Lacuna: Demons of the Void (26 page)

Soon enough she felt the now familiar lurch as the artificial gravity was switched off, her hair floating around her head as she and Kamal once again inserted their dual keys, twisting them to the right.

However, this time, the ship’s systems immediately began screaming at them; dozens of alarms squealing and crying at once. Liao snapped her head around to Summer’s console.

“What the- Report! Report!”

Summer thumped her fist against the console. “Jump failed, Captain! There’s a gravimetric disturbance at the jump site. Possibly another ship, possibly a gravity mine... The jump drive’s gone into safe mode to prevent melting itself into slag and ripping the ship to pieces. We’re still in the Sol system.”

“
Safe mode
?” Liao echoed Summer’s comment incredulously, her tone laced with confusion. As she spoke the artificial gravity slowly came back, the Operations crew gradually floating back down to the metal of the deck. “What the hell does that mean?”

Summer gave another of her trademark derisive snorts, much to Liao’s chagrin. “It means,” she answered, “that instead of tearing us apart by jumping into an occupied location, the system cancelled the jump. It’s blown out its capacitors and massively overheated, however, so we won’t be able to jump for some time.”

Liao gripped her command console so tightly her fingers hurt. “How long is ‘some time’, Rowe? Specifics, please.”

The redhead shrugged helplessly. “A few hours, best case scenario... more realistically, half a day. We’ll have to wait until the jump drive cools and then we can begin the work, which is pretty laborious in and of itself, and-”

“No.
Unacceptable
. I need that jump drive
now
, Rowe, so we can try again – so we can jump to another jump point within the Hades system and then rally with the
Tehran
at sub-light-“

Summer gave a barking laugh. “I’m sorry
reality
is unacceptable, Captain, but this isn’t some fucking science fiction story where you can just invert the polarity and fix something... And I’m not Montgomery-fucking-Scott. The jump drive is sitting pretty at nearly six
hundred
degrees Celsius, and it’ll take hours to radiate all that heat out. Now, normally, changing the capacitors takes thirty seconds
each
... and there are twelve, so six minutes to change. However, we’ll have to shut down the drive completely to try and get that heat away from the core as fast as possible, so we’ll be approaching this from a cold start. Takes five minutes per unit, so right on an hour, and
then
we have to go through the jump preparation all over again…”

Liao felt helpless anger building up within her. She turned to Hsin, the Communications officer. “Signal the TFR
Sydney
. I want to speak to Captain Knight – tell him to charge his jump drive. We’re going to send the
Sydney
in as a rescue mission. Their jump drive should still be functional and-“

“-has been plagued with problems since her launch, Captain…” Kamal stepped up to her again, once again keeping his voice low. “…as has most of her systems. The whole reason
we’re
here is because they’re not combat ready, remember? Besides... what’s to say that they won’t just encounter the same problem and blow out their jump drive too?”

The man put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Captain. You know there’s nothing we can do but wait now.”

Melissa was quiet for a moment, and then she just gave a small nod.

*****

Later

The minutes turned to hours. Fleet Command had requested a debriefing; Liao had Mister Hsin send through a terse message that, since the
Tehran
had not yet returned, the operation was not complete so no debriefing could take place. Fleet Command had sent back a response but Liao had not bothered to read it. She could guess what they would say anyway.

Liao did not leave the Operations room except for a brief excursion to the head. There, once away from prying eyes and the demanding gazes of her crew, she resisted – somehow – the urge to vomit all over her shoes. She felt nausea come in waves, as though her stomach were being punched and kicked from the inside. She knew it was stress - worry for the missing ship, worry for its missing Captain. Ghostly images, fears both rational and irrational, danced through her head, each more brutal and horrid than the last.

She could not shake the mental image of the
Tehran
floating in space, her back broken in two, her hull smashed open like an egg under a mallet... And just like an egg the white atmosphere would pour into the void, followed soon after by the soundless stream of human yoke, sucked out into space to asphyxiate and die. She saw, in her mind’s eye, the faces of James’ crew facing an ignoble death in the orbit of a dying star millions of light years away from their homes and friends with nobody to mourn them. The families of the crew would have no graves to visit or bodies to bury, their frozen loved ones floating forever through the frigid ink-black emptiness, until pulled in by the tiny but inexorable pull of the dead star’s gravity well and-

The thought was too much for her. She had skipped dinner, so Liao was suddenly reduced to dry heaving over the steel toilet bowl, coughing up saliva and bile. Soon the hacking and wrenching was punctuated with quiet sobs. The sounds were her only companion as her grief finally made itself known.

They
had
to go back.

Liao used the hand towels available in the bathroom to clean herself up, glad that there appeared to be no residue on her uniform aside from a few spots which she quickly cleaned up with a dry hand towel. She washed her hands several times, gulped down mouthfuls of freezing cold water, touched up the small amount of make-up she was wearing in the small mirror, and then stepped back out to confront the crew.

She half expected Iraj or Jiang to be waiting outside the head for her with another of their endless reports, but it seemed as though fate was prepared to grant her at least one small mercy this time. Her walk back to Operations was solitary, although when she arrived she found that the room was a hive of activity.

“Mister Iraj, status report.”

Iraj turned to face her. “Captain, we just detected a jump-in at the L2 Lagrange point.”

A jump in! Melissa’s heart leaped, eyes widening. “Good news or bad? Is it our people?”

Iraj looked like he desperately wanted to give good news, but instead gestured to Hsin. “Communications is trying to raise the ship, Captain, but we haven’t heard a reply to our hails on any frequency. That said... they haven’t made any aggressive moves, nor have they made any transmissions of their own that we can detect. Yet.”

Liao realized she’d been holding her breath. She slowly let it out, closing her eyes a moment and steadying herself, then opening them again. “So... a little from column A, a little from column B.”

“That pretty much sums it up, yes.”

Melissa crossed the floor of the Operations room, moving over to the Communications console. The Chinese woman leaned over Hsin’s shoulder and examined his readings.

“What about signals in other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum? Anything on thermals?”

Hsin craned his neck, glancing over his shoulder to his Captain. “Too far away to see anything of interest on thermals, Captain… Way out of range to get anything more than a blob. The resolution on these things just isn’t as high as our radar...”

Lieutenant Dao called over to Liao. “Captain – we’re detecting an active radar signal from the unidentified vessel. They appear to be targeting us... intermittently.”

Liao clenched her fists. This was strange behaviour for a friendly ship, but it might be something the Toralii would do if they were trying to paint them as a target...

Something nagged at her, though.

“
Intermittently
?”

“Yes ma’am. On and off, then on again, then off… but not a steady pulse like a sweep would be. Maybe they’re damaged.”

Liao frowned. She moved over to Dao’s console, taking in the readings from the passive sensors he was using to observe the unknown ship’s signal. “That doesn’t make
any
sense. Normally, attempts to scan for targeting information or obtain range should be regular and rhythmic…” She pointed to the screen. “...This is anything but.”

Summer slipped her way over to Dao’s console. “Lemme see.” Liao, unable to learn anything more, stepped aside and let the red-headed woman take a look.

“There’s a pattern,” Rowe announced almost instantly, “with the radar pulses. It’s not intermittent. Or rather... it is, but it’s not random... it’s
repeating
. See that? Long, short, short, long...”

Liao’s eyes widened. “It’s Morse code!” She snatched up a notepad and pencil, scribbling down the signal.

When it was almost done, she dropped the writing device with a small gasp. She knew the word before it was even finished.

P-E-A-R-L-S

Chapter XII

“Salvation”

*****

Docking Umbilical

TFR
Beijing

Three days later

The hatchway’s seal was made, the
Beijing
’s docking umbilical forming an airtight link with a soft hiss. Liao, Cheung, Summer, Saeed and a whole team of marines stood by the doorway, ready to rush across the boarding platform and render whatever assistance they could. It had been a long three days journey time to the Lagrange point the Tehran had arrived at... and Liao had spent most of the time trying to determine what state the
Tehran
was in and how they could assist.

And worrying. Liao had done her fair share of that.

There had still been no word from the
Tehran
aside from the repeated radar signal… Although, as the
Beijing
had approached their sister ship, their own eyes had told the story of what had happened to the ship better than words could.

The
Tehran’s
hull was visibly pockmarked with deep gouges and craters, the armoured plates of its hull broken and warped from the pounding of enemy weapons. Many of her cooling fins were holed or broken off entirely, and there were many significant structural breaches... places where the
Beijing
’s crew, via long-range optics, had observed ominous gaps in the hull. Some were the size of a man’s fist, others were larger than a car.

Most alarming, however, was the huge damage done to the stern of the vessel. A giant crescent had cut away almost twenty cubic metres of material, like curved scissors through cloth; a huge chunk of the ship was simply scooped away as though by some huge blade. Only the thick titanium beams of her superstructure remained, like the exposed bones of a rotting carcass.

Aside from the blackened, charred and partially melted superstructure beams, the cut was fairly clean. The damage was only fifty metres from the reactor cores, a fact Liao was extraordinarily thankful for. Whatever the
Tehran
had been hit with, if it had been even slightly more on target, there would in all likelihood not be anything left of them at all.

The sharp optics on the
Beijing
revealed more than Liao wanted to know – she knew that the
Tehran
had suffered extensively in the time before it was able to jump back – but at the same time the prime, burning question of hers had not been answered.

Where was James?

He was alive at one point, that much was obvious, since the radar was ‘transmitting’ a signal only she would have been able to understand… But had this been his dying command? Or even a fail-safe he had entrusted to his first officer, Commander Farah Sabeen?

Based on Rowe’s analysis of the
Tehran
’s battle damage, it was anticipated that the ship’s computers, long range radios and short range radios along with their entire radar system would be basically fried or, at the very least, operating at dramatically reduced efficiency.

Given the extensive damage that seemed to affect every single system, Melissa was surprised that the ship had been able to jump back at all.

The airlock swung open. Liao and her marines found themselves staring down the barrels of a dozen exhausted looking marines from the
Tehran
who, thankfully, quickly lowered their rifles.

“Commander Liao, TFR
Beijing
. Permission to come aboard?” She glanced between the fatigued faces who stared at her from across the gulf of the docking umbilical. She hoped to spot James’ dark face amongst the Iranians, but it was Farah – a bloodied Farah, her green head-scarf stained with sweat and showing three day old blood stains – who limped forward, favouring her left leg, and extended her heavily bandaged right hand.

“Permission granted, Commander. Welcome aboard the
Tehran
…” The Iranian woman gave a sardonic grin, gesturing at the debris strewn corridor with her left hand, the right extended towards the other officer. “…At least, what’s left of her.”