The Dauntless emerged from Transit thirty AUs from Antares and Ontario Base. The bridge was lit red and blue by the emergency lights and the sparking flicker of ruined components; they still had pressure, but the command deck crew were working in their vacuum suits, with the faceplates open and the gauntlets off their hands. So were the emergency repair crews from Damage Control, cursing and praying as they yanked components and shoved in replacements, splicing and soldering and improvising in a frenzy of organized chaos. The air was thin and heavy with the stink of ozone, also with less pleasant odors from the dark stains across several of the consoles.
And the normal-space velocity indicator stayed stubbornly fixed at .02 C, exactly what it had been when they made that last desperate jump into Transit.
"Paddy," Captain Montoya snapped into her comm. "We need those engines now!"
"I can't do it, Captain," the engineering chief answered.
His thick New Hibernian accent sounded worried and sincere. Behind him in the holo display she could see the same sort of chaos as the bridge, only worse in the cavernous spaces of Engineering. When shield fields overloaded they backlashed through the support systems; there were supposed to be stops and fail-safes, but sometimes they were overloaded, too. This was one of the sometimes. Massive superconducting busbars had shattered like fragmentation bombs as power surges went beyond redline, spreading havoc through the core of the ship. A row of bodies lay under some matting in one corner, with a chaplain whose face was half plast-bandage giving the last ritesand they included every commissioned officer in Drive Systems. The remaining crew were in white insulated hardsuits, and the arcing lightning of discharges flashing across the spaces between the cores showed why.
"I had to shut reactors three and four down. The coils took a terrible beatin' in that last surge where the plasma bursts hit us, sir. With only one and two up, we just can't get as much delta-v out of the reaction mass. And I've no likin' for the way the containment fields on one are fluctuatin'. She'll not take it if I try to get more power."
"Give me a miracle, Paddy. I won't accept anything less. Montoya, out."
The captain broke the connection and leaned back in her chair, watching her people as they worked. The damage was bad. It was a wonder they'd made it through Transit, and she knew the Mollies and their alien allies were right behind her.
Suddenly her comm came alive. "Sir, I've intercepted a message," a young petty officer exclaimed. There was hope under the hoarse exhaustion in her voice.
"Let me hear it, please," Montoya said calmly.
" . . . Lieutenant Commander Sarah James of the CSS Invincible to the CSS Dauntless. Do you copy?"
"Yes, we do, Commander. This is Captain Catherine Montoya speaking."
"Captain, I'm an advance scout for the Invincible. She is two hours behind us. What is your status, sir?"
Montoya pursed her lips for a second before she answered, as though tasting something unpleasant.
"As you can see by the speed we're making, our status is very bad, Commander. Two engines are down, our flight deck is inoperable . . ." She swallowed hard. "Our Speeds are entirely gone. We've lost nine of our laser emplacements. We have a significant hull breach, a third of our compartments are open to space, and we've had heavy casualties."
That was one way of saying a third of your crew was dead and nearly as many again wounded.
"We took direct hits from heavy plasma weapons in the last few minutes before we jumped. Field backlash put half the electronics on the ship out of action. In addition, Commander, there are far too many enemy ships less than two hours behind us." Montoya took a deep breath, holding back her fear for her people, for her ship. "We're also carrying a six-month supply of antihydrogen. So we make a great target."
"Understood, Captain," Sarah said crisply. "We've brought along two destroyers and thirty-six Speeds. So we can whack their hands if they get too grabby. And I'm sure you scratched them up pretty well yourselves," she speculated.
"We certainly did our best," Montoya said dryly.
"I've requested that Captain Knott send out the squadron to escort you, sir," Sarah said. "They'll meet us well before we rendezvous with the Invincible."
"Good," Montoya said, "because the people behind us have no brakes. They obviously intend to destroy what we're carrying."
She didn't need to point out that the enemy would be destroyed, too, if they got close enough to fight a serious engagement and then the antihydrogen went. That would be like a small but very active star. Everyone knew that the Mollies were fanatics. And for all they knew, the Fibian ship could weather the explosion.
"You might like to warn your colleagues that those Fibians are crack shots. And they have a much longer reach than you might expect."
"Will do, Captain. Thank you. James out."
"The prey bleeds, Hunt Master," the Fibian tech told his commander. "It limps and staggers." There was malicious glee in the harsh trembling voice.
"And yet it flees," the Hunt Master said grimly. Fek-tk was very unhappy with the way things were going. He had no wish to die and their human allies were most definitely going to get them all killed.
"We should offer the enemy terms," his second suggested.
Fek-tk clicked his mandibles in agreement. Short of a miracle it was the only hope of survival that any of them had.
"I will speak to the Mollie commander," he said.
Instantly the comm light on his console lit, showing that his call had been received by the Mollie ship. He had to wait several, increasingly anxious, minutes before the Mollie captain answered.
"What is it, Fecktet?" the captain demanded. His expression, which he knew to be virtually unreadable to the Fibian, was one of great disdain. "We're busy."
Fek-tk knew he was being insulted, the deliberate mispronunciation of his name told him that, let alone the captain's curt manner. Two can play this game, human he thought. The Hunt Master placed his pedi-palps in the position of the fourth degree of respect; well below what the captain's status demanded.
"Your people will be greatly hurt by the loss of three ships," he suggested. "The destruction of the vessel we pursue will guarantee them great sadness. I respectfully suggest that we offer the enemy terms of surrender."
"Terms? To that scum!"
"We need not honor terms made with such loathsome creatures," Fek-tk soothed. "But surely it would be better to bring ourselves and the antihydrogen back than to die here and lose all."
"I would not lie to save my very soul," the Mollie shouted, clearly incensed, even to Fibian eyes, "let alone to save your whole soulless crew! Your orders are to pursue that ship and kill it. Don't bother me again with your cowardly suggestions. Out!"
There was silence on the Fibian bridge for a moment.
"Why must we die because they are fools?" the second asked.
"We must die because our Lady gave us to the Ambassador to use as he saw fit. And because I would rather die in battle than on a bureaucrat's table."
The second clicked mandibles in agreement. Clearly, it was a better death. "We are born to die," he said.
"So we are," Fek-tk agreed. "And so we shall."
"Burn. Give it everything you've got, Paddy."
The Dauntless' damaged internal compensators flickered. Montoya waited stolidly; if they failed, everyone on board would be crushed to strawberry jam. Odd, she thought. We're decelerating to get away. They had to match vectors with the Invincible, which was boosting at maximum in their direction; at some point they had to be going at the same velocity and in the same direction, otherwise, they'd just flash past each other uselessly.
The Dauntless passed quietly through the cloud of Speedsseparated at last from their light carrierand they greeted her with a flurry of IFF beacons, then were gone. She flowed between the Diefenbaker and the Mackenzie, moving on toward the Invincible and aid.
"Transit signatures," the sensor desk said. It was one junior technician, doing the job of ten dead comrades. "Multiples. Four. Heavy footprint, Captain. It's the enemy task force. Boosting after us, point-oh-seven cee and rising, from the particle plume."
The enemy were through Transit and closing fast, but that was a problem for the task force that had come to meet them. Captain Montoya and her crew had more immediate problems.
"Engineerin' here."
"Give me the bad news, Chief."
"It's the antihydrogen containment vessels, Captain. Their guide coils picked up surge overload when we got hit. One of them's goin' to go, the creature," Engineering Chief Patrick "Paddy" Casey said. His accent tended to get thicker under stress, and this was about as stressful as things got.
"Vent it!"
That meant reversing the procedure that pumped it through specially fitted magnetic "pipes" into the containment vessels. A desperation measure, the stuff was so bloody dangerous. Having a containment vessel fail, though . . . well, at least it would be quick. And sentient beings all over this spiral arm would see the light of destruction as it traveled through the centuries and millennia between the stars.
"Not possible, Captain. The same flux overload sheered the ventin' system on that one, sure."
"How long do we have, Chief?" Captain Montoya asked. Her eyes met those of her XO and she signaled him to get on her comm.
"Unless I find a way of stoppin' it, Captain, I don't think we can hold her for more than an hour and a half." Casey's voice sounded distracted and impatient, as though he'd much rather be working than talking. His eyes flickered offscreen to some readout, and the freckles stood out like brown beacons against skin even more milk-pale than usual.
Montoya bit her lip. "Give us that time if you can, Paddy. I'm evacuating the ship and we've got more wounded than well, so it's going to take time. And let the engines run, kill her insystem vector. No need to preserve them now."
"Aye, Captain. I'll give ye my best. Casey out."
She turned, heart leaden, looking around the pie-shaped bridge at the ship she'd fought to ten-tenths of its capacity, and the crew who'd given more. Her lips seemed to freeze, and she forced them to shape the words by a wrenching effort of will.
"Prepare to abandon ship."
Klaxons began to howl through the shattered corridors of Dauntless. Damage control teams abandoned their efforts to restore function and turned aching muscles and fatigue-deadened brains to the task of punching through safe passage to the lifeboats spaced along the shaft that joined the twin hammerheads of the ship's frame. Officers and noncoms chivvied the hale and the walking wounded into work parties to carry the wounded. The medics moved among them, patching and administering painkillers and stimboosts, anything to keep the burned, crushed, irradiated bodies going until they could reach real help.
Captain Montoya waited until the last of the crew had left the bridge, then ceremoniously stepped to the main comstation and pulled out the data package that would be presented at the Court of Inquiry. There was a long moment's silence, then she slapped the faceplate of her suit shut and walked away.
"Ooooh, somebody didn't like them," the Speed pilot said as the AI gave him its interpretation of the enemy's condition.
Bleeding atmosphere; that meant hastily patched hull breaches. Drive trail well below optimum temperature; that meant power losses. Visual showed several of the fin-mounted pods around the stern of the Fibian ship were missing or glowing, melted ruins. Empty weapons bays on the surface of the double-hammerhead Mollie ships showed that the long-range armament was depleted.
God knew what conditions were like inside, how many systems were down, what gaps there were in the sensor arrays and close-in defensive systems.
"Let's find out, children," he said to the squadron. "Get 'em!"
Peter raised his head from behind the launch-crew barrier. The flight deck of the Invincible looked huge and somehow lonely, now that the full complement of Speeds was gone. Crews waited tensely, ready to refuel and rearm if the constraints of the engagement allowed.
"Commander Raeder." Captain Knott's voice was steady with tightly controlled tension. "Prepare to receive lifeboats. Working details are heading your way with lifters to get the wounded out." A swift, concise summary of details followed, seeming to flow into Raeder's appalled mind like a datadump into a computer.
"Yes, sir," Raeder said crisply. Lifeboats? he thought. Wounded?
It was the first indication he'd had that the Dauntless was in that kind of trouble. Correction; the crew were in that sort of trouble. The ship was dying.
He grabbed Chief arap Moi and Lieutenant Robbins. "Lifeboats from the Dauntless," he said. "They're abandoning ship. Lots of wounded."
Arap Moi's eyes went wide. "All of them, sir?" His deep voice wobbled up toward a squeak. "Sir, that's three thousand people."
"Not anymore," Raeder said grimly. "And half the survivors are wounded." Then the three of them spread out and briefed the flight crews. Once again, Raeder ordered a crew to the magnetic grapple, then they cleared the deck in preparation for the new arrivals.
"All right, people," he said over the command push. "They're going to be coming in hot with nothing but amateurs and AIs at the controls. And they're going to be coming in fast. We need the flight deck back
as quickly as we can for operations. Let's cycle things through quickly. Let's do it, people."
There was a lot of storage in the locker compartments along the flight deck's walls. Much of it was medical: lifter-stretchers, first-aid equipment. Raeder walked along the side thumbing them open, while the Speed flight crews handed things out and set them to wait.
"Good!" Chief Medical Officer Goldberg suddenly said from behind Reader's shoulder. "We're going to need those. According to the captain a solid proportion of them will be badly hurt." He looked at Raeder, his eyes worried. "This is going to make our last emergency seem like a tea party."
"Fewer radiation burns," Raeder said encouragingly.
"There is that," Goldberg said like a man who has lost everything, except his watch. "Just wound trauma and explosive decompression."
There were forty-one lifeboats expected. . . .
"Flight Control, patch me through," he said. "General push to the lifeboats."
"Yessir . . . through."
"Now hear this," he said. "We've got enough room, but only just. Don't try to stick your ships in."
Lifeboats were clumsy at best, just a very basic drive and guidance system in a blister that spent most of its time as a structural element in the ship's hull. Some of them would be damaged, at that.
"Just follow the vector the Invincible gives you, and let the grapple fields do the rest. We can't disembark you until everyone's in, remember."
Lifeboats didn't run to luxuries like airlocks, for that matter.
"We'll get you all in. Now do it."
No need for the pumps; they'd kept the flight deck open. Now the great doors slid silently out of the way, into their recesses in the hull. The hard brilliance of the stars shone through. And against that velvet blackness were moving dots of pale blue flame, the lifeboat drives trying to reduce the relative velocities to the point where the Invincible could grapple and bring them aboard.
"This is going to be chancy," Raeder said, licking sweat off his lips.
Robbins nodded somberly. "Calculate it wrong and they could rip the field generators right out of the hull," she said, exaggerating only slightly.
They all felt it, a slight surge and lurch under the boots of their hardsuits. The first four of the pale blue lights turned and headed for them, looking like a fixed constellation growing brighter against the blackness. The blue-white drive flares expanded, from points of light to oblong halosthen all at once they flickered and died.
"Limited fuel capacity on those lifeboats," Raeder said. A glance at the status bars running along either side of his helmet made him whistle in relief. "Grapple field's got them."
The lifeboats grew, swelling, until suddenly the tiny points of light were bigbigger than Speeds, featureless oblongs curved above and below like pumpkin seeds, with only a few small vents at the stern to show they were spacecraft at all. Glowing patterns of light flashed into existence on the plates of flight deck, not the normal flow patterns but new ones tailored to the dimensions of the boats. He grunted with surprise.
"I ran it up, sir," Robbins said. "Seemed like it would save time."
"Good work," Raeder said.
The lifeboats touched down . . . or rather, nearly down, kept above the surface by the grapple fields. Effectively they were weightless, but that didn't remove their multitonne inertia. Starting them moving required work, and so did stopping them.
"Let's do it, people, let's go!" Raeder shouted.
Men and women dashed forward, with lifter and dragger units, some sitting in pull carts. Some forethoughtful soul had brought along spare coupling hooks and bonding epoxy. Raeder clumped forward in his hardsuit, grabbed the can, and began slapping a gob of the bonding agent on the hooks under the "chins" of the lifeboats. That way the pull carts could snap on and drag them off, assisted by anyone who could reach.
"No, no, remember it's got to stop."
Raeder's voice through the command channel brought the foot of the pull cart's driver down on the brake. That turned it into a pushcart, as the multitonne momentum of the lifeboat drove it inexorably toward the far bulkhead of Flight Deck. He winced as it butted sideways into the plating, bulging it slightly . . . and then halted, canted over.
"Move, move!"
More lifeboats, and moresome so close that they jarred together as they landed, and one went cartwheeling off like a juggernaut top, a frictionless bludgeon pinwheeling through the vast cavern.
"Dog on," he snapped, grabbing at the bonding dispenser.
He leapt, as high as he could with a cable in one hand, the dispenser in the other and a hardsuit weighting him down. Gerglop and a hand-sized bead of the stuff was holding a cable to the lifeboat's hull. Fifty hands grabbed the cable; one unusually intelligent pair dogged the other end around a stanchion on the deck used to tie down Speeds. It held, although he could feel the composite groan through his feet; the sound would have been ear-splitting if the Flight Deck had held air. As it was all he could hear was the babble of voices through the suit comm, the whistle of the life support blowing cool dry air on the back of his sweating neck, and his own panting breath.
At last he staggered, turning to watch the entry doors and feeling horror creeping up his spine at the massed lifeboats right on the approach ramp . . . then sagging with relief as he realized that they were crowded there because they were all in. All forty-one of them.
"Go, go!" He wasn't sure whose voice he heard as the great doors slid shut and a hurricane of air vented into the flight deck. Maybe my own.
Thank God, lifeboats were built to disembark rapidly. The curves of the upper decks opened like flowers, and the lower split in the middle and sagged down on either side. That threw wounded crew from the Dauntless to the decks. The Invincible's people were dashing forward, loading lifters and stretchers and heading for the now-open airlocks. Medics ran beside them, fitting blood dispensers and stabbing injectors. Occasionally one would halt, swear, or just shake his head, go on to the next. Peter opened the faceplate of his helmet and wished he hadn't. The smell of the burns and eviscerating wounds filled even the great open space of flight deck with a charnel-house odor.
Peter was directing a group of stretcher bearers who looked like they could use a stretcher themselves when Mai Ling Ju, the XO, touched his sleeve.
"Have you seen Captain Montoya?" she asked.
"She was on number forty-one, sir," one of the stretcher bearers said. "The last boat off."
"That would be over here, then," Raeder said, gesturing and starting off in the direction of the space door. "What's happening, sir?" he asked her as she hurried along by his side.
"One of the Dauntless' six containment vessels for the antihydrogen is starting to weaken," Ju said. "Losing its field."
"No!" Raeder said.
He felt like he'd been hit in the stomach. Dauntless was supposed to have a complement of three thousand. If he'd thought about it at all, which he hadn't had time to do, he'd have realized what this many wounded meant. And their captain's with them. He felt stupid. A thousand dead.
It was wrong. It was just damned wrong to lose everything those people had died for. There has got to be a way to rescue that antihydrogen.
Captain Montoya was directing some of her crew when they reached her. She had managed to bring several regeneration units with them. All of them occupied, Raeder noticed. And the things were heavy and awkward to move.
"We'll get them out first," Montoya was saying. "Then we'll worry about where the ship's surgeon wants them."
"Captain Montoya? I am Mai Ling Ju, the executive officer. Captain Knott sends his compliments and invites you to join him on the bridge when your people are settled."
"My compliments to Captain Knott," Montoya said, sounding a little out of breath. "I would be honored to join him on the bridge." She looked around and shook her head. "But I'm afraid it won't be anytime soon."
"Understood, Captain. This is Commander Raeder, our flight engineer. When you're ready he'll find someone to escort you."
"My pleasure," Raeder assured her.
"Until later then, Captain, Commander," Mai Ling said, she saluted briefly, then briskly marched away.
"My own chief engineer seems to be missing," Montoya said. "He's probably trying to fix that containment vessel." She bit her lip. "I know there are still lifeboats over there, but he's so damn stubborn, I'm afraid he won't get to them in time."
"What exactly happened, Captain?" Raeder asked.
"What exactly?" The captain gave a short laugh. "I'd have to be Chief Casey to tell you. All I know is that the containment field in bottle six began to fluctuate." She shook her head. "We'd taken a lot of damage. Probably something shorted out, or something got dentedyou know what it's like with multiple plasma strikes. I don't know." She gave him a weary look.
"We should just get these units out into the corridor," Raeder said quickly. "We've got to clear the deck in case a wounded Speed comes our way." He called over one of his people. "Show these people to corridor five," he said. "Excuse me, sir," he said to Captain Montoya, who nodded. He turned away and moved on.
It was incredible, but there weren't any traffic jams at the exits from flight deck. They're doing this as smoothly as if it were a drill, he thought, with a surge of fierce pride for his ship. CSS Butterfingers, my hairy butt.
In less time than he would have believed possible the lifeboats were empty.
"Check on them!" he said, overriding half a dozen subordinates giving the same order. "Don't rely on indent beacons, do a visualevery damned lifeboat!"
Good thing we did, he thought, as several unconscious bodiesor possibly just bodieswere carried past to the airlocks. He did a final visual himself, to make sure that nobody was here but the flight deck crews in their suits.
"Prepare for vacuum," the sweet feminine voice of the AI said. Some theorist had decided long ago that people paid more attention if computers sounded like a sixteen-year-old boy's daydream. "Prepare for vacuum. Emergency entry override."
"Secure yourselves!" Raeder barked into the command push, shoving a foot under a bracket and hanging on.
The pumps were running, but the entry doors didn't wait for them. They began to open as soon as the computer stopped talking, and while they didn't snap open, it was still a fairly close approximation to explosive decompression through a hull breach. Light tools and hundreds of cushions from the lifeboats cataracted out through the growing slit, and one crewman started to go the same way, torn from an inadequate handhold. Three of his comrades slapped hands on the harness fixtures of his suit and held him, feet outstretched to where the air was going. The suit fell silently to the deck as the pressure dropped to zero.
"Get them on the launch paths," Raeder said. "Work your way out from the center, and don't bother about alignments."
That needed to be said. A Speed launched off center would result in an extremely bad-tempered pilot at the very least, but they just wanted to get this junk out of the way as fast as possible. The first two lifeboats were catapulted out into the blackness less than two minutes after the doors opened. They shrank more slowly than usualmost launches were of powered vehicles, not redundant deadweightbut by the time the second four were on the slides and being gripped by the fields, they were featureless dots.
"Leave the last two," Raeder said. "Action stations. We've got Speeds in combat and they'll be coming in hurt or hungry. Pay attention! Get the readouts on the weapons mix they'll be asking for. Positions, positions, let's go."
Activity died down slowly. Every crew was up to strength, waiting by monitors and fueling stations, with fresh missile clusters waiting and their deadly color-coded heads peeping out of the canisters. At last he took a deep breath.
All right. Containment bottle failure. Just one of the bottles, though. That would be more than enough. Dauntless was carrying enough antihydrogen to power the whole bloody fleet for six monthsmore than they'd been able to squeeze out of the Mollies in the whole war so far. One bottle of six would be more than enough, and when it went, the rest would, too. Every gram of antihydrogen would meet a gram of normal matter and convert to energy at one hundred percent efficiency. The explosion would go on until every last atom of antihydrogen had met its counterpart. It took energies on that scale to drive ships through Transit.
"Ee equals em cee squared," he muttered to himself. "And truer words were never spoke."
The Commonwealth needed that antihydrogen. Badly. He ducked out through the airlock, into corridors where the lightly wounded from Dauntless were lying on pallets; the others were being commandeered to help, or shown how to get out of the way. Raeder put his shoulder to the wall and scooped his way through the crowds to his cubby.
"Captain Knott, this is Flight Engineering calling. Priority override."
You're doing something stupid again, Raeder, his mind said, with a voice remarkably like his mother's. Well, he hadn't paid much attention to warnings of that sort back then, either. I'll check it out. The plan in his mind was still vague. It might not be possible. He half hoped it wasn't.
"Yes, Commander." Knott looked very harassed and quite busy. The XO leaned over to say a word in his ear and he turned away from the screen.
"Sir," Raeder said, speaking over the XO, "I have an idea for a new procedure that might help to alleviate our current problems. If I have your permission to proceed, sir."
Impatiently the captain signaled Ju to wait a moment. "Yes, yes, Commander. Use your initiative. Knott out." The screen blanked.
"Yes!" Raeder said and rushed from his office. He'd have to find Montoya to get the details.
Wait a minute, Knott thought two seconds after disconnecting. That was Raeder I just gave carte blanche.
"Sir," Mai Ling said, gently but insistently.
"Yes," Knott said, and the subject of Raeder slid from his mind.
"If the captain asks for me," Peter told Robbins and the chief, "tell him you don't know where I am."
They just blinked and nodded, mumbling, "Yes, sir." The commander had been missing for about twenty minutes and had reappeared carrying a sealed bag and what seemed to be a guilty attitude.
"Good," Raeder said. "You're in command, Lieutenant, until I get back. Now get everybody out of here so the grapple crew can do their work."
"Until he gets back?" Cynthia murmured to arap Moi as they walked away.
"Don't ask," the chief said, looking straight ahead, "don't tell."
Cynthia frowned darkly, but said nothing as she returned to work.
Getting the lifeboat to one of the launch ramps was easy enough; the crews were experienced at it now. Raeder could feel the queasy dip and turn as he studied the console before him. These things are obviously meant to be foolproof, he thought. It was extremely simple, just a few controls on a flat keypad. And I'm sure this lifeboat is about as maneuverable as a hippo in a desert.
He felt the grapple seize the boat, shaking it slightly with a greasy, quivering pulse. It seemed wrong inside this absurd spacegoing bus, without the protective second-skin shell of a Speed around him. Instants later savage acceleration rammed him back into the elementary and ill-fitting acceleration couch. Blood trickled into his mouth and his vision grayed at the edges, no special suit squeezing his limbs, no molded half-liquid gel cushioning him. And maybe I'm out of practice.
His hands danced on the simple controls. The crowd of abandoned lifeboats was well ahead, showing as minute flickers on the equally rudimentary sensor system; the Invincible was decelerating, her stern and the huge glowing plasma cloud pointed outsystem. The Dauntless was still decelerating, too, its AI trying to match velocities with the Invincible. It wouldn't, but with luck the lifeboat could one more time.