“Spin her around and get us out of here,” roared the First Officer, but the helmsman remained paralyzed at his console, “That means light the engines and get us out of here, you fool,” snarled Tremblay, lunging out of the signal section and struggling for the Helm.
With a sudden, spastic jerk, DuPont snapped back to reality and leaned forward over his console, fingers flying at the controls and the ship gave another sudden lurch.
The bridge crew was watching the catastrophe playing out on their consoles or, if they didn’t have anything important right at the moment, on the main screen. People who could do something were doing it. For everyone else, it was like watching a train wreck.
Everyone who knew anything important was busy trying to save the ship. Everyone except yours truly. Because, truth be told, I didn’t know anything important. I was in absolute mortal terror, and there was nothing really for me to do. I tried to remind myself that even in a real fleet the Admiral didn’t deal directly with flying the ship, he dealt instead with directing the ship and any other vessels in their formation in the right direction. Still, I felt utterly useless. I was useless.
Wait a minute. What about the other ships, the ones that were some strapped to the outside of our hull!
I jumped out of the Throne and almost fell down. “Modulate our shields so we don’t burn up, and someone man the bucking cables,” I ordered, grabbing the arm of the Admiral's Throne and pulling myself back inside. “We still have a pirate cruiser and several cutters full of refugees welded to the hull. If they fall off and we don’t catch them, they’re as good as dead!”
“We can’t pull directly away from the planet,” cried the Helmsman, “We’re going to have to slingshot around. We’re in too close.”
“Do it, man,” growled the First Officer. “Just get us out of here.”
“I think I have a partial answer,” said the Science Officer. “This system has large deposits of Trillium, the substance used to make the star drive work.”
“Initiating full burn now,” said the Helmsman, “we’re going in!”
Engines that normally vibrated slightly when used in deep space, howled fiercely deep inside the ship as the gee forces pressed myself and everyone else on the Flag Bridge back in their chairs.
I growled wordlessly as I strained against the increasing pressure brought about by our acceleration.
Chapter 22: Aches and Pains
He was the very model of an ancient, outdated Space Engineer.
A figured loomed over the old engineer with something bright and metallic in its hand. Barely able to concentrate over the line of fire running down the middle of his chest, he still managed to get his right hand in between himself and the figure.
Wandering fingers found an arm and locked on with all the intensity a dying man could muster.
“Let me die,” said the old man. “I’ve had a good run.”
“Let go of me you ornery old coot,” said the grey haired Doctor, trying to pull away.
“Just like my good lads on the hull,” the old engineer continued, blinking back tears.
“You’re not going to die. Now keep your grabby hands off of me,” the Doctor said, struggling to release his arm.
“Didn’t ye hear me,” hissed Spalding, pulling the Doctor closer. “It’s my time. Don’t try to keep me alive any longer. Just let me go. There’s others that need you more than a washed up old has-been like me,” his hand spasmed and he released the grey haired Doctor.
The Doctor stood up and straightened his lab coat. “Just like a little spoiled boy whose toy got broken. Oh woe is me, woe is me. Life can’t go on.” He mimed the rending of his garments.
“Who you calling boy, Sonny,” coughed the old engineer to the grey haired Doctor.
“You know what, you are right,” snapped the doctor. “There’re lots of others who need that bed more than you do. Get your cantankerous old self out of my Infirmary and into your own bed for a change. We don’t need any freeloaders in medical right now!”
The Engineer half rose out of his bed before the line of fire down his chest caused him to collapse back with a grimace of pain.
“Can’t you see I’m dying, you dumb quack,” he gasped.
The Doctor threw his hands up in the air. “What a bunch of space-rot,” he said, placing his hands on his hips. The doctor started to speak in an imitation of a little girl's voice, “Oh, don’t save me. I’m as good as dead already. No one should waste the effort on such a pitiful, spoiled old brat like me, blah, blah, blah.” Then he leveled a finger at the old engineer. “It's too late to let you die, I already saved you, you ungrateful old tyrant,” he said, then muttered something under his breath.
“What,” the old engineer blurted incredulously. “But I can still feel the fire in my chest every time I move or take a breath.”
“Just like an engineer,” scoffed the Doctor, “he feels a little pain and he thinks the job’s not even started. The human body’s not like one of your mechanical contraptions. When you give it a tune up, things hurt afterwards. That’s how you know you’re still alive.”
Junior Lieutenant Terrance Spalding lay back in his bed with a sigh. Then a thought occurred to him and he picked up his head. “You didn’t give me one of those shoddy mechanical hearts,” he demanded. “I’ve seen the specs on those things and they aren’t reliable for more than forty years of heavy use.”
The Doctor shook his head. “If you’d come to me two years ago, this wouldn’t be a problem. You’re old, old man. These things wear out, especially at your age. If I had the time and equipment I’d have just grown you a brand new heart.” He turned away, “Forty years of hard work,” he scoffed in disbelief after glancing away from the aged engineer.
“What the blazes did you do,” Spalding demanded, bordering on furious.
“I removed a few blockages in your tubes, and worked a bit on some of the areas with dead muscle," the doctor explained. "Like I said, a tune up. It's amazing what modern medicine can do, even with a bunch of old, worn-out and outdated equipment like we have here on the Lucky Clover.”
“Hey, that’s first rate equipment,” the Chief Engineer barked, unable to stay silent when someone was knocking something on the Clover. Even if it was the medical equipment they were talking about. Besides, as he was the one that swiped some of that ‘old, outdated’ stuff from one of the Clover's sister ships before they went to the breakers, he felt a little bit of personal pride was at stake. He’d known the ship would need a fully equipped medical suite someday, and it looked like the he'd been right once again.
“Maybe fifty years ago it was still considered top line. Nowadays, it wouldn’t be out of place on a run-down civilian passenger ship,” said the Doctor. “Times change, you know.”
“Bah,” said the Chief Engineer. “Go away and leave me be. Can’t you see there’s a sick man in here?” Despite the sound of raised voices and lots of activity out in the rest of the infirmary, the ornery old officer refused to budge. Too sick, he decided, not trusting the wild claims made by the Clover’s chief of medical staff. “Outdated. I’ll show him outdated. He’s the one who’s outdated, not anything on the Lucky Clover,” muttered the Spalding under his breath. “He’s just afraid to admit it, he is. Ha!”
The Doctor left as instructed, but a few minutes later came back. Pulling aside the curtain, he revealed a sick bay full of men, women and children.
Children! What were a bunch of kids doing on the Clover? Pushing their way through the overloaded infirmary was a small delegation of from engineering. The Chief Engineer turned away. He couldn’t face them. All he could think about was the men lost during the ramming. Men he’d failed to keep safe.
Ignoring the hubbub outside his small bed area, he faced the Doc. “How many boys did I lose out there, Doc,” he asked, choking back the inevitable tears.
The Doctor hesitated.
“Just give it to me straight,” he said.
“I think it's too soon for
this kind of talk,” he started, but at the engineer’s raw look, he relented. “The final tally is 6 dead on the hull and 53 knocked off the hull, but eventually recovered.”
The engineer, who’d closed his eyes as soon as he knew he was getting the bad news, waited for more. When he realized that was it, he popped one eye open. Anyone dead was still one too many in his book, but he’d expected the final tally to number in the hundreds. They’d rammed another ship while a whole work shift was on the hull, after all!
“How could that be,” he wondered aloud. "I felt the impact!"
“Well,” said the Doctor, “we found crewman Pitt electrocuted in the bottom of a laser turret, not a hint of shrapnel in him, so there’s no way to tell when he perished. The other five…” he trailed off and looked away.
The Chief Engineer, who had been about to wave away details, looked up sharply at the Doc’s hesitation to give him the straight download.
“What happened to them, Doc,” he said grimly.
“Well, as best we can tell,” the Doctor said a little shame faced to be saying this, “They were men who weren’t even supposed to be on the hull. They were assigned to main engineering at the time. It seems… well from the equipment we found with them it looks like they were moving an illegal liquor still they’d hidden down in one of the laser pits, when the shrapnel cut them to pieces.”
“Names,” asked the chief engineer his eyelids squeezed tight.
“Castwell, Burke, Helio, Smith and Johnson,” the Doctor said in a low voice.
“Castwell,” he sighed. He’d always know that man would come to a bad end. A natural born slacker, if ever he’d seen on. Still, for all his other failings, the man had a natural touch when it came to handling the bucking cables.
“When you write up the report, remember, their families don’t never need to know they died abandoning their posts for liquor,” the Chief Engineer sighed again.
“Well,” the Doctor said briskly, “Fortunately our shields were full strength forward and we only hit two cutters. For a ramming event the shrapnel was pretty minimal and really only hit the port side, the one you were on. As far as the damage to the ship, that was minimal also,” He gave the Chief Engineer a level look.
“There are a few men about to come over here and thank their Chief Engineer for saving their lives and giving the command crew a piece of his mind,” he grabbed hold of the Chief Engineer’s wrist, “I’ve got over eight thousand refugee settlers to take care of and another fifty thousand spread all throughout the convoy. I’ll not have this ship torn apart by sectarian violence.”
The engineer glared at the hand holding his wrist, his other hand unconsciously reaching for his missing plasma torch.
“Praise Saint Murphy that we only lost six men and five of those in part thanks to their own greed and stupidity," started the doctor. "Watch and make sure it doesn’t happen again, certainly. But think! The way this ship is staffed right now, mistakes, grave mistakes that cost lives are going to happen. Let it go. Whatever feud you’ve started with the Admiral, put an end to it. He’s offered a pardon for all those involved. The last thing we need is engineering feuding with the bridge crew. So just take a deep breath and go say hello to those grateful men outside and turn their energies in a positive direction.”
“The little Admiral can take his pardon and personally introduce it to the reactor core,” growled the Chief Engineer.
The doctor drew himself up severely. “The ‘Admiral’ just saved a quarter of a million lives from pirates who had already blown up one ship and slaughtered close to fifty thousand helpless settlers. He did it using an old, unarmed ship that barely has enough men to operate it effectively and his actions only cost the lives of six men from engineering,” the Doctor hissed, “Six. Stop crying over spilt milk and thank Murphy twice over, the price tag was so low.”
Spalding growled. “I’ll think about it,” was all he said before deliberately turning away from the Doc.
When the men from his engineering department arrived, pirates, empires and Admirals, along with all of their problems melted from his mind.
Seeing the beaming faces of his engineering crew was like a shot in the arm for the old spacehand, and before he knew it he was on his feet with only the steadying hand of one of his crewmen.
“It's great to see you, Chief,” said one of the men.
“Yeah, sir. If it weren’t for you there’d be a lot of families missing their sons and daughters when we get back home to Capria,” said another with a grateful look at the Chief Engineer and a darker look in the general direction of the Bridge.
“Belay that stuff and nonsense, Parkiny,” said the Chief Engineer, refusing to let the good mood leave him now that it was here, “and tell me about my ship!”
From a position up on his feet, things seemed much brighter than they did lying in a bed in sick bay, asking to die. Seeing the faces of so many grateful refugees was surprising, but gratifying as well.
After looking at a twelve year old girl with a bloody nose from compression sickness leaning against the wall because there was no place to sit down, it just didn’t seem right to stay in the infirmary. How could he take up a bed when there were others that needed it worse?
Before he knew it, his men were chattering away in his ear about the next big point transfer they were going to make on behalf of the refugees. For some reason or other the Prometheans had nowhere else to go, and before he knew it he was on his way to engineering. He even had to stop a passel of overenthusiastic engineers waiting outside in the corridor from carrying him up on their shoulders.
“You’re all nothing but a bunch of blue-faced idiots. I’d smash my head on the ceiling for sure! For shame, being away from your posts at a time like this,” he said with more than a note of affection buried beneath his gruff facade. He just didn’t have the heart right then to reprimand them for slacking off, not like they deserved.
He wasn’t feeling very affectionate several hours later when they crashed out of hyperspace and the ship started shuddering around him.
“What have they done to us this time,” yelled Lieutenant Spalding.
He gestured to a group of power room technicians, “You bunch monitor the power core, while I work on modulating the stabilizers,” the Chief of Engineering yelled, fingers flying over the work console he’d just been sitting at until that moment. “The last thing we need is an emergency core shut down.”
He fine-tuned the stabilizers and realized the ship was still shaking and shuddering around them. Clearly they weren’t the issue.
“Oh gods, we’re all going to die!” A large mechanic screamed as the ship gave another big lurch and the normal space drive went to maximum burn.
His console chimed indicating an incoming call and one of the bridge crew appeared on his screen.
“Admiral says to catch the prize ships with bucking cables if they break fee and fall off,” said a scared looking bridge stander.
“Go away you idiot, I’ve got more important things on my plate than a couple of prize ships,” said Spalding, fingers flying as he checked to make sure the power core was stable.
“But Sir! They’re full of refugees. The fall into the atmosphere will kill them, for sure,” pleaded the bridge-man.
He gave the crewman on his screen a flat look and cut the connection. Atmosphere! What atmosphere, what had those boys on the bridge gotten the ship into this time, “You sleep the day away and half the night to boot and when you wake up, everything’s gone all topsy-turvy,” he cursed, fumbling for his override crystal so he could bring up the controls for the bucking cables.
“Is it too much to ask for one smooth point transfer out of this bridge crew, just one!” he demanded of the space gods. As usual, the space gods chose not to answer. “That’s all I ask. Just one.”
When the pirate cruiser, now apparently full of refugees broke free of the ship it was all he could do to catch it and then keep the bucking cables from snapping.
&
nbsp; “Hold together, my fine one,” he encouraged the Lucky Clover as gee forces pushed him into his chair. “You can do it. I know you can.”
Eventually, the shaking gentled down to a harsh vibration. Well, harsh for normally very much in fine tune normal space engines. He could feel it anyway. Even though the rest of engineering gave a cheer when the shaking stopped.
He didn’t see anything else fall off the hull, so whatever other ships they were worried about on the bridge must have stayed put because there was nothing on his screen.
Chapter 23: Bugs!
We picked up speed. Slowly at first, but faster and faster until we were hurtling at near-ludicrous speeds around the planet.
Admiral Who? (A Spineward Sectors Novel:) Page 19
