CHAPTER FIVE
Three days later, Aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay
19 February 2134
The first jump had been tough to accept. Sam had almost expected the results of the second jump, where they had attempted to jump to Eeee’ktaa but had instead just ended up another one hundred twelve light-years away from K’tok. So they spent two days meticulously swapping out every component of the jump drive they could replace, everything but the jump core itself. There was no replacement for that, but logically replacing everything else had to correct the problem. Still, he was reluctant to order the jump, wondered if there was one more diagnostic sequence he could run that would put off the fateful moment.
That was stupid. Waiting wasn’t going to change anything. Either the problem was fixed or it wasn’t. Better to find out, and if it wasn’t fixed . . . well, then what? That depended on a couple things, and neither of them were important if the next jump just took them to Eeee’ktaa like it was supposed to.
No, not actually to Eeee’ktaa, toward it. The second jump had left them one hundred forty light-years from K’tok and a little shy of one ninety from Eeee’ktaa, which was more than they could manage in a single jump. They would still emerge in deep-deep space, light-years away from the closest star, but they would at least be going in the right direction.
If it worked.
“Ops, execute the jump.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Lieutenant Brook answered and triggered the jump warning chimes throughout the ship. He waited for twenty seconds and then put his hand over the jump actuator control. “Jump in five, four, three, two, one.”
Again that sensation of floating free of time and space, then a wrenching return to wherever this was, a rise in body temperature, perspiration. He opened his eyes and saw the same blank field showing no sign they were anywhere near a star and its associated planetary system. That was okay. They knew they wouldn’t be near a star this time.
“Ops, tell me Eeee’ktaa is out there about seventy-five light-years ahead of us.”
Brook didn’t say anything for several long seconds as he worked his panel and Sam could feel the tension build on the bridge. How many of the bridge crew were even breathing?
“No, joy, sir. It’s not where it should be.”
Sam’s stomach tightened and he felt dizzy, felt panic beginning to tickle his throat. He heard groans from the bridge crew, a mix of anger and fear.
“What the fuck?”
“Now what’s wrong?”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Belay all that,” Sam shouted above the babble and the bridge quickly fell silent. “We’ll figure it out. Work your stations. TAC?”
“No nearby objects,” Lieutenant Alexander reported. “No energy sources, nothing identifiable as a tactical threat.”
“COMM?” Sam asked.
“In the dark, sir,” Lieutenant Bohnannon reported from COMM One to his left. “No communication signals on any band we’re monitoring. I’ll start a systematic sweep of the spectrum.”
“Very well,” Sam said, although he was pretty sure what that would turn up: nothing.
“Two hundred sixty-one light-years from K’tok’s primary, sir,” Brook reported from Ops One. Sam noticed that Brook hadn’t moved since coming out of jump, hadn’t spoken except for those brief reports. Brook knew what this last jump probably meant.
“Son of a bitch,” Sam said quietly. Another one hundred and twelve light-years, exactly. Another hundred light years from Cassandra, from understanding what happened, from figuring out what to do next with his life. He shook his head. Not the sort of thoughts a good captain would have.
“Can you plot our course from K’tok to our current location, Mister Brook?”
“Yes sir. I have it right here. We are moving almost directly toward the galactic core but slightly offset, seven degrees to spinward.”
“Have all our previous jumps since leaving K’tok been on that same plot?”
“Yes, sir, all three have been on this same course track, straight as an arrow.”
“Very well, Mister Brook. Now shoot me a view forward and tell me the distance to the next star directly on this course, assuming there is one. Or get started on it but have your number two finish. I’m going to set up a holoconference with the senior staff.”
Sam had considered all the possible outcomes of this jump he could think of and after the actual event he was down to two possibilities. Either the jump core was damaged and locked on a random course, or it was deliberately reprogrammed with a specific destination in mind. They’d find out soon enough.
Sam turned to Lieutenant Bohannon in COMM One. “Tell the department heads and the XO to helmet up and we’ll holocon. Mister Brook, Mister Alexander, that means you too.”
Sam picked up his helmet from the mount beside his workstation, clipped it on, and plugged his suit’s life-support umbilical into the socket in his workstation. With his helmet on and visor down it could get stuffy quickly.
The helmet had hologram cameras on the inside to record his face and on the outside to record his body movement. The view of the other conference participants was projected on his helmet faceplate. The only really odd thing about seeing them was he knew they wore helmets but they looked as if they did not. The helmet cameras recorded in and out from the helmet, but could not record the helmet itself. Holoconferences were normally used to allow officers on different ships to meet. On the same ship the meetings were almost always face-to-face but Sam needed to talk to his senior officers right away, in private, and didn’t want to pull them away from their duty stations.
He slid his visor down and was immediately in a virtual conference room, a neutral grey, seated at an oval table. As the others closed their visors they appeared, first Alexander, then Running Deer, Acho, Brook, and finally Ma.
And Sam was back to the two possible explanations: random damage or a deliberate destination.
If it was simply damaged, if they were headed in a random direction, they were all dead. Space was too big for there to be any possibility they would happen onto a star system with a human-habitable world before they ran out of power, food, or oxygen. Their only hope was that the course was to somewhere, a destination they could reach before they ran out of something critical. He suspected most of his officers had figured this out as well, but he wondered which ones had. Time to find out.
“So which is it?” he asked. “Some random course a damaged jump core spit out, or a specific course to somewhere?”
“Or did engineering screw up the component replacement?” Lieutenant Brook said. “Who’d you fob this job off on, Ma?”
Sam was surprised by the anger in Brook’s voice and expected an explosive retort, but instead Ma just shook his head.
“Wish a mistake was the answer, Ops. I wish to God that was all it was. But XO checked every component we replaced.”
Running Deer nodded. “I did. The captain checked my work, and Lieutenant Acho checked every part number out of inventory and every replaced component back in. That’s why we took two solid days. There’s no mistake. Every component in the jump control suite was replaced by a fresh component from storage.”
“Had to be the Varoki,” Lieutenant Alexander the TAC boss said. “That probe that did whatever it did to our jump drive, it had to be Varoki. Who else knows how to get into a jump core and mess with it? Nobody.”
“I’m not so sure, TAC,” Sam said. “The code’s nothing like their jump scrambler weapon, nothing like we’ve ever seen from any Varoki operating system.”
“Who else can it be, sir?” he asked. “Can you imagine anyone else who could possibly be responsible?”
“No, I can’t, TAC. But the thing to remember is the universe is not limited by my imagination, or yours either.”
“I don’t know who did this,” Lieutenant Ma said, “and I think it’s too early to start guessing. We just don’t know enough yet. But I’ll tell you one thing, I don’t think it’s random damage. Damage might lock in a course, but whatever this is it’s done more than that. When we jump it sucks every bit of power out of our energy ring, except the cells we physically disconnect from it. I think someone wants us to go somewhere and is in a hurry for us to get there.”
“But if they want us there,” Alexander said, “why suck the power dry? If we hadn’t had that malfunction the first jump we’d be dead.”
Ma shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, but maybe whoever set this up, their power systems work differently than ours do.”
“Varoki power systems are exactly the same as ours,” Alexander shot back.
“I know that, TAC,” Ma answered, “so you might want to rethink that theory.”
Sam couldn’t see any plausible candidate for who had done this, but the emerging consensus was clearly that it was deliberate, not a simple accident. On one hand, the idea that anyone even had the ability to reach all the way down into their jump core and make it do whatever they wanted was not simply impossible, it was terrifying. On the other hand, they weren’t dead yet. They at least had a chance.
“Wait one,” Brook said and held up his hand. He turned to the side and listened, apparently to his commlink.
“Understood,” he said and turned back to the group.
“That was quartermaster Ortega in the Ops Two chair. I had him working on the calculations of a possible destination. We’ve got a preliminary, sir, but bear in mind that at these distances those stars aren’t where we see them anymore. They’ve been moving for a long time since that light started moving our way, but we’ve got a baseline projection of their drift over time. I’d like to deploy our large visual array and get a better look.”
“But you’ve got a candidate,” Sam said.
“Yes, sir. K2 class star with enough wobble to suggest a good set of planets. Distance is two thousand seven hundred and forty light-years from here, give or take.”
“Jesus Christ!” Alexander said. “Did you say almost three thousand? Are we going to go all the way out there?”
“I don’t know, TAC,” Sam said, “but right now it looks as if someone wants us to.”
“But why would the Varoki want to send us out there?” Alexander asked.
Sam shook his head. “That’s why I’m not onboard with that theory, TAC. It would be quicker and easier for the Varoki to just kill us. The destination star is about three thousand light-years from K’tok. That’s twenty-five hundred light-years farther than any Cottohazz survey mission has ever gone. As bizarre as this sounds, we have to face the possibility we are dealing with an intelligence the Cottohazz had never encountered before.”
“Excuse me, sir, but then how do they know how to reprogram a Varoki jump drive?” Alexander said.
“I don’t know. None of this makes sense, yet. But the important thing is we’re going somewhere. I think most of you had already realized that since we cannot change course, if we weren’t aimed at a star system, we’d be dead inside a couple months, and not much we could have done about it. But we are aimed at a star system, and that means we’re still alive.”
They sat in silence, stunned silence, Sam thought. Finally Running Deer shook her head. “An alien intelligence. And it’s controlling our ship. We’re going to have some very frightened people on our hands.”
“Yeah,” Lieutenant Ma said, “including me.”
“Scares the hell of me too,” Sam said, “if that’s any consolation. Once we break out of this conference, though, all of you need to hide that fear way down deep. You’ve got officers and crew and civilians looking to you to set an example. We can’t change the course, but we can control when we jump, and we can control how far by how many power cells we disconnect, and that’s something. We decide how long this trip takes. Mister Ma, how’s our fuel endurance look?”
“Um . . . I’d have to check sir. We’re in pretty good shape, I think.”
“I have it here, sir,” Running Deer said and looked at her data pad. “The reaction mass tanks are over ninety-five percent and if there’s a gas giant at the destination we can scoop more hydrogen from it. Fuel pellet supply for the fusion reactor is our critical power limit, since we can’t fabricate those. But the Bay was designed with the alternate peacetime role of deep interstellar survey. That’s why we’ve got twice the jump range of any combatant ship in the fleet and lots of reactor fuel. We’ve got twenty-one hundred hours and change on the reactor—about three months at continuous peak power. We can easily triple that endurance, or more, if we aren’t maneuvering and jumping all the time.”
“Good. What about food, water, and oxygen?”
Lieutenant Acho, the logistics officer, answered immediately. “We recycle every drop of water and scrub the carbon out of the air. Those aren’t an immediate problem. Because we are liable under treaty to serve as a Cottohazz transport in emergencies, we carry compatible protein stock for all six intelligent species. We have rations for five and a half months for the Human passengers and crew, effectively unlimited for the fifteen Varoki and twelve Buran on board—because there are so few of them compared to the stocks we carry.”
“Okay,” Sam said, “I figure we’re twenty-five more jumps from our destination—let’s just start calling it that: Destination. Twenty-five jumps. If we stick to one jump a day we’re looking at a month there. If we can get whoever reprogrammed our jump drive to change it back, it’s another month back to Eeee’ktaa. Sounds like we’ve got fuel and rations for out and back with a considerable reserve. So that’s something positive right there.”
“How are we going to make whoever’s waiting for us reprogram our jump drive?” Alexander asked.
“When I know that, Mister Alexander, I’ll tell you. We’ll break now. I’ll take care of the announcement to passengers and crew. After that, you department heads start meeting with your officers and chiefs. I want a list of ideas for possible contingencies we may have to face and drills to deal with them. XO, I want to meet you afterwards, say fifteen minutes in the briefing room.”
“Sir, the briefing room is up in the habitat wheel. May I suggest we use the alert wardroom here in the main hull? If we go up into the wheel we’ll be mobbed by a lot of frightened passengers with questions we won’t have the answers to yet.”
“Good point and good suggestion, XO. Okay, see you there.”
He raised the visor of his helmet, the connection broke, and he saw the bridge crew at work around him again.
Sam sat there, alone with his thoughts for several long seconds, but the truth was for much of the last two days he had thought through what to say to the passengers and crew in this nearly worst of all possible cases, to the point that he felt he had already spoken the necessary words many times. He had Bohannon connect him to the all-ship comm circuit.
“Attention, this is the captain speaking. As most of you have seen by now the jump did not take us to the Eeee’ktaa system. Instead we are in deep space on the same course as in our last two jumps. Our conclusion is that the object we encountered somehow managed to corrupt our jump core, which we have no access to or ability to repair. As a result, we are locked on a course toward a star a considerable distance away. We are not helpless, however. We control when we jump as well as how far. We just can’t change the direction. We also have an extensive sensor suite and as we approach our destination we will use it to study the star system and gather whatever information we can.
“I have already arranged to consult on a continuing basis with key representatives of the civilians on board. We have an impressive pool of talents and experience to draw on. But I will not attempt to minimize the potential danger we face. I do know that our best chance of surviving whatever trials lie ahead of us is together and working as a team.
“I promise you anything we find out which bears on our fate I will share with you. We are in this together. Thank you for your courage and patience.”
The alert wardroom was in the main hull, not the rotating habitat ring, which meant it had no simulated gravity. Sam got there five minutes early, got a zero-gee squeeze bulb of black coffee from the dispenser, and clipped his tether to the table in the middle of the room. The alert wardroom, austere by the standards of Cam Ranh Bay, was larger than the only wardroom USS Puebla had.
He missed Puebla. Mostly he missed the familiarity of working with a crew he knew he could count on. Not that the Bay’s crew was second-rate. He still just didn’t know them well enough, didn’t know their strengths and weaknesses, didn’t know where he could lean on them for strength and where he had to go easy, help them along. He did know something was wrong with the officers and he finally had an idea what it was.
His stomach growled. He’d deliberately put off eating to avoid post-jump consequences. Now he touched the smart surface of the table and ordered a seaweed salad with Bosnian chicken, and texted his apologies to Chief Duranski for having to skip their scheduled lunch. Just as the XO got there the steward brought Sam’s salad out and clipped its magnetic plate to the table surface. As usual Sam looked at the metal plate and half expected the salad to float away, but it never did. The surface tension of the liquid salad dressing was enough to hold it in place. The silverware, on the other hand, was magnetic to stick to the table when not in use.
Running Deer still wore a broad piece of surgical tape across her nose but the swelling had gone down and the bruises under her eyes, shiny greenish-purple at their peak, had faded to pale blue shadows.
“Sorry I’m late, sir.”
“No, I’m early. Get something to eat if you like. How’s that nose?”
“My nose is fine, sir, and thank you for asking. I hardly feel it anymore. I’m not hungry, sir, but I’ll grab a cup of tea if you don’t mind.”
She drew a zero-gee squeeze bulb of black tea before clipping her own tether to the table.
“I want to make this a slow trip, XO. We need to work the crew, get them used to the idea of where we’re going. You live with something long enough you start getting used to it, no matter how screwed up it is.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, but it sounded pro-forma to Sam as if she wasn’t sure she agreed.
“The other thing is the officers,” he said. “A month or more will give us time to whip them into shape.”
“Sir?” she said, as much a challenge as a question.
Sam took a breath before continuing. He really dreaded this next part.
“XO, I’ve been trying to figure out what the problem is with the officers, and I finally did. It’s you.”
Sam saw her mouth stiffen, her body draw back slightly, and her neck and cheeks color.
“It’s not that you don’t know your stuff,” he continued. “In terms of technical skills, you’re clearly the best officer on this ship. You could take the place of any department head tomorrow—except maybe engineering—and not lose a step, hit the deck running.
“But you cover for them, like you did for Ma in the holocon just now with the fuel numbers. You connect the dots between the departments, fill in all the blanks. They get about 80% of the job done and you take the baton and cross the finish line for them. Any time departments need to cooperate, you do it. The department heads don’t even need to talk to each other.”
Running Deer looked at him but her eyes had become glassy, expression fixed, and he saw her knuckles had turned white on the hand that held the grip rail around the edge of the table.
“I know. You knock yourself out to make this ship run like a well-lubricated machine, and now here’s some new captain ragging your ass over it. But XO, you’ve got to let these people do their jobs. No, strike that. You have to make them do their jobs, because that’s your job.”
“I-I don’t know what to say, sir,” she stammered. “I thought you were satisfied with my performance.”
“It took me a while to figure out what was wrong. So now I have and now I’m telling you, but you can turn this around. You’re a fine officer, Running Deer. Look . . . tell me about Lieutenant Brook. Give me your unvarnished assessment of his strengths and weaknesses.”
She looked at the table surface for a moment, collecting her thoughts, then looked at her bulb of tea. Sam wondered how much she wanted to throw it at him. She took a breath and looked up.
“Ka’Deem is smart and technically very proficient. There isn’t a station in the Ops department he can’t crew as well or better than the specialists assigned to it. He cares about his people, looks out for their welfare. Very conscientious.”
“But,” Sam said.
She shifted uncomfortably. “But he is conflict-averse, sir. He doesn’t like to discipline people. He covers for his weaker staff. He goes along with other people’s ideas even when he thinks they aren’t the best way to do things, just to avoid a disagreement. He’s great at coming up with compromises . . . maybe too great.” She thought about that for a moment and looked Sam in the eye. “You think I’m like Ka’Deem Brook, don’t you?”
Sam chewed another bite of salad thinking about how to answer that, what the most honest answer was.
“No. You have more initiative than he does, and you’re clearly a stronger leader. You’re being the XO Captain O’Malley wanted you to be, and there’s nothing wrong with that. He was the captain. But you got a new captain now. So be the XO I know you can be.”
He pushed the remnants of his salad aside and leaned forward.
“We’re one ship, a transport, not even supposed to be anywhere near real trouble, and I think we’re about to go into a shitstorm of epic proportions. But we’re not defenseless or helpless. We’ve got a month to get our people working together and coming up with ideas for how to get every gram of performance out of this ship. And I mean weapons, life-support, sensors, acceleration, endurance, data analysis, everything. We have to get every quantum of knowledge and experience and imagination out of the crew.
“It’s not your fault, XO, but the Bay’s been coasting. Hasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and then nodded in genuine acceptance.
“Okay. No more coasting. What do you say? Let’s light some fires.”
She looked away for a moment and then looked back.
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Okay, then. Carry on.”
She unclipped her tether and pushed off through the hatch, and Sam sighed.
Well, it sure wasn’t the enthusiastic embrace of the new order he had hoped for, but it was probably the best Running Deer could manage under the circumstances. He hadn’t meant to damage her self-esteem but he hadn’t known any other way of getting through to her. He wondered if she understood how little actual experience he had at this captain stuff.