Star Force: Flashpoint (SF8)

by Aer-ki Jyr

  “Yes,” Borsk answered.

  “Ditto here,” Paul confirmed a moment later.

  Kara and Andy made their way through the limited number of rooms on what was left of the dorsal gravity disc, coming up against another sealed door three quarters of the way around the arc which wouldn’t open due to atmospheric safety protocols…meaning they’d made their way back around to the breach point, so they doubled back to the nearest stairwell and headed up a level, eventually arriving at the ship’s galley.

  When they entered the thermal readings on their armors’ external monitors jumped 13 degrees up to -7. The two bodies they’d seen on the surveillance camera were floating mid room, but there were five others spread out attached to various chairs, tables, or cabinets by makeshift ties to keep them from floating around. All of them were wrapped up in what looked like thermal blankets.

  Now that they were in atmosphere their armor pumped the external sound through their helmet speakers, so when the crinkle of synthetic material sounded it got their attention immediately. Both of their helmeted heads turned to the right and saw one of the bodies twist slightly, crackling the makeshift blanket he wore.

  Kara walked over to the person, tied to a floor-mounted chair via a wristband, and saw frost on his face and eyebrows, along with a plume of white as he suddenly exhaled in the frigid conditions when he realized someone had found him.

  “Captain, we’ve found a survivor,” she reported. “We need an evac suit over here on the double.”

  “This one’s dead,” Andy said, beginning to check the others.

  “What’s his condition?” Borsk asked.

  “Disoriented and frozen. Possible frostbite,” Kara reported. “We’ve got 7 people holed up in the galley wrapped in some type of blankets…might even be packing material. This room is slightly warmer, due to their body heat I’d guess.”

  “Got another,” Andy said, his voice elevating a notch. “She’s barely showing life signs. We’ve got to get some heat in here.”

  “Are the scrubbers working?” Borsk asked.

  “Last I checked, yes,” Markinson said from the other side of the gravity disc, monitoring their conversation.

  “Archon,” Kara asked, “is there a junction box near the galley?”

  “Yes, should be a few steps away…too your left,” Paul said, checking the ship schematics.

  “I’m going to try and get the heat on, see to them,” she said.

  “I’m sending over recovery pods,” Borsk added. “You can use their internal heaters to warm them up. Are any of them responsive?”

  “Barely,” Andy answered. “Visual recognition only. No speech…got another dead one.”

  “How many survivors?” Paul asked.

  “Looks like just the two here,” Andy said, double checking the woman. “But I’m not sure if this one is going to make it. And we haven’t finished searching the ship yet.”

  “There’s also a few rooms attached to the depressurized section that we couldn’t search,” Kara pointed out. “Aside from soft sealing each one I’m not sure how we can get at them.”

  “We have drill cams for that,” Borsk noted. “I’ll have some sent over with the pods. If we find anyone then we can soft seal, but for now attend to the ones we’ve found and keep searching the ship. Priority goes to them first.”

  Andy looked at the pair of survivors, bobbing about slightly attached to their tethers. “Not much we can do here for them. Get those pods over here as fast as you can.”

  “They’re coming,” the Captain promising.

  Twenty four minutes later Kara and a medic from the ship hauled four thigh-sized cylinders into the galley, one held under each arm. Kara passed one to Andy and ‘dropped’ the other, letting it float lazily across the room as she looked at the man staring back at her with what looked like dead eyes, but the small puffs of breath oozing out of his nostrils testified to his continuing existence, and she hoped he could hold on long enough to get back to the ship.

  She checked her thermals…now up to +4 in the room, but still below freezing elsewhere in the ship. The thermal strips in the walls, ceiling, and floor had been jacked up as high as they could go and were eating up a significant portion of her power pack, plugged into the wall outside, and woefully insufficient to warm up the entire disc, but hopefully a few degrees here would buy the survivors some more time.

  Kara watched as both Andy and the medic opened their respective cylinders and pulled the insides out, expanding the compact bundles into what looked like sleeping bags. The soft, flexible material then mushroomed out into an elongated pod as hard ribs unfolded, along with a clear face cap at the opposite end from the hard equipment bundle at the feet.

  “Some help,” Andy asked Kara as he began to pull off the woman’s blanket.

  Kara stepped over and helped him slide her inside the pod, then hurried over and helped the medic do the same, sealing the survivors inside and activating the limited internal life support, warming the inside air, adding small amounts of oxygen, and scrubbing out the carbon dioxide.

  “Take this one,” the medic said, switching over to look at the woman as Kara began walking the pod out of the galley.

  “She’s weak,” Andy said as the medic looked at the condition of her face through the clear shield.

  “Worse than the other,” he declared. “She goes first then. Let’s hurry.”

  Together they pulled the pods back to the breach point and loaded them up on another support craft which ferried them back over to the SR, with the medic riding on the outside of the craft along with his two patients. He had a receiving party waiting for him in the hangar back on the ship, and signaled to them to get the woman through the airlock and into the med bay first. He stayed with the man for the three minute delay, then followed his pod inside.

  The search team stayed with the ship, loading up the dead bodies into pods after looking for and finding no additional survivors. The engineering compartment under and aft of the saucer section had been completely depressurized with several holes opening it directly to space…and the cargo sections behind it were in even worse condition. Whatever had hit the ship had hit it hard and repetitively, making a mess of what had once been a truly elegant starship.

  With the survivors onboard the SR and the recovery efforts continuing, Paul and Roger went over the ship’s sensor logs meticulously, unfortunately with little data to work with. The radar records clearly showed another ship in the vicinity of the Leo at the time of the incident, but it had no transponder and had made no contact with the Taiwanese vessel.

  It took quite a while to sift through the external camera feeds, but an enlargement of three of them showed the culprit firing off a series of missiles at range, just before the feeds went dead. The ship was hazy, due to the range and magnification issues, but using the various angles they were able to construct a rough wireframe of the vessel, which didn’t match any on file, Star Force or otherwise.

  Paul stared at the diagram, slowly spinning on a wall display next to the fuzzy images trying to piece it all together.

  “Any theories?” Roger asked.

  “It’s Earth tech, obviously,” Paul said, still looking at the screen. “But I don’t see anything here to identify the ship, and there’s no record of any ghost sightings in the traffic logs. All radar contacts have been tagged, so whoever this is, they’ve been sneaking about outside the detection range of our facilities.”

  “Seems like someone has gone to significant effort to hide this ship, and perhaps others from us,” Roger said ominously.

  “Meaning Davis was right,” Paul agreed. “They’re starting it all over again.”

  4

  November 5, 2059

  Paul casually leapt up the stairs into Davis’s office, easing into an almost silent walk on the top step and passing through several intense sunrays coming in through the 360 degree, wrap-around window late morning to find Davis pouring over a mountain of data that he didn’t look up
from. Paul walked forward and sat down in one of the three opposite chairs and waited for him to finish.

  “The survivors?” Davis asked several long seconds later, finally looking up from his corporate figures.

  “Transferred into the medical facility on A-23 three hours ago.”

  Davis nodded. “Get anything useful from them?”

  “Nothing in addition to the sensor data, and the woman is still in coma. I doubt she’ll have anything to add if and when she wakes up.”

  “I haven’t reported the incident to the Taiwanese ambassador yet, and so far they haven’t made any inquiries. I wanted to decide what we were going to do before word gets out.”

  Paul frowned. “How could they not know they’ve got a ship missing? The moment the transponder cut out they should have seen a red flag.”

  Davis inclined his head skeptically. “Either they’re not as vigilant in monitoring their ships…or they’re waiting to see if it will eventually come in.”

  “Sloppy,” Paul said dismissively.

  “Course projections showed it wasn’t due to arrive at the Exchange until the day after tomorrow. I assume that’s not going to happen?”

  “No it won’t. We’ve already diverted what’s left of the ship safely away and it should rendezvous with a proper tug within a week. The debris is another matter. The SR took care of the big pieces, but the sweeper team won’t get there for another two days. We’ll need to yellow flag the area for the public within the next 12 hours.”

  Davis nodded. “And tell them what?”

  “I don’t know,” Paul said honestly. “We haven’t been able to locate or backtrack the ship. We have no idea who owns it, who built it, or where it’s hiding…or how many of them there are.”

  “What do you want to do about it?”

  Paul stared him straight in the eye. “I want to bring in the fleet and hunt it down.”

  “Which means letting the cat out of the bag.”

  “We can do it quietly…for a while. But if there is a rogue warship out there we have to protect our civilian fleet. We’ve kept them unarmed for political reasons, which makes them target practice without escorts.”

  “And escorts are visible.”

  “Again, we can keep it discrete, but we don’t have enough warships to cover our own transports unless we start grouping them in convoys, which would then be letting the cat out of the bag.”

  “Why convoy if there’s no escort?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Any guesses as to where it came from?” Davis asked, already having formulated a few of his own.

  “There has to be a covert shipyard somewhere,” Paul said emphatically. “We already keep surveillance on all the current ones to make sure new ships are transponder tagged and they know it. The question is, where is the shipyard and how did they build it without us knowing.”

  “I’m assuming this warship is too big to have been launched from Earth?”

  “Yes, it’s roughly corvette-sized, and even if it was brought up from the surface in pieces we would have detected the launch.”

  “Because they have to be transponder tagged,” Davis echoed. “So when can they get some peace and quiet away from us?”

  “Best guess would be a side trip by an unmarked auxiliary craft or drone,” Paul said, laying out the possibilities that he’d been calculating the past 2 days. “A transport makes a routine run through a dark zone with us tracking the transponder. It launches a smaller, faster unmarked craft that travels to an orbital slot off the main detection grid and drops off supplies or parts, then it accelerates to catch up and re-dock with the transport before it comes within radar range of any other ship or station.”

  “How big of a transport are we talking?”

  “Any cargo module would work, but it’d have to be listed as an empty berth or a mislabeled one if the business they were carrying out was with us, and most of it is. If it was between other parties they could carry whatever they wanted, but most of those trips are within station groups or along high traffic lanes. Bottom line is there’s some opportunities to exploit, but in order to do so they’ve had to be very sneaky and innovative…and it would be very expensive.”

  “Where’s the most likely place they’re hiding?”

  “My money would be mid orbit along the transit lanes from Luna. A station parked there would come into alignment every few weeks, but that would also put it in detection range of passing ships temporarily, so it’s not exactly the perfect hiding spot. It could also be trailing the moon in the same orbit, outside the range of our Lunar Cyclops, but the deviation point would have to be well prior to arrival at Lunar orbit, meaning a great deal more range to cover. It’s something I’d try, but with their limited technology and fuel reserves it’s unlikely…unless they’re very committed.”

  “Which is a distinct possibility,” Davis added.

  “Another option is that they’ve refitted one of their known stations with an internal shipyard…one that we’re not monitoring. It’d be a game of cat and mouse in closer to the planet to avoid detection, but it does appear that the warship had at least moderate stealth plating that would diminish effective radar range.”

  “But no AG?”

  “Not based on the shape and size, no,” Paul said relatively confident. “Either it’s a drone ship, which I find unlikely, or they’ve got their crew in zero g round the clock, which is just plain stupid.”

  “But it also has advantages?”

  “Smaller ship size per mission profile,” Paul acknowledged. “The gravity discs and cylinders are mass anchors. Take them out of the equation and you have faster ships that can carry greater fuel loads for extended range…they just suck the life out of your crew at the same time.”

  “But our warships are faster still, because they have no crew?”

  “That and our tech’s better, yes.”

  “If we bring in the fleet, how do you go about finding them?”

  “There are a few locations I want to check out, but if we don’t get lucky then we’ll have to wait for the next attack. That’s why I want our ships moved in closer. Had they been here two days ago we could have had a chance of chasing this bastard down. Even now I could probably find him, but any ship I send chasing will just be a sitting duck.”

  “So it shouldn’t be that hard to find unless it stays quiet?”

  “Space is vast, but fuel calculations and drift are easy to figure. Give us a starting point and the ability to move high powered radars into the zone of probability and we’ll find them. Our ships are faster than theirs and more fuel efficient. Get us close and we’ll find them.”

  “And if they play possum?”

  “Given enough time I’ll find them. Even if they can move their warship around to avoid detection, they can’t do the same for their shipyard…plus, they have to keep running supplies out to service it. If we can find those lines they’ll give it away. If our increased scrutiny cuts the lines, then the warship is rendered useless. Either way, the harder we make it for them to hide the greater the odds we force them into either abandoning the operation or revealing themselves.”

  “Or forcing their hand,” Davis added.

  “That won’t get them anywhere,” Paul said resolutely.

  “I know that…but they don’t. Their secrecy suggests that they’re one of our customers and they don’t want to lose our resources, but they still don’t know of our military capability. If push comes to shove they may try to start taking what they currently buy.”

  “All the more reason to move the fleet in,” Paul argued.

  “I agree, but we must be cautious. If they have more than one warship, how many can we handle?”

  “Head to head, as many as they want to throw at us…the trick is being in the right place at the right time, and we’ve got too many stations to guard. We’ll have to start adding the defense packages for deterrency, otherwise all they have to do is build more crappy ships than we have and send them out
to different locations simultaneously, and by sheer numbers they’ll get a few victories because we can’t cover all our infrastructure…unless we hit them first, which I would greatly prefer.”

  “So, we have the advantage, but not so much that they can’t hurt us?”

  “If they’re smart about it, yes,” Paul confirmed dourly.

  Davis nodded. “We also have to consider the reaction of the Americans, Brits, Russians, Chinese, and Brazilians…assuming they’re not the ones involved. They all have warships of their own and could start throwing their weight around in an attempt to hunt down the enemy…or more likely start blaming each other and reopen old political wounds. We need to find out who’s to blame and deal with them before this starts to get out of hand. If we do have to let the cat out of the bag, let’s do so in a way that deters their aggressive ambitions.”

  “Kicking the crap out of whoever’s to blame will do that,” Paul pointed out. “And not just the warship. We need to take out the shipyard that built it.”

  Davis considered that. “If they should all turn on us, can we handle that?”

  “Based on their known ships, yes. It’s on the surface where we’ll have trouble.”

  “That thought has crossed my mind,” Davis admitted.

  “In space we can kick their asses, not only because we have better tech and people, but because we know where their infrastructure is. If we wanted to we could really hurt them on the surface by taking out their satellite communications and kicking them back down to the planet, but our facilities in their countries would be in jeopardy. The trouble with the Phantom is we don’t know who they are, so we don’t know who to hit. That’s what makes this situation difficult, which is why I need the fleet to start searching. Secrecy is their shield, and we need to take it away from them ASAP.”

  “You said you could do it quietly…how?”

  “They’re not the only ones who can turn their transponders off,” Paul pointed out. “We can play that game too, stick outside of radar zones while repositioning to where we want. It’s not very hard to hide from them, we’re the ones with the detection grid that we graciously allow them to borrow. Some computer wizardry and we become ghosts to all but their own radar sources.”