Inexplicably, the ship that the Larkspur had fired upon suddenly disintegrated in a bright ball of expanding plasma!
As that event was registering in his overloaded brain, Bishara watched in horror as one of the attacking destroyers fired a salvo of pulses from her front turret at the helpless Federation ship, striking the front main battery turret and totally destroying it. This was appalling as well as confusing! The Larkspur had surrendered! The Naval rules of engagement regarding the next course of action were crystal clear: they were to accept her surrender!
The entire affair had a sort of wrongness to it that left Bishara with an impossible decision to make. His mind worked frantically. By declaring his small fleet to be acting on behalf of the Sheik of Barsoom, the leader of the Jasmine forces had declared himself and his companion ships to be outlaws!
Bishara made the most difficult decision of his entire naval career. His course was clear however, Meridian was not at war with the Federation nor did they want to be. He sent a message.
"Commander Salib you must cease this illegal attack at once."
In direct defiance of Bishara's announcement, Salib's ship, the JRS Asad, targeted the rear turret of the helpless Larkspur and destroyed it as well.
"You will declare allegiance to the Sheik of Barsoom or you'll be next Nasr!"
With his heart in his throat, but knowing that he was absolutely doing the right thing, Bishara carried through with his duty.
"Weapons? Target the engines on the Asad, we must stop this illegal slaughter!"
Two beams from the front turret on the Nasr lanced out and struck the Asad from the rear. Five seconds later, to Bishara's horror, the Asad, rather than simply being disabled, blew up in a searing flash!
"Sensors? What just happened. Our single salvo should not have destroyed that ship!
"I cannot be certain, Captain," replied the sensor operator, "something is definitely out of the ordinary."
The other intact Meridian ship turned to face the new threat and fired her front pulse beams at the Nasr. And then fired them again, impossibly quickly! It soon became obvious that this ship was performing well above her normal capability as Bishara noted with growing concern that the strikes from the two salvos in rapid succession had dropped his shield strength to less than twenty-five percent! There were also reports coming in of minor damage to several areas on his ship. Another hit could well put him and his crew in mortal danger!
"Captain?" ventured the sensor operator, "I think I know what they have been doing."
"Quickly, sensors, we have no time!"
"With the readouts I'm getting, it is almost certain that these ships have been operating their power plants in high overload mode," reported the sensor operator. "That explains why their rate of fire was is so high and why the shields on the Asad had been so effective against the Federation pulse beams."
"Until we put a couple of pulse bolts right up her drive tubes," said Bishara. "Good work sensors! Weapons? Target the bridge area on that remaining ship! Quickly, he is operating his weapons in overload as well, we cannot sustain many more hits."
The Nasr fired her front pulse beams and scored two impacts near the enemy's bridge. Bishara fully expected retaliation but, for some reason, there was no return fire, at least for the moment. Bishara was running down his limited repertoire of responses when he got help from an unexpected source: the Larkspur. The Federation ship had lost both main batteries and had not been able to restore her shields but, taking advantage of the brief respite provided by the Nasr, she fired one of the ship-to-ship missiles she carried and managed to put it right up the drive tubes of the remaining rogue Jasmine ship. There was a primary explosion as the missile detonated followed almost immediately by a much larger secondary explosion from the implosion of the overloaded power plant.
That quickly, the battle was over.
Some thirty seconds later, Bishara was contacted by Helmsford.
"Meridian ship, whoever you are, this is the Larkspur, I thank you for your help but that last salvo was more than our ship could take, we are losing containment on our reactor. We must abandon ship and we must do so immediately!"
"Larkspur, this is MIS Nasr, Captain Bishara speaking, "We are prepared to render assistance. How long before that reactor goes critical?"
"We don’t' have much more than fifteen minutes unless my chief engineer can find a way to buy a little more time. Please don't delay, Nasr, we're already getting radiation readings well above safe levels!"
"Get your people ready to evacuate from both airlocks, Captain Helmsford. We'll send our cutter immediately."
"Roger, Nasr, Larkspur is preparing to evacuate."
During the brief lull in his duties as the crews of both ships rushed to respond to the immediate danger, Bishara queried the Captain of the Larkspur. "What in the name of the Prophet happened here?" he asked.
"We were just about to the docking area for the communications platform when these three ships started shooting at us. One of the ships targeted the communications platform and the other two opened up on us. The attack was totally unexpected and completely unprovoked. Thank God I have a good crew! My sensor operator noted charged weapons and my first officer ordered the shields up or the opening salvos from those ships would have been devastating. If those two hadn't been on the ball, you and I would not be having this conversation!"
"I assume you will also require medical assistance, Larkspur?"
"You assume correctly, Captain Bishara, we have heavy casualties from those last two enemy salvos. That hit on the aft turret with our shields down was really bad. It completely destroyed our hyperdrive module and destabilized our reactor. The section of the ship from the aft turret to the stern is only barely attached to the rest of the ship! Main power is functioning but highly unstable and is still not responding to our attempts to shut it down. We have atmospheric leaks all over the ship!"
"Stand by to receive our cutter, Captain Helmsford, they are departing now and should be there in a few minutes. Perhaps you should send over your wounded first."
"Roger, Nasr," came the reply. "Our own cutter is leaving now with the worst of the wounded."
With both cutters making two trips, the transfer of the wounded and the able-bodied from the Larkspur took just under fifteen minutes. The rapid evacuation was aided somewhat by the grim number of the Larkspur's personnel who no longer had reason to abandon ship. Even so, the thirty-nine survivors out of the original crew of sixty-five on the Federation destroyer were going to severely tax the resources of the Nasr. Making matters even more critical was the fact that eight of the survivors were severely injured, including several who had lost limbs and others with so far undetermined but obviously serious internal injuries.
In spite of their best efforts, the Larkspur's engineering crew had been unable to shut down the destroyer's reactor. The chief engineer had managed to make a few rough adjustments that lengthened the time to containment failure, however. Surprisingly, during the rescue effort, the Nasr's cutters had also encountered two lifepods containing five survivors from the three ships that had attacked the Larkspur.
One of the survivors was a bridge officer from the Asad.
As the rescue effort wound down, Bishara ran the episode over and over in his head but could make little sense of the rationale behind the unprovoked attack. But then, everything seemed to be a bit out of kilter lately. The people on his home planet of Meridian had been embroiled in a civil war for almost a month now. What the final outcome would be was far from clear. The Meridian Imperial Space Navy had chosen not to take an active role in the conflict, with the overall commander of the Navy remaining resolutely neutral.
Jasmine was another matter entirely, apparently. It looked as though the commander of Bishara's small force and the Captains of the other two ships had just decided to stake out a political position on their own volition. What was almost certainly, in Bishara's opinion, an unprovoked attack on a Federation ship was an extremely
serious development.
After the transfer of the Federation personnel to the Nasr was complete, Bishara moved his ship to a safe distance from the time bomb that the Larkspur had become and raised his shields. The two Captains met for the first time a few minutes later on the bridge of the Nasr.
Captain Helmsford was a tall, athletic woman with dark hair and blue eyes. She came onto the Nasr's bridge with her left arm in a sling and an assortment of small cuts and bruises marring an otherwise rather attractive face.
Her counterpart, Captain Bishara, was perhaps a half a head shorter than she was and had the black hair, dark eyes and olive skin typical of most Meridian subjects. He wore a neat mustache and while he had a reputation as a strict commander, he was also known to be fair.
"Captain Helmsford, it is a pleasure to meet you, though I believe we both would have preferred that it be under different circumstances."
Bishara had the viewscreens on his bridge set to display the dying Larkspur. The Federation ship was a sorry sight, with her stern portion bent about fifteen degrees to port and barely connected to the rest of the ship. Jagged rips and tears from multiple pulse beam strikes continued to vent atmosphere and fluids though not quite at the furious rate that they had been a few minutes earlier.
"Likewise, Captain Bishara," said Helmsford, her face understandably grim as she observed the last moments of her dying ship.
"How long until that reactor loses containment?" asked Bishara.
"I can't believe it's lasted this long. It should be letting go any minute now..." There was bright flash on the viewscreen. The Federation Captain managed to maintain her composure but she had been unable to hide an involuntary wince and a clenching of her teeth as the Larkspur was converted to plasma. Both Captains watched in silence as the explosion flared brightly for a few seconds before immediately beginning to die down.
"My sincere condolences upon the loss of your ship, Captain," said Bishara.
Helmsford responded, her voice almost breaking, "Thank you, Captain Bishara. She was bravely fought but, under the circumstances, we really didn't have much of a chance."
"Bravely fought, indeed," replied Bishara. He paused for a moment to take a more careful look at Helmsford, "Do you require medical attention yourself, Captain?"
"Not right this minute," she replied, "I don't think I have any broken bones. I jammed my shoulder during the battle."
"Please let me know if you need anything"
Helmsford, realizing that she still had a crew to command, tore her attention away from the loss of her ship and forced herself to concentrate on the current situation. The implications of what Bishara had done, attacking ships from a government that was supposed to be allied with his, were not lost on her. Nor was there a clear course of action for the two of them.
"What do you suppose we should do now?" she asked.
Though they didn't exactly know what to do next, it was obvious to both captains that the personnel on the overloaded Meridian destroyer were going to have to find a refuge of some sort and they would have to find it fairly quickly.
"I need to get a message back to Meridian," said Bishara, "but the situation there is in such turmoil that I don't know for sure how to go about it. Too bad these defected ships destroyed the communications platform, we could have made good use of it. We should be able to access a Stage two communicator at the Santana Nexus, though."
"I don't know if that will work either, Captain Bishara, the last we heard was that the Santana Nexus had been captured and is now under the control of this Sheik of Barsoom."
"That may be why Commander Salib was willing to declare his allegiance," said Bishara, "he was convinced that this renegade Sheik has gained the upper hand." He paused in thought for a moment. "I really wish we could contact Mohammad Saladin, the Meridian Ambassador to New Ceylon, he is next in line to head up the legitimate government of Meridian."
"You might just be in luck on that account, Captain," said Helmsford, "we have it on good authority that the Ambassador escaped the attack that took over the Santana Nexus and has taken refuge in the floating spaceship junkyard out in the New Ceylon system. As far as I know, we have a decent chance of finding him and maybe some other friendly forces there."
"It sounds like as reasonable a destination as any at this point."
Bishara gave the order to microjump back to the hyperdrive zone. With his mind in turmoil over the possibility that he may have just committed some very serious crimes and unsure of what the eventual consequences of these actions might be, it seemed that the best course of action was to find Ambassador Saladin and report to him as soon as possible.
Bishara himself had never been much of a political creature and had instead concentrated his energies on becoming the best ship commander he could be, leaving the politics to others. If there was anyone who represented the legal Meridian government, it was Ambassador Saladin. Hopefully, Helmsford's information was correct and the Ambassador was indeed in the New Ceylon System. Maybe he could help Bishara sort some kind of order out of the madness that seemed to have taken over the Santana Quadrant!
Chapter 2
"...The main facility at the Santana Nexus is probably the ultimate expression of what can be accomplished using the basic spindle and ring design for an orbital space station. The vast majority of stations of this type consist of only a single ring. Another ten percent or so have been constructed with two rings. Only a few of them have been built with more than two rings and the Santana Nexus station is one of only three that have ten of them...
...Another way in which the Nexus facility differs from most other stations of its type is that the station doesn't circle a planet in close orbit. Instead, the sprawling facility occupies the L-5 point in the orbit of a large gas giant in the Santana Star System. This arrangement places the station permanently within a very reasonable distance from the system's Whitney jump zones. The harmonics of the various gravitational influences in the system place the jump zones way above the plane of the ecliptic, about one astronomical unit above the North Pole of the star, in fact. The nearly circular orbit of the gas giant, and consequently that of the Nexus station, means that the distance from the station to the jump zone area remains, for all intents and purposes, the same, no matter where the station happens to be in its orbit...
...There are no inhabitable planets in the Santana system but there are several very strategic and vital Whitney jump zones. Though a minor player compared to the Sol Terra Quadrant, the Santana Quadrant contains a great deal of important real estate including five major, inhabited Federation planets and another half-dozen minor planets, like New Ceylon, which have Federation ties. The Santana jump zones are also the gateways to some of the most important planets of the Islamic Alliance, including Meridian, Jasmine and New Saudi Arabia. This vital location means that the Santana Nexus is a bustling point for travel and trade and justifies the expense of supplying virtually everything needed to sustain a permanent population of some fifty thousand people with another two or three thousand temporaries who are in transit to or from the Quadrant and the various destinations that can be accessed through the hyperlink points..."
Hartwell Wrist Comp reference highlighted for further review by Tamara Carlisle. Excerpt is from "The Santana Nexus Station: What Makes it so Special?" by Thomas Priebe.
"...You simply won't believe how incredible this Santana Nexus station is! When we first caught sight of it, it was no more than a bright point of light. As we got closer, you could start to make out some details. Imagine a stack of ten wagon wheels on a long, thin barrel of a spindle. At each end of the spindle is a gigantic air curtain air lock. Now imagine that the entire construction is rotating majestically to create simulated gravity. Now surround it with ships and other constructs and put over fifty thousand people on it. As we got closer and closer the sheer size of the thing was almost overwhelming, the rings are each a full two kilometers in diameter and the central spindle itself is over a kilometer long!.
.".
First impressions of the Santana Nexus Station recorded by reporter Rebecca Tyndall of The Intergalactic Digital Press upon her visit to the station in 2597.
Onboard the heavy cruiser JRS Hercules, recently defected from the Jasmine Republic, on station near the hyperlink zone of the Santana Nexus system, January 2, 2599.
On the bridge of his powerful ship, the JRS Hercules, Captain Gazwhan Kassab scowled at the image of the huge, complex construct that was the Santana Nexus Station rotating slowly on the main viewscreen of his cruiser. As one of the largest free-standing space stations in all of Human space, the Nexus was also the de facto Capital of the entire quadrant. The image was being relayed from monitor feeds that were located in the spaceship docking area near the huge construct. The Hercules was several astronomical units away where she was currently maintaining station out near one of the hyperlink zones for the Nexus system. She had been sitting there idle for almost a week, parked where she could observe the vital hyperlink zone while she supplied power to a mysterious module that had been brought on board and mounted in the front cargo hold up in the nose of his ship. Other than that, the ship and crew were essentially doing...nothing. His crew was becoming restless; Kassab knew that too much pointless waiting was very detrimental to morale and to discipline. Perhaps he had better schedule some drills and some practice exercises.
The Captain's thoughts returned to a theme that had been nagging at him for some time. Perhaps this Sheik of Barsoom wasn't the leader they had all hoped he would be. Yes, things had pretty much gone his way during the early stages of this campaign but since then? Not so much. Losing an engagement and two destroyers to a bunch of refugees holed up in a floating junkyard had done little to boost Kassab's confidence. Kassab shook his head disgustedly. Who was this Sheik of Barsoom anyway?
Kassab fervently believed that the restoration of the leadership of the Islamic Alliance to a Monarchy was necessary to restore order to the Universe but maybe there was someone else who was better suited to the task than this Sheik who, in Kassab's opinion, was little more than a blustering, bad-tempered old fool.
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