by Jay Allan
“You would risk the destruction of the entire fleet?” Winston was incredulous. “You would advance against a superior enemy, throw our forces into a complex and protracted battle, one from which it might become impossible to effectively withdraw?”
“Sir, we must defeat the enemy. Buying time does nothing for us. We have to stop their advance somewhere. If we don’t, they will continue into the heart of the Confederation. If we wait here, we cede the initiative. We give them time to—address—Dauntless and Intrepid, and the damage that has been done to their supply lines. We have to do something. And I think Captains Barron and Eaton, and Lieutenant Stockton, have given us an opportunity.”
“I’m afraid I cannot agree with you, Admiral Striker. I am charged with command of our combined fleets, and my primary duty is to preserve them. You would risk them on a wild gamble. Such an action might feel good, Admiral, but we cannot charge off heroically into a hopeless battle. Officers in our positions must be cautious…we must consider many factors before ordering any action.”
“Sir…”
“No, Admiral Striker. I will not throw away First Fleet on some wild gamble…and I will not allow you to unduly risk Fifth Fleet either. An attack into Turas is out of the question. I don’t even see how we can even hold Mellas. The enemy’s supply disruptions have given us an opportunity, however…one to withdraw, to pull out of Mellas, perhaps to Halos. Or farther back.”
Striker watched his commanding officer with growing horror.
My God, he’s broken. The losses, the retreats…it’s been too much for him. He will run from the enemy, and his weakness will destroy the Confederation.
But he knew there was nothing to say, no words he could utter to change Winston’s mind. He just stared back, stunned, terrified at the implications. Finally, he managed to say, “Yes, sir,” the words scraping over his throat like a blade.
“Very well, Admiral Striker. Dismissed.”
Chapter Forty-One
Bridge
CFS Dauntless
Varus System
308 AC
“Captain…I found Commander Fritz. She says she’ll have internal comm restored in most areas of the ship in a few minutes.”
Barron scooped up the portable communicator and held it in front of him. He’d sent Atara Travis to track down the chief engineer, and to get an idea just how close his ship was to being a total wreck. But first, he’d broken out an emergency kit from one of the lockers on the bridge and grabbed a pair of small comm units, giving his exec one of them so they could keep in touch.
“That’s good news, Commander.” He paused. “How are things, Atara? Really?”
“It’s pretty bad, Captain, but a lot of it is more superficial than it seems. The lifts are all out. That was one hell of a trip here by ladder. I’m just glad I was going down and not up. Though the grav compensators are out in a lot of sections, so maybe I could have just floated up.”
“Any word on the reactors?”
“Commander Fritz says both reactors are close to functional. It’s mostly some minor malfunctions near the reactors rooms made a hell of a lot worse by damage to the transmission lines. It looks like some pieces of that fighter slammed into one of the major power routing centers. Still, it’s not all bad news. We don’t have much functional right now, but as far as Commander Fritz can tell, the reactors, the engines, even the primaries, are basically fine. It’s a lot of small and scattered damage that’s causing most of the trouble. There’s a good chance we can get some of these systems back online pretty quickly.”
“Fritzie was right to start with comms. That’ll make everything easier. Ask her about ship-to-ship…and scanners too.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Barron could hear Travis speaking, and another voice in the background, Fritz’s.
“Sir, she says she’ll have ship-to-ship comm for you in thirty minutes, maybe even sooner. But scanners will be a while. There’s a lot of damage to the external systems, and she’s going to need to send some EVA teams out before she can finish repairs.”
“Very well, Commander.”
“Captain, I think I can be of some help around here. Request permission to remain and assist with repair operations.”
“Do it. Hell, if I knew the top from the bottom of a polarity wrench, I’d be down there too. Conscript anybody you need, Commander. I don’t care what their normal duty is. There’s nothing on this ship right now—nothing—except for the repair operations. Get it done.”
“We will, sir.”
Barron looked around the bridge. The main lights were on, but the persistent flickering told him the power lines feeding the bridge were in less than perfect shape. The workstations were still down, but he didn’t think the issue was on the bridge.
Probably in the data processing center…Fritzie will get someone on that as soon as she can.
He was uncomfortable—a massive understatement—at sitting here blind, with no idea of what was happening out in space. The enemy ship had been hit hard when he’d lost scanners, and he knew Eaton would have kept pounding away at their adversary. He’d felt Dauntless shake a few times as enemy laser blasts slammed into her, but that had stopped twenty minutes before. Coupled with the fact that his ship still existed, it suggested to him Intrepid had vanquished the enemy vessel, destroying it, or at least rendering it incapable of further attack. Either way, that bought some time to restore operations on Dauntless.
Barron knew there were hundreds of his people working on repairs, that everything that could be done was being done. But he felt helpless. He looked over the bridge, his officers all sitting around, trying with varying degrees of success to hide the fear they were feeling. It would have been easier if they’d had something to do, but with all their instrumentation down, they were just staring at each other.
“All right,” Barron said as he jumped up from his chair. “Let’s stop wasting time.” He gestured toward Lieutenant Darrow. “You’ve got some engineering experience, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” the communications officer replied, somewhat meekly. “A little in the Academy, but then I changed my course of study to communications.”
“Well, it’s time to draw on old knowledge, Lieutenant.” Barron opened one of the lockers, and leaned forward pulling out a heavy case of tools. “The damage control teams are working on the main systems, but let’s see what we can do up here. I guarantee we’ve got some burnouts and other issues we can find and repair, so when operations come back online we’re good to go.” He looked around at the surprised faces staring back at him. “Let’s move,” he yelled, waving his arms upward. “Out of those chairs. If you don’t know what you’re doing then help someone who does. Check out your workstations for anything we can fix up here. If you need help, shout out for it. We’ve got enough combined knowledge to do more than just sit here and look at each other.”
Barron didn’t know how much good the bridge crew would do trying to troubleshoot and repair their stations, but he was sure about one thing. Even if they didn’t fix one burned out circuit, they were a damned sight better off working on it than they were sitting around looking at each other.
* * *
Walt Billings pulled himself up the ladder, pausing and taking a few deep breaths. He was careful not to look down. He wasn’t scared of heights, at least not too scared, but Dauntless was a big ship, and some of these emergency access tubes were awfully long…or tall, depending on perspective. He wasn’t in any real danger of falling. The ship’s engines were shut down, and without any thrust, the dampeners were providing only a small amount of simulated gravity down here. If he lost his footing, he would fall, but he’d drop so slowly, all he’d have to do was reach out and grab another rung. Still, he suspected the view of the two hundred meter drop would give him the sweats, and probably some stomach flops too, so he kept looking up rather than down.
He’d spent the last four hours tracking down and fixing severed power lines and replacing
blown junction boxes. He had a crew of seven working under him, but he’d dispersed them all, sending them in different directions to test the lines and fix anything that wasn’t functioning.
Dauntless was a big ship, a fact he sometimes forgot when comparing her to vessels like Repulse and Defiant that outmassed her by a million tons or more. But crawling around inside the endless kilometers of access tubes and corridors was definitely a job designed to make one appreciate the immensity of any Confederation battleship.
He reached up and pulled himself to the next level, turning to face a large hatchway. He punched his access code, wondering for about the hundredth time if the door would unlatch, or if he’d have to spend time and effort prying open a wracked and twisted chunk of metal.
He heard a loud click, and a smile slipped onto his face. The power was out in the whole section, so the door didn’t slide open as it normally would have, but he slipped his hand into the small crack and pushed. The hatch slid open easily, and he climbed through.
He reached up, opening a small panel and pulling out a circuit board. He looked down at it.
Yup…fried.
The power feedbacks from the internal explosions had burned out electrical gear all across the ship. But this should be close to the last bit of it, at least along the main comm hub. He reached down and pulled a replacement from his sack. He pushed it in place, slipping it right into the grooves that had held the old, damaged one.
He pulled the small portable comm unit from his belt and held it to his mouth. “Commander, Billings here. We’re done…at least, I think we got everything. Ready to test when you give the go-ahead.”
“Do it, Lieutenant. It’ll give us a chance to see how good you are.”
Billings made a face at the remark. He respected the hell out of Fritz, and he considered her the best engineer the fleet had ever known, but she wasn’t the easiest officer to work for. She wasn’t even close. She really needed a course in the care and feeding of subordinates.
“Activating comm systems now, Commander.” He took a step to the side, and reached out to a nearby workstation. He flipped a series of levers, and then he punched a code into the small keyboard. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then the indicator lights on the panel began to come on. Green, across the board.
He tapped the small controls next to the workstation’s comm unit, calling up Commander Fritz’s channel. “Commander, this is Billings. Do you read?”
He waited, tense, hoping he hadn’t missed anything.
“I read you, Billings. Good job.”
He nodded, cracking a tiny smile. That was high praise from Fritz.
“Now, get your people down to main conduit C, Lieutenant. We’ve still got a break somewhere on that line, and we need to track it down.”
“Yes, Commander.”
He turned and moved back toward the hatch to the access tube, but then he paused and looked back at the comm unit.
Oh yeah! That’s how good I am, Commander!
* * *
“It’s good to hear from you, sir. You had us worried for a while.” Eaton’s voice was a bit distorted, and there was a small buzz in the background. Dauntless’s inter-ship comm was functional again but, like many of its systems, small glitches remained.
“Thank you, Captain. It’s good to hear from you too. Things looked a little grim there for a while, but it turned out a lot of systems were down because of isolated damage.”
“That’s good news. Honestly, better than I’d dare to hope.”
“Thanks for watching our back, Sara. If your people hadn’t managed to take out that enemy battleship, we wouldn’t have survived long enough to get systems back online.”
“Any time, Captain. Actually, there wasn’t much left for us to do. Our tiny joint fighter wing did a lot of it. When you get a chance to review what happened, you might want to consider Commander Jamison for a decoration. I’ve never seen anything like the way he led that strike.”
“I will, Captain. Jamison is one of the best, no question. And thanks for landing my strays while we were dealing with the damage.” Barron hesitated for a few seconds. “What is Intrepid’s condition, Sara? This is an extremely unhealthy place for us to remain, but we can’t leave until we take out that station.”
“We’re in good shape. Primaries are still online, reactors close to full output. We’ve lost a couple of the secondary batteries, but mostly our broadside is solid too.”
“How about your bays?”
“They’re both operational…more or less. But we’ve lost one of the catapults, and there’s a lot of damage to the supply delivery systems and the refueling lines. We can launch and land ships, and we can refit them, slowly. But we’re far below normal operating parameters. I’m afraid to ask, but what shape are you in over there?”
“Probably better than you think. We’ve got lots of small glitches and malfunctions, but we’re being pretty brutal in prioritizing repair operations, and most of the vital systems are at least partially functioning. Power generation is good—the reactors only suffered light damage. The power lines are still down in some areas, but we’ve installed some bypasses, and restored energy transmission to all weapons and to the bays as well. I’ve got my teams double checking the main guns, but they should be ready for action within an hour.”
“That’s amazing, far more optimistic than I’d have guessed. Your Commander Fritz really lives up to her reputation.”
“Yes, she does. I’m very lucky to have her…and she’s built one hell of an engineering team.”
“So, when do we move on the station?” Eaton’s voice was a bit tentative. Barron understood, and he felt the same way. Neither ship was ready for action, not really. Many systems were patched back together haphazardly, subject to renewed failure under the pressure of battle. Half of their fighters were trapped in Dauntless’s still-inoperable bays. But none of that mattered. The Varus system was far behind enemy lines, a dangerous place for two Confederation battleships, and they’d pushed their luck far enough already. Waiting wasn’t an option. Destroying the station was too important…and if fresh Union forces arrived, the chance would be lost.
“An hour,” Barron said. “That will give us time to do a final check on the primaries. Then we’ll move forward and engage.” He hated the idea of charging in with their battered ships, and with no real idea of what defenses the station mounted. But he didn’t see an alternative. “I doubt we’ll be able to get the bays up and running by then…can you get your fighters launched?”
“Some, at least. We’re still trying to refit and refuel them, but we’ve got about twenty ready to go now, and we’ll have more in an hour.”
Barron nodded, to himself as much as anyone. The situation seemed almost unreal to him. In the Academy they taught doctrine, how to proceed in battle conditions. But his rapidly increasing combat experience was teaching him that much of what he’d learned was useless. It was all well and good to review things under textbook conditions, but he’d found that such situations were shockingly rare in real combat. No Academy class would have discussed two battleships, both battered and depleted, attacking a massive enemy construct, with no idea of the weaponry they’d face and no useful estimate of what it would take to destroy the thing. But this wasn’t a classroom, and the destruction of that supply facility could be the difference between victory and defeat, not just in Varus, but in the entire war. Dauntless and Intrepid had to go in. Barron knew that, and he was sure Eaton did as well.
“Very well. I know your people will do their best to use the hour well, as I am sure mine will. Then we go in, Captain. And we don’t stop, we don’t pull back until we’ve destroyed that thing…or it’s destroyed us.”
Chapter Forty-Two
CFS Fortitude
Mellas System
308 AC
“Open.” Striker snapped the word, far more of his anger and frustration coming out with it than he’d intended. He was glad it was just the AI speaking to him, and n
ot one of his spacers. The computer wouldn’t take offense, wouldn’t think he was angry at it.
He was angry, though, or, more accurately, he was frustrated. His meeting with the admiral had gone poorly. That hadn’t been a total surprise. But realizing that Admiral Winston had lost his nerve, that the fleet’s senior officer was shaken so deeply by the defeats he’d suffered, he was prepared to do anything to avoid risking battle again, was a sobering piece of news. And Striker had no idea what he could do about it. He’d argue his case again, of course, but he already knew that would be a waste of time.
The door slid open, and he walked through, into his quarters, pulling his hat from his head and tossing it toward the table. It hit near the edge and slipped off, falling to the floor. He turned to walk toward the small counter along the wall. He needed coffee. Actually, he needed far more than that, and for a passing moment he regretted the fact that he wasn’t a drinker. The idea of really tying one on appealed to him, at least in a theoretical way.
“That bad, eh?”
Striker whipped around at the words, his hand moving reflexively toward the pistol at his side. He checked the movement before he actually drew the weapon. He was on his flagship, after all, not on a battlefield. But who the hell was in his quarters?
“No need to defend yourself, Admiral. I just wanted to have a word with you away from, shall we say…prying eyes.”
Striker relaxed slightly as he recognized the voice. Holsten.
“You really have to be more cautious, Director. Someone a little more tense than I am might have reacted with combat instincts…and only find out later they’d decorated the far wall with the brains of the chief of Confederation Intelligence.” He didn’t bother to ask how the operative had gotten aboard his flagship without his knowledge. He suspected that had not pushed Holsten’s skills to their limits.
