Extremis (13 page)

“Until about thirty seconds ago, it wasn’t as bad as I had thought it might be. Now, well, I’ll just be happy when it’s over, sir.”

Fleet Captain Yoshi Watanabe’s smile widened. “That’s two pieces of basic wisdom learned in one day. Not bad, Lieutenant. We might make a real officer of you yet. Here are the orders for your CO. Carry on.”

Ossian Wethermere snapped a salute, started back for the
Bucky Sherman
, and wondered if he’d still be alive come supper time.

* * *

The fourteenth time the warp point began to flux after a precise eleven-minute interval, it had become almost a dull routine—except this time it was not a single recon drone. Instead, eight Baldy RDs came through all at once, two of which destroyed each other as they tried to reform in the same volume of space.

Ossian Wethermere watched the tacplot as the
Balu Bay
burned the last six down with lasers and force beams—just as she had thirteen times before.

Zhou, who flew the bridge Engineering console and was a decided wiseass, sneered, “Gee, that time the
Bay
’s gunners actually had to work a bit.”

Wethermere felt, as much as saw, the ship’s CO—First Lieutenant (senior) Lisette Zuniga—turn slowly: it was the pace at which she did most things. She impaled Zhou with her deep-set, deep brown eyes. Her face—lined despite antigerone treatments—was a wordless reproach: to Ossian, no matter the lighting or her mood, Zuniga always looked like a grieving mother who had wandered out of a Goya canvas. She had been CO of the
Bucky Sherman
for an unprecedented seven years and showed no inclination or ambition to pursue any higher position. She did not seem to enjoy command—indeed, she did not seem to enjoy people—and now she was having to veer into both of these unwelcome domains at the same time. “Mr. Zhou,” she began, “if you cannot constrain your remarks to matters—”

“Transit!” shouted Sensor Officer Lubell.

In the tacplot, a single—and very large—red blip had emerged from the warp point.

Lehman at Tactical shouted louder. “Holy shit—it’s an SD!
Balu Bay
flushing her racks!”

Wethermere slammed the shock harness down over his shoulders as Zuniga, eyes wide and staring, started to give an order, then seemed to change her mind—

She’s not going to send in time
, Wethermere realized in one terrified blink. He shouted over the others. “Communications, send alert to the Fleet, all sys—”

And then the world turned upside down and wrenched violently sideways. He had a brief impression of Zuniga flung from her chair and straight against the portside bulkhead, then propelled headfirst into what momentarily looked and felt like the ceiling-become-the-deck as the gravitic polarizers flip-flopped. A few other bodies tumbled past, glass sleeting straight through one of them as a flatscreen burst outward and the acrid pall of burning wires and insulation seemed to rush into the bridge from all directions.

Wethermere almost failed to realize that the world had come to a stop again. He looked around.

Zuniga, Lehman, and Masharraf at Ops were all dead. Zhou had only got his harness half on and was clutching his left arm. Nandita Vikrit, at the combined Communications and Computer Management console, looked almost bemused as she dabbed at the red wash of blood pouring down from her sliced forehead. The other three—Lubell, Anapa at Helm, and Tepple at Weapons—seemed unhurt.

“Anapa, best speed. Heading—uh, directly away from that SD.” An inelegant but effective first order as commander, thought Wethermere. “Ops, status of the
Balu Bay
—” And then he realized he had made a request of a dead man. Time to recrew empty stations. “Nandita, run Ops through your board. Tepple, shift over to Tactical—transfer Weapons there. Zhou, can you still man your post?” Zhou groaned something that Wethermere decided to interpret as an affirmative. “Nandita, send to all ship’s sections: report damage and casualties. Lubell, keep one eye on the SD and give me its approximate status—but keep the other eye on the warp point. If there’s any change—”

“Got it, sir. Our sensors are in good shape—”

—Zhou tried to agree by saying “yes,” but it became “yaaughh” as he winced against the pain in his arm—

“—but
Balu Bay
is—sir, she’s gone. Not even flotsam.”

“The Baldy SD?”

“She’s coming about now, sir. Sluggish. Evidence of internal fires, explosions. A hell of a debris cloud around her.”

“Zhou, how are our shields?”

“Fifty percent,” the engineer gritted out between clenched teeth. “We’ve lost our offensive weapon—”

Damn: scratch one force beam…

“—and our commo is gone.”

“All of it?”

“Take a look, sir.” Zhou transferred an external image to the monitor that served the XO’s seat: where the complex arrays of the communication mast had been, there were only stars. At the bottom of the screen, a thin protrusion of tortured, twisted metal marked the site of the mast’s amputation.

Zhou detailed the consequences. “Long-range lascom and main antennae are history. And internal shorts have burned out the main and backup transmitters.”

“Chance of repair?”

“A week—at a Fleet Base.”

“It’s that bad?”

“It’s that bad. Maybe worse.”

“I have the ship’s status, sir,” murmured Vikrit.

Wethermere nodded at her as he started scanning the other engineering data that Zhou had thrown up in the margins of his screen.

“Overall, about thirty percent crew casualties, sir. Two fusion plants off-line. Away boat and bay are wrecked. Engineering deck sections 12 to 16 are flooded with coolants and wastewater.”

“Seal the leaks and seal those sections. Evacuate all toxics to vacuum.”

“Trying, sir. Not all bulkheads are responding to command circuits.”

“Contain as possible.” He stared hard at the engine data in the margin of his screen, then turned to face Zhou. “I’m no expert, Mr. Zhou, but do those three red indicators mean what I think they mean?”

“Sir, if you think they mean that we are at about forty percent speed—and losing pseudo-velocity envelope coherence, then yes, sir, your understanding of our situation is quite accurate.”

“Time to failure?”

“If we run at half output, maybe a day. At max? She’ll shake apart in an hour. And sir—I do mean that she’ll shake apart.”

“Warning duly noted, Mr. Zhou. How about our escape pods?”

Zhou brightened. “Fifty-five percent show green, twenty-five percent yellow, twenty percent red. So about fifteen percent of us are going to be rolling the dice, sir.”

Vikrit leaned in. “Sir, should I instruct the crew to report to evac—?”

“I’ll tell you if and when we get to that point, Ensign. And should we find ourselves taking that step, bear this in mind; officers will take compromised pods, starting with the most senior and working on down.”
Lucky me.
“No exceptions. Is that understood?”

The noises of assent around the bridge were clear but not enthusiastic.

“Mr. Zhou, about those engines—”

Lubell interrupted. “Sir—missile launch. Closing rapidly.”

“Tepple?”

“Range twelve light-seconds and closing. Engaging defense batteries.”

Wethermere glanced down in the tacplot; the missile didn’t appear there, but the SD did, lumbering after the crippled green speck that was his first command. He waited. Seconds passed. “Mr. Tepple?”

“Sir, I—” Then: “Missile destroyed, sir.”

“About time.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“But what, Mr. Tepple?”

“Sir, that missile would never have hit us. It wouldn’t have even come close. I had to boost the coverage envelope of the defense battery just to get it to engage.”

Wethermere frowned. “Did they ever get a targeting lock on us?”

“Not that I could detect, sir.”

Wethermere thought that through for three seconds. Then: “Mr. Tepple, on no condition are you to activate our own targeting arrays.”

“Very well, sir—not that we have any reason to. With our force beam out—”

“Never mind that. Take no chances. Take your arrays off-line.” He turned to Lubell. “Same goes for sensors—particularly for sensors. We run passive arrays only.”

“Passive? Sir, we won’t get very precise—”

“Mr. Lubell, would you rather have precise data—or would you rather live to tell your grandchildren that you
didn’t
have precise data?”

“Sir, active-array circuitry is off and routed for command override only.”

“Very good, Mr. Lubell.”

Zhou straightened up. “Skipper—”

“Skipper?” Well, that came fast—but maybe things do, in combat. Or maybe that’s just Zhou…

“With respect sir, what the hell is going on? What’s with the nix on the active arrays? And—an SD? The Baldies sent an
SD
? On a recon run? What the hell were they thinking?”

“They were thinking they might surprise us—which they did pretty well, Mr. Zhou. And I’ve been inspecting the first few seconds of detailed sensor data we got on the enemy SD. Look at the damage. I’m guessing the Baldies were ready to write her off anyhow, and then figured if she could make transit, last just a few seconds, and get back through the warp point, they’d finally get a look at what was killing all their RDs over here. Or if she didn’t get back, they’d reason that we were holding the point in force.”

“Okay—seems logical. But then why hasn’t she gone back, or at least sent a message?”

“Mr. Lubell, do our sensors give us any answers to that?”

“I think they might, sir.” Lubell threw up an old-fashioned 2-D cad-cam approximation of the debris field around the SD, about five seconds after her exchange with the
Balu Bay
. Using a light pencil, Lubell pointed out the remains of half a dozen externally mounted pinnaces. “She may have been equipped to send back messengers—but she lost that in the shootout with
Balu Bay
.”

Zhou rubbed his swelling arm. “Okay, but if she carries any internal couriers or fighters…”

Wethermere shook his head. “If she had them, then she’d have launched them already. But look at the emission spikes Lubell got on the passive thermal scans, here—and here.”

“What do you figure they are?”

“Internal explosions.” Wethermere leaned back, rubbed his chin, felt stubble starting to sprout there. “From what I remember of the technical intelligence on this class of ship, these old SDs were built with only one flight deck. I’ll bet those thermal blooms are conventional fuel bunkers cooking off, or the Baldies are venting them to eliminate the possibility of a catastrophic chain of secondary explosions.”

Lubell nodded vigorously. “That theory matches up with this sensor reading. At first I thought she was leaking atmosphere, but the pre-dispersal density of the gas is too light. That’s pure hydrogen. And there it goes—” A brief thermal spike indicated that the vented fuel had ignited—spectacularly.

Zhou checked his engines again, made a disapproving clucking sound, and returned to his customary role as devil’s advocate. “Okay, so the SD doesn’t have any way to send a message back home. So then why doesn’t she turn tail and go back herself?”

Ossian Wethermere watched the big red blip overtaking his little green one—slowly but surely—in the tacplot. “Because of us.”

“Us? Why us?”

“Because we can report.”

“Well, yes—but he can always blow us to pieces first—and
then
go home.”

Wethermere smiled at Zhou. “Yes, that would seem like the best plan, wouldn’t it?” He thought a moment. Then: “Sensors: bogey’s heading?”

Lubell paused, then reported with admirable composure. “Bearing constant, range closing.”

Zhou sputtered. “Holy hell, is she—is she trying to
ram
us?”

Wethermere cut him off with a raised hand. “Mr. Lubell, check again. Is her bearing
absolutely
constant?”

“Yes sir, it—no, wait. Bearing has shifted one-thousandth of one degree ecliptic declination.”

Zhou swallowed, his eyes large but noticeably relieved. “For out here, that’s still a damned close pass.”

“Yes, it is. Close enough to bring her within a tenth of a light-second, Mr. Lubell?”

“Aye, sir. Close enough to dent our fender—literally.”

Wethermere nodded to himself—and didn’t realize that a few seconds had passed until Zhou interrupted his thoughts with, “Okay, Skipper, we’re all waiting. What’s she playing at?”

“I don’t know yet. She’s obviously having trouble getting a lock on us. Which is consistent with the rest of what we’ve seen. She hasn’t powered up her active arrays once, not even on low power. So I’m thinking they must have been knocked out by
Balu Bay
.”

“Okay, but her failure to attack would have to mean that her passive sensors are too imprecise to get a lock on us, also.”

“They probably are, but who can know for sure? Passive sensors are—well, passive, so we’ve got no way of knowing what they’re showing her. Hell, they might not be showing her anything. They could be fried along with her active arrays.”

“Okay—but if that were the case, why would she stay in-system and chase us? She can’t get target lock, so what’s she going to do? Space is too big, and we can alter velocity enough that she’ll never be able to try visually directed fire. And in her condition, if she encounters anything bigger than a cruiser while she’s chasing us, she’s a goner.”

Wethermere shrugged. “She might be a goner right now, but not in half an hour. She’s a big ship—she’s got options we don’t. Her damage-control parties might be swapping in a brand-new array this very minute—or booting up and calibrating a backup system. And anyhow, she’s only coming after us because she needs to silence us.”

“Okay, I still don’t get that. Why good does it do for her to silence us? Those antimatter missile salvos did a pretty good job of announcing her arrival to everyone in this system.”

“They announced
an
arrival—but of what? A ship? A whole fleet? A single SBMHAWK? Our own fire? And the activation of the warp-point doesn’t tell our side anything special. Their drones have been triggering warp point transits every ten minutes or so for the last few hours. No, we are the only hull left, the only ones who know that, this time, it was an actual Baldy warship—and that they’ve taken out the
Balu Bay
. And that, therefore, the door from Raiden into Suwa is wide open. And these Baldies are going to make sure we never get a chance to communicate any of that.”