Safety, Chapter 2/9

Chapter 2
10 44 Saturday 14 October 2299.
Monarch Sector, disputed zone, USCS Rolling Thunder, deck #10, conn.

Blue returns to the conn, bathed in pulsing Klaxon noise. He stands next to the digital map table, and watches the main viewer.

“Status report, and kill that noise,” he commands, calmly.

“Hull integrity is moderately compromised in the upper aft sectors,” the eighteen-year-old prodigy of a Corps Chief Tactical Officer, lieutenant Philip Vaughn, reports. “The shields are at full charge capacity and cyclically discharging. Scope is clear and baffles report no unusual activity.”

“General quarters in effect. Weapons operable, computer systems online, engines, life support, damping fields, and ZPMF all nominal, reactors are at seventy-five percent of capacity, and aft sensors have just completed calibration procedures. Hull maintenance reports severe collateral damage in aft sectors L, M and N, decks four, five and six. Temporary repairs to be effected in twenty-eight hours,” Roger Kahn, the graying, middle-aged, full lieutenant Chief of Operations reports.

“Two-zero-decimal-six-one-niner AU to waypoint five, all ahead flank,” the chief at Helm, Roger Fox, says. “Thirty-four minutes, twelve seconds to turn… mark.”

“Radio and gravimetric communication silence in effect. All communications weaponry appears to be operating within normal perameters. Nothing to report, no contacts,” reports senior chief Henry White. Though a younger gentleman, his life revolves around audio of all kinds, so much so that he managed to attain his post and rank as Chief Communications Officer through a batch of degrees, tests, and written requests presented to Command.

Blue stands over the map table in the center of the Conn as Tharsis takes a position between the four other officers on deck, preparing to enforce the Captain’s orders. “Get me one-hundred percent on the reactor,” Blue says calmly to no one in particular. Of course, this is a direct order to his first officer.

Tharsis picks the hotline to engineering out from the equipment hanging over the map table and activates the receiver, speaking into it. “Engineering, Conn: go to one-hundred percent on the reactor.”

“Engineering, Aye,” the voice on the other side, Chief Engineer lieutenant commander Gordon Wright reports. Tharsis switches off.

“Recompute time to waypoint,” Blue says.

“Helm, time to waypoint,” Tharsis calls.

“At flank speed and one-hundred percent on the reactor,” Fox reports, reading from a calculator on his console, “time to waypoint is twenty-one minutes, fifty-six seconds… mark.”

“Good. Steady as she goes. Ops, you have the conn. Tharsis, you’re with me,” Blue says as he walks to his office, Tharsis in tow.


“Something to drink, Del?” Blue asks after the door slides closed.

“I think I’m going to need either several seriously Irish coffees, or one heck of a brandy.”

“Brandy for you,” Blue agrees, heading to his wet bar. “Scotch for me.”

Tharsis takes the chair closest to his captain’s desk. “A mole. A goddamn mole!” he laments, jumping to the obvious conclusion.

“Hit the secure switch on my console before you start shouting state secrets,” Blue orders. Tharsis immediately leans over the desk and taps in a short sequence of keys, securing the room. Blue returns with an old-fashioned glass in each hand, both containing large amounts of brown liquids. Triples; straight, no chaser.

“You got my number, captain,” Tharsis says, taking the glass from his CO, draining an ounce from it immediately. “Ahh,” he heaves, a sigh of burning pain mixed with relief.

Blue, now sitting behind his desk, opens the crew roster on his console, sipping his huge glass of whiskey as he scrolls through the list of names, faces, and dates, looking for something. “The planning for this mission began right after we got the intel on Gelenk’rt’s little project.”

“We ought to just declare war on those damn lizards and blow Gelenk’rt straight into her sun,” Tharsis says almost casually, leaning back in his chair, balancing his glass between two digits above his eyes, glaring through the substances to the ceiling, allowing the liquor to work its way into his body. He looks down suddenly, bringing the glass down to chest level. “Who was the one that acquired it, again?”

“The background said it was one of the local turncoats, no name provided, the intel middlemanned by an agent working as a merchant trader. Typical…” Blue says, pulling up the dossier, reading the screen. “Fred Smith. Heh, must be the eightieth one by that name.”

“He’s gotta be making money hand over fist, being on two lucrative payrolls at the same time. What’s your take on this whole thing?”

“It looks to me that this whole damn thing was compromised from the beginning. I mean, look at it in sequence: we get info that the Yvellians are experimenting with teleportation technology, and have had some limited success with small inanimates, which is more than our scientists can say. Intel confirms this, and Command creates the mission outline, which Mission Ops refines and hands to my battle group commander, with orders to give it to me and not to look at the contents. We do a standard crew rotation in port at Bernhard’s Pass, we come here, and are attacked twice, once from within. That’s… four months… twelve days from start to now. ‘At what point was the project compromised?,’ that’s the question.”

“Well, here’s another one: who’s in on this, on both sides…”

“Right.”

“Seems to me that we have at least one, possibly two Fleet personnel and any number of Yvellians in on this.”

“Maybe. Another question that I have will wait until Frank can be here.”

“Do you think he can be trusted?”

“Can you be trusted?” Blue asks with bravado. “Can I? He’s been here, for the time concerned, just as long as either of us have. I think it’s safe to say that we can trust him.”

“Sure. Hell, if it was him, would we ever figure it out?”

“Damnit, I hope that we could. Computer, contact Chief of Security Henry,” his request followed by a beep from the PA systems, followed by the short pause necessary to inform Henry of an incoming call.

“Henry here, Sir, go ahead.”

“Frank, drop whatever you’re doing and join me in my office, please.”

“Aye aye.”

“Out,” Blue says, closing the channel. The two senior officers sit in silence, draining their drinks quickly, half out of necessity created by the stress of a compromised op, half out of courtesy to the inbound, sober-living, recovering alcoholic Chief of Security. While neither voice it, both men hope that the third won’t detect the alcohol on their breath.

Finished, Blue returns the glasses to the wet bar just as the lieutenant requests ingress, causing the portal to chime. Blue actuates the door from his console, allowing the lieutenant inside. “Have a seat.”

“I think I know what this’s about,” Henry says, when the room is again secure. “We have a mole, meaning that the mission was compromised before we even got word.”

“That’s our conclusion so far,” Tharsis comments.

Henry continues: “Now, because of the Yvellian skirmish, and the observations of the Chief of Salvage, it’s apparent that any cover we may have had is in jeopardy.”

“Correct. Now, we have three questions to ask. First,” Blue says, counting off on his fingers, “when was the operation compromised, second, who, on both sides, could be in on this, and third, what could have possibly motivated such an attack?”

“Huh,” Tharsis responds. “How do you mean?”

“What do you think our gunman had to gain through an attack of a force field in the single damaged area of the hull?” Blue asks.
They pause for a moment, and Henry replies: “It could only be the destruction of the ship.”

Blue nods. “The sixteen guys that died were all crewman grade ranks; they were experienced men, hard workers, but not one was so important that anyone couldn’t have gunned him down at Bernhard’s Pass without so much as a minor JAG investigation. I have to think that that shot was meant to cause a shipwide explosive decompression.”

“If that’s the case, they damn near succeeded,” Tharsis replies. “It was only the new alert condition protocols sent out last week that called for the lockdown of all closed bulkhead doors after general quarters has been called.”

“So this mole has to be suicidal,” Blue continues. “But, why not just fire a shot directly into an antimatter systems regulator? There are plenty of them around, and it’d be an easy enough explosion to start a chain reaction to destroy the ship.”

“Theory dictates, cap’n,” Tharsis retorts, “that teleportation technology won’t be able to pass through some EM fields. Hell, you remember Kennison’s recollection of that battle: they waited after our shields dropped, fired again after they went back up, then went home. Seems to me that they had to wait until our shields went down before planting the gun. Could explain why the reactor core wasn’t shot; all those retaining fields wreak havoc with electronics as it is. No telling what they’d do to a teleporter ray.”

“Hull stabilization fields generally aren’t up when the hull isn’t damaged. Could we bypass that, put em up? Maybe buy us some margin of safety?”
Henry replies: “It’d be risky, Sir. Those things get fickle after prolonged use; they end up getting static and objects inside ‘em can polarize and sometimes shatter if struck. Besides, that didn’t help the field generator that was hit.”

“Wait a minute,” Blue interjects. “We only got hit there because of a massive systems failure. Do we even know why our shields dropped?”
Silence.

“We were winning that battle, skip. Those Marauders weren’t a match for us; the failure was labeled a systemic problem. That’s when the aft quarter was hit, with a shot already inbound, and that must’ve been when they planted the weapon!” Tharsis says, triumphantly.

“It’s safe to assume that this technology can’t work within a strong EM field,” Blue says, ending the topic. “But what I want to know is how far this conspiracy goes. How much do you think the lizards know?”

“We have to assume that their Command knows everything, I think,” Henry replies.

“Are you familiar with their system of government, Frank?” Blue asks.

“I know that they’re a constitutional monarchy, with a matrilineal…”

“Not even close,” Blue interjects, cutting him off.

“Sir?”

“Are you familiar with the Abjaufek Syndicate?”

“Supposedly an organized crime system using Yvellian businesses as fronts.”

“Not just supposedly. They are a massive organized crime association, composed of dozens of paranoid, militant families, operating under the cover of their puppet government. This means, in order to maintain control and to stem assassinations of what would be the actual leadership, that they’re heavily factionalized into a collaboration of families. Intel reports that if it weren’t for the constant council of the heads of the families, they’d collapse into groups of bickering tribes, and eventually splinter into a whole bunch of proto-governments.”

“So, how does this keep their High Command out of the loop?”

“Their High Command, Frank, was never in the loop to begin with. All they do is decide large-scale tactical deployments, recruiting from planetary militias that have commanders sworn to allied families, when they need to attack either us or the Tourellians. They’re given authority by the family council to do these things, so their government at least appears legitimate. The thing is that it’s their custom to withhold all technology from distribution until it’s completed, and when it is given away, it’s used in a sort of monetary or barter system among the families, good for organized rights to skirmishes with the unaligned systems, territory grabs, bounties on rogues, and prize moneys.

“Chances are that the project we know that they’re working on is only known to the lizards on the planet, our agents, our Intel, and us. Hell, the ships that hit us were probably only from Gelenk’rt, sent out to patrol our possible avenues of approach, each of them with only maybe one officer from the project that knew what was going on.

“Our orders indicated that we were to go to Gelenk’rt to capture any technology and, after that, to terminate the operation of the developmental facilities there. No dispatch from Command at any time said anything about teleportation.”

Tharsis speaks up: “I’m thinking the same thing you are, cap’n.”

Blue grins slightly and nods. “They intercepted our orders only after Mission Ops dispatched them to Bernhard,” he announces. Being the focal point of the Monarch sector, a heavily disputed tract of space between the Yvellian Union and the Fleet, Bernhard’s Pass remains the only known direct navigable tract of interstellar space between the two nations; the rest of the Monarch sector north and south of Bernhard’s Pass is composed of dark dust nebulae with crushed planetary debris, Oort clouds, uncharted systems and various ill-defined gravity wells scattered within it. The primary system of Bernhard’s Pass is the single largest port system within the Monarch sector, a hub for local and international trade and a free port open to practically anyone who isn’t intent on a battle. Currently occupied by the Fleet, it remains as both a fortress protecting the interests of the USC and a staging point for patrols of disputed territory and probes into enemy space, when the cease-fire agreements with the Yvellian Union invariably expire. “Their intelligence sharing may be backwards, but their Early Warning Intelligence Networks sure are up-to-date. Since it took only that day for me to get our orders, we’ve gotten it narrowed down to a span of about twenty hours.”

“So, if it was compromised at Command, there’d be a hot war right now, because they’d have the info on the teleporters,” Henry ascertains. “But, as far as they know, we’re ignorant. Gelenk’rt wants us to think that they have nothing of any real importance, so they’re not opposing us with strength or in force, instead confronting us with a small force to attack us and plant a weapon that they’ve somehow persuaded a mole aboard to use. They’re playing the hunch that we’re unaware of exactly what technology they’re working on. Therefore, because war hasn’t broken out yet, the leak did not occur earlier than before the orders were issued, and because of the radio silence, not later than when you read the orders yourself,” Henry concludes.

“That’s right.”

“Well, whatever the case,” Henry says as he stands, “the statutes are clear; I must issue the order for all concerned personnel to equip side arms, as per regulations. This includes the senior staff and all security personnel.”

“Pistols? What if we’re just handing another gun to our boy?”

“Seems to me, Sir, that the mole is among those acquired from Bernhard’s Pass, not my staff, and no one who’s been with us for any length of time,” Henry says directly. “That aside, ‘our boy’ is already armed with possibly the most powerful firearm known in the galaxy. I don’t see how giving him a pistol would make the slightest difference.”

A pause, then Blue acquiesces: “Well, you have your duty,” he says, opening a drawer behind his desk, removing two pistols and holsters. He pushes Tharsis’ set, a shoulder harness packing a 9mm with an extended clip and two extra magazines, across his desk, attaching his, another 9mm of a different design, to his thigh. “Frank, this is your investigation now. Include your best, most trusted people only. We don’t want any leaks. Dismissed.”

“Sir,” Henry, a soldier of the old style, says as he salutes.

Blue returns it, and opens the portal for him.

Tharsis continues, when the door closes: “He’s from Bernhard, eh? How many does that eliminate?”

“Besides us, we’ve a crew of thirty-seven officers and two-hundred seventy-six enlisted personnel,” Blue says, rubbing his face, squinting, “one third of which just rotated back from shore duty. The ones that were killed were here since USC space. That’s one-hundred three men and women who are still under suspicion, minus the fourteen secure personnel under Frank.”

“Eighty-nine people who we need to do background checks on, under radio silence, on the q.t., under threat of a hypothetical sniper with a shipwide view,” Tharsis concludes. He pauses momentarily. “Is it too late to switch sides, cap’n?”

“Yes,” Blue says steadily as he stands, entering the unlock key sequence for the room.

“Damn,” Tharsis retorts. They return to the conn, Blue standing toward the center, Tharsis respectfully off to his right.

“We’ve reached the waypoint, Sir,” Fox reports to his captain. “Awaiting orders for FTL.”

“Kahn,” Blue says, still standing, circumventing Tharsis’ interpretation, “what’s the status on our cargo?”

“ADS bay crews report that the ships are ready for launch, and up to specs. They’re just waiting for the correct transponder codes, Sir,” he replies. Destroyers, like the Lakota-class mark II Rolling Thunder, normally carry two ‘Assault-Drop Ship’ type, Lenin-class gunboats for planetary deployment of Marines, transfer of materiel or cargo, or for just the supporting role they can play alongside fightercraft as gun ships. For this mission, however, the standard compliment of two Lenin-class ADS have been replaced with two older ADS-class boats, gutted and converted to appear as merchant ships, while possessing both retrofit, upgraded engines and top-of-the-line orbital bombardment systems, each with the payload and launch capacity of one round of low-yeild, antimatter-based ammunition.

“Vaughn,” Blue asks of his cocky, young, Chief Tactical Officer, “What’s the word?”

“We have one-twenty-six of one-thirty concussion missiles, full load of forty antimatter torps, and enough chaff and flares to last us to entropy, Sir,” he responds.

“Good,” Blue says, and continues. “Let’s spare no ceremony; helm, give us maximum speed to the jump point.”

“Helm aye!” Fox calls. Planetside, on his home of Venus, Fox owns one of the fastest commercially produced and privately upgraded endo/exo-atmospheric vehicles around, and uses it constantly, breaking all sorts of speed limits, but somehow never getting into trouble. It’s no secret: any way you slice it, and however inconsequential it is in interstellar space, Fox is in this line of work for the joy of speed, and is right now applying for transfer to OCS to train as a fighter pilot.

As the zero-point mass field generators fire up, the rays of light coming into the sensory receptors begin to be effected by the change into absolute masslessness relative to the world outside the effective radii of the fields. The incoming light, much like everything else within the fields, has now become nearly massless with reference to that which is beyond the field. Effectively, a fourteen-point-three-million tonne ship such as Thunder now only has about as much measurable mass as a small, vacuum-capable fightercraft. By lowering an object’s apparent mass, or mass signature, while retaining the full physical mass, the ‘cosmic speed limit,’ as it’s called, is raised.

The visual effect of altering the meager mass of light is that main viewer distorts and glimmers as the light bends before reaching the receptors. As the ZPM fields reach full strength and optimum radius, the picture blurs until the stars appear as large, overlapping, shuddering dark grey spots of light on the screen.

The gravity drive engines, housed safely within the destroyer’s engine housing nacelles, far away from anything important in the main body they’re attached to, begin the process of readjusting the gravitational intensity gradients around themselves, more or less ‘tugging’ on the gravitational lines strung across the galaxy, creating a virtual gravity well just in front of the ship, causing her to fall, fast, in whatever direction is necessary. Combined with a ship that has virtually no mass with respect to the rest of the universe and additional fields to nullify virtually all inertial variation, one can travel faster than light with no time distortion.

“Operations,” Blue says, “do you have anything for me?”

“Operations reports nothing new.”

“Good. Comm?”

“Nothing intercepted, nothing on scope.”

“Tactical?”

“Tactical clear, Sir.”

“Tharsis,” Blue says suddenly, to the slight surprise of all in the conn. They know what’s to follow, and that’s for their CO to leave them, but for what reason? “You have the conn.”

“Aye, Sir,” Tharsis says.

Blue opens the portal to the traversing corridor, and starts in the direction of a lift, leaving the conn in the capable hands of his XO.