Black Box (8 page)

The pilot on duty was a rookie by the name
of Roger Winkler. Beckett knew little about the young man except
that his grades were excellent and his performance reviews on his
training assignments had also been top shelf. Peer reviews were
ridiculously good. This kid was headed for command, which was
probably why he had chosen navigation. Navigators seemed to have an
easy road to the top. Take Lara Tedesco for example… As Winkler
moved the ship into a landing trajectory and found the outer
atmosphere, Beckett thought he was a pretty uninspired pilot.

They dropped a tracking satellite, which
could record their movements in space as well as on the ground,
into orbit and then headed into a landing trajectory.

“Whoa!”

Beckett cocked his head toward the radar
console. From his vantage point, he could only see the back of
William Boone’s head.

“Mr. Boone?” Beckett asked.

“Sorry, sir,” Boone said. “Something just
popped up on my scope.”

Beckett went right to the station and looked
at the screen. A small window on the bottom gave him a video view
aft, but there was nothing there except outer space and the flutter
of air molecules in the stratosphere. In another window, the radar
screen showed an approaching blip.

“It just appeared there, sir.”

Beckett could feel Hardy’s eyes on him. More
than that, though, he noticed a difference in the movement of the
ship.

“Mr. Winkler, have you adjusted your
course?”

“Slowing, sir.” Winkler sounded nervous.
“Just in case.” It sounded more like a question. Beckett ignored
it. A random radar blip could be anything in the vast reaches of
outer space. But he was a cautious man and an experienced captain.
By the looks of this particular blip, it was steered. Though its
course had seemed erratic at first glance, it was now making steady
progress in their direction.

“Abort the landing,” Beckett ordered
quickly. “Take us out of the atmosphere and…” he glanced at the
screen and the approaching blip. They would not be able to hide
themselves behind the planet. There was not enough time or space.
With quick decisiveness, he read off a course reading that would
take them into direct contact with the newcomer.

“You think it’s a Ghost ship,” Hardy mumbled
under his breath, but still loud enough for the captain, and
everyone else in Control, to hear.

Beckett nodded.

In all of its time in space, humanity had
only encountered two alien races. The first was the eXchengue, who
had discovered and conquered the Earth for a brief period of time.
The second was the Ghosts, so named for their ability to appear and
disappear at will. Ghost technology was beyond the scope of human
and eXchengue understanding. Sometimes their technology seemed
vastly superior to anything either race had ever seen. Other times,
they were easily outwitted and overmatched. Their early campaigns
had met with great success. Both Earth and eXchengue ships had been
armed with energy weapons, which had proven effective against each
other, but against the Ghosts, they did no harm. In fact, it was
theorized that the Ghost ships absorbed the energy from the weapons
and used it to power their own ships. Earth and eXchengue ships
were looted and their crews destroyed in multiple, yet random
encounters, across occupied space.

The two races turned their attention away
from each other and more toward the imminent threat of Ghost
attacks.

“Get those cameras lined up,” Beckett
ordered Boone impatiently. He quickly adjusted the view so that two
windows showed space off the bow. “There it is.”

As he had suspected, Beckett was looking at
a Ghost ship. In his gut, he felt nothing. He had encountered them
six times in his career and successfully driven them off all six
times, although the first encounter had left him with a badly
damaged ship and more casualties than he cared to remember. Though
the technology and weaponry on Ghost vessels varied from ship to
ship, the general shape was always the same. Ghost ships were
oblong in appearance, with jointed sections so that the ship could
literally fold itself into other shapes. Jutting out from the main
sections in all areas were what looked like antennae. Some of them
were needle thin, while others were as thick as Habitrails. For all
any human being knew, there could be crew or devices or both in any
one of them. No one had ever seen any of the occupants of the Ghost
ships. They were either destroyed or they disappeared. Anyone
defeated by a Ghost ship was never seen alive again.

Beckett called for battle stations.

“They’re using a heat ray, captain,” said
the young lady, McCallum, at the Engineering station with distaste
and disbelief.

Nodding his head, Beckett ordered Winkler to
take the ship into a roll. Heat rays could be very damaging and
very destructive, but they often required a very narrow beam and a
prolonged focal point. They were also very inefficient in outer
space, where heat energy was sucked out of the beam at a ludicrous
rate. He then ordered Boone to load a weapon firing program that he
had written for the
Valor
himself. The program cycled
through the guns mounted on the top, sides, and belly of the ship.
It readjusted the angle when the guns were silent and fired each
gun for a prolonged period while they were facing the target, whose
point of reference was passed into the program as a parameter. At
close range, it afforded each gun a six second cooling period while
maintaining a steady rate of fire.

It was brilliant, really.

And yet William Boone hesitated.

“Is there a problem?”

“The guns are powered by an electric
generator,” Boone informed him. This, of course, he already knew.
“With the sustained fire of that program, the generator won’t be
able to cool itself quickly enough. It’ll burn out.”

“Mr. Tunsley?”

“Yo,” came Jack Tunsley’s cheery voice over
the intercom.

“Can the weapons generator keep up with the
rFireBeckett17 program?”

“Sure thing, Skip? You know that.”

“It’s true. I do.” Beckett seemed
unconcerned with the Ghost ship looming closer into the
cameras.

“With all due respect, sirs,” Boone said
through gritted teeth. “I have studied many generators that are
similar to the ones installed on this ship…”

“But not the ones on this particular ship,
right?” Tunsley’s disembodied voice asked him. “Know your own ship,
man!”

“Thank you, Mr. Tunsley.” Beckett cut him
off. “That’ll be all.”

Boone reddened from his neck to the tops of
his ears. He was no stranger to reprimand, but public humiliation
was something else entirely. Without another word, he ran the
program.

All around them, they could feel the roll of
the ship and the thrumming of the guns. Since energy weapons were
ineffective against Ghost ships, most United Earth vessels used
simple ballistic weapons. Heavy repeating guns were the norm, with
torpedoes and nuclear missiles installed on war ships. The
Valor
was not a war ship, though she could hold her own in a
fight because of her sleek design and speed.

As the two ships approached each other, the
guns probed the alien enemy for weaknesses, pinging off of its
unprotected hull. Many of the shells went awry, missing the Ghost
ship entirely. They would drift off into space, inertia carrying
them at the same speed on the same course until they collided with
something. As the guns fired, the computer was recording the
trajectory of every bullet, logging it so that other ships coming
into the area would be aware of the danger.

A small white flare showed up on the
camera.

“Capture,” Beckett ordered.

Boone’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he
checked the screen and the read-outs. The seconds ticked by. The
distance between the two ships grew short.

“The computer’s narrowed it to about two
hundred shots.”

Damn. That wasn’t nearly a small enough
sample. Boone’s capture had been competent, but Beckett wanted more
out of his program. He’d always known he would need to automate the
capture, but had yet to figure out a way to make the computer
understand that a critical hit had been recorded without human
intervention. Well, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it now.
With a two hundred shot margin for error, he was better off
continuing the program. For all he knew, the white flare meant
nothing anyway. They may have hit a light bulb.

Stepping over to Winkler’s station, he
ordered them into a mock orbit around the Ghost ship. This was a
tricky maneuver. Winkler could program the helm to use the enemy as
a focal point, but since its motion didn’t follow a mathematical
pattern, there was no way to maintain the program. The pilot would
have to do it manually.

“You may need to wrap this up, Captain,”
Jack Tunsley said from over the intercom.

“What’s the problem?”

The Engineering Officer snorted. “We’re just
getting a little cooked, that’s all.”

There was another white flare.

“I got a better capture that time,” Boone
reported before Beckett could ask. “About half the shots and…” he
was looking over the screen, making some adjustments, “with a
cross-reference…” he made one final check, “I’ve got a decent
target lock.”

“Feed it to navigation. Mr. Winkler, you
keep that position in our sights.”

Maybe it was Beckett’s imagination, but it
looked as if the young man was beginning to sweat. He tried to
remember the first time he’d been in a control room during ship to
ship combat. That had been a long time ago. He’d been manning the
Engineering station and the captain had pressed him for updates
every fifteen seconds. He’d used the words
no change
so many
times in just eight minutes that they still echoed queerly through
his skull.

But this was nothing. Of all of the Ghost
ships Beckett had encountered in the service of the United Earth
Space Force, this one was proving to be the most ineffective.
Despite Jack Tunsley’s assertion that they were getting “cooked”,
he could see on the display that hull temperature was only slightly
elevated. At this rate, he estimated they had another eighty or
ninety minutes before there would be any noticeable damage.

The ship moved into position.

“Cut the firing program, Mr. Boone. Target
the capture point. Mr. Winkler, run an unsteady back and forth
pattern and continue to roll. We don’t want that heat ray to get a
bead on us.”

The ship responded efficiently and Beckett
could see that Boone’s skills had improved since before their
leave. For once, he’d used his time wisely instead of sitting out
in the hayfields of his parents’ farm with old sports magazines.
Beckett blanched. Were his hobbies any better? Maybe not. But his
skills certainly were.

Before long, a trail of vapor began to run
from the Ghost ship. It brought a smile to the captain’s face. He
only wished he had some idea what it was he was disabling. If he
could shut down their drive, he could maybe capture one of the
bastards.

And then it was over. There was a flash and
a pop and the Ghost ship vanished from space.

“Did we destroy it?” Winkler asked before he
could stop himself.

Beckett shook his head. “They ran.”

To date, no one had been able to figure out
Ghost wormholes. They opened within an instant, taking the Ghost
ship away from an enemy, but they closed slowly. Once, during the
early days, an eXchengue captain had worked up the nerve to follow
an opponent. That captain and his ship were never heard from again.
UESF captains were under standing orders to log the positions. So
far, no Ghost ship had ever emerged from the wormhole of an
escaping ship.

With the battle over, Beckett’s crew was now
without orders. Winkler, as uninspired as he appeared to be, was
moving the ship back into position for a landing. But to Beckett,
the attack seemed too coincidental. Another failed landing would
burn too much fuel and they would be unable to complete the
assignment. He ordered Winkler to program a course that would take
them on a patrol about the planet and its satellites. Then he
ordered all of his officers into an immediate conference, leaving
the Crew Chief in charge of Control.

The largest and most luxurious room on the
Valor
was neither large nor luxurious. The short corridor
that ended in the door leading to the Control Room had a conference
room that paralleled it in shape and length. Two doors led from the
corridor into the conference room, one in the front and one in the
back. The setup allowed officers to enter and exit in a steady flow
and reach the control room in seconds. Inside, the room was narrow,
just enough space for a thin conference table and ten chairs. The
table was so thin, in fact, that officers could actually reach
across and touch each other if that was part of the protocol. Built
into the table, at an interval that forced two people to share,
were computer monitors and keyboard screens. There was one setup at
the head and another at the foot of the table so that the captain
and his first officer had one each to him or herself.

Beckett, having been in Control, was the
first to arrive at his briefing. He took the chair at the head of
the table. He could literally exit the room and spill himself into
the hatchway back into the control room. He sat for almost five
minutes, drumming his fingers absently on the table in front of
him, considering his options. It seemed obvious, what his officers
would say. Ghost attacks were random and unpredictable. This one
had nothing to do with the assignment itself. It seemed unlikely
that Ghosts were involved in the massacre of Walker and his crew.
This was no reason to abort the mission.

And yet, something nagged at him. Beckett
was an experienced captain. He’d successfully relied on his sense
of a situation before and his gut was now telling him that the
Valor
was ill equipped to handle this job. It was supposed
to be a historical mission, a gathering of the past. But they had
seen combat. Call it a bad omen.