A Call to Duty

by David Weber

  “They’re not showing either,” Creutz said. “Could be just the sensors are down. The—oh, my God,” he interrupted himself, his voice suddenly horrified.

  “What is it?” Ouvrard demanded, pulling herself down into the nearest station and jabbing for a status report.

  “The reactor pylon,” Creutz said mechanically. “It snapped. It just snapped.”

  “That’s impossible,” Ouvrard countered, the words complete reflex as she pulled up the proper sensor schematics. The pylon connecting the reactor section to the forward part of the sloop was a solid twenty meters in diameter, containing an axial access passageway as well as a pair of heavily shielded, two-meter-diameter plasma conduits. It couldn’t just break. It simply couldn’t.

  Only it had.

  Ouvrard stared at the display in disbelief, her injuries and even those of her crew momentarily forgotten. The pylon had broken just forward of its midpoint, leaving the two sections of the ship connected only by the slender dorsal bracing line. The pylon and hull forward of the break had been burned black by the explosive release of the plasma jets from their containment conduits. On one of the camera views, she could see a section of the hull still bubbling as it radiated the extra heat into the vacuum. The aft section of the ship was flopping slowly back and forth, the movement threatening to break the final connection and send it drifting away.

  Ouvrard had known the hull harmonic from the unbalanced impeller ring was bad. She’d had no idea that it could be this bad.

  She took a deep breath, wincing as the lung expansion sent a stab of pain through bruised or cracked ribs. What had happened had happened. Her responsibility now was to what was left of her ship.

  Or rather, what was left of her crew. The ship itself, as a ship, no longer existed.

  She jabbed the intercom’s broadcast key. “Initiate emergency procedures,” she called toward the mike. A formality, really—anyone aboard who was still alive and functional would already have figured out that part. “Damage control: triage assessment. Medical personnel: full sweep.” She glanced over her shoulder. “And send someone to the bridge,” she added.

  She keyed off, wondering dimly if anyone was even out there to hear.

  A hand groped across her shoulder to one of the handholds. “God in heaven,” Creutz murmured. “What in hell just happened?”

  “Three things,” Ouvrard said. “One: we just lost MPARS’s criminally stupid race to Rafe’s Scavenger. Two: we also just proved that this ship design sucks swamp water. Three: we got an unexpected chance to practice our wrecked ship search-and-rescue techniques.”

  “On ourselves,” Creutz said with a shallow sigh. “Aye, aye, Ma’am. I’m on it.” Carefully, he eased toward his station.

  “Where are you hurt?” Ouvrard called after him.

  “I’m all right, Ma’am,” he replied over his shoulder.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “I know,” Creutz said. “I’m moving. Others aren’t. Triage rules say they go first.”

  Ouvrard eased a tentative hand against her injured ribs, wincing at the flash of fresh pain. “Very good, Commander,” she said, keying for a damage-assessment schematic. “Carry on.”

  The only really good thing about working in zero-gee, Travis had long since concluded, was that it gave you the ability to turn and twist your body into whatever angle was most convenient for the task at hand.

  Still, it remained a bit disconcerting to look up and see the entire CIC crew in their stations hanging above his head.

  “Five-mil,” Yarrow said.

  Travis returned his attention to the half-open display monitor and handed her the requested wrench. Above and behind him, the CIC hatch slid open, and he felt the ripple of air as someone came into the compartment. “Relieving you, Jones,” a familiar voice said.

  Travis looked up again. It was Senior Chief Inzinga, taking over from the current gravitics operator. Odd, because like Travis and the rest of his tech unit, Inzinga was supposed to be off-duty right now. Maybe there was more going on with this rescue than Craddock had said, something that had induced the captain to pull in more of his first-watch people.

  And given that Travis already had a casual-conversation relationship with Inzinga, this might be his chance to find out what was going on.

  “We’re getting these monitors fixed,” Travis said as Inzinga strapped himself into the station. “Chief Craddock pulled us off-duty—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Inzinga said distractedly as he punched at his keys. “Bridge; CIC,” he called toward the mike. “Inzinga. I’ve rewound the record and am starting my pass.”

  Travis looked at Yarrow, saw his same puzzlement reflected in her face. Whatever was going on, they’d apparently missed it while they were concentrating on the broken monitors.

  “Okay, I see it,” Inzinga said, leaning a little closer to his primary display. “Their wedge crashed, all right. We’re still too far away for any real detail, but it doesn’t look like the fusion plant blew.”

  “We should know that in about thirty seconds,” Captain Davison’s voice came from the speaker. “Chief Grillo?”

  “Yes, Sir, I’m on it,” the woman at the tracking station said briskly. “Standing by.”

  Travis looked at the chrono. Assume Inzinga had been called shortly after the wedge event, factor in how long it took to get dressed and then get from the petty officers’ area to CIC, add in thirty seconds . . .

  “Here we go,” Grillo said. “No flare . . . no neutrino burst,” she said slowly, reading the data off her displays. “Looks like the reactor scrammed safely. From the acceleration profile, I’d say she was in turnover when the wedge went down.”

  “At least we don’t have another Rafe’s Scavenger on our hands,” Davison said. “So what the hell happened to her?”

  “Must be talking about Phobos,” Yarrow murmured in Travis’s ear.

  Travis frowned. “Phobos is out here? Who told you that?”

  “Atherton,” Yarrow said. “He heard she was heading for the same wrecked mining ship we are.”

  Travis huffed out a breath. A Navy and an MPARS ship on the same rescue mission? “Must be one hell of an important miner.”

  “No idea,” Yarrow said. “Ten-mil.”

  Travis handed her the wrench, his thoughts on Phobos and whatever was happening out there. It didn’t make sense for a ship to simply drop her wedge, especially when she was on something as time-critical as a rescue mission. Mechanical problems, then?

  But a com signal traveled at the same speed as the data from her scrammed reactor. If she was in trouble, a distress call ought to be reaching Vanguard any time now.

  “One moment, Sir,” Grillo said. “There’s a small star cluster right behind them. Let me see if I can get anything from occultation.”

  Travis stiffened. He’d taken a cursory look at Phobos’s stats during the big hoopla that had accompanied her launch. Now, suddenly, something in that list seemed to leap out from his memory. “Oh, no,” he breathed.

  “What?” Yarrow asked, peering into the open display. “Looks okay to me.”

  “Not that,” Travis said. “Phobos. I think she’s broken up.”

  “Broken up?” Yarrow repeated, staring at him. “That’s ridiculous. Tracking already said the reactor scrammed safely.”

  “I know,” Travis said, the horrific image of a shattered ship floating in front of his eyes. “But she only has a single impeller ring. If it gets misaligned or mistuned—”

  “You’ll start running harmonic stress to the hull,” Inzinga finished for him.

  Travis looked down to see the senior chief looking quizzically up at him.

  “Sorry, Senior Chief,” he apologized, wincing. He hadn’t realized he was talking loud enough to be overheard.

  “Never mind sorry, Spacer Long,” Inzinga said. “Where in the world did you learn about something that obscure?”

  “I wrote a paper on impeller instabilities at Casey-Rosewood,�
� Travis said, feeling his face redden at the memory of how that paper had come to be.

  “Oh, my God,” Grillo murmured. “Captain, if I’m reading this right, there are multiple occultations. Not a single ship, but a partial ship plus several pieces.

  “Sir, I think Phobos has broken up.”

  “That’s impossible,” another voice came from the speaker, sounding as disbelieving as Grillo did. “She wasn’t attacked—we’d have seen the flash of a warhead or the explosion from a beam weapon.”

  “Unless it was a hull harmonic,” Davison said grimly. “Senior Chief Inzinga, am I correct in assuming that can happen with a ship Phobos’s size running a single impeller ring?”

  “Yes, Sir, you are,” Inzinga said, his forehead slightly furrowed as he looked up at Travis. “It’s highly unlikely, even with a single ring, but it can happen.”

  “Well, it apparently has,” Davison said.

  Yarrow touched Travis’s arm. “We’re finished,” she said softly.

  Travis looked at the monitor. While he’d been focusing on Phobos’s accident, she’d finished fixing the monitor and had put the casing back in place.

  And it was time for them to go.

  Only Travis didn’t want to. Not now. He wanted to hear what the captain was going to do about Phobos. Just because the sloop had broken up didn’t mean that no one was alive aboard her. On the contrary: with the reactor safely scrammed and life pods within easy reach of everyone, there was a good chance that many or even most of the crew had made it through.

  But they couldn’t last out there forever. A catastrophic hull harmonic could have left hidden damage: charged capacitors, unvented plasma streams, or stress cracks that could shatter at any time. The crew were sitting inside a gigantic time bomb, and sooner or later that bomb would go off.

  “Come on,” Yarrow said, more emphatically this time.

  Travis clenched his teeth. “Right,” he said. Glancing around CIC, he silently wished them all good luck.

  They, and Phobos’s survivors, were going to need it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Metzger had hoped the preliminary report would turn out to be wrong. There was every chance it would, after all, especially given the extreme unlikelihood that Phobos had been taken down by a hull harmonic catastrophe. Senior Chief Inzinga could easily have been jumping at shadows in reading his data.

  But he wasn’t. The harmonic was real.

  Phobos had disintegrated. Some of her crew were undoubtedly already dead, with more to follow over the next few hours. The question now was how long that list would ultimately be.

  And Vanguard and Captain Davison had now been presented with the ultimate nightmare dilemma. Because Rafe’s Scavenger was also out there, just as crippled as Phobos, also carrying the dead and the probably soon-to-be dying.

  Metzger had run the numbers. If Vanguard continued on her present course, there was a good chance she would reach Rafe’s Scavenger before the miners’ air ran out. Alternatively, Davison could change course and probably get to Phobos before the hulk disintegrated further.

  But whichever path the captain chose, there was virtually no chance Vanguard could rescue one ship and then get to the other. Not in time.

  “Still no response from Phobos,” Com reported. “Looks like their laser and radio went out when the ship broke apart.”

  “Keep trying,” Davison ordered, his tone studiously neutral. He was facing forward, and Metzger couldn’t see his expression from her station, but she had no doubt it was as steady as his voice.

  But it was all a mask, and everyone on the bridge knew it. This was the situation that every commanding officer knew he or she might one day have to make.

  Rafe’s Scavenger was a civilian craft, and RMN standing orders were to render all aid and assistance to such vessels. Phobos was an MPARS rescue ship, with many former Navy personnel aboard.

  Rafe’s Scavenger had eight survivors awaiting rescue. Phobos’s tally was unknown, but it was probably in the dozens.

  Metzger had no idea which way Davison would go. She had no idea which way she herself would go if the decision was hers.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, the starry-eyed cadet who’d once dreamed of command was being very quiet.

  The monitor had been fixed, Craddock had decided that more people on the secondary collection system would just get in each other’s way, and Travis and Yarrow had been returned to off-duty status.

  “You all right?” Yarrow asked as they sat across from each other in the mess hall.

  “Hmm?” With an effort, Travis brought his eyes back from his contemplation of nothing in particular.

  “I asked if you were all right,” Yarrow said, lifting her coffee cup carefully. The spin section had been started up again, but at half its usual speed, and in the lower gravity it was easy to let liquids get away from you.

  “Not really.” Travis tried a smile. “I didn’t think I was letting it show.”

  “Next time you don’t want something to show, pay more attention to your coffee,” Yarrow advised. “You’ve been ignoring it, and you hate cold coffee.”

  Travis looked down at his cup. She was right, on both counts.

  “Actually, come to think about it,” she continued, “there’s probably a regulation against taking food and not eating it. You should look into that. It would be a travesty to waste food.”

  “I keep thinking about Phobos,” Travis said, not even caring that, once again, he was being ridiculed simply for following the rules. “There has to be something we can do.”

  “I assume the captain’s working on the problem,” Yarrow pointed out. “Not to mention everyone on Unicorn One and Gryphon Base. Unless you’ve got a magic wand stashed away somewhere, I think you and I are pretty much out of it.” She cocked her head. “You never said anything about having written a paper on impeller instabilities. Was that part of your class work?”

  “No, it was a special project,” Travis said, feeling the bitter irony of the situation. If Lieutenant Cyrus hadn’t trumped up those charges and kicked him out of impeller school, he might have been one of the people who’d helped design and tune Phobos’s ring. He might have been able to keep this from happening.

  Instead, he was sitting here helplessly, with agonized frustration and cold coffee.

  And then, an odd thought tweaked at the back of his mind. Lieutenant Cyrus . . .

  “What is it?” Yarrow asked.

  “An idea,” Travis said. He stood up—too fast—and started to float off the deck. He caught the underside of his chair with his toe and pulled himself back down. “I need to run some numbers. Lounge terminal’s closest, right?”

  “Should be,” Yarrow confirmed, standing up more carefully. “You going to drink that coffee? Or should we say to hell with regs and throw it away?”

  Travis hesitated, then picked up the cup and downed the contents in a single, long swallow. It tasted terrible. Grabbing Yarrow’s empty cup, he set both mugs on the nearest disposal podium and pushed off his chair. “Let’s go.”

  Hanford stared at his helmet chrono, watching in strange and morbid fascination as the numbers clicked over to yet another minute. A lot of the minutes were past. A whole lot more of them still lay ahead.

  And the ultimate end was still shrouded in blackness. The same blackness that shrouded his dead ship.

  He scowled, forcing his eyes to shift their focus to his faceplate and the scene beyond. He’d never been the moody, introspective type. Here and now, with their lives hanging by a spider thread, was no time to start.

  Or maybe it was. Certainly the rest of Rafe’s Scavenger’s remaining crew seemed to have gone that direction. They were floating in various spots and at various angles around the bridge, some doing a slow spin, others mostly stationary. The rotating ones’ faces were periodically visible, and Hanford noted that all of them seemed calm or at least resigned. That was good: slower breathing would stretch out their air supplies. The two who were fa
cing away from him were more of a question mark, but their lack of restless twitching implied that they, too, were trying to conserve their oxygen. Gratz was still unconscious, and Chou was still watching over him, her monitor plugged into his suit’s data jack.

  Juarez, annoyingly, had found enough peace within him to actually take a nap.

  For a long minute Hanford gazed at the man’s calm, sleeping face. Then, with nothing better to do, he returned his attention to his chrono.

  Another minute had passed. With a sigh, he settled back into his vigil.

  “Okay, here’s what’s we’ve got,” Creutz said, making a final notation on his tablet and offering it to Ouvrard.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking it. Creutz was still moving slowly and carefully, she noted, as was perfectly natural for a man with a broken arm and some cracked ribs. But the medics had done their job well, and Creutz seemed more or less functional again.

  Certainly as functional as Ouvrard herself was feeling. Her own cracked ribs were thankfully not hurting anymore, but the painkillers she’d been given were making her just a bit light-headed. Blinking away the slightly sparkling fog, she ran her eyes down Creutz’s list.

  It was as bad as she’d expected. Possibly a bit worse. One of the shuttles had taken a full blast of plasma in its flank and control thrusters when the conduits snapped, and wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The other was flyable, but the wrenching of the pylon where it had been attached had put some cracks in its body and two of its three fuel tanks.

  As for Phobos herself, she was in the process of dying.

  Half the forward compartments were either breached or cut off from the central core. The impeller room, only one bulkhead forward of the bridge and the rest of the core section, was nevertheless completely inaccessible, and all attempts to communicate with possible survivors in there had gone unanswered. There was no communication at all with the aft part of the ship, the section containing the fusion plant and associated engineering compartments behind the broken pylon. There might still be survivors, but there was no way to tell until a search party could physically get back there and look.