Dark Running (Fourth Fleet Irregulars Book 4) (48 page)

Alex paid no further attention. Now that he was satisfied that the Samartians had no immediate intention of attacking, all his attention focussed on what was happening aboard his own ship.

He caught his breath again as his eyes moved to the damage control boards. He could hear Buzz beside him, talking calmly through a headset. He could see on comms that teams were at work, already assessing the damage and prioritising repairs. He could see the medical teams, too, and the names of the casualties they were working on. At first sight it looked just like a drill. Everyone was doing what they should be, busy and focussed. It was only after a few seconds that the eye took in the burnt and broken fittings, the bent, half-melted furniture on mess deck two. It took a couple more seconds again to recognise that the substance the little autobots were cleaning away so efficiently from the walls and floor and ceiling was charred blood.

There were three casualties listed from the explosion on mess deck two. Tina Lucas was being carried to sickbay already – rated a minor injury, she had broken her leg.

The other two were already in stasis bags. Petty Officer Ali Jezno and Ordinary Star Banno Triesse. Banno was rated category six, meaning that he required stasis for immediate life-saving but that his injuries were considered to be treatable. Ali Jezno, however, was category eight. That meant he was so badly injured that he was considered to be dead, though it would need a medical appraisal before that was made official.

Alex stared at the names. Ali Jezno had been with him since before the Fourth even
became
the Fourth. Originally sent to Alex as a bullock for rehab, he’d risen through the ranks to become one of the most capable petty officers on the ship. He was one of the most popular members of the crew, too, with his ever-ready grin. His talent for story-telling could hold an audience spellbound. He had even undertaken a key role in their operations at Tolmer’s Drift, helping to convince the spacers there to take their cargos through to Novamas.

Alex realised that he was thinking of Ali Jezno as if already composing his obituary, and reminded himself that it wasn’t over yet. He had two of the best medics around right here on this ship. And he’d seen them save a man, too, just about any other medic would have declared dead on arrival at sickbay.

And then there was Banno Triesse. Alex hadn’t wanted civilian recruits, on principle, but Banno had become as much a member of his crew as if he’d transferred in from the regular Fleet like everyone else. Alex liked his enthusiasm, his determination to succeed even if he could do no more than race to the skipper’s cabin with coffee when he saw there was a meeting there. And now he was seriously injured.

Alex had no time even to think about that, though. His attention had to be directed to getting his ship and crew ready to face another onslaught. More Marfikians might come at them at any moment, or the Samartians themselves turn on them. They had to be ready.

Alex could see that his crew were just as shocked as he felt, himself. They too were coming out of the auto-pilot state that the immediate demands of action had triggered. They were realising what had happened, and seeing the names of casualties on the damage control board. In another few seconds, Alex knew, they would start to react emotionally.

‘Attention on deck.’ His voice sounded harsh even to his own ears, and he realised that he had not made a conscious decision to put his hand on the ship-wide broadcast. ‘Keep it together, people.’

It worked. His words caught them just at the moment when they would have started to exclaim and swear. He could see people all over the ship taking a grip on themselves, taking deep breaths, closing their eyes for a moment or gritting their teeth as they got on with their work. The thought crossed his mind, fleetingly, that he would be immensely proud of them, later. For right now he didn’t seem to have any more capacity for feeling anything very much, beyond a desperate sense of urgency.

It seemed to take an age even to work out what had happened to his ship. He felt as if he was sitting there, dazed and incomprehending, while everyone else knew what had happened and was getting on with fixing it.

That was an illusion, he knew. The only member of his crew at that point with any clear idea of what had happened was Buzz, and that because it was his job to keep his eyes on damage control screens no matter what else was going on. In reality, everyone was just carrying out their practiced role in whatever situation was in front of them right then, from those who were dealing with the blowout in section eight to those who were going through rapid checklists in undamaged sections.

The worst of the damage was on mess deck two. Alex could see the trail of devastation that had led to the explosion there. Marfikian fire had ripped across their starboard side and struck their comms array. The blast of energy had been so overwhelming that it had jumped cut-outs intended to prevent energy surges from penetrating the hull. Once into the ship’s systems, it had branched into every conductive path it found – every wire, every pipe, everything that could carry a charge. Fuses, safety-cut outs and insulator systems had been firing in a tumultuous cascade. For the most part, they had worked. But the energy bolt had leapt a cut-out and crashed through to an air processing unit on the mess deck.

It was that which had exploded – heated to hundreds of degrees in a fraction of a second, the air pressure had detonated with the force of ten grenades. Their survival suits were good, the best Alex had been able to get, but they were not invulnerable. They could be penetrated by supersonic shrapnel. The heat in the explosion had also been so intense that it had caused a flash fire which ripped through the section in the wake of the blast. Seeing the levels of energy involved, it was a marvel that any of the people on the mess deck had come out of it uninjured.

Alex, though, merely noted what systems were down and how long it would be till the ship was back in a reasonably functional state. That wouldn’t take long. Teams were already fixing an emergency airlock over the torn and blasted wreckage in section eight. Others were busy all over the ship, getting backup systems operational while the primary response team dealt with the immediate aftermath on mess deck two. Even Davie North was helping – he was running systems diagnostics on one screen while staring intently at the external data screens, watching the Samartians. Estimated time to achieve functional stability was eight minutes, though it would need a good couple of days’ solid work to get everything fixed. Their fighters, miraculously, had come through it relatively intact – scorched and trailing superficial hull-tech damage, but still reporting combat-ready and with no casualties. They were on-station alongside the frigate, hovering protectively.

Feeling as if he was in slow motion and dragging himself through treacle, Alex forced himself to concentrate and make decisions. Buzz had damage control well in hand. Officers and crew were keeping it together and doing everything that needed to be done. There was nothing he could do for the casualties right now. His job had to be dealing with what was going on outside the ship.

The fighters could stay where they were. Ordinarily he would have called them back to the ship for repairs and a medical check for everyone who’d come under fire. Right now, though, the situation wasn’t safe enough for him to recall the fighters. They might need them again at any moment.

So he looked back at the Samartian ships. There were only five of them there. In the moments that he’d looked away, the spinning out, dephasing one had fallen off their scopes. Data on the readouts told him that two of the others had gone after it. The other five had reformed into a neat formation, though one of them was still leaking a thin trail of gas which exploded in its wake, leaving a fire-streak across the stars. As he watched, though, that stopped, repair work evidently going ahead at speed aboard the Samartian ships, too.

Why
? It was the only word in Alex’s head, filling his whole consciousness. Why had the Samartians done that? Had they meant the Marfikians to destroy them? Would they come in soon to finish them off? Or had it been some kind of test? Why?
Why
?

Then other questions crowded in. The Samartians had led them straight to a trio of Marfikian ships right there at their border. They had obviously known where the Marfikians were. So was that an unusual occurrence, a Marfikian scouting party that just happened to be at Samart at the same time they’d arrived? Or was it common for their ships to be probing the Samartian border? And if that was the case, could there be
more
of them here?

As he was still trying to make sense of it, the lead Samartian ship sent out a comms probe which flashed past them and signalled to what was left of their comms array.

The translation matrix decoded the signal and made its best guess, displaying the translation on the screen.

‘Are you happy?’

Alex stared at it and felt a surge of fury rising. He quelled it, physically swallowing to control the rage that was pounding in his veins.

‘Do you want more?’ the translator matrix added, after a little hiccup trying to decode the second string of base-four analogue coding the Samartians used for comms.

Davie North said a word. He had probably never even heard any bad language before he’d come aboard the Heron, but his experience there had been broadening in many ways.

Alex flicked his gaze at Davie, and as he did so, saw the translation
he’d
come up with from the code, relying as much on instinct as linguistics. His version read, ‘Are you satisfied? Do you want to continue?’

‘Skipper!’ he grabbed Alex’s attention, and neither of them even noticed at the time that he called him ‘skipper’ as naturally as if he’d been a member of his crew, ‘They think we
asked
for this!’

Realisation hit Alex like a douche of icy water.

‘We seek a relationship of mutual benefit.’
They had signalled to the Samartians, in response to their question, ‘What do you want?’

And with that, they had sent them a little diagram showing themselves and the Samartians standing together to fight the Marfikians.

They, of course, had meant that as a generalised, future-alliance suggestion.

It was all too apparent, though, that the Samartians had interpreted it to be a request from the Heron to fight Marfikians with them, right here, right now. And after a week or so to consider it, the Samartians had obliged.

Alex knew it was true as soon as the realisation hit him. There were other possible explanations, of course, but he just knew in his bones that this was the right one. The Samartians had done this because they believed the Heron had
asked
them to.

And that, of course, was Alex’s decision. His responsibility. The skin over his cheekbones bleached as the colour drained from his face, and bone gleamed white where his knuckles clenched, too. But he managed to keep breathing, not to cry out, not even to swear. He was the anchor holding everything together right now. If he gave way to an outburst, the sense of unity and purpose on the ship might well disintegrate.

What do I do?
He thought, but he knew the answer even as he asked himself the question.

‘Signal back,’ he said, with a scalpel edge to his voice, ‘Satisfied: yes. Continue: no. Repeat ‘continue: no’ three times. And ask, if you can, if there are other Marfikian ships nearby.’

Davie nodded, already coding and programming a comms probe.

The answer came back just six minutes later. It took Davie a little time to decode it, as the transmission contained more complex data than the matrix could currently cope with. Even Davie struggled for several seconds before he saw the structure of it and was able to decode it into a comprehensible image. It was a holographic diagram, a model of the Samartian system with its incredible cloud of sensors around it. Davie could not yet translate all of the data that had come in with the image, but he was able to see that it tracked known ship movements at the border. Working at high speed, with a frown of effort as his fingers blurred over banks of screens, he was able to figure out that each data strand represented a ship which had darted into sensor range. Calculating distances and the known top speed of Marfikian Thorns, it was apparent that there were at least forty seven of their ships in the vicinity of Samart. Then as Davie resolved an anomaly in the coding, the image became clearer and they could see that there were, in fact, at least forty seven
groups
of ships in the vicinity of Samart. Most, like the trio they’d encountered, were in threes, but some groups had six. The number of Marfikian ships patrolling around the Samartian border was estimated as at least a hundred and eighty.

Alex had always thought that the expression ‘blood running cold’ was a metaphor. Now he experienced the reality, the chill that seemed to strike through his veins like an injection of chemical refrigerant.

The question of what they would do if they found Samart under attack from Marfik when they got there had of course been raised and discussed at an early stage of planning. As Alex remembered saying at the time, though, they had no intelligence even suggesting that the Marfikians were about to attempt to invade Samart again. If it did happen that they met Marfikian ships out here, they would have to deal with that as best they could.

He had not thought that a likely probability. Quite apart from their intelligence sources on Prisos which seemed to suggest that Marfik was building up towards another phase of border-testing raids in the region around Cherque, the chances of meeting
any
other ship out in space were so remote that the odds were vanishingly small. Ships which wanted to find one another had to work to extremely precise coordinates in order to rendezvous, as another ship could pass by even just two minutes away without ever appearing on your scanners.

Now, it dawned on Alex that that did not apply, here. They were in a relatively constrained area, close around the edge of the Samartian sensor-zone. With forty seven high speed squadrons dashing around in the same orbit, the chances of encountering them were very much greater. As he recalled the way they’d been cruising around for the past two weeks, oblivious to that danger, Alex felt the ice in his blood strike through to his bones.