Manxome Foe

16

“Dreen,” Kond said, about an hour later. “Yes, we are fighting those ones. We are fleeing those ones. Our home world was lost. Fleet is finding safe world. We are last guards.”

“We have three survivors from the last battle on-board,” Spectre said. “We picked them up along with some wreckage for study. How can we transfer them over?”

“Lost are they,” Kond replied, waggling tentacles again. “Space is their home.”

“No, we picked them up,” the CO said, confused. “We can get them over to you easily enough.”

“Lost are they,” Kond repeated. “Source is not. Behind they are. Understanding?”

“Sir,” Miriam said, quietly. “I think what he’s saying is that the resources of their ships are so minimal that they can’t take them on. If they lost their ship, they have to be left behind.”

“Lost are they,” Kond agreed. “Is sorrow. Is must.”

“We can carry them,” Spectre said, his jaw firming. “Is that permitted? Is that okay?”

“Very okay,” Kond said. “But not for us. Little air, water, food we have. Food very little. Damages we carry from battle. Unable to squee!”

“I think that squeal was important,” Weaver interjected. “Unable to fly? Unable to warp? Unable to go faster than light?”

“Unable to be unreal,” Kond replied. “Unable to run.”

“They can’t get their FTL drive to work,” Spectre said, nodding. “Can we help?”

“Part is broken,” Kond said. “Squee! Is damaged before, damaged again. May not be fix.”

“Can you show us the part?” Spectre asked. “We have a way to get some parts from home. It’s possible we could get something that will work. If it’s not complicated.”

“Is only squee!” Kond said.

“He’s exasperated,” Miriam said. She had an earbud in and was apparently picking up the raw sounds from the alien. “I’ve heard that tone before. It goes very high, super ultrasonic. Frustration. I think it’s something simple but for some reason they can’t fix it.”

“And since he’s a sitting duck until they do…” Weaver said. “Kond, can you show us the part?”

“Wait,” Kond said.

“Elav, in my cabin, the model of the ship. Get it.”

“Yes, Ship Master.”

“This part,” Kond said, holding up a model of the ship. It was detailed but small. He might have been pointing at one of the pods or the nacelle-wing leading to it.

“The engine or the wing?” Spectre asked.

“The squee!” Kond replied, holding it up and pointing to it again. With the tip of one tentacle he lightly caressed the wing.

“Commander Weaver, what’s the size of one of those things?”

“Kond, we must send an active thing at your ship,” Weaver said. “Light. It is not dangerous.”

“Send,” Kond replied.

Weaver went over to his controls and brought up the laser rangefinding system used for inshore maneuvers. Sending a pulse at the distant ship, and finally getting a hard range return, he was able to determine sizes. The wing was thirty-seven feet long, the pod on the end about twenty long and ten wide at the widest point. Looking at the design he knew exactly what would fit, if there were no special requirements. And if they could somehow attach it.

“Kond,” he said, getting back up and walking over to the center of the conn. “Does it have to be special materials?”

“Not understood,” Kond said. “It can be any squee… It can be squee or squee or even squee. Anything. Must be strong.”

“If we can get back to Gamma and if we can convince the Prez, and if we can get one down to Antarctica fast, he should be able to use a wing off a transport plane,” Weaver said. “Figure they have to fly C-17s in to the area anyway to bring the gates. There’s an airfield. Fly in a C-17, cut off the win—” He stopped at the CO’s expression. “Or not. But I figured out a way to pick it up and attach it using the Wyverns and space ta — Or not.”

“Here’s an alternative thought,” Spectre said carefully. “Did we see any of those things floating around back at the battlefield? I seem to recall your last brainstorm involved high pressure hydrogen throughout my ship.”

“Yeah, heh,” Weaver said ruefully. “I’m glad nobody pointed out to you that it was explosive.”

“What?”

“I kept expecting us to blow sky high,” Weaver said. “Oxygen and hydrogen are not a good mix. One spark and… But, yeah, there are probably some parts back at the battlefield. Now if we can just explain that we want to take some of their people back there to check it out.”

“How about the three space cases in isolation?” the XO asked.

“Well, what we need are their version of machinist mates and for all we know we’ve got cooks,” the CO said, still trying to assimilate that the ship had nearly gone sky-h — Been blown to smithereens. “But if we can get it across to the Kond fellow, maybe it will work. It’s no worse than any of our other plans. Except the one that involved cutting off the wing of a billion dollar airplane.”

“They could repair it,” Weaver pointed out. “I mean, it would be pricey but we’re talking about high level diplomacy here. Seriously, they shove it through the gate fast and then we use the Marines to—” He looked at the CO’s face again and paused. “Or not.”

“Could you go over that for me again, sir?” the COB asked.

He got that they’d encountered another alien race. He got that they were friendly. He even got that their ship needed to be repaired and, hey, you did that for friends. He was just having a hard time with…

“We gotta go pick up the wing of a C-17 that’s floating around in space?”

“Forget the C-17,” Spectre said patiently. “We’re warping back to the scene of the space battle. We’re hoping to find a part that sort of looks like a part of a C-17 wing that got cut off and cut short. We need to pick it up and bring it back here so the aliens can fix their ship and get out of here before the Dreen catch them. Are we clear on all of that?”

“Yes, sir,” the COB said, taking another sip of coffee. “How big is this thing? How are we going to bring it back, sir?”

“That, COB, is up to you,” the CO replied. “I’ll send Commander Weaver out with the party. He will be in nominal charge. But as we both know—”

“The commander don’t know his butt from a hole in the water about anything nautical, sir,” the COB said, sighing. “I been trying—”

“We’re all trying, COB,” the CO said. “On the other hand, what he doesn’t know about space hasn’t been learned, yet.”

“Got it, sir,” the COB replied. “I’ll need a couple of machinists, three bosuns and we’d probably better get a couple of the Marines. They’re the only ones in armor. If this thing is dangerous…”

“Understood,” the CO said. “Get to it.”

“And a lot of space tape…” the COB muttered as he left the conn.

“Have we gotten our passengers in touch with the ship?” the CO asked. “I don’t suppose they can be of any help?”

“They’re talking,” Miriam said, leaning into her earbud. “I’m listening. The high frequency compression is making some of it hard to understand, but I’m getting most of it. But the ‘passengers’ don’t appear to be of much use to us in this. If I’m getting it right, one of them is something like a cook, there might be a supply person and I think the third is something to do with navigation.”

“So no lost princesses?” Weaver asked. “Captain of the destroyed ship? Their chief engineer?”

“No engineers at all,” Miriam said.

“Do they know you’re listening in?” the CO asked.

“Yes, sir,” Miriam replied. “Doing otherwise wouldn’t be… nice.”

“That was actually my point,” the CO said. “Okay, then it’s up to us. Commander Weaver, you’re going to be in charge of the recovery detail. Ideas?”

“Move to about a hundred thousand meters from center,” Bill said. “Do a visual and radar sweep for the shape we’re looking for. Close to it. Determine if it’s attached to something or not. Connect to it, probably by using suits carrying lines to the piece, pull it onto the hull, secure it and then we head back.”

“On the sweep,” Miriam said, still looking at the deck. “I can write some code to do automatic shape matching. It might speed things up.”

“Thank you, Miss Moon,” Bill said. “But, we already have auto-target recognition code for targeting and navigation based on matched filtering, FFTs, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms that work just fine and can be used just as readily. After all, how do you think the navigation computer recognizes the star patterns or the targeting systems recognize, uh, targets?”

“Oh.” Miriam wasn’t sure if Weaver was being flippant or arrogant, so she dropped it.

“I suspect the genius is going to be in the details,” the CO said.

“So do I, sir,” Bill admitted. “So do I. But it can’t be worse than catching a comet.”

“Commander, let me give you a piece of advice from my many years in the Navy,” the CO said. “Never ever say: It couldn’t be worse.”

By integrating the lidar system and the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems on the Blade to get a range, they could determine roughly how big the debris field was. But at a light-second out the size and a shape of the individual pieces were beyond the limits of even the big twelve-meter aperture of the main sparse array telescope system. Running SAR and lidar image enhancement codes they were able to increase their resolution a few percent and started picking up potential large pieces of more than fifteen meters in length while still a light-second out. Smaller pieces were still unresolvable. They were approaching under normal space drive so they had nearly thirty minutes until they reached their pause point.

“Too bent,” Bill said, looking at the first match. “I think it’s one of the things we’re looking for but it’s bent. You can see it.”

“I see it,” Miriam said, declicking the first match. “There’s another.”

“I think that’s a section of hull,” Bill replied. “It’s not the thing Kond was pointing at.”

“Might work,” Miriam pointed out.

“Better than a wing from a C-17,” Spectre said dryly. The matches were displaying on the main conn screens for size and resolution, so he didn’t even have to look over their shoulders. “Highlight it as a possible, though.”

“Broken,” Bill said on the next. “Bent again…”

“We’re scavengers,” Spectre interjected sadly. “Scavengers of a battle fought not so long ago. And… Tactical?”

“Conn, Tactical.”

“Don’t get caught up in this search,” the CO said. “The Dreen are probably going to be checking out this battle site, too.”

“Aye, aye, Conn.”

“Be a bit ugly if they showed up while we’re doing this, sir,” Bill said. “Not a wing. Something else.”

“Hull?”

“I think it’s part of a passageway. What’s that, though?”

The system was highlighting the piece as a low-priority. That was because the “wing” was still attached to one of the pods on the end.

“I forgot to add the pods,” Miriam admitted. “Sorry. But that looks—”

“Good,” Bill said, zooming the camera in. The “wing” had what looked like a bit of the hull still attached and still had its pod. He very much wanted to get his hands on one of the pods. The aliens had as much as said that they were part of their FTL system, one that humans might be able to replicate. “That looks very good. CO, I think we have a winner.”

“The COB has assembled a recovery crew,” Spectre replied. “Best go get your armor on. Pilot, bring us in close to that piece of debris.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“More alien space junk,” Smith muttered, thrusting over to the tumbling “wing.”

“Just get it stabilized, relative to the ship,” Berg replied. “I’ll take left, you take right. Just stand by to stabilize, I’m going to try something.”

“Is that anything like, ‘Hey, y’all, watch this?’ ” Himes asked.

“Probably,” Berg said, flying “over” the spinning wing. It was mostly tumbling end to end, pretty fast all things considered, with a slight skew and “down” being towards the boat. And it was moving “away” from the site of the battle very fast, having apparently been imparted with quite a bit of velocity from an internal explosion. But the ship was matching that to within a few meters per minute. He could “follow” it with his thrusters easily enough. But they had to stop the tumbling.

He hovered over the left end of the piece until it headed back “up” then engaged his shoulder thrusters, heading “down” towards the pod on the end. He realized at the last moment that the pod might be fragile, in which case this was going to be one stupid thing to do. And depending on its mass…

The soles of his armor, though, encountered the upthrusting pod with a “clang” that could be heard through his armor. It slammed him upwards, hard, spinning him away. But as he spun he got a glimpse of the piece and the rotation had slowed to almost nothing.

“Good one, Two-Gun,” Commander Weaver said. “You okay?”

“Fine, sir,” Berg replied, working his jets to try to get his own tumble balanced out. “Himes, Smith, can you stabilize it now?”

“Got it, Sergeant,” Himes replied.

Berg finally got stable looking “down” at the ship and the piece of debris. He was low on nitrogen-pressure for the thrusters and still moving away from the ship. That wasn’t so good.

“How you doing, Two-Gun?” Weaver asked. The transmission was somewhat scratchy.

“Working on that one, sir,” Berg admitted. “I’m not sure I’ve got enough pressure to make it back. I don’t suppose you could ask the CO to come pick me up when you’re done, could you?”

“Lo… ssure?”

“Low fuel,” Berg said calmly. “Low fuel. Low fuel.” His rangefinder had the Blade at over a kilometer and receding at ten meters per second.

“…ger… ait.”

“Conn, EVA…”

“Two-Gun’s doing a Dutchman,” the CO said. “We see that. Tell the other Marines to standby on the debris. We’ll go pick up Two-Gun and come back.”

“Roger, sir.”

“Pilot,” the CO said, gesturing with his chin. “Carefully.”

“Go pick up one wayward Marine, sir,” the pilot replied. “Aye, aye.”

The pilot swung wide around the debris, which was between the ship and the wayward Marine. The boat was nearly three stories high, if he didn’t go “high” he was going to clip the debris and the Marines still clinging to it. That would be, in piloting terms, an “oops.”

The ship at these low speeds was remarkably delicate in handling. He could accelerate and decelerate faster than an Indy car. So he had to mainly be cautious in how fast he moved. Although he could decelerate fast, he could accelerate fast enough that he didn’t have the reaction time to slow down. A thousand gravs of accel were at his fingertips. This movement required less than a gravity of acceleration. Keeping it that slow was the problem.

From Berg’s perspective, the ship was starting to get a bit smaller. Which was not comforting. Space was a very big place.

But as he watched it moved “upwards” from the debris as delicately as a snowflake then suddenly expanded in size, coming towards him like lightning and then “stopping.” Actually, it was still coming towards him, just much slower. The pilot was a genius.

Then he started to feel the “pull” from the ship’s artificial gravity and “down” suddenly became far less abstract.

“Commander!” Weaver said as Berg started to fall towards the ship, accelerating fast.

“Conn, EVA,” Weaver said over the comm link. “We’re going to need to bring Two-Gun in in microgravity. And we need to convert fast.”

“Already considered, EVA,” the CO replied. “XO, sound microgravity.”

“ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS. MICROGRAVITY IN TEN SECONDS. TEN, NINE, EIGHT, SEVEN…”

“Shit,” Machinist Mate Gants said, grabbing his tools up and putting them in their slots.

“Just what we needed,” Red replied, picking up the smaller attachments for his Number Two arm and stowing them in a butt-pouch.

As the gravity fell away, Red continued picking up tools with the small pincers that were a permanent attachment of the Number Two Arm. Gants picked up his last screwdriver, grabbed a screw and then paused.

“Man, I really wish we hadn’t had chili for lunch,” Sub Dude moaned.

“If you puke all over this compartment… Use a bag man, use a bag!”

Berg still had his velocity but the pilot, again, corrected delicately so that he floated “down” to the ship, only having to correct slightly as his boots touched the upper deck.

“I’d take that as a mixed experiment, Sergeant Berg,” the astrogator said. “On the one hand, you corrected the rather notable spin.”

“On the other hand, I got blown into space doing it, sir,” Berg ended. “Yes, sir. I’d given that some thought.”

“Conn, EVA,” Weaver said. “Marine recovered. Let’s go pick up some debris.”

“Okay, this is where it gets tricky,” Bill said. “We’re grounded, right COB?”

“Aye, sir.”

Four lines had been attached to the debris as well as a grounding cable, the ship rotated “up” to the wing and positioned delicately under it. All they had to do was get it across twenty meters of empty space.

“Pulling this thing in will be easy,” Bill said, looking at the four bosun mates on the lines. Those lines, however, had already started to oscillate, imparting a vector to the wing. “But while it seems light, it has lots of mass. If we get it moving too fast, it’s going to crush you between it and the hull when it hits. So you’re going to have to—”

“Sir, if I may?” the COB said. “Team. On my command. Handsomely.” He waited about a second. “Belay. Step back. Retrieve lines. Retrieve… Just pull out the oscillation. No more pressure than that.”

The piece was coming down slightly askew and very slowly. But slow was good in Bill’s opinion. And he noted that the COB had arranged some sort of rubber matting where the wing was going to hit the ship.

The ropes the crew was using were flying everywhere in the microgravity environment, but they didn’t seem to be getting in the way. The four bosun mates were retrieving them hand over hand, stepping away from where the wing would impact.

“Four, handsomely,” the COB said as the wing started to get some drift to the side. “Belay. Retrieve. Retrieve…”

As the wing impacted the rubber mat, it rebounded upwards.

“Belay!” the COB said. “Sharply!”

All four of the bosun mates clamped down on their lines, then pulled in, fast, stopping the wing from getting out of control. In a moment it was hard against the hull and steady.

“Something like that, sir?” the COB asked.

“Just like that, COB,” Bill admitted. “I’ll leave it to you to get secured.”

“Why, thank you, sir.”