“Sir…” Harts replied uncertainly.
“Do you get me?”
“Sir…”
“Don’t think, Marine. Stop trying to remember. Just act like the Marine you used to be. Do you get me?”
Harts knew he had been someone different. Now he had to remember how to be that person again. He had a job to do. He had to be that person from before.
“Sir, yes, sir,” Harts shouted. Certainty began to return. Moment by moment, his memory of his old life returned and the memory of his captivity and interrogation by the Chitins faded.
Lying on the sandy ground with tears in his eyes, he knew he was close to getting back to the fleet.
11
Jack found his way to the corridor Slim had directed him to and searched for the particular panel. Jack detached it and slipped into the cavity behind. Putting the panel back in place, he closed himself inside.
His flashlight gave him a restricted view. He turned his head this way and that to have a better look at his surroundings. Jack was sitting on a bundle of conduits that ran along the narrow cavity branching of at intervals. Here one turned ninety degrees to the left and disappeared through the bulkhead. There another turned ninety degrees downwards and vanished into the depths of the Scorpio’s hidden spaces. At intervals, a conduit joined the bundle from one direction or another. Each conduit had a purpose, whether it was for ship defense, life support, crew comfort, or communications. The hidden conduits and circuits were as vital to the Scorpio’s functioning as the engine assembly or the gun batteries. It was a hidden world unknown to most of the Scorpio’s crew, and Jack was in it.
Moving forward carefully, Jack looked for the one that Slim had described to him, a conduit as thick as Jack’s forearm and made of the dark composite material that the ship’s hull was made from. Jack spotted the conduit. He followed it another twenty meters where the conduit turned ninety degrees vertically. Jack began to climb.
Slim had given him detailed instructions. The man had a detailed knowledge of this hidden world. Jack wondered if there was a nut or a bolt that Slim didn’t know about.
The only way to access the compartment that Reyes was in without alerting the guards was via a floor panel in a small cabinet at floor level. Jack had been concerned that the glass panel compartments would mean that as soon as he crawled out, he would be spotted by the guards, or a nurse, or worse still, Agent Visser. Slim had told Jack how he could fix that too.
The maintenance department was overworked and Slim was currently the only technician on board. Various crewmen had been transferred to the maintenance department, but they were performing tasks specific to their official stations. None of these emergency assistants understood the ship the way Slim did. He could understand the Scorpio, not just as a collection of systems, guns, targeting, drive, and crew support systems. No, Slim saw the ship as a single living entity built up from its component parts.
“The medical bay negative air pressure system has been faulty for months,” Slim had told Jack.
“Negative air pressure? What that?” Jack asked.
Slim had explained, “If any microbial, bacterial or viral matter escapes the medical bay, it could infect the entire crew. The med bay is kept at a lower pressure than the rest of the ship so air only flows in and never out. A series of chemical and physical filter systems keep the air clean, but nothing can escape, just in case.”
Jack reached a point in his long climb where the conduits pressed together. Slim had told him it would be a tight squeeze.
“When you are in position, I will start work on the faulty air system,” Slim had told Jack. “It will cause the lights in the medical bay and the detector systems to fail.”
Jack squeezed through the tight gap and found himself in a wide opening. A large bore pipe ran across the space. Jack followed the pipe to his left.
“I don’t want to get you into trouble,” Jack had been seriously worried about Slim and his enthusiasm to help. Slim had reassured him.
“There are so many systems that need attention. I can’t help it if I accidentally cause one to overload another. It’ll look like a complete accident. I have a work order somewhere. They’ve been waiting for me to deal with that med bay air pressure problem for weeks.”
Jack reached the bulkhead where the large bore pipe met and intersected with another. This was the point he’d been looking for. Two meters right of that intersection and Jack was finally in place.
“The lights and the alarms will only be off for a few minutes,” Slim had told Jack. “It’s the best I can do.”
“How will I know when you’ve caused the system failure?” Jack had asked.
“You won’t be able to take any communicators if you don’t want Fleet Intelligence to find out. Any device might give you away.”
Jack found the panel and detached the small clips. They were right where Slim had said they would be. Then Jack took out his small pocket watch.
“I’ll create the system failure at the start of third watch,” Slim had said. “But how will you know when it’s third watch?”
“I’ll know. Leave that to me.”
Jack sat in the dark and watched the second hand on his pocket watch tick around the small white face. The world around Jack was reduced to a small pool of light from a small head-mounted flashlight. He concentrated on his watch. The second hand hit the point where Jack knew third watch would begin. He’d synchronized his old family watch with the ship chronometer. He switched off his flashlight and quietly removed the panel.
The panel opened into an almost empty cabinet, only a small composite dish and a few packets of disposable items littered the space. Jack carefully removed them and set them aside.
The cabinet door opened easily with a gentle touch. Outside, he could hear the voices of the Marine guards and a nurse. One guard was shouting for emergency lighting.
“Does nothing work on this old ship?” another voice complained.
Jack crawled out of the cabinet and crossed the compartment floor. He stood up next to the bunk near Sarah Reyes’s head. Jack had thought of how to leave her a message. He could leave his watch for her. When she woke, she would know that he had been there. Maybe she would guess that she should talk cautiously. Jack could break his watch in the hope that that would tell her they were in danger. Jack knew a handwritten note would just land them both in trouble and possibly side by side on the gallows back on Eros.
There was one way Jack could be sure Reyes didn’t ever speak… If Reyes didn’t ever wake up. She was lying there completely at his mercy. Jack cursed himself for allowing the thought to cross his mind. He knew he couldn’t hurt her, or betray her like that. He couldn’t bear the thought of any harm coming to her. She was beautiful and interesting, and she’d saved 6th squad from the Chits at the Battle of Kratos Fuel Station. Maybe they could both disappear. The system was huge, and the war wasn’t everywhere. There were rogue settlements dotted across the galaxy. They could escape the fleet and live together somewhere.
Jack knew all these ideas were hopeless. Maybe he had only come to be with her one last time.
Jack touched Sarah’s hair. He felt her thick hair under his sweating hand. He could feel her beauty. He wished he could look at her, but his flashlight would give him away to the guards. The guards would arrest him and then Visser would be all over him like a mass of Chitin tentacles.
He felt the soft skin of her forehead and her smooth cheek. He remembered it now, flushed with the effort of work, smeared with sweat and dirt. She looked good in her overalls, busy at her workbench. Jack wondered if he’d ever see her there again.
“Sarah,” Jack whispered in her ear. “I need you to know.”
“Jack?” Her voice was weak.
Jack’s heart leapt. He felt an urge to yell out in triumphant joy. She was awake. Sarah was awake.
“Yes,” he whispered, his lips so close to her ear.
“Jack,” she said again. “I can’t see.”
“You are safe. The lights are all out.” Jack knew they’d be coming back on at any moment.
“We were on Kratos,” she said.
“Shh,” Jack whispered. He held his lips so close to her ear that they touched it lightly. “They will ask you what happened to Commander Finch. I told them he went missing. As far as we know, the Chits took him. Don’t say you saw him. Okay?”
Silence.
“Okay?”
The dark and the silence. The flashing of a light somewhere at the far end of the medical bay caught Jack’s attention.
“Sarah, can you hear me?”
The voices from the far end of the med bay were loud and anxious.
“I thought you were still guarding her,” said one Marine.
“No one’s been in or out,” the other said.
The flashlight beam flashed into the compartment, the light scattered by the many panels of translucent composite. Jack looked down and saw Reyes, her eyes closed and a smile on her rosebud lips.
Jack slid to his knees, head next to hers. “Don’t tell them we saw Finch.” He crawled back to the floor-level cabinet and climbed back inside. He pulled the door shut just as the lights burst to life, flooding the med bay with its stark light.
“There,” a Marine guard said. “She’s still there.”
Jack climbed carefully and quietly back into the dark world between the bulkheads in the hidden spaces of the Scorpio.
12
Pretorius stood before the holostage on the command deck. The holostage standby image rotated in front of him, an image of the Scorpio. It had been captured when the Scorpio had first left the construction facility in orbit around the home world, Eros. The Scorpio was, at the time, the newest and most powerful destroyer in the fleet. It was fast, able to cross from one side of the system to the other in one Eros day. She was heavily armed with port and starboard batteries of high-density shot cannon, deploying a range of high-density shot warheads from kinetic, incendiary, high ex, and antimatter payloads. The combat drone launch tubes were housed on the lower hull while the upper hull was dominated by the four high-energy laser cannons.
The Scorpio and her eleven sisters, together with the four massive carriers, were thought to be the ultimate defense against the newly discovered Chitin threat. That was until the carrier Crown was destroyed along with its flotilla of frigates and corvettes. Then the Libra was lost. Then the Gemini.
The Scorpio had seen its share of battle. Pretorius balanced the need for aggression with the need for survival. The Scorpio had used its speed as much as it had used its weaponry. Pretorius had mastered the hit and run. He had Chitin kills on his jacket. A dozen Krakens had met their end at the hands of Pretorius. The feather in his cap was the destruction of the Chitin Hydra at the battle of Hades North. He’d fought the battle at high speed, moving in and out of range of the Chitin focused plasma arc and he’d concentrated his fire on the Hydra, ignoring the Kraken infiltrators. He’d been boarded for the first time during that battle and lost many crewmen to the Chits that day, but he’d scored the fleet’s first kill on a Chitin Hydra. His tactics that day had been shared with the destroyer fleet as the primary method of engagement with a Hydra-class vessel.
The Scorpio that rotated on the holostage in front of Pretorius was not the battle-scarred vessel under the captain’s feet right now. The engine reactor was in need of an overhaul. It was operating at only sixty-eight percent efficiency. The Scorpio’s port-side battery was operating at only forty percent. Several cannons were out of action for the want of basic replacement parts. They had subsequently been cannibalized of other parts to service the remaining operational cannons. Pretorius knew he could not take on a Hydra and win now.
His starboard battery was fully functional, but he was short on crew to properly serve both batteries. He could fight with one side or the other. The high-energy laser was underpowered. It was still powerful enough to slice through a Chitin hull, but the range was so reduced that it would be a point-blank battle, one Pretorius knew the Scorpio would not survive.
The combat drone tubes were fully operational, but the supply of drones was limited. The Scorpio had one big fight left in her before she would have to return to port for rearmament and repair. Pretorius knew that fight was coming soon. He stood patiently in front of the holostage and waited for Group Captain Chen Li to appear.
Pretorius hoped the other ships in the assembled group were in better fighting condition than the Scorpio. No single destroyer had seen as much action as the Scorpio, none that were still in operation. The Scorpio was joined by two other destroyers, the Aries and the Pisces. Pretorius knew their captains well and he was happy to be alongside such good captains. The carrier leading the group was the Monarch. Her commanding officer was Group Captain Chen Li. She was cautious in battle as well as in politics. She had risen quickly from captain of a frigate, through Fleet Headquarters, and onto the bridge of the Monarch. At Fleet Headquarters, she had masterminded a successful attack on a series of Chitin asteroid facilities. She had leapfrogged some longer serving captains to the position of group captain, but her political and diplomatic skills, as well as her coldhearted military skills, had kept her in favor with her subordinates as well as her line commanders.
“Incoming message, Captain,” Commander Chou informed Pretorius. “It’s Group Captain Li aboard the Monarch, sir.”
“Put it on the holostage, Mister Chou.” Pretorius straightened.
The holostage flickered into life. Group Captain Li appeared in the center of the stage from the hips up. To either side of Li appeared smaller images—Captain Janie Lauafa of the Aries and Derrie Baskin of the Pisces.
“Captains,” Li said coolly. “Fleet has assembled us for an operation against a Chitin facility on Proxis, the closest moon to the gas giant Penthus. Success in this operation will limit the Chitins’ operational range in the system and relieve pressure on our convoys from the outer asteroid cloud.”
The holostage image flickered and changed to a view of the entire planetary system. Li, Lauafa, and Baskin appeared at the side of the display.
“As you can see,” Li said, “the two gas giants, Penthus and the Chitin home world Zelos, are currently on opposite sides of the star from each other.”
“We know the Chitins have a drydock facility on this moon.” The image zoomed in on Proxis, the inner moon of Penthus. It was a black moon of hard crystalline rock. “They service their deep space craft here, including their Leviathans. This drydock has allowed the Chits to extend their operational range across the entire system. If we can remove the Chitin presence around Penthus, we will push the Chitins back to the far side of the system, restricting their movements and freeing ours.”
The image of the system disappeared to be replaced by the group captain.
“I want full inventory and battle capability reports by end of second watch. Full armament readiness by third watch. We progress to our target at low velocity at the top of first watch. Transmitting battle plan and zero hour to you now.”
Pretorius knew he was here to fight. He didn’t need to be asked nicely. He was motivated as firmly as any person in the fleet, but it was unusual not to hear some introductory pleasantries between senior officers on an operation. Then, it seemed that Li hesitated for a moment.
“I know you are seasoned veterans, so I am honored to be leading this carrier group.” Li paused. “You have your orders.”
The image of Li flickered away, leaving Lauafa and Baskin on Pretorius’s holostage. The three captains smiled and greeted each other warmly. They all knew each other personally and by reputation. Between the three of them, they had more Chitin kills than the rest of the destroyer fleet put together.
“Good to see you both again,” Pretorius said. And as the three caught up on news from home, news of the war, of friends and families, and as they laughed with each other, Pretorius knew he was going into battle again.
13
The latest VR training sessio
n had a fresh feel to it. The scenario was not some generic battle situation, but had the feel of truth about it. The battlefield was a moon orbiting Penthus. Jack could see the huge gas giant filling the sky. The surface of the moon was a hard, glass-like rock, shot through with cracks and deep channels. The surface was difficult to walk across, even more difficult to crawl over.
Jack pulled off the VR helmet and clambered out of his pod. He was aching and sweaty. The scenario had been run several times this watch already. He’d once again completed an assault on a fixed position. His squad approached using stealth and natural cover concealment on one run-through, and on another, he had employed a rapid frontal assault. This last run, he’d used fire and maneuvers to advance on the position. He was outnumbered and out-gunned. He’d completed his objective and destroyed the target, a simulation of a Chit structure, but every time, he’d lost all of 6th squad. He had also been killed after the final destruction of his target.
Whatever the Marines were preparing for was going to be murder, sheer and utter murder. Jack wiped the sweat from his brow, grabbed his sweater, and left the VR suite. He was on a one-watch liberty. He wandered toward the med bay.
The corridors were the busiest Jack had ever seen them. Almost every corridor had a crewman walking one way or another. One corridor was blocked as a group of crewmen maneuvered a massive trolley holding a stack of four combat drones. The ship was clearly preparing for an operation.
He was forced to find a way around the blocked corridor. The sweat had cooled as he walked and he started to feel cold. He pulled the sweater from around his waist and pulled it on. After a few more corridors, and few encounters with crewmen and one flustered junior officer, Jack reached the med bay’s wide double-doors.
Torent was sitting on the edge of his bunk. He had one arm in his jacket and his new prosthetic arm out. He appeared to be having difficulty getting dressed.
Jack Forge, Fleet Marine Boxed Set (Books 1 - 9) Page 22
