Fatal Boarding (27 page)

“Must I?”

She laughed. “From what I’ve seen so far,
going through systems reports will be the least of your
worries.”

There was a touch of gravity in her
statement. I could only guess at the mess we were in. As I sat down
at Tolson’s desk, my disdain for desk work waved a scolding finger.
I promised myself it would only be temporary.

Ann-Marie’s reports were already listed on
the screen. I started with propulsion and worked my way down
through nav, life support, communications, networking, and all that
followed. The reports were substantial. The motivation of the crew
was beyond what anyone could have expected. They must have barely
left the aft section when they reported for duty.

The problem was it was seriously bad. The
aliens had attacked the hard wiring that ran from the various
control rooms to the peripheral devices at the other end. These
were the lines that ran through all the most difficult and remote
areas of the ship. The wire-type connections had been fried, the
cabling no longer any good. Even worse, the fiber cables had
somehow been overheated so that the glass in the lines was
distorted and unusable. We had communications within the ship, but
all lines leading to dishes or antennae were destroyed. We could
eventually repair and reboot the necessary computer systems, but we
could not communicate with the equipment they controlled.

It was the end result of what the aliens had
first begun. We had been forced to control our gravity manually. We
had planned to start our engines manually. They had been destroying
our interfacing before we even knew they were there. Had that been
the worst of it, we would have had a chance. Unfortunately, looming
beyond those problems was the loss of air and water. We knew more
than half of both had been taken. The final inventory had not been
completed yet, mainly because many of the sensor lines were no
longer working. When the reports came in, the air and water levels
would tell us how long we had to live.

Replacement department heads for those
missing needed to be appointed, and then a staff meeting scheduled
to reconstitute upper management. The captain had said that
distress beacons were already sent out, but the chances that they
were blocked were great. We could not pop out in the escape pods.
We were too far from anything, and it was doubtful anyone was
coming for us.

I put my elbow on the desk and rubbed my
forehead. We needed to go home. To do that, we needed to go to
light. Somehow, we had to go to light.

I pushed back in my chair and took a deep
breath. At the door, I asked Ann-Marie to arrange a department flow
chart for me with all the missing or out of action people
co-notated. She gave me the ‘already done’ reply, and pointed me
back to my desk.

In a way, filling the missing positions
wasn’t too difficult. Since I did not know many of them, I had to
take the highest available name on each chart and bump them up. In
cases where I could, I used the people who had been so proactive in
our recovery from the unthinkable. In one of life’s many ironies,
Maureen Brandon had survived the ordeal.

I had Ann-Marie schedule a staff meeting.
The only minor item still needed, was a plan.

They arrived at least forty-five minutes
early. We squeezed everyone in and let the doors shut. I did not
have to ask for silence. It was already there.

“So, I’ve gone over your status reports.
Great job, by the way. I don’t quite know how all of you managed to
do that much so quickly, but thank-you. Obviously we need to
address the most pressing issues beginning with Life Support. Mr.
Leaman, is there any further updates on critical expendables?”

“We know it’s less than three months worth
of air and water. We began the trip with roughly twelve months of
supplies, twice what we needed, so they transferred a hell of a
lot, before they were stopped. We probably should expect no more
than two months of normal use expendables, so rationing should
begin immediately.”

“When do you expect the final figures?”

“Sometime in the next four hours. The crews
have some climbing around to do.”

“Please let me know as soon as that comes
in.”

“Doctor, your current status?”

Doctor Pacell looked exhausted. Clearly he
hadn’t got the same break I had. He straightened up and tried to
appear composed. “The victims of the alien assaults are being kept
in suspension in a storage compartment we’ve converted for that
purpose. I am monitoring that area continuously. Otherwise, we have
no critical cases. Perk Holloway is stable and doing very well. I
see no medical reasons he won’t recover fully after a long
internment period. Our other cases range from miscellaneous
injuries, to psychological stress. All of those are in treatment
and controlled.”

“Do you have everything you need,
Doctor?”

“Considering how many people have been
variously affected, we are doing okay supply wise. I’ll let you
know if that changes.”

“Okay. Propulsion, we’re ready for the bad
news.”

Paul Kusama stood up and leaned forward on
the table. “Our Tachyon drives are perfectly healthy. Our Amplights
are perfectly healthy. Our interface from main control is damaged
beyond repair. We can still only give you manual control of both
engine sets. It’s a shipyard type of job to fix this.” He sat back
down and folded his arms, with an expression that suggested it was
not his fault.

“Well getting right to the point, has a
manual jump to light ever actually been done?”

Without looking up, he shook his head. “Not
to my knowledge.”

“I know the basics of it, but give us a run
down on the problems.”

Leaman took the question. “There’s a shock
wave going into light, and it’s not just a sonic-boom type of
thing. It’s more like a long corridor. There’s an extremely complex
computer generated algorithm that’s used within the gravity matrix
to compensate for it. So, besides controlling gravity up to the
engine exchange, the time-space warp corridor is an entirely
separate habitat transition.”

“Is there any chance we can we re-interface
to the gravity field generators?”

“It’s five hundred thousand fiber lines,
along with some huge power cables.”

I paused and looked around for additional
input. Everyone looked back at me worriedly.

I gently put one hand on the table. “We can
easily break this down to the choices available. As I see it, we
can wait here until life support runs out, hoping someone will come
and help, or we can attempt a jump to light using manual control
along with whatever automated systems we can get up and running.
Does anyone have a third alternative?”

The atmosphere around the table was intense,
the silence heavy. One of the gravity field technicians who had
been forced up to management level spoke nervously. “We have cut,
polished, and put connectors on fiber lines in the past.”

Silence.

I helped him. “You mean to repair fiber
lines that weren’t working?”

He looked around nervously. “There was an
upgrade and we came out with too much light coming through some of
the feeds. The lines were shorter than expected, so too much laser
was saturating the receptors. We cut the fiber and put in
attenuators to reduce the amount of light. The fiber from our
gravity field distributors could be cut, spliced and connected to
new computer cards at the site.”

I looked at the new head of Life Support,
Barbara Deyo. “What do you think?”

She nodded. “All of that is true, of course,
but you’re talking about one bundle of fiber at a time, out of half
a million lines. Then half a million wireless transmission channels
from the main control system to the new cards. Sending control
signals to the gravity field generator matrix by wireless feed is
another thing that’s never been done.”

RJ’s eyes lit up. “We only need to keep
people alive. We don’t need regulated gravity all over the ship.
Could we pick the easiest area to do this, regulate just that area,
and have everyone ride out the jump there?”

More silence with a subtle touch of hope
behind it. People began looking around instead of holding their
breath.

Deyo nodded again. “Commander, I should head
down to the engineering group right now and lay this out and run
some numbers. I’ll call in as soon as we have something for you.”
Without waiting for a response, she stood, waved the former
technician to follow, and squeezed her way out of the room.

The secondary items were easy, shift
schedules, food dispensary, and power generation. They all seemed
more a distraction than anything else after the problem of getting
home. I held off on rationing consumables until the final resource
numbers came in. People needed a chance to get at a little bit
normalized. We closed by planning to network the next meeting.

When the meeting room doors slid open, I
should not have been surprised by the crowd of fifty-plus people
that had gathered outside. The meeting participants merged into the
sea of onlookers, who stared with questioning eyes. There are no
other doors adjoining the main meeting room, so RJ and I were
forced to go out into the middle of them. I was taken back when, as
I approached, a pathway opened up and continued to open as I walked
through. They were silent except for a few murmurs here and there,
back dropped by some low level conversations. I knew not what to
do, so I gave my best imitation of a dutiful expression, and headed
calmly in the direction of Security. The crowd began to quietly
disperse as we disappeared around the first corner.

Without looking at RJ, I asked, “What the
hell was that about?”

He smirked. “I think they like you.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“You’re lucky nobody asked for an
autograph.”

“Oh my god.”

“Don’t worry. At least I know you’re only
human.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Nothing. It’s a very good thing. If there
was ever a time people needed someone or something to believe in,
it’s now. You know what they’ve been through, and what they’re up
against. Now all you have to do is go around looking confident, and
everyone will figure you have it under control.”

“Oh my god.”

“You said that already.”

Chapter 28

It took four hours for engineering to work
out a gravity generator fiber optic bypass plan. It was not simple.
Earth-bound engineers would have considered it absurd. The work
required polishing tools, microscopes, and fiber couplers.
Technicians from every department were redirected for the project.
A training station was set up to show all involved how the fiber
connectors were installed. As technicians demonstrated they could
make the polished joints, they were quickly dispatched to the work
areas. Inspectors, trained in the same way, toured the areas to be
sure everything was happening as it should.

In parallel, the Supply Group went into
twenty-four hour operations to locate and stage the necessary
circuit cards for the new connections. When supply ran out,
engineering jumped in to decide where other cards could be
cannibalized, and modified if necessary. Software engineers
supported the effort by working full time to develop the necessary
code to give priority to the gravity field in the area the crew
would take refuge.

When the air and water numbers came in, the
news was worse than expected. We had air for sixty days, but only
one bladder type storage unit of water. For the remaining crew,
that meant about five weeks. It made the decision to manually go
light, an easy one.

Although I had not been summoned, I found an
inconspicuous time to visit Captain’s quarters. In the low light,
nothing had changed within the forsaken room. The Emissary’s door
was closed. Paperwork from before the invasion still sat on the
desk. Both computers had Electra emblems on their screens. There
was a strange stillness in the air. I wandered slowly around and
began to think about leaving when the door slid open behind me.

She entered the brightening room, her hands
held closely in front of her. The golden feeling became dominant
once more. I wondered if she understood the dangers of acceleration
we were about to risk, and if we needed to arrange a special area
for her.

“Transcendence”, was her silent reply. She
had her own solution.

Did we need to make arrangements for her
when we arrived home?

“Unshared time-space.”

That reply challenged me. She was saying
that when we arrived at our system, she would not be a part of that
time and space. She knew the concept would perplex me. She intended
it to. It was homework from the teacher.

I wondered why she hadn’t helped us more,
having come to understand how omnipotent she actually was.

Her answer was equally complex. “The least
necessary.”

The system of life we exist within is here
for a reason. It was created by the highest of intelligences. The
rules that govern it cannot be broken or modified without
compromising its core purpose. For any advanced being to do so, is
a sin, in that they presume to be wiser than the creator of the
system. She had aided us in the least necessary way, to equal the
playing field against an advanced, malevolent species. After that,
it had become a test of free-wills. She had done her best not to
circumvent the will of the creator, or to rob us of a test we
needed to endure and confront. I had been embarrassed to ask the
question, fearing it would be insulting, but she had been waiting
for it all along.

As usual my mind was overloaded, and having
fulfilled my reason for visiting, I was left not knowing what to
say. At the same time, I dearly did not want to leave it at that.
It was not enough. I wanted this to be a friendship.