Blood and Fire Read online

  “It’s your call.”

  Korie nodded glumly. “It’s what I’d do. It’s the logical thing to do.”

  The captain frowned. “Not everybody is as logical as you are.” Then she stepped forward and called out an order to her helm and her astrogator. “Nose-to-nose docking. Set up your approach. Let’s do it.” She turned back to Korie. “Break out the spare repulsors from the cargo and install them forward. Let’s focus them into the docking tube.”

  “They’ll use a lot of power—”

  “We’ll shut down the active core-control of the singularity and depend on the passive systems to maintain.”

  “Can’t do that for too long. Thirty-six hours max. After that, you don’t have the power to reboot.”

  “We don’t have thirty-six hours in any case. That ship is falling into a star. Let’s get in, get the survivors, and get out of here. If we can save the ship, we’ll tow it. HARLIE, set up the procedures.”

  Docking

  The Norway was traveling “sideways,” perpendicular to the star’s equator, her bow pointed toward galactic south—so the Star Wolf would have to come up from “below” for a nose-to-nose docking. As soon as HARLIE confirmed that they were in the channel for final approach, Parsons issued a single order. “All right,” she snapped. “Let’s do it. You have a go for docking.”

  Korie was listening through his headset. “The mission team is ready,” he reported.

  “Good. Mr. Korie, go suit up. I’ll meet you at the forward airlock for inspection. As soon as the docking tube is pressurized, you’re going across.”

  “On my way, Captain.” He was already pulling his headset off.

  “Oh, Korie,” Parsons called after him. “I want the log of the Norway.” Her tone was unequivocal. “Make that a special priority.”

  Translation: Make it your first priority. Rescue of the survivors was secondary to understanding what had happened here. Rescue was important. Understanding was more important. “Aye, Captain,” Korie said. He didn’t always agree with the cold equations of space, but he never argued with them.

  Korie ducked down into the Fire Control Bay, an equipment-filled chamber directly underneath the Command Deck. Five more steps aftward, down another short ladder and he was in the keel, the corridor that ran through the spine of the ship. He turned and headed forward, already thinking ahead to the mission. His frown deepened as a thought occurred to him. Did Captain Parsons know something more about the Norway than she was acknowledging? Did she know what they were likely to find?

  No. He dismissed the thought. If she knew, she’d have briefed him. She wouldn’t send a team into danger uninformed. No captain would. But it was possible she knew something ... No, Korie thrust even that thought away. “Jon, your paranoia is showing again,” he said to himself.

  On the Bridge, Captain Parsons watched the progress of the docking procedure with deep concern. The forward display showed the nose of the Norway, seen head on. The image of the starship grew steadily, expanding to fill the screen. The docking collar was open in a receiving position. The mating of the two vessels should be routine. But Captain Parsons had learned the hard way that nothing was ever routine in space. Everything was potentially deadly.

  HARLIE spoke then. “We are now in position for acquisition.”

  “Activate the repulsor fields,” Parsons ordered.

  “Activating the repulsor fields,” Goldberg echoed. Through the keel of the vessel, a new note added itself to the symphony of shipboard sounds, a deep heterodyning sensation. “Confirmed,” said Goldberg. “Fields are up. Five by five.”

  “We are ready to proceed with acquisition,” HARLIE said. “Go or nogo, Captain?”

  Parsons nodded. “Go.” Then she added, “Bring us in gently.”

  “Working,” HARLIE said.

  At their respective stations, the astrogator and helm watched carefully, each ready to take control immediately if any untoward circumstance occurred that HARLIE couldn’t handle. As unlikely as such a situation might seem, it had happened. And the Fleet had a tradition of never allowing its intelligence engines to work without human supervision.

  The two ships thumped softly together. The connection was barely felt aboard the Star Wolf.

  “We have acquisition,” said HARLIE. “Nose-to-nose docking confirmed.”

  “The board is green,” confirmed Jonesy from the helm. From the astrogation station, Tor added her own confirmations.

  “Extend the transfer tube,” ordered Parsons.

  “Working,” HARLIE said. A moment later, he added, “Transfer tube extended, sealed and locked. Stand by for transfer tube integrity check.” He paused. “Integrity check confirmed. Confidence is high. Ready for pressurization.”

  “Confirm that,” Jonesy said.

  “And again,” echoed Tor.

  “Pressurize,” ordered Parsons.

  “Working,” said HARLIE. And a moment later, added, “We have pressure in the transfer tube. Equalized. Confirmed.”

  Jonesy confirmed that, and so did Tor.

  “All right. Good. We’re ready to pop the hatch,” said Parsons. “Commander Tor, you have the conn.” She ducked down through the Fire Control Bay, following Korie’s path down to the keel and forward to the Airlock Reception Bay.

  At the nose of the ship, the airlock itself was a cramped tube, barely wide enough for two suited crewmembers at a time. Directly behind the airlock was the Forward Airlock Reception Bay. The FARB, as it was identified on the bulkheads, was a wider tube than the airlock. It was lined with suit-lockers, equipment racks and maintenance stations. Separating the Reception Bay from the airlock was a decontamination station.

  At the moment, the Reception Bay was cramped with suited figures. Although the Norway was a pressurized environment, Class-X protection required the use of starsuits or equivalent protective gear. Korie had opted for starsuits. Again, the captain’s imperative for caution had outweighed all other concerns, including comfort, mobility and expedience.

  Captain Parsons had to turn sideways to squeeze past the suited figures; she worked her way forward to Korie, acknowledging nods all the way. Chief Medical Officer Molly Williger was briefing Medical Technician Paul Berryman; not that he needed additional instructions at this point, but Molly Williger preferred to leave nothing to chance and she was trying to pour forty years of hands-on experience into a twentythree-year-old body. Berryman was wearing a portable medi-kit and a variety of scanning tools and medications.

  Security Officer Helen Bach stood patiently against one wall, flanked by Fire Control Officer “Wasabe” Shibano and Daniel Easton, another crewmember assigned to security detail. Easton had worked security before and had demonstrated considerable aptitude for it; now he was checking the charges on his, Bach’s and Shibano’s weapons—an exercise in redundancy, because the other two would have already checked their own armaments; but the revised procedure book required security teams to triple-check each other’s equipment. All of them wore additional helmet cameras. Every starsuit helmet on the ship already had a standard bank of cameras built-in, but for this mission additional high-resolution cameras and wide-spectrum scanners had been mounted on helmets, chest panels and backpacks.

  At the forward end of the reception bay, Mikhail Hodel was conferring hastily with Korie. Two Quillas, Omega and Theta, were helping Korie suit up while he talked. Parsons squeezed past Easton to join them. “Status?” she asked.

  “Just waiting for Mr. Korie to come up clean and green,” said Hodel.

  Behind her, Easton reported. “All the other boards are green. The hardware is ready. The software is clean. We have clean signals from all the remotes. Confidence is high.”

  Parsons nodded curtly. There wasn’t much she could say that she hadn’t already said. The situation was unknown, almost certainly dangerous—extremely dangerous. Everyone knew it. “All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Korie said, just as the two Quillas
lowered his helmet in place and sealed it with a series of electronic beeps and whistles. Parsons turned aftward. Easton was checking Berryman’s suit as carefully as a mother; Berryman looked as annoyed as an impatient cub. “Will you stop fussing already?” Berryman said. “No,” Easton replied blandly. He yanked another strap.

  Parsons followed the two Quillas aft, to get out of the way of the exiting team members. She paused alongside Molly Williger, meeting her glance with a questioning look.

  “Med Bay is ready,” Williger said unconvincingly.

  What made Captain Parsons an exceptional captain was that she listened to a person’s tone as much as their words, sometimes even more so. Now she looked at the chief medical officer, her eyes narrowing perceptively. “You don’t sound optimistic.”

  Williger looked up sharply. “You know the stats, Captain. Ninety percent of these rescue operations are too late. Yes, there might be people still alive over there, but ... they might also be trans-critical.” Trans-critical . Beyond saving.

  Or worse. Infectious.

  “I’m aware of that,” said Parsons. “But the rules of rescue are always operative, and those rules date back to a time even before there were spacecraft. Even if we have to put ourselves at risk, we’re required to make a full and responsible effort.” Then she added, “And we need the log. Almost as important as the rescue—sometimes even more important—we need the ship’s log. In this case ... this is probably one of the sometimes.”

  Williger grunted—neither agreement nor disagreement, merely acknowledgment. Like a stone dropped from a height, they no longer had a choice in the matter; they were going to fall toward their inevitable conclusion no matter how they felt about it. She turned back to preparations.

  Wasabe Shibano was double-checking Korie’s gear and the integrity of his starsuit. Korie ignored Shibano’s attentions as best as he could while he briefed Hodel. “HARLIE can’t get the log out by remote. Their intelligence engine has probably been shut down. We’ll try and wake it up, of course, but we don’t have the override codes if it’s locked down. If that’s the case, we’ll go around and yank the data from below. We’ll dump a copy of the core into one of our transmitters and let them decode it back at Fleet. I want to go straight to the trunk-channel under the Intelligence Bay and tap in there. The system should be on standby, but if there’s no power, then I’ll climb up and pull the cards manually. If the cards are missing, then we’ll have to grab the orange box. That’s your job. You know where the access panel is? Just behind the captain’s chair?” Hodel nodded and Korie passed over a plastic card, which Hodel tucked into a holder on the forearm of his suit. “Those are the codes to disarm the self-destruct on the orange box. If anything abnormal pops up, abort the procedure. Commander Brik will be riding in your ear, so minimize the jokes, Mike.”

  “I’ve worked tougher rooms than this,” Hodel said. Even through the glass of his helmet, his grin was visible. “I’ll have that Morthan giggling in his shorts in no time.”

  “As bizarre as that image is,” Korie acknowledged, “let’s stick to business on this one. This is serious.”

  Hodel sighed. “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Thanks, Mike.” Korie wondered if Brik had heard the exchange. Most likely, he had. Even so, he was unlikely to comment on it. Korie didn’t like Brik very much—no one onboard really did—but he did respect him, and the one time Fleet Command had offered to replace the Morthan security chief, Korie had rejected the suggestion. For all of his personal distaste, he knew the Star Wolf would never find a more qualified officer. He didn’t know how Brik felt about him, and he didn’t much care, although he surmised that Brik was at best amused and at worst annoyed by Korie’s presumption of equality because they both wore the same uniform. The important thing was that they worked well together. Possibly because they were each trying to prove something to the other.

  Annoyed, impatient and tense, Korie called back over his shoulder to Shibano. “Are we done yet? Or what?”

  “Jai!” said Wasabe, in that little explosive punctuation mark of language that non-Japanese hear as “Yes,” but really means, “I hear you,” and sometimes also means, “but I’m too polite to say no.” In Shibano’s case, however, it actually meant “Yes.”

  Although raised in a traditional Japanese culture, Shibano had been a starship officer long enough to have achieved that state that some sociologists called trans-human—a condition where one’s mental state was no longer local to a specific circumstance, but had become attuned instead to an interstellar scale of human behavior. In lay terms, a trans-human was an individual who had lived among the stars too long, someone with a million-light-year stare—someone who had traded in his or her definition of humanity for a more direct working knowledge of sentience.

  By that definition, most of the officers in the fleet could be considered trans-human. It came with the job. Few people were born into a trans-human state, but almost all evolved into it living on a starship. But some officers were more trans-human than others. Korie, for instance ...

  Korie finished with Hodel and spoke now to HARLIE. “Status report?”

  HARLIE replied blandly, “The transfer tube is fully pressurized. Integrity is confirmed. Repulsor fields are focused. Confidence is high. All mission preparations are complete.”

  “All right,” said Korie. “On my mark. Let’s go.”

  At the aft end of the Reception Bay, Parsons and Williger watched grimly. The interior hatch of the airlock popped open and the mission team began filing quickly into the cramped space of the airlock tube.

  “Mr. Korie—” Parsons said quietly into her headset.

  “Captain?” His voice came back through her earphone.

  “Let’s be careful out there.”

  Hearing that over his suit-phones, Korie smiled in recognition. It had been the watchword on Parson’s first ship, the Michael Conrad. Maybe it could be the watchword here too. Certainly, it should be.

  Hodel saw Korie’s smile. He’d heard the captain’s instructions, but not having the same background as Korie, he saw it as a straight line needing a topper. Ever the comedian, he poked Wasabe in the ribs and added, “Yep. Watch out for sparkle-dancers and man-eating tribbles.”

  “A man-eating tribble?” Wasabe asked.

  “Some men will eat anything,” Hodel replied blandly, reaching for a handhold.

  Korie, Bach, Hodel, Shibano, Berryman and Easton lined up in three rows of two in the airlock tube. As the hatch popped shut behind them, each grabbed one of the handholds above—this was a precaution in case of sudden decompression. Not that they expected it, but it was part of the drill.

  “We’re green,” said Korie. “Do it.”

  Through their suits they could hear the mechanical sounds of clamps engaging and locking—additional fail-safes on all the hatches. The deep heterodyning note of the repulsors was more noticeable here; an almost palpable sensation that made the hair on the back of the neck stand up in dismay.

  Korie studied a display on the bulkhead. “Tube pressure confirmed here,” he reported.

  For a moment, nothing happened, then—

  Boarding

  The hatch opened slowly, revealing the interior of the transfer tube. The semi-translucent material of the tube looked solid, an illusion of air pressure. The presence of the looming red star seeped through the membrane; one side of the tube was dark, the other glowed with a brooding crimson tint. Railings extended the length of the tube to provide handholds for the starsuited crew. Exterior to both ships, the transfer tube was a null-gravity zone.

  Standard procedure would have been to leap out into free fall and coast across.

  But not here, not now. Not with the repulsor fields throbbing.

  The fields were a physical presence, like invisible surf pushing them inexorably forward. Coming from the other direction, it would have felt like pushing through gelatin and spiderwebs and elastic; it would have felt as if the air had been thickened. Moving with t
he pressure was like riding a rising balloon. It was a tangible sensation. The mission team grabbed handholds on the railings and let themselves be pushed along.

  The combined strength of three concentric fields was focused into the transfer tube. The power expenditure to maintain a palpable force of this strength was enormous. The Star Wolf had shut down all of her non-essential systems to maintain this safety barrier.

  Korie had never moved through such a strong field before and it gave him a queasy sensation in his gut as the pressure worked on his internal organs. And then, abruptly, he was through the thickest part of the field and coming up to the outer hatch of the Norway’s forward airlock. Even so, he could still feel a residual push.

  Korie turned and watched as the entire mission team came across. Lt. Bach was the last to exit the Star Wolf’s airlock. Korie reported, “All right. We’re clear. Seal the hatch.” It popped shut with a hard mechanical thump—the Star Wolf was secure. And as soon as the Norway’s hatch was opened, the mission team would be regarded as contaminated ...

  Hodel was watching a set of readouts on the arm of his suit. “Pressure is equalized to the Norway,” he announced.

  Korie acknowledged the report and turned forward to the Norway’s forward hatch. He held an entry card against a reader plate, and waited for the panel to turn green, silently praying that the Norway would recognize their authority. He didn’t want to manually force the hatch, he didn’t want to cut his way in. He wanted this operation to run smoothly. By the book. The panel went green and Korie whispered soft thanks to the unseen crew on the other side. “That’s a good sign,” he said.

  “Yeah, they’re only paranoid, not crazy,” agreed Hodel.

  “It’s wartime. Everybody’s crazy. The only question is whether we’re crazy enough. All right, here we go. Bach, Easton, Shibano—” The security officers pulled themselves into position just behind Korie. They unshouldered their weapons. They raised blast-shields into position.