Engineering was as pristine as any found in the Space Command fleet. Obviously a disciplined engineer, Charley wasn't in the Engineering section during the tour, but no one challenged their presence. As they made their way aft, for the tour of the cargo section, a door with ‘No Admittance' printed in large, red letters caught Jenetta's eye.
"What's that, Gloria?" Jenetta asked.
"That's the starboard torpedo room. Want a look?"
"If it's all right."
"Sure it is. Space Command officers always have access to any part of the ship. A Space Command safety team performed an inspection after the tubes were installed and certified them as ‘acceptable.'"
"Just ‘acceptable?'"
"Just? I thought it was normal, like being either acceptable or unacceptable."
"Well— it is one step above unacceptable. It means that the equipment passed an operations test and that the birds won't detonate before leaving the tubes."
Gloria looked at Jenetta apprehensively as she placed her hand on a palm print reader and the door slid open noiselessly to reveal an area rarely visited. On either side of the room, five enormous black torpedoes with bright red warheads, gleamed ominously in auto-feed racks. When activated, the automatic loading system would gently lower the next of the fourteen-meter long torpedoes to a conveyor, which would in turn slide it into a tube.
"Now we're talking," Jenetta said as she saw the equipment, then, "Oh— my— God!"
"What?!" Gloria asked anxiously. "What is it?"
"It looks like a Falcon Mark III system."
"That's right, Jen. You certainly know your armament." Seeing the severe expression on Jenetta's face, her own filled with concern. "Uh, is there a problem?"
"I thought they stopped making these things a century ago. There's one in the exhibit hall at the Space Weapons Museum in Kansas."
"A century ago?" Gloria said with raised eyebrows. "They looked brand new when they were installed."
"Maybe they'd just been given a fresh coat of paint or something. I'd say some arms merchant or salvage yard had these in storage for a long, long time. Apparently they finally found a suck— uh, purchasing agent or broker to buy them."
"What's wrong with them? I thought a torpedo was a torpedo was a torpedo."
"The Falcon Mark III system has two major flaws. One, and the most serious, is that reload takes almost five minutes. The other guy can be pumping a torpedo from every tube every fifteen seconds while you're sitting on your hands waiting for yours to be ready. And two, once the torpedoes are fired, there's absolutely no telemetry and guidance adjustment. They either find the target you initially pointed them at on their own, or they don't. You have no way to retarget. And there have actually been a couple of cases where Falcon Mark III's lost their intended target and then acquired their own ship as the target. At least they self-destruct fifteen minutes after being fired to prevent them from becoming a hazard to future navigation."
"God! Are there any positives?"
"Just one. You get a full three minutes of controlled flight time from them before they go ballistic for an additional twelve minutes."
"But they do explode?" Gloria asked.
"Oh, yeah, they explode. The firing mechanism goes active three seconds after leaving the ship. The trick is to get them to explode inside the enemy's hull rather than your own. And where modern systems give you a choice of several different warheads, nuclear, bomb-pumped laser, or high-explosive, the Falcon Mark III's were limited strictly to high-explosives. With laser heads, you only have to get fairly close to the target, while with nuclear warheads, you have to get very close, but with high explosives, you have to literally punch through the hull of the target to get the maximum killing effect from concussive force. If you can do that, they'll do the job nicely."
Gloria took a deep breath as she thought about the damage a torpedo would do to a ship. "Hopefully, we'll never have to use them."
Thinking only about the unreliability of the weapon, Jenetta said, "I'll certainly second that prayer."
The hover-sled ride was a new and exciting experience for Jenetta. Stretching out ahead of them for more than six kilo-meters, the tunnel had two lanes for sleds, with a two-meter wide walking track between. Overhead conduits carried fiber-optic wiring that linked all sections together for communications, armament control, and life support. Before they entered the tunnel, Gloria recorded Jenetta's name and her own in the terminal near the entrance. Their names immediately appeared on the large wall monitor that listed everyone outside the main ship.
"You put it on the hover track yourself," Lieutenant Sabella said as she took one of the five-centimeter-thick, meter-and-a-half-long sleds down from a storage rack and demonstrated. "It's really lightweight; only weighing about twelve pounds. The larboard lane takes you toward the stern and the starboard lane takes you forward towards the bow. The sleds use maglev to ride about a centimeter above the magnets in the lane."
"Maglev?"
"Yeah. That was the best option when the Lewiston link frame was designed. There are so many hundreds of thousands of link frames in use now that it's unlikely the system will ever change. An independent company introduced an ‘oh-gee' sled a few years ago that could be used with the maglev track, but it flopped. It offered improved performance, safety, and comfort, but the old sleds have become so common, they're dirt-cheap. Freight company officials embrace anything that's dirt-cheap."
Gloria placed the sled on the larboard lane, and raised a piece into position to form a backrest for the rider. Simultaneously, a t-bar safety bracket lowered into a slot on the track and swiveled. "You sit on the sled, put the heels of your boots against the stops, and grip both handles. When you're ready to move, you squeeze either handle tightly and depress the button by your thumb. The pressure on that handle then determines your speed. To speed up, release your grip a little. The harder you squeeze, the slower you go. You can't manually slow so quickly that you're ejected from the seat or flip over. When you reach your destination, depress the button again before releasing your hand, remove your sled from the lane, and hang it on a sled rack or on the railing along the walking track. If you fail to slow the sled near the end of the track, the system should slow and stop you automatically to prevent injury."
As Gloria watched, Jenetta sat down on the sled and fidgeted until she felt comfortable. Gripping both handles tightly, she depressed the button by her right thumb and slowly loosened her grip. The sled started moving slowly towards the stern of the ship, picking up speed as she relaxed her grip more and more. Her face broke into a wide smile as the individual link trusses overhead began to blur into one long piece. By the halfway point, she was barely touching the handle, and the velocity caused her facial skin to contort and ripple.
As the stern of the ship loomed ever larger, Jenetta gripped the handle, slowly tightening her grasp until she came to a halt just several meters from the end of the track. She had decided not to trust the system to halt her progress. Depressing the button, she dismounted, pushed the backrest down, then picked up the sled and hung it on the walking track railing, where she stood until Gloria finally arrived.
"That was fantastic!" Jenetta said raucously when Gloria reached her. "It's better than the Descent into Doom ride at the Old Georgetown Death Thrills Amusement Park. I loved it!"
Gloria grinned and shook her head as she stood up. "Do all Space Command ensigns have a death wish, or only you?"
Jenetta, her face still flushed with excitement said, "What?"
Pointing to the small display on the sled Jenetta had used, Gloria said, "You reached the stern of the ship in just two and a quarter minutes."
"Really?"
"So that means you were traveling what— about a hundred-sixty kilometers an hour?"
"It was fantastic! It felt like I was flying!"
"You were flying. And you could have been ejected from the sled if something had happened, like a sudden power loss. There's no seatbelt on these things
. Or you could have run up on top of someone going a lot slower."
"Does that happen?" Jenetta asked, her excitement diminishing slightly.
"Well— there are lots of system safeguards built-in, and I've never heard of it happening, but it could theoretically happen."
"But it was so much fun, Gloria! I was taught to pilot a shuttle at the Academy, which included Free Fall Spin Training, but even that wasn't anything like this. This was so real, so thrilling, so— so— visceral."
Gloria grinned and shook her head again. "Don't take this second life thing too far, Jen. You're not invulnerable, you know."
"I know," she said, then added excitedly, "but it was so much fun!"
"You're just lucky that we don't have any flying insects on board or you'd still be picking them out of your teeth."
Jenetta smiled, and picking at her front teeth with a fingernail, said jokingly, "Now that you mention it…"
Due on the bridge at 1800 hours to relieve the captain, Gloria had to cut the tour short, but Jenetta had learned enough so she could travel throughout the ship on her own. They put their sleds down on the other lane and headed back for the main ship, but this time Gloria took the lead, and Jenetta was forced to keep a grip on her sled's handle. Even so, their return to the lead link-section took just seven minutes.
Before breakfast the next day, Jenetta began jogging on the walkway in the tunnel. She could only run a half-kilometer the first morning, before being forced to return by the limitations of her body, but over the following days she increased the distance as strength returned to her limbs. She would always smile pleasantly and wave when she passed someone traveling the other way on a hover-sled, even though they couldn't raise their hand to respond. She slowly got to know all the faces even if she didn't know the names. The vitamins, nutrients, and medications provided by the doctor greatly assisted her recovery, and by the end of another week she managed to jog the entire thirteen plus kilometers to the ship's stern and back, about a third the distance of a marathon run. Her face had mostly filled out again, and thanks to her punishing exercise regimen, her body was nearing the prime condition it had been in when she leapt into the life pod aboard the Hokyuu. Her new uniforms now fit her like they had been tailored after careful measurement of her form, rather than simply being copied from an old uniform.
After working at the science station on the bridge each day, scanning space around the ship for any sign of other ships, Jenetta would run or exercise in the gym until she could barely lift her arms and legs. Several crewmen could usually be found there, practicing their kick boxing skills. Jenetta became intrigued, and after watching for a few days, asked them to teach her. It was infinitely different from the standard judo training that she had received at the Academy. Her exercise program had redeveloped her quick reflexes, along with strong arms and legs. She proved to be a natural for the contact sport, and she picked it up quickly.
Jenetta always tried to wrap up the day with some reading, having almost eleven years of news to catch up on. Although the ship couldn't transmit messages because of the danger from revealing its position, it could pick up vid & text broadcasts from the news services.
* * *
At the end of her first month aboard the Vordoth, Jenetta was feeling like a regular member of the crew, much more so than she ever had on the Hokyuu. She was able to practice with the kick-boxers as if she'd been at it for a year, and wore each bruise proudly. The level of her skill improved with every practice session. She had also started getting up an hour earlier each morning so that she could surreptitiously take a few high-speed hover sled rides before the first watch reported in. It was the one time of the day when the hover tracks were virtually deserted. Jenetta would laugh and squeal with delight as she flew through the ship at maximum speed.
At dinner one evening, Charley brought up the subject of the escape pod. "I had a chance to examine your pod this morning, Jen. I was curious as to why the retrorocket hadn't fired. I saw that the computer had sent the proper command automatically, followed by a number of manual commands to fire, so I followed the connections up to the rocket and discovered the problem. The line from the fuel tank had been ripped away. It must have happened during the explosion of the ship. There's a two-ton section of steel truss stuck in the heat shield of the main rocket engine. You must have ejected less than ten seconds from the explosion in order to have been close enough for that to happen. Your com antenna had been sheared clean away also. No wonder they never picked up your emergency beacon signal."
"I guess that explains how I got here. I'm just glad the stasis chamber exceeded specs. I can't wait until we reach the Belagresue system so that I can report in and have them notify my family that I'm still alive."
"Only about 83 more days, I estimate," Gloria said.
Jenetta came instantly awake when the Vordoth's red alert horn in her quarters began to yelp the following morning. Like its brethren everywhere, it was designed to rattle your teeth and ‘wake the dead.' Jenetta believed at first that she was experiencing the recurring dream of her final night aboard the Hokyuu, but the persistence of the shrieking alarm and flashing red lights made her realize that she was awake and that a true emergency existed. Leaping from the bed, she shed her pajamas in two quick movements, and she had her trousers on before the pajama buttons had even stopped rolling on the deck. No message to abandon ship was being broadcast, so she took a few extra seconds to button her blouse and seal her tunic before racing to the bridge.
* * *
Chapter Eight
~ July 9th, 2267 ~
Pandemonium isn't a word that should ever be used to describe events aboard a ship in space, but it most accurately characterized the situation Jenetta discovered upon entering the bridge. If she hadn't seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn't have believed it. The first and second watch groups were both rushing about screaming orders, or answers, while red emergency lights flickered incessantly.
At the Academy, they screen a preposterously amusing vid for all new cadets showing what not to do when an enemy strikes. That worst-case example seemed almost like a piano recital compared to the chaos on the Vordoth's bridge. Captain Lentz's presence was conspicuously absent in the bedlam so Jenetta headed towards Gloria, who was concentrating her attention on the astrogator's console, to the exclusion of all else.
"What's going on?" Jenetta shouted to Gloria, trying to be heard above the din.
"We're under attack by Raiders," Gloria shouted back as her hands tapped furiously at contact points on the console's control panel.
"Where's the captain?"
"We can't contact him!" Gloria shouted out without ever slowing her efforts. "I think he was in the stern-most laser array link when the attack commenced. He came to the bridge about an hour ago and told me that he was going to check out a problem with its weapons control system."
"Why are we traveling sub-light?"
"Our Light Speed drive has been disengaged by the anti-collision system! I'm trying to reengage it, but no matter how many times I reset it and alter our course, it still refuses to build an envelope! When we spotted fighters heading our way, I ordered the sub-light engines to full power. They're on a manual override so the ACS can't shut those down."
"What can I do to help?"
"I— I— I don't know. See if you can help out with the weapons fire control."
Without further word, Jenetta wheeled and rushed to the fire control consoles at the rear bulkhead where two crewmen were futilely trying to hit numerous small targets. The tiny ships, a dozen kilometers out, seemed intent on passing the Vordoth. Jenetta assumed their goal was to fire on the main ship, but with the Vordoth pushing her sub-light engines at maximum acceleration, the fighters were finding it difficult to overtake the ship while flying an erratic course that would help them avoid laser fire. Several Vordoth crewmen watched in fear and silence, while a half dozen others, like spectators at a sporting event, yelled frenzied warnings or shouted advice to the
gunners. Several of the Raider fighter craft were in fact occasionally firing on the Vordoth. They seemed to be targeting the freighter's laser arrays as they dodged and weaved their way forward, pushing their small craft to the limits of their engines. This was no computer game or simulation.
"Trying to reduce our fire capability, I assume," Jenetta said out-loud to no one in particular; and it was doubtful that anyone heard her words.
Each of the weapon screens showed the area of fire covered by the laser arrays under the control of that gunner, and each of his arrays tracked the target, but the weapons control computer selectively discharged only the array closest to the enemy craft when the command to fire was received. Jenetta watched in stunned silence and amazement as the two gunners poured an almost continuous stream of laser pulses towards the six fighters, yet never damaged a single craft. She noticed that they consistently divided their fire among all available targets instead of concentrating on one until it was destroyed. Another failing was that they never waited to get a targeting system lock on the fighters before firing. Without a lock, they might as well have been aiming a spotlight at the fighters.
By concentrating her attention on the attackers, Jenetta felt sure that she saw a pattern to their movements, but her attempts to instruct the undisciplined gunners were seemingly unheard and went unanswered. The gunner on the starboard weapons console was bobbing and weaving like a prize fighter, as though his movements and ‘body English' could somehow make up for a serious deficiency in weapons training. Unable to contain herself any longer, Jenetta finally reached out and grabbed the collar of his tunic during one of his bobs to the right. Using the momentum of his own body, as with a judo move, Jenetta yanked him clear of the chair, sat down, locked onto a target, and fired before the crewman had even stopped rolling on the deck.
* * *
Arlie ‘Vulture' Leggmann grinned wickedly as he fired an intermittent stream of laser pulses into the freighter. He loved his work. While other young boys had dreamed of building things, he'd known that he was born to kill and destroy. The three deadly arson fires that he'd set in his own neighborhood before he was even ten-years-old proved that. The third blaze had been his last though, at least until he reached eighteen. He'd been repeatedly observed chortling and trying to mask his glee, while firemen risked their lives to rescue the people and pets trapped in the homes. A suspicious cop worked with arson investigators to put the pieces together and Leggmann was arrested. Convicted of seven counts of murder, along with arson charges, he'd been sent to a juvenile facility for rehabilitation. Somewhere along the way, he learned to effectively conceal his psychosis from psychologists appointed to evaluate his mental condition. Despite the number of deaths he'd caused, his tender age at the time of the offenses saved him from being remanded to an adult facility to continue the sentences when he reached eighteen. He was instead released back into an unsuspecting society.
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