Starhunt: A Star Wolf Novel (13 page)

“Yes, sir. We’ve been ready for twenty minutes.”

“My fault. I should have given orders for you to start even if I wasn’t here. Oh well, no matter.” He unclips his hand mike from his belt. “Now hear this,” his voice is amplified throughout the engine room. “We’re going to skip the two warm-up problems and go directly to the important ones. This first drill will be a series of hit-and-run missile firings to see if we can lay down a wide-spectrum barrage. We stand a better chance of getting that bas—that bogie, if we can drop a school of fish on him instead of just one. As soon as we master that, we’re going to add a few extra touches—some evasive maneuvers and some programmed missile firings by our simulated enemy, so while we’re ‘shooting’ at him, he’s going to be ‘shooting’ back at us. And I promise you men—it’s not enough to just kill the bear, we have to take
his skin home and nail it to the wall. Uh—Chief Leen tells me I should compliment you men because you’ve trimmed your efficiency down to 22 per cent of optimum. I disagree. I don’t think so. Not yet—let’s get it down to that, we may be able to make the kill. And, of course, that’ll mean bonus money for us all, right?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, let’s go.”

He swings back to his board as the klaxon squawks across the room. The massive framework of the generator mounting fills the engine room like the bones of some Brobdingnagian beast. The conical black giants within the framework hum with a life of their own. Even from his position at the console, Korie can feel the tingling on his cheeks and hair that indicates the field pressure. “Chief?”

“Sir?”

“Static—I can feel it. Is everything all right?”

“Uh—” Leen steps to Korie’s console, leans over him, and flicks a switch. He watches the monitor screen as it flashes a series of diagrams. “It’s okay, sir. It’s just routine discharge through the injective compensators. Auxiliary control must be doing it to prepare for the drill.”

“All right. Thanks.”

Leen straightens and moves away. Korie glances at his screen. The
Burlingame
’s warp is now moving at 28.5 lights. They have covered thirty-six light days, they have twenty to go.

He clears his board again, sets it up to monitor the drill. As an afterthought, he switches off the intercom, decides not to listen to the intersystem chatter this time. He will watch only the changing pattern of lights and diagrams.

Originally, he had thought his presence here in the engine room would allow him to pinpoint a specific cause for the crew’s inefficiency—a man who was not doing his job properly or a procedure that was wasteful of time—but after running a few drills. Korie has realized that there is no one specific reason for the engine room’s looseness; rather, it is a general sloppiness of the whole crew. The only way to tighten them up is to drill them—and drill them and drill them.

Korie narrows his thin lips in thought; they are almost bloodless normally and this slight pressure is enough to make them go white and disappear against the paleness of his skin. His eyes are veiled pinpoints of concentration.

Under ordinary circumstances, on their normal patrols, Korie would not have objected to a certain laxity in the crew’s performances of their duties. This is an old ship and a tired one; if there is a noticeable lack of pride in her operation, it is not without justification.

But this is not a normal patrol—abruptly, they have been thrown into battle, and Korie is faced with the task of converting the lackadaisical crew of a middle-aged ship ordinarily assigned to backwater duties into a crack crew of precision military men able to compete with the best of them: they are equipped with inefficient equipment and they are underarmed, yet somehow he must make them meet—and exceed—the standards set by the finest ships in the force.

The bogie shimmering on his screen now is only a simulation—but somewhere out there, only twenty light days away, is a real bogie. An enemy ship, squat and deadly; its stress-field disturbance indicates it is a destroyer of much the same size as the
Burlingame
. Beyond that, its
capabilities
and armaments are unknown.

They’d picked up the bogie a little more than thirteen days ago in a supposedly “clean” area of space. There’d been a few scares in DV sector, though, and they had been warned to be on their guard. At first, Korie had dismissed the warnings. Threebase issues them with monotonous regularity—but when the first sensor flashes were picked up, he had been forced to change his mind.

They’d spotted the ship almost by accident—and at first, the radec crew couldn’t believe there was actually something out there; after all, it was so unlikely. They kept checking and rechecking their instruments, but the bogie only became more and more substantial.

It was almost directly ahead of them and it was heading for their base on the same course they were—presumably, the other ship was on a hit-and-run bombing mission. At first, Korie had thought it might be one of their own ships, but a check of the records and the bogie’s behavior quickly negated that possibility. Its stress-field shimmer—as individual as a fingerprint—was totally unknown; therefore, it had to be an enemy.

As they increased their speed, so did the bogie. Apparently it had become aware of them at the same time they had become aware of it. The captain of the other ship must have decided to forsake his mission, for he bypassed their base. In hot pursuit, they did the same. The
Burlingame
increased its speed to maximum. The bogie did likewise; according to the computers, its warp had been boosted to 171 lights. But that speed was uneven, it kept slipping downward. Perhaps the other’s cells were at their limit, perhaps his engines were unstable—whatever the reason, pursuit was feasible.

It was more than feasible—it was inevitable. Korie had been on the
Burlingame
for twenty-one months without seeing any action. The frustration had been building in him, gnawing
at him like some deadly internal parasite. He’d been trained for battle, he’d been promised it, every part of his career had been oriented toward this one goal. His hands ached for the feel of the war, his eyes burned with it, his whole body had gone rigid with anticipation. He had given the order for pursuit without even thinking. In his mind, he had no choice. (And then, struck by what he had done, he had looked to Brandt; but the old man had only nodded and said, “This one is yours, Mr. Korie. Go get it.” Then he left the bridge.)

For ten days, Korie had watched that bogie on the screen—and all during that pursuit, one thought had stayed uppermost in his mind.
When we catch it, will we be able to kill it?

They had one advantage. The other captain obviously didn’t know how badly equipped they were and how weakly they were armed—else he wouldn’t be running. As far as that other captain knew, he was being chased by a K-class cruiser.

(Fine. Good. Let him think that. Let him go on thinking that at least long enough for me to fire my missiles and climb back into warp. Just that long, that’s all I’ll need.)

Korie had brooded on that, long and hard. (This is not a fighting ship; this is not a fighting crew.)

Drills?—he had scheduled a few during the strung-out agony of the chase, but his concern then had been to determine what his men were capable of so he could plan a battle strategy around that. Now that his strategy had been changed by circumstance, he had no choice. He had to try and whip them into shape. It was no longer a question of making the kill—it had become a matter of their own survival; they had lost their advantage. (That captain’s going to know we’re not a K-class cruiser by now; we’ve got to prove otherwise.)

Korie watches as the massive generators slide downward in their mountings, an important part of the drill, a bright-suited crewman scrambles to keep a cable from hanging up. The ship is
changed her orientation within the warp, altering the direction of her inherent velocity. For a moment, the man teeters precariously in the webs; then the cable slides into its proper channel and Korie lets his breath out. The men know what they are doing, but still—

The man hangs there easily now, glittering in his yellow protective suit, dark goggles, and helmet. A cable runs from his left leg to a station on the engine room floor; should any of the generators throw off a massive spark of static electricity—as has been known to happen—the cable will ground it out. Dispersal of static electricity has always been a bothersome problem in spacecraft.

The warp generators are impressive units in their spherical framework. Each of the giant cones is eighteen feet long. The six big engines impress their fields one on top of the other in the narrow area at the center of the mounting sphere—creating a miniature warp there; that warp in turn is
resonated
through the three sprawling grids which surround the ship. In a sense, the warp is both within and without the starcruiser.

The grids expand the warp to enclose the ship and move it through the stress field. Every time the ship rotates, the orientation of the generators—and the warp within them—is changed in relation to the grids; but the shape of the
resonance
must be maintained in relation to the stress field—thus, as the ship and its grids swing into a new position, the phase reflex system adapts and adjusts the
resonance
throughout the grids, allowing the warp to maintain its orientation and stability.

The larger warp without keeps its relation to the smaller warp within; the ship turns between them. All the while, the injective compensators work to control any sudden energies thrown off by the phase adaptors. If the system didn’t work this way, if the warp grids didn’t change the shape of their
resonance
as the warp generators turned within the ship,
the result would be a feedback, an overload, and a possible burnout—the latter would mean the destruction of the ship.

If a ship were to try turning without adjusting the
resonance
of its warp, it would—in effect—be trying to turn a piece of the stress field. The task is not necessarily impossible because that piece of the stress field is removed from the greater field surrounding it; but to do it would require more power than any one ship could muster.

It’s easier just to turn the ship and leave the stress field alone.

The only other maneuver which involves the turning of the warp generators within their mountings occurs when the ship is
not
in warp. If a captain wishes to direct his inherent velocity along an axis other than the “usual” forward-and-aft orientation, he need only rotate his ship while in normal space. As there is always a small stable warp maintained within the generators, they function as a gyroscopic flywheel around which he can turn—in effect, bringing the generators into a new home position for warp control. The ship continues to fall along the same vector, but pointed now in a direction other than the one in which it is moving.

Once back in warp, operations proceed as before, only now the ship’s inherent velocity might be downward, upward, sideways—whichever direction the captain has chosen. As before, he can alter the direction of that velocity by turning within the warp.

The main advantage of this procedure is in docking. If a ship’s inherent velocity is already fairly close to that of its destination (and it is to the advantage of all ships and orbital stations to keep their velocities within an optimum range) it need only match the angle of its approach and the direction of its velocity. Both can be done by maneuvering within and without the warp.

Neat. Effective. Cheap.

And if one’s inherent velocity is either too great or too small, he need only pick out a nearby planet and burn off some of his kinetic energy by fighting its gravity well, or pick up some more by diving into it. Most captains prefer to keep their inherent velocities low, however. It’s easier on the compensators. Even when the ship isn’t turning in warp, its inherent velocity creates a certain amount of feedback into the generators. The less the inherent velocity, the less the feedback.

The
Burlingame
’s phase adapter and phase reflex systems have only recently been rebuilt. If they had not been, this pursuit and stalking of the enemy ship would have been impossible. Without those two systems, the
Burlingame
would have lacked its necessary battle maneuverability. It would have been a “straight line only” ship, limited to only the simplest of spatial maneuvers. That the phase handling systems
have
been rebuilt is a point of pride with Korie; he is the one who had located the parts and technicians to install them.

He wants a ship that is as battle perfect as he can make it—if he can’t get one through regular channels, then he will go outside them and build it himself. Throughout the
Burlingame
are scattered dozens of auxiliary devices and controls scavenged from scores of parts depots and decommissioned hulks. Korie wants his ship to work.

But most of all, he wants his
own
ship. He wants to be
Captain
Korie of the U.S.S.
Whatever
. At the moment, he almost doesn’t care
what
ship they give him, as long as it’s a ship. As long as it moves and holds air—

To be a starship captain, a man needs to master a whole new order of physics just to navigate his ship; he must learn to think in two directions at once.

To be a starship captain, a man must know his ship inside and out; he must know every piece of equipment on her, how each piece works, and how it’s taken apart, repaired, and
put back together again. Before his training is complete, he will know every function of the ship; he will be able to step into any job at a moment’s notice and see why it isn’t being done right.

A man must work the simulations again and again, so that his every split-second decision will be backed up by hundreds of hours of experience with comparable problems. Being a starship captain means taking full responsibility for a ship and her crew. A man must understand the decisions that will have to be made; he will have to make them and live with them.

To be a starship captain—

—is what Jon Korie wants.