Ship of the Damned

by James F. David

  “Are they listening to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand. I’ll give you a few more minutes, but you and Anita are weak. If you don’t find Ralph soon, we’ll have to find another way.”

  “I understand,” Elizabeth said.

  Wes returned to his console and said to the others, “We’ll maintain the integration for now.”

  Shamita shook her head in disagreement. Monica put her hand on Wes’s shoulder and gave him a slight squeeze.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” she said.

  He wished he was as confident as she. He was filled with doubt, and a part of him sensed something new about Monica—he didn’t trust her. She had been too quick to insist that they keep the integration going. Anita’s well-being should have been her first concern, and it wasn’t clear that continuing the integration was the best thing to do. Why was Monica so certain?

  Taking Elizabeth’s hand, he watched her eyelids, seeing the movement beneath them that indicated dreaming. He wished he could be there with her.

  BATTLE

  Jett opened his eyes to see Ralph’s face, his jaws chewing away at a fat wad of gum, his wet fleshy lips slightly parted. His breath smelled of spearmint.

  “He’s not twitching anymore. That’s good, isn’t it, Walter? It’s not good to twitch like that, is it?”

  Jett was on his back looking straight up. He could see the opaque field that was Pot of Gold’s sky. There were heads leaning over him, Ralph’s the closest, but also Dr. Kellum’s and some of his men, including the bald man with the battleship tattoo. Jett’s heart was pounding in his chest and his body tingled from head to toe. His arms responded sluggishly, as if he was pushing through water.

  “Look Doctor Kellum, he’s moving his arms, too!” Ralph said. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  Then Ralph pushed his face closer so that his nose nearly touched Jett’s.

  “Do you feel like talking, Nate?”

  “Get out of my face,” Jett said in slow, crisp speech.

  “I think he’s getting better,” Ralph said.

  Hands gripped his shoulders and he was helped into a sitting position. Dr. Kellum was cleaning his glasses again. He smiled smugly.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work. They sent you on a suicide mission. You were expendable, just like us.”

  Jett struggled to his feet with the help of Ralph and a sailor. He unbuckled his belt and dropped the useless hip unit on the ground.

  “You might as well take yours off too, Ralph,” Jett said.

  “Is it okay if I keep mine, Nate? I think it’s neat and I don’t mind if the little light doesn’t work.”

  “You can have mine if you want it, Ralph. My light works.”

  Like a kid on Christmas morning, Ralph lit up, his lips spreading wide in a huge grin.

  “Thanks, Nate. Thanks a lot.”

  While Ralph busied himself switching hip units, Jett faced his new situation. He wasn’t suicidal and he never accepted a mission where he didn’t have a plan to extricate himself and his team. Lee and Woolman had lied to him about an escape route so that he would take the mission. Now he had few options. He had signalled Rainbow that the Nimitz wasn’t in Pot of Gold, but now realized that the Nimitz might actually be inside. Woolman had been clear that retrieving the Nimitz was top priority, so if he could find the ship, he and his team might be able to return with it—if he could tell Woolman it was inside. Except the other signal laser had been destroyed when Thompson was burned. His only other hope was Ralph, who stood like a bipedal cow, chewing his wad of gum.

  “Still want to destroy the field generators?” Dr. Kellum asked.

  “I’ve got something else on my mind right now,” Jett said honestly.

  Survival was on his mind; survival, and finding a way out so he could return to Rainbow and kill Lee and Woolman.

  “If you destroy the generators, we’ll all die,” Kellum said.

  “Not as long as you have the Nimitz,” Jett said. “You got it inside, didn’t you? Why not just get on board and ride it back out again?”

  “I only wish it was that easy,” Kellum said. “First of all, I don’t have the Nimitz—McNab and his Crazies have it. Second, riding it out, as you put it, would be a sure way to die. Your aircraft carrier came here in a very different way than the Norfolk. With the Norfolk, we had the magnetic pulse generators installed in one of the boiler rooms. When we began the experiment we first synchronized the pulses to create resonance, and then brought the power up slowly. The field gradually formed around the hull of the Nimitz and created two poles—positive at the bow, negative at the stern. As I told you before, the electric charge that was generated was so great, I nearly terminated the experiment, but the field expanded out around the ship before it reached full strength. None of us on the Norfolk ever felt the field’s full power.”

  “Like I did when I touched it?” Jett said.

  “It hurt, didn’t it, Wes,” Ralph said. “I bet it hurt lots.”

  Kellum smiled at Ralph, warming up to him like everyone did.

  “You just got a taste of it,” Kellum said. “I estimate we were in here two decades before I came up with a way to get out. I knew people occasionally found their way in and out. That’s why we were mapping the ship, trying to understand the pattern to the twists in time and space. Finally the significance of those holes in the field hit me. You see, the field that surrounds us is really electromagnetic radiation, which propagates in waves. The waves interweave to create the field that you touched. I reasoned that if you stretched the field, the holes in the fabric of the field would get larger—so large, in fact, we could all escape. Here’s how I explained it to my people.”

  Pulling up one of his pant legs, Kellum put his fingers inside his argyle sock and stretched it until his fingers could be seen through the fabric.

  “See, the holes get big enough that you can see through them.”

  “That’s neat,” Ralph said.

  “Do you create the holes in the amniotic field by changing the settings on the generators you built?” Jett wanted to know.

  “No, they don’t respond to the controls. Once the field was created and we found ourselves here, the generators began drawing their power from the fabric of this universe. My idea was to build a second set of generators to make the field asymmetrical and to stretch the field, making more and bigger holes.”

  “McNab let you do this?” Jett asked, remembering what Dawson had said about the Crazies protecting the generators.

  “Not right away, not for a decade in your time. McNab’s cult is based on the belief that we are in purgatory, awaiting service to God. I met with McNab a dozen times before I convinced him to agree to let me build the new generators. One day he claimed he got a revelation from God and gave me permission.

  “We had to strip the copper wiring out of the Norfolk on four time levels to get enough for the new generators, and even then they’re half the size of the originals. I wanted something we could control, something like what we had on the Eldridge. Construction of the generators took years in our time. Then it took a long series of trials before I got the frequency right so the generator pulses would resonate. But I did it, and it worked, and we would be out of here now except for one mistake.

  “We built the new generators in the desert just off the stern of the Norfolk. When we turned them on we found we could slowly bring them up to power and reshape the existing field. We started by creating a second negative pole that pushed against the existing pole at the stern of the Norfolk. This compressed the existing field, creating a bulge. Then I decided to reverse polarity and try stretching the field. When I did, the fields were now in series—positive pole to negative pole—and the combined fields elongated the field. When it stretched, the field lost some of its opacity and we could see a ship. It was an aircraft carrier, and the biggest ship I had ever seen. It was passing through the same latitude where we had conducted our original experiment. Then
we discovered the ship was being pulled into the field just like a magnet attracts a nail. But either the field was too weak, or the ship did not pass close enough.”

  Jett realized that the ship must have been the John F. Kennedy, the first carrier to encounter the effect.

  “It was after that experiment that McNab reneged on our agreement. Two of my assistants had been corrupted by McNab, and they took control of the new generators. Next thing we heard, McNab was fishing for a warship to pull in. He wanted one with uranium bombs—what do you call them?”

  “Thermonuclear weapons, hydrogen bombs, fusion bombs, they have many names,” Jett said.

  “That’s what McNab was after, and now he has them.”

  “Then he intends to escape using the Nimitz? Can it be sent back the way it came?”

  “It can go back. The only thing holding it here are the new generators. But no one can go back with it. As I said, the Nimitz was pulled in through the field. Most of the crew of the Nimitz were either killed when it entered or frozen in time when the ship shifted out of normal time/space. We’ve heard that some of the crew below decks survived, insulated from the intense shock of the field. By now McNab will have converted them or killed them, but no one would survive a trip the other way.”

  “Even if they insulated themselves?” Jett asked.

  “It won’t matter. The field will ignite the explosives, oil, and aviation fuel on the carrier, and any other combustible. Coming this way it doesn’t matter, since the field dampens rapid chemical reactions, but going back to the world, the ship would become an inferno.”

  “So what is McNab planning?” Jett said.

  “I don’t know,” Kellum replied.

  “I’ve been outside many times, and I didn’t see the Nimitz,” Jett said.

  “The generators exist only on level one, and the Nimitz is on that level. I told you, the field is generated around Norfolk, not the Nimitz. The carrier just serves as a pole to elongate the field.”

  Even though he had been betrayed by Woolman, Jett found that he couldn’t abandon his mission. His high A-scores—for authoritarianism—meant that he followed the chain of command, even if that chain had decided he was expendable. Besides, McNab was the craziest of the Crazies, and now he had access to nuclear weapons. If he could get back to the world, he would be ruthless.

  Shouting came from the deck of the ship, and one of the sailors called over the rail.

  “Margolin’s sensed the Crazies! They’re after the newcomers.”

  “Hurry to the ship,” Dr. Kellum said, starting to jog. “We can’t get caught down here.”

  He didn’t have to explain. If the Crazies took control of the deck, they would be caught on the open ground of the desert, their back to a sheet of electricity—a perfect killing field.

  Ralph loped along in his peculiar fashion, oversized strides keeping him close to Dr. Kellum. Ralph’s face showed concern, his jaws continuing to work the gum. They were nearly to the cargo net when the deck above was strafed. It wasn’t gunfire—none was possible—but Jett knew the sound of metal hitting metal. There was a scream from above, and shouting. A fireball rocketed over their heads into the desert, setting a small patch of brush on fire—it burned, but with a dull flame and much smoke, quickly dying to a smolder.

  Jett reached the net ahead of the others, waiting for Ralph and Dr. Kellum.

  “My gun?” Jett said.

  Dr. Kellum hesitated a second, then there was more strafing above, another scream, and the thud of a body hitting the ground. Dr. Kellum motioned to a sailor, who handed over Jett’s gun, helping him on with his pack. Two sailors started up the net while Jett made sure the weapon was pressurized. When Dr. Kellum was on the net, Jett took Ralph’s arm to help him up.

  “I can do it, Nate. I had one in my backyard, remember?”

  Jett ignored him and helped him up. A half dozen fireballs shot randomly off the deck, hitting the amniotic field and dissipating.

  They were halfway up the net when a sailor shouted from above.

  “We can’t hold them much longer. Hurry!”

  Before the sailor could pull back over the rail, there was the rat-a-tat-tat of metal on metal, and something tore into the sailor’s face. He fell back with a scream, hands covering the bleeding wound.

  Suddenly there was the crackle of static electricity, and the deck above was lit up. A half dozen men screamed.

  Jett had never felt this vulnerable before. Hanging from the net, he was completely exposed, only the curve of the ship’s hull giving him and the others some protection. More fireballs flew from left to right—from the attackers toward the defenders. Two impacted above them on the left side of the net, setting it on fire. The fire died, but the blackened net continued to smolder.

  “Climb right,” Jett ordered.

  The sailors did as they were told, but Dr. Kellum looked first to see why. The first of the sailors reached the top, risking a quick look onto the deck and then ducking back down, nodding encouragement to the others, waiting for them to climb up close. When they were all near the top, the sailors looked to Dr. Kellum, expecting orders. When Dr. Kellum hesitated, Jett took charge. Pointing to the sailors in front, he lifted two fingers and then pointed over the rail with one. Military-trained, the sailors accepted Jett’s commands, confident in his natural leadership abilities. Jett then indicated that Dr. Kellum would go next, followed by Ralph and then himself. The other sailors were to follow.

  At Jett’s signal, the first sailor went up and over, sprinting across the corridor to shelter behind a forty-millimeter gun turret. Just as the second sailor climbed over the top, the left side of the cargo net snapped. The net dropped a foot, and then another foot as the second rope in the net broke. Instinctively, Jett reached out to grab Ralph’s arm.

  “I told you, Nate, I had one of these in my backyard,” Ralph said, hanging on tight. “Course, it never gots on fire.”

  Jett shushed Ralph, who had forgotten that his lips were locked. The flames were gone, but the net was still smoldering, and the next rope would break soon. Dr. Kellum was due to go over next, but Jett held his leg, then climbed up next to him, peeking over the top. There was a body directly below the rail, and two more to the right—both burned and smoking. To the left there was another body lying on its back. This one wore a tee-shirt that said “University of Maryland.” The tee-shirt was soaked in blood. There was movement to the left, eyes peeking out of corridors and hatches. The battle was either at a stalemate or it was a trap. Jett assumed a trap.

  Another rope snapped and half the fibers of the next gave way. Jett checked Ralph again, but he was still hanging on just below Dr. Kellum. One of the sailors below Ralph had his hand on Ralph’s back, steadying him. Jett looked back over the railing, checking to see if it was still clear, then climbed over, squatting, gun covering the corridor. He felt for the pulse of the man on the deck, not because he cared, but because Dr. Kellum’s followers would see. There was no pulse. Jett was relieved. He had no intention of dragging a wounded man through a battle.

  Movement down the corridor alerted him, and he dropped flat behind the body just as a cloud of metal shards rocketed by. Two impacted the man he hid behind; the rest ricocheted all around him. From behind him, one of Dr. Kellum’s Specials conjured up a fireball and it whistled past, Jett feeling the heat. On impact the fireball burst into a thousand candle flames and sprayed in all directions. A sailor ran from his hiding place, his hair on fire.

  Now Jett could see why weapons development hadn’t proceeded much beyond simple crossbows. It wasn’t just that the close quarters limited the need; it was also that the the abilities of the Specials were more effective weapons.

  Jett popped up, then reached over the rail, pulling Dr. Kellum over. Keeping his body between Kellum and the Crazies, he helped Ralph onto the deck.

  “I told you I could do it,” Ralph said proudly.

  Jett motioned Dr. Kellum and Ralph to move to the right, away from the Craz
ies. Before they could, another cloud of metal whistled down the corridor. Jett tackled Ralph and Dr. Kellum. Neither man had the reflexes to survive on a battlefield. One of Dr. Kellum’s sailors was caught with one leg over the rail. Jagged bits of metal ripped into his neck and chest, spraying bloody flesh and bone fragments. The impact carried him back over the rail, and he fell silently to the desert below, landing with a bone-breaking thud.

  When the barrage stopped, Jett lifted his head to see a man standing in the corridor. He had wild, black eyes, and his black hair was long and matted. He was dressed in black biker boots, jeans, and a denim jacket. His hand was extended, and his face was nearly purple with exertion. There were sparks between his fingers, growing in length and intensity, and now they shot off his finger tips like tiny lightning bolts.

  “It’s Cobb,” Dr. Kellum said.

  Jett raised his gun to fire, but was struck, electricity arcing from his hands to his extended gun arm. Out of control, his arm tingled and twitched. The shock spread up his arm to his torso, his nervous system shorting out, neurons firing randomly, muscle groups working against each other. Then the electric charge increased in intensity and he felt as if his whole body had been plugged into a light socket. Ralph and Dr. Kellum convulsed behind him. The intensity was building, and for the second time that day he was being electrocuted.

  Suddenly, there was a whistling rush of wind as something flew over Jett. It was a steel hatch pulled from its hinges and launched by one of Dr. Kellum’s Specials. As the hatch passed them, the current was attracted to the steel door. Arcing light spread around its perimeter, looking like a grotesque fourth of July sparkler. Jett got relief from the shock as the door flew over, but still he couldn’t use his muscles. Then there was the deep sound of heavy impact as the hatch hit steel, and clanging and crashing as it came to rest on the deck.

  Now a steady stream of metal fragments came from Dr. Kellum’s Specials. Even if Jett had had muscle control, he wouldn’t have been able to rise for fear of having the top of his head taken off. He knew the cover fire couldn’t last much longer, but he had the strength of a four-year-old, the coordination of a baby. Then there were hands on him, pulling him along the deck under the strafing fire. He saw Ralph and Dr. Kellum being dragged, too.