Starship Alexander (4 page)

Anna Velasco lowered herself gingerly into the captain's chair and looked around. She was pretty sure at least one lieutenant was watching her from the corner of his eye, but most of the bridge crew seemed focused on their own stations. She balled her hands into fists to keep herself from fidgeting, took a deep breath, and searched for calm.
How bad can it be? I'm not the one doing the actual flying. If I do something really stupid, one of these lieutenants will speak up.

Won't they?

That would be humiliating. Crashing the ship into the edge of the Gate would be much, much worse. She imagined half the ship warping through to pop out the other side while the other half remained behind. Could that happen?

I'm an administrator, not a bloody physicist! I'm not a ship's captain, either.
She thought of the reports and proposals accumulating in her data stream.
I've got things to do. Important things. I'm helping direct the course of Spacecom itself. I'll be an admiral someday. What the hell am I doing out in space?

It didn't help that she was utterly exhausted from a combination of stress and trying to catch up on projects back at Spacecom. She suppressed a yawn and gathered her wandering thoughts, checking the screens arrayed around her chair. The biggest screen, mounted just above her knee, showed the view from the forward camera. The Gate loomed there, a vast steel ring almost edge-on.
We need to move the ship over. That's not the terminology, though. What am I supposed to say?

The helmsman, a young cadet who looked almost as frightened as Velasco felt, turned in his chair and glanced back at her.
I'm taking too long. You can't just sit here. I have to at least pretend I know what I'm doing.
"Helm." Her voice wasn't perfectly steady, but it would do. "Bring us around."

The cadet nodded, hesitated, then said, "Heading, ma'am?"

For a long frozen second she stared at him, terror constricting her throat.
I don't know what heading! That's your job. Haven't you done this a thousand times in simulations?

He had, of course. She couldn't talk him through it step by step, but she didn't need to. "You know where we're going." She gestured forward, where the Gate lay. "Line us up with the Gate."

"Aye aye, ma'am." He turned to his console, and she felt the faintest of tremors as the
Alexander's
maneuvering thrusters fired. The Gate seemed to turn in place on her screen as the ship drifted sideways. She supposed it might be faster to turn the ship and fly around in a big arc using the main engines. There was no rush, though. The slow approach would work nicely.

When the Gate formed a perfect circle on her screen she felt another tremor. That would be the maneuvering thrusters on the other side, firing to bring them to a stop. The cadet seems to expect her to say something, so she said, "Well done." He beamed as if she'd promoted him to lieutenant. Strangely, it deepened her unease.
I don't want this kind of power. I'm not ready for it.

The bridge went silent, and she stared at the Gate.
This is it. It should be perfectly simple, right? We just fly right through.
She touched her tongue to her lips, wondering why her mouth was so dry.
Am I forgetting something? If I am, someone will speak up. Right?

The helmsman turned again to glance at her.

"Take us through," she said, then added, "Slow and steady."

The cadet didn't speak, just nodded. She could see his tension in the set of his shoulders. She felt the same tension in her own shoulders and neck. She took a quick, furtive glance at the three lieutenants managing bridge stations. None of them looked nervous.
Maybe that means I'm doing fine.

The Gate grew larger and larger on the screen until it disappeared completely. All she saw was the black of a starless expanse. There was a way to show distance to the Gate, but she didn't know the controls well enough to-

"One hundred meters," said a lieutenant to the right. "Fifty meters. Ten meters."

Velasco held her breath.

Her screen shimmered, and she saw a matching shimmer on screens all around the bridge. Then the stars appeared, cold and bright.

They were through.

Velasco exhaled, careful to do it quietly. "Very good, Cadet."
I'll have to learn his name.
"Take us around behind the Gate." That would take the
Alexander
out of the path of any ships coming through. "Stop us at a range of, oh, a kilometer." She stood. "Someone tell our Gate technicians we've arrived."

The bridge doors slid open. Hammett came in, nodded gravely, and said, "You are relieved."

"Thank you, Sir." Was that a hint of a twinkle in his eye? It couldn't be coincidence that he showed up right after they came through the Gate. Had he been monitoring her?

If he had any sense, he was. She supposed she should have felt relieved, but she felt unsettled. Hammett took his seat and she walked out of the bridge, heading for her quarters. She had more to do than she could possibly accomplish, but the thought of office politics and procedure papers left her strangely hollow.

I thought it was me. I thought he was trusting me to get us through the Gate. I thought the whole ship was counting on me …

In a way they were, she decided. After all, she could have found some way to screw it up, even with Hammett monitoring her. The pressure had been sickening at the time, but now that it was over, she felt … different.

She'd had a glimpse, she realized, of why so many officers wanted to serve on ships when it took them so far away from the Admiralty and the fast track to promotion. The sense of responsibility she'd felt was terrifying, but it was addictive, too. It wasn't just commanders who felt it, either. That cadet at the helm. He'd felt it. Every officer on the bridge would have felt it, to a lesser degree.

Velasco reached her quarters, glanced at her data station, and instead stretched out on her bunk. She was suddenly drained.
For pity's sake, Anna, you didn't even do anything. You just told a cadet to fly us through a Gate. It's not as if you …

She fell asleep before she could complete the thought.

Hammett and Carruthers walked down a broad, empty corridor along the spine of the ship. The
Alexander
was losing the air of quiet efficiency he'd seen during his earlier walk with Velasco. He sighed. "Give me the bottom line, Jim."

"We can still generate a wormhole," Carruthers said, giving him a sympathetic smile. "It'll still have decent range, too. Over ninety percent." He didn't add that they weren't going to generate any wormholes on this trip. Carruthers knew perfectly well that it wasn't the point.

"Well, if that's all that goes wrong, we'll be lucky." He told himself that he shouldn't grumble, then gave in. "She's a good ship, and she deserves better."

Carruthers nodded. He loved the
Alexander
too, probably almost as much as Hammett did.

"We're last in line for every kind of service." Hammett made a frustrated gesture. "Susan reported the generator problem, what? Six months ago? Back then, it was a maintenance issue, not a repair. Now the wormhole generator's borked, and instead of a day in drydock we'll need over a week."

"Not that we'll get it," Carruthers said gloomily.

He was right, of course. Spacecom wasn't going to pay for nonessential repairs to a ship that was due for decommissioning. Hammett balled up a fist, thought about punching a bulkhead, and decided against it.

Carruthers gave him a cautious look. "You ready for more bad news, Chief?"

Hammett nodded. "Sure. Hit me."

"The rest is just little stuff," Carruthers said. "It's in the category of hardware troubles, but really, it's personnel issues. Tony ordered the guns stripped and cleaned." Lieutenant Tony DiMarco was the ship's weapons officer. "They didn't need it, but he wanted the cadets to get the experience." Carruthers shook his head. "Some young genius loaded explosive rounds in the belly gun without the steel casings."

The ship carried ballistic rounds, essentially steel canisters with a lead slug in the center to give them mass, and explosive rounds, much more delicate and expensive, with a detonator and a payload of chemical explosive. Each explosive round had to be loaded into a steel container sized for the barrel of the rail gun.

"How bad?" Hammett asked.

"Well, there were no explosions," Carruthers said. "Still, it was bad enough. The magazine jammed, and the kid decided he wasn't pushing hard enough. He just kept ramming in more rounds." He shook his head. "I haven't seen a mess like that since I did the exact same thing, twenty years ago on the
Atlas
."

Hammett looked at him, startled, then laughed. "I never did that," he said. "I did once load a magazine with empty canisters, though." He chuckled, remembering. "I had this fire-eating gunnery sergeant taking a bunch of us through a drill. She had a couple of second lieutenants firing on a derelict hull." Hammett felt a belly laugh start to build. "The rounds kept hitting, dead on target, but they bounced off the hull like so much popcorn." He gave in to the laugh, hearing it echo down the corridor. "You should have seen the look on her face! I tell you, Jim, if I'd known what it was going to do to her, I'd have done it on purpose!"

They continued on their way, inspecting the dorsal rail gun (which hadn't jammed) and then descending several decks to examine the equipment that would generate a wormhole if the ship needed to make a faster-than-light jump without the use of a Gate. Neither man had the advanced engineering degrees they would need to actually understand a wormhole generator, but they had years of experience on the
Alexander
. Hammett could tell by the background hum, by the hint of vibration he felt through the deck plates, by the very feel of the air, whether his ship was running properly.

They finished their tour in the missile bay. "Apparently there's a comet wandering through the system," Carruthers said. "It's coming within a couple of million kilometers."

"Practically scratching distance," Hammett said, wondering what he was getting at.

"Might make some good target practice," Carruthers said. "We could lob the nukes at it."

"No." The refusal came without thought, and Carruthers looked at him, raising an eyebrow. Hammett felt himself flush. "They're the last six nuclear missiles in the entire fleet," he said, feeling irritable and embarrassed. "I know we're supposed to blow the damned things up." He spread his hands, unable to articulate what his instincts were telling him. "Not yet," he said at last. "Not on a bloody comet."

Carruthers nodded without remark.

A chime sounded in Hammett's ear. He tilted his head to bring up a menu, accepted the incoming message, and watched text scroll through the air in front of him. The Gate technicians were done their inspection and back aboard the ship.

He called the bridge, reached a lieutenant named Chen, and told her to set a course for Gate Five. The Naxos system had two Gates, Four, which led to Earth, and Five, which led to Deirdre. The Gate technicians would inspect Gate Five, after which they would expect Hammett to take them back to Earth.

The sensible thing to do was to go home. Even better, fire half a dozen nukes at an orbiting snowball, give a bunch of cadets some experience they would never be able to apply, and
then
go home. His orders were vague – aside from inspecting Gates Four and Five, he was to give the cadets training opportunities – but those orders certainly didn't include travelling through another Gate.

Still, what was Spacecom going to do? Take away his command? Put him out to pasture?

Toss his ship on the scrapyard?

"Come with me to the bridge," he said. "You can watch me trash my career."

Carruthers gave him a quizzical look, then followed him toward the bridge. "What's up?"

"I'm going to take a very broad interpretation of my orders," Hammett said. "I'm taking us through Gate Five." He watched as the lieutenant's eyebrows climbed his forehead. "That way more cadets get to fly through Gates."

Carruthers said, "Okay …"

"Spacecom thinks everything will be fine on the other side. I want you on the bridge when we go through, though, in case Spacecom is wrong."

Carruthers stopped. "What's going on, Richard?"

"That's a good question," Hammett said. "Three Gates have failed, one after another. Each new failure is closer to Earth than the one before. And we're supposed to believe that it's just mechanical malfunctions."

Carruthers shrugged. "What else could it be?"

Hammett hesitated. It sounded absurd when he put it into words, but he was damned if he was going to be afraid to speak. "It could be an attack."

Carruthers's eyebrows went higher. "An attack? By who?"

The word "aliens" hung in the air between them. Instead, Hammett said, "It's a big galaxy, and we've explored, what? A tenth of one percent of it?"

"Less than that," Carruthers said. "Spacecom must be sending someone to take a look."

"I'm sure they are," Hammett said. "They'll send a corvette, when they can spare it from all those terribly important customs duties." He scowled. "What if it's an invasion, Jim? That's a job for a warship, and we're the only warship left."

We're a broken-down warship that hasn't had proper maintenance in a decade, armed with a lot of decaying missiles, and crewed by cadets.
He didn't put the thought into words. He just looked at Carruthers, who said, "It's probably just mechanical failures, Captain."

"Probably," Hammett agreed.

"Well, if it isn't," Carruthers said, "I guess we'll have an interesting flight."