A Sword Into Darkness (28 page)

He cleared his throat and said to Nathan, “Well it certainly looks impressive.  How is it working?”

Nathan shrugged.  “It’s working pretty much as planned, breaking up and dispersing all the incoming, but the debris front is still moving toward us.  We’ll have to see how we weather the storm.”

Kelley spoke up.  “Targets reaching point defense boundary at 150 km.  Lasers are cycling to auto.”

Henson nodded.  “Very well.”

While the ship continued to jerk and swing, and the railgun continued to thump and fire away, the diode laser banks on each of the six emplacements began to track and fire.  There was little sound from these weapons, only the repeated snap and hum of continuously charging and discharging capacitors.  The railgun power supply made similar sounds, but that was lost next to the awesome crack of a shot ablating down the rails.

Invisible beams sought out chunks of rock, starting with the nearest and the largest inbound threats and working out from there.  Though the beams were not apparent, their effect was unmistakable, as hurtling meteors flared bright, turned to vapor and slag by the energy of the beams.  Where a meteor was too large to be burned away completely, the section of it that was burning would outgas, pushing the chunk onto a new vector away from the ship.

It was a success.  All the weapons worked.  What had begun as a mountain floating in space, an ancient leftover from the birth of the solar system billions of years before, was now a continuously expanding sphere of rocks and meteors—and one side of that expansion had been further reduced, pummeled and vaporized into harmless pebbles and dust.  Nathan sat back and smiled, letting the system wrap things up for him.

Flawless, he thought.

Kris’s voice cried out suddenly, strident and fearful.  “Leaker!  I’ve got a track on a collision course, no weapons pairing!”

They all looked at her and then at the main screen.  Highlighted on it was a single track:  a two meter wide, irregular mass of iron streaked through the gunnery sector without an engagement and broached the self-defense line without a laser reacting to it.  It stayed on a constant bearing, its range ticking quickly down on a collision course with the ship.

The system failed to react and there was no time to engage it manually.  Nathan’s eyes widened and he shot out a hand, striking a control on the emergency panel between his and the XO’s seats.

The strident beep of a collision alarm sounded.  At the same time, the ship’s voice cried out, “Brace for shock!”

The destroyer lurched to one side, jerking them badly in their seats.  The lights flickered, then died, returning a moment later on half-lit battery backups.  Static washed over their control screens and the gun and laser emplacements were silent.

They all set dazed for a moment, until Colonel Henson shook his head and looked at the four others.  “What the hell was that?  All right, SITREP.  Find out what’s up, what’s down, and where we are in terms of that blast front.  XO, get comms re-established and get us a head count.”

Nathan, Torrance, and Gutierrez each responded simultaneously with, “Aye aye, sir.”  Kris answered numbly with a slow nod of her head.

The static cleared from their screens as the system reset itself.  A few moments and keystrokes later, they had Henson’s answers.  Weps spoke up first.  “Sir, the railgun shows 136 rounds expended, bore clear, no apparent casualties.  All lasers have green boards.  I have charged capacitor banks on all weapons, but the detection and tracking systems are down due to loss of power.  Radar and lidar are down for the same reason.  The system is dead reckoning all tracks in from their last good radar sweep and we should be okay.  All major, potentially damaging rocks were destroyed, and the blast front is approximately two minutes out.  We may get peppered, but unless there’s another pop-up leaker, we should be all right.”

Henson nodded.  “Very well.  Engineering?”

Nathan answered.  “Power is down, obviously.  Engines are down and the reactor is scrammed.  Helium coolant pressure is zero.  Reactor room air pressure is zero.  I’ve got hull damage alarms and radiation hazard alarms for the whole of Engineering, and all the safety airlocks for that section are in lockdown.  My guess is the leaker penetrated us right over the portside radiator, and breached the reactor vessel.  I’ll have to suit up to confirm it, but it’s probably a hard vacuum back there, with clad plutonium pebbles spilled out all over the place.”

Henson nodded and looked at the XO.  Torrance responded, “We got lucky.  If we had a full complement, we would have lost at least two or three people, but no one was in the locked down area.  I’ve got reports of some bruises and a whiplash or two, but everyone’s still alive and functional, Colonel.”

The CO relaxed slightly and rubbed his own aching neck.  “Lucky.  And astronomically unlucky as well.  Mr. Kelley, this is an inauspicious beginning for your space fleet, don’t you think?”

“It’s disconcerting, sir, but I don’t think it invalidates what we’re trying to do.”

Henson’s lip turned up on the threshold of a grim smile.  “It doesn’t?  We were just taken out of the game by an inanimate hunk of iron.  Our hull is open to space and we’re practically in the dark here.  We could have lost men’s lives.  How do you think we’ll fare against your technologically advanced aliens?”

Nathan held up his hands in protest.  He was about to speak, but a sudden patter of dinks and bangs sounding from the hull gave him pause.  They all listened to the meteor storm front sweep by them, worried and almost convinced that there would be another collision and another breach.

Their earlier weapons fire had been effective, however.  All that struck them was sand and pebbles, moving at a slow enough relative speed that the destroyer’s chromatic armor plate could successfully shrug it off.

The noise faded after a few moments.  Nathan lowered his hands and sighed in relief.  “Colonel, this is a glitch, a bug, Murphy’s Law.  Nothing more.  I don’t know why that meteor was able to sneak through our defenses, but it does not invalidate what the rest of the trial showed.  We investigate this, we make repairs, and we try it again.  And then you fine gentlemen go make the Deltans wish they had never heard of Earth.”

Henson and Torrance exchanged a look and a nod.  Henson turned back to Nathan.  “Fine.  Now, what about repairs?  Can we get the power and engines back online?”

Nathan and Kris looked at one another, and she shook her head.  He motioned for her to go ahead.  She flushed and stammered slightly.  “C—Commander, Colonel, we, uh, we can’t fix this here.  Assuming the only thing that was damaged was the reactor itself, and that’s a big, bad assumption, we can go EVA and slap a patch on the hull and the reactor vessel.  We can clear away the rad hazard and maybe re-pressurize with helium, but there’s no way to tell if the reactor safeties will even allow us to bring it back online, and we’re going to soak up a lot of REMs while we’re making the attempt.  Also, if we can’t get it done in six hours, which we can’t, the air is gonna get awfully stale.”

Nathan nodded.  “Our only real option is to abandon the ship in the SSTOS and come back with a proper engineering team.  It’ll take about three cramped, uncomfortable days to make the trip home.  Then a few days to gather personnel and materials, another three to return, a week or two for repairs, and then … ?  Figure on the better part of a month before we can get the
Sword
underway again and back to Earth orbit.”

Henson punched his seat’s armrest in frustration.  “Shit.  There’s no other way?”

Nathan shook his head.  “Not with the resources we have out with us at the moment.  I’m sorry, sir.  This trial is over.  You have to focus on getting your crew home now.”

“I know that.”  His tone was sharp, but he relented a second later.  “It’s just … I had a lot riding on this mission as well, you know?  Fine.  Mr. Kelley, you’re sure the shuttle has the range to get us all home safely?”

“Absolutely, sir.  That was one of the safety constraints for the mission.  It won’t be that pleasant, but the SSTOS has the delta-v and the resources to get us all back to Earth safely.”

“Very well.”  Henson slumped slightly in his seat, in so much as one could slump in microgravity.  “Issue the order, XO.  Abandon ship.”

Torrance nodded and reached down to the comm panel.  As he began to speak to the rest of the ship, relaying what has happened and what they had to do now, Nathan and Gutierrez worked in concert to shut down and safely power off all the charged weapons systems, using what computer control they still had while the various battery backups were still active.

Kris unstrapped from her seat and floated up, her face stricken.  “I’ll go pre-flight the SSTOS,” she said softly.  The CO simply nodded, staring at the bulkhead.  As she passed by Nathan, she reached out a hand and squeezed his shoulder.

He reached up to catch her fingers and drew them to his lips.  He kissed the back of her hand without any of his earlier self-consciousness.  “It’ll be all right, babe.  This is just a setback, but we’ll work our way past it.  Okay?”

She attempted a smile, but failed to pull it off.  Kris nodded, her eyes limned with tears that could not fall, and then turned in mid-air and dove out of the room.  Nathan went back to his work, refusing to notice the other three men watching him.

Around the darkened, quiet ship, personnel began to make their way from their stations toward the dorsal interior of the destroyer and the large shuttle hangar there.  They pushed their luggage before them or dragged it haltingly behind, struggling with their massive packs now that inertia had been divorced from the aid of either gravity or pseudogravity.

Inside the hangar, the line of Navy and Air Force officers and crewmen drifted into the sleek, gray, single-stage-to-orbit-shuttle.  A slender, lifting-body design, it had been adapted from NASA’s somewhat successful sub-orbital spaceplane.  All that differed was the power plant, replacing the turbo scramjet/chemical rocket hybrids with a small thermoelectric fission reactor and a photonic reaction drive.

While the skeleton crew stowed their gear and went back for several days’ worth of rations, the adapted shuttle came to life, its ventilation fans, pumps, and motors providing welcome white noise to the crew.  It was not acknowledged among the uninitiated, but sailors of all stripes secretly feared the silence.

At sea, at sail, silence meant a dead calm, awaiting a slow death while lingering in the doldrums.  In later generations, silence meant the end of engines and power, forcing the tin cans and iron men of 20th and 21st century navies to negotiate with the capricious elements, at the mercy of forces they had long since conquered.

Aboard the
Sword of Liberty
, the silencing of technology’s pervasive noise meant they were stranded on the furthest, most isolated, most inhospitable reef man had ever ventured toward.  Out here, there was nothing that would not kill them, from the implacable vacuum to the impenetrable cold of space.  Seeing the SSTOS come to life let many of them release bated breaths they had not even realized they had held.

The last to go aboard, Colonel Henson allowed Commander Torrance to precede him into the shuttle.  Nathan placed himself just inside the shuttle’s hatch, ready to close it and conduct his door check.  Henson stood at the threshold, halfway in the destroyer, halfway aboard their forlorn lifeboat.  He looked wistfully at the ship.  “One month.  I’ll see you in a month … I promise,” he said, his voice a whisper.

He turned and pulled himself into the SSTOS.  “XO, is everyone aboard?”

“Yes, sir.  LCDR Oneida and Major Keller are in the cockpit, and Ms. Muñoz is back aft, completing the reactor and engine checks.”  Torrance began putting on his five-point harness, settling in.

Henson pulled himself forward, drifting to his own seat next to the XO.  “Very well.  Mr. Kelley, if you would get the hatch, plea—”

The hatch, firmly shutting on his request, gave him pause.  He turned around, just as everyone else began to crane around in their seats to get a look.  Nathan Kelley had indeed shut the hatch to the shuttle.

Except that he was on the outside of it.

A horrible possibility suddenly dawned on the colonel, and he jumped off and flew to the hatch.  He tried the auto release, but it would not work.  Fumbling with the manual release cover, he opened it to find that the operating mechanism had been removed.  The colonel growled in betrayal.

Henson spun around to glare at Torrance.  “You said Muñoz was aboard?  She’s back aft?”

“Yes, sir!  I saw her go back there myself.”

“Is there another hatch back aft?”

He had his answer when the XO went pale and began fumbling to release his harness.  Henson cursed and jetted himself into the cabin and then flew up onto the flight deck.  He jerked open the door and stared at the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit, going over their checklists.  “Oneida!  Do you have controls?  Is your board up?”

The pilot looked confused and turned to his panel.  He flipped a few switches, and tapped a few keys, but nothing seemed to happen.  “That’s funny.  It was working a minute ago . . . .”

“Damn it!  Get it back online!  Do whatever you have to.”  Henson turned and flew back into the main cabin, just as the XO emerged from his trip into the shuttle’s small engineering space.

Torrance looked as if he did not know whether to be sick or to throw a fit.  “She’s gone and the aft emergency hatch has been disabled.”

Henson growled and sought out his Chief Engineer among the assembled, strapped-down crew.  “Commander Marcus, did you actually see any of the meteor damage?  Any at all?”

The Navy astronaut looked around at his men and then shrugged, embarrassed.  “Well, no, sir.  The cameras were offline and the doors to that section were sealed for a vacuum and rad hazard.  I thought we would at least do an EVA and survey, but the Muñoz woman said there wasn’t enough time.  We had orders to spend the time shutting down and evacuating.”

“Good god, I’m an idiot.”  Henson ran a hand over his face.  Everyone else in the cabin stared at him, unsure of what to do, of what to say.