McCollum - GIBRALTAR STARS (37 page)

From their acceleration profiles, these ships weren’t planning the head-on rendezvous profile the avenger had followed. The fastest among them were accelerating at six standard gravities, putting as much distance between themselves and the planet as possible. Either these lead craft were unmanned Kamikazes, or possessed hydraulic beds and other special equipment to protect against acceleration, or were manned by crews risking their lives and health to close with the unknown enemy.

In this objective they were destined to be frustrated. An hour after
Yeovil
cast off, the ‘threat’ from alien intruders would cease to exist. One of their targets would blaze into an incandescent ball of nuclear-induced plasma while the other fled above the system ecliptic. If for any reason the self-destruct aboard
Sasquatch
failed to explode, a rain of SMs from
Yeovil
would finish the destruction in short order.

Mark watched the viewscreens, marveling at how much one could learn when the instrument suite on a cruiser was working properly. Beside him, Captain Sulieman was issuing orders pursuant to getting underway.

“Release docking tube.”

“Docking tube released and retracted, Captain. Ready for boost.”

“Generators to standby.”

“Generators are holding at optimum standby, Captain. Ready for boost.”

“Medical, what is the status of the wounded?”

“We’ve got them all strapped down in bunks, Captain,”
Yeovil
’s doctor reported. “Anti-acceleration drugs have been administered. We’re monitoring life signs. Medical is ready for boost.”

“Our other guests?”

“Comfortable on foam pads in the mess compartment. All are strapped down and ready for boost.”

And so it went. Over five minutes, each department reported that they were ready for acceleration. It seemed to Mark that the checklist was hurried. He ascribed that to the fact that there was a ticking atom bomb next door.

Finally, Sulieman seemed satisfied. “Maneuvering, you have the conn. One gee, due north.”

“Aye aye, Captain. Generators to power, now!”

As
Sasquatch
had attempted five days earlier,
Yeovil
responded to generators with a steady, gentle push that built up over a period of ten seconds.

One of the hull cameras was focused on his battered command, producing a panoramic view of the damage as they pulled away. The stern was a tangle of broken hull plates and mangled girders, with all sorts of wiring and conduit hanging out. Other parts of the ship were crumpled as well. Seeing the damage from the outside, he was amazed
Sasquatch
had retained any of its pressure integrity.

He watched the cruiser rapidly shrink on the screen. When it disappeared, he was surprised to discover tears streaming down both cheeks.

#

Lisa had been difficult to live with before she learned her husband was alive and likely to stay that way. Some aboard, though, maintained they preferred that mopey, angry Lisa to the current one. To say that she was happy was to engage in British-class understatement. She was, in fact, giddy.

“Are you sure you are all right?” Doctor Carr asked her after Sun-Ye Tsu found Lisa unconscious at her duty station. The doctor had been called in to give her a physical examination.

“I’m fine, Doctor,” she said, perched on the edge of an examining table. As she answered his questions, she simultaneously performed the difficult feat of anchoring herself with one hand while holding the back of her medical gown closed with the other. “There’s nothing wrong with me, really!”

“You’ve had a series of shocks this past week. A human mind can only take so much, you know.”

She smiled at him and did not reply.

“All right, you win. I’m certifying you as fit for duty. But if you notice yourself laughing uncontrollably, or weeping without reason, you get back here immediately. Understand?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

With her release from medical, she returned to her cabin, climbed into her bunk and fastened the sleeping net. She was asleep in seconds. For the first time in days, her dreams were not peppered with nightmares. In fact, when she woke, she could not remember dreaming at all.

Overhead the blue lights told her it was night. However, she was famished. Floating out of bed, she slipped into her shipsuit and slippers, and headed for the mess compartment. The mid-watch cook was on duty and served her a full meal, after which she chattered at him in something approaching free association mode until morning watch arrived.

She reported for her regular shift after breakfast, unaware that she had missed the previous day’s duty. No one said anything about it. Instead, there was some quiet rearranging of schedules behind her back while Lisa slipped into her usual monitoring station.

Several hours later, she was joined in her joyful mood by the rest of the crew. A cheer echoed through the ship as
Yeovil
reported they had all the survivors aboard.  There were more cheers an hour later when an actinic point of violet lit up the firmament, expanding into a blue-white ball of incandescence, then down through the colors of the rainbow as the cloud cooled and faded. A recording of Taps echoed through the ship in honor of their dead colleagues whose bodies had just been purified in nuclear flame. No longer was there any possibility of their remains ending up on a Broan specimen table.

Galahad
remained on station for another five days as
Yeovil
gained velocity, climbing high above the plane in which Sabator’s planets orbited. Two of the Broan warships made halfhearted attempts to pursue, but quickly gave up when it became obvious the strange alien craft had the better pair of legs.

On the fifth day,
Yeovil
crossed the critical limit. By this time the speed of light delay between the two cruisers was nearly three hours, making it difficult to keep the comm-lasers aligned. The last message from
Yeovil
signaled her intent to jump to superlight.
Galahad
acknowledged receipt, but the response likely found empty space when it arrived three hours later.

Their mission at an end, if not successful,
Galahad
’s crew began making preparations for their own departure. As was the case for most spy missions, they were glad to be leaving. The constant tension associated with lurking in an enemy star system was debilitating, causing even the hardiest soul to cheer when the ship jumped to superlight. No one aboard would be sad to see Sabator’s yellow ball in the rear viewscreen.

Lisa and Gerry Swenson were on duty in Monitoring as the ship made its final preparations to depart the system. There was little more to be learned and they wanted to get their data back for analysis. The panic evident in the Broan commands that flooded the airwaves in those first few minutes after their three craft were destroyed had largely died down. There were still plenty of intercepts. The eavesdropping computers recorded them all and served up the juiciest tidbits to their human masters.

“Lisa?”

Lisa was listening to a report by one of the ships that had been sent to pursue
Yeovil.
Upon reversing course, it was directed by traffic control to check whether anything remained of
Sasquatch.
The ship had just reported negative results after combing the region with sensors.

Lisa pulled herself out of her reverie and swiveled in her seat. “What is it, Gerry?”

“I’ve got something here. Can you listen in?”

“Sure.”

She keyed into the other monitoring station and listened to an intercept. The traffic control computers were ordering all ships to steer clear of the Gamma Stargate until priority traffic cleared the system. The message was delivered in the same unemotional voice traffic computers used for all orders. What was unusual about it was the request for acknowledgement. It also bore a priority routing code.

Frowning, she reset the time mark and listened to it again.

“Do we have a track on the ship this pertains to?” she asked. One thing their new software did for them was monitor the automated channels that told every ship in the sky the whereabouts of every other ship in the sky. It was a capability they could have used on any number of Q-Ship missions.

“Here it is. It’s a small scout out of Karap-Vas. It seems to be in a hurry. If this isn’t in error, it says that it is accelerating at 3.5 gravities. Course is direct to the stargate. Estimated time to jump: two hours.”

Something about “in a hurry” triggered a stray thought in Lisa’s brain. It took her a moment to isolate it, and when she did, she felt a sudden chill.  She wondered whether this was one of the symptoms Doctor Carr had warned her about. Then she put the thought out of her mind. It took up too much room and she needed the space to consider the other thought.

Reaching down for the strap release, she snapped: “Get Sun-Ye down here to cover my station!”

“Where are you going?” Gerry asked.

“I have to see the captain. It’s important!”

#

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The return to the Hideout System took seven days and the voyage from the outer reaches of the system to Brinks itself another five. When they arrived, they found Sutton between Hideout and Brinks, and the base on the night side of the moon.

The base was not in darkness, however. On nights when Brinks was ‘full’ and in the sky, the surface of Sutton glowed in the light reflected off the gas giant. Brinks-glow, as the inhabitants called it, was some fifty times brighter than the light of a full moon on Earth. On the moon’s surface, operations continued on “silver” nights as though Hideout was still shining, which in a way, it was. From orbit, the reflected light caused Sutton to glow as though covered with a layer of new fallen snow. It reminded Mark of the night he and Lisa had ridden the bullet train to European H.Q. to receive their medals.

At the end of its long journey,
Yeovil
spiraled down into its assigned parking orbit. On the bridge, Mark was once again seated at the tactical warfare station, with young Mr. Vladis displaced on the orders of Captain Sulieman. Mark watched the glittery moon pass beneath them until the cruiser shut down its engines and then turned to the console in front of him.

For the first time since their arrival in the system, he could query the base computer directly. Sorting through the available options, he pulled up a list of the other ships in orbit or en route to or from the critical limit. Scanning the list, he looked for a particular name. It wasn’t there.

“Any sign of her yet?”

“Still no sign,” Mark said. The ‘her’ was
Galahad
, the third member of their ill-fated expedition.

Mark was beginning to worry. Five days ago when they first arrived in the outer system, Mark sent an inquiry asking if
Galahad
had reported in. Due to speed of light delay, it took several hours to receive an answer. It was negative. That hadn’t surprised him.
Galahad
had stayed to watch
Yeovil
’s departure, so they were likely still en route.

Yeovil
, by virtue of being chased by the Broa, had been ready to jump the moment she crossed the critical limit.
Galahad
, on the other hand, had antennas and sensors to collect and stow. It would take several hours longer for her to prepare for interstellar flight. It was logical that she would return to base after her sister.

That reasoning satisfied Mark for the first two days. When there was no sign of Lisa’s ship by the third, the first twinges of worry stirred. Now, at T plus five days, they were no longer twinges. The truth was that he missed his wife and was worried about her safety.

Perhaps it was an overreaction to his close brush with death. While en route from Sabator, he kept the longing at bay by burying himself in work. There was the After Action report to be composed. This particular report, he suspected, would go up the line as far as Admiral N’Gomo on Earth, and he wanted it to withstand the criticism he knew was coming. He would have liked to compare notes with his predecessor, but Captain Darva was still fading in and out of consciousness, much to the worry of Dr. Hamjid.

In writing the report, Mark tried to be restrained and objective in his criticisms of the planning that had gone into the mission. However, he quickly discovered that objectivity is the first casualty of nearly getting killed. Time and again, he had to go back and rewrite paragraphs that had seemed reasonable only minutes earlier.

Much of his day was spent interviewing the other
Sasquatch
survivors, probing their memories in order to ensure he was factually accurate concerning events following the explosion.

Most interviews took place in the Mess Compartment, the least crowded of all the spaces aboard
Yeovil
. The rescue had caused significant crowding aboard the cruiser. Luckily, this was less of a problem than it would have been in a comparable wet navy ship, say a submarine.

 With
Yeovil
in microgravity, there was no need to ‘hot bunk,’ the ancient and barbaric custom where two crewmen shared a single sleeping space in rotation. Ships in microgravity solve the problem by adding sleeping nets where needed, ‘hanging’ them on hooks magnetically attached to convenient bulkheads, decks, or overheads.

Feeding everyone was not so easy. To solve the problem, Captain Sulieman adopted a system popular with cruise ships. He ordered the mess department to double up on meal times, establishing early and late seatings.

Sasquatch
’s survivors, most of whom were being carried as supernumeraries, ate early. Mark frequently found himself seated in a cluster of his former crewmates, and across the table from Susan Ahrendt.

No matter what they discussed during the meal, afterwards, when small quantities of alcohol were consumed (by dispensation from Captain Sulieman), the conversation somehow turned to Lisa. Usually, it was Susan who initiated it, making Mark suspect that she was trying to get him to talk as a form of therapy.

After a few well-chosen comments to get things started, Susan would fall silent and let him do most of the talking, occasionally uttering a monosyllable of encouragement or reaching out to give him a sympathetic pat to the back of his hand.