Chapter 7: Priorities
You could say I slept through the jumps to Kapteyn's Star, Kruger 60, and Rigor Vulcanis, only I didn't do that much sleeping. Just a lot of tossing and turning. It didn't help that I avoided shutting down my computational systems. It's said that dreams are how the brain processes the day's events. In my case, then, the endless number-crunching my cybernetic processors engage in could be thought of as "dreaming." The psychological effects are certainly similar, sometimes indistinguishable from "real" dreams. If I could pinpoint one distinct difference, it's that the dreams of my artificial brain were more concrete and potent than those of my natural one. I played out numerous scenarios for our impending encounter with the Koraxians. Would they blow us up on the spot? Offer us new technology? Refuse to even communicate? Trust us quickly? Provide a significant fleet for a counteroffensive? I had no idea. Neither did anyone else, based on the information I had. Too little data let my mind run wild, extrapolating the most elaborate and unlikely scenarios possible. In the end, what actually ended up happening proved to be outside the bounds of my most outlandish simulations.
I had a habit of sleeping with a family heirloom clutched in my hand. It didn't look like anything special: a flattened square with a hole in the center, and a narrow peg extending one side of the square about a centimeter. Dull, gray, and worn by the passage of time, I wore it on a silver chain and never took it off. My parents used to tell me stories about our ancestors in Scotland, and how this "lucky charm" saved our family's bacon on numerous occasions. Intellectually, I never put a lot of stock in their legends, until the War, when it stayed attached to me even though I'd been blown in half. I vowed never to take it off after that. Not only did it connect me to my parents and my family history, I had the unshakable feeling that it had, somehow, actually saved my life.
I couldn't have proven it at the time--really, I probably could never have proven it in a scientific fashion. But I believed it. And I kept it close at all times, normally only giving it any thought at night. I'd come to think of it as a kind of ward against evil--so long as it dangled around my neck, no dire forces would dare approach me while I slept.
My half-sleep came to be interrupted by Commander Ramsey, paging me directly in my quarters via the intercom. "Captain Maxwell to the bridge, please. We have a situation."
Oh, but it was always "a situation." I let go of the charm, noticing the imprint it left on my palm, like always, and rolled out of bed. I didn't bother with the lights, using my artificial eye's infrared mode to see in the dark. I yanked a uniform out of the closet and slipped into it in a hurry, on top of my gray underclothes, all the while wondering what kind of trouble my idiot XO had gotten us into.
I followed my familiar path to the bridge, dodging crewmen who rushed from one station to another, exchanging data, giving orders, professionally but quickly carrying out their duties. The ship hadn't given any noticeable vibrations--no indications of weapons impacts. But something clearly had everyone on alert.
I found out what it was when I reached the bridge. The main display announced our location: the Firewall system, one of our "border" areas, where most of its FVs led into Koraxian space. The tactical overlay showed a battle in progress, at least a dozen Koraxian ships bearing down a sizable joint Terran/Oolian fleet. But the good guys were dropping like flies, vanishing one by one from the screen.
"Ramsey!" I barked. "What the hell happened?"
He stood and gestured toward the screen, anxiety all over his face. "I don't know! We jumped in and this was already happening. We're on course for the next fold vector but we're going to pass awfully close to those Koraxian ships."
"Sir," Lt. Arnold interrupted. "We've been getting a lot of communications since we entered this system. Captain Argyle of the Titus has asked to speak with you directly."
I sighed. I didn't really want to hear what I already knew he was going to say. But I let her put it on.
His voice crackled through the speakers on the bridge. "Captain Maxwell? Robert? It's Randy. We're getting killed out here! You've gotta help us. We don't know when we'll get reinforced. The Oolians are taking a beating and talking about retreat. Our FV drive is down, we're sitting ducks out here!"
Ramsey looked at me, trying to gauge my decision before I announced it. I didn't have to glance at everyone's faces to know how pained they looked. Our friends, our allies, they were all getting slaughtered. Maybe it was easier to handle when it was just a nebulous thought, but here, they could see the debris, watch the ships drop off the scanners, hear the final words of each crew as their lives were snuffed out.
And it fell upon me to tell them we couldn't stop to help. "We have our orders. If we stop now, we may miss our rendezvous and be unable to complete our mission." I stated it matter-of-factly, hiding how I truly felt about it. I had to appear decisive, despite my conflicting feelings. Did I truly believe in our mission to rendezvous with the Koraxian dissidents? Not really. I had no reason to trust them, or believe our encounter would be fruitful. But Jack tasked me with this personally, and he'd never--never--let me down. It was a gamble, but one I had to take.
Ramsey apparently had similar doubts. "This is a mistake," he whispered, so the others couldn't hear. "We should make a stand here and try to hold off the Koraxians. We don't even know that anyone will be at our destination, or whether it's a trap, or anything about it. We can make a difference right here, right now."
I shook my head. "No, we won't. We'll just get killed right along with everyone else. We will proceed to Nanias, and I don't want to hear any more about this."
Captain Argyle tried to plead with me, too. "Come on, Robert! We're about to lose our weapons entirely, our reactor is failing, we're going to--" I motioned to Rydia to cut him off, which she did, albeit reluctantly.
I sat down and checked my console to see if any new information had come in. Nothing. So, we kept on our beeline to the next FV, to the Trevor system. "Ensign Yuro, orient the ship to minimize the profile we have facing the Koraxian ships. If they decide to take potshots at us, I want to give them as small a target as possible."
Yuro nodded in acknowledgment and I could almost visualize the momentum wheels throughout the ship spinning along a horizontal axis, turning us to face the Koraxian fleet. The Protector was long but relatively narrow. Showing them our "face" gave them a very small target to shoot at.
And they did make a couple attempts--massive, deadly spikes coasted past us, nearly clipping some of the ship's protruding structures. I held my breath, waiting for one of them to make an impact, but we came out unscathed. This time, I reminded myself. We moved at a pretty good clip, near the edge of our weapons' range from the Koraxian ships. Still plenty close enough for some of them to break off and pursue, but none of them bothered.
I watched the battle progress on the screen, as more friendlies simply vanished. The Koraxians were fanning out into a spherical formation, surrounding the quickly-dwindling survivors. I felt sick to my stomach as the blip for the USS Titus faded out. Why couldn't we hit the fucking FV to Trevor already?
The screen went completely dark when we jumped, and took a few moments to bring up an initial scan of our new location. I reminded myself we only had one more FV to go.
I wondered how the Trevorans were holding up. Technologically, they were about forty years behind us. They tried to run us out of their system when we first encountered them, greatly exaggerating their firepower with an undeserved sense of superiority. At that moment, though, I found myself feeling sorry for them: with each successive scan of the system, Koraxian ships appeared, swarming the Trevoran homeworld and their few offworld colonies. Evidently, we weren't the only ones under attack today. If we didn't stand a chance, the Trevorans were less than hopeless.
It was not a fate I would have wished upon them, even with all their arrogant huffing and puffing.
We were still about 24 hours out from the FV to Nanias, due to the fact that it was way off at the edge of the Trevoran system. I intended to stay up the whole time, watching the annihilation of the Trevoran race unfold in symbolic fashion on the viewer. Everyone else paid attention to their immediate duties--combat readiness primary among them.
The hours drifted by as we passed from one end of the system to the other. Shifts changed. Ramsey went off duty, along with Arnold, Collins, 'smyth-Kennedy, Yuro, Rivera, Jones. Vorlano stayed at his post, seemingly unbothered by staying on duty for days on end. Humans really got the short end of the endurance stick, as far as I could tell.
I wound up pacing back and forth between the science and security stations, trying to wear a groove in the floor. "ETA," I rasped at the blue shift navigator, whose name escaped me--I wasn't normally up at this hour.
"Three hours," she reported quietly.
Our first encounter with the Koraxians began to feel like it was months ago. It seemed like an eternity since I'd met with Jack. The last words I heard from Captain Argyle stood out in my mind, but started fading quickly.
I neglected to eat, keeping my metabolism stable through deliberate manipulation of my bloodstream as it passed through my artificial limbs. Sometimes it helped having direct control over my own physiology. I could go for weeks without eating, if I stored up enough glucose in the small chambers spread throughout my artificial components. They could also clean out toxins more efficiently than my liver and kidneys, although I didn't typically urinate out of my index finger in mixed company, as cool of a party trick as that was.
I realized, then, that the anticipation was getting to me. I'd resorted to thinking about pissing out of my finger, just to entertain myself in some perverse way. Good God.
And then we jumped.
I gave the scanners a few minutes, but no Koraxian ships--or any ships, for that matter--showed up.
"Where the hell are they?" I wondered.
Chapter 7
- Printer-friendly version
- Login or register to post comments
- Send to friend
Not much to add to this one,
(Why is this suddenly being typed in bold?)