Flagship (A Captain's Crucible #1) (18 page)

"Helm, full stop. Tactical, recall fighters." Robert stared at Task Unit One on the display. "Time to do whatever we can to help the
Hurricane
."

There was a blinding flash on the external video feed, which he had kept running in the upper right of his aReal overlay. "What the hell was that?"

He no longer saw Task Unit One on the tactical display. Nor the second group of enemies that were assailing them. There were no blue or red dots in that area whatsoever.

"My aReal seems to be malfunctioning—" Robert began.

"It's functioning," Miko said. He sounded stunned. "I'm receiving reports from my counterparts throughout the flotilla, confirming our readings. The
Fortitude
... it detonated, sir. They activated the planet killer. The second enemy group, and the closest members of Task Unit One, they're completely gone. There's no wreckage. Nothing."

Robert was quiet for several moments. He blinked rapidly. "Status on the remaining ships from Task Unit One?"

"Only a single ship remains," Ensign Lewis said. "The
Salvador
."

"Why isn't she showing up on my aReal?"

"She appears to have comm node damage. She's limping away from the detonation site. The wreckages of the
Devastator
and the
Halberd
reside four hundred thousand kilometers behind her. I'm detecting lifepods in their general vicinities."

"What about the
Hurricane?
" Robert asked.

Lewis shook her head. "Lost with the
Fortitude.
"

Robert sat back. "Five thousand human lives. Gone in the blink of an eye." More than that, if the escort vessels were counted.

A part of Robert had wanted the admiral to lose, but now that it had happened he hated himself for ever having such thoughts.

Sure I wanted him to lose. But not like this.

He had imagined a surrender. Not the nearly complete destruction of Task Unit One.

"We're the flagship, now," Ensign Lewis said. Shock, disbelief, anger... her tone conveyed those emotions and more in that moment.

"Status on the remaining two enemy craft?" Robert asked, forcing himself to focus.

Lewis didn't reply.

"Ensign!" Robert said.

"Remaining two craft are continuing to retreat," Lewis finally answered.

"Do we have an update on their heading?"

"They appear to be making for the far Slipstream, 1-Vega," the ensign said. "To rejoin the remaining alien vessel in the system."

At least Robert wouldn't have to worry about the threat from that angle. For the moment.

"Maxwell, current location of Jonathan Dallas?" Robert said.

He was expecting the AI to reply with the usual: "Unknown. Last known location the brig."

But instead Maxwell said: "Jonathan Dallas is no longer aboard the
Callaway
."

Jonathan lay on a hospital bed. The heart rate monitor beeped incessantly beside hi
m—
his hands and feet throbbed painfully in time. He felt nothing at all in his fingers and toes. Beside him lay other patients whom he didn't recognize.

The nurse came. She wore a white clinical mask, obscuring the lower half of her face. She unwrapped the gauze that covered his right hand. The fingers were black. Seeing them, Jonathan felt suddenly very hot. He broke out in sweat and dry retched.

"You suffered minor frostbite to your nose and ears," the woman was saying. "But the damage was the most severe to your fingers and toes. We're going to have to amputate and replace them."

"I don't want them replaced," Jonathan said.

The woman turned toward him and lowered her clinical mask.

It was Famina. Behind her floated the
Dominion
, split in half down the middle.

"I tried to help you," Jonathan told her.

"Wake up," she told him.

"I tried to—"

"Wake up!"

He opened his eyes.

Stars filled his sight, the peripheries of his vision constrained by the rim of a helmet. A cooling undergarment pressed into his body.

What—?

And then he remembered.

He glanced at the oxygen level indicated on the HUD. He had floated out there at least half a day, judging from the amount of O2 remaining.

The slow beeping of the heart rate monitor from intensive care continued in the background. Except it wasn't a heart rate monitor: the tone accompanied the flashing "air release malfunction" message on his HUD.

Abruptly the warning ceased, as did the beeping.

Apparently whatever was blocking the vent had cleared.

Jonathan tried the release. Sure enough, he could now vent oxygen again. Not that it mattered. He had no use for emergency propulsion, not when he had no idea where the
Callaway
even was. He was quite literally lost in space.

The HUD's rear-view camera overlay wasn't working, so he issued a spurt from the side vent to turn around, not sure what he expected to see. He rotated a full three hundred sixty degrees and then issued a counter spurt to halt the spin. He repeated the motion in the vertical direction. Not unexpectedly, there was nothing out there.

He fumbled for the PASS mechanism—Personal Alert Safety System—at his belt, and confirmed that it was on. Not that it mattered: the spacesuit version of the device wasn't powerful enough to transmit farther than several hundred kilometers or so. And the weak thermal signature of his suit wouldn't even register as anything but background noise beyond a few kilometers. Space was a very big, very vast, place. If the
Callaway
was looking for him, they likely had at least a five million square kilometer area to deal with: it would be like trying to find an individual bacterium on a grain of sand on a beach. 

Yes. He was screwed.
Famina, why did you wake me up to this?

He sighed. At least he still wore his aReal, with all its terabytes of locally cached content. He had told Robert he wanted to retire in VR. Well, it looked like he was going to die in VR instead.

It was a fitting end for a former Vaddict like himself, he supposed.

He pulled up the app browser and perused the list of programs and simulations. He navigated into the "memories" section, which contained the VR recordings he'd made over his lifetime. He scrolled through nostalgically-named entries like My First Time On The Bridge and My First Promotion.

And then motion drew his eye to the star-studded backdrop of space beyond the HUD.

A lifeless Avenger class fighter drifted by. An incredible coincidence, not only because it passed so close, but because its speed was only a few kilometers per second different from his own.

Thank you, Famina.

The fighter was one of the unmanned versions—it was missing the cockpit bulge that would have been present otherwise. The vessel looked relatively intact, save for a gaping hole under the front starboard side, precisely where the AI system was located. It was possible the fighter was still mostly functional, and merely inactive because of the damaged AI. With luck, it had a working communication node Jonathan could link his aReal to.

Even so, getting to the fighter would be tricky. If he didn't want to use up all his remaining oxygen he'd have to precisely time his emergency venting.

Taking a deep breath, he released the first spurt and headed toward the craft...

Jonathan paused outside the bridge entry hatch. Would his crew accept him? They had seen how capable Robert was in command. He had, too: he'd spent the night under observation in sick bay, and he'd used the time to watch archival footage from the latest battle. Robert had commanded admirably. More than admirably. A part of Jonathan felt he should permanently abdicate and let his first officer remain in command.

I have no business in the captain's chair.

Jonathan took a deep breath. He reminded himself that Robert had not cleanly won the previous engagement. The first officer had damaged the enemy, yes, though at the cost of two warships. And arguably it was the detonation of the planet killer that had routed the enemy. Still, Jonathan doubted he could have done a better job.

But when the time came, he would certainly try.

He stepped onto the bridge.

"Welcome aboard, Captain," Robert said. "Maxwell, as acting commodore of the fifth task group of the Seventh Fleet's second task force, I hereby restore Jonathan Dallas to his previous position as captain of the flagship
Callaway
."

"Affirmative," Maxwell said. "It is good to see you again, Captain."

Jonathan ignored the AI, nodded at Robert, and took his place at the Round Table. The officers smiled and nodded in greeting.

He had come home.

"Ops, status report," Jonathan said.

"Roughly half the lifepods from the
Linea, Selene
,
Devastator
and
Halberd
have been collected," Ensign Lewis said. "Rescue operations are ongoing in the wreckages of said crafts."

"Robert, have you been working with the other captains to assign them suitable berths and crew positions?"

"I have," the commander said.

"Good. Anything else?" Jonathan asked Lewis.

"I don't know how much the commander has told you..." Lewis began.

"Absolutely nothing," Jonathan said.

"Well," Lewis said. "We discovered some drifting wreckage from one of the alien ships, near the
Halberd
. A wing segment of some kind. We dispatched a drone team to investigate and discovered one of the aliens on board. We believe it's injured."

"I asked the Lieutenant Commander of the MOTH platoons to come up with a capture scenario," Robert said. "And our chief scientist is working on a containment plan as we speak."

"Is that wise?" Jonathan asked his first officer. "I watched the footage recorded by the Centurions before the MOTH chief blew up the deck to expel our intruder. Though it looks harmless, that dark mass packs a mighty punch." He was lucky the intruder hadn't fired at him and Bridgette like it had done to the robots. Then again, he hadn't threatened it with plasma fire. "Do we really want something like that aboard?"

"Our chief scientist analyzed the footage, too, and she's positive she can build a container that will hold up to those attacks," Robert said. "Besides, if the alien is injured, we have an obligation to help it. It has rights as a prisoner of war. We can't treat it any differently than a human being."

"Oh, but I think we can," Jonathan said. "Since it's
not
a human being."

"But we would hope the aliens would treat our own captives with the same dignity and respect," Robert said.

Jonathan assumed Robert was referring to the theory that the
Selene's
crew had been taken prisoner. He sighed. "Your optimistic nature is returning. That's good, I think."

"It definitely is," Robert replied.

Jonathan extended his noise canceler around the commander. "I only hope it's not misplaced. You mentioned a containment plan. How, exactly, are we planning on holding the alien? When I was in the brig, the intruder was literally darkness embodied: a black mist that flowed through the air."

"The chief scientist and her men have been poring over the data from the Centurions, and the drones," Robert said. "They've concluded that the being is constrained by ordinary spatial dimensions. They've created a glass-walled receptacle to hold it. No ventilation, since the alien can survive in the void. In theory that should be enough to contain the thing."

Jonathan wasn't entirely convinced but he couldn't ignore the opportunity to study one of the aliens firsthand. He deemed the risk worthwhile. "I want the containment properties thoroughly tested beforehand. You said 'it should contain the thing.' I want that changed to, 'it
will
contain the thing.' We don't need the creature breaking out while on board."

Robert nodded. "Agreed. The scientists will brief us at oh nine hundred, but I'll relay your concerns to them immediately."

"Good." He canceled the silence field and asked the ensign: "Is that it, Lewis?"

"There is one more thing, Captain," Lewis said. "Analysis of the battle footage has revealed that the alien ships slowed down during their attack to capture one of our disabled Avengers. It was a manned fighter."

"
Manned
, you say?" Jonathan asked.

"Yes. The aliens have the pilot, Lieutenant Commander Jason Wolf, and his copilot Lieutenant Lin Akido."

So when the commander mentioned prisoners of war earlier, he hadn't actually meant the
Selene's
crew after all.

"That's unfortunate," Jonathan said. "Thoughts, Robert?"

"I'm not sure there's anything we can do for them," Robert said. "We can't justify risking more lives to spring the pair. Assuming we could even get a MOTH team aboard, there's a good chance such a team would simply become hostages themselves. If we could prove that there were more than two prisoners, say, the crewmen from the
Selene
as well, then a rescue attempt might be justified."

Jonathan tapped his lips. "Agreed. Until we can get some confirmation that the
Selene's
crew is still alive, I'm reluctant to dedicate resources to any sort of rescue operation for Wolf and Akido alone."

"What happened to no one gets left behind, sir?" Ensign Lewis said.

The captain glanced at the naive ensign and was momentarily stunned when he saw porcelain-skinned Famina sitting at the ops station.

"Sir?" Lewis repeated.

He blinked and the vision was gone.

Jonathan smiled bitterly. "Welcome to the real world, Ensign. Where the whimsical notions of honor, courage and commitment hammered into your head during bootcamp no longer apply."

The entire bridge crew was looking at him.

Jonathan realized what he had said was bad for morale, so he decided to add: "You'll have to excuse me if I'm a bit disillusioned, people. Being thrown into the brig for disobeying an order that goes against everything I stand for will do that." He glanced at the ensign. "You never know, maybe we can find a way to resolve this diplomatically once we have our alien hostage aboard. An exchange. The alien for Wolf and Akido." Assuming the scientists could even figure out how to communicate with the species. Having one aboard for study was a good start, though.

"Yes, sir," Lewis said.

"How long until we're ready to get under way, Ensign?"

"Rescue operations and crew assignments should be complete in under twelve hours," the ensign answered. "Containment of the alien should be concluded in half that time."

Jonathan exchanged a glance with his first officer. "That gives me a chance to catch up on a few things. Robert, Miko, join me in my office."

* * *

The two-dimensional video feed hovered in front of Jonathan at a viewing distance and angle best suited to him. Seated before him, Robert and Miko observed the same feed at similarly optimal angles on their own aReals.

Jonathan and the two men had re-watched portions of the previous battle, as logged by the lightfield cameras on the bridge, pausing at key points to discuss the tactics and thought processes behind the decisions the commander made. When that was done, they had moved on to the footage captured by the external cameras to study the fate of Task Unit One.

The video was currently near the tail-end of the latter recording. The
Hurricane
limped between the encroaching alien capital ship and the
Fortitude
in a valiant effort to protect the planet-killer ship. Both the
Hurricane
and alien vessel appeared heavily damaged by that point, while the damage to the
Fortitude
seemed only minor in comparison. Fighters swarmed around both human ships—half were alien, the remainder were Avengers.

The capital ship suddenly fired its particle beam. Because of the relatively high speed and opposite motion vectors of both vessels, the
Hurricane
was utterly sliced in half.

Dedicated to the mission to the end
, Jonathan thought. He had to give the admiral some credit. Knox did fight, all out, to accomplish his orders, however unprincipled said directives might have been.

The damaged alien capital ship closed on the
Fortitude
. As did one of the dart ships. The destroyer only fired three aft Vipers in defense—the remaining heavy beam turrets were likely damaged. The
Fortitude
didn't launch any rear missiles: presumably it had expended them all by that point.

The dart ship returned fire, launching a weakened version of its particle beam. It was enough to eliminate the remaining heavy turrets.

The alien capital ship meanwhile deployed some kind of grappling hook, wrapping long black tendrils around the
Fortitude
. Those tendrils reminded Jonathan of the mist-like darkness he had seen aboard.

The video log ended moments later with a bright flash.

The three officers sat back, rendered speechless by what they had just witnessed.

"The robot crew of the
Fortitude
obviously had instructions to detonate the weapon," Miko said.

"Probably a good idea," Jonathan said. "Rather than allowing the planet killer to fall into enemy hands."

"Do you think the aliens detected the bomb?" Robert said. "Despite the shielding we put around it?"

Miko nodded. "I would say it's highly possible. We don't know what their technology is capable of, after all. Although... they might have attacked the
Fortitude
merely on instinct: they do seem drawn to the targets we're obviously protecting. You saw how they turned their attention on the
Selene
,
Grimm
and
Marley
in the last battle."

"I wonder if we could use that to our advantage?" Jonathan said.

Miko nodded. "Possibly. When are we planning our next engagement?"

Jonathan activated the tactical display on his aReal in "shared" mode, and floated it between the three of them. "The two alien ships are continuing on course for 1-Vega, apparently to rendezvous with the remaining vessel in the system. It seems obvious they want to prevent us from leaving, and from communicating with NAVCENT. If we want to go home, we'll have to clear the enemy away from that Slipstream and build ourselves a Gate.

"So in answer to your question, Miko, our next engagement is as soon as possible. We'll be leaving the moment local rescue operations are complete. Review this footage and the footage of the previous battle as many times as it takes. I want you and Maxwell to come up with some potential strategies long before we reach the enemy."

"What about repairs?" Robert said.

"We can't afford to delay. We repair while under way. The longer it takes us to reach them, the more time the aliens have to effect their own repairs."

"What about the
Marley?
" Robert said. "Given the damage the Builder has sustained, she'll never keep up with the rest of us."

"She'll have to stay behind then," Jonathan said. "It's probably better that way, anyway. She's the last ship we want damaged in the battle to come."

They exchanged comments and ideas like that for a few more minutes, then Jonathan dismissed the men.

Miko left immediately. The commander, however, lingered.

"Can I see you in private for a moment, Captain?" Robert said, still seated. His voice had an uneasiness about it that made Jonathan wary.

"Certainly," Jonathan told him. "How's Bridgette, by the way?"

"Very good."

"Glad to hear it. She's a good wife. The best. So. What's on your mind?"

"Is there something going on between you and my wife?" Robert asked without preamble.

Jonathan felt his brow furrow. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"She was in the brig with you when the attack came."

Jonathan chuckled, thinking Robert was playing some strange joke. But the commander remained dead serious.

Jonathan dismissed his grin. "She didn't want to be alone, Robert. That's all. We talked. That's it. Review the logs. They're public."