Indomitable, p.7
Indomitable, page 7
“If we don’t manage to stop this Syndicate cruiser, then there’ll be no more profits for any of us. Or ships to captain, I imagine.”
“Yes, so President Meyers says in his message that tells me to run back to mama.” The middle-aged captain snorted and waved a hand through the air. “They will put some small pea shooter railgun on my baby, and then send me to fight against frigates? What sense does this make?”
“You won’t be fighting alone,” Erik said. “Hopefully, most of the Guild ships will be armed by the time the cruiser approaches Earth. We’ll also be fighting alongside the Coalition frigates.”
“Give me a strong gun like the one I see on your ship, and I would feel like my Tamerlane had a chance in a battle. These old light railguns they are handing out to us were designed for days when pirates in ships older than our freighters were the only enemy to worry about.”
“I wish I had some of them to hand out. We were lucky to get two of them, but not lucky enough to have enough rounds to make them more than a minor nuisance for the Syndicate fleet.”
Farouk clenched his jaw, and then his expression softened on the holo display. “I am sorry to hear about John and Sally. I did not know them well, but always there were good things said about them.”
“They’re sorely missed,” Erik replied softly.
“Is it true that this Syndicate cruiser killed all of the colonists on Interamnia?”
“Their weapons tore the asteroid apart, Farouk. The cavern where the colony was set up is gone, and the mining tunnels must have funneled the blast in such a way that it split Interamnia into hundreds of pieces. The bulk of the asteroid is still there, but it’s seventy percent of what it used to be.”
“Never did I think I would see such butchery.” Farouk slammed a fist on his chair. “What is the universe coming to when people with such barbaric ideas are given command of ships? It pains me that the nation I was born to is part of the Syndicate.”
“That’s why it’s imperative we do everything in our power to fight back and stop them.” Erik said. He turned and looked at the terminal to his right, eyes darting across the numbers displayed. He wondered about the best approach to get what he wanted from the other captain. “Can your freighter manage a fifteen minute six G acceleration burn four times a day, with a thrust of one third G in between?”
“No! You are pushing your ship too hard if that is what you have been doing. Our babies must be cared for. Nurtured. Treated like the queens of our hearts.” The old captain placed a hand tenderly on his chest as he spoke. “I will do this hard burn two times each day, but I protest it every time.”
“Protest it as much as you like, as long as you do it.” Erik smiled into the camera to take the bite out of his words. “I want to beat that cruiser to Earth, and if you can give me the acceleration burn twice a day we can arrive at Luna in a little over three weeks according to my projections. That should be almost a month ahead of their long detour to Mars.”
The connection was ended, and Erik turned off the holo display to rise from his command chair. “Work out a schedule for the burns with the pilot of the Tamerlane,” he told Mira. “We also need to figure out when to start the braking burns. I’m guessing we’ll need at least a week to shed off our speed before reaching Luna.”
“More than that, cap.” Mira turned her chair to look at him. “We’ve built up so much speed that my calculations are calling for nine days of hard braking burns. I’ll see if the other freighter is sturdy enough for that, but if not we might want to start them two weeks out from Luna.”
Erik groaned at the thought. “How much does that push back our arrival?”
“A couple of days,” the pilot said with a shrug. “Four at the most.”
“Okay, do whatever you think best for Vagabond. I trust your judgement.” Leaving the control room, he marveled at the words he’d just spoken. It had been only two months since he met Mira, but already he felt as comfortable with her at the controls of his ship as he had when John Murphy sat in the chair. Stressful situations had bred a quick camaraderie in the combined crew, to the point that it was hard to think of them as separate crews anymore. They were all part of the Vagabond now.
With those thoughts in his head, he altered his planned course, turning right instead of left. Entering the cargo bay, he looked around the space and felt a wave of nostalgia for all the days he had shared with Tuya there. He reached out to pat one of the cargo pods they had picked up on Interamnia, a last remnant of the destroyed colony. The analytical part of his brain wondered who would get paid for the load of ores and minerals now that the colony no longer existed, but he shoved that down with ease.
Erik found the person he was looking for farther inside the bay, hunched over a scattering of armor pieces that had been black when brought aboard the freighter. Tom was working on scouring the surface of the lightweight metal to strip the black paint and expose the dull gray surface beneath. It took days of hard work to get the enamel layer removed, heating it and then scrubbing at it before heating it again.
“Looks like you only have a few bits left,” Erik said as he bent to pick up a completely stripped forearm plate.
“Captain,” Tom said, not looking up from where he was rubbing a rough wire pad in constant strokes.
Erik watched him work for a minute, feeling bad for neglecting the man who had not only lost his ship and most of his fellow crew seven years before, but then had his best friend turn against them during the escape from the Indomitable. Aside from the day they’d all met in the galley to talk through their feelings of loss and anger, he had rarely taken a moment to get to know Tom. Mira he saw every day, and Jen he spoke with at least a couple of times each week as they bumped into each other in the galley or when she was giving updates on any medical treatments that had been required.
“How are things going in the engine room?”
“Good. Fynn and I get along really well.” Tom had been spending most of his days working with the engineer or on the hull repairs and railgun emplacement with the old Norwegian.
“You’ve been doing great work down there. Thanks for putting in so much time to help get the ship ready for whatever comes.”
Tom scrubbed at the armor for a few more strokes, and then set the wire pad aside and looked up to meet Erik’s eyes. “Did you have something you wanted to talk about?”
“I just want to check in and make sure you’re doing okay. I haven’t taken the time to speak with you much since the Indomitable. You saved us back there, and I hope you know how much we all appreciate it.”
“Tuya saved us,” the former Marine said. “I couldn’t even see that Richard was going to double cross us before it happened, even though I saw all the signs.”
Sighing, Erik crouched down to be on the same level. “We all have a blindness to the failings of the people we care about. Don’t be hard on yourself for not seeing it. Jen said she noticed the same signs you did. Richard spending more time with friends outside of the old Telemachus crew, and seeming to be more comfortable under the Syndicate military discipline than in the earlier years. She didn’t think he would turn on his old crew, either.”
“Yeah, but I’m the one who spent almost every day by his side.” Tom tossed the shin armor to the ground in disgust. “We walked patrols for hours on end, we nursed our small daily alcohol allowance in bars after shifts, we even shared the same cabin.”
“There you go.” Erik shrugged and held out his hands. “You were with him every day, more than anyone, too close to see the wider view. It’s like a problem in the engine room. You know there’s some malfunction in the wiring somewhere, you spend hours sorting through everything that you felt could be the problem, and then someone else comes in and spots the problem in ten minutes. They’re looking at the problem with a fresh perspective, without all the built-in biases and assumptions that everyone develops when they’re around things all the time.”
“I still should have seen it.” Tom shook his head, and turned his eyes away. “If I had just spoken up about some of the things I’d seen, maybe all of us would have seen the danger.”
“What then?” Erik asked, an eyebrow raised.
“Then we wouldn’t have been betrayed!”
“How would you have accomplished that? Leave Richard out of the plan? Leave him behind on the Indomitable instead?”
“Yeah, if we had to. At least then I wouldn’t have to keep reliving that instant in the hallway when he turned against us. I dream of that moment every night. When I can sleep at all.”
Erik reached out a hand to grab at Tom’s arm. “You would have traded one regret for another, that’s all. You’d be dreaming of leaving Richard behind, always wondering if he would’ve really turned on you or joined in the escape plan after all. There was no way to come out of that situation with a win, but there’s also no reason to continue blaming yourself for something that should be solely laid at Richard’s feet. It was his decision to turn his back on family.”
Tom slammed a fist against the floor and growled. “I know that. I hate Richard for what he did, the way he betrayed everything we’d built up from the first time we met on the Telemachus. But I hate myself just as much for caring about someone who could do what he did, for being friends with a traitor.” He grabbed up the shin piece and wire pad, and set about scouring the enameled paint again. “I’ll be fine, captain. It’s just going to be a long time before I’m over it.”
Erik rose and watched the man work at the armor, wishing he could have done more to alleviate the feelings of guilt and betrayal. “You know, once that armor is scraped clean it would look good with a symbol on the chest plate. Perhaps the bow and arrow, from the banner of the Telemachus.”
Tom’s hands stopped, and he nodded after a few seconds. “Thank you, captain. That’s a great idea.”
Eleven
“A month without more bombings,” Janet blurted out as Nat entered the cabin. “Why stop when the security forces were nowhere near finding out who was behind it all?”
Shrugging out of her dirty jumpsuit, Nat could only shake her head. “Perhaps they achieved whatever goal they had? Or maybe the security forces did track them down, but kept it quiet for some reason.”
“I can’t see that happening. There are still riots with protesters calling for stronger measures to protect their cities from the threat of bombs. The prime minister and his cabinet would’ve been shouting it from the rooftops if they’d found whoever was behind it.”
“It’s all way above my pay grade, Janet. They tell me to fix a part of the ship, and I do it. I’ll leave the bigger picture to the people getting larger piles of credits.” Nat entered the small washroom and stepped into the shower, hearing her roommate call out from the other room.
“That’s not the mindset you need to have. We all have to take an interest, or people like this bomber will never be deterred from creating more chaos and terror.”
Rinsing herself off, Nat pulled a towel from the rack and began to wipe away the water that hadn’t been blown away by the short air blast at the end of her shower. “There’s too much bad shit going on right now. If I spent all my time worrying about each thing, I’d have no time for work or sleep.”
Janet’s head appeared around the edge of the doorway, a frown on her face. “So you trust people like Fleet Admiral Holgerson to handle everything instead? That idiot has done nothing since he came aboard but slow everything down.”
Chuckling at the memory of the shuttle pilot wiping a bit of dirt from the wing, she tossed the towel back into the rack where it would be dried and freshened. “What’s he been up to on the bridge now?”
“He has the captain enforcing a cleanliness check every hour. No dust allowed on consoles, fingerprints have to be wiped from screens before the inspection, and if you show up with the slightest bit of grease on a uniform cuff they’ll add a note to your file. How is a frigate supposed to operate like that?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s easy when you have nothing to do but orbital patrols.” Nat pulled on loose cotton pants and shirt, sighing with pleasure at the soft feel of the fabric on her skin. Returning to the main room, she flopped onto her bunk. “I’ve heard rumors that when he was a captain it was seen as a punishment to have to serve on his ship. I guess now we know why.”
“I swear, Nat, I get half the work done that I used to. There were twelve requests in the communications queue today, resupply shipments and troop movements that are necessary to complete, and they made me stop for five minutes to clean off the display because the admiral saw a few fingerprint smudges.”
“He came through Engineering a few days after coming on board. Tried to pull the same thing down there, and the Chief gave him an earful about how a clean engine room is one that never gets used. Hasn’t been back since.”
Janet climbed into her bunk above, sighing heavily. “I wish the captain would do the same thing. But he knows too well that his career could be ruined with a snap of the admiral’s fingers.”
“Let’s just hope he loosens up once we’re in action against those Syndicate ships.” Nat closed her eyes, not wanting to think of the fight that was getting closer every day. “The first of the Syndicate frigates is supposed to be reaching the cruiser pretty soon, from what I’ve heard.”
“Tactical crew on the bridge estimate three days for the first, with the second and third each another day behind.” Janet’s tone had turned somber at the change in subject. “Do you really think arming the Guild freighters is going to help us against that thing?”
“It can’t hurt to have a little extra firepower. Dex seems to feel confident that they’ll be able to contribute enough to change the odds.”
“How’s your sister doing? Still on Luna?”
“Yeah, and I’ve given up trying to convince her to leave. I think she’s going to stay there through whatever happens, and work as hard as she can to fight against the Syndicate until the end.” Nat rubbed at an eye that grew watery as she spoke. “I should give her a call and check in.”
“I need to do the same with my parents,” Janet said from above. “They’ve been talking about moving back into New York City now that it seems the bomb threat is gone.”
Putting on earbuds, Nat pulled up the video chat function on her tablet and initiated a connection with Luna. Routing through to her sister, she waited as the screen showed that it was attempting to connect. She was about to end the call when the screen changed to show Dexterity, a comfortable view of home behind her.
“Wow! I think this is the first time I’ve called in months and not found you in the office.”
“Hey, Nat. Meyers sent me home and told me to take a day off. He’s been forcing time off on everyone, said we’ve been working too hard.”
“That is a smart man. You’ve been pushing harder than you need to, sis.”
Smiling, Dex held up a finger to point at the camera and then herself. “Pot, meet kettle.” They laughed. “How are things going on the Waterloo? Still making preparations to head out and meet the cruiser?”
“Every day, and there always seems to be more to do than time to do it in. The ship is still bursting at the seams, but they keep stuffing more people and supplies in. As long as they don’t force another roommate on me and Janet, I’ll put up with it.”
“Is there any kind of ETA on leaving orbit? You know the Syndicate cruiser is only a few weeks from reaching Mars.”
Nat frowned, her eyebrows drawing in. “I know, it’s one of the things everyone is talking about lately. I don’t think many people are happy that we haven’t already left orbit to try and defend the joint scientific colony there.”
Dexterity looked around the view, as if ensuring that no one was around in Nat’s room. “Don’t spread it around, but I’ve heard rumors that the Coalition Parliament decided to let the Syndicate have Mars. Not worth the effort, I think was what it boiled down to.”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Unfortunately, yes. President Meyers tried to protest the decision, but they didn’t care to hear his input.”
Nat couldn’t believe that the Navy would agree to leave several hundred people undefended so callously. “Maybe they’ll pass it by and leave them be if they see the Coalition forces remaining around Earth?”
“Fingers crossed.”
“What about that special project you’ve been working on? You’re always so mysterious about it, but is it coming along?”
Dexterity grimaced and shrugged. “It’s not going as smoothly as I’d hoped. I don’t think we’re going to have the results we wanted before the cruiser arrives, but it might still come in handy down the line. I wish I could tell you all about it, but it’s being kept under wraps so tightly that I’m the only person the president is allowing to work on it.”
“Give mom a call while you’re relaxing at home, okay? She’s always asking me about you.”
“Already did, Nat. It was the first thing I did when I left the Guild offices.”
“And that is why you’re the better daughter.” With a smile, they ended the call and Nat put the tablet away. She could hear Janet speaking softly above her, still connected with her parents. Zipping into the bed, she dropped into a restless sleep with dreams of black-armored soldiers and red dust.
A few days later, Nat was working in the docking bay again. It seemed as if there were tasks drawing her back to the vast area that filled half a dozen decks at the aft of the frigate several times each week. The admiral’s shuttle still sat in the middle of the open floor, the traffic of people and carts flowing around it like a trail of ants diverting around an obstacle placed in their path.
Stepping into the bay control room, she saluted Lieutenant Simon. The officer looked almost exactly as harried and stressed as always, and she was beginning to wonder if he had any other mode. “Lieutenant, Chief said you need assistance getting a couple of docking cranes rerouted?”
