Challenger's Hope (The Seafort Saga Book 2) Page 11

  “Yes.” I held my baby to my shoulder while she smoothed the sheets in his crib. A small hand clutched my neck as he stirred.

  She took him from me and laid him facedown in his bed. Then she came and nestled against my arm. “I love both of you,” she said, and tears stung my eyes.

  The next day the alarms sounded while we lunched in the passengers’ mess. The crew hastened to General Quarters; I raced to the bridge, slapped the hatch shut, slid into my seat.

  “Encroachment thirty-six thousand kilometers and closing, sir.” Alexi’s eyes were glued to the screen.

  “Recognition code received, sir,” Danny interrupted. “Positive ID on Kitty Hawk.” I breathed a sigh of relief as we stood down. Our frequent Defusing was nerve-wracking. We were still only fifteen light-years from home, with most of the cruise still ahead of us.

  I let Pilot Van Peer take the conn to maneuver us into position relative to Kitty Hawk. Short bursts from the thrusters reoriented us. I remembered the dinner Captain Tenere had given us on Freiheit and wished he were first on station, so I could return the favor.

  Would Captain Derghinski consider it presumptuous to invite him over? I thought of the months of isolation aboard a Fused ship and smiled. “Danny, make contact with Kitty Hawk’s bridge.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Nola says Captain Derghinski’s off duty now but she can wake him.”

  “Nola? Their puter?” I knew our puters locked in tightbeam whenever two ships approached. Lord God knew what they exchanged. “Wait until he wakes,” I told him.

  Two hours later I was in my cabin, humming to myself as I changed clothes. Captain Derghinski had accepted my dinner invitation with alacrity. I’d ordered the steward to outdo himself for our guests, and was wondering where to hide the transients for the evening.

  “Let’s meet him at the lock, hon. The Captain and the Captain’s lady.”

  Amanda smiled back as she took my arm. We strolled down to Level 2. Near the airlock, the corridor was crowded with sentries for the ceremonial of Captain Derghinski’s entry.

  Passengers peered through our transplex portholes for a glimpse of Kitty Hawk.

  I beckoned to young Eddie Boss; he approached apprehensively. “Pass the word to your, ah, comrades. Anyone who causes the ruckus you made with the Admiral will spend the rest of the trip locked in his cabin. All eleven months!”

  Eddie looked awed. “I be tellin’ em good, Cap’n. Giim lots room, I tell ‘em all. Noway makin’ trouble nohow, Cap’n.”

  “Be sure of it, Eddie.” Frowning, I watched him retreat.

  Amanda inquired, “When did you put him in charge?”

  “I didn’t, but he’s large enough to get the point across.”

  “And then some,” she agreed.

  A sailor peered through the porthole. “Their launch berth doors are opening, sir. He’ll be on his way in a minute.”

  Alarms sounded. For a moment I panicked, knowing Kitty Hawk’s gig wouldn’t set off our alarms. Then understanding came and I cursed to myself as I relaxed. “Another ship’s Defused,” I said to Amanda. “Lousy timing. It’ll set dinner back at least an hour. I’ll be back as quick as I can.” I trotted to the bridge.

  Danny’s adolescent voice was shrill. “Encroachment seven kilometers, bearing oh four oh and closing!” I slapped the hatch shut. Vax and the Pilot were at their consoles.

  “That’s awfully close,” I muttered to Vax as I slipped into my seat. “Who is it, Danny?”

  “No recognition signal, sir! And bounceback isn’t showing metal.”

  My fingers tightened on the caller. “Comm room! What do you read?”

  “No metal, Captain. It’s not a ship.”

  “Battle Stations!” I hit the klaxon, and sirens blared throughout Portia. “Danny, full magnification!”

  “Aye aye, sir!” The screens leapt into focus.

  “Oh, Lord God preserve us!” Vax, in a whisper.

  “Shut up, Vax. Fire control, I’m activating all lasers! Deploy shields! Enemy target oh four oh!” My sphincters twitched. I tried to tear my eyes away from the object in the screens. I thumbed the laser activation release.

  A fish.

  Two-thirds the size of Portia, half the size of Kitty Hawk, it drifted toward us, closing fast. As I watched, a hole near its tail squirted propellant and its speed increased. A glob on the creature’s knobby surface began to spin lazily.

  So much for trying not to initiate hostilities.

  “Commence firing! Vax, turn off those bloody alarms. Danny, inform Kitty Hawk we’re shooting!”

  “Aye aye, sir,” Danny said, breathless in the sudden silence. “Mr. Derghinski informed by tightbeam.”

  A spot on the alien form glowed red. Colors swirled; holes opened and the fish jerked aside from our laser beam. Its spinning glob released, came sailing toward us.

  Vax roared into his caller. “Laser Group B, fire on the projectile!” He’d once seen an acid glob eat through Hibernia’s gig and kill its crew. We waited, watching the screens. Our lasers again found their target, and the glob flared and melted.

  Alarm bells clanged anew. Danny shouted, “Encroachment five hundred kilometers! Course three four one!”

  “Puter, lower your voice! Put the bogey on the screen.” I tried to sound calmer than I felt.

  “Recognition codes!” said Danny and Vax together. A second’s pause, and Danny added, “It’s Challenger.”

  “Signal them we’re under attack. Any more projectiles?”

  Vax checked his screen. “None at the moment, but debris from the one we broke up is still approaching. Looks like it’ll hit the shields aft.”

  “Very well.” The goldfish shape jerked as laser beams struck it from the side; Captain Derghinski was in action.

  “Maneuver us closer, Pilot. Vax, ask the Admiral if Challenger will join the attack.” My fingers ached from gripping the arm of the chair.

  “Aye aye, sir. Challenger’s closing—”

  The alarms clanged. Danny and Vax were both shouting. “New encroachment forty kilometers, course three three nine!”

  “Another encroachment, one kilometer, dead ahead! They’re not ships!” Vax pointed.

  The Pilot slammed the starboard thrusters to full, blasting propellant to steer us clear of the encroachment ahead.

  “All lasers fire at will! Take the nearest targets!” No time for target selection by the book. The original fish glowed red from several laser penetrations. Propellant squirted in three directions as it corkscrewed away. Kitty Hawk spewed flames in pursuit.

  The fish ahead drifted to our port side as our thrusters turned us. An area of its surface began to swirl. A dot appeared, separated from the fish’s body. It launched itself toward us.

  A shapechanger. I’d met one of the alien outriders aboard Telstar, and nearly died of fright.

  I watched the screen, sweating. Globs of material seemed to swirl under the translucent creature’s suit. My skin crawled; I remembered that it had no suit.

  “Repel Boarders! This is no drill!” I brought my voice under control. “Prepare for decompression. Laser control, fire on that—thing! Master-at-arms, stand by with a fighting party in case the bastard penetrates!” The shape jerked once as it passed through our beams. Danny’s sensors followed its lazy glide. It floated onto our hull and hung a moment, quivering.

  “Boarder on the outer hull, amidships!” Danny’s words came low and fast. “Two meters abaft the airlock. All corridor hatches sealed. External lasers cannot reach target.” The ship couldn’t fire on itself.

  “Sensors reporting hull damage. Captain, it’s coming through!” The puter’s voice changed. “Conversational overlays deactivated. ALERT! Imminent danger of destruction! ALERT, SECTION EIGHT! Hull breakdown one meter aft of airlock. Section eight isolated by corridor hatch seals.” New alarms added their din. “DECOMPRESSION EMERGENCY! LEVEL 2 SECTION EIGHT DECOMPRESSION! Bridge airlock controls inoperative!”

  I slapped off the alarms. “Mr
. Banatir, report!” I keyed the master-at-arms’s suit channel to our speakers.

  “We’re in section eight, Captain. I see it. Oh, God! Sorry, sir. It’s in the corridor. All of you, open fire! Damn, it moves fast! GET IT!” The suit lasers whined in the speaker.

  Below, someone sobbed, “Mother of God, what is it?” The whine of lasers came faster.

  “Roast the son of a bitch!” Mr. Banatir, in fury. “That’s it, you got him! Easy now, or you’ll burn through the deck!”

  Heavy breathing. A grunt. “I think it’s dead, Captain. There’s not much of it left.”

  “Don’t touch anything!”

  “No, sir. God Almighty.”

  Frowning at the blasphemy I glanced at the screen. Kitty Hawk’s jets had taken her about thirty kilometers from her station, in pursuit of an alien. The fish was moving faster than she was. She fired. The fish pulsed rhythmically. Then it vanished.

  “Kitty Hawk got it!” Vax pounded the console.

  “Maybe. Where’s the other one?” The screen swiveled to the alien shape amidships. Another of its globs began waving in ever-faster circles. I snatched the caller, “Fire control, get the part that’s waving!” Banks of lasers concentrated on the rotating arm. It melted off the fish and sailed lazily away, at right angles to the ship.

  “Now, fire on the fish!” As the lasers were brought to bear, the creature pulsed. Then it too disappeared from our screens.

  The alarms went silent. Trembling from adrenaline I glanced wildly at the screens. “Where did it go? Where is everybody?”

  “Kitty Hawk is one hundred fifty kilometers, course one eight nine, declination nineteen.” Vax’s tone was uneven. “No other encroachments.”

  “Lord God.” I sat, trying not to tremble. “Vax, send a damage control party to section eight.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” He spoke quietly into the caller.

  “Danny, get me Kitty Hawk.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Reactivating conversational overlays. Okay, you’re patched to Kitty Hawk’s bridge.”

  Captain Derghinski’s face appeared, grim. “You all right, Seafort?”

  “Yes, sir, but we took a hit. I have damage control on it now. We chased one and it disappeared. What happened to the fish you were after?”

  “Gone. I don’t know where.” We eyed each other. A pause. “Is that what you saw last time?”

  “Yes, sir. The goldfish.”

  Derghinski snorted. “More like barracuda, if you ask me. Goldfish don’t bite, or come after you.”

  “Yes, sir, but they look like goldfish.” My voice was shaky.

  Raw fear welled up. I swallowed, battling nausea. “Are we alone, then?”

  “It appears so.”

  I asked stupidly, “Where’s Challenger?”

  “It seems she Fused.”

  “In the middle of a battle?” I said, unthinking.

  Derghinski glared. “I’m sure he had his reasons.”

  I felt a complete fool. “Yes, sir.”

  His tone was bleak. “Or maybe the son of a bitch ran away.” He cut the connection.

  Vax was careful to look elsewhere. The Pilot examined the backs of his hands. I keyed the caller. “Damage control, report!”

  The response came almost immediately. “We’re brazing a patch on the hull from inside, sir. Another few minutes, I think we’ll have it. Sorry, sir, Petty Officer Everts reporting. When the patch is in place you can recompress, sir. I don’t know about the airlock controls yet. A lot of wiring is fried.”

  “Very well. Thank you.” I lay back, closed my eyes. Where had they come from?

  “Where’d they go?” asked Vax, as if reading my thoughts. “Is it possible they Fused?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re organic.”

  “Amanda’s all right, sir. I called the cabin while you were talking to Kitty Hawk.”

  I glared. He blushed but held my gaze. “Thank you, Vax,” I said at last, ashamed.

  Captain Derghinski’s lined face showed his anxiety. “What do you think they’ll do next, Seafort?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” I repeated. I’d had only one encounter with the fish that lurked behind Telstar, and that was enough to scare years from my life. Yet Derghinski was deferring to me as if I were an expert. “Sir, Portia has repairs under way. We can either wait for the rest of the squadron or Fuse. What are your orders?”

  My prompting seemed to help him pull himself together. “I wish I knew where Challenger went.” He sounded glum. “If she’s coming back we should wait here; if she’s gone to the next rendezvous we should try to meet her.”

  “Yes, sir.” I waited.

  “All right; let’s give it three more days. Full alert. No, cancel that. We can’t keep men on Battle Stations without a break. If Freiheit and the others Defuse by then, we’ll go on together to the next rendezvous point. Otherwise one of us will wait behind for stragglers.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “What precautions did you take for infection, Mr. Seafort?”

  Before I’d first reached Hope Nation, an unknown virus had decimated the colony. Because the Admiral had been killed, I’d remained in command, not only of Hibernia but of naval, forces groundside. We now realized the virus was spread by the alien fish, and all ships carried vaccine, like the rest of the fleet, we were under orders to observe the tightest viro-bacteriological security in case of contact.

  Our damage control parties had followed regulation decontamination drills. Our decompression had actually helped safeguard the ship; the chance of airborne virus was much reduced. The decking surrounding the gruesome scorched blob was taken up, vacuum-sealed, and stored in the hold for analysis by our xenobiologists back home, and new decking put in its place. Sailors returning from the damaged section through the corridor hatch seals were put through rigorous decontamination procedures. I told Derghinski as much.

  “Very well. I believe your infirmary carries the serum for the Hope Nation virus?”

  “Yes, sir. Dr. Bros is inoculating everyone, to be safe.”

  “Well, you’ve done what you can. Let me know if we can help with anything.”

  “Thank you, sir.” We broke the connection. I glanced at the screens. Outside the ship, for tens of millions of kilometers, was nothing other than Kitty Hawk. Within our vessel all systems were at alert. In addition to Danny’s sensors we now had full complements manning the radionics in the comm room. Our lasers were activated and ready to fire. Shields were fully deployed, though the gossamer laser shields were not much help against the protoplasm the goldfish threw.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  Two days later Mr. Banatir spoke of a headache. On the way to his berth he collapsed. He was dead before they got him to the infirmary. I was notified in my cabin. I ordered all hatches sealed at once and went to tanked air throughout the ship, while I waited with Amanda and Nate in an agony of tension.

  Some hours later Dr. Bros reported his findings. “Definitely a virus, sir. It operates like the Hope Nation strain but it’s something else. I’ve got the synthesizers working on it.”

  “How does it spread?”

  “It’s nasty, this one. Airborne, liquids, even through the pores of the skin.”

  I spoke through gritted teeth. “So the whole ship could be infected?”

  “It may have spread widely, yes, sir. As soon as I get a serum ...”

  “How long between the time we contract it and the time we die?” My tone was blunt.

  “I don’t know, sir. It puts out a lot of toxins. Two days, perhaps. No more, or the master-at-arms would still be alive.”

  “How long before you have a serum?”

  “Thank Lord God for the automated machines, sir. We had to isolate it, grow a culture, analyze it ...”

  “How long?” I snarled. If only I’d had the sense to go to quarantine the moment we were invaded.

  “I can’t be sure.” The Doctor’s worry was evident. “Perhaps tomorrow afternoon. So
oner if we’re lucky. If it weren’t for the data from Hope Nation we wouldn’t even know what to look for.”

  No point in hounding him. “Let me know the moment you have results.” I paused. “You’re following sterilization procedures yourself?”

  “Yes, sir, you’d better believe it.” His tone was emphatic.

  I frowned at his manner, but knew enough to ignore it. “Any risky operations, coming in contact with the virus ...”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Have a med tech do it,” I said bluntly. “Yours is the most valuable life on the ship.” I set down the caller.

  Melissa Chong and Mrs. Attani died that night. Also three transients. To my dismay I realized I hadn’t even learned their names. Each section of the disks survived on isolated bottled air; we weren’t using recyclers at all.

  I had Alexi, who was holding the bridge, call Derghinski on Kitty Hawk. We agreed that, no matter what happened to us, there would be no interchange between ships until we’d found a vaccine. We might lose one ship, but not both.

  The exhausted bridge watch remained on duty behind sealed hatches for the second straight day; Alexi and the Pilot reported to me every fifteen minutes. If one of them became ill I would open the isolation seals long enough to get to the bridge, and then use suit air until the siege lifted or I died.

  Outside the ship all was still.

  By morning sixteen crewmen in crew berth one were dead. The survivors cast discipline aside and pounded on their sealed hatches, frantic to escape from the contaminated berth.

  Two hours later Dr. Bros’s haggard voice crackled through the speaker. “We’ve got it, sir! The synthesizers are building vaccine right now. We have the first batch, and more in an hour. Preventative and curative both, thank Lord God.”

  “You’re sure it works?” I asked stupidly, my head reeling from exhaustion.

  “Yes, sir, it knocks the cultures dead, in the gel and in human blood. Once we knock out the virus, we can start to dialyze out the toxins. We should be able to save most of the infected.”