Scout Ship: Rise of the Empyrean Empire: Novel 01 Page 4

  I shrugged when she didn’t reply, and got into the shower. A.I.s were smart, in some ways smarter than humans, but conversationalists they were not. After a quick wash, I dried off and pulled my ship suit back on. It was essentially our uniform, and in case of decompression the collar would open up and seal us in a plastic bubble which had enough compressed air to last an hour, more than long enough to make it to an extended oxygen supply cabinet, which were all over the ship.

  The oxygen bottles in the cabinets had a shoulder harness, and a short tube that would plug into the suit to maintain the oxygen levels in an emergency for up to twenty-four hours per bottle. The suit itself wasn’t quite skin tight, but it was conforming and would tighten further in a decompression emergency.

  We did have a formal uniform as well, but those were never worn while in space, regulations were that we needed to be ready for decompression at all times, except when impossible, like in the shower.

  Amy said, “The captain has set the funeral directly after shift change in thirty-six minutes.”

  I closed my eyes and blew out a breath. He’d been like a brother to me, and we’d stirred up mischief in more than one port together. Expected or not, it was always a shock when it was someone I knew that had an implant malfunction, thankfully it’d only happened once before.

  I got a tight grip on my emotions and moved into the corridor, and down to the mess hall. I was looking forward to a real meal this time, since we had gravity back and would keep it for the next five days.

  “Hey Cass.”

  She smiled, but it was a little muted, probably because of the upcoming funeral. I didn’t imagine my smile was any more convincing either.

  “Commander, one second.”

  She opened some of the lids on the heated containers, and scooped out some fried rice, onions, mushrooms, steak, and shrimp. Then she dribbled some sauce on it. It looked delicious as she handed me the plate.

  “This looks great, thanks.”

  I dropped my food off at the table, and went back for my morning coffee and a fork. Sure, I was in charge of second shift, twenty hundred hours to oh eight hundred, but it was still my morning. That kind of stuff wasn’t that important in space, though Columbus did vary the lighting enough to emulate a circadian rhythm of a twenty-four-hour night and day, but it was very subtle and not dark at night or anything.

  The food was excellent as always when we had gravity, though it still wasn’t bad when she had to make packs when we lacked gravity. The ensigns came in a few minutes later, and sat at the other table. I didn’t take offense, ensigns didn’t invite themselves to eat with superior officers. Though I still wasn’t completely used to it, sometimes I thought they were crazy to promote me so soon.

  It was also a bit lonely, having to keep that emotion distance with the rest of the crew, but I’d survive it. After this was over, and a couple of weeks of R&R, I’d hopefully get posted on a larger ship, with more than one Lt. Cmdr. running around. I’d have to wait and see.

  I pushed down the self-pity, I wasn’t usually like that, but with my best friend’s death, being stuck on this tin can for a year with long boring shifts and no female companionship, and now possible danger ahead? I supposed it was all starting to get to me.

  I finished dinner, and headed to the bridge fifteen minutes early…

  Chapter Five

  “Michael, glad you’re here early. The ship’s in good shape and the missiles were launched, I might stick around a bit to see what if anything our initial close up scans tell us. Also, I’ve taken your suggestion, and already had Cindy plot us a new course that keeps us out of the core of the solar system. That should be close enough to determine if there’s any alien presence in the system, yet not intrude very far in if there is. Their response to that if they’re there will be telling. If no one is there, we can swing in with a short fifteen minute four gravity burn and slingshot around the outer gas giant. We’re close enough now to pick up they have two of them, and a few inner planets, but we won’t get detailed images until we’re almost there.”

  Our passive sensors were good, but there was a huge difference between seeing planets and moons out this far, and a mile-long ship. Yes, they were big ships, but infinitesimal given the size of space and planetary scale objects.

  I nodded, “I’ll keep an eye on it captain. Five more days until we know for sure?”

  She shrugged, “Most likely, unless they have ships at the edge of their system, or some kind of other large space facilities, like the yards we have around Mars. If we do we’ll pick them up in a couple of days.”

  “Understood.”

  We were silent for a while, and Captain Samantha Kane got up and walked in front of main view screen as the ensigns came in and faced us all. Her expression was grim. I clenched my jaw and stood as well, and walked to stand with the others before she got started. I hated funerals, but I suppose that was normal, no one liked them, or at least I hoped that was the case.

  Part of the screen behind her switched to a view of the launch bay, where a missile stood in a cradle, and the outer doors were already opened. Next to that on the screen was a life-sized picture of Lt. Timothy Johnson, my friend.

  The captain said, “We gather here to remember, and say goodbye to one of our own. Timothy Johnson joined the UEDF at eighteen, and gave the last nine years of his life to the beliefs and ideals that all of us here hold dear. In protecting our worlds, our own people, and expanding out into the stars.”

  The captain went on for a while, listing his accomplishments and the two decorations he’d earned in battle. The first I hadn’t been around for, it’d happened on his first assignment when we’d been split up after the academy, and he’d never talked about it. The second had been earned at Beta Hydri, when he’d saved my life, and I’d done something stupid and crazy, which worked, saved the mission and a whole lot of people, and got me promoted over him.

  She clenched her jaw, but her voice was gentle, “He died too young, but while he lived, he left his mark on all of us. Attention!”

  We all straightened up, arms at our sides, feet set, and eyes forward.

  Columbus started to play a dirge, as the captain turned and came to attention herself.

  “Salute!” she ordered, and despite my best efforts to suppress it, I felt the tears at the corners of my eyes as the rocket ignited and set out into space. When it was no longer within view, she lowered her salute, and we all lowered ours a heartbeat later.

  Then she turned, “At ease,” and we all relaxed our posture slightly, put arms behind our back, and spread our feet.

  The captain spoke in a relaxed voice, “I would like nothing better, than to raise glasses to him and share stories, get a little drunk and give him the send-off and goodbye he surely deserves, but we’re on a supposedly easy mission that just got a lot more uncertain. We were already shorthanded for a scout ship moving toward possible conflict, now even more so. I need everyone’s complete effort over the next week, and we’ll get home safely. You are the best of us in the fleet, and I’ll get you all home with your dedication and usual standards of excellence. Timothy would want the rest of us to get home safely, and when we do I’d be honored to raise drinks to him with all of you, and tell stories of Timothy Johnson, when the mission is complete in the next week or so, and we start our post mission leave.”

  She looked confident in all of us and the mission, as she stared at each of us for a few moments. It was her conviction, presence, and bearing far more than her words that instilled confidence in the rest of us. It was something the best captains had, and Samantha Kane had it in spades.

  “Dismissed.”

  The captain walked back over and took her chair, and I took the one next to hers as the ensigns took a seat at their consoles. The three senior lieutenants cleared the bridge, and I couldn’t help but notice the tears in Katy’s eyes, and the look of anger in Cindy’s. Even George’s stony face had lost its usually arrogant cast. We all processed grief differe
ntly, and I’d suppress my own, at least until I was in private.

  It was my shift, but as long as the captain was here she was still in charge. I’d almost forgotten she’d said she was sticking around, to get a look at the initial scans of the alien vessel.

  I brought up the sims database, and checked on all their scores, which were above satisfactory. I spent a few more minutes on John, since he’d technically be senior pilot as an ensign, but his scores were excellent. He’d blown up the ship a few times, but the sims were both incredibly and impossibly hard, so much so that it was extremely unlikely to see something so dire in real life. To his credit, he never failed a sim more than once.

  Carly said in a puzzled voice, “Captain, initial scans are coming in.”

  Kane replied, “Report.”

  Carly said, “Initial spectrographic scans indicate the hull is made from an unknown alloy composite. The sensors are also unable to determine what ripped the ship open maam. It was not caused by laser, plasma, kinetic strike, or an explosion, either conventional or nuclear. Not acids or any kind of high intensity radiation. Maam, it looks like it was simply, torn and crushed.”

  The missile circled the ship, and they could see it was holed several times, some of them quite large, by an unknown kind of weapon. I hated that I was right, whatever these aliens were, they were far more advanced.

  After a slow full revolution around the derelict alien spacecraft Carly asked, “Should I blow the case, and send in the drone?”

  The captain nodded, “Do it, and make sure Marilyn and Carl are getting these scans, it wouldn’t hurt to have our engineers look at it. Enter the large hole at the back of the ship, I have a feeling if we learn anything it will be in their engineering section.”

  We all waited for a while, even at light speed it would take time for the sensor missile to get the commands, and implement them. It was almost a half an hour later before we saw the results.

  The missile casing opened, and the sensor blister at the nose was ejected. The sensor blister was only a couple of feet long, and about a foot wide. It also had small attitude jets, and it moved into the ship.

  The captain sighed, “I better turn in, or I’ll be late for my shift. I’ll review the data in the morning. Try to get that thing to find engineering, hopefully it’s back with the engines, otherwise at this range it will take weeks to find the damned thing.”

  “Aye captain.”

  The probe did have arms, but I worried we wouldn’t be able to open the doors, I’d find out soon enough. Either way, this shift wouldn’t be nearly as boring as most of the others.

  The inside of the ship yielded a few secrets, the corridors were made of a tough but known polymer, and not the strange metal alloy of the exterior. The corridors were also bare, and an off-white color. The lighting was off of course, but we could tell they used lighting strips of LEDs on the walls and ceiling, much like our own ship.

  The corridors themselves were alarmingly small, only six feet in height. The walls were angled inward and just four feet wide at the base, and three feet at the ceiling. I say alarmingly, because if the aliens themselves were that small, then they could fit a lot more living space into a ship that big, not to mention a third again as many decks as I’d estimated earlier. It would also make it hard for our people to move about if they got a team out here, or even a reclamation team to bring the ship home to study, but that choice was up to the admiralty. Each of the doors had a dead flat-screen console embedded in the wall at about two point six feet in height, which meant the aliens were probably at most four feet in height.

  Other than that we couldn’t tell what they might look like, they could be humanoid in form, or anything else that was four feet high. Blobs, arachnoids, unicorns, it was all on the table, including something so alien we’d never even conceived of the possibility.

  There were no signs or plaques on any of the doors, not even a single symbol of alien writing which might represent a number. All of which would make finding engineering difficult at best, I can only assume the consoles were used to perform that function. There was no way to know if these were crew quarters, labs, bathrooms, or personal dining rooms. Then again, even if there had been writing of some kind, we wouldn’t be able to read it without a lot of study, much less within my duty shift.

  Still, the probe steadily made its way through the corridors toward the back of the ship, in the hope that the captain was right. Chances were if we made it to the back of the ship were the engines were, we’d find engineering, or at least one part of it, if it wasn’t centralized.

  “Commander,” Carly said, “Part of the floor was ripped up and destroyed under where the probe just passed.”

  I raised an eyebrow, “They were in a battle Carly.”

  She nodded, “Except, there’s no damage anywhere but right there, sir. Which would indicate they were boarded and the aliens have hand weapons that do the same type of damage on a smaller scale than what happened to the hull, which we can’t determine.”

  I nodded, “Good point, anything else?”

  She said, “There are EPS conduits under the floor, at first I thought it was just a power run through the ship, but there are also strange components the power was fed through.”

  My eyes narrowed, I wasn’t going to say it, but what if those components could create a limited artificial gravity field? I shook my head, I’d taken a guess a few days ago and now I was attributing tech to prove my theory, they could be any number of things. I did still believe they had artificial gravity, simply because of the shape of the ship, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions. Let the scientists reverse engineer and figure it out once they had the ship.

  In truth, this scan was more an indulgence of curiosity than anything else, I doubted we’d find anything truly useful. Except, if it did come to battle when we met these aliens, maybe we could find something that would help, it was worth the effort even if it didn’t yield results. Still, it was both exciting and terrifying in a way, real aliens.

  The probe kept moving back on its own, the A.I. on it was smart enough to follow the simple orders we’d given it to find engineering at the back of the ship, and send sensor data. Otherwise it would have taken a day or so to get as far as it had, if we had to wait for the transmit times and feedback before making another decision.

  Finally, the probe made it to the back of the ship, according to its data, it was able to determine it was only two hundred feet from the engines, and there was a closed door at the end of the hallway. First, it tried to pry the door open. Initially as I watched it struggle, I thought it would fail, but after several seconds of constant leverage the door popped to the side a couple of inches. The probe worked its arms into the space, and levered the door about halfway open, and then moved inside.

  I suppressed a chuckle at what we saw, and Ally muttered a bad word in her surprise which I ignored. Short aliens or not, engineering was a vast room, with a ceiling at least thirty feet high. The walls to the left and right, were equally a hundred feet away, and the back wall where what I assumed were the engines was about a hundred and fifty feet away.

  That was about fifteen thousand square feet.

  There were very tall and large machines of some kind all over the place, but the only thing that looked vaguely familiar was in the center of the room, and it was twenty feet in diameter, and went all the way to the ceiling. It looked like a reactor of some kind, but not like ours.

  The Columbus ran on a hydrogen fusion reactor, with lead lining as well as a three feet water jacket to capture any harmful radiation, though fusion itself was a clean reaction, there were side reactions to be careful of. That accounted for our power production, but xenon was used as fuel for our ion drives, while very efficient at lower gravities, the system had limits.

  This alien reactor looked nothing like ours, yet it was obviously the reactor, as EPS feeds ran from it to every other large piece of equipment in the room, including the engines.

  The prob
e flew around engineering, doing a spectrograph scan of all the components, power lines, and other things. We couldn’t see inside anything to figure it out, but we could see what it was made out of, and make a few suppositions. For about an hour the bridge crew just watched the visual on the screen, I allowed it since if I tried to make them work on sims right now, they’d have probably mutinied.

  Carly muttered, “That’s impossible.”

  “What’s impossible?”

  Carly looked up and blushed, “Sorry sir, it’s just there’s nothing in here but machines and power feeds. I don’t see any feeds at all for any kind of reaction mass, for either the engines or the reactor. I don’t see any cooling lines either. That would mean the engines are reactionless, which is impossible, sir.”

  Yeah, just one more thing labeled impossible by our scientists who couldn’t figure it out.

  “What about above or below, the reactor goes from floor to ceiling, could the feeds be below or above? Maybe the engine feeds are in the back wall?”

  Carly shook her head, “That back wall, floor, side walls, and ceiling is the hull of the ship sir, same unknown alloy as outside the ship. The only wall that is made with the internal polymer is the one that leads back into the rest of the ship. Remember, the back of the ship shrinks back down, and is only forty feet high. We also know the hull is five feet thick from all the holes. There’s no feeds sir, I’d bet on it. The hull did have some power feeds in it elsewhere, but I doubt they’d compromise their hull by putting fuel lines through it, not when there are easier and better ways.”

  Well, at the very least they knew where engineering was, if they fought one of these things it would be obvious where to attack it.

  “I agree with you Carly, maybe it’s some sort of impulse drive.”

  An impulse drive was merely a drive that created an artificial gravity gradient in space, so the ship would literally fall in whatever direction the gradient was created. I’d have said it was impossible a few days ago, but if they had artificial gravity as the ships design suggests, then maybe they used it to drive the ship as well? It made more sense than using reaction mass, if they had the ability to do it.