An Officer’s Duty (35 page)

“Either they’ve been destroyed by an enemy, sir, or there’s one hell of an ion storm coming our way,” Lieutenant Chen stated from his seat at the engineering workstation. “System buoys and hyperrelay stations are over-engineered to prevent casual failures.”

Both
, her precognitive instincts warned her. But there were still too many possibilities. “Until we find out otherwise, we will presume we have lost the buoys to
both
solar storms and
enemy ships, and act accordingly,” Ia ordered. “Engineering, standby on external repairs.”

“Sir?”

“Repair teams are to use remote drones to survey the damage, first. If the drones can’t manage the repairs, the teams will have to suit up in ceristeel, in case it’s an ion storm,” she ordered. “Helm, roll the ship to put the system sun on our portside. Gunnery, crew the aft Sections 3 and 4 P-pods and launch seven scanner probes, six in the cube and the extra sunward, staggered, so we can get realtime estimates if there
is
an ion storm out there.”

“Rolling the portside to sunward, Captain,” Vizzini stated, complying with a touch of the controls. The ship swayed slightly under them, but the hint of a tilt was subtle at best.

“Seven scanner probes launched in the cube, two to the sun staggered, aye, sir,” Bruer agreed, repeating her orders. That meant launching one probe in each direction, to the fore, aft, dorsal, ventral, starboard, and two to the port, the second one several seconds behind the other. He relayed them on his comm headset directly to his gunnery teams, not over the intercom like Abbendris’s orders had been sent.

“Captain! We’re in the yellow for three enlisted personnel,” Abbendris told her. “They’re trapped in a maintenance locker on Deck 3, Section 1. All the others managed to evacuate.”

“Are the door seals holding? Do they have p-suits and oxygen in there?” Ia asked.

Abbendris relayed the query, reporting within moments the results. “Captain, they say the door seals are leaking very slowly, but they’re suited up, with two-hour standard emergency oxypacks each. However…they’ll freeze within the hour, with the starboard side now in the shade. The damage interrupted most of the power to that area. They have some gravity, but zero heat, sir.”

“Captain, scanner pods away,” Bruer told her. “They’ll be up to full insystem speed in twenty seconds, deadheading away from us in the cube.”

“Noted. Lieutenant Abbendris, send the Section 1 schematic to my primary screen,” she stated, addressing the cadet by her scenario simulation rank. “I want to know exactly where our three trapped crewmates are located, and what’s around them.”

“Aye, sir. The damage alterations will be incomplete until we get pingback from the repair drones,” Abbendris warned her. “Most of this will be an intact schematic.”

“Understood, Abbendris,” Ia told the other woman.

“Repair drones are now launching, sirs,” Bruer stated. That was his duty as the gunnery officer, though it was up to Abbendris to make sense of the readings, just as it was up to astronavigation officer Shinowa to make sense of the data the launched sensor pods were collecting and sending back. Each one was equipped with insystem thruster fields, minimum shields, enough ceristeel plating to protect the delicate instrumentation in most conditions, and more.

The repair drones had a variety of flexible servo-arms to make repairs, while the sensor drones bore miniature hyperrelay units to boost the data streams above the speed of light. Both kinds were expensive, if necessary, and it would be a mark against her if Ia didn’t make sure each one came back intact.

Within moments, her largest, central screen brightened with the three-dimensional wire sketch framing the decks of the
da Gama
’s foremost section. Three yellow humanoid shapes lit up one of the cube-chambers. Frowning in thought, Ia tapped the screen, rotating the image, zooming in and out. She touched keys on her console, adjusting the opacity of walls, highlighting power conduits and other ship systems, coaxing her tired mind into thinking.

“Lovely…” Abbendris murmured. “Captain, we’re beginning an exterior survey of the damage.”

“Noted. Send a couple remote ’bots through the section airlocks, too, to examine the damage from the inside.”

“Aye, sir.” The cadet overseeing ship systems relayed the orders, then hesitated. “Captain? Aren’t we going to send in a rescue team to pick up the yellowlights?”

“Not until we get a system report. We are still lightspeed blind, Lieutenant,” Ia reminded her. “We have three problems that are slightly more urgent at the moment. We don’t even know yet what we hit, if it was an isolated asteroid or a chunk of ship. There might be other debris out there. If we get overtaken by a solar storm and the radiation gets in through the cracks in the hull during a rescue operation, it’ll kill those three faster than if they stayed locked up for half an hour while we wait to
find out. And if there are enemies lurking somewhere nearby, taking out those system buoys, better for our crewmates to be in an intact cabin with functional interior fields to help cushion them from sudden maneuvers, if we have to bolt and run.”

“Careful observation leads to comprehension,” Bruer murmured.

Ia smiled wryly. “Exactly. Right now, our biggest need is information.”

Shinowa spoke up. “We’re getting initial system telemetry from the probes, Captain. We struck one of…what looks like seven asteroids within twenty lightseconds of our position. Comparison with known system data suggests these are unregistered bodies, possibly rogues. There’s also some strange radiation in the system. Some of it’s leaking from the damaged ship section, I think. I’ll have a better analysis of it in a few moments…”

“If we hadn’t slowed down, the FTL field should have pushed them aside,” Chen groused. “Slowing down
caused
the collision.”

Shinowa shook her head, her gaze dancing between her primary, two secondary, and bank of tertiary screens. “Incorrect, Lieutenant Commander. If we hadn’t slowed when we did, we would have plowed into the largest of them, which is now dead ahead by five thousand klicks. We are damned lucky we stopped when we did. FTL can’t push aside a rock that’s 2.3 kilometers long. Instead of being banged up by a rock two hundred meters across—which I’ll admit
would
have been pushed aside by the warp panels—we’d have been dead. Very dead.”

“This system is only partially surveyed,” Ia reminded the others, backing up her navigation officer’s assessment, and explaining her own reasoning. “Prudence demanded that we drop to sub-light speeds and ping the buoys for the latest system updates. With those buoys dead, it’s even more imperative we hold position until we know what’s out there. That’s why I ordered the scanner drones deployed.”

“Those are rather large for rogue asteroids. They should’ve been on the system charts at that size, rogue or otherwise,” Bruer muttered, staring at his screens.

“We deal with what is, not with what we want it to be, Lieutenant Bruer,” Ia reminded him.

“Scanner probes edgeward are picking up traces of massive ion trails, Captain,” Shinowa reported. “Looks like this system’s been hit with a really big solar flare in the last week—
ah
—!” She slapped the intercom. “
All hands, brace for an ion storm!
It’s a big one, Captain, coming up fast. We have maybe twenty minutes at lightspeed before the worst of the radiation hits. We’re going to have to seal as many sunward ports and panels as we can. It’s either shut it all down for the duration, or be rendered sensor-blind on that side.”

“Right.” Tapping her screen and her console, Ia sent the sketch she made to the ship systems station. “Lieutenant Abbendris, to your primary. Use this plan to get those crewmates out of that locker.”

“Sir?” Abbendris asked, looking up from her screen to Ia. “
This
plan?”

Ia met her gaze impatiently. “You heard Lieutenant Shinowa. You have less than twenty minutes. Execute it.”

“Aye, sir.” Turning back to her station, Abbendris started relaying them, directing the repair crews to power up a welding drone, empty out a storage crate, and have two team members don stevedore mechsuits. The plan was to use the welding drone to cut through the back wall of the supplies locker from another room deeper inside the ship, and bring up the two-meter-square storage chest for the three pressure-suited crewmembers to crawl into, so they could be carried out of the damaged sector.

P-suits were silvery grey to help retain body heat and ward off some forms of stellar radiation, but an ion storm would pass its energy right through the relatively thin material. The ceristeel chest wasn’t very dense either, but then neither were the stevedore suits; their only advantage was that they would be more protection than the p-suits alone. All five crewmembers would be at risk until they reached the safety of the unbroken ship sections, where layers of ceristeel would absorb and diffuse the energies hurtling toward them from a mass ejection of the local sun’s corona.

Connecting her headset to the infirmary, Ia contacted the head of the medical cadets undergoing their own version of Hell Week along with SF-Navy Class 1252.
“Captain Ia to Doctor Underhill. Prepare to receive five patients. Three will
have decompression sickness and all five will probably have ion radiation burns.”

“Understood, Captain.”

Tense, quiet minutes passed on the bridge. Abbendris reported the extent of the damage to the starboard hull, in between reporting the progress of the welders. Shinowa reported increasing levels of ionized gasses expelled from the system’s star. T’siel warned Ia that the ion storm was now so intense, their connection to outsystem hyperrelays were failing. More than one tertiary screen at the various bridge workstations included shots from the cameras on the welder drone and the stevedore-suited crewmembers hauling the oversized ceristeel crate.

A subdued cheer broke out among the cadets on the bridge when the oval slice of metal was extracted from the wall. Another muffled cheer accompanied the sight of the crewmembers climbing into the crate, piling one on top of another, and the lid being fastened.

“Eyes to those boards, sailors, and keep your minds on your jobs,” Ia ordered the others. “We’re still running lightspeed blind.”

“Here comes the radiation crest!” Shinowa warned everyone.

“Repair Team Sierra, the ion storm is cresting. Get everyone back through the section lock, bounce it on the double,”
Abbendris ordered the men and women listening on her headset.
“Don’t make any careless mistakes.”

“Lieutenant Shinowa, what’s the estimated density of the storm?” Ia asked.

The other cadet shrugged. Navigation was not her track specialty. “It’s a big one, Captain. Big enough, the crest is starting to push
us
, sir. If there were other, relatively recent storms the size of this one, they could have altered the orbits of those asteroids, turning them rogue.”

“Rogue asteroids and ion storms, just our luck,” Vizzini muttered. “Captain, do you want me to use the thrusters to maintain our position? We’re starting to tumble from the stellar winds.”

“Maintain portside sunward, Commander Vizzini,” Ia instructed him. “Protect that broken hull section. But the moment those crewmembers are safely in Section 2, I want you to swap ship ends.”

“Sir?” he asked, giving her a puzzled look.

“Point the bow back the way we came, maintaining portside to sunward,” Ia clarified crisply. Unclipping the stylus from the edge of her workstation, she lifted it in her fingers and twisted her wrist, using it to demonstrate how she wanted the ship ends swapped.

“Sir?” Vizzini repeated. “I don’t understand, sir. Wasn’t the direction we were originally headed the correct one, Captain? Why would we go back?”

“Repair Team Sierra has reached the airlock, Captain,” Abbendris reported quietly. “They’re cycling through, sir.”

“Commander Vizzini, you are to swap the ship ends, keeping the portside sunward and the damaged hull to the edgeward side of the system, in the lee of the ship. You have your orders. If you are too tired to carry them out, let me know and I will relieve you of the burden of commanding the helm so you can get some rest.
Are
you tired, Commander?” Ia asked her second-in-command softly.

“Sir, no, sir,” he responded, turning back to his controls. “Helm is now swapping the ship ends, keeping the portside sunward, sir.” Left hand in the thruster glove, right hand dancing over the buttons on his console, he slowly rotated the ship. Half under his breath, he muttered, “I just don’t understand
why
…”

Ia didn’t explain. Instead, she worked on building a new set of orders. Her right secondary screen flashed with an incoming comm message. Linking to it, she listened to the report from the infirmary, and nodded.

“Thank god…The infirmary reports they have received all five crewmates and are treating them for very minor ion storm burns,” she told the rest of the crew. The others cheered. Ia allowed herself a small smile, until her right secondary screen flashed again, this time with a text message from a different part of the ship. “Well. It looks like supper for the cadre has now been prepared.”

“Rapture,” Bruer quipped. “Redlight or greenlight, routine or emergency, the cooks keep on cooking. Pass along my compliments to…uh…Lieutenant Harper? It’s his duty shift, isn’t it?”

“Yes, he took over from Lieutenant Jinja-Marsuu three hours ago. She swapped back to lifesupport for the second half of her
duty shift,” Ia said, calling up and checking the duty roster. “Given our delicate situation, and the general exhaustion of the crew—meaning we don’t have a lot of choices for relief watch officers—I am going to authorize permission to the bridge crew for us to go eat one at a time.”

They looked at each other. The order wasn’t usual, though it wasn’t unheard-of. Chen shrugged. “Who goes first, Captain? By rank, or…?”

“All bridge stations, ping me a standard RNG to my tertiary three. Highest random number goes first, lowest goes next to last. I’ll take the absolute last supper in the rotation, and handle each of your stations in the meantime.” Waiting for the numbers to scroll up the center of her five bottom screens, Ia touched the monitor as soon as all of them had reported in. A swirl of her finger on the screen and a tap of the other hand on the keyboard reorganized the numbers in descending order. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander Chen; you rolled a ninety-seven, which means you get to be the first victim of tonight’s version of a culinary masterpiece.”