In fact, it gets better than that. They must have found a way to get their programming to work with our hardware, which means that given a bit of time, we can reverse-engineer the process.”

   “How long?”

   “If I had a quantum computer, a month. Using our on-board resources, more like a year, but the point is, boss, that we've got everything we need to give the bright boys back on Mars the tools to come up with some real countermeasure packages.” Shaking her head, she said, “Skipper, this alone is worth everything we've done up till now. It'll give our e-war teams something to do in a battle other than sit on their thumbs.”

   “Great work, Kris. You can start cataloging all the data when you get settled in.”

   “Huh? Oh, you want me to stay over here? Who are you sending to take command? Powell?”

   A chuckle crept through the static, and Orlova replied, “I'm not sending anyone over. It's a small ship, with a small crew, and I think Lieutenant Kristen Harper is more than capable of getting her back into commission. I'll get Petty Officer Lombardo with a damage control team over to you on the next shuttle to start with.”

   “Maggie, I'm not a command officer.” Turning to face the viewscreen, she said, “This is a really bad idea.”

   With a sigh, Orlova replied, “Lieutenant, I don't have the time or the energy to argue with you. Between the chaos over here and everything happening down on the surface, I don't have anyone to spare to send to Daedalus. You seem to have a handle on what needs to be done to get her fixed, and you've got the rank to do the job.” She paused, then added, “Besides, given all the headaches you've given your commanding officers in the past, I think it's about time that you got to see what it looks like from the other side. My orders stand. Alamo out.”

   “She's got to be out of her mind!” Harper raged, turning to Perry. “My rank's honorary, near as damn it! I only got it because I needed it for my security clearance, and she knows that.” Looking around the bridge, eyes darting back and forth, she continued, “I don't have the first idea where to begin.”

   “Well, you outlined a pretty reasonable plan to the Captain,” he said. “Given that you know what to do, it makes sense to let you get on with it.”

   “Don't you get it, Sergeant? There's an enemy warship coming into orbit tomorrow! What the hell am I supposed to do? I've never had any tactical training, just what I needed for my e-war console.”

   He shrugged, and said, “With a capital ship sitting less than two miles away, I don't think you need to do anything more complicated than keep your head down and run if anything comes too close.” Tapping the control panels, he said, “The arsenal's empty anyway. We fired all the missiles in that last battle, and we never had a chance to top up. They haven't put any of theirs on board.”

   “This ship doesn't even have a combat fabricator?”

   His eyes widened, and said, “You can fabricate missiles fast enough to reload in combat? That's amazing! I thought that project had been abandoned.”

   “We've had that technology for twenty years,” she said, shaking her head. “Are there any other surprises I don't know about?”

   “You mean other than the strange green monster that eats panicked commanding officers on their first day on the job?”

   “Don't call me that,” Harper replied, pointing her finger at him. “Maggie's decided to pull some sort of a joke. Powel
l or Kibaki will be over here on the next shuttle, someone who really knows what they're doing.”

   “I'm not so sure,” Perry replied. “She didn't sound much like she was joking to me.” Gesturing towards the command chair, he said, “Maybe you should try it for size.”

   Looking down at it as though it was covered in some sort of toxic liquid, Harper slid down into it, pulling the control panel over her lap, and said, “This might have some advantages. I won't have to argue with anyone for command access, and I'll be able to get on with everything without someone questioning my every move.”

   “See?”

   With a sigh, she said, “Well, then, Sergeant, if I'm in command, go down and see if you can speed up Bartlett a bit. The sooner we get that data transfer started the better. Then take charge of the crewmen and get started on the maintenance checks, engines and thrusters first. If we can't fire any missiles, at least I'd like to be able to get out of the way when the enemy starts shooting.”

   “Aye, Captain,” he said with a smile, earning himself a dirty look. As he left the bridge, she looked around, glancing at each console in turn, and shook her head. Her own command. Crazy.

  Chapter 9

   Cooper trudged through the snow, struggling to reach the top of the pass, at the head of the reconstructed First Squad, Corporal Stewart taking up the rear. Up ahead, Kelot was making enviably good time, striding away from the rest of them, borrowed Triplanetary rifle in his hand. The biting cold cut at him, and he tugged his hood forward into position, grateful that Quinn had managed to find the time to produce some decent cold-weather gear.

   Raising his hand to call the column to a halt, he pulled out his datapad while struggling to catch his breath, and started to flick through the screens, calling up the latest orbital footage from Alamo. For once, they had all the support they were meant to have from their base ship, a full tactical overview of the planetary situation, but it didn't seem to help as much as he'd hoped. Somewhere up ahead was a group of Xandari, he knew that much, but he could only narrow it down to an area of half a mile. On a flat, even plain, that would be no problem, but there were a million places they could hide in this wilderness. For all he knew, they'd already walked past them without realizing it.