McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (33 page)

Mark noticed a change in the expressions around him. The older spacers, in particular, seemed relieved. He appointed Lieutenant Sotheby Exec, and issued his first order.

“Let’s get the badly injured into cabins and assign people to care for them. I want work parties to check for air leaks. We’ve a limited supply of breathing gas. And can anyone stop this damned tumbling?”

#

The blow that had smashed Auxiliary Control hadn’t reached the bridge. Most of the shrapnel buried itself in decks and overheads farther aft. Consequently, the bridge was practically intact. However, the computers were down and the normal attitude control system inoperative.

Attitude control was handled by the normal space generators. Instead of differentially warping space fore and aft in order to provide momentum, small modules attached to the hull warped space at right angles. This produced controlled torque around each of the three orthogonal axes. With the engines vaporized, that particular system was no more.

For a backup, the ship’s designers relied on a much older technique. Just as commercial aircraft had been equipped with propeller-driven emergency generators for decades after the last propeller-driven plane left the sky, starships were still equipped with reaction jet thrusters.
Sasquatch
’s hull had eight thruster quads mounted at strategic points. Four of these survived the explosion.

With the computers down, there was no way to centrally control the small rocket nozzles. The designers had provided for that possibility, too. Each cluster could be controlled manually from inside the hull. Mark dispatched spacers in vacsuits to gain access and stand by for his orders. When communications proved more difficult than envisioned, he dispatched other spacers to relay commands.

They then spent a frustrating half-an-hour halting the rotation the ship had picked up, then another twenty minutes slowly rotating
Sasquatch
to aim its bow directly toward Sabator.

Next he called all able-bodied personnel to assemble in the mess. Mark counted eighteen effectives after ordering two injured men back to bed. He assigned Felicia and Susan to nurse duty, along with a corpsmen with a broken arm and Spacer Gomez. Dr. Hamjid was put in overall command.

He ordered half his remaining spacers to get to work converting the mess into a sanctuary where they could retreat should their supply of breathing gas run short. That meant salvaging every pressurized cylinder they could find and anchoring them to the deck.

One hour later, Mark was out of his suit, strapped into the Captain’s chair on the bridge, with a few unassigned spacers surrounding him.

“All right. Next thing we need is to contact
Galahad
and
Yeovil
. Any suggestions?”

“Lasers are out,” Engineer-Second Gwendolyn Tasker said. She had the bridge duty when the egg exploded, and was thus the sole surviving member of her department.

 “Any way to get them online?” Mark asked.

“No, sir,” Gwen replied. “We’ve no way to point the comm lasers. Even if we could, we don’t know where the other ships are.”

“Radio then?
Galahad
is monitoring the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Their computer-driven alarms will light up like a Christmas tree if they hear a human voice.”

“Possible. We’d have to jury-rig a directional antenna and spray our message in their direction. It wouldn’t have to be very precise. Rigging the antenna is straightforward; if, as you say, the port lift is open to vacuum at the bottom. It won’t be pretty, but it will work.”

“Two-way communications?”

“Not likely, Captain. Not enough receiver sensitivity to pick them up this far away. Besides, if they answer back via radio, the Broa will detect them.”

“Get started on the antenna. We’ve no chance of rescue if we can’t tell the fleet of our predicament.”

“Yes, sir.”

She and two helpers left.

Mark turned to Spacer Rogers, an electronic specialist. “Get us some communications, Mr. Rogers.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rogers pulled himself to one of the darkened consoles, pulled off an access panel, and began yanking out circuit cubes.

That left Mark and Lieutenant Sotheby.

“We need sensors…” Mark paused. “What the hell is your first name, Sotheby?”

“Christian, sir. Chris for short.”

“We need sensors online ASAP, Chris. The Broa are coming for us and we’re blind. I want to be able to surprise them.”

“Surprise them, how?”

“I haven’t got it completely worked out. About those sensors…”

“What sort, Captain?”

“Thermal. We can’t very well bounce radar off them, not without alerting them that we’re still alive. That means we track them passively. Wide-angle thermal arrays for initial acquisition, then a scope to get up close and personal.”

“I’ll get a party on it, sir.”

“If my plan is going to work, we need fire control.”

“What are we going to shoot?”

“SMs. Battery One intact?”

Sotheby nodded. “I doubt we’ll be able to hit anything, but we can probably launch.”

“That is all we need,” Mark replied.

The idea that was nagging at him was not the best one he’d ever had. In fact, it was the sort of thought that comes to a man only in the most dire of straits.

Which was as good a definition as any of their situation since about thirty seconds after they launched the Trojan Horse.

#

Chapter Thirty-Four

Lisa Rykand’s eyelids twitched as she woke from a nightmare. She couldn’t remember the dream itself, but the residue of dread it left behind was a memory from her distant past. When she was seven, her family lived in an old, drafty townhouse in London. Somehow she’d gotten the idea that a monster lurked in her closet. She would wake each morning, shivering, not from the cold, but from fear.

The monster was back.

A hand shook her shoulder and a gentle voice cooed in her ear. “Time to wake up, Lisa. Open your eyes.”

Strange, she thought. The monster has a pleasant voice.

She opened her eyes. Above her was the face of Dr. Carr. He was staring down at her. Behind him were the blue painted bulkheads of sickbay.

“Doctor, what am I doing…?”

She didn’t finish the question. It was then that memory came flooding back and she knew that the monster that disturbed her dreams this time was real. Mark was dead and he would remain so for the rest of her life. What was she to do?

“How do you feel?” the doctor asked.

“Depressed, angry, lost,” she answered. “How should I feel?”

“Do you want something to calm you?”

“Can you keep me drugged for the next fifty years?”

His professional smile was ruined by the sad look in his eyes. “I’m afraid not.”

“How long did I sleep?” she asked, lifting her arms to stretch and yawn. If it hadn’t been for the deadness in her heart, she would have felt almost human.

“Eighteen hours. We had you slated for the full twenty-four, but the Captain wants to speak with you.”

“Captain Cavendish? What about?”

“He will tell you. Do you think you can dress yourself, or should I have an orderly help you?”

“I can dress myself, doctor.”

“All right. Call if you need me.” With that he departed, and activated the privacy field that caused the walls of the small cubicle around her bed to turn milky white.

Lisa pulled herself erect and floated to the washbasin. Being in microgravity, she made no attempt to turn on the faucet. For one thing, it wouldn’t have worked. Instead, she reached into the drawer where a wet sponge was housed. She washed the stink of yesterday’s stress away and brushed her teeth. Someone had retrieved a clean uniform from her cabin and a few items of makeup, which she almost never wore aboard ship. She decided that today would be an exception. She lightly powdered her face, applied eye liner, and lipstick, then slipped into the shipsuit and cinched the belt at her waist. She combed the tangles out of her hair before putting on her slippers and found that she felt as human as possible. Under the circumstances.

She checked her appearance carefully in the mirror screen. Today would be a bad day. Everyone she met would feel sorry for her, and pity would flow like a river.

She turned off the polarizer, returning the cubicle walls to their transparent state, before venturing out into sickbay’s common area. One of the orderlies glanced up and gave her
that
look. She pretended to ignore it.

“I’m ready to be released, Doctor.”

“Need an escort?”

“No. Where is the captain?”

“In his day cabin.”

“Thank you for making me sleep. It kept me from thinking about… yesterday.”

“If you have any problems sleeping tonight, come see me,” the medical man ordered. “Now, get along. We don’t want to keep the commanding officer waiting.”

Captain Cavendish’s day cabin was on Delta Deck, on the other side of the ship. Lisa navigated to the starboard shaft, up one deck, and then around the passageway to where a Marine guard stood anchored to the deck beside a hatch labeled
COMMANDING OFFICER
.

“Captain asked to see me,” she told the guard. “Commander Lisa Rykand.”

“You can go in, Ma’am,” he said, keying the control that retracted the hatch. It might have been her imagination, but he seemed to give her
that
look as well.

Lisa floated inside. Cavendish was strapped into his chair behind the desk. He directed her to take one of the two chairs in front. Lisa noted that he didn’t appear to have slept.

When she was properly anchored, Captain Cavendish regarded her for long seconds without saying anything. His expression shifted through a jumble of emotions. Something was wrong. The protocol for these occasions was well established. A captain should strive for the delicate balance of sadness and sympathy perfected over the centuries by funeral directors, the better to calm the grieving subordinate. Instead, he seemed agitated.

“Captain, you wanted to see me?”

“Yes, Commander, I did.”

“Is something wrong?” It seemed a particularly inane thing to ask after yesterday.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said. “I even thought about not telling you. However, you have a right to know.”

“Know what, sir?”

“Your husband is alive.”

The words were delivered in what seemed to be plain Standard. Even so, she had trouble comprehending them. For an instant, she thought Cavendish was playing a particularly cruel practical joke, but to what purpose?

“Alive, sir? How do you know?”

“Communication from
Sasquatch
. The Trojan Horse exploded almost immediately after they launched it. The cruiser was badly damaged and a lot of people were killed. Commander Rykand wasn’t one of them.”

“Was his name on some sort of a list? Could it be a mistake?”

“No mistake. He is the senior officer aboard. He has taken command. The message was in his voice.”

Mark? Alive? The dread she had been holding at bay vanished as though a switch had been flipped. Her heart raced and she could hardly breathe. She wanted to scream and to leap out of her chair and dance for joy. Only military decorum and her seat belt prevented her from doing any of those things. Otherwise, she might have injured herself when she crashed into the overhead.

Then a suspicion began to grow, at first tempering and then engulfing her joy. Something was wrong. Cavendish did not seem to share her excitement. It didn’t take much thought to deduce why.

She frowned. The words, when she finally got her mouth under control, were bitter. “Mark’s alive, but he isn’t going to stay that way, is he?”

#

There was a long, uncomfortable silence as it was the Captain’s turn to search for words. Finally, he said, “I don’t want to give you false hope. He’s alive, but they are in a desperate situation. They have fewer than thirty survivors trapped aboard a hurtling mass of scrap metal. They are in pure ballistic flight directly into the heart of the most powerful Broan-controlled system of which we are aware. Their engines are gone, they can’t maneuver, and they damned well can’t take to the lifeboats.”

Lisa nodded. “And the Broa have dispatched three ships to intercept them. Any further news on that?”

“None. We are too far out to detect them. All we have is your initial report. If they are being dispatched from the planet, it could take most of the next ten days for them to match velocities and rendezvous. If they are starting in the asteroid belt, they could be there in half that time.”

“Is there
anything
we can do?” Lisa asked.

“It’s a long shot, but we are organizing a rescue. Whether we will be too late…” Cavendish let the statement die away.

The storm of emotions that had flowed through her veins in a span of less than a minute left Lisa drained. There is an old expression: You can’t wet a hurricane.

Suddenly she felt very tired, despite having just slept for eighteen hours. “Perhaps, sir, you should start at the beginning.”

“Perhaps I should,” Cavendish replied, leaning back in his chair. “The call from
Sasquatch
came in about two hours ago. You can imagine our surprise and excitement when we heard a human voice coming out of your eavesdropping computer.”

“The call came in by radio, not comm-laser?”

“Apparently, their lasers are inoperative.”

“What happened?”

“Your husband reports the Trojan Horse exploded immediately after launch. There was a malfunction and the Horse tried to jump to superlight. That deep in the gravity well, it couldn’t stabilize its field, and so it exploded, releasing its stored energy against
Sasquatch
’s hull.

“The damage was extensive. Hangar Bay and Engineering are gone, along with their crews. Shrapnel accounted for most of the other dead and injured. Among the survivors, there are broken bones and other injuries. Casualties among the officers were high. Captain Vanda is alive, but has a serious head injury. That left your husband the highest ranking officer. He has assumed command.”

She nodded. “That’s just like Mark. He’ll always step up when prudence dictates his best course is to keep his mouth shut. What are we doing to rescue them?”