McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (32 page)

He retreated back into Auxiliary Control, where he could hear Susan pleading with Felicia to wake up. The sound in his earphones had the reverberating echo he’d noted while regaining consciousness, an effect caused by her radio signal reflecting off the surrounding bulkheads.

There was a long groan, and then a bewildered voice asked, “What happened?”

Susan explained. By the time she finished, Mark had joined them. Felicia pawed at her strap release and missed. Mark restrained her flailing arm and hit the strap release himself. He helped her sit up.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Anything broken?”

Felicia’s head and neck writhed through a complete gyration as she moved her arms and legs inside the suit. “I don’t think so. Just sore. How is Gordon?”

“He didn’t make it,” Susan answered.

Felicia’s lips moved in a silent prayer inside her helmet. He waited for her to finish before asking, “Any idea what went wrong?”

“I’m not sure. It seemed to me that we had trouble accelerating when the engines powered up.”

“We did,” he agreed. “Almost like a ground car trying to get traction on black ice.”

“I felt it, too,” Susan said.

Felicia nodded thoughtfully. “Then I wasn’t imagining it.” After nearly a minute, she emitted a single syllable. “
Damn!
”

“I take it you know what happened.”

“I don’t
know
,” Felicia replied. “However, I strongly suspect.”

“What?” Susan asked.

“We powered engines too close to the egg. I should have thought of it.”

“Beg your pardon?”

She scowled as she looked at Mark. He noted that her lower lip was swollen from where it had contacted the inside of her helmet and one eye discolored with the beginnings of a shiner.

“As I told you at lunch the other day, Earth’s idea for tracking a Broan ship back to their home world was both brilliant and a little dangerous. Energizing the star drive generators at minimum power rotates the gamma into the aleph, but not enough to actually jump to superlight. In the process, the ship dissipates energy to rotated space, where the Broa can’t detect it. I think Captain Vanda jumped the gun on making our getaway.”

“How so?” Mark asked.

“We ejected the egg at the lowest separation velocity we could manage so as not to disturb its basic orbit. Then, we tried to get the hell away from it as fast as we could. The egg was one hundred meters out when we brought the normal space generators online. If I’m right, our drive field enveloped the egg and the two fields became entangled. The egg’s star drive began feeding off the energy we were generating. When it reached critical, it jumped to superlight!”

Mark nodded. “And like a superlight missile, it couldn’t maintain the field this deep in Sabator’s gravity well, so it fell back into normal space and exploded!”

“Something like that,” Felicia agreed.

Susan, who had been following the conversation, said, “Then we’re damned lucky to be alive.”

“Are we?” Felicia asked. “Aren’t you forgetting General Order Seven?”

“What’s that?”

There was a long pause, after which Felicia said in a soft voice, “Mark, you’re regular Navy. You tell her.”

 “General Order Seven: In the event of imminent capture by the enemy, naval personnel will do their utmost to destroy their ship and to prevent themselves, or their bodies, from falling into the hands of the enemy.”

#

There was a long silence. Finally, Susan asked, “Are you saying we have to commit suicide?”

“That is exactly what I am saying,” he answered, grimly. “Our only weapon in this war is the secret of Earth’s location. We must be willing to sacrifice everything to keep that secret. Didn’t they teach you any of this at the Academy?”

“There was something about it, but I guess I never thought it would apply to
me.”

“None of us did.”

Susan’s voice rose an octave as the seriousness of their situation hit home. “The fleet will rescue us. They must have seen the explosion!”

“They probably think we’re dead. From what I saw in the corridor, I would say both the hangar bay and much of engineering is gone. It was one hell of a blast.”

“So we self-destruct?” Felicia asked. Her tone was matter-of-fact, as befitted a woman of an age where thoughts of one’s demise were an everyday occurrence.

“Self-destruct?”

 “Calm down,” Felicia ordered in a motherly voice. “We aren’t going to do anything right now. Correct, Mark?”

“Correct,” he said. “We have to get word to our other ships that we are alive. We have ten days until perigee with Karap-Vas. That’s plenty of time to think of something. Perhaps
Galahad
or
Yeovil
can rendezvous and take us off before the Broa reach us.”

 Susan considered the answer for ten long seconds, then asked, “What is this self-destruct?” She seemed to have regained some of her composure.

“Every ship has one,” Felicia said. “A nuclear charge in Engineering. Don’t worry. It’s completely painless. We’ll be vaporized before our eyes have a chance to tell our brains about it.”

“That may be a problem,” Mark said, more thinking out loud than wanting to impart information.

“Why?”

“The charge is bolted to the thrust frame in Engineering. I’m not sure there
is
an Engineering, and if there is, the charge might have been damaged in the blast. Contrary to popular belief, atomic bombs are delicate devices. They require several things to happen in exact sequence before they go off. If even one of those things doesn’t work correctly, there will be no explosion.”

“But if we can’t blow up the ship…” Felicia said.

There were other ways than nuclear annihilation to take their own lives. Merely removing their helmets would do the job quickly. However, explosive decompression, electrocution, or the legendary poisoned chalice all had a major drawback. Each method would end their lives, but would leave their corpses intact. And the Broa could learn almost as much from a dead human as from a live one.

“Let’s change the subject,” Mark said.

 “All right, change of subject.” Felicia Godwin agreed. “What do we do now, right this minute?”

“We search for other survivors,” Mark answered. “Then we get this damned tumbling stopped before I heave in my helmet.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Leading the way, Mark pulled himself to the open hatch and out into the passageway. Like all such, the passage was equipped with “barber poles” to aid in microgravity locomotion. He pulled himself hand over hand to the starboard lift. First Felicia, then Susan, followed. The three clustered around the lift door and confronted their first problem. The door was closed.

“Any suggestions?” Felicia asked.

“Wait a second,” Mark replied, fishing in his suit’s external tool pouch. Finally, by the process of trial and error, he found what he was looking for, a small knife used for a variety of trimming tasks.

He forced the blade into the door frame gasket and slowly pushed the door open and into its recess. Keeping a firm grip on the barber pole, he looked aft. What he saw confirmed his suspicions.

 Three meters ‘below’, the shaft truncated abruptly. Beyond was the infinite vacuum of open space and a slowly moving star field.

Pulling back into the passageway, he ordered, “Tether, Susan.”

“Why?” she asked, even as she reached to extend one of the thin, strong lines that are part of every vacuum suit’s standard equipment.

“If you lose your grip on the next leg of our journey, it’s a long way down.”

Mark and Susan pulled their tethers out to full length and hooked them to Felicia’s equipment belt. Once roped together like mountain climbers, Mark led the way. The lifts were used when the ship was under thrust. When in microgravity, the lift cars were retracted to the bottom and personnel floated between decks.

Reaching out, he grabbed onto a rung and pulled himself ‘upward’, stopping to allow his companions to join him. When all three were perched within the shaft, he moved hand-over-hand toward the bow, floating slowly enough that Felicia could keep up. Susan, he noted, was crowding Felicia’s boots, anxious to be free of this bottomless pit.

They climbed past four closed pressure doors, Mark halted at the fifth. Pulling his alternate tether free, he anchored himself to the rung below the door and once again reached for his knife. Slipping the blade into the gap, he repeated his earlier action, giving them access to Epsilon Deck.

He clambered into a passageway identical to the one they’d just left, except that it was sealed by closed pressure doors in both directions. One door was two meters to his right, the other an equal distance left. Beside each was the standard control panel inset into the bulkhead. Both indicators were blinking red.

“There is pressure on the other side of this door,” Mark said as first Felicia, and then Susan, exited the lift.

Mark anchored himself to the barber pole and leaned forward to gaze through the small window inset into the face of the closed door. Beyond was another closed pressure hatch, this one with a steady green indicator.

“We have a good seal. The far door has equal pressure on both sides. Stand back.”

He turned the hand valve below the control panel one-quarter turn. They were momentarily enveloped in a cloud of expansion fog. The indicator on their side turned green and the one visible through the window began to blink red.

“After you, ladies. Squeeze in. We don’t want to dump atmosphere twice.”

The distance between the emergency doors was the regulation one-meter, leaving the space crowded, but within capacity. Mark activated the control to close the first door. A second valve restored pressure to the makeshift airlock and allowed them to pass through to the passageway beyond.

“May we take our helmets off?” Felicia asked.

“Not yet,” he answered, his own words reverberating back to him in the enclosed passageway. “No telling what contaminants are in the air.”

Epsilon Deck was devoted to crew cabins and sick bay. They made for the latter.

Inside, they found Doctor Hamjid and Spacer Gomez. Both were in suits, but with helmets and gloves removed. The doctor was working on a supine figure strapped to his operating table. It was Captain Darva.

“What’s wrong with the Captain?” Mark asked before remembering that the doctor couldn’t hear him through his helmet. Sheepishly, he took off his helmet, then secured it to its shoulder anchor.

The doctor looked up at the sudden noise. “Commander, Rykand! Good to see you alive. We thought you’d had it, along with everyone in Engineering.”

“We came close. What’s wrong with the Captain?”

“Head trauma. His brain is swelling. We’re trying to relieve the pressure.”

“How many alive?”

“Two dozen the last time I received a count. Twenty-seven now, counting you. Anyone else back there?”

“Not that we saw. Dr. Smithson’s dead. There were only the four of us in Auxiliary Control. There’s nothing left aft of that. The guys at the Hangar Bay airlock and in the engine room didn’t have a chance. Who is in command?”

“Lieutenant Sotheby, Second Mate.”

“Where is he?”

“Beta Deck. The bridge is more or less intact. A lot of shrapnel damage on Gamma and Delta. That is where most of our casualties were.”

“How do we get up to Beta?”

“The starboard lift is still airtight. You can use that.”

Mark gestured for his companions to remove their helmets, then told them what he had learned.

“Twenty-seven survivors?” Susan asked. “Is that all?”

“There may be others.”

They followed him to the opposite side of the ship and again into a lift shaft. The shaft was sealed off two decks aft, but was open forward all the way to Alpha Deck.

Once again, Mark led the way, with Felicia and then Susan following.

Beta Deck was crowded. Half the surviving crewmembers were out of their suits and being bandaged or splinted by what seemed like the other half. There were no screams, just low moans. It was evident the worst cases had already been anesthetized.

 “Commander Rykand, good to see you!” a frazzled young lieutenant greeted him as he made his way onto the bridge.

“You, too, Sotheby. What’s our status?”

“We’re in a hell of a fix, sir. Captain’s injured. Exec’s dead. The whole ass end is gone, vaporized I guess. We’re running on emergency generators and just about everything is offline. We’ve got no communications, no attitude control, no eyes, no nothing. Self-Destruct isn’t responding to signals, either.”

“Nor will it,” Mark said. “It went with Engineering.”

“May I speak with you in private, Commander?” the young lieutenant asked.

“Certainly. The captain’s space cabin?”

“Just the thing,” Sotheby replied.

They made their way through the hatch on the opposite side of the bridge. Beyond was Captain Darva’s sanctum sanctorum. A space cabin allowed a captain to go from deep sleep to his command chair in five seconds flat.

“What is it, Lieutenant?” Mark asked, fairly certain that he knew the answer already.

“What do we do, sir?” the Lieutenant asked urgently. “We’re headed straight into Broan territory and we don’t have any way to maneuver!”

“You the senior officer?

“Yes, sir. I guess so.”

“You’re regular ship’s company. I’m just a hanger-on this trip, but I’ve been an Exec and I outrank you. I’ll take over if you like.”

“Would you, sir? We’ve got dozens injured, some dying, and General Order Seven hanging over our heads. I’m not sure I can handle it.”

 “Relax, son,” Mark replied, slipping into his best Admiral Landon imitation. “We’ve got plenty of time for that. As senior officer, I relieve you.”

“Thank you, Commander,” Sotheby responded. “I stand relieved.”

 The Lieutenant’s eyes reminded him of a lost puppy who has just been found. The situation had not improved markedly in the last ten seconds, nor was it likely to do so in the next ten days. Still, Sotheby had someone else to take the weight of command. He smiled at the prospect.

“Come on, let’s inform the crew.”

The two of them floated back onto the bridge where Lieutenant Sotheby announced in a loud and formal voice that Commander Rykand was now Captain.