by Crucible
“Try to come up with another fifty. Some more ships would be good too,” Keeler told them
“Now, should we pursue the alien ship?”
“For all we know, it burned up in the sun,” Alkema said.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Keeler replied. “I think they flew close enough to the sun to spoof our sensors, that’s all.”
“I would advise against going after that ship,” Adrian Honeywell said. “As I told you, we are stretched thin. It would make more tactical sense to keep our forces close to our own ships. If we send out search missions, the enemy can isolate and destroy them, or attack us when our defenses are down.”
Keeler knew Honeywell was right. But that didn’t matter. He was in command. “Prepare long-range reconnaissance ships and have them stand by.”
Keeler – Secondary Command Center
Lear regained consciousness, feeling curiously refreshed after her dream. Somehow, Scout and Fangboner had rigged up a sort of cot and laid her out in an auxiliary chamber. She sat up, feeling a little dizzy, the room temporarily went out of focus, but she willed herself to see straight.
The Secondary Command Center seemed lighter than before as she pulled herself into it.
Repair drones were busily constructing an inner dome, below the large dome that sealed off the damaged part of the ship. Nearly half-completed, the inner dome was beginning to hide the clear crystalline outer dome beyond, and its lighting beams made SC-2 much brighter than it had been previously.
She checked her chronometer, and saw that six and half hours had gone by.
She also seemed to be alone
“Specialist Fangboner?” she called out. “Lieutenant Scout?” She got no response. She touched her COM Link. “Specialist Fangboner or Lieutenant Scout, please respond?” No response came. “Fangboner? Scout?…” she gritted her teeth. “Move-0-Bot.”
“Yo!,” said Move-O-Bot emerging from an alcove. “You look terrible.”
“Where are Fangboner and Scout?”
“They went below to check out the Secondary Command systems… and the Central Braincore,” Move-O-Bot explained.
“They left you behind to tell me this?”
“Negative, I just didn’t feel like working.”
As soon as these systems are stabilized, I’m having his speech protocol erased, thought Lear.
“Isn’t there some debris somewhere you should be clearing?”
“Negative. The repair bugs are processing the debris into structural patches to close up the breaches in the inner hull.”
Lear crossed the SC-2 to a command station. Scout had rigged it up with a power-pack from her toolkit, and Lear could access up-to-minute data on the ship’s repair status. However, she decided it would be better to get an oral report from Lieutenant Duke, and remind him of who was in charge on this mission.
Duke’s face appeared on the command station’s COM Link. “TyroCommander Lear, good to have you back with us.”
“Status report, Lt. Duke.”
“Are you all right? You had us worried.”
“The status of the ship, Lieutenant Duke.”
Betraying the slightest irritation, he answered. “Keeler is 145,000 kilometers above the planet. We are in no danger of hitting the planet, but we will fall into the gravitational influence of the planet’s largest moon in eighteen days and impact the surface nine days later.”
“Will the ship be repaired before then?”
“Barring further attacks, we will be able to make a stable orbit before then. There are twenty-one repair teams on the ship currently, supplemented by ten teams of warfighters… a total of 255 personnel are on-board Keeler.”
“I want the number of teams on this ship doubled in the next ten hours,” she said.
“I would stretch that to twenty hours minimum, and forty would be better. That many crews would be difficult to manage without more operational systems. We…”
“Four hundred people, Lieutenant,” she repeated. “I want four hundred people working on this ship in the next ten hours, is that clear?”
“You’ll have to take that up with Commander Keeler,” Duke replied tersely.
“And the next two teams that arrive on this ship I want sent to SC-2 to give me an operational Command Center,” she continued. “Where are the repair teams currently concentrated?”
“Most of them are working on damage assessment and repair of critical systems, especially positional thrusters and command and control systems. We also have one team currently working on restoring the Number 1 fusion reactor. If we can make it operational, we’ll regain gravitational stability, power to thrusters, life support, and primary Braincore. That would be a huge help.”
“You can forget about Primary Braincore,” said Technical Lieutenant Scout, emerging from an access point in the floor. “All the power and data relays have been severed. It will take hours to restore those connections.”
“Report to me, not to Lieutenant Duke,” Lear corrected her. “What is the status of the Primary Braincore?”
Scout stared at her for a second, and then repeated. “All the power and data relays have been severed. It will take hours to restore those connections.”
“How did the battle damage get through to the Braincore,” Duke asked. “It’s in the most heavily shielded section of the ship.”
“It wasn’t battle damage, it was sabotage,” Scout told them. “Someone physically cut the connections with a plasma torch.”
“Who?” Lear demanded. “Who sabotaged this ship?”
“I don’t know,” Scout answered. “I could not possibly know.”
“It wasn’t me,” said Move-O-Bot.
“If someone was sabotaging this ship, then that’s a bloody serious problem,” Lear said in a near shout which hurt her head and she had to close her eyes straightaway afterward.
“Are you all right, TyroCommander,” Scout asked. “Should we send for a Med-Tech?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” Lear yelled. “Are you trying to remove me from my command, because I am absolutely fine, and I am going to return this ship to full functionality. Mr. Duke, you will send an additional repair crew to SC-2, A.S.A.F.P. I will get two hundred more technicians from Keeler. And the rest of you will bloody well do what I order you to, is that understood?”
It was quiet for a moment. “Is that bloody well understood?” she repeated.
“Affirmative,” said Duke.
“Affirmative,” Scout repeated. And she quietly began to descend back into the access tube for the Primary Braincore.
She looked at them, her face a mask of contempt. “Then, get back to work, all of you.”
“TyroCommander Lear,” Duke said, his voice not in the slightest undeterred.
“What is it?” she snarled.
“I thought I should tell you that we have completely lost contact with your son. He was last seen in the UnderDecks below the Hangar Bay, which underwent a severe structural failure about two hours ago.”
She looked stunned. “Can you track his ID sliver?”
“There’s still too much residual EM Interference from the TransAtmospheric detonation,” Duke told her. “But we will continue to try.”
“Affirmative, you will continue to try,” Lear ordered, seething at him. “Add another twenty search and rescue personnel to the two hundred you will demand from Keeler.”
Keeler – Hangar Bay Alpha
After transmitting the demand for two hundred more personnel (and being told one hundred in the next twenty hours was all he could expect under the circumstances) Lt. Duke was leaning over a communications panel, speaking with a holoprojection of one of his repair team leaders, several decks below. Specialist 1C Miranda reported, “The original interface was fried, Lt. Duke. We’ve replaced it with a Technical Datapad. We haven’t detected any internal damage.”
Duke pondered this for a moment. “You’re telling me it’s operational.”
“We’ve d
one everything we can without turning it on,” told him. “We have high confidence that it won’t explode.”
“High confidence?”
“Forty per cent, maybe better.”
“Fire her up!” Duke ordered.
The technicians around him grabbed on to the sturdiest objects they could find.
Duke touched on the command pad and entered the activation sequence.
And with a tritium kiss, the great spirit of the Fusion Reactor awakened. Light and power built in its heart, then flowed outward through the conduits and into the wrecked, salvaged, and surviving systems of the Pathfinder Ship Lexington Keeler.
Where the power conduits were intact, the power flowed where it was meant to go, and it brought life to lighting systems, life support, sensors, and even the gravitational regulators.
Where the power conduits were blocked, the power flowed into capillary systems, seeking a way around the blockade, as the systems had been programmed to. A diversion here, a backtrack there, a new bridge somewhere else and this power brought still more systems to life.
Around the ship, sensors that had not been on-line since the initial attack awakened, and sensed the degree of damage. The ones that found themselves in vacuum activated emergency bulkheads and re-pressurized sections where possible. Where they were able, the systems providing light and heat activated.
The water processing systems activated, then shut down again, as 85% per cent of Keeler’s water supply had already boiled away into space and the rest was locked in tertiary containment areas.
Some of the power n were completely gone, for example, every powerline to the Primary and Secondary Command Towers abruptly ended where the two towers had been destroyed.
One power stream flowed up and spiraled around a ruined support beam, lighting it up like a giant Tesla coil before pulsing off into space.
Raw power gushed from a ruptured conduit at the base where the Primary Command tower had once stood, turning from white to yellow to orange to pink as it flowed across the ruins of the dorsal hull. It encountered a battalion of insectroid repair mechabots resealing the plating over the habitation areas. Gorging on the sudden flood of energy, the mechabots grew larger and reproduced madly. A few of them mutated. Most of the mutations were recognized as defective by the other mechabots and immediately consumed for construction materials.
But a few emerged with higher efficiency, and went immediately to work.
And one defective repair bug scurried away from the others, and hid itself on the underside of a girder, where it hid and thought about its future.
In the Hangar Bay, Emergency Lighting was replaced by brighter secondary lighting.
Several columns of displays and instruments came to life. The repair crews applauded.
“Next stop, primary drive,” Duke ordered.
“That will take longer,” Technical Specialist 2C Sperry explained. She indicated a schematic. “We’ve completed a quantum resonance scan of the primary keel. The stress of the blast and the time in the planet’s gravity well has caused micro-fracturing along its entire length. It will take days… a lot of days… to mend it.”
“What would be our best speed, with the hull in its current condition,” asked Technician Magnificent, a Sapphirean who was also trained as a helmsmen.
“Maybe… one-quarter standard velocity,” Sperry guessed.
“That won’t be fast enough for us to escape another attack,” another Specialist, a Sapphirean named Bark Magnificent said.
“Fix the drive,” Duke ordered. “We’ll worry about the rest later.” Chapter Eleven
Keeler – The UnderDecks
The foursome descended, much to Trajan Lear’s chagrin, through an access lift to a utility deck two decks below. Several of the storage lockers had buckled under pressure, and spilled tools and supplies onto the floor. Driver grabbed a few food packs, and unwrapped and ate a food bar from one of them..
“Maybe to pass the time,” Trajan began, “We could…”
“Have sex with each other,” interjected Muffy, expectantly. “After my master has satiated himself in my loins, we can trade off.”
“Um, I was thinking we could just talk about our voyages,” Trajan Lear said.
Christmas began speaking. “Our first voyage, to the colony called Silver proved uneventful. The coordinates provided were wrong, and when we arrived at system 14 146
Pegasi, we found no inhabitable planets. We proceeded to our next destination.
“14 440 Pegasi was the site of the colony world Emeishan, which was found on the third planet of that double-star system. It had a rich oxygen – nitrogen – xenon atmosphere, which colored the sky in shades of pink, and set green clouds against it. There were 682 million human inhabitants there. The planetary capital was called Attenborough.
“At the time of its discovery, Emeishan had been a humid planet with thick ground vegetation and a mean surface temperature 8 degrees above that of Sapphire. It was also densely inhabited with saurian life forms.”
“Warm-blooded reptiles,” Driver said aloud.
“Correct… eight-legged reptiles in this case, including a number of predatory species, they would have made it hazardous for humans to colonize. The first Explorer ship solved the problem by directing a barrage of asteroids into the two continental landmasses of the eastern hemisphere, obliterating most of the life forms there. The impacts also burned the jungles away and cooled the planet with atmospheric dust.
“This was almost three thousand years ago, the jungles have turned to grasslands and the climate has stabilized. The colonists primarily inhabit the dual continents of the eastern hemisphere. Their technology is only a few centuries behind ours. They have no interest in space exploration. However, they extended hospitality to our landing party..
“On the triple continent where the Commonwealth explorers let the Saurians survive, the colonists have established some outposts, mainly for resource extraction and also because the saurians are something of a tourist attraction.
“The areas of settlement on these continents are built out in huge bunker-type structures, made of heavy stone and reinforced steel, deeply rooted in the ground with no more than one or two stories above. Most settlements are surrounded by electrified border fences, to keep the predatory saurians at bay. At the settlement our team visited, the fence was taken out in a hurricane and parts of the base were over-run. Several of our crew were killed.
“We lost another exploration party on the tri-continents when they went exploring and were caught in an earthquake; Geophysical Survey Specialist Marshall Texaco of Republic, Zoological Scientist Holiday Brooke of Sapphire, and Technician William Buckshot of Sapphire.”
Driver added. “We lost five on our first voyage, to the Meridian colony. We also lost an Aves. Meridian was being taken over by an alien race…”
“Our losses were a portent of losses still to come,” Christmas interrupted, grimly of course.
“At Meridian, we discovered there was an artificial consciousness residing in the cloned alien components of the ship’s braincore,” Driver went on.
Christmas halted, and his brain began furiously processing. “Is your ship controlled by this consciousness, or did you destroy it.”
Driver clarified. “We managed to isolate ours before it was integrated with our main artificial intelligence. It calls itself Caliph, after the Caliph probe.”
“How many people did the artificial intelligence on your ship kill when it became self-aware?” Christmas asked.
“Um, none,” Trajan Lear answered. “It did threaten to annihilate a planet with two billion…
um, people … on it, but we managed to convince it not to do so.” Christmas checked his weapons and quickened his pace. “I remember why I stayed behind now. Our ship’s intelligence also evolved, and completely took over our braincore. Only by threatening to destroy it did we maintain control over it. It probably engineered this entire incident to rid the ship of its human crew.
”
This sounded a little insane. “Why would you think that?” Driver asked.
“Lex has been plotting to take over the ship since its awakening. Prime Commander McGyver never gave the order to attack the alien ship. Lex over-rode the controls and initiated the attack himself, knowing exactly what the effect would be on the ship and on the planet, either killing the crew or rendering it uninhabitable.
“Why would it…” Lear began to ask, but Christmas cut him off.
“After the crew evacuated, I remained, unknown to Lex. I could not allow him to take control of this ship, with its knowledge and its vast arsenal of weapons. I shut down the Primary Braincore to eliminate the threat.”
Christmas turned and grabbed Driver by the throat. “Your repair crews. Will they not try to reactivate the Primary Braincore?”
“Uh…” said Driver.
“Of course they will,” Christmas finished. “We have to stop them.” He abruptly stooped and pulled open an access hatch. “This way,’ he said.
Driver paused to make sure he had his bearings properly oriented, then he said, “That’s not in the direction of the Landing Bay.”
“We are not going to the Landing Bay,” Christmas said. “We have to go to the Secondary Command Center. The Primary Braincore can be accessed from there. We have to stop them.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you can do that without me,” Lear begged.
The Surface
Quentin and Rhoda made steep dives through the roiling cloud cover and leveled out at low altitude, hugging the terrain as they closed on the city. On board Quentin, Lt. Scientist Morgan conveyed to his landing team that subsurface winds in this region were down to an acceptable 10-15 knots and explained that this location’s high latitude protected it from the catastrophic disruption of the planet’s jetstream. Although the land they were flying over seemed desolate –
