Solfleet: The Call of Duty (7 page)

“You’re
grounding me?” she asked timidly.

“Yes,
Heather, I’m grounding you,” he assured her. “And for the next
six months
,
you are not permitted to set foot inside this store for any reason unless I’m
with you. Do you understand me, young lady?”

“But me and
my friends come in here every weekend!” she complained.

“I said, do
you understand me?” her father repeated unwaveringly.

She huffed
and turned her face away. “Yes,
sir
, Admiral, sir,” she answered
sarcastically, but nonetheless submissively. “I understand you.”

“Good.” He
turned back to the proprietor. “And please, Colonel Worthington, if my daughter
does come in here without me at any time over the next six months, feel free to
contact Civil Security and have her arrested,
before
you call me.”

“Dad!” she
exclaimed, glaring up at him again.

Her father
silenced her with a simple look, then continued, still speaking to Worthington,
“You’ve been more than patient, sir. I’m truly sorry for all the trouble.”

“I
appreciate your saying so, Admiral. Thank you.”

At that very
moment, a pair of uniformed Civil Security officers walked in and quickly
scoped out the room. Clean cut and muscular, they were two of the most
confident and professional looking civilian law enforcement officers Hansen had
ever seen. A frightened look of concern crossed Heather’s face as soon as she
saw them. She licked her suddenly dry lips and swallowed hard.

“Admiral
Hansen, I presume?” the one with the single chevron on his sleeves said in a
clear, baritone voice after glancing over the admiral’s uniform.

“That’s
right,” Hansen acknowledged with a nod.

“The chief
said you needed some help here, sir?”

“Yes indeed,
gentlemen,” he confirmed. He pointed Heather out to them. “This young lady here
is my not yet fifteen year old daughter, Heather, and she’s gotten herself into
a bit of trouble.” It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the officers. But with
Heather looking the way she did, and human nature being human nature, he’d
thought it prudent to let them know how young she was. “Now, I have to get back
to my office, so I’d appreciate it if the two of you would escort her back to
our quarters and see that she’s locked inside for the day.”

“
Dad!
”
she shouted. “
That’s not...
”

“I don’t
want to hear one more word out of you right now, Heather!” he scolded, pointing
at her almost as if his finger were a lethal weapon. “You’re damn lucky I don’t
just march you straight over to juvenile confinement!”

She huffed
and scowled and stamped her foot in anger and frustration, but wisely didn’t
say another word.

“Sure thing,
Admiral,” the other officer said with a shrug of his shoulders. “We’ll be more
than happy to take her home for you.”

“Good. I’ll
leave it to her to lead the way to our quarters, but if she starts leading you
on some kind of wild goose chase or gives you any grief at all, go ahead and
lock her up for the rest of the day, on my authority as her sole parent, and I’ll
pick her up this evening. Clear?”

“As crystal,
sir,” the ranking officer answered. “No problem.”

“Thank you,
gentlemen. Please, proceed.”

The officers
took up positions on either side of her. “You heard your father, miss,” the
second officer said. “Stand up. Let’s go.”

Heather
huffed again as she stood up wearing an angry scowl on her face and gave her
father a look that would have killed him if her eyes had been laser emitters,
then stormed out of the office with the officers flanking her on both sides.

“Thank you
again, Colonel Worthington,” Hansen said as soon as they closed the door, offering
his hand.

“I hope your
day improves, Admiral,” Worthington told him as they shook hands.

“Yeah, so do
I,” Hansen agreed. And with that, he turned and walked out.

Starcarrier
U.E.F.S. Victory

Earth Standard Date: Saturday, 17
July 2190

Captain Suja
Bhatnagar grasped the arms of her chair and slid forward to the edge of her
seat, watching the action unfold on the enormous main viewscreen through
unblinking eyes as her vessel’s last four plasma torpedoes soared through space
and closed on the wounded and fleeing Veshtonn battlecruiser. Both interceptor
squadrons, having already launched and formed a wide defensive perimeter in
anticipation of the ambush, had been more effective against the lone enemy
vessel than she could possibly have hoped for. No sooner had the battlecruiser jumped
in than the interceptors fell upon it like a swarm of angry hornets and quickly
knocked out some of its most vital systems, including all of its offensive
weapons. Incredibly, the enemy hadn’t gotten off a single shot at the
Victory
before they’d forced it to turn tail and run.

“Come on, my
little babies,” she quietly coaxed, as if her gentle, coddling words might
somehow encourage the torpedoes to pursue their prey a little bit faster. “Make
mama proud.”

They glowed
white-hot from launch, as bright as burning magnesium, but cooled quickly as
they sailed through the icy cold of space, cycling through steadily darkening
shades of yellow, orange, and red, then disappearing altogether in the
distance.

“Tactical
display,” Bhatnagar ordered the second she lost sight of them.

Dull green
lines instantly appeared on the screen, forming a grid over the image of the
exterior reality and breaking it into sectors identified by small numbers in
the lower right corner of each square. A narrow, dull red oval marked the
location of the shrinking enemy vessel, and four blinking blue dots represented
the torpedoes, each with its own set of numbers, rapidly decreasing in value to
indicate its distance from target.

In what would
hopefully turn out to be their final act of desperation, the enemy suddenly
threw what must have been every defensive countermeasure in its inventory at
the incoming torpedoes, represented on the viewscreen by dozens of small red
dots that formed what looked like a kind of glowing smokescreen over the enemy
vessel. But once a Mark-II plasma torpedo locked onto a target, there was no
fooling it. Theoretically at least.

Seconds
seemed to stretch into minutes as all eyes remained glued to the screen. The
red enemy vessel continued to shrink in the distance as it somehow still
managed to outrun the pursuing
Victory
, despite the heavy damage the
interceptors had inflicted upon it. The blue torpedoes continued to blink in
their own, much faster pursuit. Knowing full well that the longer their pursuit
dragged on, the less likely it was the torpedoes would hit their mark, the
captain began to regret having given the order to fire, fearing that she’d
wasted their last four torpedoes for nothing.

Then, just
as she was about to proceed as if they had indeed missed their target, a
blinding flare of super-heated gases like a small sun gone nova burst forth in
the center of the screen and quickly expanded beyond its borders.

“Hell yeah!”
the tactical officer exclaimed, waving her fist in triumph as she spun her
chair around to face the captain. “Target destroyed, Captain!” she reported
victoriously, just to make it official. “
Completely
annihilated!” she
then added for good measure as she turned back to her console.

Lieutenant
Julienne Irons wasn’t usually so loud and animated, and Captain Bhatnagar
wouldn’t normally have tolerated such an outburst on her bridge. But the
younger woman had received word only yesterday that her even younger brother, a
Marine Corps PFC assigned to the
Tripoli
, had been killed in action two
days earlier in this very star system, during a boarding action his unit had
carried out against one of the Veshtonn command cruisers. Bhatnagar had
suggested she take some time off afterwards to deal with her loss, but Irons
had respectfully refused, saying simply that she had a score to settle with the
lizards. Since that time, her already superior performance of duty had risen to
a whole new level. So, as far as Bhatnagar was concerned, Lieutenant Irons’
dedication to her duties had earned her the right to celebrate every moment of
her revenge. She was not going to rebuke her for it.

“Mister
LaRocca,” she called out, turning to the helmsman instead. “Plot a course to
the
Tripoli
’s sector and engage. Best speed. They need all the help they
can get over there.”

“Already
plotted, Captain,” the helmsman advised her as his long, slender fingers danced
over both his helm and navigation controls at the same time. “Engaging now.”

Bhatnagar
turned her chair around to face the fully manned four-station operations deck
that dominated the rear of the bridge, and saw right away that the new engineering
ensign was working there again—the teenaged-looking one whose name she could
never seem to remember. That made three days in a row. Commander Marshall must
really have felt a lot of confidence in the young man to assign him that much
bridge time. The chief engineer usually rotated his young officers through
bridge duty on a daily basis.

“Engineer,”
she called out. But before she could say another word, her chair suddenly
dropped out from under her and she found herself tumbling head-over-heels sternward
across the ceiling as a thunderous crash and the crew’s pained and frightened
screams resonated through the bridge. And then, when the artificial gravity
promptly compensated for whatever catastrophe had befallen them, she fell
backside-first to the operations deck with a solid thud. Excruciating pain like
a high voltage electrical shock shot up her right side and down the length of
her leg, and she let out a quick yelp of her own.

Purely out
of instinct—she’d always preached that a ship’s captain should know her vessel’s
heading at all times—she looked up at the viewscreen to find the stars rolling
upward rapidly. Whatever had happened had sent the ship into a sudden and
certainly unexpected high-speed positive pitch.

“What the
hell was that?” she demanded as she picked herself up off the deck, wincing against
the piercing pain that pulsed through her right side and shot down her leg
again and again with every move she made. Then, glancing around the bridge to
quickly assess the situation as she hobbled back to her chair through a
thickening cloud of acrid smoke, she saw that those officers and crew who were
able to, and who could afford to stay away from their stations for a few more
moments, were busy running around the bridge with hand-held extinguishers—the automatic
fire suppression system had apparently been knocked offline—putting out a
number of small fires that had flared up.

Those
personnel not helping with the fire control efforts were picking themselves up
from wherever they’d come to rest and would resume their posts momentarily. As
far as she could see, no one had been seriously injured. No small blessing,
that, and one for which she was very grateful. She could only hope the same
held true throughout the rest of her ship.

“Whatever
hit us came in from below and behind us, Captain,” Lieutenant Irons reported,
standing behind her broken chair and leaning over it to read the computer’s
impact analysis. Broken chair? Someone had to have been thrown directly into it
for it to have been broken off of and then jammed down onto its shock absorbent
mounts like that.

Bhatnagar watched
as the tactical officer sat down very gingerly, fearing that the chair might
not support her weight. But it did, at least for the present. “Where did the
Saratoga
go, Lieutenant?” she asked, squirming in her own chair, trying to find a
sustainable position that minimized the pressure on her injured pelvis. She
expected to have one hell of a bruise on the right half of her backside
tomorrow. “They’re supposed to be covering our back.”

Irons
targeted her scanners on the corvette. “They’re out of the fight for good,
Captain. Both jump nacelles have been severed, and their main hull has been
ripped in two and is drifting apart. Multiple fires burning on several decks.
Cargo holds and engineering decks are venting atmosphere. Indications of
secondary explosions...” She cross-checked the
Victory
’s onboard
sensors. “As a matter of fact,” She straightened and turned to the captain, “our
onboard sensors aren’t picking up any residual radiation from direct weapons
impacts. I think it was a piece of the
Saratoga
that hit us.”

“Escape
pods?” Bhatnagar inquired hopefully, still squirming. Her hip
really
hurt.

“I’m on
that, Captain,” the helmsman chimed in. It wasn’t really his job of course, but
he wouldn’t have wanted to inadvertently vaporize any of the
Saratoga
’s
surviving crew who might have been drifting directly behind the
Victory
’s
fusion cowlings, had Bhatnagar called for speed. “At least ninety escape pods
are free and scattered all over the place. About two dozen more are indicating
occupied but have so far failed to launch. Various allied vessels are moving in
from all directions to pick them up.”

“Very well.”
Having finally found relative comfort by leaning on her left elbow, resting her
right ankle across the top of her left foot, and pushing off the right arm of
her chair to keep the pressure off her right buttock—how long was she going to
be able to hold
that
position?—Bhatnagar looked back over her shoulder
as best she could. “Engineer,” she called out again. Try as she might, she
still couldn’t remember the kid’s name. “Give me a damage report, please.”

“Massive
structural damage to our aft keel, Captain,” the stubble-haired tenderfoot
began, reading from one of his numerous status screens. He hadn’t sat back down
yet, either. “Loss of atmosphere on deck fifteen aft. Partial pressure only and
zero gravity on decks twelve through fourteen aft. Emergency bulkheads...” He
coughed, “...in place. Gravity on decks ten and eleven aft at forty-nine and
twenty-seven percent respectively. Looks like something really big hit us,
Captain,” he commented. He coughed again, and then added, “My guess is
Lieutenant Irons is right about it being a piece of the
Saratoga
.”