Starship Alexander (6 page)

Velasco stared, rigid with horror, at the image of the Gate on her screen.
Maybe it will miss. The gate is so narrow. It's a tiny ribbon of metal, and-

The Gate vanished. She didn't see the missile, didn't see an explosion. One moment the circle of silver metal was there, glittering in the light of the star Naxos. Then it was gone. The shuttle appeared as if by magic, a blocky white shape against the darkness of space, and she heard Carruthers say, "Looks like the shuttle is all right."

They're not all right
, she thought.
They're stranded here, with us. With them.
She switched her display to the forward view where the alien craft was closing with terrifying speed.
Those are hostile aliens rushing at us, and you just destroyed our only escape hatch.
She looked at Hammett, who lounged in his chair, looking incomprehensibly calm and unperturbed.
You've killed us all, you bloody maniac.

Terror was like a gibbering specter hovering around the edges of her thoughts. She wanted to scream. In fact, she was finding it very difficult not to.
I have to do something. I have to get a message back to Spacecom. Someone has to know that this lunatic is out of control.

Radio transmissions didn't work through wormholes, and there was no way to send a message faster than light. The only way to contact Spacecom was to fly all the way back to Earth.

Maybe we can still survive. If we flee now, if we generate a wormhole and escape through it.
She looked at Hammett.
But this idiot is flying us toward the aliens. Can't he see we need to go the other way? The man is unstable. He's insane. I should relieve him from duty. I should take command and get us out of here.

She looked at Carruthers and the other lieutenants. They were hunched over their stations, totally focused on their tasks.
Will they support me? They have to. They would be idiots not to.

"Commander Velasco. Commander!"

She jumped and looked around. Hammett was glaring at her, and she flushed.
How long was he trying to get my attention?

"Did you hear a word I said?"

Velasco opened and closed her mouth.

"I'm going to need you to launch drones," Hammett said with an air of strained patience. "But not until we match velocities. Get ready to launch on my command."

"Drones," she said. "Right." She looked down at her console, feeling some of her terror recede.
It's too late to run. We'll have to fight our way out of here. But we have hundreds of drones. We'll win this fight. We have to.

The
Alexander
had changed course, she saw. The ship was moving laterally, putting itself between the enemy craft and Freedom Station.
You idiot. We could run away while they're busy with the station.
Her finely-tuned political instincts told her not to make the suggestion out loud.
It's too late to run. We'll fight. Focus on making sure we win.

With that in mind she hit the icon for the console's main menu. Lines of text and translucent buttons appeared all around her, projected on her retinas. She found a red-outlined box labelled "Tactical Menu" and touched it.

The display around her changed. Now she saw menus for weapons, targeting, and damage reports. She had last looked at this interface in the Naval Academy ten years before, but much of it was coming back to her. She poked the "Drone" icon and the display changed again.

The ship had two hundred and eight drones, and she selected all of them, queuing them up for launch.
We're fighting for our lives. It would be stupid to hold anything back.

A tactical map appeared to her right, with glowing circles around Freedom Station, the enemy ship, and the shuttle. She quickly labelled the station and the shuttle as friendly, and the enemy ship as hostile.

She looked again at the icon for the enemy ship, now circled in angry red. It was appallingly close. Less than two thousand kilometers. What was Hammett waiting for?

As if reading her mind, he said, "Launch missiles."

Half a dozen fresh icons appeared on the tactical map. The missiles streaked forward, moving closer and closer to the circle of red. The alien vessel was moving almost as quickly as the missiles themselves. Collision was only moments away, and she held her breath.

One by one, all six missiles sailed past the alien ship. There were no impacts, no explosions.

Hammett said, "Dammit, Jim …"

"Still not responding, Captain," Carruthers said. "I can't explain it."

"Launch the nuke," Hammett said. "Velasco. Launch drones."

"Missile away," said Carruthers. Velasco slashed a hand through the launch icon and watched as new icons erupted onto the map.

"You launched them all?" Hammett said, sounding startled. He gave her a considering look and said, "Probably for the best."

She set the drones on full autonomous mode, and set the stance to highly aggressive. A cloud of tiny icons surged across the tactical map, making the
Alexander
look suddenly small and alone. Velasco reached out with her hand, swiping across a couple of dozen drones to select them. She switched those drones to defensive stance, and watched as they hurried back to hover around the
Alexander
.
If a hundred and ninety or so drones won't do it, the rest won't help. This way we're ready if they surprise us.

"The nuke just stopped responding," Carruthers reported. "Eight hundred kilometers from the bogey, same as the other missiles." He checked a screen. "We'll be within that range in about a minute."

On the tactical map the enemy ship seemed to crumble, and Velasco felt a surge of hope.
The nuke must have exploded
! When she glanced around the bridge, though, she saw only grim concentration on the faces around her.
It's reconfiguring,
she realized. T
hey all bunched together to share thrust, and now they're breaking apart to make smaller targets.

A course of beeps sounded in Velasco's ear through her implants, and she watched a wave of color change wash through the cloud of drones on the tactical map. The projected ships lost some resolution, too, becoming a bit fuzzy. She poked a finger into the cloud, selecting a drone at random, and read the status message.

"They're dead in space," she said, feeling a cold chill wash across her skin. "No transponders. I'm getting nothing back at all."

Carruthers said, "Thirty seconds until we're in range of … whatever it is that's happening."

Hammett snapped, "Get the rest of those drones back on board." He touched a button on the arm of his chair. "All hands. Prepare for a possible immediate loss of power."

Velasco made quick, urgent gestures with her hands, herding her drones closer to the launch tubes. She stared helplessly at the menus for a moment, her mind filled with swirling panic, then pressed the heels of her hands to her temples.
Come on. You know how to do this. The button is right there, you just can't see it.

She lowered her hands. There was the recall command, hovering in the air beside her. She poked the button and the surviving drones swarmed around the launch tubes. One after another they popped back into the ship, guided by force field beams from the
Alexander
.

Nine drones were back on board when static howled in her ears. Pain filled her skull, and she screamed, clapping her hands to the sides of her head. The deck dropped away beneath her, she squeezed her eyes shut, and the pain and noise vanished.

Velasco opened her eyes. She saw a moment of blackness, felt her stomach heave in reaction to zero gravity, and then emergency lights came on around the bridge. Gravity came next, a couple of seconds of gentle pull that let her get her feet under her, and then full gravity a moment later.

The tactical map was gone. She tried to bring it back up, but the menu didn't even appear on her implants. In fact, all her implant data was gone. She looked down and to the left, and the time didn't appear on a projected readout. She looked to the far left.

No menus.

She hadn't been without a data connection since puberty. Velasco shook her head, unable to believe what was happening.

"Oh my God." Her implants were completely dead.

Shock crashed over Hammett in an icy wave. Every screen on the bridge was blank. All his tactical and sensor projections were gone. He was blind, crippled, helpless.

Well, he could function without implants. His thumb pressed a button on the arm of his chair, and he said, "Susan. What's your status?"

There was no reply. Not even the usual beep of a channel opening and closing. He had communication with everyone in reach of his voice, and that was it.

That was when panic hit him. He'd been scared plenty of times, but training and experience had always given him something to focus on, something to do. Now he stood on the bridge of a crippled ship with an enemy closing in, an enemy he couldn't even see. And he could do nothing.

Nothing at all.

He froze. He sat rigid in the command chair, every muscle in his body clenched, his mind filled with a silent scream. His breath came in tiny, short pants, and he was dimly aware of pain from his arms and legs and chest and stomach as his muscles strained against each other.

A tiny corner of his mind scrabbled through thirty years of memories, looking for a solution, looking for something to try. Every day of his career, though, every crisis he'd faced and survived, he had used the same basic toolkit. A toolkit that was now gone. The ship couldn't maneuver, he had no weapons, he couldn't even see …

Thirty years as an officer held nothing for him in this crisis. Instead, he found himself remembering his Academy days. The instructors at the Naval Academy had taken a sadistic glee in dreaming up bizarre, incomprehensible problems for the officer trainees to overcome. Those memories should have been blurry and distant, but the Academy had been an intense, life-changing experience.

He remembered an exercise in a shuttle simulator when he had lost sensors, life support, basic navigation, and lateral control. He remembered the voice of an instructor lecturing him from the cockpit speakers. He couldn't remember the woman's name, but he remembered her voice. "Never mind what you've lost! You can spend the rest of your life thinking about what you used to have. It'll be about five minutes, by the way. Think about what you've got. What are your resources right now? What do you have? What can you use?"

He'd survived that exercise, getting his bearings from the view out the front window and bringing the shuttle in for a hard emergency landing. There was no window here, though, and nowhere to land.

I should step aside and let one of the cadets take command. They don't have thirty years of irrelevant experience in the way. They can still think outside the grid.

Well, we do have a lot of cadets on board. Dozens of them, in fact. Running around in the corridors or huddled at their duty stations, on the verge of panic and contributing nothing at all.

His muscles seemed to release him all at once, and he took his first deep breath. He could see nothing but Singh's face, puckered with worry, peering back at him. It was a classic symptom of extreme stress. A person in duress developed tunnel vision. He knew it from his training, but he'd never experienced it before.

As panic released its grip the bridge seemed to appear from a grey mist. He looked around. Nearly everyone was staring at him.

"Cadet!" The kid was probably in plain sight, but Hammett couldn't see him. "Where the hell's that cadet?"

"Right here, sir." The voice was a frightened squeak.

Hammett looked around until he spotted the kid, a frightened-looking youngster standing rigid beside the helm station. Hammett pointed at him, and the kid's eyes went wide. "You're going to be my new communication network. The first thing we need is more bodies. Go find me more cadets. Send some to the bridge. Eight or ten." He thought furiously. "Send some to engineering. And the missile bay. Medical bay as well." When the cadet just stood and stared he barked, "Go! Move!"

The cadet fled, and Hammett stood, pacing around the bridge to burn some of his adrenalin. "Does anyone have a functioning station? Anyone's implants still working?" He already knew the answer. He just needed the crew to see him doing something. He needed to look as if he was still in charge while he took time to think.

Running footsteps thumped in the corridor outside, growing louder as someone came closer. A cadet appeared in the doorway, a young woman, badly out of breath. "Cadet Sm-"

"Find a laser battery," Hammett interrupted. "If you pass any more cadets, tell them the same thing. You're going to man the laser battery. The targeting system won't work. You'll find your targets visually, and fire manually. Shoot everything that looks alien."

The cadet gaped at him, then started to turn away. More feet thumped in the corridor outside, and she retreated into the bridge as three more cadets filled the doorway. Hammett repeated his instructions.

"But-" The speaker was a chunky young man with a red face. "We're not trained for this! We've never done it before."

"None of us are," said Hammett. "Nobody gets trained on how to function in a ship that's lost every computer-controlled system." He made sure his voice carried to every corner of the bridge. "None of us trained for an alien invasion. None of us trained for whatever weapon it is that incapacitated us." He turned to survey the bridge. "But we're all professionals, and we'll cope." He turned back to the cadets. "You cadets have an advantage. You're fresh out of school. You're not set in your ways, like we are. You've been trained to be flexible, to think on your feet. And that's what we need right now. People who are quick. Nimble. People who don't panic."

They were nodding, straightening up, losing some of the lost, fearful look in their eyes.

"We've lost our computerized systems. We've lost our implants. But there's more to this ship than the computer, and there's more to us than our personal electronics. This ship has twelve laser batteries, which means twelve lucky cadets get to take a direct shot at the enemy. Now get moving, and kill me some enemy ships."

The doorway emptied in an instant, footsteps fading in the distance. More footsteps came closer, then stopped, and Hammett heard the chunky cadet say, "You two come with me. I'll explain on the way."

The bridge went silent, but the air of desperation was gone. They were thinking about solutions now. They were thinking about what they could do.

"I notice we're still alive," said Carruthers. "Do you think they're being careful? Creeping up on us? Wondering if we still have any teeth?"

Singh said, "Maybe they know we're helpless. Maybe they're focusing on the station."

That would buy them some time, Hammett reflected, but he hated to think what would happen to the civilians.

"Cadet Rogers reporting, Sir."

Hammett looked at the doorway. "The next time I see you, Rogers, you'd better be out of breath."

The cadet blanched.

"Run to the engine room. Tell Lieutenant Rani that I need a good engineer to meet me in the missile bay right away."

Rogers ran out, shouting, "Aye aye, Sir," over his shoulder.

"Velasco. You're in charge here. You won't have much to do except coordinate information." He looked at Carruthers. "Jim, I want you to visit every laser battery and make sure they're all manned. After that, use your own judgment. Try to make yourself useful." He looked at the others. "We can't really do much from the bridge. A couple of you stay and help Velasco. The rest of you, pick a section and go see what's going on. Keep my ship functioning. Do all the things I haven't thought of yet."

He made himself smile. "Every one of you has earned that uniform you wear. I know I can rely on you. I'll be in the missile bay, preparing a nasty surprise."

He hurried out of the bridge.