Mission Zero (Fourth Fleet Irregulars)

by S J MacDonald

  Mako just smiled and accepted that, picking up not just from the skipper but from a general lack of excitement, that it was highly unlikely to lead to anything. He was, he found, quite pleased that the ship was getting under way again, with no regret at departing either from the slimeworld or at parting from the noisy sports-loving freighter crew. It would be rather nice to be heading off, out of busy space lanes, just to have some time quietly to themselves.

  It was, too. Minnow became a self-contained little world, without the frequent distractions of encounters with other ships but with plenty to keep Mako busy and interested. Some of that was professional, as he was able to record with pleasure that all three of the parolees were moving towards going back on active service. Both Jace Higgs and Jok Dorlan were now being allowed to go on duty, shadowing their oppos. Seeing Mako working in the galley seemed to spur Ty Barrington on, too, as he asked if he could do the same.

  He was put in charge of the hydroponics unit, in fact, which was beyond Mako’s own level of training. It was a unit built in under the counter of the galley, producing a limited range of vat-grown salad stuff and vegetables. It was a trivial thing, really, but very satisfying for all concerned to see Ty Barrington, who’d been so anxious when they’d brought him on board, taking charge of even that small responsibility. Mako felt that himself as they prepped for lunch together, seeing how much stronger and more confident the PO was getting. They had not been wrong, he felt, to bring these three out here where they could get themselves together with the support of their shipmates, in an environment that was, to them at least, familiar and homely.

  It was increasingly familiar and homely to Mako too. A few days into the Pagolis, he was asked if he would be ‘chaos maker’ during a drill. That meant being provided with a supply of red stickers, going about the ship during the drill slapping stickers onto tech and crew. This would take them out of action, either as damaged tech or casualties.

  It was a sobering thought that there would be no minor casualties, in this. Because everyone would be wearing suits, if people sustained any injuries at all they were liable to be life threatening, so all casualties were to be treated as needing stasis. There would be no time to fix tech during the combat, either, so anything with a red sticker on it would be out of action.

  In that, as the skipper observed, Mako really would bring a chaos factor to the exercise. He didn’t know which tech was actually most likely to be damaged in combat, so his decisions would be entirely random.

  In fact, they were not entirely random, at least where casualties were concerned, since Mako decided to have some fun by going after all the officers. The scenario for the drill was a convoy escort, with four freighters under escort that were coming under attack from a Marfikian warship. Minnow’s role was to keep themselves between the warship and the freighters they were protecting, taking out missiles that were fired at them, and taking cannon fire on their own hull to protect the far more fragile freighters.

  This, Mako had been told, was the most desperate kind of combat there was. If they could manage to get out of it with their own ship and even one of the freighters intact that would be counted as a success. If he had just been sitting there with nothing to do but watch as the simulated Marfikian warship fired at the helpless freighters it could have been really frightening, particularly as he knew that such combat simulations were based on records of real incidents. Being part of it, though, with the crew in high spirits at the prospect of a full on combat exercise, was exciting.

  There was much amusement on the ship as he was going around. Some of the decisions he made about which tech to slap ‘out of action’ stickers on were apparently hilarious to the spacers. As it became clear that he was going after the officers, too, the crew found that highly entertaining. Once he’d taken out Dan Tarrance, Morry Morelle and Martine Fishe, he headed for the command deck, encouraged by a cheer from the crew. Even the skipper and exec found that amusing. Buzz surrendered with lifted hands and a chuckle as Mako slapped a red sticker on him, and the skipper merely sat back in his chair, accepting it when Mako took him out of the game.

  It did feel like a game too, even though the ship really was juddering and shuddering under the force of speed and manoeuvres they were pushing it through. Mako knew that they would not, obviously, push the ship so far as to make it really dangerous. Everyone was enjoying themselves. Nobody did more than curse when one of the freighters they were protecting lost its nerve and tried to flee from the convoy, at which it was promptly taken out by the Marfikians. One bright silent puff of light and the simulated ship on their screens was gone, and with no more than a swearword or two, forgotten. All effort was being focussed on protecting the remaining ships.

  Hali Burdon, however, now in command of the ship, clearly had her own ideas about how to fight off the Marfikians. Taking stock of the situation with a glance as she arrived on the command deck, she gave crisp orders.

  ‘Hack the simulation and lay me a sim of Archer’s alongside it.’ She indicated the nearest solar system, which had several gas super-giants, and sketched where she wanted the simulation of it laid into the drill scenario.

  ‘Hack...?’ The young rating gave her an astounded look but Hali nodded confirmation.

  ‘Do it!’ she insisted. Elsa made no further protest but got straight to work. As she was doing so, Hali told the rating on comms to signal new evasive manoeuvres to the freighters, and laid in a course for them on the astrogation screen.

  In seconds, they were turning into the simulated solar system, with Hali signalling busy instructions to the freighters and to their own helm.

  What happened next was so fast that Mako did not stand a chance of following it. He had half a second to catch his breath as the enormous bulk of a gas giant filled every screen. Collision warnings were shrieking at ear-drilling volume. There was barely even time to remind himself that this was a simulation before an enormous cheer erupted from the crew, yelling and punching the air.

  The Marfikian ship was gone. Afterwards, it was explained to him that Hali had actually forced the corvette through the outer levels of the gas giant’s atmosphere, causing severe damage to their own hull and that the Marfikian ship had run into it and exploded on impact. Their hulls, he gathered, were considerably thinner, a trade off between strength and speed which Hali had exploited.

  Had the simulation been real, as the skipper observed in post-exercise debriefing, they would have saved three out of the four freighters and destroyed the enemy ship, a remarkable achievement. They would also, however, have been so badly damaged themselves that they’d have been lucky to make it back to port. Hali had also cheated on the exercise and broken Fleet regs, too, in ordering a combat exercise programme to be hacked and altered. At no time, ever, had it been part of Fleet combat protocol to take superlight freighters into solar systems, or to shave planets with their own ships. She had got that trick, as she freely admitted, off a holo-game, Cosmos Warfare, in which it was the solution to level seventy nine.

  Alex von Strada clearly found that amusing. He was obliged to record, officially, that the exercise was rendered null and void by CPO Burdon’s unauthorised alteration of the scenario’s parameters, but made his feelings on that abundantly clear by also recording a commendation for her and all the crew involved for the initiative and skill they had demonstrated in problem solving. He also recorded thanks to Inspector Ireson for his role in the exercise, getting a laugh from the crew as well as applause when it was noted that his choice of casualties had been rather more selective than random.

  None of them had any idea at the time that innocent conversation about the fun they’d had with this would end up on the news. It would surge out on the media as a story that they actually had hurtled their ship through a solar system and grazed it through the outer atmosphere of a gas giant. They had no way to know that not even release of the ship’s logs proving that it had only been a simulation exercise would change people’s minds about what they believed ha
d actually happened here. Mako would, in fact, be questioned and challenged about this for the rest of his life by people who believed him to have been ‘part of the cover up’. At the time, sublimely oblivious to the oncoming storm, he merely joined the crew in celebrating their success with an issue of candy-chip cookies to mark the occasion.

  With that, life settled back to normal on the corvette. Their main occupation became sweeping for data from the thousands of micro detectors that had been laid in the Pagolis region. They found quite a lot of them destroyed, with barely even a spreading cloud of atoms to show where there’d once been a cup-sized detector. The difficulty was, as Martine Fishe explained, that if a ship passed by close enough to be detected and recorded on the micro-scanners, the chances were high that the micro-scanner itself would also be detected. There was a very narrow window in which the scanner could see the ship but the ship not see the scanner. Any ship up to no good would be likely to have shuttles out, spiralling about the ship to extend their viewing range, for no other reason than to spot detectors and take them out.

  This made data pickup a frustrating exercise, but Mako noticed again that the Fleet crew did not seem to feel any great degree of frustration. They were philosophical about it, accepting it as just what they’d expected. The chances of them actually finding any useful data were, evidently, astronomically remote. By the same token, nobody was holding out much hope for any outcome to the information the Cargomaster 469’s skipper had passed on to them.

  ‘Even if it was good information, and not misdirection deliberately put about to distract us,’ Alex told Mako, ‘timing is such a narrow window in these things. A cargo cache may only be in use for a few days between the ship that drops it off and the one that picks it up. Even if it’s there for longer, the chances of finding the right place at the right time are just so remote, even with good intel on the place, you don’t stand much of a chance, realistically, unless you have the time, as well. Which we don’t, here, just location coordinates. So, we’ll check it out, but don’t be disappointed when we find nothing there.’

  His expectations were clearly shared by the crew and, since they were the experts, after all, Mako didn’t give any more thought to the matter, himself. It seemed a matter of mild interest when they arrived at the solar system to which the freighter skipper had directed them.

  They did not go into the system. It was a wild system in the early stages of formation, with tens of thousands of planetismals cannoning about, besides millions of meteors and great swathes of stellar gas still in the process of swirling and forming in the gas-giant region. The Comet Cloud of gas and tiny icy fragments hurtling about at high speed was, in itself, a very dangerous barrier to entering the system. It was just not somewhere any sane skipper would venture a superlight starship in any cross plane navigation. The only way into it, as Buzz explained to Mako on a simplified astrogation chart, was to drop in vertically. Even that would be difficult, requiring either precision timing to drop through the Comet Cloud, or ‘going in hot’, meaning firing guns ahead of you as you went to clear the way.

  ‘The cloud is actually very diffuse and you could pass through it easily at sublight speeds,’ Buzz informed him. ‘But at superlight speeds, it’s all about whether you have time to manoeuvre in the time you have between seeing an object ahead and hitting it. Comets are at the same temperature as the surrounding space so you can only spot them on radar and may only get two or three seconds to dodge them. And while that’s fine – our auto-safety systems can handle a lot tighter impact than that – at these speeds, jinking out of the way of one comet almost certainly means you’re immediately heading straight for another one. That can throw your ship into a highly reactive tumbling scenario in which you’re being thrown around like a 3D pinball.

  ‘Going in hot is much safer. Comets are only ice, and even rocky asteroids evaporate under cannon fire, so you can blast your way through very confidently. The only problem with that is that, for a while at least, it leaves a detectable trail through the cloud, a clear path which certainly isn’t natural in a randomly distributed cloud.

  ‘How long it remains detectable depends upon the density of the cloud and the energy with which it’s in motion. In the case of a very highly energetic young system like this, we’d expect to be able to pick up a trail for maybe a few months, but it would degrade very rapidly. That’s why we’re circling and scanning, looking to see if there are any traces of a path having been cut through. We call that an ‘eye’ in the cloud. Just to make it more confusing, they can occur naturally too, especially in young, forming systems like this. If a planetismal comes careening out of the system, as they may do under impact, it may clear a path as it exits, see, just by crashing into everything in its way. We’re not finding any clear paths, but there are areas of lower density that might once have been eyes. What we’re attempting to do now, is analyse the data from those, to try to work out whether they were caused by something blasting in or crashing out.’

  That took some minutes and was inconclusive, though opinion on the command deck was that something that might once have been an eye out on the edge of the system was too vertical to the plane of the system to look natural.

  ‘It’s more like a starship dropping in than a planetismal crashing out,’ Buzz explained. ‘But our best estimate for how long ago it formed is six to nine months, so it’s highly unlikely that there’s anything to be found there now.’

  Still, having assessed the situation, Alex made the call to send in their biggest shuttle. It was armed with lasers capable of taking out asteroids if need be, was far more agile than the corvette in jinking through obstacles, and should be able to get into the system without creating an eye. More importantly, it could drop sublight under its own power to investigate the location indicated by the freighter skipper.

  As unlikely as it was that they would find anything, it was fascinating to watch the process of planning and prepping for the search mission. It was more complicated than Mako expected, with a great deal of scientific and technical talk that went right over his head. One part of it, though, was in his own professional field.

  The snatch team for this was determined by the current watch rotation. As luck would have it, the snatch team on call for that particular watch included A/S Roby Cortez, who happened to be Jace Higg’s oppo. He was shadowing her, working alongside her as a microstep towards getting back on duty. When she was called to the team, he came too. He was trying to look innocent and just trying to take it for granted that he would be allowed to go along, perhaps in the hope that nobody would notice he was there. They did, though, of course, with everyone looking from Buzz to the skipper. Jace himself looked as beseeching as a small boy pleading for candy. At Buzz’s, ‘Fine with me, sir.’ the skipper nodded too, at which there was a cheer and much slapping on the back of a now hugely grinning Jace Higgs.

  Mako dutifully made a note that the parolee was being allowed to take part in an active operation, but he too congratulated him. He understood entirely what an important step that was for the crewman in getting back to work.

  He had no concerns about it either. It wasn’t as if it was any kind of combat operation, after all, with the crewman’s role going to be assisting with the laying of comsats. This, Mako gathered, was a technical challenge, but not one that needed more than a few minutes discussion. There was full agreement amongst the officers on the route they were to take and the placement of the three comsats it had been determined would be needed to maintain comms link with their shuttle.

  ‘That’s just good practice,’ the skipper informed him as the shuttle departed. All of them were suited up by then. The ship had gone to action stations, not with any kind of drama but simply as a precaution, in case they needed to go in hot after the shuttle. ‘If your shuttle is out of comms range, obviously, they’ve got no way to call for backup if they’re having problems, so it’s standard practice to lay comsats into wild systems. We’ll have to collect them again, after. They’re
very expensive, and yes, classified. They can transmit between sublight comms to superlight arrays, which is highly complex, and they can transmit visuals too.’

  Mako knew just enough to be impressed by that, having already noticed that starships talked to each other using voice only, unless they were close enough to engage a direct, high capacity datastream interface. Normally, starship comms were all about coding the data to keep it as small a transmission as possible.

  ‘Will I be able to watch what they’re doing?’ he asked, hopefully, at which the skipper smiled.

  ‘Yes, certainly,’ he said, and provided him with echo screens. By taking out all the feeds that would be incomprehensible to him, the skipper left him with a simple range of visuals in which he could switch between shots and listen on the comms between the shuttle and the ship. There was a lot about that, even, that Mako didn’t understand, but he was able to follow enough to recognise that the comsat deployment was going as planned as the shuttle made their way into the system. They were jinking a little but it was too quick and too subtle for Mako to notice the tiny course changes as they dodged around comets. They were very soon approaching the coordinates the freighter skipper had given them, carrying out a textbook deceleration to sublight speeds.

  It was at that point that everything changed. Suddenly, in a second, the cheerfully purposeful manner of the team on the shuttle and the casual interest of those on the command deck froze into a moment of silence that just seemed to go on for an age.

  Even Mako could see why, though he did not yet understand the enormity of what he was seeing. He was only amazed to see, as everyone could see, that the small object the shuttle had come up to was not in fact an asteroid, but a cargo container.