Transition of Order

by P. R. Adams

  Rimes flinched involuntarily. “Shaw, is there a problem?”

  “I’m not sure. Give me a second.” Shaw’s voice wavered, a sound that could mean mission abort or it could mean nothing. “Secondary maneuvering systems aren’t coming online.”

  “Secondary? So we’d have primary maneuvering? The mission’s still a go, right?”

  “Contrary to rumor, not all pilots are insane. No secondary maneuvering systems, no…“

  “No what?”

  Shaw whistled nervously. “Now it’s the sensors. What the hell?”

  Rimes scanned Lopresti’s team; they still seemed caught up in their own weapons and suit checks. “Do we have another shuttle we can transfer to?”

  “332’s prepped, but it’s not my favorite—” Shaw whistled, this time upbeat. “Okay…“

  “Okay? Okay good or okay bad?”

  “Okay. As in, we’re in business. I think. Sensors, secondary maneuvering systems—everything’s online. Let me run another couple checks.”

  “Was it the EMP?”

  “Nah. These systems wouldn’t come up without some serious maintenance if it was from the EMP.”

  Rimes chided himself for being overly cautious, but he realized there was no real downside to it. “So the mission’s a go.”

  Shaw laughed, his voice once again calm. “Don’t sound so disappointed. Flying patrol may not sound interesting to you, but someone has to do it. These genies don’t sound like the type to pass up a good fight. If they’re not waiting in ambush for us out there, they’re almost certain to be waiting for us somewhere else.”

  “Roger that.”

  Finally, the shuttle cleared the hangar and took up position several kilometers ahead of the Valdez. The shuttle’s sensors and communications systems worked fine, allowing it to contact other ships in the task force and to bring them back to ring the Valdez.

  As they drifted through space, Rimes listened in on communications chatter. Within an hour, the rest of the task force ships had created a crude globe around the Valdez. His soldiers were about as safe as they could be until the Valdez had her sensors and weapons back online, assuming none of her critical systems failed.

  How the hell can everyone be so calm about something like this? What’s to prevent power from failing and knocking out the gravitic drive? Without the drive’s protective field around the ship, we’d probably be super-compressed or something. Billions and billions of dollars lost on a ship like ours, and the crew? Irreplaceable.

  “Shaw, you ever see a failure like this one before?”

  Shaw made little popping noises with his tongue. “Nah. First time out into deep space like this for me…but I heard about an accident a long time ago. One of the early runs. Small crew, small ship.

  “That’s when they gave the reactors and the gravitic drives dedicated systems controls. Whatever caused that failure, they don’t want it affecting those systems.”

  Whatever caused that failure, whatever caused this failure. How common is this? “But weapons and sensors are okay to lose?”

  “We survived it, right?”

  Rimes shook his head in stunned disbelief at Shaw’s unfathomable acceptance. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Shaw made a few final calls, then, the mission complete, he returned to the Valdez. Rimes found his thoughts returning to the problem at hand. Without the Valdez, the task force wasn’t even at half-strength. That had to be eating at Fripp. It had to be.

  Once back aboard the Valdez, Rimes searched for Cooper on the ship’s Grid. His signal showed him in Brigston’s weapons department. Rimes headed there at an aggressive clip.

  The weapons department was a cramped space, less than three meters deep and half as wide. Much of its space was occupied by systems and display panels. Cooper’s head was hidden by an open maintenance panel. He was calling out numbers to a female petty officer squatting on the ground in front of a glowing piece of test equipment that looked like a glass toaster.

  Rimes stopped at the hatchway. “Ensign Cooper?”

  “Is that you, Rimes?” Cooper’s voice was muffled.

  “It’s me.” Rimes smiled and nodded at the surprised petty officer.

  He’d formed a friendship with Cooper over a few games of poker, but the two of them had a hard time figuring out what was acceptable behavior among the rank and file.

  Cooper in particular had a problem keeping things formal.

  Cooper popped his head over the maintenance panel, noted the petty officer’s uncomfortable stare and blushed. He shook his head and ducked back behind the maintenance panel. “Not now, Sir.”

  “We need to talk.”

  Cooper eased back from the maintenance panel. He sighed and let his shoulders slump. He looked at the petty officer. “Sonya, take a break, okay? Five minutes?”

  The petty officer excused herself; Rimes waited until she was gone. “Coop, I’ve got an idea.”

  “I have an idea too. Why don’t you let me do my job and save me an ass chewing?”

  Rimes confirmed the passageway was clear. “Listen to this, okay? When we checked out the lifeboats, we launched drones to do the work from a distance, right?”

  Cooper looked at the floor as if he might be counting to stay calm. He nodded. “I heard about that. Do you know why Fripp’s got Brigston on the bridge? Because he can’t bite him in half over the intercom. We’re the task force’s biggest ship and we’re deaf, dumb, and blind right now.”

  “I know.” Rimes waved Cooper down. “So give me a second, okay? The shuttle’s systems worked, so this problem’s not from the EMP.”

  Cooper’s brow wrinkled. For a young man, his forehead had numerous, deep troughs, and his eyes had noticeable crows’ feet. “Who said it was from an EMP? We know what it’s from.”

  “You know—?”

  “It’s some sort of synchronization problem. The signals are flowing from system to system, but they’re getting fouled up somewhere. It happens sometimes.”

  Rimes blinked. “Sometimes? Shaw said it happened before, but you’re making it sound like it’s fairly common.”

  “Sure.” Cooper seemed perfectly fine with the idea of a ship of war traveling through space without sensors or weapons. “We just don’t have an easy fix. We could take everything offline, but that’s risky, and there’s no guarantee everything will come back up.”

  Shit. A multi-billion dollar ship defenseless, and they don’t have a solution or a backup? “Okay. I understand we’re in a bad spot. But will you hear me out?”

  Cooper squeezed his eyes shut and blinked a few times rapidly. “Okay.”

  “So we used the drones as our remote eyes and ears, right? Why not do something like that now? The shuttle becomes your bridge. Launch drones beyond the edge of the task force, feed the data to the shuttle. You could even run the other ships’ feeds through the shuttle relay, get their sensor input, communications, everything.”

  Cooper shook his massive head slowly and puffed out his cheeks. “Those drones don’t have anything like that. Long-range sensors, communications…they’ve got cameras and a few basic sensors. It won’t work.”

  “They could carry something, though, right? Cobble a housing together? Maybe take some batteries from the Erikson’s lifeboat?”

  Cooper sat still for a moment. “That would take people away from fixing these systems. There’s no way someone would approve that. It just doesn’t make any sense, not with what we’re up against here.”

  “What about the shuttle, then?” Rimes struggled to fight off the sense of annoyance he could feel building. The idea had seemed like a good one when it had come to him, but he’d assumed the drones could be easily modified.

  Cooper anxiously stared into the passageway; Rimes turned.

  Brigston stared back. “What about what shuttle?”

  “I’m sorry, Sir.” Rimes stepped aside to allow Brigston to pass. “I was bouncing some ideas for a temporary solution to this outage off Ensign Cooper.”


  Brigston looked at Rimes, then turned to glare at Cooper, who looked like a speared fish: stunned, twitching, resolved to his fate.

  Brigston colored slightly. “I left Ensign Cooper in charge of troubleshooting my weapons system, Captain Rimes. I left him with Petty Officer Nunoz. Ensign Cooper, you seem to have lost your petty officer?”

  Cooper’s mouth opened, but he didn’t say anything.

  “That’s my fault, Commander,” Rimes said.

  Brigston turned on Rimes. “Your fault?”

  “I needed to run these ideas by Ensign Cooper. I pressured him to give Petty Officer Nunoz a break.”

  Brigston blinked. “These ideas sound awfully important, Captain. More important than getting our weapons functional again?”

  “Well, I was hoping they’d give us functional eyes and ears until the systems came online again, but Ensign Cooper shot them down. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

  “Well, the shuttle idea may be worth pitching.” Cooper’s voice was uncertain, feeble.

  Brigston glared at Cooper again before turning back to Rimes. “What’s the shuttle idea?”

  “I—”

  “He was thinking it could be a mobile command post, Sir,” Cooper said. He flashed a resigned look; he would be Rimes’s advocate. “Put the officer of the deck and quartermaster in one of the shuttles and run a relay from the shuttle to a shuttle in the hangar bay, pipe it through the intercom or dedicate the Grid bandwidth to it. They could communicate with the rest of the task force.”

  Brigston closed his eyes and sighed. He sucked in his cheeks as he thought the idea through. Seconds dragged by. “Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll take it to Captain Fripp. Captain Rimes, you need to exit my area. Now. Ensign Cooper, you need to get your troubleshooting done. Now. No more screwing around.”

  Cooper and Rimes simultaneously released a relieved, “Aye, Sir!”

  Rimes headed for his quarters at a quick walk. Nervous energy shot up his legs with each step, and he could feel his gut churning. It wasn’t like being in the field. Independent thinking, resourcefulness, solutions: that wasn’t expected of him now. Even if it was, he was so caught up in trying to figure out the genies that he was making mistakes. He’d gone outside the chain of command and put Cooper in a bad spot.

  Rimes was having a hard time adjusting to the differences in the way the Navy operated and to his new role as a leader. He’d been entrusted with the mission against the genies, and he’d already lost Morelli.

  He couldn’t afford more losses like that.

  18

  24 October, 2167. Shuttle 332.

  * * *

  RIMES GRUNTED as he twisted in the shuttle harness. Except for the struggling atmospheric system and Munoz’s thunderous snoring, the cabin was quiet. With all the bodies stuffed inside for so long, the recycled air had become hot and stale, enervating, oppressive. Rimes’s own unpleasant breath hovered inside and around his helmet, stubbornly resisting the recycler’s pull. His mouth felt like he’d gargled with sand. What he needed was a drink of water and a thorough rinse, but if he took another sip, he knew he’d have to pee.

  It could wait. The mission was a short one.

  He shifted, cursing the harness. He hated the thing, its design, its appearance. It was pinching at him, bunching up his environment suit and shoving his armor into the creases of his joints. There was real animosity between him and it. He finally found a somewhat comfortable position and relaxed.

  After a moment, he glanced at his earpiece’s display. Time crawled, completely out of sync with his perceptions. He and Lopresti’s team had been on duty more than twenty hours, and the wear was showing.

  Across from him, Lopresti sat still as a corpse, eyes closed, lips moving in some silent recitation, maybe of their training, maybe of her favorite poetry. Her squad was caught up in its own matters, some completely absorbed in a game running over their communications systems, some hovering on the edge of collapse. It had been a very long day.

  Let them sleep. We’re just along for the ride for now.

  Rimes suppressed a yawn. Sleep was a siren that would have to wait.

  Data from the shuttle’s systems silently played across his helmet display. He watched it scroll by for several minutes, unsure if he’d even blinked. They were decelerating toward the orbital plane and Rendezvous 9AR. A quick check showed they had less than an hour to go.

  So much can go wrong in an hour.

  Rimes thought of the modified rockets hanging beneath each of the shuttle’s wings. They were fiery payback if things went to hell and the genies were waiting for them.

  Space was vast, and there was no reason for the genies to have come to COTOR-7. It was a dead planet of negligible value. Whatever had drawn the genies to the Erikson, it gave them access to the galaxy and beyond.

  Rimes detached a box from his hip pouch. Like everything from the Valdez, it was a dull gray. It was slightly larger than his hand and had a comfortable heft to it. He triggered the lid and it slowly opened. Four numeric fields flashed over a red button labeled OVERRIDE. Once they were in the system’s orbital plane, he would need to enter a code only he knew within a certain amount of time, or the rockets would seek a target and launch.

  Telepathic push or not, the rockets will launch if the genies are waiting for us.

  Just one of the rockets would be enough to cripple a ship the size of the Valdez. Even the Erikson would probably be seriously damaged. It just required penetrating the hull, and the rockets were built for exactly that.

  With a quiet sigh, he put the control box away.

  Once the Valdez’s communications came up, he leaned back in his seat and pulled up the messages that were waiting for him. The messages were months old, pulled from the system’s message buoy that they’d found when the signal ship had run a deep scan around the Valdez. Finding the buoy intact was a welcome miracle for the task force, proof not only that they had working sensors, but that they could actually have something go their way.

  If the genies came here, why’d they leave the buoy intact? Is there a tactical advantage I’m not seeing, or is it just proof they didn’t come here? Or maybe they came here just long enough to rendezvous with another force, then left?

  Rimes rubbed his forehead as if he might push away the oncoming headache.

  He turned his attention back to the messages. There were five messages, three from Molly, and two from her and the boys. It was hard watching Molly’s videos. She looked stressed, tired. Jared was having problems, acting up. When Molly put the boys on to record something for their father, Rimes could see it in their faces.

  They need me. They all need me.

  He wiped at his eyes and saw the moisture on his gloves. It was nearly impossible to hide that you were crying in such cramped quarters. He closed his helmet for privacy, checked his communications system was muted and had a quiet moment.

  Lieutenant Shaw opened a channel. “Rimes, we’ve got a call from the Valdez. Patching it through.”

  “Thanks.” Rimes cleared his throat and listened for the barely audible hiss. They were far enough away from the Valdez to introduce a lag. The hiss sounded. “Go ahead, Valdez.”

  “Captain Rimes?” It was Fripp. An unhappy Fripp from the sound of his voice.

  “This is Rimes, Sir. Go ahead.”

  Seconds passed; the lag made communications painful.

  “This is Captain Fripp. We just had another vessel enter sensor range. We have limited intelligence on it at the moment. We know it’s decelerating and we suspect it’s not a warship. It could, however, be the first of several vessels. Be advised you may not be able to return to the task force position should we find ourselves engaged.”

  Rimes sighed at the pace of the communication. The conversation was little better than crude text messaging, sending snippets of data back and forth. Waiting. Waiting. “Message received and understood, Sir.”

  An inbound vessel or weapon, but the message buoy had been left
intact. It would help if at least Sheila could make some sense of what the genies are up to. I sure as hell can’t.

  Rimes turned his thoughts back to the genie tactics—assuming they were tactics. He decided to focus on what he knew.

  The genies still had a smaller force. They still wanted to rely on surprise and deception. It was not knowing their objectives that was the real problem. Knowing their objectives would make understanding and predicting their actions easier. Even the most radical and unpredictable opponent had a goal and built tactics around it.

  Perditori claimed the genies wanted to get rid of us, to find a home to call their own. Did he mean genocide? Crippling our ability to defend ourselves?

  The easiest approach to genocide would have been a biological weapon, some sort of super-virus.

  Even with humanity spread throughout the galaxy, the genies would have had a good chance at decimating the population. But genies were highly specialized in their training, and they had never been used for tasks such as engineering bioweapons. The X-17 nerve gas they’d used to steal vessels from an orbital shipyard was purchased from rogue Commandos. Humans.

  That lack of training left several thousand field operatives, pilots, and similarly dangerous individuals capable of mayhem.

  But not genocide.

  Rimes’s helmet display flashed. They were flattening their trajectory, entering the orbital plane. He pulled the control box out again.

  Minutes ticked down, became a minute, then seconds.

  A click sounded, and Shaw spoke, his voice crisp. “We’ll be about seventy thousand kilometers out from the fourth planet. I’ll keep us at five thousand kph. We can manage ten, maybe twenty seconds of active sensor scans. If we pick up anything, I’m bugging out.”

  “Understood.”

  Rimes gulped, loud in his helmet.

  “Readouts coming…now.” Shaw whistled so loud and high that the sound degenerated into a staticky hiss.

  Data burst across Rimes’s helmet’s primary display, creating a three-dimensional view of their environment. He scanned the image, noting where details faded at the edge of the sensor array’s range or broke apart where his systems didn’t have the computing power to make sense of the data. They were approaching the fourth planet, a gray-ochre ball with streams of wispy white clouds.