The Voyage of the Star Wolf (5 page)

“HARLIE?” he asked.

No response. He didn't expect one. It was still bad news. If the ship was totally dead, then so were they. The CO
₂
buildup would get them within hours. His head hurt and his shirt and shorts were drenched with sweat and blood. He'd fouled himself as well.

“Starsuits.” Korie said it aloud. But if the ship was without power, then the suits would probably be dead too.

What was wrong with the auxiliary power? Why hadn't it kicked in?

“Captain?” Li's voice. He sounded strained. “Mr. Korie? Anyone?”

Korie caught his breath. He couldn't believe how his lungs ached. “Here,” he said. “Can you move?”

“I don't know. I'm caught on something. What's wrong with the power?”

“I don't know. Anyone else conscious?” Korie called.

He was answered by groans and pleas for help. Someone was crying softly. That was a good sign, Korie thought. If you have the strength to cry, you have the strength to heal. “Hodel?” he asked. “Hodel, where are you?”

The crying hesitated.

“Hodel, is that you?”

“Over here, sir.” A different direction.

“You okay?”

“I will be. In a year or two.”

“I think the emergency power system failed. We're going to have to plug in the fuel cells manually and jump start the system.”

Hodel groaned.

“Can you move?”

“I can move. I just don't know where I am.”

“All right. I'm on a railing. And I'm holding onto someone. Wait a minute, let me see if I can feel who it is.” Korie moved his hand carefully across the other man's body, trying to find a shoulder so he could feel the insignia. . . .

He was holding the captain.

He pulled the captain closer to him, felt for his neck and his jugular vein.

He couldn't tell if the captain was alive or not.

Korie didn't want to let go of him, but there was nothing else he could do for Captain Lowell until some kind of light was restored to the Bridge. Korie felt his way along the railing; it was the railing of the Bridge. He reached the end and felt his way down to the floor. Good. He knew where he was now. Still holding on to the railing, he felt his way back along the floor to the emergency panels. If he was right—

He popped the floor panel open and felt around inside the compartment. There. He pulled out a flashbeam and prayed that it still worked. It should; it held a solid-state fuel cell.

It did.

There were cheers as he swept the beam across the Operations deck. Besides Captain Lowell, there were two other bodies floating unconscious. There were dark globules of blood and vomit and shit floating in the air. Hodel was hanging onto a chair; so was Li.

“Hodel? Can you move?”

“I haven't tried—” Cautiously he launched himself toward Korie. He floated across the Operations deck and grabbed at the Bridge railing, grimacing as he caught it. “If that's what it's like to be dead, I don't like it.”

“It's not the dead part that hurts. It's the coming back.”

“It's a long way to come back, sir. I hurt all over.”

“So does everyone else,” said Korie. He passed Hodel the light. “Aim it there—” He pulled himself along the floor to the next emergency
panel and yanked it open. Inside was a double bank of switches. He began punching them on.

Nothing happened. Korie and Hodel exchanged worried looks.

“Try again?”

Korie nodded and began punching at the buttons one more time.

Again, nothing happened.

“Shit,” said Korie. “All right. We'll go down to the keel and try every fuel cell in the floor until we find a set that works. All we need is one. We're not dead yet.” He pulled open the next panel and started passing equipment to Hodel. “I think we'll have to—”

Something flickered.

The ceiling panels began to glow very softly. Hodel and Korie looked around as the emergency lights came on, and grinned.

“All right!” said Li.

“Listen,” said Hodel. “The circulators are back on.”

Korie stopped and listened. “You're right.” He tapped his headset. “Engine room?”

Chief Engineer Leen's voice sounded surprisingly loud in his ear. “Captain?”

“No. Korie.” He swallowed hard. “Damage?”

“Can't tell yet. We're still sealed off. Do you have light?”

“They just came on. Thank you. The singularity?”

“It's still viable—”

“Thank God.”

“—but we're going to have to jump start the whole system.”

“Are your men okay?”

“None of us are okay, sir; but we can do it.”

“How long?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Sorry. Oh, Chief?” Korie added. “Don't initiate gravity until we've secured the entire ship. There's too many unconscious bodies floating.”

“Right. Out.”

Korie noticed that the chief had not asked about the captain. He swung to face the flight engineer. “Hodel?”

“Sir?”

“Take the captain to sick bay. Then come back for the others.”

“Yes, sir.” Hodel launched himself across the Bridge, colliding clumsily with the captain. He grabbed the old man by the back of his collar and began pulling himself across the ceiling toward the rear exit.

Korie floated across to Li. “Hold still, Wan—” Li was pinned in his
chair. Korie shone his light all around the wreckage. “Okay, it doesn't look too bad.” He anchored himself and pulled. Li floated free. “You okay?”

“I've been better.”

“There's a sani-pack in that compartment.” Korie pointed. “Start getting some of this crap out of the air.” There were floating globules of blood and urine everywhere.

Korie was already checking the other Bridge officers. Two of them were dead in their chairs. The third was unconscious. He wondered if there were enough survivors to bring the ship home.

“You know, we can't stay here,” Li said, behind him. He was vacuuming wet sphericles out of the air. “Our envelope didn't flash out. They're going to know we're still alive and hiding in normal space.”

“It's very hard to find a dead ship. You have to be right on top of her.”

“They'll track our singularity with a mass-detector,” Li argued. “That's what I'd do. They know where we went down, and they're going to have to come looking for us to make sure. They can't leave us here to attack the
Dragon Lord
.”

“We're not attacking anything right now,” said Korie. He floated over to the auxiliary astrogation console and began trying to reboot it.

“They don't know we're hit,” the weapons specialist pointed out.

Korie grunted. The console was dead. He drifted down to the base of it and popped open a maintenance panel. He'd run it on battery if he had to. “Everything you say is correct. But we don't have a lot of options right now. If we recharge our hyperstate kernel, we'll be instantly visible to any ship within a hundred light-hours, and if we inject into hyperstate, we'll be visible for days. If they've englobed the area, we'll never get out.”

“You think you can sneak away at sublight? That'll take weeks.”

“We're going to need a few weeks to rebuild this ship anyway.”

“They're still going to be looking for us, no matter what we do. If they don't find us immediately, they'll expand their search patterns. They know we're here and we can't shield against their scanners.”

Korie looked over at him. “At this point, Wan, I don't know how much of this ship is left. That's what'll determine what we'll do. By rights, we should all be dead now.”

The auxiliary astrogation console lit up then and Korie was momentarily cheered. It was a start. As each piece of the network started coming back online, it would start querying the rest of the system; if the queries went unanswered, each piece would automatically initiate its own set of restoration procedures for the equipment it could talk to.
The resurrection of the ship would happen in pieces, much like the individual resurrections of each surviving crew member.

Two of the other consoles on the Bridge flashed back to consciousness then. Korie floated over to them and punched for status reports. As he suspected, they were still isolated from the rest of the ship. They had no information to report.

Korie considered his situation. His captain was disabled, maybe dying. His ship was dead in space and an unknown number of his crew were unconscious or dead. They were light-years from the nearest aid and they were surrounded by enemy marauders who would be looking for them as soon as they finished destroying the rest of the fleet. They had no weapons and no engines. They couldn't retreat either sublight or superlight. And, if that weren't enough, they were blind. All their sensors out of commission. He had no way of knowing if an attack was imminent, and no way of fighting back if it were.

But on the plus side
, he told himself,
I'm finally in command.
The irony of it was almost enough to make him smile. He tapped his headset. “Chief?”

“It's bad news,” said the voice in his ear. “I'm going to have to restring everything. It'll take days.”

“We have days,” said Korie. “Listen, I have an idea. Can you put a man in the lookout with a sextant? Take a sighting?”

“It won't be very accurate.”

“It doesn't have to be. I just want to make sure we're pointed in a useful direction.”

“I can do that. If we're not, we can rotate the ship around the singularity until we are. I can even do that by hand, if I have to. We'll rig block and tackle and walk it around.”

“Good. Now, here's the second part. Can you run the mass-drivers off the fuel cells—and for how long?”

“Do you mean leave the singularity damped?”

“Yes.”

The chief thought a moment. “It's very old-fashioned,” he said, “and I'm not sure what you're gaining, but it's doable. This is just a guess, but I can probably give you six weeks at least, maybe eight, but not more than ten.”

“I'll take the six. If we make it that far, God likes us. I want no stress-field activity at all for the entire time, and I want you to minimize all electrical functions. Let's run this ship as if she's dead. Minimum life support, minimum everything.”

“It won't work,” said the chief. “They'll still find us. We can't get far enough away.”

“Do the math,” said Korie. “It's not distance that works for us. It's speed. Normal space is nasty. A constant acceleration of even one-third gee will pile up enough velocity in twelve hours as to make it practically impossible for anyone to intercept us in normal space—not unless they're prepared to chase us for several days, more likely weeks. And if we know they're chasing us, we plug in the singularity and go to full power and it's still a standoff.”

“Mmm, maybe—” The chief engineer was not enthusiastic about the idea. “What's to keep them from jumping into hyperstate, leaping ahead and brushing us with their ripple?”

“If we live long enough to get to that situation, we'll activate our own hyperstate kernel. If they brush us they'll disintegrate with us. Not even a Morthan would consider that an honorable death.”

There was silence from the other end of the line.

“Chief?”

The Engineer's voice had a sour tone. “Can't say I like it. And it's going to be hell to burn it off at the other end. We'll have to spend as much time decelerating as we do accelerating. And we'll have to do it before we can inject into hyperstate for the way home.”

“Well, let's think about that . . .” suggested Korie.

“Uh-uh,” said Leen with finality. “I can't compensate for that high a velocity inside the envelope. We'll be too unstable to hold a modulation.”

“All right,” said Korie. “You win. We'll do it your way.”

“You listen to me. I'll bring you home. Leen out.”

Korie allowed himself a smile. Three weeks of steady subluminal acceleration, plus another three of deceleration, would also give them enough time to effect major repairs. If they could do it at one gee, it would put them twenty-five light hours away before they had to inject into hyperstate. Not a great head start, but workable.

Korie remembered the problem from Officers Candidate School; he hadn't ever expected to apply it in a real situation. If it worked here though, they would earn themselves a place in future texts. But it would be difficult. Unless they could find a way to disassemble and rotate the main mass-drivers, it would be like standing the ship on its tail . . .

No. They didn't have the time. They'd have to jury-rig ladders. They didn't dare risk powering up the gravitors. That would be almost as visible to a tracker as the pinpoint black hole in the engine room.