Black Fleet Trilogy 1: Warship (27 page)

"This is Captain Jackson Wolfe, commanding officer,
TCS
Blue Jacket
, and this will be the final log entry for DS-701. I have ordered all hands to abandon ship as she is no longer safe nor capable of controlled flight. We have been battling an alien incursion that is made up of a single ship since arriving in the Xi'an system nearly three weeks ago. We have inflicted grave damage to the enemy, but they have persevered and delivered a killing blow to my ship.

"My hope is that the data cores that this log is attached to will help the Terran Confederacy understand what happened out here on the frontier and help them prepare for what must be coming. My observations of this alien ship lead me to believe its mission was to learn about us and our capabilities even while it was destroying industrial and agricultural capability along the way. Any of my crew that are recovered can vouch for the data contained within.

"This Captain Jackson Wolfe, signing off."

He appended the entry to the log, sent it to the backup system, and ejected it after he got the confirmation it had been uploaded. By the time he was done the last few crewmembers had made it off the ship and the number remaining on his display showed one. He verified that the one crewmember left was himself before getting up and walking over to the tactical station.

The alien ship was still trying to put some distance between themselves and the stricken destroyer. He could already see that the edges of the massive wound they inflicted were beginning to curl in and pull together in an attempt to heal the damage. It was as if the damn thing couldn't be stopped. The imagery cementing his decision, he quickly pulled up another set of screens, logged in with his credentials, and began inputting commands.

It was nearly eleven overrides later when he finally began receiving warnings that what he was doing was successful, and highly dangerous. He watched as reactor one came back out of safe mode and joined the other three as they began winding up to full power, then past it. All four were soon operating at one hundred and thirty percent of their accepted maximum output. He quickly sent information over to the helm before racing over to the reclined seat and strapping himself in.

****

"Is there any way to tell if we're all off?" Major Ortiz asked. Between the stress of the order to abandon the
Blue Jacket
, and being suddenly forced into a zero gravity environment, nobody in the lifepod was looking all that chipper.

"No," Celesta said. "Captain Wolfe wants us to remain silent for a few hours before turning on the radios and beacons."

"Is there anyone left on the
Blue Jacket
?" the major asked, peering out the small portal in the side of the pod.

"There shouldn't be by now, why?" Celesta asked.

"See for yourself," Ortiz said, floating out of the way so she could look out. It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing, but after a second there was no doubt as the three remaining engines on the
Blue Jacket
flared brightly and the ship began to accelerate away from the formation of lifepods with surprising speed. Celesta knew who must be still onboard and she also thought she knew why.

"Goddamn it, Captain," she said quietly. "There had to have been another way."

****

Jackson strapped himself into the helmsman's seat, noting how wonderfully comfortable it was, before taking inventory of what flight systems were left available. Three out of four main engines, no bow thrust, and limited attitude control in general ... should be an interesting few minutes. He advanced the throttles smoothly and felt the pull as the mains pushed the destroyer away from the lifepods at maximum acceleration.

It took a long, arcing turn to come onto his new course since he couldn't use the bow thrusters to point him in the right direction. Once he was on the proper track he reached over and flicked up four hoods, each safety wired down with a fine copper line, to expose four ordinary looking toggle switches. He flicked them up one at a time and watched on his main display for confirmation that four circular hatches had been blown clear from the stern of the ship.

EMERGENCY AUXILIARY THRUST AVAILABLE

The message flashed on his display twice before the red button to the left of the throttles lit up and began blinking. When he'd flicked up the secured switches the thrust nozzles of four massive solid rocket motors, which had been right under the hatches, had been exposed to space. The system was a last ditch failsafe in case the ship was in a decaying orbit with main propulsion failing. It would also give the
Blue Jacket
a tremendous burst of acceleration when the time came and he ignited the boosters.

Jackson pulled up the powerplant vitals on one of the station's displays and watched as his reactors began to heat up to their maximum allowable limits. He'd disabled all the emergency shutdown protocols and allowed them to cook. The coolant system was taxed beyond its limits as the steam pressure built and the power generating turbines that were within the closed system were also pushed to dangerous levels.

"I've got one last little surprise for you mother fuckers," Jackson said with a grim smile. "Neither of us is making it out of this system alive."

Within a few minutes he could see the alien ship on the thermal optics. He made a few more course corrections and let the computer lock onto the exact point he wanted to be at and turned over control. The thousands of fine corrections needed at the closure speed he was achieving meant it was impossible for him to manually steer the stricken ship. As the computer fully took over the helm he cinched his straps down and pulled up another menu on his right display. He began venting superheated steam from the reactor coolant system to alleviate the pressure on the turbines, still needing them functional for the next few minutes, and pulled up a precise range calculation between him and the target.

When he crossed the seventy thousand kilometer mark he closed his eyes and let out a cleansing breath. He quickly disabled the water jets that directly cooled the reactors, relying on the pressure already built up in the system to continue providing power even as the reactor temperatures began to climb again, now far past their redline. He smacked the flashing red button on his left and waited as the ship vibrated harshly with the ignition of the four mammoth rocket engines. With an explosive
whump
he was shoved violently back into his seat as the
Blue Jacket
leapt forward with renewed vigor.

The human visual cortex was still a relatively primitive processing center whose evolution had not kept pace with technology. It was never designed to interpret objects at the distances and speeds humans were now able to achieve with their machines. Jackson knew this on an intellectual level, but he was still surprised when the alien ship went from a relatively insignificant spec to suddenly filling the entire view. The closure was so fast that he didn't have time to swear or even brace himself, both useless actions, before the final impact.

****

He watched his sensor display with interest as lifepods began popping off the port and ventral surfaces of the badly damaged destroyer. He'd watched the entire battle unfold in the Nuovo Patria system and had thought Captain Wolfe might have actually been able to defeat the leviathan. It was with dismay that he watched the
Blue Jacket
, streaming atmosphere and missing an engine, disgorge her crew even as the alien ship began moving out of the system. The trick with the ten strategic missiles had been brilliant, but ultimately not enough.

Just before he was about to finalize his recordings and make a hasty retreat the engines on the
Blue Jacket
flared and the destroyer flew off towards the enemy. He watched with further interest as white hot gouts of flame burst from the ship's stern and she streaked like a missile towards the target. He held his breath until the inevitable and the destroyer slammed her ruined prow into the exposed interior of alien ship.

When his sensors were able to refocus on the pair of ships he could see the stern of the
Blue Jacket
, badly deformed, sticking out of the wound in the enemy ship, which was now spinning out of control. He was still considering if that would be enough to permanently disable the beast when one or more of the
Blue Jacket's
reactors went critical and his displays were washed out in a brilliant nuclear blast that made him blink even with the sensors attenuating themselves.

This time when the image resolved itself he knew the alien ship was not going anywhere. It was now in at least a dozen large pieces, each spiraling away from each other at high velocity.

It was over. For now.

"I can't believe you did it," he said. "You crazy son of a bitch." He finalized the data packet he'd been preparing and prepped a com drone, pausing a moment to add a final message.

"This is Pike," he said. "The enemy has been stopped in the Nuovo Patria system. I've uploaded all the data from the time the alien appeared to when the
Blue Jacket
was destroyed stopping it. I've tracked an object originating from the enemy ship moving away from the battle at high speed back towards the frontier. I have to assume it's delivering a message back to wherever it came from. I cannot intercept it from where I'm at.

"We have the remaining crew of the destroyer in lifepods within the system and we need rescue support immediately. I'm tracking the debris from the alien ship and will update when relief arrives."

Agent Pike added the message and fired off the newest generation of com drone towards the next system over. He knew there were two CIS Prowlers sitting less than ten hours’ flight time away. He leaned back in his seat, the instruments of his Broadhead softly pinging as he considered what he'd just been witness to.

Chapter 23

"Where am I?" Jackson Wolfe asked. It had taken him over ten minutes to get his mouth working in order to speak the words. When he finally managed it, they rasped out of his throat like dry autumn leaves.

"Please just answer a few questions for us," a voice said from above him. He couldn't see anything but shifting shapes in the light. "Do you know who you are?"

"Jackson," he said. "Jackson Wolfe."

"What's the last thing you remember, Mr. Wolfe?" the voice asked. He paused, confused. It had been some years before anyone had addressed him as "mister."

"My crew," he croaked, ignoring the question. "What happened to my crew? And where am I?"

"Please relax for a moment."

He felt his body begin to incline upwards, only then realizing that he'd been lying down flat. After that the lights began to get brighter as he felt someone unwrapping something from around his head. Soon he was blinking, the brightness of the light torturously painful.

"Wait here," the middle-aged man standing next to the bed said to him, turning to leave. Squinting, Jackson was able to see he was firmly secured to the bed with straps, so he wasn't sure where the man thought he'd be going. It was another thirty minutes or so before anyone else came in. He had drifted in and out of sleep during the time so it was impossible to tell.

"Commander Wright," he said with a smile that hurt his cracked lips. "Civvies and long hair? You're out of uniform."

She favored him with a sad smile before sitting down beside the bed. "It's just Celesta right now," she said. "We've both been taken off active duty pending an investigation into events on the
Blue Jacket
and our eventual trials. You're to be first so I've been cooling my heels waiting to see if you would ever wake up."

"No good deed, eh?" he said with a mirthless laugh. "So how long was I out?"

"Nearly two weeks."

"More to the point, how the hell am I still alive?" Jackson asked, accepting the assistance from Celesta with the glass of water that seemed to weigh a ton.

"The short answer is that when you hit the alien ship the superstructure was sheared clean off the hull," she said. "The bridge was sealed and had a self-contained, emergency life support system so when the recovery team finally got around to tracking down the missing pieces of the ship they found you still secure in the helmsman's seat on the way out of the system at high velocity."

"Interesting," he said neutrally. "I would assume I didn't just need a bit of rest and fluids to survive that?"

"No," she said. "You were nearly dead. Collapsed lung, bruised heart, severe dehydration, severe concussion, skull fracture, blood sepsis from all the untreated wounds ... that's most of the more serious stuff."

"Which was the worst?"

"Are you sure you want to know this soon?" When he nodded she reached over him and pulled the blankets up and back so he could see that his left leg now ended about six inches below the knee.

"Well ... shit."

****

It was two agonizing months later when Jackson was finally discharged from the medical facility. He'd been given a cheap civilian suit to wear as he was not entitled to wear his uniform under his current status. If he was cleared of the charges, an unlikely event given that most of them were true, he would have his rank and status restored. From what he'd learned from the smarmy attorney the JAG had sent over, he'd be lucky if all that happened to him was a quiet discharge from service and a ride back to Earth. The more likely scenario was that he was staring down the barrel of a long prison sentence.

He had been isolated from the rest of the crew during his recovery, something that was just short of actual incarceration, and informed in no uncertain terms that his security clearance was revoked and any discussion of the previous mission would land him in a Fleet brig no matter how serious his injuries were.

It was only the fact that he was still heavily medicated that even allowed him to view those restrictions with a certain ambivalence. On one hand there was an almost overpowering sense of panic that so much time had passed without the Fleet fully mobilizing. On the other there was the relaxed feeling of being safe on Haven and under the influence of powerful narcotics. As they weaned him off the pain killers and his recuperation and rehabilitation period came to an end the concerns of what they'd found on the frontier came flooding back. For a while, when he first woke up and realized he wasn't dead, he was almost able to convince himself that it hadn't really happened. Something else must have happened to his ship and his subconscious had made up some fantastic story to explain away his obvious incompetence. One look at Celesta Wright's face, however, brought that illusion crashing down around him.

Now, as he walked with defiance toward the waiting Fleet vehicle—complete with armed Marine guards—he knew that he would have just one chance to try and rectify the situation.

****

"Mr. Wolfe, please be seated."

Jackson sat down next to his JAG-appointed attorney and looked over his inquiry board. Two senior captains, one fleet admiral who pulled considerable weight on Haven, and his nemesis: Admiral Alyson Winters. Of course.

"This board of inquiry is to determine if the formal charges against you will proceed and a full court martial convened," one of the captains was saying, reading off a tile in front of him. Jackson thought his name was Brabus, but he couldn't read the name tag from where he was seated. "The
only
things we will be discussing today are the specific charges. Any mitigating circumstances that may exist shall be left for the full court martial proceedings. Do you have any questions?"

"My client understands the nature of these proceedings, sir," the lawyer spoke up before Jackson could even open his mouth.

"Very well," the captain said. It was definitely Brabus. Jackson could remember meeting him during a conference on Jericho Station. "Admiral Winters ... you initiated the charges against Mr. Wolfe. You may proceed."

"Thank you, Captain," Winters said, looking at Jackson the way a cobra might look at a rat. "Jackson Wolfe ... you are charged with disobeying a direct order from a superior officer, theft of Confederate property, namely the
TCS
Blue Jacket
, dereliction of duty that resulted in the loss of life as well as the complete destruction of your ship, the aforementioned
TCS
Blue Jacket
. Do you understand the charges against you?"

"My client—"

"Your client can speak for himself," Jackson said sharply, glaring at the lawyer. "Now sit there and shut up unless I request your counsel."

"Mr. Wolfe!" Brabus said sharply. "A little decorum, if you please."

"Captain Brabus ... I'm from Earth. Apparently I have no decorum, just ask Admiral Winters," Jackson said. "Furthermore, I'm technically a civilian right now and feel little need to adhere to military etiquette and protocol."

"Very well, Mr. Wolfe," Winters said in a voice that was so brittle it crackled. "How do you plead?"

"Before I answer, I have a question," Jackson said, looking her in the eye. "How the hell is it that I'm sitting here and you're up there without a care in the world? You and I both know that you should be sitting in a brig somewhere awaiting—"

"That's enough!" Fleet Admiral Jessop boomed. "Mr. Wolfe, you will answer the question. Guilty or not guilty. Those are the only two options you have in what comes out of your mouth next. We are well aware of the situation on the frontier—"

"I highly doubt that," Jackson interrupted.

"—but none of that is germane to your situation," Jessop finished. "Try to muster what little dignity you have left and let's get this over with. I think we both know this is going to a full court martial."

Before Jackson could answer, the double doors at the back of the chamber opened with a crash and he could hear multiple pairs of footsteps coming up the aisle. Thanks to the injuries to his neck he couldn't even attempt to turn and see who it was.

"Now what the hell is going on?" Brabus said irritably, rising out of his seat.

"Admiral Alyson Winters," a voice called loudly from behind him. "You are under arrest. Please stand and surrender yourself to the Marines behind me."

"What is the meaning of this?" Jessop nearly shouted, his face turning red. "What's the charge?"

"Treason," another voice said, this one much more familiar. "There are a few others that will be filed later, but that's the only one she needs to know for now."

"And just who the hell are you?" Jessop asked, trying to reassert control on the proceedings as they spiraled into chaos.

"My name is Aston Lynch, aide to Senator Augustus Wellington," Pike said as he walked around the table. Jackson just stared as the arrogant prick that was Aston Lynch walked up to the bench with a self-satisfied smirk. "But I'm just the messenger. Winters is being arrested under the authority of CENTCOM Chief of Staff Marcum. Here's the paperwork." Lynch/Pike handed Jessop a sheaf of hardcopy documents and waited as he shuffled through them, his jaw dropping lower and lower as he read.

"Take her," Jessop said quietly, leaning back in his seat as the Marines walked up and grabbed a gibbering Alyson Winters roughly and slapped restraints on her.

"Thank you for the permission, Admiral," Pike said sardonically, "but we weren't exactly asking."

Jessop cleared his throat, looking at Jackson with obvious distaste, "
Captain
Jackson Wolfe, under the authority of CENTCOM Chief of Staff Joseph Marcum and President Caleb McKellar all charges against you are dropped and your rank within the Confederate Starfleet is reinstated, effective immediately. You are ordered to appear before the Chief of Staff at eleven hundred hours tomorrow."

"Thank you, Admiral," Jackson said, not bothering to stand while not in uniform. He watched as Pike leaned in and whispered something into Winters' ear. Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of her. Her expression transformed from one of anger and confusion to one of genuine fear. She looked at Jackson with a haunted expression. He smiled largely and waved to her, much to the disgust of Fleet Admiral Jessop.

After the chaos had died down and people were filing out, Jackson hauled himself out of the chair and turned to leave. He was still not fully mobile and he had to be careful how quickly he turned. As he was leaving, intent on making sure that the charges against Celesta were also nullified, he passed a smirking Agent Pike standing just outside the chamber door.

"Interesting timing, Mr. Lynch," Jackson said.

"Oh, you have no idea, Captain," Pike answered, breaking character. "I've had to sit on that for a few weeks waiting for this exact moment ... and it was every bit as glorious as I'd dreamed it would be. Did you see her face? Anyway, our analysts were going through the com platform logs and figured out pretty quickly what she'd done with your status reports. Normally that sort of thing would be overlooked, but when we have nearly two billion people dead, powerful people demand answers. Winters was stupid enough to assume just because she deleted her local copies that the evidence of her tampering was erased."

"I have to say I'm a bit concerned at the leisurely pace things seem to be moving," Jackson said, walking slowly beside the CIS spook. "I've been in medical for months. What the hell are we doing about this new threat?"

"
Seems to be moving
is the key phrase there, Captain," Pike said. "We're moving on things, and quickly. But it's going to take some effort to change the culture at CENTCOM and in Starfleet. Right now CIS is spearheading operations until Fleet is back on war-fighting footing ... if it even ever was. I'll let the Chief of Staff fill you in. It's a bit above my paygrade, to be honest."

"I doubt that prevents you from learning about it though," Jackson said sourly.

"We all have our unsavory habits," Pike smiled before his face morphed into the most serious expression he'd ever seen on the man. "Thank you, Captain, for not giving up. A lesser commander would have taken any excuse to turn tail and run when facing an enemy like that. There's no telling how many lives you saved."

"Yeah ... all we'll know for sure is how many I didn't," Jackson said, the full implications of the alien attack beginning to sink in.

"Don't lose heart. We're going to need you," Pike said, looking around as if suddenly bored with the conversation. "I left a little gift in your room. Think of it as returning the favor. I gotta run, take care of yourself."

Even with Jackson observing him directly it seemed the agent just sort of dissolved into the background, blending into the sparse crowd and disappearing.

When he got back to his room in billeting he saw there was more than one gift waiting for him. The first thing he noticed was a brand new set of dress blacks decked out with his rank, name, and awards. Sure enough, a full issue of dress uniforms and utilities were hanging in the closet. There was also a wooden box on the desk with a note on it.

This was floating around on the bridge when I found you spinning out of the Nuovo Patria system. Figured you'd want it back. Do you think Singh would make me one?