Sam spoke up from the copilot seat. “Hey, Nelson, if Rick says he’ll be OK, he’ll be OK. He’s a good guy.”
“If you say so.” The pilot responded. He was edgy, anxious. This rescue drop was the first non-routine thing he’d done since he signed up with Universal Transport. He didn’t want to screw it up, get a black mark on his record. A passenger was just a complication. “Ace control, this is the shuttle, requesting clearance to exit.”
Vassily’s voice came back. “Roger that, shuttle. Standby, doors opening.”
In the airless shuttle hangar, the only sound was transmitted faintly through the support arms which held the shuttle in place. A vibration, a whirring of gears, then the shuttle bay was flooded with brilliant sunlight as the doors cracked open. Rick strained in his seat to see through the tiny window. Rusty red. The planet was directly below his window.
“Doors open and locked.” Vassily reported. You are cleared to power up.”
“Open and locked, roger that.” Nelson said. “Bringing internal power on line now.” There was a high-pitched whine, then a steady humming sound. Eventually, Nelson was satisfied the power generators were functioning normally. “Internal power is active and nominal. Releasing umbilical cables.” A series of sharp, metallic sounds announced the cables unplugging and retracting into the shuttle bay.
Rick let out a long breath, louder than he intended.
“We boring you, professor?” Nelson asked, without turning in his seat.
“No, no. This is all really interesting.” And all very, very time consuming. How could it take so long to prepare a shuttle to drop? Either everything took incredibly long, or Nelson was dragging things out. Rick supposed that when he flew on commercial spaceplanes, which wasn’t often, the crew had all the checks completed before he settled into his seat, so didn’t see all the complicated, tedious work the pilots went through before the glamorous part of their job started.
“Shuttle, you have a twenty minute drop window, starting... now. You have control.”
“I have control, roger that.” Nelson began flipping switches, and ran down a checklist with Sam, who was in the copilot seat. APUs started and running, internal power on and steady, umbilical lines retracted, docking clamps unlocked, blah, blah, blah. Rick reflected that these were the sort of mundane things that went on in the cockpit of commercial spaceplanes while passengers checked their pockets for snacks, read books, and decided what drinks to order.
Joy brought her children back to the cabin, clicked the viewscreen controls so that the big screen in the parent’s bedroom displayed a track of the shuttle’s flight path, which had just cleared the landing bay doors. With daughter and son settled in, she went to the bridge, and took a seat next to Gina, the ship’s communications specialist.
Joy didn’t expect anything to go wrong. She was on the bridge to make sure that if anything did go wrong, the crew put her husband’s safety first.
The excitement level for Rick kicked up a notch once they exited the shuttle bay and got clear of the ship, when Nelson flipped the shuttle around and fired the main engines, a maneuver intended to slow them down enough so that the shuttle would begin falling out of orbit. And fall they did. Rick was able to see a slice of the planet below out a side window, it kept getting closer, and closer, until the red planet filled the window, and he could see the horizon, or the blackness of space. Sam came over the intercom, and told Rick that they were about half an orbit away from contact with the top of the planet’s thin atmosphere, and there was nothing to worry about.
Gina spun around in her chair. “Captain, a ship just dropped out of hyperspace, I’m picking up a burst of gamma rays.”
“A ship?” There weren’t supposed to be any ships in the area. “Navy?”
“I don’t- wait, we’re getting a radio message, I’ll put it through. There’s a two second time lag, Captain.”
The screen on Gina’s console flickered, then displayed the image of a pleasant if bland looking man, short brown hair, wearing an ordinary shirt, not a uniform. Not Navy. He smiled. “This is the BioPharma research vessel Nightengale, I’m Ted Miller, captain here. We picked up the distress call, is there anything we can do to help?”
Schroeder looked at the newcomer suspiciously. “This is Captain Schroeder of the Universal Transport vessel Atlas Challenger. Why didn’t you respond to the distress call? The Registry doesn’t show any ships in this area.” He clicked the button to mute and said to Seth “See if you can find a registration for this ship.”
Miller looked sheepish when he sent his reply. “Our hypercomm transmitter isn’t working, we can receive messages, but not send, ditto for our transponder. We weren’t supposed to be in this area, we cut our survey trip short to get the transmitter repaired. This ship's complement is mostly doctors and medical research people, can we assist? Our shuttle only holds four people.”
Schroeder kept the radio on mute as he looked impatiently at Gina, until she replied. “Ah, Captain, Nightengale is registered, and the ship out there meets the configuration. It’s a survey ship, they search for alien plants and animals that could yield useful drugs. That’s what the Registry says, anyway.”
Schroeder nodded, satisfied he had all the information he was going to get. His ship wasn’t a Navy warship, Ace’s sensors were for navigation and that’s about all. He sent a reply. “Be advised that we have a shuttle dropping now, it should be on the surface shortly. Could you rendezvous with us, in case any of the miners need medical attention? All we have aboard is a medical bot.”
“Sure, the doctors here would like a change of scenery anyway, and this will be good public relations for BioPharma. Always good to keep your employer happy.” Miller said with a friendly smile. “I see your shuttle on radar, we can rendezvous with you in…” he checked something off screen, “about fifty minutes.”
Schroeder raised an eyebrow, and turned toward Seth. Fifty minutes, from dropping out of hyperspace, to matching orbit with Ace? That was fast, such maneuvers often took a day or more, depending on the relative positions of the two ships. Seth queried his navigation console, and gave a thumb’s up sign. “They came out of hyper right in the sweet spot, Captain, they’re just about lined up for orbit already. Their navigator is either very good, or very lucky.”
Captain Gante came back onto the bridge, with a thought nagging at the back of her mind. Tigershark had been patrolling this sector for fourteen months with no incidents, now there were two distress calls at the same time. It never rains unless it’s pouring, her mother used to say. She came up behind her first officer’s chair, and drummed her fingers on the seatback. “XO, any luck?”
Lt. Commander Ross blinked, and rubbed his eyes. He’d been staring at the screen for too long. “Ma’am, if I was fishing for our dinner, we’d be eating crackers tonight. I’ve got nothing. No sign of the Isaac Newton, and no sign of an explosion.” He turned halfway around in the seat to face his captain. “If anyone survived, they must be using battery power to run whatever life support they have left.”
“Keep looking, XO.” She frowned, and crossed to the communications technician. When Atlas Challenger had arrived at Ares and gone into stable orbit, that transport ship had sent a message to Tigershark that the rescue operation was on schedule and going well. No communication since then. That was not unusual, because if the freighter had sent a message directed back toward Earth, Tigershark could not have picked up the narrowband transmission. She instructed the communications technician to signal the freighter to send a status report, then Gante went back to her cabin to complete some crew evaluations.
For Rick, the flight got boring again, until the shuttle encountered the planet’s atmosphere, and he experienced the familiar roaring sound, and turbulence, of a spacecraft slowing down by burning a hole in the air. In Ace’s no-luxuries cargo-hauling shuttle, the descent was much louder and rougher than the commercial spaceplane flights Rick was used to. At some point, Sam came over the intercom to announce tha
t, because the shuttle was now surrounded by super-heated plasma, they would soon temporarily lose contact with the ship. It was nothing to worry about, Sam said, everything was going as planned.
“You’re in the pipe, five by five, shuttle.” Vassily’s voice declared. “We’re losing you now, see you on the other side.”
“Tssshhk-uttle, acknowle-sssssss Nelso-“ The radio cut off, drowned out by static.
Kaylee glanced over at Manny, to see if he was scared that they had lost contact with their father, as his shuttle dropped through the atmosphere. If anything, he looked excited. The video image on the screen now showed the shuttle’s planned flight path, with a blinking light indicating the spacecraft itself. Brother and sister had elected to sit on their parent’s bed to watch the video feed, rather than on the sofa in the main compartment. Kaylee was sitting cross-legged in the center of the bed, Manny slumped back nonchalantly against the pillows, both had an array of snacks to munch on. Manny pointed to his watch, and was about to say something, when their mother’s voice came over the speaker.
“Kaylee, Manny, this is nothing to worry about,” Joy said in a soft voice that had a worried catch to it, “the shuttle can’t use its radio when they are coming down through the atmosphere.”
“I know, Mom,” Manny said, “they will be out of contact for seven minutes. It’s because the super-heated plasma surrounding the shuttle drowns out radio signals.”
“Of course you knew that.” Joy replied, with a hint of a laugh.
“I knew that, too.” Kaylee added defensively, and stuck her tongue out at her brother.
“Good. We will talk to your father in a few minutes. The crew here tells me everything is going smoothly.”
“We can see that here, Mom, the shuttle is right in the flight path. Don’t worry about us.” Manny said.
“All right. And don’t eat too much junk, we’re having dinner in a few hours.”
Kaylee rolled her eyes at the speaker, and popped a chocolate into her mouth. “Yes, Mother.”
Captain Schroeder couldn’t be blamed for what happened to his ship. The Ace was a transport, essentially a long frame with four large cargo boxes and a hyperdrive, designed to haul cargo between the stars at minimal expense; she had no defenses, and only limited sensors. The attention of everyone on the bridge was focused on their shuttle’s descent through the atmosphere, which was now approaching the period of maximum stress on that craft’s heat shielding. No one was paying any attention to the innocent medical research ship that was approaching.
Gina had been chatting with Joy, to take the other woman’s mind off the fact that they’d temporarily lost contact with her husband, when a light on Gina’s console flashed. Gina activated the display. That was odd. They had just lost the signal from the hypercomm navigational beacon in Earth orbit. She figured there were two possibilities; either the beacon had stopped transmitting, which had never happened before, or something was wrong with Ace’s hypercomm gear. She didn’t consider a third possibility. “Just a minute, Joy, I’ve got a-“ she hesitated, searching for a word that would not be alarming to the passenger seated next to her, “glitch in my comm gear. I need to adjust something.” Her console, like the rest of the ship, was old, and equipment sometimes malfunctioned. The comm gear, however, had been through routine scheduled maintenance while the ship had been in Earth orbit, and the hyperwave antenna had been replaced. Gina frowned, and started tracing the problem through the system. She started with the hyperwave antenna. It appeared to be functioning normally.
While Gina was trying to figure out why she’d lost the nav beacon, and the others on the bridge were watching the shuttle’s passage through the atmosphere, Nightengale fired her thrusters, and rolled slowly around her long axis. That in itself was not noteworthy, ships in normal space routinely rotated, so that radiation from the star didn’t cook one side of the ship. If anyone on Ace’s bridge had been looking, they would have seen that a bay door on the medical ship’s port side was open. Now, that was odd, if any of Nightengale’s crew were going outside, they should have notified any nearby ships. The open door rotated toward Ace, and, for the briefest moment, a pair of red-colored tubes were visible inside the airlock, then something shot out of one tube.
The missile was launched by a magnetic pulse, invisible to any human observer. Once the missile reached a safe 500 meters from Nightengale, its solid rocket motor ignited, and the missile altered course. The launch was undetected, and the missile itself was unseen, until it had crossed half the distance to the freighter. On Ace’s bridge, the collision alarm sounded, triggered by the low-powered radar which constantly swept the space around the ship.
Seth barely had time to check the radar, and see with shock that the source of the alarm was an object traveling at high speed from the medical ship, when the missile struck the freighter, right at the junction tube which connected the saucer-shaped command section to the rest of the ship. The missile penetrated the thin outer skin of the tube, then the low-power warhead exploded.
The blast ripped through the junction tube, tearing it completely apart, and also cut through the three structural frames which connected the command section to the rest of the ship. The command section was wrenched free with the shrieking, groaning sound of tearing metal and composites and separated from the rest of the ship, spinning end over end, out of control.
On the bridge there was pandemonium. Seth was the only person strapped into a seat, everyone else was flung around from the force of the explosion. The artificial gravity cut off immediately, along with the lights. Joy was fortunate to be knocked first against the flat bridge doors, then fall forward into Schroeder, who was rebounding off the back off Seth’s chair. Gina and Vassily hit the ceiling. Everyone was shouting, no one was listening.
CHAPTER 6
The dim emergency lighting snapped on, then a few consoles came back to life, navigation first, followed by communications. Captain Schroeder, bleeding from a cut on his head, managed to get a grasp on a handhold. “Is everyone all right?” He shouted out.
Seth’s brain felt like it had been on a rollercoaster ride. He blinked, his vision was functional. “I’m OK, Hans.” He responded, for the moment forgetting shipboard formality. Seth unbuckled from his seat, and pushed off to grab Vasilly around the waist, then pull the engineer down to his duty station and strap him loosely into his own seat. Vasilly had a deep scar across his right temple, blood was welling up. His eyes were barely open, and glassy, staring without seeing. He moaned in pain. “Vasilly’s alive, he took a knock on the head, I think he’s unconscious.”
Gina cried out from the far corner of the bridge, she was still floating in the air. “I think I broke my arm.” Her voice was shaky from the pain. Her left forearm was at an odd angle, she cradled it with her right hand.
Joy coughed, and spit blood from a cut on her lip. She had also bashed her nose at some point, and it too was bleeding. Fingers and toes were moving. “I’m fine here. What happened? My bComm isn't connecting to the ship computer.”
“I don’t know what happened yet, my bComm is down also. Ms. Sanchez, can you help Gina? Seth, make sure Vasilly won’t float around, then get back to your station, we need to figure out what our status is.” Schroeder pulled himself along the handholds, trying to get to a viewport which looked aft. He stopped to speak over the intercom.
Joy, moving on adrenaline, held onto a railing with one hand, and reached up to get hold of Gina’s pantsleg with the other. Gently, she pulled the other woman down toward the deck, until Gina got her legs wrapped around the railing. “You can hang on now?”
Gina nodded without speaking, her eyes streaming in tears from the pain. Her tears floated away, forming salty droplets in the zero gravity.
“I have to check on my children.” Joy said with determination, and was about to push herself toward the bridge doors, when Schroeder spoke.
“Ms. Sanchez! Don’t. We are no longer attached to the rest of the ship.” He said, w
ith a tone of alarm in his voice.
“What? What do you mean?” Joy, for the first time, felt panic well up inside her.
Schroeder pointed out the viewport. “I can see behind us, and the cargo section isn’t there. It’s drifting away from us. The blast must have knocked us loose.”
“We have to get there! My children are on that ship!” Joy awkwardly flung herself toward Schroeder, nearly bashing her head on a console, but he caught her and guided her away. He held tightly onto her shoulders and looked her right in the eye.
“Ms. Sanchez! Listen to me! We have no way to get from here to the other part of the ship. We only have one shuttle, and it’s on Ares right now. Your children, listen to me, listen to me-“ he said gently as Joy tried to wrench herself away, “are you listening? I’m trying to help you. Your children are most likely in better shape than we are. The rest of the ship has much more mass, the explosion would not have knocked it around nearly as much. All the power and life support systems are in their part of the ship, and Jen is there with them. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Joy whispered.
“What we need to do now is restore power to the radio, and contact Nightengale, or the shuttle. They will-“
Seth interrupted. “Captain, Nightengale isn’t going to help. I think they fired a missile at us.”
It was Schroeder’s turn to be incredulous. “What?” He released Joy and made his way quickly over to Seth’s console. Until then, Schroeder had assumed the explosion was an accident, a mechanical failure, or a high-speed meteor impact. Surely his navigator was wrong. Joy turned around to look out the viewport, and caught a glimpse at the cargo section, it looked far away already. Her heart sank.
Seth pulled up the brief radar track he’d seen before the explosion, and played it back for Schroeder. “Mein Gott.” Schroeder whispered, lapsing into his native German. “You are right. They attacked us.” He pointed to a second image on the screen, in the opposite direction. “What is this?”
Aces Page 6
