Chapter 4
By Cliff
Beta By Nathan
Reviewed by Hotpoint.
21 Aug 3046
LGR 2345 over 600 light years from New Circe, 800 light years from Inner Sphere
The SLS Styx popped out into real space five days later in a null gravity zone. There was no way that any would have called this a standard jump point. They were far too close to celestial bodies for that. Instead, the transient point of equalized gravity was known as a “pirate point”.
They had an updated location of the wrecked JumpShip, which was “only” few months old. Months old data and orbital body movement meant that the relatively small JumpShip would be relatively difficult to locate.
Captain Copeland hoped that they might be able to register some sort of emissions from the ship. It seemed that centuries of drifting abandoned had left their target completely dark. The Styx even tried thermal imaging, hoping to locate the leftover heat from the fusion power plant, but to no avail.
At least they had time. It should have taken over twenty jump cycles to get here, even with using the lithium-fusion battery to do double jumps. If everything had worked perfectly in years past it would have taken the over sixty weeks to make it to this one location. Now, with the use of the Colonial drive the Styx could have me the trip in even less time than it had, save for the need for security.
The escort vessel for the modified Tramp-class JumpShip had only been around at the end of all the jumps completed in a day. It always seemed to be on other tasks. Ones that also just happened to be on the other end of whatever solar system the stop happened to be in.
The Captain of that vessel was fallowing the letter of his orders, but not the spirit of them. He thought it was going to protect him when they returned home. Doubtless he felt he would be vindicated by the mission review.
Robert knew otherwise. He was giving the man enough rope, and he expected the arrogant officer to hang himself. Every detail of the escort’s actions was noted in the larger ships log, by whatever person had deck duty when the “escort” would check in.
Robert knew a little secret he was sure the younger man did not. It was that higher command did not have room for a person who only fallowed the letter of the given orders. Adherence to orders was neither and excuse for bad behavior in the Wolverine navy. Both Robert and Jules had seen what happened to officers that thought so and knew what would be done. All they had to do was to hold their temper until they got back home.
The 660 meter long Styx fired its station keeping drives and pointed its nose toward the star at the center of this bit of the deep dark. The jump sail started its deployment and, unlike before, an active radar started its screaming into the open cold of space.
It was looking to bounce its attenuated energy beams off of what the ships and their crews had traveled so far to find. Active light-speed sensor use would be slowed by distance, but sure. Eventually they would find their prize.
It took less time than Robert had feared. A few minutes after the start of the active scan, the sensor crewman reported.
“Sir, I have a contact,” they said. “100,000 KM out and down 45 degrees from the nose and 67 to 66 degrees to port. It looks like she is moving at about 1.5 km/s on a line taking her away from us. It reads about the right mass for our baby.”
“Good,” said Robert. “Pass along that information to the Hard Hat, with an okay for them to depart whenever they are ready. Have the White Skies launch when she is ready. I want her to be ready to move crews over to that wreck. The faster we can get this done the better. Be safe about it. I do not want to have to write any letters to surviving families when we get back home.”
The 15,000 ton Hard Hat was an Elephant-class, nearly unique among the ships of the SLDF-In-Exile. It shared the standard spheroid DropShip shape from the trusters to about halfway along the hull. From below, it could seem to be a Mule or Union-class DropShip, or any one of a dozen other ship classes.
The specialty of the Elephant was from admidship forward. A massive, heavily articulated series of manipulators tipped with magnetic clamps allowed the Hard Hat, and other of her type, to move around ships many times her own size. The Hard Hat would use that ability to retrieve the damaged JumpShip.
It only took a short burn from tug’s massive drives to get the tug moving towards the Scout-class JumpShip. It did not take long for the tug’s support systems to spot the target and her cargo, which was strapped to her single docking collar. Once clear of the Styx and its fragile jump sail. The tug fired it massive engine for a 1.75 g burn for a few minutes. She needed to get her speed built up to catch up to the target.
When the tug was half way to the tumbling target ship, it flipped, and then re-fired its engines a second time. It was not a full powered burn, but was only to slow down some. It needed to find out more about its target before any work could be done.
The Hard Hat flew the length of the ship, training its sensors on the stricken Scout. It had been out in deep space for a long time without anyone to look after it. That was never a good thing to happen to a high-tech item, and centuries of exposure to space dust and hard radiation could do all sorts of nasty things to any piece of high technology.
The scan was quick, but thorough. Watching a video relay on the Styx, Robert could see the hull of the vessel pitted by micrometeorites and scraped by space dust. To an untrained eye, the ship would have looked like a worthless hulk.
He wondered to himself. Whatever had happened in the past? It had not killed every one of the crew at once. What would it have been like to be stuck here in a strange system, with no hope of escape?
Someone had tried to deploy the jump sail, but now no one could tell if it had worked, helped, or not. Whatever power might have built up within the K-F drive had long since dissipated. The sail was mostly gone. Just a few hundred meters were left streaming behind the wrecked ship connected by two deployment wires still connected to the outer hull of the small ship. The tatters of the sail streamed behind it like a forlorn banner. It looked pitiful, but that banner must have been why the Styx’s scan had gotten results so quickly.
The tug fired a short burst of its massive main engines to stop its motion relative to the Scout. The huge tug fire maneuvering thrusters and started the process of closing the gap to the JumpShip, but very slowly. Their grapple point was on the nose. They needed to get the Tug in line with that, and would have to pass quite close to the docking ring, and the DropShip attached there. They only missed it by a few meters. The fine control jets were fired to match the exact rotation of the 90,000-ton tumbling ship. Robert felt himself tense. Failure could badly damage one, some, or all of the three vessels. It was a credit to the Hard Hat’s crew that they did it with precision and care.
The next move was the trickiest, and it was the reason that only the best pilots were given the job as a Tug pilot. Tug pilots in the Wolverine navy were paid more than combat pilots, and with good reason..
This tug pilot made more per month than any DropShip Captain in the fleet. She earned every penny of her paycheck today. She had to flip her ship. It moved 180 degrees after passing the JumpShip. Robert felt himself tense as the bell-like protrusions of the main engines came perilously close to the prow of the JumpShip. After the maneuver, and the firing of a few more thrusters, the Hard Hat sat nose-to-nose with the Scout.
She was moving perfectly in all three dimensions. She was mirroring exactly the JumpShip’s rotation so they could start the next part of the job. SLDF Navy doctrine said that she would only have three tries to snag her target. After that she would have to turn the task over to her back up pilot. This person would also only have three tries. If all six tries had failed? They would need to wait a day before they could do it all again. Salvage pilots had nerves of steel that no one, not even assault pilots, could rival.
The Hard Hat now closed the distance to the wreck, at only about two meters a second. It had to be slow, so as to lessen the chance of damaging the target any more. At about ten meters from the JumpShip, the DropShip halted its approach. The triangle shaped plate on the front of the Elephant extended, and the clamp ended arms readied themselves for action.
When the arms were fully deployed, the two ships slowly started to close again, and then the clamps reached out. The magnetic fields from the manipulators started to reach out further and further. They started pulling the ships closer together until the ball-shaped front of the scout vessel touched the smaller tug. Then the thick and perfectly shaped armored plate standing off the nose of the old DropShip was standing out almost two meters from the tug.
Now as one big mass moving through space, the Hard Hat finished attaching herself to the larger ship with all of the docking arms. Each arm was tested to ensure it was secure, one at time. If the hold was weak it would be reset and tested. It was imperative that the two ships not separate from each other.
When all of the arm testing had been completed a group of small-to-medium sized thrusters in a set sequence came to life. First, they had to stop the roll.
That had to be done over s space of minutes. Though the roll was slow, they took two hours to bring the roll to a stop relative to the Styx. Any faster would have caused a torquing stress towing the vessel. This torquing stress would have warped the jumpdrive, damaging it further than it already was.
Robert, who was in constant contact with the captain of the Hard Hat, could occasionally hear the stress of the tug’s pilot through the communicator. Several times he heard what must have been the tail end of a stream of invective from the pilot coming over the mic of the Hard Hat’s captain. The deceleration had to be adjusted to avoid damaging the JumpShip, and the stress of the adjustments was apparently quite frustrating.. It was very unseemly behavior, but Robert let it slide. The pilot had enough on her plate already.
She did get points for being able to snag the errant JumpShip on the first try. The next step was to stop the end-over-end rotation of the 90,000ton JumpShip, which somehow had developed while it had been in this star system. They wanted to do this maneuver in such a way that the Hard Hat’s main engine was also pointed way from the Styx. Only one set of thrusters were going to be used, for safety’s sake. This rotation was more aggressive than the roll, and took the tug and pilot four more hours to stop. By the end, Robert was fairly certain the pilot of the tug must be hoarse from her tirade.
You would think, thought Robert, that after all of hair pulling out stress that had been already been endured that slowing down the escaping ship would be child’s play, It would have been right normally, though Robert had hs doubts. Six hours of tense work ad left the Hard Hat’s crew drained. They were at the limit for non-emergency work load, and it was time to take a break, lest someone’s exhaustion lead to negligence..
The Captain of the Hard Hat knew went it was too dangerous to continue. When the time came, he pulled the plug on the operation for eighteen hours of down time for his key personnel. The crew went to minimum manning all around the DropShip. A bridge watch was kept to keep an eye on things, but for most of the day the assembly of tug and JumpShip simply floated in space.
The first bit of work the next day, before any work on recovering the JumpShip could start, was to contact the Styx and ask for a situation update. The only thing the Styx reported was that one of the jump fighters was in system. They did not know where it, or the carrier it was assigned to. had gone.
The next hour was spent re-checking all the towing systems and locks between the two ships. While there had been so indications of a possible failure, salvage crews knew better than to simply trust that everything was safe. A failure now could destroy both vessels.
With all the grunt work done, the engines on the Hard Hat fired up to the idle power setting. The massive main engine could have pushed the DropShip along at over 4g if it needed to. Now it only slowly built up thrust to 0.5g of output. Any more could damage the JumpShip, which was never intended to move at a significant acceleration.
The Scout-class JumpShip had been alone in space for a long time, and it had picked up enough velocity that it would take some time to bring the vessel to rest. The low power setting on the Tug’s engines was a way to safely slowly stop the wreck. It kept the target from getting even farther from the Styx, which was the tug’s ride home.
Now that the ship was not getting farther from help, it now started to slowly make its way toward the other ships. This allowed the next phase to start in the recovery of the target. A group of three repair techs entered a repair tube that had extended out from the primary hull of the Hard Hat, through the armored plate and arms that connected the two ships.
The tug-class onboard computer systems had been loaded with the schematics for most ships that had been produced up until the SLDF had left on its Exodus. This included all civilian ships that had been designed during that time frame. That way the tugs would be able to help them, when they got into trouble. The techs would use this information to make a survey of their salvage prize.
It was easy for the repair techs to direct the access tube to the emergency hatch. This would have held one of the four escape pods while the Scout-class was operable. The tube sealed up tight to its target, and the crews tried to open the hatch, but soon they were stopped by built in safeties that were still working. Without power, the hatch indicator still registered the passage as open to space, and would not budge.
That obstacle took the survey team a few hours to overcome. Each lock had to be cut through, one by one. By the time they made it into the ship, the first group had little air left. Their primary job was to patch as many holes in the skin of the craft as they could and close any open hatches.
They also ended up counting all the dead bodies, still held by the hulk after centuries. The mummified remains of over twenty people were found, in different areas of the ship. That was far more people than the crew of the little JumpShip was supposed to have. This first group also found out that all the doors and hatches to the DropShip, and the main bridge of the JumpShip were locked down tight.
It took three days for the two ships to make it back to the target location, just two Km from the Styx and the jump point. The Styx’s other DropShip, the White Skies, was not launched until the second day of the recovery. She used her small craft to send crews over to the hulk a few at a time.
The two recovered ships would be lifeless hulks, at least until their fusion engine could be fixed. Until then the Hard Hat was supplying all the power to run the lights and repair equipment on the Scout. If this had been done by any other class of DropShip, it might have been a problem. For the Hard Hat it was just another day at the office, and the work went on.
The Captain of the Hard Hat was a rail-thin man with skin that looked too thin for a living person. He had all the appearance of someone who spent too much time in space and preferred for it to stay that way. It did not seem to matter to him what the health effects might be.
Since they did not have to exercise emissions protocols, he used the radio to transmit a live image to his Robert. He was of the opinion, that if you had to deliver bad news you should be able to look your boss in the eyes when you give it.
“Sir, said the Hard Hat’s captain, “We cannot get this ship to jump on her own core. We have completed all the repairs that we can using our allotted spares. We should have a detailed list of possible item or systems, which need to be fixed for a bigger facility. My team has done everything that they can with our limitations of parts and time.”
He had hoped that some spares and a little work would be enough to get this Scout back into service. Before the Colonials had moved in he would have told his mission commander just to blow the wreck to bits and move on. Times had changed. The Colonial drive meant that this ship was now salvageable. That was all a tug commander would wish for.
A third and new image was soon displayed on the screen being used for this meeting. He started talking as soon as his image cam on. “Captain. Can you give everyone an update, to what your people have found out about this ship?” This was from the Captain of the White Skies. He was the youngest of the three men, and on his first mission outside of the home system. He was still trying to figure out where and how he fit in.
The thin Captain of the Tug came back on the line, and he had a frown on his face. It was his opinion that this should be handled via written reports, not chatting on a video conference. But he had been asked a direct question, and it needed to be answered.
“We know that all of the escape craft were ejected. Not used, just ejected from the ship. All the hatches, bay doors, and anything else that would open to space had been opened to space. Mostly likely due to a computer or system command. The only hatches that were not opened were the ones going to the Dropship and to the Bridge. The Bridge hatch was dogged and locked from the inside. I can tell you that it took some time and precision cutting to get inside of both of those areas.”
“When we did get the hatch open to the Bridge we found one body. Female. We think that she was in her late teens or early 20’s, but we are not for sure. It looks like she opened the ship to space. Why was this done we do not know, and we might never know. All of the data storage areas are ruined and with the ship open to space. Any lose paper or notebooks went out airlocks at the same time the air did. Kerensky knows where that all is now. We were going to do a burial in space for everyone, as was planned for before we left New Circe. Now that this might be a crime scene? We have put everybody in body bags and stored them. All the personnel effects have been cataloged and boxed. I had them put it the same room as all the bodies.”
It was apparent that talking about dealing with dead bodies was wearing on the tug ship’s master. He gave his head a slight shake to clear some remembered image.
Robert stepped in.
“Thank you, Captain,” he said. “I know stuff like that is hard to deal with. Please pass along to your crew that they did a top shelf job, and it will be reported as such when we get back home. What about the rest of the ship?”
“The JumpShip’s hull has been patched and is now air tight and good for jumping.” replied the Hard Hat’s captain. “All of the computers have been damaged by cosmic rays, but no more so than was expected. We are repairing a lot of the computer and support systems with the spares we have. But this hulk will need a complete software reinstall. We do not have the right software here.”
“The jump sail will have to be replaced. We had to cut what was left and just let it float off. It was getting in the way of other tasks, and it was of no use to us. It will be cheaper to replace most of the power system instead of trying to repair it. The entire helium system will have to be replaced all the way from the main holding tanks to the seals going into the core. The Fusion engine will have to have some rebuilding, but we think it can be repaired. Overall not too bad. If we had a Yard ship here? We could have gotten her fully jump ready in a month or so.
He shrugged. “As it is, we need to go with Plan B after all.”
Plan A had been to repair the Scout in place, put a skeleton crew aboard her, and jump her back to New Circe. It would have taken a while, but with escorts it was by far the safest method,
Plan B was riskier, even if only because it involved a new techniquie. The Styx would need to carry the Scout to her destination using the Colonial drive. That still seemed impossible to Robert, but it was apparently quite possible.
The Tug captain stopped talking, and checked his notes, and took a sip of water from a zero g bulb. “We have been checking out the leopard CV. Her computers were not as damaged as the JumpShips, so we found out that she was built for House Kurita around 2705. How did it wind up on this side of space we could not find out. Well, not yet.”
He gave the camera a sly grin. “She was sealed but is in bad shape. It’s nothing that a good cleaning, could not take care of. She was being used as a pirate vessel operating in and around the Free Worlds League. The records end around 2825. She has five fighters loaded, all of them damaged. Some more than others, but all have seen battle before they were stranded out here.”
“We found a Cheetah, a complete lance of Lightnings, a huge Stuka, and the worst damaged is an Ironsides. I do not know if we have parts to repair them, even back on New Circe. We did not expect to see them. We assumed the ship had been stripped. It is a decent haul, but I would bet that they will wind up in storage or scrapped for spare parts.”
The meeting went on for another half hour before Robert put an end to it. They were starting to rehash items that had already been covered or out of their control.
“That does it gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s wrap this up. I think we have covered everything now. I want to start pushing the Scout towards the Styx and get her tied down by the end of the week. I want to be on the way home, with that hunk of junk, in four days ladies and gentlemen. We will have six more days on the road to find or fix what we can on her. I will get a message to Benedict to let him know about the change of plans. I am sure he will really love it. And no, do not pass that last part to your crews.”
Robert had a sly smile on his face. He had stopped calling Benedict by his rank among this group of Captains by his rank some time ago. It was bad for, but all of them had reason to dislike the man.
He looked around the screen and then around room. With a nod to each person. Robert stood up from his chair and pulled himself out of the meeting camera frame. It was time to wrap this up and get home.
