Theirs Not To Reason Why: An Officer's Duty Part 17

"All hands report for greenlight," Lieutenant Abbendris ordered over the ship comms. "Repair teams suit up and report to Decks 2 and 3, Section 1 interior airlocks."

"Captain." That came from Cadet, or rather, Lieutenant Shinowa, stationed at the navigation post. "System buoys are silent. I've tried pinging them, but I'm getting nothing. We're flying blind on lightspeed wavefronts only."

"I'm not getting a ping on any of the system hyperrelays, either," the communications officer, T'siel, warned her.

"Either they've been destroyed by an enemy, sir, or there's one h.e.l.l of an ion storm coming our way," Lieutenant Chen stated from his seat at the engineering workstation. "System buoys and hyperrelay stations are over-engineered to prevent casual failures."

Both, her precognitive instincts warned her. But there were still too many possibilities. "Until we find out otherwise, we will presume we have lost the buoys to both solar storms and enemy ships, and act accordingly," Ia ordered. "Engineering, standby on external repairs."

"Sir?"

"Repair teams are to use remote drones to survey the damage, first. If the drones can't manage the repairs, the teams will have to suit up in ceristeel, in case it's an ion storm," she ordered. "Helm, roll the ship to put the system sun on our portside. Gunnery, crew the aft Sections 3 and 4 P-pods and launch seven scanner probes, six in the cube and the extra sunward, staggered, so we can get realtime estimates if there is an ion storm out there."

"Rolling the portside to sunward, Captain," Vizzini stated, complying with a touch of the controls. The ship swayed slightly under them, but the hint of a tilt was subtle at best.

"Seven scanner probes launched in the cube, two to the sun staggered, aye, sir," Bruer agreed, repeating her orders. That meant launching one probe in each direction, to the fore, aft, dorsal, ventral, starboard, and two to the port, the second one several seconds behind the other. He relayed them on his comm headset directly to his gunnery teams, not over the intercom like Abbendris's orders had been sent.

"Captain! We're in the yellow for three enlisted personnel," Abbendris told her. "They're trapped in a maintenance locker on Deck 3, Section 1. All the others managed to evacuate."

"Are the door seals holding? Do they have p-suits and oxygen in there?" Ia asked.

Abbendris relayed the query, reporting within moments the results. "Captain, they say the door seals are leaking very slowly, but they're suited up, with two-hour standard emergency oxypacks each. However...they'll freeze within the hour, with the starboard side now in the shade. The damage interrupted most of the power to that area. They have some gravity, but zero heat, sir."

"Captain, scanner pods away," Bruer told her. "They'll be up to full insystem speed in twenty seconds, deadheading away from us in the cube."

"Noted. Lieutenant Abbendris, send the Section 1 schematic to my primary screen," she stated, addressing the cadet by her scenario simulation rank. "I want to know exactly where our three trapped crewmates are located, and what's around them."

"Aye, sir. The damage alterations will be incomplete until we get pingback from the repair drones," Abbendris warned her. "Most of this will be an intact schematic."

"Understood, Abbendris," Ia told the other woman.

"Repair drones are now launching, sirs," Bruer stated. That was his duty as the gunnery officer, though it was up to Abbendris to make sense of the readings, just as it was up to astronavigation officer Shinowa to make sense of the data the launched sensor pods were collecting and sending back. Each one was equipped with insystem thruster fields, minimum shields, enough ceristeel plating to protect the delicate instrumentation in most conditions, and more.

The repair drones had a variety of flexible servo-arms to make repairs, while the sensor drones bore miniature hyperrelay units to boost the data streams above the speed of light. Both kinds were expensive, if necessary, and it would be a mark against her if Ia didn't make sure each one came back intact.

Within moments, her largest, central screen brightened with the three-dimensional wire sketch framing the decks of the da Gama's foremost section. Three yellow humanoid shapes lit up one of the cube-chambers. Frowning in thought, Ia tapped the screen, rotating the image, zooming in and out. She touched keys on her console, adjusting the opacity of walls, highlighting power conduits and other ship systems, coaxing her tired mind into thinking.

"Lovely..." Abbendris murmured. "Captain, we're beginning an exterior survey of the damage."

"Noted. Send a couple remote 'bots through the section airlocks, too, to examine the damage from the inside."

"Aye, sir." The cadet overseeing ship systems relayed the orders, then hesitated. "Captain? Aren't we going to send in a rescue team to pick up the yellowlights?"

"Not until we get a system report. We are still lightspeed blind, Lieutenant," Ia reminded her. "We have three problems that are slightly more urgent at the moment. We don't even know yet what we hit, if it was an isolated asteroid or a chunk of ship. There might be other debris out there. If we get overtaken by a solar storm and the radiation gets in through the cracks in the hull during a rescue operation, it'll kill those three faster than if they stayed locked up for half an hour while we wait to find out. And if there are enemies lurking somewhere nearby, taking out those system buoys, better for our crewmates to be in an intact cabin with functional interior fields to help cushion them from sudden maneuvers, if we have to bolt and run."

"Careful observation leads to comprehension," Bruer murmured.

Ia smiled wryly. "Exactly. Right now, our biggest need is information."

Shinowa spoke up. "We're getting initial system telemetry from the probes, Captain. We struck one of...what looks like seven asteroids within twenty lightseconds of our position. Comparison with known system data suggests these are unregistered bodies, possibly rogues. There's also some strange radiation in the system. Some of it's leaking from the damaged ship section, I think. I'll have a better a.n.a.lysis of it in a few moments..."

"If we hadn't slowed down, the FTL field should have pushed them aside," Chen groused. "Slowing down caused the collision."

Shinowa shook her head, her gaze dancing between her primary, two secondary, and bank of tertiary screens. "Incorrect, Lieutenant Commander. If we hadn't slowed when we did, we would have plowed into the largest of them, which is now dead ahead by five thousand klicks. We are d.a.m.ned lucky we stopped when we did. FTL can't push aside a rock that's 2.3 kilometers long. Instead of being banged up by a rock two hundred meters across-which I'll admit would have been pushed aside by the warp panels-we'd have been dead. Very dead."

"This system is only partially surveyed," Ia reminded the others, backing up her navigation officer's a.s.sessment, and explaining her own reasoning. "Prudence demanded that we drop to sub-light speeds and ping the buoys for the latest system updates. With those buoys dead, it's even more imperative we hold position until we know what's out there. That's why I ordered the scanner drones deployed."

"Those are rather large for rogue asteroids. They should've been on the system charts at that size, rogue or otherwise," Bruer muttered, staring at his screens.

"We deal with what is, not with what we want it to be, Lieutenant Bruer," Ia reminded him.

"Scanner probes edgeward are picking up traces of ma.s.sive ion trails, Captain," Shinowa reported. "Looks like this system's been hit with a really big solar flare in the last week-ah-!" She slapped the intercom. "All hands, brace for an ion storm! It's a big one, Captain, coming up fast. We have maybe twenty minutes at lightspeed before the worst of the radiation hits. We're going to have to seal as many sunward ports and panels as we can. It's either shut it all down for the duration, or be rendered sensor-blind on that side."

"Right." Tapping her screen and her console, Ia sent the sketch she made to the ship systems station. "Lieutenant Abbendris, to your primary. Use this plan to get those crewmates out of that locker."

"Sir?" Abbendris asked, looking up from her screen to Ia. "This plan?"

Ia met her gaze impatiently. "You heard Lieutenant Shinowa. You have less than twenty minutes. Execute it."

"Aye, sir." Turning back to her station, Abbendris started relaying them, directing the repair crews to power up a welding drone, empty out a storage crate, and have two team members don stevedore mechsuits. The plan was to use the welding drone to cut through the back wall of the supplies locker from another room deeper inside the ship, and bring up the two-meter-square storage chest for the three pressure-suited crewmembers to crawl into, so they could be carried out of the damaged sector.

P-suits were silvery grey to help retain body heat and ward off some forms of stellar radiation, but an ion storm would pa.s.s its energy right through the relatively thin material. The ceristeel chest wasn't very dense either, but then neither were the stevedore suits; their only advantage was that they would be more protection than the p-suits alone. All five crewmembers would be at risk until they reached the safety of the unbroken ship sections, where layers of ceristeel would absorb and diffuse the energies hurtling toward them from a ma.s.s ejection of the local sun's corona.

Connecting her headset to the infirmary, Ia contacted the head of the medical cadets undergoing their own version of h.e.l.l Week along with SF-Navy Cla.s.s 1252. "Captain Ia to Doctor Underhill. Prepare to receive five patients. Three will have decompression sickness and all five will probably have ion radiation burns."

"Understood, Captain."

Tense, quiet minutes pa.s.sed on the bridge. Abbendris reported the extent of the damage to the starboard hull, in between reporting the progress of the welders. Shinowa reported increasing levels of ionized ga.s.ses expelled from the system's star. T'siel warned Ia that the ion storm was now so intense, their connection to outsystem hyperrelays were failing. More than one tertiary screen at the various bridge workstations included shots from the cameras on the welder drone and the stevedore-suited crewmembers hauling the oversized ceristeel crate.

A subdued cheer broke out among the cadets on the bridge when the oval slice of metal was extracted from the wall. Another m.u.f.fled cheer accompanied the sight of the crewmembers climbing into the crate, piling one on top of another, and the lid being fastened.

"Eyes to those boards, sailors, and keep your minds on your jobs," Ia ordered the others. "We're still running lightspeed blind."

"Here comes the radiation crest!" Shinowa warned everyone.

"Repair Team Sierra, the ion storm is cresting. Get everyone back through the section lock, bounce it on the double," Abbendris ordered the men and women listening on her headset. "Don't make any careless mistakes."

"Lieutenant Shinowa, what's the estimated density of the storm?" Ia asked.

The other cadet shrugged. Navigation was not her track specialty. "It's a big one, Captain. Big enough, the crest is starting to push us, sir. If there were other, relatively recent storms the size of this one, they could have altered the orbits of those asteroids, turning them rogue."

"Rogue asteroids and ion storms, just our luck," Vizzini muttered. "Captain, do you want me to use the thrusters to maintain our position? We're starting to tumble from the stellar winds."

"Maintain portside sunward, Commander Vizzini," Ia instructed him. "Protect that broken hull section. But the moment those crewmembers are safely in Section 2, I want you to swap ship ends."

"Sir?" he asked, giving her a puzzled look.

"Point the bow back the way we came, maintaining portside to sunward," Ia clarified crisply. Unclipping the stylus from the edge of her workstation, she lifted it in her fingers and twisted her wrist, using it to demonstrate how she wanted the ship ends swapped.

"Sir?" Vizzini repeated. "I don't understand, sir. Wasn't the direction we were originally headed the correct one, Captain? Why would we go back?"

"Repair Team Sierra has reached the airlock, Captain," Abbendris reported quietly. "They're cycling through, sir."

"Commander Vizzini, you are to swap the ship ends, keeping the portside sunward and the damaged hull to the edgeward side of the system, in the lee of the ship. You have your orders. If you are too tired to carry them out, let me know and I will relieve you of the burden of commanding the helm so you can get some rest. Are you tired, Commander?" Ia asked her second-in-command softly.

"Sir, no, sir," he responded, turning back to his controls. "Helm is now swapping the ship ends, keeping the portside sunward, sir." Left hand in the thruster glove, right hand dancing over the b.u.t.tons on his console, he slowly rotated the ship. Half under his breath, he muttered, "I just don't understand why..."

Ia didn't explain. Instead, she worked on building a new set of orders. Her right secondary screen flashed with an incoming comm message. Linking to it, she listened to the report from the infirmary, and nodded.

"Thank G.o.d...The infirmary reports they have received all five crewmates and are treating them for very minor ion storm burns," she told the rest of the crew. The others cheered. Ia allowed herself a small smile, until her right secondary screen flashed again, this time with a text message from a different part of the ship. "Well. It looks like supper for the cadre has now been prepared."

"Rapture," Bruer quipped. "Redlight or greenlight, routine or emergency, the cooks keep on cooking. Pa.s.s along my compliments to...uh...Lieutenant Harper? It's his duty shift, isn't it?"

"Yes, he took over from Lieutenant Jinja-Marsuu three hours ago. She swapped back to lifesupport for the second half of her duty shift," Ia said, calling up and checking the duty roster. "Given our delicate situation, and the general exhaustion of the crew-meaning we don't have a lot of choices for relief watch officers-I am going to authorize permission to the bridge crew for us to go eat one at a time."

They looked at each other. The order wasn't usual, though it wasn't unheard-of. Chen shrugged. "Who goes first, Captain? By rank, or...?"

"All bridge stations, ping me a standard RNG to my tertiary three. Highest random number goes first, lowest goes next to last. I'll take the absolute last supper in the rotation, and handle each of your stations in the meantime." Waiting for the numbers to scroll up the center of her five bottom screens, Ia touched the monitor as soon as all of them had reported in. A swirl of her finger on the screen and a tap of the other hand on the keyboard reorganized the numbers in descending order. "Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander Chen; you rolled a ninety-seven, which means you get to be the first victim of tonight's version of a culinary masterpiece."

"My stomach thanks you from the bottom of its random number generator, Captain," the man at the engineering console quipped. "Transferring engineering command to your station, Captain."

"Transfer received, thank you," Ia murmured a few seconds later. "You are free to leave the bridge, Lieutenant Chen. Don't eat so fast that you choke, but don't dawdle, either. Commander Vizzini will be next."

Unbuckling himself from his seat, he hurried to leave. She envied him; she hadn't eaten a lot at their last meal, for fear some of the scenario options selected would be too rough a ride to keep the food down. But the job of being the ship's captain-of being an officer, period-meant asking nothing of her crew that she wouldn't ask of herself. That meant waiting until last.

"Commander Vizzini...I am having the engineering department reverse the directional pulse pattern of the insystem thrusters. Upon my command, you will put this ship in reverse, quarter speed," Ia commanded. "Lieutenant Shinowa, alter course of the sensor drones. Keep them in the cube, but match course and pace to our own. Heading is one eighty-three by one seventy-two. Maintain portside to sunward at all times."

"Uhh...reverse, sir?" Vizzini asked. "You want me to back up the ship?"

"We cannot go forward into a solar storm as dense as this one, Commander," Ia said. "The holes in our bow would act like a scoop, gathering up far too many ionized particles for our safety. We will therefore, as you put it so succinctly, back up the ship. We cannot afford to waste time sitting out a storm this bad. It's either move to get out of the storm and stay on course, or move to find a planet to hide behind, and we're in the wrong quadrant for that this year."

"Aye, sir," he agreed, shrugging and returning to his controls. "Ahe...er, reverse engines, one-quarter speed, heading one eighty-three by one seventy-two."

Satisfied he would comply, Ia relaxed a little. Her screen flashed again, this time a request for a private commlink. Ia linked into it. "Captain Ia here."

"Captain, this is Lieutenant Commander Jinja-Marsuu, down here in lifesupport," the other woman spoke, voice projecting solely into Ia's left ear. "I trust this is a private channel? It's not something that needs be broadcast to the crew."

"Go ahead, Commander," Ia replied, adjusting her headset a little more comfortably in her ear. "You're in the clear."

"Captain, your, ah, replacement, Lieutenant Wong, has taken his sweet time getting down here to lifesupport. In fact, I was told by Lieutenant Harper that he swung by the officer's galley and chatted up some of the crew, cadging a snack before making his way down here. And when he did finally show up, he broke one of the drinking water pipelines, and made a mess of repairing it. I would like to request permission to replace him...and to ask if you think I should write him up for a Fatality Four, Dereliction of Duty."

That was a fairly serious charge for a cadet to accrue during h.e.l.l Week. It was something that would go on his permanent record, in fact. For a moment, Ia wondered why Wong-who had looked reasonably alert when she had reached the bridge and was relatively competent in his lifesupport cla.s.ses-would have been so tardy. Curious, she dipped into the timestreams, looking into the past, not the future, for a glimpse of what had delayed him.

What she saw widened her eyes. Blinking as she came back to herself, Ia quickly smoothed out her expression and silently weighed the best options based on the variables she could foresee. "Replace him, but order him confined to his quarters for the next eight hours. Make a note of the incident, but do not put any charges into his record at this time. We're all exhausted by now, Commander. Hopefully with a bit of sleep, he won't be so slow to report next time."

"Understood, sir. Jinja-Marsuu out."

CHAPTER 12.

Mind you, they did try...but once again, they didn't break me.

I broke myself. Painfully.

~Ia The first wave of vomiting swept through the crew roughly an hour later, while they were still trying to out-crawl the ion storm. The first one on the bridge to succ.u.mb, naturally, was the first one to have eaten. Lieutenant Commander Chen cast up the contents of his stomach on his workstation console. Thankfully, the keys were sealed against all manner of spills, but the sound and the mess were disturbing.

Ia quickly transferred the engineering controls back to her own station, adding them to the gunnery controls. Excusing himself, Chen rose and wobbled out of the bridge, heading for the cleaning supplies. They heard him retching again just beyond the door, before he managed to slap the controls, shutting the panel.

Shinowa let out a soft whistle. "That was unpleasant."

"Please," Vizzini muttered. "I'm trying not to think about the sound or the smell...and I don't feel so good myself."

Ia's right secondary screen lit up. She opened the commlink to the whole bridge. "Lieutenant Harper, I was just about to call you. Commander Chen just cast up his stomach all over my bridge."

"Uhhh...sorry, Captain. I don't know how, but..." He sounded horrible. "Captain, I think some sort of contaminant got into the cadre galley. I've just sent five crewmembers to the infirmary, and I need to report in, myself. I'm taking samples of food, drink, and water down there for...uhhh, G.o.d..."

"Get everything examined, Lieutenant," she said. Then had to wait as he retched. She thumbed down the volume while she waited, then dialed it back up again. "Report to the infirmary with samples of everything, Lieutenant Harper. Make sure the unaffected members of your crew suit up before they a.s.sist, to ensure nothing is cross-contaminated." Ending the connection, she addressed her bridge crew. "Lieutenant Abbendris, wake up the first watch officers and have them report to the bridge on the double. Make absolutely sure they have eaten and drunk nothing in the last three hours before you permit them to come onto this bridge."

"Aye, sir." The other woman bent to her task...and flinched as Vizzini groaned and struggled out of his restraints.

He managed to lurch halfway to the bridge door before retching right next to Ia. Nose wrinkling, she struggled not to breathe too deeply. She hadn't consumed anything beyond the bottled water available to the bridge crew in the last few hours, but the smell was enough to make her feel nauseated, too.

Thumbing open the ship intercom, Ia announced, "Attention all hands, this is the Captain. Attention. We are experiencing some sort of shipwide illness. It looks like it's going to get at least half of the officers. Either this is biological, or it's sabotage. I am therefore or-"

"Holy shakk!" Shinowa swore. "Captain! Ships emerging from FTL to our af...er, bow-behind us! Three...five...oh, holy ancestors-Captain, they're Salik vessels! Twelve vessels, Captain!"

"Shakk," Bruer swore. "We can't run with the front half of our warp panels powerless, and we can't fight back against that many. And if they board us, they'll eat us! They've given us a G.o.dd.a.m.n Kobayashi Maru, on top of everything else!"

"The Kobayashi Maru scenario should be illegal in these tests," someone else muttered.

"Not to mention cliched," one of the other cadets agreed.

Ia jabbed her controls, bypa.s.sing T'siel's communications station. Fingers stuttering as fast as she could go, she linked into the ship's broadcast relays, and into all seven drones. Two final taps opened up a recording unit, and the broadband broadcast command. Her words echoed through s.p.a.ce as well as through the ship, since the ship's internal comm systems were still active at her station.

"This is Captain Ia of the TUPSF Vasco da Gama with a Quarantine Extreme warning. I transmit this in the broadband lightspeed; I transmit this on rotating hyperrelays. By the rules of Sentientarian s.p.a.cefaring Aid, this vessel is sealed under the rules of Quarantine Extreme. All ships, do not attempt contact with the TUPSF Vasco da Gama. All ships, do not attempt to load any water from the ice rings of the fifth planet in star system Ceti Ceti Delta 175 until further notice.

"We are under biological attack from an unknown contaminant traced to the hydrosupplies we collected from the ice rings of the fifth planet at Ceti Ceti Delta 175. This biological agent is jumping species. I repeat, it is jumping species. Any attempt to contact the atmosphere, fuel, or life-forms aboard the TUPSF Vasco da Gama will risk your own biological contamination. This is a Quarantine Extreme warning."