“We got your Communications Arrays, Admiral,” Eastwood said, looking back at me briefly.
“The Comm. Arrays…” I said, feeling stumped and then a vague memory from the beginning of the fight drifted back into my forebrain. I remember something about ordering a retaliatory strike after they hit our Comm. antennae.
“A gunnery team on one of the turbo-batteries waited until the Vineyard was on us and then snuck in a shot on the Clover while they weren’t expecting it, Sir,” Eastwood explained, “looks like you’re going to have to pay out that bounty!”
“Good job, team,” I said fiercely.
The bridge didn’t even bother to cheer but at this point I was past that. As far as I was concerned, steeling my own resolve to go down fighting was more than enough.
“They’re damaging our power grids and we’re knocking out their external com-arrays,” Laurent said grimly.
I knew what he very deliberately didn’t say: we couldn’t keep that kind of trade off going for long. I clenched my fists, realizing my knuckles were actually numb from so much tension in my hands. If only they weren’t faster than us. I’d put us in a death roll with one of the dastards and at least have the satisfaction of taking one of them down with us, and who knew; there was always the chance we’d come out the other end in good enough condition to try the other.
“If you want, I can give the order,” Captain Laurent said with a sigh. It took me several seconds to realize what he was saying, and when he did I felt my face turning red and it was all I could do not to grab a weapon and shoot him.
“They’ll have to take me out in a body bag, because I’m not leaving,” I snapped and deliberately turned away from the Captain.
Chapter 83: The Davy Jones
Activating the lift, he turned to Brence. “Might be a few minutes, even with the priority code,” he confided to the younger man, “sometimes it takes a while for the lift system to reroute to this office. You see, the destination we want can only be reached using one particular lift: lift 42.”
“A secret mission and a secret lair,” Brence said, sounding delighted, “and my mother said the recruiter’s promises of action and adventure were all hogwash!”
“Smart woman, that,” Spalding grunted, a hint of a smile tugging around the corners of his mouth.
Brence paused and then chortled, “Don’t I know it!”
Two minutes later, the lift dinged and Spalding strode inside. After a brief hesitation, Brence followed.
The door swished closed and Spalding leaned down to the touch panel built into the lift, and quickly tapped out a code that caused the panel to fall forward, revealing a secret compartment behind it. Entering another code on the second touchpad hidden within, he leaned down for a retinal scan and placed his finger on a sensor designed to read his fingerprint and take a blood sample. “Blast,” he said in surprise, staring down at his artificial hands, “override, override, override,” he said. “Blast, I plum forgot I lost both me hands! Let me get a knife and I’ll get you the blood supply, though,” he assured the panel. Reaching into his tool belt, he pulled out a small blade and nicked himself up on the shoulder. Then, swiping his hand through the blood, he placed it into the blood verifier.
“Destination Deck Thirteen set and locked in, Engineer Spalding,” said a computerized voice over the intercom.
Brence breathed a sigh of relief and then started. “Deck Thirteen,” he said excitedly, “there’s never officially been a Deck Thirteen in the SDF. I knew they were hiding something; the denials were too convincing!”
Spalding shook his head at this tomfoolery, and Brence was still rambling when in all four corners of the lift, panels dropped down revealing heavy blaster mounts which tracked and focused on him and the old Engineer. The young Warrant Officer immediately blanched.
“Uh, Lieutenant,” Brence gulped, pointing up at the anti-personnel weapon, “I think the blood sample didn’t take or something.” He quietly started sidling toward the wall, and careful not to lift his arm, pointed his stunner up and toward the ceiling.
“Oh?” Spalding glanced up at them, ignoring the lad’s failure to use his new ‘Lieutenant Commander’ rank. “Almost forgot,” he said with a mischievous wink, “not quite so exciting when you’ve got defensive blasters pointed at you, eh?” he chortled with glee.
Brence stared over at him in disbelief.
“Spalding AO4769, my voice is my password, verify me,” said the chrome-domed officer, leaning forward and speaking into the hidden control panel in a clear steady voice.
The panel beeped several times before the secret panel almost reluctantly popped closed, and the anti-personnel blasters retracted into their hidden corners with a mechanical whine as their concealing, metal doors closed.
When the lift started moving, Brence wasn’t the only one who breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Several minutes later, the lift finally came to a stop and the doors slid open to a pitch black room.
Spalding stepped forward, enjoying the way his droid eye easily adjusted to the lightless condition as he strode quickly into the foam-covered room.
“Kind of dark in here,” Brence commented.
“Got a flashlight around here somewhere,” the old Engineer said, moving unerringly toward the pile of hand torches and activating one.
“That’s a relief,” Brence said taking a cautious step into the room. He stopped briefly to look around, “Why is everything covered in foam?”
“They filled the whole level when they left,” Spalding said impatiently, “thought it was a fire hazard. It took a while to clear it out but after we did, she made an ideal place to stash perfectly good equipment. Why, I’ve collected parts and pieces in here not just from the Clover, but from two other Dreadnaught classes that were sent to the breakers,” he said, waving his arm to shine the light on the vastly smaller piles and stacks of old, yet perfectly functional equipment on display
Most of the gear he had already put back in service after the break with the Imps, but there were still a few choice bits lying about here and there, and he looked around at the stockpile with pride at preserving the serviceable equipment from going to the breathers with their old ships.
Then his proud display faltered and his eyes narrowed. “Ships what were supposed to be sent to the breakers, anyway,” he said, thinking of the ships that had supposedly been broken apart and recycled, only to really be sent over to the Captain. Jean Luc. The very man who had turned pirate and stolen the Clover!
“This is amazing,” Brence breathed, hurrying over for a hand torch of his own and then activating it. “This looks just like the lair of the Bug Queen set off of…” Spalding whipped his head around and the younger man hesitated. “I mean, in a holo-vid I watched one time,” Brence clarified, clearly trying to downplay the whole situation in the face of Spalding’s now scowling demeanor.
“This is no holo-vid,” Commander Spalding barked, “we’re on a mission to save the ship!” He turned with a ‘harrumph,’ and began striding deeper into the bowels of Deck Thirteen.
“Sorry, Sir,” Brence said in a temporarily subdued voice. Mere seconds later, however, he was back to his juvenile antics, “This is so cool. I never thought I’d be able to say I’d seen the Davy Jones Locker and been in Captain Moonlight’s secret lair! I mean, not that I would ever actually say anything,” Brence stumbled, “it’s just, you know, the possibility that I could. Or rather, you know, that I’d actually been there myself! I wouldn’t have to say anything—just knowing I’ve been there and could go again—”
“What are you blathering on about, man,” Spalding demanded unhappily. “If I’d known you were going to be such a chatterbox, I’d have come by my lonesome!”
“Oops,” Brence said in a small voice.
“Yes, ‘oops’,” Spalding frowned thunderously, “now keep quiet and pay attention. We’ve got to find five different rooms in here and connect the cables I’ve already laid out.”
“Of course, Chief,�
�� Brence said in more professional voice, “I understand.”
“Good,” the ornery old Engineer said shortly. “Stay focused and on task,” that was a perfectly good place to end the conversation. Brence’s cheerfulness had put Spalding in a such a terribly bad mood for some reason—perhaps because he was showing him one of the greatest mysteries this ship had to offer and he was practically jumping around and squealing like a pubescent girl at her first boy band concert—that he just couldn’t contain himself. “And another thing: there’s no need for all this tomfoolery and diarrhea of the mouth. This is the Davy Jones; a sacred, hidden place on the ship, where even whispers fear to tread,” he barked.
“Sorry, Commander,” Brence said in a subdued voice. “But didn’t you ever have a secret hero you didn’t think was real? Well, I did, and I just found out he was real—on top of that, he’s been taking me down to the a place most spacers gossip about in whispers and say doesn’t really exist. This is the Davy Jones! This is the ship’s secret locker, and it’s an entire, ‘lost’ deck! On top of that, you have no idea how many hits the Moonlight Chronicles have back home on Capria. The idea that the government is ignoring a Droid problem, while Moonlight is out there defying the anti-machinery laws and capturing rogue Droids was part of a small, counter-culture movement when I was still in secondary school.”
“More stuff and nonsense,” Spalding grunted, secretly touched and then his head snapped around in recognition. “It’s over here,” he said, spotting the first of the rooms they would have to find. He could tell because of the roll of cable with one end coiled up outside the room, and the other running off into the darkness.
“What do we have to do, Sir?” Brence asked.
“We just need to unroll this end and take it into the room to hook her up to the spike I sent down into one of the ship’s main data lines. Then we process in the other five locations,” Spalding explained.
“The main data lines?!” Brence blurted, clearly surprised but the surprise was temporary. Like any engineer worth his salt, the younger man rallied and figured it out without help, “Of course…this is an entire, unaccounted for, deck. If it was set up like the others it had to have had taps set to hook into the rest of the ship.”
“This one hooks up to one of the key clusters of the ship’s DI,” Spalding explained as he cracked open the door and snatched up the wire. Walking backward, he unspooled the wire until he reached the illicit data terminal he had hooked up to the tap in the ship’s systems. Turning around, he plugged in the wire. “Only four more to go, then we hook the other ends into the cluster,” the newly minted Engineering Commander said with satisfaction.
“Yes, Sir,” Brence said, hurrying along behind as the two men rushed down the corridors to the next data line that needed connection. “I understand what we need to do. But sir, can you tell me how tapping into the DI is going to be better than just dumping the fusion reactors and shutting this ship down?”
“We’re not just tappin’ into the ship’s DI, Brence,” Spalding said scornfully, “if that’s all we were doing, we’d have a mighty fine intelligence-gathering operation, but I don’t see how that would do us any good in recapturing the ship!”
“Then what’s the plan, Sir?” Brence asked.
“Well…” the old Engineer hesitated and then decided he might as well break down and explain things, “first we finish connecting the other four cables to the spikes and—”
“More spikes into the DI,” Brence said, nodding his head and the old engineer felt a surge of anger at the short-sightedness of his companion.
“No, the other spikes hook into each of the ship’s isolated subsystems; the ones that are kept free from direct contact with the DI,” he growled.
“You mean…the ones we need separated to keep the ship from going sub-AI,” Brence said.
“Exactly,” Spalding said with satisfaction.
Brence gulped. “You mean…we’re going to hook them up, and hope an AI starts to manifest and crashes the ship’s systems?” he said with clear dread in his voice.
“After a fashion,” Spalding said after a pause. In retrospect, it was probably best to initiate the young man to the various mysteries of the ship in smaller job lots. After they’d connected each of the sub-systems into the hub he had long since created, it was probably best if Spalding just took the sixth cable that connected to the hub directly into the Heart of the Ship personally.
“But what if it takes too long for the ship to develop an AI and the battle is lost, Sir?” Brence asked. Spalding had to admit it was a logical question, if a man was operating off Brence’s limited data set.
“Now, you just let me worry about that,” the old man said as they arrived at the second door and, stopping briefly, he laid a finger alongside his nose.
They worked in silence as they went from room to room, the ship shuddering around them as the Clover reengaged, in all likelihood, the Armor Prince. They worked until each of the room’s spike taps had been connected on one end, then tracing the last cable, they arrived at the hub at the junction of the four, foam-filled corridors.
Ignoring the equipment and hand tools strewn around the head-sized, multi-port adapter, the two men immediately started hooking the thick data cables into the adapter.
When they were done, Brence stood there silently counting under his breath. When he was done, he reached over and grabbed a hold of Spalding’s arm.
“Sir, there’s six cables here, not five,” he said urgently.
“Of course there’s six,” Spalding said derisively as he went over and picked up an old, standard, tool box.
“But you said we only had to connect the five cables from five different rooms,” Brence said, “what about this sixth one…did we miss something?”
“Oh, that,” Spalding started, remembering he hadn’t yet told the younger man about the Heart of the Ship. He thrust the tool box in Brence’s arms, “I’ll just go run this last one into the Heart, to speed things along, and you wait here. If anything goes haywire, I’ve left a cable splicer, a crimper, and a new adapter head so you can make repairs.”
“The Heart? What Heart?” Brence said curiosity.
“Shut it down, lad, and stay focused on your task,” Spalding growled before he picked up the large spool of data line hidden just a few feet down the corridor. Unlike the rest of the lines, he had never run this one because it just wouldn’t do to leave something like that where anyone or their sister of the night could stumble over it, after all. “I’ve got this.”
“You’re the expert; I’ll take care of things on this end,” Brence said firmly.
“Good lad,” Spalding said, rapidly unspooling the line as he walked away from the other man.
Chapter 84: Unexpected Difficulties
“Sir, the Bug Mother-ship—she seems to be waking up,” cried the Parliamentary Tactical Officer.
“What?” roared Jean Luc.
“She’d almost stopped firing entirely, but now more than half their beam weapons are unloading and are much more effective; we’ve been hit by half a dozen beams in the past five seconds alone!”
“Comm., are you still transmitting that message program I instructed earlier?” Jean Luc demanded, storming over to the Comm. Section.
“Sir, we’re still transmitting over the short range antennae, but as I reported earlier we’ve lost the primary array,” the Tech said crisply.
“What are you blathering about, fool?” Jean Luc snarled. “Use the secondary back up.”
“The secondary array has also been destroyed for some time!” the Tech said, eyes widening as the terrifying figure of the Commodore leaned over him.
“Blast,” Jean Luc cursed, coming over the top with a right cross to the face that knocked the com-tech out cold and made the Montagne Prince feel better, but did nothing to improve the situation. “Get a new com-tech on the main board and up the gain on that signal. Also, contact the Vineyard and see if they still have an undamaged array!”
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br /> Glances were exchanged around the bridge, but the crew quickly resumed their duties.
“Shields approaching critical levels; failure is imminent unless we have time to recharge,” reported the Shields Officer.
“Time we were supposed to have as we circled around the Confederals,” Jean Luc said tightly as he returned to his Throne.
“Orders, Commodore?” prompted the Tactical Officer.
Jean Luc scowled before turning to the Helm. “Helm, increase our distance to the Mother-ship, even if we have to miss our next firing pass to do so. It won’t destroy the Vineyard to spend an extra few minutes exchanging blows with the Armor Prince,” he snapped before rounding on the Comm. Section with the new tech sitting at the main control board, “and continue trying to raise the Vineyard to relay that program!”
“Trouble?” asked Heppner, popping up on the screen of his Admiral’s Throne.
“My nephew is proving more tenacious than expected, and the Mother-ship is waking up,” Jean Luc growled unhappily.
“War is hell, that’s why they call it ‘war’,” Heppner said dismissively. “Get your head back into the battle; we knocked out the Mother-ship’s engines, so she’s not going anywhere. We’ve time to finish off the Royalists and come back to pound the Bug Queen from outside her beam range. Our turbo-lasers have the range, and we can rip her to shreds without them being able to respond.”
Jean Luc’s frown tightened and then he threw back his head and laughed. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around,” he roared. “You’re right; I’ve got the galaxy in my hand, and here I am whining because my foes aren’t dying fast enough to suit my purposes. I think I’ll keep you around for a while longer,” he chuckled.
“I’m glad I can provide you with amusement, Sir,” Heppner nodded, and Jean Luc reached down to cut the communication.
Chapter 85: The Opening
Admiral's Revenge (A Spineward Sectors Novel:) Page 50
