FWSS Ishaq, Karovic Reef
The forenoon watch had been pretty much the same as all the other watches Michael had stood, though he had been promoted. Deemed competent, he now ran the entire sensor management center when-somewhat to Michael’s surprise given that they were supposedly out hunting pirates-Ishaq was at cruising stations, two full levels of readiness below general quarters. He would have been more than happy with the promotion had it not been for the fact that it put him firmly in the firing line when Constanza came looking for someone to kick. Still, he consoled himself, at least he did not have to defer to officers who did little to conceal their lack of interest in the job at hand.
By Michael’s rough calculations, he had watched well over four hundred merchant ships go through the routine of dropping out of pinchspace. The endless procession of spherical ships transiting this or that reef before jumping back into pinchspace had been interrupted only by the other ships of Task Group 225.2 as they and the Ishaq patrolled the FedWorld-Old Earth trade route. Michael sighed. Antipiracy patrols in response to a threat as vague as the one supposedly posed by the Karlisle Alliance-pirates nobody thought actually existed-were boring, and it was becoming a real struggle to stay keen and enthusiastic.
Things on board Ishaq were not getting any better. On any other ship, Michael’s latest stint as second officer of the day would have been just a matter of trailing around behind the officer of the day. In theory, it gave him the chance to observe firsthand how more experienced officers skillfully defused the minor crises that beset ships as large as the Ishaq.
That was the theory, anyway. To be fair, most of the day had been routine enough to allow Michael to put in some serious time on his COMEX project. That had all changed in a hurry. Michael, tired of work, had been passing the last dregs of the evening away in the wardroom with Aaron Stone when an urgent comm from the officer of the day had dispatched him to take charge of the ship’s internal security patrol. A vicious brawl had broken out on one of the junior spacers’ mess decks, and it had to be stopped before half the ship joined in.
Order had been restored eventually, but it had been one hell of a job, with Michael twice calling for reinforcements. When the dust settled, eight spacers were in the ship’s sick bay, another ten had been dragged to the cells struggling like wildcats, and thirty were subject to further investigation. It took the internal security patrol well over two hours to get to that happy state of affairs, another hour to clean up the damage, and Michael another three hours to debrief the patrol, review Ishaq’s internal security holocam footage, and write up the official report for the executive officer. All in all, it had been a horror night. Michael had the bags under his eyes and the wandering concentration to prove it.
“Sensors, gravitronics.”
“Sensors.” Michael started. Had he been asleep on watch? Christ, he hoped not.
“Don’t like the look of this one, sir. Here. It’s only just painting on gravitronics and the AI’s making a mess of it, but it looks to me like inbound on Green 10 Down 2.”
“Not on the traffic schedule, I take it.”
“No, sir.”
“Okay. Call it in.”
Michael’s heart began to pound as the gravitronics operator formally reported the suspect contact. No ship should be joining the traffic stream from that angle. That would put it on the wrong side of the traffic lane running galactic north toward the Federated Worlds. Depending on the new arrival’s vector, it could mean chaos as fully loaded merchant ships, probably the most sluggish things in deepspace, made desperate attempts to avoid a collision. “Unbelievable,” Michael muttered. Billions of cubic light-years of space to work in, yet here was some clown looking to get up close and personal. The son of a bitch should be shot.
The sensor management center was no longer the relaxed place it had been. In seconds, Michael had every available sensor on the task of working out what was about to drop and, much more important, what its vector was. If the ships transiting Karovic Reef were to have any chance of avoiding a rogue crosser, they needed good vector data, and fast.
The tension rose and, as quickly, ebbed away. To Michael’s relief, the bearing of the gravitronics intercept started to move across Ishaq’s bows, dropping as it did so. It was a rogue for sure, no doubt about it. The ship had no flight plan logged into the traffic control AIs and was about to make an illegal entry into restricted space. Thankfully, it was not a dangerous rogue. All Michael could hope for was that eventually the ship would fall into the hands of the International Admiralty Court, though there was not much chance of that. According to the sensor AI’s best guess, the ship was probably in transit from the Rogue Worlds across humanspace to one of the Marakoff Consortium Planets. Because neither system paid much-if any-regard to the institutions of international space justice, he did not think the ship would ever be caught.
“Sensors, gravitronics. Track 781553 is dropping. Estimate drop datum at Green 5 Down 15, range 55,000 kilometers.”
Ouch, Michael thought, 55,000 kilometers was safe but still way, way too close. “Sensors, roger.”
Track 781553 dropped in a short-lived blaze of ultraviolet light. Michael went through the routine of reporting the new arrival’s identity, but it was a short report. Apart from confirming the ship’s vector and noting that the starship was a small, spherical high-speed courier, there was little more the sensor team could add.
The ship carried registration marks recorded in no database held by Ishaq-probably false in any case, Michael thought-squawked the same unknown identity, transmitted nothing else on any frequency, and refused to acknowledge Ishaq’s strident requests to stop and be boarded.
For a moment, Michael wondered if Constanza would launch one of Ishaq’s space assault vehicles to get close enough to have a better look. When he worked out the vector needed to intercept, he realized that although it could be done, it would be pretty marginal. In the end, the Ishaq’s log recorded the rogue crosser as yet another of space’s little mysteries.
The watch ground its predictable way to an end. Michael handed over to his relief; after a quiet word of thanks to the gravitronics operator, he was on his way to grab a quick lunch.
He had a lot to do, and the previous night’s fracas had added to the load.
The debate got quite heated. It was surprising, Michael thought, that two people who normally were so controlled could get so worked up, and Ichiro and Bettany were pretty worked up. Each was clinging like a limpet to the rock of a well dug-in position. Michael waited until logic started to give way to emotion before interrupting.
“Okay, guys. Enough. Can I have a go?”
“Be my guest, sir,” Ichiro replied with a wave of her hand. “I’m not getting anywhere with Petty Officer Bonehead here. Maybe you’ll have more luck.”
Michael laughed. He knew as well as Bettany did that there was no malice in Ichiro’s invective. “Yes, thanks for that, Chief.” He paused to gather his thoughts. How the debate was resolved would decide the Hammer strategy Michael and his team were putting in place for the COMEX. With a mountain of small details to be worked out before uploading the exercise parameters into the AI running the COMEX, time was getting short.
“If it were left to the Hammer’s admirals, I would agree with you. They hate nukes because in the end war is about territory, productive territory. Keeping theirs, taking ours. So what’s the good of an irradiated planet? It’s just another lump of useless, slag-encrusted dirt. God knows we have trillions of those to choose from, whereas there are precious few terra-standard planets. Left to the admirals, there’d be no nukes, but it’s not up to the Hammer’s admirals, not this time. We’ve been through all the intelligence summaries analyzing what’s changed with Polk’s takeover. Merrick was a hard man, no doubt about it. Until he went solo with that damn stupid Mumtaz hijacking, he would at least listen to his military staff. Polk won’t. He’s put the best part of the Hammer’s brass into DocSec lime pits, so who in their right mind is going to stand up to him? I’ll tell you. Nobody! It’s too dangerous.”
“So it’s Polk’s call,” Ichiro said. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“Exactly! In the end, Polk will tell the military what to do.”
Ichiro sat back, hands behind her head. She took a while to think it through. Patiently, Michael and Bettany waited until Ichiro, mind apparently made up, came back to the table. She nodded her agreement. “Okay, I agree. Dirtside nukes it is. Of course, there’ll be hell to pay, sir.” Ichiro looked troubled. “You know that?”
Michael nodded. “Yeah, I do.”