by Chris Hechtl
“Aw-shucks,” Kedson muttered, but she knew he didn't mean it.
== ^ ==
They were nervous for each jump. There was no telling what was on the other side of the hyper barrier.
Sailing in hyperspace meant no flight time for the wing. Suddenly the limited number of simulators on board the ship was very popular as were bull sessions in the pilot's ready room or mess. A few fights and other problems broke out, more out of boredom than any real adversity between antagonists. Each was handled in house by an Article 15 captain's mast and NJP, Non-Judicial Punishment.
To keep the crew busy, the XO and senior staff organized PT as well as games to keep them occupied. Competitions on who had the best score between the departments kept them interested in honing their skills.
But eventually the enforced boredom forced everyone to get caught up on the paperwork the navy seemed to float on as well as the tests and quals for their next promotional grade. The maintenance crews didn't have a lot of space to work within the hangar bay and work bays, but they still found a way to pull a bird down and then dig into her. Each and every bird was squared away with their thirty-/sixty-/ninety-day maintenance checks.
The pilots learned that if they wanted to avoid busywork from the CAG they better look busy, which meant helping the deck apes and their crew chiefs with their birds. Along the way they might actually learn something when they weren't bullshitting each other about one thing or another.
Getting into B101a1 and out into the void once more was a relief, even if it was only temporary. Jerrica ordered the alert five launch as soon as the ship secured from jump and the captain called for air ops.
It was also something of a relief and a little bit of a letdown to find nothing in the star system except the picket ship.
== ^ ==
Once they settled into B100 omega, the ships watched as their engineers helped the freighter set up the ansible platform. Two other freighters had come with their small force; they departed for Hidoshi's World.
When the freighter carrying the ansible was finished, it unloaded a small transhab inflatable cargo module and then stuffed it with the remaining stores of fuel and parts. She then sat and waited for her companions to return from their errand in Hidoshi's World.
Jerrica did her best to keep her people busy. She ordered a series of exercises to blow the rust off. They had to ration their fuel though, which was a problem.
There was a small dim bit of good news. Tempest had a pair of Raptor fighters on board. The division of fighters frequently mixed it up with the fighter wing, playing op force. They came over to receive maintenance when they needed to do so as well, though that drew down on Kitty's limited stores of parts.
Three weeks into what was turning into a long drawn-out and rather boring post, a meteor clipped a Cobra, tearing into her engine intake to foul her port engine. The meteor ricocheted around the interior of the engine, apparently tearing into her fuselage before it stopped.
Jane had been out flying wing with Tommy since his usual partner had maxed out his flight time for the week. When his ship sparked and then kicked over, she instinctively moved clear then tried repeatedly to radio him. When she heard PRIFLY doing the same, she reduced her calls and attempted to temper her anxiety for Tommy.
“Kitty, this is Sweety Pie,” she said over the radio. “Cobra 2 is dark; I repeat dark. One engine is down. I'm moving in to investigate,” she said.
“Understood,” Jerrica replied, coming over the link.
Jane used small economical puffs of fuel to get within viewing distance of the other fighter's cockpit. When she saw it was pitch black with no running lights like the rest of the ship, her heart fluttered then sank in despair. But then a flash light came on and waved to her.
“Sweety Pie to Kitty, we have signs of life. She's alive. Tomcat, if you can hear me, signal with your flashlight,” she said.
“We're dispatching an SAR flight now,” Kitty replied.
“Roger that. Looks like he's lost power …,” she frowned as something glittered out of the other ship's intake and exhaust. “Kitty, it looks like he's got FOD coming out of his port exhaust and intake. He either blew an engine or ate something that didn't agree with him. We've been flying with only our particle shields so I'm not sure which.”
“He should be able to boot from the other engine. It shouldn't have cut power,” Jerrica said, starting to sound vexed.
“I'm just reporting what I see.” She saw him point the flashlight at his own face. Tomcat was terrified, she could see it etched all over his face. “You're cool,” she sent. She edged the fighter in closer until they were less than a meter apart. At that distance her broadcasts should get to his implant receiver directly.
“Tomcat, report.”
“Shit, oh shit, oh …,” the chatter continued making her grimace. The kid was panicking; there was no doubt about that. “Tom! Tommy! Report! Get your head out of your ass and work the problem, stop becoming it! SAR is on the way, but you need to keep cool and figure this out!”
“Um,” the kid calmed for a minute but then started to gibber. He was obviously spooked.
“Procedure, Tom, follow the steps.”
“I … I can't!” the kid wailed. “Nothing is responding!”
“Okay, breathe. Focus on my voice. Now, work the problem. No power?”
“No. She's dead.”
“Okay, so, we've got steps to work through. You've got battery power; you've got suit power. Now, your port engine is dead, but the starboard one should have kicked on. Since it didn't that means a spike must have blown across her systems and threw the main breaker. I want you to go over the steps to check that fault with me.”
She had finally gotten him calmed down and his fighter's life support back up and running when the SAR flight arrived on the scene. She reluctantly moved out of the AO to allow them to work. She went into a slow orbit, watching as the robotic arms docked with the stricken fighter then more robotic arms attached mooring lines and umbilical's to the pilot's cockpit module.
Once the ship was secure and the medic on board had reviewed and talked with Tomcat, the ship was towed back to Kittyhawk. Jane followed in their wake quietly.
== ^ ==
“Good job out there,” Jerrica said with a nod to Jane when she finished the hot wash of the incident. “By the way, a look into the fighter's engine intake leads the plane chief and BOSS to tentatively conclude it was a meteor strike. It came in at an angle that the sensors didn't see. It turned the inside of his engine into a colander.”
Jane whistled. “It must have been something super hard!”
“I think so. They are checking now.”
“And Tomcat?”
Jerrica grimaced. “He's grounded pending a review. Since he's pretty shook up, I don't know what will happen to him. I'd like to get him back on the horse to see if he's been broken, but …,” she shook her head. “I checked the logs and the transcripts from his implants as well as the black boxes. He lost it.”
“CAG …”
Jerrica held up a restraining hand to forestall any pleading on Jane's behalf. “Can it. He screwed up. There is a procedure for this. We've all gone through it. The fact that he just lost it … honestly, I don't know how he got this far,” she said.
“Um …”
“I think …,” Jerrica ran a frustrated hand through her hair. “I don't know.”
Jane frowned pensively. It was obvious that Tomcat had never taken the various sims they had undergone to heart. Never made the emotional connection since they had just been sims. When he'd been dumped into the real thing, it had short-circuited his brain and his fear had taken over his sense. Not good.
It just proved there was a limit to what sims could accomplish. Real world training was a must.
Jerrica snapped her fingers startling the younger woman. “Did you hear me? Or are you coming apart too?”
“Sorry, ma'am, just thinking about the emotional disconnect between a sim
and reality, ma'am,” Jane blurted out.
Jerrica frowned thoughtfully then nodded. “It makes sense I suppose. He never really had his life on the line before, none of us did.”
“I've been in real world problems, ma'am, but nothing like this. You keep your head or you lose it. Binary set. Panic doesn't serve you or anyone else any good.”
Jerrica nodded. “Right. The medics are ordering mandatory counseling for him. I'll see what they say. Go write up your report, full download of it.” Jane grimaced. “I know; you don't want to tattle on a fellow pilot. Tough. We need a hard-hitting report on this to show the brass and the other pilots. If it makes Tomcat into some sort of gory lesson, so be it.” She grimaced. She was already mentally writing the pilot off and that sucked. He was most likely going to be relegated to flying shuttles after their tour was complete. She might even ship him back home in the freighters when they returned.
“Dismissed. I want that report in my inbox by next shift,” she ordered.
Jane came to attention, nodded once, and then about-faced and took herself off. She saw a few friendly faces in the companionway but ducked her head, ashamed at what she was going to have to do.
Hopefully someday Tomcat and the others would forgive her.
== ^ ==
The round of Murphy's mischief and Lady Luck's blind eye didn't stop with Tomcat's fall from grace. Shortly after the pair of freighters returned from Hidoshi's world; they offloaded a cargo of fresh food and gifts to the ships as they waited anxiously for the green light. A day after their unloading, the reply came from the ansible giving them the all clear for them to proceed. The trio of freighters left to run the gauntlet of the B101a1 star system on their own.
Kittyhawk and Tempest were left to their own devices for thirty-seven hours without incident before a major incident occurred. A fuel leak on the hangar deck led to a spill and clean-up. The incident sparked the shutdown of the hangar and all hands at their damage control stations while they tensely listened to reports as the hazard and damage control teams dealt with the spill. An investigation was launched to find the culprit once the fuel was contained.
Jane like many of the pilots didn't care so much who was to blame than the fuel loss and what it meant to the flight roster. Fortunately, most of the fuel had been contained by Orville and the damage control teams. The fuel that had spilt had been contaminated by the foam used to catch it before it got into the voids of the ship and caused serious problems or even a potential catastrophe like a fire.
The investigation turned up a pair of deck apes who had been clowning around on the deck with a football. One had tripped over a hose fitting and had knocked it loose. They hadn't made certain it had been properly dogged before they took off. The JAG and senior officers held long sessions deliberating what to do before they determined to go with an Article 15. It had been careless, but it hadn't been intentional and each of the men and women involved had been contrite about their guilt.
== ^ ==
In order to supplement their limited fuel supply, they prospected for fuel during patrols. The admiral had taken the small gas giant refinery platform with him when he'd abandoned the star system years ago. A friendly rivalry sparked between Wilbur, the sensor crew on the two ships, and the pilots out in the field.
Some of the shuttle pilots of Squadron Four were tasked with tug duty if something of value was tagged for retrieval. The crew of the shuttles worked the sparse asteroid belt and heliopause to bring in rocks. A bonus was logged for the best rock, which turned out to be anything with water ice in it. Each iceball that was brought in and successfully processed meant a little more fuel for them to go out again, which was an added bonus to the pilots.
Eventually though the prolonged missions became too hard on the equipment. Failures began to crop up and minor accidents had the pilots and ground crew nervous. The last investigation into a shuttle that had gotten dinged when it got too close to an asteroid and had misjudged the OMS shut down the project for good.
== ^ ==
Wraith copy B1001 attempted to assimilate its various components as each was downloaded through the ansible. But there wasn't enough of its kernel to properly direct its various tentacles. Fortunately, feelers and spider bots had gotten a map of the system. There were three, one in the Arboth class and two systems in the carrier, one for the ship's systems and another dedicated to running the flight wing. Neither seemed sufficient for its needs.
The ansible was also a problem. It's throttled download speed was hampering the virus's ability to spread into the new system. It revised its timeline estimate and fired off a report to the main host.
== ^ ==
News flowed into their systems on a daily basis as more ansibles came online and other events were reported. The fleet channel was constantly updated as were the ship's internal internet.
When word of the admiral's secret mission was released, it earned whistles of appreciation and cheers that new sleepers had come into the fold. That accolade was quickly followed by something else, something far more ominous. A fresh spat of gremlins threatened personnel on the ships.
System lag and sim crashes told the pilots something was up. When a fighter's crash cart robot malfunctioned and went on a spree, they realized it wasn't an ordinary prank. Kedson had his hands up in the air and professed his innocence whenever anyone came near him. “This isn't my thing, honest. I'm not this stupid.”
Wilbur's firewall kept getting pinged by intrusion reports. He fired off a report each time and received a reply that his intrusion software was being tested. He didn't report the problem initially.
It took time for the cyberists and the A.I. to run down the problem and the source. A malfunctioning load lifter led to the BOSS shutting it down and then pulling it apart. Nothing was physically wrong with it so he turned his attention to the software. There he found a recent patch that had come from the ship's network. The data tag stated it was a recent patch, which was impossible. He forwarded his results to the Neobeagle as well as the XO.
When Chief Oddie demanded to know why the ships were receiving such a massive download from the ansible, the communication's crew looked into it and found the culprit.
“I'm now noting another intrusion,” Wilbur reported.
“Another one?”
“I have received several hundred over the past twelve hours. All were reported to be hack attacks by naval security to test our systems. I now wonder about the authenticity of the sender. I am now noting the latest intrusion is a memory leach and a processor bleed to sap the host's power to fight back. This is not a malfunction or a test. This is a serious attempt to suborn me. I am firewalling the communication's array.”
“Tempest's telemetry link has gone down, sir,” the communication's rating reported.
“Get them back up. Use hand signs and flashlights if you have to. Flash our running lights or hell, send a shuttle over. Tell them we're under a cyber-attack and to shut down their links and scrub their systems.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Orville, a little help here? I'm not sure what's been compromised,” Wilbur implored.
“Gladly, brother,” Orville said, throwing himself into the fray.
The news that the ships were under cyber-attack by something made its way through the ship's grapevine like a lightning bolt. Orders were dispatched over the intercom to reduce internet traffic and to shut down nonessential systems.
Something was attacking them through the ansible. Once the source was identified, Captain Nax ordered the communications crew to shut the ship's communications array down while the A.I. and crew tracked down the problem. Work crews were dispatched to the ansible platform to manually shut it down from that end.
The virus hadn't managed to download enough of itself to take control of the ship's systems. They had no choice but to kill it; any attempt to quarantine it ended in failure or destruction of the virus. Sometimes the virus would take down an infected system when it went down. Orville an
d Wilbur survived and declared victory five tense hours after the battle had commenced.
Tempest reported she was clear of the virus an hour later.
== ^ ==
They received the full report on what had happened after the ansible software was purged and restored. Apparently a Xeno virus had been awakened when the secret facility had come online. The full details remained classified. The narrow bandwidth in their ansible connection had partially protected their ships from becoming completely infected and taken over or destroyed.
“So, the real spat of gremlin problems we've been having recently was the damn virus all along.”
“How much of it was the virus and how much was general wear and tear though, sir,” Oddie frowned, then shrugged. His floppy ears flicked. “I can't honestly tell you. Everything before we set up the ansible we know was the usual crop of gremlins. The same for anything that came up before the secret facility's ansible came on line I suppose.”
“We're certain it came from there?” the XO asked.
The captain nodded grimly. “I don't have all the details, and I can't share a lot with you, but yes.”
“Okay then.”
“And we're sure it's dead?”
“Here, yes. I've scrubbed our systems and reset everything back to factory settings for anything effected or that had gotten a recent update patch,” Oddie replied. “Orville and Wilbur are scrubbing the system now.”
“We are certain it is dead,” Wilbur said. “We have assembled a contact report for the admiralty to go with the investigation report. Since the Xeno virus is classified, our contribution will have to be handled as classified as well.”
“Why?” the communication's officer asked.
“Because if the virus isn't dead, the steps we took to find and kill it will be out there for it to read and adapt against,” Orville replied, stepping in.
“Understood,” the XO buzzed as the comm officer nodded in understanding.
Orville made a show of adjusting his long flying scarf and his ancient aviator goggles on his avatar while the captain shifted the topic to the next problem on their list.
