by Dietmar Wehr
“I’ve lost helm control! We can’t evade!” The Com Officer said.
“All com channels with the rear half of the ship have been cut!” Shiloh had to find a way to get the ship maneuvering again. It was their only hope of evading another devastating blow. He thought fast.
“Sykes!” He called out the Weapons Officer’s name. “ Get down to engineering and tell the XO to take over Helm functions from there. Tell her we need to start evading again fast!” To his credit, Sykes didn’t even waste time acknowledging the order. He was already on his way by the time Shiloh had finished giving him the order. Shiloh didn’t know how long it would take the alien vessel to recharge its weapon. Sykes would have to detour around damaged areas of the ship and might not get to Engineering fast enough but he couldn’t think of anything else to try. Conning the ship from Engineering was their only hope. He checked the status of the drones again. The closest drone was only seconds from ramming the enemy. Those few seconds seemed to take forever but eventually they disappeared and the Sensor Tech gave an exultant cry.
“Direct hit! Major hull penetration!.....sensors picking up secondary explosions from inside the hull…..acceleration has dropped to zero! We plastered her good by God!” The whole Bridge erupted with shouts of joy. Shiloh grinned but said nothing. He understood their need to vent their feelings but he felt it was premature to declare victory just yet. There was no way of knowing if that ship could still fire its weapon. With both ships apparently heavily damaged, the winner would be the one able to get in one more good hit. He checked the drone status again. Drone #2 was about 34 seconds from impact. As the cheering died down, the Helm Officer shouted out.
“We’re evading again! Sykes must have gotten the word to the XO!” That brought another round of cheering. Shiloh watched the seconds count down to the second drone intercept, desperately hoping that the alien ship wouldn’t fire for just a little bit longer. As the last few seconds fell away, he looked at the direct video view of the enemy ship. It was too far away to see the ship itself but the sudden burst of light off in the distance at the moment of impact was all he needed to see to know that drone #2 had hit the target dead on. Even the Sensor Tech’s report was more subdued that before.
“Drone #2 made a direct hit….I’m reading major pieces of debris scattering in all directions….energy emissions are now zero.” He looked over at his CO. “I think we’ve killed that ship, Skipper.” Shiloh nodded.
“Yes. I’m inclined to agree with you. We’ll let drone #3 impact the wreck anyway. Helm? I want you to transfer to Engineering and take over helm functions from there. Tell the XO we can stop evading and I want us on a course for a jump back to our departure system. Also tell her to send a complete damage report to the Bridge by runner if the com system isn’t repaired by then. Com! Any word on casualties yet?” The responding voice was heavy with regret.
“Preliminary reports say 13 dead and eight more injured. Repair teams are working on repairs. No estimate yet of when we’ll get com links back up with the other half of the ship. There may be more casualties that haven’t been reported yet. I’ve asked Chief Watson to send a runner to check on casualties from the areas we can’t contact, Sir.”
“Good thinking. Send a signal to any of our ships you can reach that we appear to have won the battle and are leaving the system as soon as possible. Wish them luck.” The Com tech acknowledged the order.
“I’ll address the crew now…Intercom…shipwide.”
“Attention all hands. This is the CO. I know that only some of the crew can hear my voice but I wanted you to know that even though we’ve taken damage and casualties, the alien vessel that we engaged appears to be in far worse shape and is currently drifting in space, apparently unable to maneuver or fight. We’re going to hit it one more time with a recon drone set to ram. I doubt there’ll be any survivors on that ship after that happens. We’re not going to stick around to find out. We’ve been ordered by the Squadron Leader to make sure that HQ knows what happened to the 319 and to us, so we’re going home asap. First stop will be at our departure point where we’ll top up our fuel from the supply ships waiting there and then we’ll resume our journey home. The rest of the Squadron will hopefully follow us by a few hours. I’m keeping the ship at General Quarters for now. As soon as we enter jumpspace, we’ll stand down from General Quarters. You all deserve to pat yourselves on the back for your efforts in getting us through this. I’m proud of this ship and its crew. That’s all for now. End message.”
He settled back in his Command Chair and felt the adrenaline fatigue begin to hit him. Even the impact of the final drone was anti-climatic. There was less visible light from impact #3 versus #2. When he asked the Sensor Tech if there were any signs of life on board the alien vessel, the answer was a definitive ‘No, Sir.’ The message drone entered jumpspace a few seconds later. It would arrive near where the support ships should be and notify them that 344 was on its way back.
Just over 10 minutes later, the ship entered jumpspace and with com channel links restored with the rest of the ship, Shiloh ordered the crew to stand down from General Quarters. When the XO arrived back on the Bridge to finish what remained of her duty shift, Shiloh said.
“Your duty shift will be over soon. I’ll cover the rest of your shift for you until Michaels takes over.” The XO looked at him with a sad face and said.
“Cmdr Michaels was killed by that laser hit we took, Sir.” Shiloh sighed and said nothing for a few seconds. Finally he spoke.
“Michaels was a promising officer. The kind of officer I have a feeling we’re going to need very badly before this is all over. Okay Angela. You take over now and cover the first half of Michaels duty shift. I’ll take the second half in addition to my own. By the time you relieve me again we’ll have reassigned personnel to cover the gaps. Do you need a few minutes break before you take over here?” She thought about that then nodded. “Then go ahead and take a break. Have a coffee and a bite to eat and I’ll see back here in a little while.”
“Thank you, Sir.” She left and Shiloh was alone with his thoughts. The more he thought about their close brush with death, the more worried he became. He doubted that this would be the last time Humanity encountered that alien race. He had a terrible feeling come over him that this had just been the opening skirmish of a much larger conflict, Humanity’s first interstellar war
Chapter 2 - To Fallen Comrades
While the 344 was accelerating in preparation for entering jumpspace, Shiloh realized that the energy drain from the multiple laser shots fired at the alien vessel had used up a significant amount of their remaining fuel. In fact the ship had barely enough heavy hydrogen remaining to reach the refueling tankers waiting for them at the other end. The only combination of acceleration and jump time followed by deceleration that would work, required them to enter jumpspace at a slower than normal speed. So not only did the 344 arrived at the exploration mission staging system with very low fuel reserves left but Shiloh expected that his ship might actually arrive after the other ships of the squadron even though they would have entered jumpspace after the 344 did. They would have passed the 344 at some point in jumpspace. Unfortunately the means to communicate while in jumpspace hadn’t been invented yet. The extra trip time filled him with frustration. He wanted to get his injured personnel back ASAP! He knew that in their destination star system, the Squadron had left behind a collection of support ships including two small tankers, a supply freighter and a Command/Support ship containing various support staff like medical personnel, scientists, engineers, etc. The Command ship could handle most kinds of routine maintenance in order to keep the Exploration Frigates in the Field as long as possible. Medical facilities were capable of handling all but the most extreme kinds of medical emergencies. In any case, the support ship had better medical facilities than did a Frigate and some of the 344 crew injuries were serious.
Upon arriving back in normal space after a jump transit of almost 42 hours (versu
s the usual time of 36 hours for the same distance), Shiloh was again on the Bridge and quickly fired off a message to where the support ships were last known to be stationed and where he expected them to still be. Because 344 had emerged from jumpspace at the outer edge of the star system, the signal would take hours to reach the gas giant that the tankers used to skim for heavy hydrogen, if necessary to top up their tanks. And since the ship emerged from jumpspace with the same velocity that it had entered jumpspace with, the 344 was moving towards the inner part of the system less quickly than normal. In order not to fly past the gas giant, the ship would have to decelerate and that would require pretty much all of their remaining fuel. The possibility that the tankers might not be where Shiloh had last seen them made him sweat. They SHOULD be there. But the Demon God Murphy sometimes reached down to muddy the waters or as someone else once said long ago, ‘shit happens’. So it was with great relief that after almost 13 hours after dropping back into normal space, 344 received the expected acknowledgement from the support ships that they were ready and waiting to refuel the 344 and take care of the wounded. Shiloh received some other news as well. The message drone had arrived as expected and some but not all of the rest of the Squadron had also arrived ahead of 344 as expected and were also soon about to rendezvous with the support ships. The bad news was that the 301 and 299 had been ambushed by at least three other alien ships roughly fifteen minutes after 344’s short, violent clash with her opponent. Squadron Leader Torres had explicitly ordered the other four frigates not to come to 301 and 299’s aid because active scanning had confirmed the fact that there were even more alien ships waiting to pounce once the other frigates got within range. She ordered the rest of the Squadron to retreat back to the staging system. Communications with both the 301 and the 299 were lost while they were still fighting for their lives and no one knew what the ultimate outcome was but the odds for survival were not good. Torres had also communicated her belief that the ambush had been triggered early as a response to 344’s confrontation with the alien vessel and had it not been for that, Torres believed that the entire Squadron would have been attacked once they had regrouped. Her recorded message praised Shiloh for deploying the recon drones and as a result, springing the trap early enough so that half the Squadron could get away unharmed. The tone of that recording combined with the unknown fate of both ships, made the message particularly poignant. After sharing it with the crew, Shiloh asked all off-duty officers and NCOs to assemble in the Officers’ Mess and they raised a solemn toast to fallen comrades. Shiloh was absolutely certain that it would not be the last such toast he would participate in.
By the time that 344 entered orbit around the gas giant and rendezvoused with the support ships and the rest of the Squadron, the other frigates had already been refueled. Another fresh message drone carrying all of the data from all of the surviving frigates was already in jumpspace on its way back to a forward Space Force base, where the data would be further disseminated via another drone, etc. Shortly before commencing refueling operations, Shiloh participated in a video conference with the other Frigate skippers and support ship COs. They wanted to hear about 344’s battle first hand and then compare notes. The general consensus was that all of the alien ships were more heavily armored and armed with more powerful laser cannon than their Space Force counterparts. 323’s Skipper, Cmdr Omar, in his capacity as acting Squadron Leader (being the most senior officer present), had declared his intention to wait another six hours and if neither missing ship showed up during that time, the four combat capable frigates would return to the battle system to search for survivors. Omar had told Shiloh that since the 344 had no operational laser turrets left but did have a damaged hull and crew casualties, he would order the 344 to head back to Sol System for repairs. Shiloh thought going back to the battle system was a mistake and respectfully said so but Omar was adamant. And since there was no point in 344 waiting to find out if the 301 or the 299 showed up before heading home, Shiloh ordered the now fully refueled ship to leave orbit as soon as her more seriously injured crewmembers had been transferred to the Command/Support ship for further treatment. With that task accomplished, and with plenty of fuel to burn, 344 left orbit at maximum acceleration. Her destination was the same Space Force base that the message drone was headed for. The message drone had not been a waste of effort. Standard operating procedure was that important data/communications were supposed to be sent by more than one method to create redundancy that would minimize the loss of the information due to some unforeseen circumstance like a malfunction.
It was with a wistful sigh that Shiloh examined their intended jump route back to the Sol star system. Exploration Frigates had enough fuel capacity to travel up to 12 light years in a series of short jumps or a maximum of 18 light years in a single jump. The Sol system was just under 90 light years away but places, where they could refuel, weren’t spaced out evenly enough to permit the ship to get home in just five jumps. It would take a total of seven jumps and almost 440 hours of transit time. Just under 18 days. A long time to ponder recent events and the future.
Even though his duty shift was over before the ship reached the specified pre-jump velocity, Shiloh stayed on the Bridge until 344 was safely in jumpspace. He then spent some quiet time in the Officers’ Mess, which he had to himself and soon started thinking again about the vision that caused him to deploy the recon drones. An action that he doubted he would have taken on his own initiative if it hadn’t been for that vision. Shiloh had never considered himself a spiritual person. If he looked deep within himself, he supposed that at some basic level he believed in some kind of higher power. Most Space Force personnel eventually came to believe in some version of God. The universe had so many awe-inspiring vistas that it was hard not to feel at some emotional level that it had to have been planned that way. In Shiloh’s case, he also had a thirst for knowledge about the sciences. The order that he had seen and heard about ranging all the way from the inner structure of atoms up through the mind-boggling complexity of human DNA, up to the marvelously perfect functioning of a human body, all led him to the conclusion that it was just too complex and too perfect to have been the work of mindless random forces. From that deep basic belief in a higher power, he now wondered if that higher power had intervened and if so why? Was it to save him personally? He didn’t think that likely. Maybe it was someone in the crew that God or an angel was looking out for. As he often did when he was pondering a mystery, he started making a list. At the top he wrote ‘Possible explanations for the vision’. Under that he wrote the following.
It was a hallucination
It was a use of unsuspected pre-cognitive esp talents
It was the result of external intervention.
intervention by God
intervention by aliens
intervention by humans
from within the ship
from within the squadron
from the future
from some other source
He looked at the list and couldn’t think of anything else to add. The only one that seemed to be halfway plausible was the use of unsuspected pre-cognitive esp talents. He remembered testing above average as a student in a university lab experiment testing for esp ability but it wasn’t above average by enough to be considered a significant ability. If he really did have some unsuspected esp ability, he was at a loss as to how to turn it on or off. If he couldn’t control it, then what good was it? Would it happen again and if so, when? He discounted the other possible explanations mainly because of the similar previous experience as a teenager, long before he joined the Space Force. It seemed unlikely that aliens would intervene at that stage in his life to save a friend that, so far at least, had no obvious connection to the Space Force or any human colony. And intervention from humans, whether from the future or from within the squadron, was unlikely for the same reason. That left intervention by God or a hallucination. In both those cases he would have expected to experience an auditory kin
d of sensation such as a voice instructing him to deploy recon drones. Instead he had what appeared to be an out of body experience. He had actually watched himself standing in front of Admiral Howard’s desk. The key was to see if the Admiral really did compliment him on coming up with the recon drone deployment idea. If he did, then hallucinations or divine intervention would also appear less likely than a spontaneous instance of precognition.
Satisfied for the time being at least that he wasn’t crazy, he decided to turn his thoughts to other matters. HQ would obviously want a detailed report on the whole mission. He had plenty of travel time in which to write it and he was probably going to need every spare moment available for that task. Having served for a year on the staff at HQ, he knew that they would be expecting more than just a dry, factual minute by minute account of what happened. They would also want some analysis, even if only guesswork about the nature and capabilities of the unknown enemy and even more importantly, recommendations on what should be done next. Shiloh could think of quite a lot of recommendations already but he wanted to get some input from his XO too. Just before her duty shift ended, he intercomed her and asked her to stop by his cabin for a short chat after her shift ended. When she arrived he said.
