Penance (RN: Book 2) (28 page)

Never having conceived of the AI reversing the connection, the bandits watched helplessly as the Victoria locked them out of every system as it scanned their data banks for anything there was on her one known enemy. Once it had learnt all it could, the AI reversed the power flow to bleed the frigate of every kilowatt before severing the connection to leave it an impudent hulk dragging alongside.

In less than a millisecond, the Victoria had used this new information to run hundreds of scenarios before selecting the one possible solution that might kill via primary contact, but would certainly damage via collateral affect. With no ability to train her guns the solution was a long shot in every sense of the meaning, but if the enemy continued on its curving course then the possibility existed.

Deep within her number one turret rams pushed, gears turned and heavy chains snatched into motion as a hoist raised its two tonne cargo from below. The flickering blue glow of an electric arc appeared within her one functional barrel, with the orphaned spark quickly growing to become a blazing cyclone of electrical energy as the AI committed many a broadside’s worth of power into this one final act.

***

The Bristol’s the over-driven auxiliary engines flared, with the rose tinted exhaust punching through the last of the six pearlescent shield bands and stretching half her length as she accelerated toward the gate point. The gunship’s structure groaned from the undamped forces that shook the hull, with the darkened bridge alive from the rattling and chattering of floor grates and loose equipment as the unrelieved stress of rocket acceleration urged her forward.

With the gravity rotors slowing, the g-forces made themselves evident and Canthouse gripped the command chair as he swayed from the reduced gravity and acceleration. The bridge shook and rattled around him as he watched the shrinking distance to the gate point on the tactical display. “C’mon, c’mon,” he cried as he thumped the arm of the chair to urge the struggling gunboat ever forward,

Stavener stared intently at his display as he counted down the chemical fuel reserves, “Eighty seven; eighty five; eighty one. Jesus, LC, she’s chewing through the fuel.”

“How far?”

“Four fifty, four hundred, three fifty ...

O’Dean palmed the manual throttle against its limiter in an attempt to coax more from the straining engines.

“Set destination as Trent station and begin the gate sequence now. I want the engines spooled when we get there.”

ding ding

The first officer side glanced to Stavener, “What is i –“

“Oh, Christ!” Stavener cried, his eyes wide with fear. “The Victoria -she’s firing!”

***

Somewhere on the Victoria a final code sequence executed and a relay closed. The projectile and turret atomised in an instant with the dreadnought’s entire hull collapsing as if sucked inward by a black hole. Where the Queen Victoria had been the fabric of space dipped and then heaved to wrench open like a deific eye, which briefly stared into this universe before the retina expanded into a magma filled blister as what lay behind attempted to burst through to this side. Yet the local fabric prevailed with the eye snapping shut in a titanic release of energy that compressed the FTL drive to a quarter of its original volume, and triggering instant fusion, The two events compounded into a single cataclysmic detonation that rent a great boiling portal in the fabric of space, with trillions of tonnes of red hot material ejected into this universe from the next. The portal lasted but the briefest of instants before staggering local forces crushed it like an air pocket, with a shattering energy release equal to hundreds of supernovas buckling the local fabric and sterilising space for billions of kilometres in every direction.

What few atoms of the Victoria’s projectile that did survive the initial collapse were shot gunned toward the fleeing gunship at relativistic speeds, with two of the atoms entering the gate portal as it folded behind the Bristol to send her out of the frying pan and into the fire.

***

No sooner had the gate closed behind them than Canthouse had collapsed into the command chair, his hands clasped to his face as he released a long weary moan. Four weeks he had anticipated for them to reach Trent station. Four weeks in which they could repair, restock and reevaluate their situation. The new gate portal chime sounded six seconds later.

Three days later.

“The medic did tell me, but where was he again?”

“In the forward magazine.” Hewton stood with his thick arms folded across his barrel chest as he watched the patient. “He was wrapped in a blanket; asleep atop a shelf of class twos’. Everything’s automated down there and they couldn’t activate the lifts without crushing him, so they had to use a fire hose to wake him. When they did, he just climbed down right as rain.”

The doctor huffed. “Of all the places, there is no stranger than anywhere else.”

Hewton nodded as he and the doctor looked toward a towel draped Avery who sat hangdog on the edge of a stretcher. He chatted with the medic who alternately shone a pencil torch into each pupil.

“How is he?”

“Physically he’s fine. Nothing amiss there. He could do with a shave and a shower,
a real shower
,” Hewton grinned, “but apart from that …no, he’s good to go.”

“And the …err …the other,
thing!
” The weapons chief whistled as he made a vague cork screwy motion near his temple.

The doctor grinned at Hewton’s eloquence, “He has no memory of what transpired in engineering, or what came after. But as for the episode itself, there’s no sign. I gave him the quick shot as I don’t have time for the full test. But there were no precursors to indicate the requirement for the full BPRS, so I’d say …ah! Based on conjunct evidence of course, that the episode has passed. He will still need to undergo the re-evaluations on Trent, but apart from that he is as he was.”

“Sooooo….”

The doctor picked up on the look in Hewton’s eye, “No. No, no. I never said he was fit for duty, just fit to be released from medical supervision. Which is just as well as we have no one to monitor him. My two full times are run ragged about the ship fixing squashed thumbs and strained backs.”

“I’m just saying, doctor, we really could use another command officer. I’m helping where I can, but Malcolm is out of his mind from lack of anyone with disaster experience.”

The doctor grimaced, “I can understand the desperation of the situation, Tom. But if he wigs out in the middle of a command decision, who knows what the consequences may be, and who’ll be held accountable?”

There was no arguing with the doctor’s logic, even if the reasoning was partly selfish, “I suppose you’re right. And as much as I think the world of young Avery, he’s a right fine command officer, but –“ Hewton swallowed hard during a considering pause and struggled on in a sullen monotone, “I think there’s something a little strange, maybe even convenient about this whole going loco thing. Going mad then recovering all sudden, like, it’s ….” He watched through the dividing screen as Avery pushed himself off the stretcher, removed the towel, brushed his uniform and locked eyes with him through the glass. He smiled and nodded his thanks to Tom Hewton, who returned the gesture. “It’s right strange, and I think someone needs to keep an eye on him.”

Canthouse rubbed the fatigue from his eyes as he listened to the tired voice on the hand held communicator. “And you can’t do anymore?”

“No, sir. The respite may have given us a little time to get a few things done, but main power is all but tapped out keeping the shields as is. And I may even have to take some of the lesser systems off line again. A 65% reduction is the best we can do at the moment, as the shields just weren’t designed to operate in such an environment. I’m working on a few new algorithms, but I’m not confident they’ll do any better.”

“Very well, I’ll inform enviromentals. Also, can you do anything about the hard link to the sensor tower. The wireless is serving, but this junk is causing so much interference it looks like we forgot to pay the cable bill.”

“The sensor hard link is a dry dock job as the whole structure is twisted so bad even Skinny Finny can’t fit in the crawl spaces.”

Canthouse had no idea who ‘Skinny Finny’ was, but if whom he presumed to be a very slender man couldn’t gain access to the sensor tower then the structure must have received even more damage than he thought. A difficult thing to believe as the last report indicated the sensor tower had been skewed twelve degrees to starboard, stripped of much of its armour and physically looked as if a giant had taken the ship under his arm and tried to twist it free with pliers.

“Understood. Anything you can do with the motives?”

“No, sir, they’re toast. All four coil assemblies will need to be replaced before they’ll take a light again.”

“Then we’ll work with what we’ve got. Good work, Mr Penton. Pass my thanks to your crew.”

Canthouse closed the link and chewed on his top lip as he gazed at the view forward, which was nothing but a tumbling green murk. He stood and moved to speak to Palmer, a marine commander who had volunteered to fill the empty operations officer slot, who stood behind Guimar noting her actions and asking the occasional direction as he watched her work.

“Anything to report?”

Palmer grimaced as he slowly shook his head in the negative. He bore the frustrated look of an intelligent person completely confounded by a seemingly mundane task.

“No. No matter what we do we can’t get the e-band to reach more than two hundred meters. We’ve plenty of power, the signals getting out but nothings coming back. We suspect the signal is being distorted or reflected away from us by this muck.” He tipped his head toward the main screen where the deep green mist swirled like blooming algae. “It’s much denser than the last cloud with far fewer of the thinned out areas we saw last time. And we’re actually encountering drag, if you can believe it. I think it’s what’s causing all those low tremors that keep shaking the ship.”

“Drag! Atmospheric drag?” Canthouse said, his head tiled and face contorted from disbelief.

“Yeah. I know, it’s hard enough to believe even when you see it. Guimar can you pull up that data on …”

Guimar sat like a flesh covered mannequin, her face expressionless as her slim pale fingers worked in anticipation of Palmer’s line of inquiry. A plan view of the Bristol appeared on the screen with various contour lines deforming and reforming as green swirls cycloned past her rugby ball shaped hull.

The first officer watched the fast forwarded video in awed fascination as striations he could only presume to be lightning forked about the forms of hurricanes, some large ponderous vortexes that ambled past at extreme senor range, others - smaller, grouped together like agitated bees that pin-balled about within the confines of their own local attraction as they skipped across the surface of the shields leaving sparkling turmoils in their wake.

“My God! Weather in space.” Canthouse said in sober wonder. He glanced at Palmer, “We are recording this?”

Palmer crossed his arms and gave a noncommittal shrug, “What we can. We lost most of the port dorsal sensor array during the last event. But what we’re getting is good data. To avoid a system lockup like last time we’re filtering it directly to the storage drives and just skimming off what we need as we need it.”

Even before he asked, Canthouse knew the answer to his next question, “With all this data do we have any idea where we actually are?”

Palmer responded with a grim shake of the head.

“Nothing from the Dogfish?”

“Not a recognisable peep since we sent it out yesterday. There was a brief energy emission from its set trajectory somewhere to the rear port quarter about eighteen hours ago, but as we don’t know what’s out there it could have been anything. And to be honest, LC, if we’re at Trent and this is all there is then there’re bigger issues than us making it back.”

Canthouse glanced behind to where the bickering voices of two engineers working on a redundant console were arousing attention. They stopped the moment they noticed him watching. “It’s better to not think about more than we have to at the moment. We still have the radiation encroaching, and though the chief is doing what he can the shields are only slowing it down, not holding it back. That reminds me, Guimar could you send a priority to enviromentals to double up on radiation protocol, we need people moved away from the most affected areas with those that need to be there suited up and inoculated with Remfine.
Is there a problem gentlemen?
” Canthouse called to the engineers whose bickering had escalated to forceful shoves and weighted tools brandished in raised hands. The two men were the colour of murder and looked as guilty as schoolboys caught with cigarettes to their lips.

“York: over there, Smith: finish that console and piss off back to engineering.” The first officer indicated their new positions with the stab of a finger. One man packed his heavy metal tool case, a hard corner jabbing into the man remaining, who in turn swiped an ankle with a wrench as the other moved to his allotted position. Evil sullen looks passed between the two as they parted.

Palmer stifled a wide yawn and rubbed his head and face with both hands. He looked severely fatigued, as did all the crew, with every man jack working double shifts to bring the ship up to a minimal state of readiness, which was doubly important given their current situation.

“That’s not the first time this has happened of late.” Palmer said as he followed the reappointed man with his gaze. “The whole crew’s on edge with increased incidents all over the ship since we arrived here. Callows has detained two in his hen houses, with others confined to quarters, which just places them amongst the off watch.”

Canthouse gave Palmer a considering look, “Paul, I need to ask –“

“Sir, may I take a minute to use the services?”

Canthouse glanced from Palmer to Guimar, “Uh, certainly, SPO. Please …”He indicated her leave with a gesturing hand.

Senior Petty Officer Guimar face fell as she slinked past the two command officers like a frightened animal.

The two senior officers followed her briefly as she bypassed the head located on the bridge, a move Canthouse never commented on as many of the female officers shunned the communal bridge facilities in favour those located in the WREN crew area.

“She’s an odd one that one.” Palmer said nodding after her, “A capable officer but she hardly speaks, rarely answers direct questions and won’t look you in the eye for love nor money. I’ve honestly no idea how she got this position.”

“Her father was the French Ambassador to England.” Canthouse’s tone carried all that needed to be known. “She’s also the one that Stavener kidney punched.”

“
Guimar!
”

“Yes.”

“He also put you on your arse a couple of times, didn’t he?”

“Ha!”
Canthouse said in an unintentionally loud voice at the memory. “Yeah, that too.
God …
He did it just so damn easy, too. No strain, no
Kung Fu
cries. Just a grip of the wrist and I was on my arse in the other direction. He gave poor Raulin a shot to the throat that dropped him like a slashed lamb, too. But you’re distracting me and there’s something I need to ask you.”

Guimar moved briskly, her quick step fuelled by her rising anxiety at the misinterpretation of Canthouse’s benign signal to pass as a flurry of male arrogance, She bypassed the bridge head facilities, instead moving to the rear door with her head tilted against a hunched shoulder and her mind poisoned by chauvinistic thoughts and personal belittlement in what was to her a foreign naval service. The last thing she remembered hearing was her name mentioned followed by laughter, which freed the muzzle from a long battled depression as the door slid shut behind her.

Three hours later.

First rate Susan Waterhouse entered the mess busy with off-watch personal and those grabbing a hurried snack before hurrying back to their posts. She scanned the room and located the object of her search sitting at a table with sub-lieutenant Henry Raulin and Chief engineer George Roberston. Waterhouse moved through the flow of people to where the three men were enjoying each others company, with Raulin miming a finger to his throat, his eyes bulbous and tongue protruding and pretending to choke when she arrived at the table.

The two other men watched her curiously as she bent and spoke quietly into Stavener’s ear, he sat unblinking as she spoke with his countenance changing from a cordial civility to one of dismal understanding. He nodded to the first rate, who left, and he made his excuses to his companions and followed after her.

Stavener paused in his step on entering the conference room, where what section chiefs who could attend sat around the oval table, with Canthouse and Palmer leaning against the far wall. He stared suspiciously around the group of men without committing himself to the room, all of whom stared back with equal misgiving.

“This isn’t an intervention, is it? Because I swear I’ll never touch the stuff again.”

“Close the door, sit down and shut up,” a thoroughly humourless Canthouse said as he retrieved his tablet from the table. Stavener sat himself next a very morose Hewton who never acknowledged his presence.

Canthouse flipped through his notes on the tablet before laying it back on the table and tapping it thoughtfully. “Gentlemen, I was planning on calling this meeting tomorrow, but –“

“Sir, if I may interrupt with a quick question?” Penton asked.