Trial by Fire - eARC (13 page)

Trevor flexed his gloved fingers. “Pressure-sealing the access ways and B deck so we can terminate environmental functions in those areas. I'll start by sealing off— Damn!” Trevor exclaimed suddenly, grabbing his shin.

—at the same moment that Caine clutched at a sudden spasm in his left arm. “What the—?”

“Coupla old men,” Trevor grinned ruefully, rubbing his left tibia.

“Yeah, but having our recent wounds bother us at the same second?” Caine wondered.

Trevor shrugged. “Ah, I’ve heard of stranger stuff, and we don’t know what kind of sensors or other field effects the bad guys may be playing around with out there. Sometimes, just the right—or wrong—frequency can twinge a break or trouble a tooth.” He smiled, finished sealing his gloves. “Space is funny, that way.”

Caine nodded as Trevor clanked his helmet into place and ran the locking rings home with a sharp, sure sweep of his hand. They exchanged waves, then Trevor took two long bounds and was out of the control room and into the main corridor.

* * *

Caine started awake, jerked upright, was not sure where he was for a moment. His hands were still poised on the virtual keyboard of the sensor panel. Like many repetitious activities, what started out as a sequence of challenging sensor tasks had quickly become a mind-numbing routine. And without a high-end computer in the auxiliary module, a detailed search routine was only so automatable.

Two quick ladar bursts at each target would have provided the needed results, but that might have also been enough to attract any nearby enemy pickets. So far, thirty percent of the possible targets for salvage intercept had been eliminated simply because of the low confidence level of the sensor measurements. The module's limited fuel situation prohibited any intercept attempts that were based on “best-guesses.”

Trevor’s voice in his earbud snapped him further awake. “How’s it going?”

“Fine. Slow. Boring. You?”

“I’m curious. Do me a favor; check on the
Prometheus
’ trajectory.”

Caine expanded his scan field, found the right blip, noticed that the thermal signature of the shift-carrier’s pulse-fusion engines had grown much fainter due to rapidly increasing distance. “They’re crowding three gee constant. And it looks like they’ve also added a slight delta vector. Meaning what? A change of shift destination?”

“Sure sounds like it.”

Caine nodded. “Then they’re heading to Ross 154.”

“What? Instead of warning Earth?”

“Oh, Earth is being warned—silently. Downing will have set up a no-show code as part of a contingency plan. That way, if Barnard’s Star is hit, the
Prometheus
can warn Ross 154 instead.”

Trevor’s voice was suddenly in the room with him. “And Earth interprets the no-show of the
Prometheus
as a warning flag. Sure. Two messages for the price of one shift.” Caine turned. Pressure helmet off, Trevor was already clambering out of the suit. “You’d better pause the salvage survey. Their initial attack group will have refueled by now and they won’t waste any time commencing preacceleration for their next shift. But before they do, they'll run an advance patrol through this area.”

“Why here?”

“Because it's the only debris field with metallic elements anywhere within two hundred planetary diameters. If our side managed to sneak in any dormant killer drones while the invaders were wrecking The Pearl or hunting down our shift carriers, this is where they'd expect them to be, mixed in among other objects with very similar sensor returns.”

“You’re sure they got all six carriers?”

“Yeah, it looked like it. Now, jack your commlink into the intercom. We’re not even going to risk using our collarcoms. When you’re done with that, seal your suit.”

Caine did as he was told, and looked over at Trevor—just as the lights went out. “Cutting power?”

Trevor nodded, started tapping commands into the computer’s one manual keyboard. “Everything except the visual sensor arrays and the required computer element is blacked out. We're running on batteries.”

Caine glanced at the REM level indicator. “What about the EM grids?”

Trevor did not look over. “We have to cut them for now. The meter of water lining the outer hull will take care of a lot of it, but we've got to wait until their advance force has swept the area before we energize the grids again. Then we can bring them back up. Slowly.”

“And in the meantime?”

“We take the rads, or get taken by exosapients.”

The smell of old sweat in Caine’s suit was suddenly overpowering. Or was it simply new sweat that had the same tang of mortal fear? He felt a saline drop land on his swollen lip, winced as the salt burrowed into the tender tissue with microfine tines of pain. He wondered how much large particle radiation was similarly digging into and through him.…

* * *

“Motion on visual array seventeen-F.” Trevor’s voice betrayed no anxiety. Caine looked over at the zoomed-in image. The streamlined Arat Kur hull appeared against the gas giant’s milky-amber whorls, heading in their general direction at a leisurely pace. They had noticed its emergence from the uppermost layer of the atmosphere half an hour ago, at which point the enemy ship had been retracting some kind of refueling drogue.

Caine turned to his sensors, ran the drill Trevor had taught him. “Establishing range and bearing.” He ran a quick superimposition of the ship's progressive positional changes over the star field backdrop. The computer chewed through the data, correcting for the module's rotation and orbital movement. Numbers striped across his screen. Caine read them off. “Range: ninety-six thousand km. Ecliptic relative bearing: 283 by 75. Current vector suggests she's looking to break orbit and make for our debris field. ETA, thirty-eight minutes.”

“Are they running active sensors?”

“Nothing radiant, but I can't tell about ladar.” Caine paused, considered the lack of active sensors. “So, will they conduct broad sweeps as they approach the debris, or wait until they're in the field before lighting up their active arrays?”

“I think they’ll wait until they're on top of us, and I mean that literally. They're worried about our drones, so they’ll want to stay dark until the last second, and want to stay out of the field itself. They’ll probably make their run ‘above’ and against the flow of the wreckage. That way, the vector difference between themselves and any doggo drone is going to make them pretty hard to catch. And the enemy is sure to have a few drones of their own out front, trying to lure ours out of hiding.”

“If only there were some to be lured.”

Trevor shrugged. “It would be a waste of equipment. We've lost this round.”

Caine sighed. “What a godawful first combat assignment, watching the enemy go through the stately rituals of invasion.”

“Actually, this is a pretty darned good first combat assignment.”

“How do you figure that?”

Trevor’s smile was mirthless. “We're alive.” He turned back to the sensor readouts. “So far.”

Well, thought Caine, Trevor called it to the letter.
Riordan watched as the cursor denoting the enemy hull spawned a growing swarm of smaller signatures, like a fish giving birth to a cloud of almost microscopic fry. “They’ve deployed a screen of small, fast drones.”

Trevor nodded, watched them begin to bore through the heart of the debris cloud, the two foremost lighting up powerful active arrays. Immediately behind them, other drones—presumably hunter-killers—waited for the first sign of hostile response. As this menacing contingent approached within ten thousand kilometers, Trevor shut down even the battery-powered systems.

And so, sitting in the darkness, they waited. Caine closed his eyes, imagined what he had come to call the enemy “shift-cruiser” looming large and shooting past, drones preceding and trailing, like a whale attended by a retinue of hyperactive minnows.

Trevor let a minute pass, in which time Caine’s radiation exposure indicator came on. The classic orange icon blinked urgently at the top center of his visor's heads-up display. He checked the dosimeter: thirty rem. Well within the limits that a healthy body could repair without sickness.

The red cursor that marked the enemy hull was now well past them. Trevor turned the battery-powered systems back on, then leaned toward the passive sensors, frowning. “That heavy—let’s call it a ‘shift-cruiser’—just deployed a number of retroboosted packages. Dormant drones, probably. But I can’t keep track of them without active sensors. So they’re going to get mixed into the trash with us and we won’t be able to sort them out later. That means we’re not going to be able to undertake sudden vector changes. The drones will be keyed to respond to any new movement other than that explicable by debris collisions.”

“That eliminates at least seventy percent of our salvage opportunities.” Caine envisioned the fruits of his tedious visual sensor labors being flushed down the toilet.

“Probably more like eighty percent.”

Caine sighed and brought the now-familiar passive sensors back online. He glanced at the environmental countdown clock Trevor had started: sixty-eight hours left.

Give or take a few last breaths.

Chapter Ten

Adrift off Barnard’s Star 2 C

Caine double-checked his survey results and sighed.
So our survival depends upon my skill as a trash-scrounging sensor jockey. Great.

Trevor checked the tactical plot, leaned back, removed his helmet, and powered up the life-support systems. His words rode plumes of mist up into the chill air. “Enemy hull now crowding three gees, passing five light-seconds range—and good riddance.” Trevor swiveled toward Caine. “Time to pick through the junk. What looks best?”

Caine scanned down the list of possible salvage targets, now fallen off to less than fifty, and compared apparent mass with total thrust required for intercept. “Only one promising target remaining. This one.” He pointed. “It’s a fast mover and near the leading edge of the debris field.”

“Is that still in range?”

“Barely. We have twenty-two minutes left to initiate an intercept burn.”

Trevor looked at the fuel numbers, shook his head. “Damn, that's an expensive intercept, Caine. We'll burn up all of our primary thrust fuel, and we'll have to dip into our station-keeping fuel by ten percent.”

“I know it's expensive, but take a look at the mass and volume estimates of the other remaining targets.” Caine pointed to the depressing data. None of them were likely to be larger than six meters in their longest dimension. Most of them were probably fairly light as well. “Just hull fragments, I'd guess.”

Trevor’s misty breath fogged the computer screens in front of him. “Any possibility for new targets, ones we haven’t seen yet?” Without commenting, Caine displayed the statistics on wreckage density. Trevor saw the sharply diminishing values, then nodded soberly. “Looks like this vein is just about tapped out.”

“My thoughts exactly. So what now?”

“Now we take another look at our last, best hope, see what we can learn before we have to start maneuvering for intercept. I want to make sure it's not another dry hole.”

Caine swallowed quietly.
And if it is? Then what? Spend two days staring at the walls, waiting to slip finally, fatally, into anoxia?
Or assuming they found some way to breathe, waiting for the excess rems—the ones that the EM grid and shielding didn’t stop—to build and the sickness to gather like a sour oil slick in the pits of their empty stomachs?

The sensors produced their first image of the target wreck upon which they were pinning their diminishing hopes of survival: a slowly winking patch of brightness at the center of the screen. Caine enhanced the scan sensitivity to maximum. The object's reflected light patterns might allow the computer to estimate its structural configuration and yield a better mass estimate.

Trevor read off the results as they appeared on the screen. “Craft type and class: unknown. Mass estimate: 2455 tons, plus or minus 3 percent. Estimate confidence: 98.2 percent.” He frowned, then typed: “detail configuration.”

The screen scribed a three-axis grid. An outline formed swiftly at its center: a small wedge-shaped prow, a midsection of oblong bulges, and a confused collection of sharp angles to the rear. The confidence level indicator for the basic outline showed eighty-five percent. That initial level began increasing rapidly as planar surfaces started shading in, first in green—the high-confidence planes—then orange, and finally red: successively less certain projections. Caine and Trevor watched the object go through rotational analyses several times before they looked at each other.

Caine cleared his throat. “As a command grade officer in the USSF, it is my responsibility to be able to identify any human-built craft from a single cross-section, taken from any angle.” He looked back at the rotating image on the screen. “I am not familiar with this design, Captain.”

“I am, Commander,” Trevor replied in a tight voice. “That’s the small craft that was approaching the cutter, the one Hazawa hit with the PDF battery.”

Caine took a deep breath. “Do we make intercept?”

Trevor shrugged. “Do we have a choice? Enemy or not, that wreckage is the only chance we have of extending our survival time. If we're lucky, its engines might still be intact, and they've got to be at least ten times more powerful than ours. That will give us enough thrust and endurance to angle back toward The Pearl, find if anything is left, maybe in the hidden caches, see if we can piece together some way to survive.”

“Assuming we can find a way to control the exosapients’ systems.”

“We'll find a way, or we'll reroute control through to our own computer. Otherwise, we're on a short countdown to death from either asphyxiation, radiation exposure, or dehydration.” Trevor unstrapped, pushed off and drifted to the command center’s utility locker. He opened it, reached in and produced a Unitech ten-millimeter pistol. He unholstered it and started a crisp and professional inspection of the handgun. Caine raised his eyebrows slightly. “Are you expecting a welcoming committee?”

“No. But, in case I'm wrong…well, I hate going to a party empty-handed.”