Chapter 23
Lieutenant Riggs worked his fingers across his console, monitoring the ship’s position in relation to the complex on the planet’s surface. Every few minutes he found himself correcting their orbit as the ship had a tendency to shift half a degree forward. It was a curious anomaly until he noticed the engines were operating ever so slightly harder than they needed to be.
He should have known it was Lieutenant Drake’s fault. The young man had an insatiable lust when it came the ship’s power, always driving the power harder and the engines faster than what was needed. Drake was the guy who had to drive a Mustang back home, and refused to drive it less than fifteen miles above the speed limits.
Down in the engine room, he always had to give the Colonel more than he asked for. If Freedom had asked for five times light speed, Drake had to give him 5.2. Ten times became eleven. None of the reprimands or the threats of a Section 13 corrected his urges. In the end, Colonel Freedom found it more efficient to ask for less so that Drake gave him what he intended.
Riggs called down to the engine room to get the power nudged back. It solved the drift problem, but it remained to be seen how long before Drake grew itchy with his controls again.
Across the bridge, Pittman also grew itchy. His job was to shoot things and blow things up. With the scrambler being the choice weapon in this conflict, he had spent the day monitoring power readings, identifying moments when the miners’ inhibitors were down to allow use of their scrambler. When he had a window, it became a race to bring down theirs and try to scramble the dish from atop the complex. The briefest delay between their inhibitors going offline and those of the Freedom matching it meant those on the ground were back up and running just in time to keep Pittman from completing a scramble. The opposing sides had to work in absolute unison. Short of guesswork and pure luck, there was simply no way for Pittman to carry out the task. Needless to say the armory officer was bored.
Lieutenant Dorsey was equally bored at the station beside his. He had one job: to monitor com chatter among the fleets and highlight the important transmissions for the Colonel. It was a job made less exciting by the fact there wasn’t much com traffic to begin with. The distrust among the nations kept the ships quiet to prevent unnecessary spying. Coupled with others who would listen in, those messages not deemed urgent, yet sensitive tended to get passed along on data chips as friendly ships would meet. Dorsey enjoyed sitting at his station for hours at a time before a message would pass through his receiver.
Satisfied the navigational drift had been corrected, Riggs tilted his head back to the pair behind him. “Dorsey, Pittman, when this is over and we finally get off duty, you want to join up for a few beers?”
Dorsey thought about the duty shift waiting for him at 0600. If this mission dragged on much longer, his off time would disappear. He knew given the choice, sleep was more important for facing the next day, but he had yet to find a fellow service member who would say no to a drink.
Pittman however, expected something more pleasurable waiting for him when he got off duty. For him, the dilemma was heart wrenching: sex or beer. Sex would have won out if he didn’t expect to sound alarms by refusing Riggs’ suggestion. Roxanne would always be there waiting for him, he reasoned. It wasn’t often all his friends were off duty at the same time.
But before either could escape their mischievous thoughts of a night out, so to speak, and return their answers, an alarm sounded on several of the consoles. Pittman detected a scrambler signal outside the ship, and Riggs detected a mess of objects ahead and coming at them fast.
The objects themselves weren’t actually moving. The scramblers don’t save or produce kinetic energy in the objects or people they scramble. Everything created ahead remained stationary in relative time and space, tugged downward toward the planet only after they had been fully materialize.
However, the ship was maintaining an incredible forward momentum in order to stay in orbit. Though it appeared to be sitting still in the space above the mining complex, if it were truly sitting still, the planet’s gravity would take hold and pull it down. Since the ship appeared to be still in relation to the planet, from the perspective on the bridge, it seemed the objects were moving toward them.
And they were moving with incredible speed, faster than their own weapons could lob a bullet or missile. The objects had pierced the outer hull of the cargo pods and tore through before the bridge crew had even identified the danger.
The RS Freedom rocked violently as several pods were torn open. Some were ripped clear from the ship, striking the neighboring pods and heaving the crew further as they broke free and escaped for a fiery death as the planet tugged them into the atmosphere.
The habitable areas of the ship survived relatively unscathed. They were tucked deep beneath the layers of unoccupied pods which themselves were heavily armored to protect from random space debris. The ship was designed thus to give the living spaces an extra layer of protection. If it came down to it, the cargo could be sacrificed and scrambled back to life during the repairs. But if the ship proper suffered a catastrophic breach leaving no one left alive to conduct the repairs or revive lost crewmen, the whole thing, including a wealth of data and technology became an easy salvage target for any of their enemies.
Colonel Freedom left the briefing room to join his crew as the worst of the attack abated.
“What was that,” he demanded.
Not one idle hand remained on the bridge as fingers flew across buttons and screens to collect and process an overwhelming stream of readings and data.
“About twenty to thirty small objects materialized ahead of us.”
“We’ve lost seven storage pods, and another twelve have been severely damaged.”
“Inhibitors are down in the forward sections of the ship!”
“Get us out of here, Riggs,” Freedom barked. “We need to be out of range of their scramblers, but keep us in range of the debris so we can make repairs. Dorsey, update Colonel Fortune on our situation. Warn him the miners may be after him next, and give him my apologies we won’t be able to provide support. Lieutenant Drake,” he called on the radio, “begin repairs immediately. I want this ship ready to fight yesterday!”
Freedom called up images of the space around the ship, uncertain what he was looking for. It seemed too late to search for more objects, so he shifted to a sensor map displaying the debris they were leaving behind in their wake as Riggs pulled them away from the planet. One by one, the dots and boxes indicating the remains of their cargo pods and their contents went dark.
“Is that us,” he called out to no one in particular, but to anyone who could get him the answer. “Are we scrambling the cargo, or is that the miners?”
“It’s them, Sir.” As he delivered the bad news, Pittman went to work on taking down the last of their inhibitors so they could enter the race for the materials. With most of their pods damaged or lost, unable to hold the material he scrambled, Pittman entered the fray at a disadvantage. All he could do was conduct simple transports to move it away from the planet. The cargo he could capture remained floating in space, but at least he could get it out of range of the hostiles until the repairs were complete.
“Maybe we can bomb that complex into the Stone Age and end this,” the armory officer eagerly offered. If he didn’t get to blow something up soon, he would consider launching a few missiles at some random asteroid just to satisfy his cravings.
“Our top priority is the data in their computers, Lieutenant. All other concerns are secondary.”
Freedom sat on the edge of his chair as his crew carried out the orders they were given. He had full confidence in this crew. Every one of his officers was doing the job he expected of them. But as he awaited the damage reports and Riggs’ word that they were safely away from another attack, he couldn’t take his mind off the unusual vibration he felt through his chair as the engines pushed them along. His shi
p was broken and he wouldn’t be at ease until it was put back together.