Hellfire (THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY) (6 page)

“With that in mind, it is my solemn duty to inform you that as your commanding officer, I, Ship’s Captain Ia, will be working under a double-indemnity clause regarding any and all corporal punishments accrued by this crew,” she stated briskly, hands pushing back the edges of her jacket so she could rest her palms on her hips. Ia did her best to meet the bemused looks of every member in the Company, or at least look like she was meeting them. “What that means is this: if you break a regulation or a law, however many strokes of the cane
you
receive,
I
must receive an equal number of strokes, too.”

She paused a moment, letting the men and women around her absorb that information. Ia followed it with an exact explanation of what that meant, so that there would be no mistake.

“If you receive one stroke of the cane for Fatality Four: Dereliction of Duty, then I must also receive one stroke of the cane, without restraint or hesitation,” she told the men and women around her. Most stared in skeptical disbelief, though a few winced, including the man seated immediately to her left. “If you steal from someone and receive three strokes for that theft, I, too, must undergo three strokes for Fatality One: Committing a Civilian Crime. If one of you completely loses your wits and starts selling military secrets to the Salik, you and I
both
shall be hung, drawn, and quartered for Grand High Treason.

“This is
not
a jest, meioas,” she stated grimly, pinning some of the more dubious soldiers with a hard, brief look. “The security level for this ship, her crew, and her mission is Ultra Classified. Revealing its secrets to anyone outside your direct chain of command will be considered an act of Grand High Treason.

“This is not a joke, this is not a game, and this is not a lie,” she warned them soberly, reinforcing her words. “I selected you because you
can
be discreet, and you
can
do the jobs ahead of you
if
you watch what you’re doing. I have no intention of being flogged for any incompetencies, which is why I selected the best possible people for this job. Make sure you live up to my expectations.”

She paused, partly to let some thumping and clanking outside pass without having to raise her voice, and partly to judge the moods of the women and men listening to her. Her dips through the timestreams, gauging this moment, had suggested a mix of warning and praise, of the carrot and the stick, would be most likely to get through to them.

“With that said, we turn now to a quick overview of our brand-new…” She had to pause again as someone noisily pounded something into place until it seated in a deck-vibrating
clunk
, and finished, “…ship. As I stated when I assumed command, we are now on board the TUPSF
Hellfire
. She is the first of the Harasser-Class line being produced here in the Triton Secured Shipyards, with one notable exception. That exception is the main gun, which we will discuss last. From stem to stern, the
Hellfire
is 0.9 kilometers long, and looks like a thick, lumpy, silver needle.”

Lifting her hand, she snapped her fingers. The snap wasn’t
necessary; all it took was an electrokinetic prodding of the display system’s workings to change the view, a mental click of the correct key. Ia snapped her fingers so that her crew would pay attention. Most sat up a little at the sound, switching their gazes from her figure to the flatscreens behind her.

The secondary screens fell dark, and the main screen lit up in a sparse diagram showing three cross sections of the ship: external, deck by deck, and radially. The images started with a real-time view of the pewter silver ceristeel hull, dotted with the rounded, somewhat oval lumps of projectile pods and laser pods, special gunnery turrets that could be extended and rotated to cover a wide firing angle, or retracted for interstellar travel.

Technical specs lit up the secondary screens, slowly scrolling upward with lists of the standard information: things like overall length, width, tonnage, atmospheric pressure, molecular content, ambient temperature, gravity gradient, number of decks, so on and so forth. On the main screen, the flatpic view of the ship’s hull vanished, replaced by a line drawing showing the different sections of the ship. Those sections lit up in various colors as she spoke, echoing her words.

“Originally designed to hold a complement of five hundred or more—and indeed all other Harasser-Class warships will continue to function with that many—the
Hellfire
is barely a frigate in crew size. Instead of five hundred, we will have a crew of 161.” Sections lit up in light green. “All of our berths, common rooms, recreation cabins, dining facilities, so on and so forth, have been divided up between the middle three sectors of the ship, being the fore, amid, and aft. The other two sections are the bow and stern.”

Each segment lit up as she mentioned it, briefly glowing like part of a pastel, five-hued rainbow. That made the ship schematic look like a multicolored worm for a moment. A tap of her mind zoomed the deck-by-deck sketches, giving a close-up on the crew quarters.

“Unlike most ships, where a particular section is devoted to a particular watch, I have instead divided up all three Platoons and scattered your quarters throughout the three main sectors. All common rooms and public facilities are to be considered open territory and thus available for everyone to use, regardless of your Platoon designation. I know that normally
the military’s psychologists divide things up into ‘territories’ to compensate for the natural Human tendencies of competitiveness and territorialism, but we cannot afford to be divided as a Company. Your Platoon designations are therefore mostly just a matter of what duty shift you’ll be working. You are
all
members of Ia’s Damned, and you will conduct yourselves accordingly.

“In compensation for the openness of the common territories, most of the original berths have been gutted, giving each team slightly expanded quarters and greater privacy. Most of you will still have to share your cabins, but the privates will have as much room as is normally allotted to a sergeant, the sergeants get junior lieutenant quarters, and so forth, save only for myself; my quarters are no larger than the others officers’ are. This extra personal space is all that I could give you, given the existing floor plans,” Ia admitted wryly. “The rest of the crew quarters have been turned into storage holds and manufactory bays.”

Those lit up in beige and yellow respectively, scattered throughout the ship, though most appeared on the middle decks. Between them lay a strange, blank section, as if the ship were hollow down the center, almost like a straw. Nothing filled that blankness; no lines indicated bulkheads, pipes, or passages, not even section seals. Ia ignored the anomaly as she continued her introduction to the ship.

“We will all become very familiar with these manufactory bays. What parts we cannot acquire during our brief resupply stops, we will have to be able to craft ourselves. Main engineering is located in the aft section, though each sector is being fitted with a redundant emergency engineering station,” she stated, as a patch of the second-to-last segment of the ship turn a brighter orange. Paler peach colors indicated the backup posts. “You will also note a secondary engineering bay in the bow sector, one almost as large as the main. That is because this ship has been equipped with OTL hyperrift generators, in addition to FTL.”

Spyder choked. He wasn’t the only one to cough on his own spit at that, but he was the nearest, and the first one to rasp out, “—Choo gotta be
kiddin’
me, Lieu—er, Captain,” he corrected himself, staring up at his former fellow Marine. “OTL, onna ship
this
big? ’S’bigger than th’
Liu Ji
, an’ y’know bloody well
whatchoo did t’
that
ship, three years back. Beggin’ pardon, an all tha’, sir, but tha’s
shakkin’
crazy.”

“I don’t deny that the
Hellfire
is longer than the
Liu Ji
, Lieutenant Spyder,” Ia admitted with a dip of her head, acknowledging his concerns. “But it is not
fatter
than the
Liu Ji
. In fact, its radial cross section is considerably skinnier. When it comes to hyperrift travel, the single most important physical consideration is the diameter of the ship in relation to the hyperspace rift’s aperture when combining other-than-light interstellar travel with faster-than-light-sized ships. There is, of course, an upper limit on what the
length
of even a skinny ship can be, but our current vessel does not exceed it.”

“If you say so, sir,” he muttered. “’S’long’s it’s not comin’ outta
my
pay cheque…”

Ia grinned, amused by the reference. “Nor, indeed, out of General Sranna’s pay cheque this time around.” She sobered a bit and turned back to the rest of their Company. “…The incident Lieutenant Spyder refers to is how my old Company arrived at the Battle of Zubeneschamali fast enough to effect the rescue of our commanding officers and fellow sergeants, back in my Marine Corps days. Rest assured, most of the OTL-FTL surfing
we
will be doing will be done under much more controlled circumstances.”

“I’m surprised Commander Harper wasn’t the one choking.” The muttered dig came from Doctor Mishka, seated on the other side of Bennie from Ia. With Spyder breaking the silence of the officers, she apparently felt it was alright to speak up as well. “Since he’s supposed to be the chief engineer, shouldn’t he be more concerned about you mangling this ship?”

Harper gave Ia a sardonic look before leaning forward just enough to look past her and address the other woman. “I’ve already seen it working properly, Doctor, via the Captain’s precognitive efforts. This ship
can
take it, once properly retrofitted.”

He did not say anything more, let alone anything about how or when. Harper just sat back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. Like most of the other officers, he was clad in Dress Greys with his full glittery of service pins, awards, and medals—most of them Compass Roses for outstanding feats of engineering—pinned to his chest. He looked well, if sullen. Dangerous, where her concentration was concerned.

Pulling her attention back to her work, Ia continued. “In terms of sheer tonnage, approximately forty percent of this ship consists of fuel compartments. In that regard, we are the equivalent of one of the Beluga-Class tankers. However, we have as many hydrogenerators as a high-end battle cruiser, or a low-end battleship.”

Those sections of the ships turned blue, revealing that much of the ship was indeed dotted with storage containers and pipes for carrying purified water to the ship’s hydrogenerators, displayed in a darker shade of blue. Most of the tanks were clustered around the edges of the ship, just beneath several layers of hull plating, sensory equipment, the L-pods and P-pods, and the projectile-weapons bays. Most of the hydrogenerators were clustered around that curiously blank inner core, which ran most of the length of the ship—far more hydrogenerators than what a ship of similar size should have needed.

After a moment, Ia electrokinetically shifted the schematic colors from the blues of hydrotechnology to the bright reds of projectile weapons and the darker reds of laser cannons. There were a lot of red dots on the hull.

“Some of our energy requirements will feed the dual engines and other shipboard needs, but the majority is reserved for the weapons. In terms of sheer firepower, if we exclude the main cannon, this ship qualifies as a high-end cruiser or low-end battle cruiser. Each and every manned post, L-pod or P-pod, will actually be operating anywhere from one to five slave-interfaced weapons pods at any one time, depending upon the severity of the current mission. Of the P-pods, we will be manning up to sixteen projectile posts during those missions, which means we will be firing from a bare minimum of sixteen up to a total of eighty P-pods staggered radially around the ship,” Ia informed her crew.

She had to pause while several people whistled softly. Others blinked in shock, and a few of the enlisted who specialized in gunnery posts whispered to each other. Just as they died down, she held up her hand…waited…circled her hand impatiently…and nodded as yet another rasping shudder rumbled through the bulkheads. It ended with a very loud
thunk
, and a brief dimming of the lights before they brightened again.

“…For those of you wondering what all that noise is, I’ve requested the fitting crews to install additional lifesupport bays,
manufactory equipment, and other odds and ends we will be needing later on,” Ia told the men and women around her. “The fore, aft, and amidships sections are more or less complete, but they’re literally still rebuilding the interior bulkheads around us here in the bow and stern sections, after having ripped half of them out. This chamber was actually supposed to be a storage bay before I had it partitioned and reinforced into the company boardroom, with extra hydrofuel tanks beneath your seats. Above us is the OTL engineering compartment, and aft of us is one of our two shuttle bays.

“The original boardroom, located in the fore sector and sized to fit the original crew of five hundred, has since been redesigned into a recreation deck.” The schematic changed colors again, briefly illuminating each section. Returning to the discussion at hand, Ia relit the drawings of the ship with bright and dark red dots. “At the moment, this ship has only the barest minimum of lifesupport supplies, and no armaments beyond the laser turrets and a few installed projectile launchers. Rest assured, we
will
be fully fitted for war before we leave dry dock.

“Each ship sector also has four portable hydrogenerators, which can be converted within three minutes or less into catalytic payloads…and which can be launched from a standard P-pod bay, for a total of twenty nonradioactive hydrobombs, with payloads ranging from ten to fifty liter-tonnes. That’s enough power per hydrobomb to completely destroy any major modern supercity, such as Tokyo—both Upper
and
Lower Tokyo.” She let the gravity of that sink in, then added, “We
will
be using them in the future, and we
will
be using them on Salik targets. We cannot and will not stop the coming war…but we will be doing our best to break the most critical components of their war machine.”