The Santana Nexus (Junkyard Dogs Book 3) (6 page)

"A mutiny?"

"If that's what you call it when the crew takes back their ship after the command staff has defected to an illegitimate government. Well over half of the crew hadn't approved of the defection in the first place. When they got a chance they acted."

"Remarkable," was all the Admiral could say.

"Yeah, I don't know how things would have turned out if that ship hadn't surrendered. The rest of the attackers began retreating soon afterwards. Just to finish up, we also have several cutters and two utility sleds." Kresge paused for a moment before redirecting the discussion. "What about your forces, Admiral?"

"
The
Asimov
has some minor damage where we nicked the shuttle bay door with the cutter during our escape from the Nexus," said Kingston, "but, as you can see, some of the higher ranking officers assigned to her were not able to get back onboard ship before we were forced to get out of there. As a result, the
Asimov's
command staff is somewhat...," she stopped to search for a word that wasn't too derogatory and came up with, "...inexperienced." She took a deep breath and sighed before continuing, "I don't think the
Xerxes
is going to do much more fighting, Commander. It might be best if we just parked her right here in your Scrapyard, it's kind of where she belongs."

"She
's the same class of ship as the
Perseus
," said Kresge, "and it appears that her front battery is intact. Perhaps we could use parts from the
Xerxes
to repair the
Perseus,
bring her back to fully functional?"

"That would be up to the Meridian authorities
," said Kingston. "What do you think, Mr. Ambassador?"

"I say
proceed with the repairs! We need all of the warships we can get right now!"

"We'll get to work on it right away," said Kresge.

"Thank you all for the updates," said Kingston. She paused a moment for effect. "Now I have to tell you about some other recent developments. As some of you know, the
Asimov
is outfitted with a Stage II communicator. We spoke to Federation Central Command back on Earth just before we came over for this conference."

"When can we expect reinforcements from Earth?" asked the Ambassador.

Kingston took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "There will be no reinforcements from Earth," she said. "At least not anytime soon."

"Have they given you any reason?"

"Yes, they have and it is a very serious development," said the Admiral. Again she paused for a moment and looked around the room. "Some might say that what is happening is impossible."

"How so?" asked the Ambassador.

"Central Command reports that they are currently unable to macrojump between the Sol-Terra and the Santana Nexus hyperlink point."

There was a silence as the people in the room digested the news and the implications.

"You say they can't use the hyperlink zone?" asked F.C.Talbot, who was both intrigued and appalled by the announcement.

F.C.
Talbot had been a Federation Navy engineer a long, long time ago, all the way back during the Succession War, in fact. After the war, he had gone on to forge a long and lucrative career as consulting engineer and along the way had become a philosopher of some note who was known to be particularly critical of organized religion. He had been invited by Ambassador Saladin to participate in the Ambassador's diplomatic summit meeting, which was to have been held at the Santana Nexus a few weeks ago, in the hope that the old engineer cum philosopher could provide a fresh viewpoint and perhaps help the diplomats find a way to ease the political tensions that were permeating through and poisoning the entire Quadrant.

The meeting had been aborted
by the Sheik of Barsoom's attack upon and subsequent capture of the Santana Nexus Station during which the Ambassador had been forced to flee the system. Talbot had been on board the
Istanbul
when she jumped out to safety during the attack and had been marooned with all of the other diplomats when the diplomatic ship had taken refuge in the Scrapyard. With his wealth of practical knowledge concerning older ship designs, Talbot had volunteered his services to the Scrapyard defense effort where his expertise had proven to be particularly valuable.

"No, they can't
," said Kingston. "Something happened about twenty-four hours ago. Two different ships that were scheduled to use that hyperlink point charged up their jump modules and attempted to jump but they were unable to generate a field and they...," she searched for the appropriate word, "...they overloaded their jump modules. A third ship stepped her module up to emergency power levels and suffered an explosion and fire. The Federation authorities are looking into it but they have suspended all traffic through that hyperlink point until they can figure out what's wrong."

"That means..." mused Talbot, "...that someone m
ust have figured out how to generate a hyperdrive counterfield, the so-called 'hyperdrive damper!' But that's supposed to be impossible!"

"No one knows for sure what is going on, Dr. Talbot,
" said Kingston, "but Central Command had stationed a scientific ship nearby before the third ship attempted to jump and they got some very peculiar readings from the zone."

Talbot
continued musing, "Well...there is a sort of 'handshake' protocol between the ship and the zone they are linking to. It's a calibration wave that allows a final fine tuning of the jump parameters. Stage II communicators are really just a modified and greatly extended form of this handshake wave. We can ping the zone with the handshake wave to obtain final jump parameters and we can send bursts of information through with our Stage II consoles but that's all we've been able to do so far. Generating and sustaining a damper field is way beyond anything that has been possible before. If this has been accomplished, it could change everything!"

"I know, Dr.
Talbot, and you can bet that the Federation has put an army of their best people to work on the problem but the most immediate effect is that we can expect no help from the Sol-Terra Quadrant until they can figure out how to restore the use of the hyperlink point."

"This means that..." began Kresge.

"...Yes, Commander," the Admiral finished for him, "We are on our own out here in the Santana Quadrant."

The Admiral's final comment left a silence in the room.

Kingston's condition was obviously poor enough that she easily grew tired. After delivering the news that there could be no reinforcements from Earth, it was obvious to all that she was physically drained. She finished paying her respects and was escorted out a few minutes later. The young Spacer Ensign who had been part of her entourage, came over to have a brief conversation with Carlisle as the Admiral was being escorted out.

"You are Tamara Carlisle, from the Piedmont Mining Colony?"

"Yes, that's right," she replied.

"Massa Sukamoto, from
Sol-Terra." He paused for a moment. "You were something of a legend back at the Academy," he said, "You were also an inspiration to me, a fellow Spacer. I...I'm glad to finally meet you."

"Ah...thank you, Ensign Sukamoto, I
really don't know what to say. Do you mind if I ask how you come to be a tactical officer so quickly? That almost has to be some kind of record!"

"The Admiral wasn't kidding when she said that we had to leave
the Nexus in a hurry," replied Sukamoto. "Believe it or not, I am the third highest ranking officer currently on board the
Asimov
. Kingston didn't much like appointing me to the position but she didn't have a lot of choice. She'll probably appoint someone over me as soon as she can find someone suitable."

"
Enjoy it while you can, Sukamoto," said Carlisle. "Congratulations!" she added.

"I hope we can talk more soon," said the young man.

"I look forward to it," said Carlisle.

"I
'd better go," said Sukamoto. He flashed Carlisle a smile before he turned and rushed to catch up with the departing Admiral.

Chapter
9.

"...Thank you for purchasing a Hartwell Wrist computer. This fine product is a breakthrough design that has created a whole new style and level of effectiveness for a human-computer interface. Capable of the entire suite of functions and displays that could previously only be performed by machines of much larger dimensions, this superb device still has no equal. The interface can be operated by voice and by the incomparable cyberdex virtual keyboard. The latest models have even incorporated recent breakthroughs in brainwave stimulation technology.* One of the most useful features of the Hartwell Wrist Computer is the ability of the operator to make full use of its capabilities while inside the confines of a space suit. These little devices are widely sought after by anyone who wishes to be on the cutting edge of computer capability...

*This feature requires additional training and the use of the proprietary 'cyberdex cranial sensor net,' available at extra cost..."

Hartwell Wristcomp reference note highlighted for further review by Amanda Steuben. Excerpt is from the Hartwell Wrist Computer owner's manual.

UTFN Reclamation Center, on board Meridian Imperial Diplomatic Ship
Istanbul
, January 2, 2599.

With the Admiral's meeting
concluded, Ensign Carlisle returned to the engineering section of the
Istanbul
and went directly to the electronics shop where she had met earlier with Heskim, the Ambassador's computer tech. She found him at the workbench of his cluttered little electronics laboratory, bent over a cleared space and in the process of working on her ancient quantum drive.

"Hello, Heskim," she said.

"Ah, Dr. Carlisle," he replied, "Welcome back."

"
Have you been able to find out anything yet?" asked Carlisle.

"I
have been able to power up the drive," replied Heskim, "but it is not in very good condition and some of the data on it is probably no longer available. As you can see, I didn't have the proper connectors for it and have had to rig some temporary connections."

H
eskim had suspended the drive above the workbench by laying it across an inverted coffee mug. Five different wires, two of them connected to the drive with alligator clips, hooked it up to what looked like a power supply on one side and an obviously jury-rigged cable a centimeter or so in diameter connected it to a modern computer on the other.

"I have copied what I could access to
this computer. I may be able to get more of the data with some deeper probing techniques, but I haven't had the time yet."

"Can you transfer what you have to my wrist computer?"

"I should be able to. Go ahead and put your computer into receive mode."

"Just a moment," said Carlisle. She fished around in a pocket on her coverall and pulled out a delicate
, almost gossamer, net. She pulled the net down over her hair, made a few adjustments to get it properly aligned and touched the centimeter-diameter, flat, circular plate that was positioned over her right temple. Her eyes seemed to glaze over for a couple of seconds. The Ensign rotated her head side to side and announced.

"Done."

"But you didn't do anything," said the technician.

"This
web is the cranial net that came with my wrist computer," said Carlisle, waving her open hand over the top of her head.

"I had heard of
such nets, but have never seen one." Heskim looked the net over more closely. "Ingenious!" was all he could say. "It gives you full access to all of the computer's functions?"

"Yes, and it can do even more," said the Ensign, "I really don't know how I got along without it. It's really nice when you're wearing a spacesuit. Here, watch this..."

Carlisle brought up a hologram in the air between them, a schematic of the
Istanbul
, something that Heskim was certain to be familiar with. The schematic began to rotate.

"Remarkable! It has been rumored that you can do
things like this, but until now I have not seen it done. I begin to see how useful such a device must be."

Heskim
dragged his attention away from the hologram with an effort. "So you are prepared to download this information?"

"
Anytime you're ready."

Heskim sat
back down and consulted the monitor for the workbench computer. He selected a file and punched a button on his keyboard. Meanwhile, Carlisle had switched her display to another view and the schematic of the
Istanbul
dissolved and was replaced by a display that consisted of scrolling columns of text and numbers as the download proceeded. The download took about thirty seconds.

"That's it," said Heskim.

"I should be able to do something with this," said Carlisle, as she skimmed over some of the information she'd just received. "It's encoded but it almost has be in an old cipher of some kind. The Federation broke these codes way back during the Succession War. Hopefully I can find the right key without too much trouble. I can already see what looks like some date stamps and other stuff." She nodded her head. "Yes, I can definitely work with this." She turned her attention back to the computer tech. "You say there is some damage to the drive?"

"No, it's really more like deterioration.
As you pointed out yourself, this drive is at least sixty years old."

"I guess it could be worse," said Carlisle. "
I got it out of a computer on the bridge of an old ship that was abandoned on a moon at the end of the Succession War. There was no atmosphere and, naturally, it was cold but the ship was mostly in permanent shadow so a least it wasn't subjected to widely varying temperature fluctuations."

"
That had to have helped," said Heskim, "So far I have extracted only the data that was easy to get. I'll have a look at some of the other areas of the drive when I get time. I'll warn you now that some of the information on this drive is almost certainly not going to be retrievable anymore."

"
Whatever else you can get will be fine," replied the Ensign, "Thanks, Heskim. Let me know if you have any luck. In the meantime, it looks like there's more than enough here to keep me busy for a while. See you later?"

"My pleasure, Dr. Carlisle."

With a portion of the data from the old drive now in her possession, Carlisle left the electronics lab and returned to her quarters. She had accomplished a fair amount on her first day out of the infirmary but the progress was not to come without a price. As she was heading down the corridor back to her quarters, she hit a mental and physical wall and suddenly felt an urgent need to lie down and get some rest. There was no sense in fighting the inevitable. She arrived at her quarters, peeled off the cranial net and flopped down on the bed where she fell asleep in under a minute.

***

Carlisle was able to get back to researching the information from the drive after she had awakened from a two-hour nap and taken the time to head down to the
Istanbul's
galley and eat a substantial lunch. The beef Burgundy and mashed potatoes were excellent, if a little over the top for a lunch menu item, but word was that the Scrapyard was getting low on food. After returning to her quarters, she slipped the cranial net back on and went back over to lie down on the bed.

Using the unique properties of the cranial net, s
he closed her eyes and began to search through the files in the partial download. After selecting a file more or less at random, she pulled up several of the old decoding programs that had been developed by the Federation during the Succession War and ran the download against them. She was rewarded when the third one that she tried brought order to the otherwise incomprehensible symbols in the file. She tried to convert the entire download at once but found that the old decoding software would only process one file at a time. That would slow the decoding process down, but one file at a time was certainly better than no files at all!

"Okay, Tamara," she
said, talking out loud to herself, another of her personality quirks that made her seem rather strange to most people, "The final battle of the Succession War was in 2542. Maybe you should start looking for entries that are time stamped with that year."

She did a search
for the number 2542 and came up with multiple entries, over forty of them, in fact, and that was just in the portion of the file that was still decoding. In an effort to determine what the nature of the information extracted from the old drive was, she accessed one of the files in the first portion of the download. Within a minute, recognizable text began to appear on the virtual display she that was being generated in her mind's eye by the combination of wrist computer and cranial net. The program converted data at a rate that was only a little more rapid than the rate she could read at so she began reading while the software was still unencrypting the files.

The date of th
e entry she had selected was, coincidently, January 2, 2542, exactly fifty-seven years ago to the day. As she skimmed through the text, she couldn't help but be a little disappointed. It looked like she was viewing electronic versions of routine reports regarding normal shipboard affairs like who was standing watch and when they logged out and who had logged in to replace them. Mildly interesting stuff, but hardly planet shaking. She caught up to the translation program when the output stopped for a few seconds as the conversion software churned away on something with a much denser form of data in it. Whatever it was, it took the program almost a minute to decode it. Finally the software indicated that it had translated a video feed of some kind and asked her if she wished to view it. Carlisle eagerly accessed the video translation and requested that it be played.

In the
video feed was a rugged looking, athletic man of perhaps forty years of age, whose bushy blond hair was styled in the modified Mohawk style favored by the Veritian Brotherhood of Christ Resurgent. Carlisle knew from her previous researches that the derelict had been operated by the Veritian Brotherhood so this particular revelation didn't surprise her. The man swiveled his chair, turned his blue eyes to the video pickup and began speaking.

What
did come as a surprise to her was that he looked disturbingly familiar...

"Captain's Journal, January, 2, 2542. Captain Josiah Dobbins reporting. The
Instrument of God
has managed to stay out of any fighting so far but it looks as though this situation may be about to change. We are on our way to join up with the people that represent the true and rightful government of Jasmine. It looks to me as though the opposing forces in this war are heading for some kind of huge and decisive showdown. As I have stated before, the Monarchists wish to maintain the purity of their race and their religion. Strangely enough, these are the same goals that we, the Veritian Brotherhood of Christ Resurgent, have vowed to achieve. After much discussion, we have decided to join forces with the Orthodox Jasminites and their allies. They have agreed that after we win this war we will be granted our own region of space and they will honor our boundaries. The establishment of a more liberal and therefore more secular Islamic Republic must be stopped at all costs!"

At this point, Carlisle froze the video and took a long look at the Captain. Dobbins? Veritian Brotherhood? This man almost had to be the grandfather or some other ancestor of Lester Dobbins, aka Ezra Hellfire Brimstone, the radical who had attacked this very Scrapyard in an attempt to kidnap Ambassador Saladin just a couple of months ago. In the process, the current-day Brotherhood terrorists had killed everyone onboard the main living facilities of the Reclamation Center and then moved on to threaten and ultimately take over the New Ceylon Orbital Station. The current-day Dobbins was reported to have formed an uneasy alliance with the Sheik of Barsoom, a known Islamic terrorist. Carlisle shook her head. It appeared as though his family had a history of such risky and uneasy relationships. Yes, decided Carlisle as she studied the frozen image, the man in the video looked way too much like Lester Dobbins not to be related to him in some way.

***

UTFN Reclamation Center, onboard Federation Auxiliary ship
Greyhound
, January 2, 2599.

"So you see,
Lieutenant," Kresge was explaining the supply situation to Harris, now back on the bridge of the
Greyhound
, "we desperately need to make a foray of some kind for supplies, the sooner the better. We're critical on food mostly, but some medical and other supplies wouldn't be unwelcome either."

"Can we
use one of our destroyers to escort one or two of our freighters and make a quick trip to one of the nearby planets?" asked Harris.

"That was sort of my plan," replied Kresge, "Helen says that Heard's World might be a good place to start."

"I agree, it almost has to be Heard's World."

"But New Ceylon is right next door...," ventured Kresge.

"That's true Commander," replied Harris, "The trouble is that they only have a couple of ground-to-orbit spacecraft and with all of the personnel transfers they made between the planet and the orbital station in the last couple of weeks, those two ships are both down for maintenance. It will be a couple of weeks, probably longer, before they'll be able to boost anything off planet again. Looks like our best bet is Heard's World."