Hammerhead Resurrection Page 16

  “Yes, sir.” Holloway moved down and began talking with her miniboss.

  Jeffrey leaned into the comm again. “Strike force commanders. You’ll be receiving adjustment instructions from Commander Holloway. Please follow them quickly and to the letter.”

  Holloway sat down at a station, looked over the screens, and said into the desk mounted microphone, “Strike force Kobayashi 55, redirect to target Sthenos 6. Flight group Rothschild 85, redirect to Sthenos 14…”

  On the Nav-Con the yellow Sthenos markers trailed after the fleet fighters. The green lights continued to wink out both on the Nav-Con and around the room. The pilot’s who had lost their final drones had removed their helmets. Some sat at their stations, eyes dazed. Others unstrapped and came to stand on the far side of the Nav-Con, watching the final moments of the fight.

  Realizing he was holding his breath, Jeffrey let it out and breathed in deep, slow draws as he watched more lights wink out. As the recalled fighters returned to the Lacedaemon, the ship’s main guns began to thump, firing at the pursuing Sthenos fighters.

  Jeffrey’s attention turned to the fighters closing in on the Sthenos destroyers. The next minute was an exercise in self control. The wheels had been set in motion—now he could only watch and wait. Jeffrey clacked his teeth together as an irritated twitch ran through his right calf.

  “Come on, just get me a few there.” He was gripping the command station rail as if he could somehow squeeze extra speed for the fighters out of it.

  More lights winked out. Only 2,000 fighters remained. On the status display the friendly counter continued to scroll downwards, the right-most digit a blur. 1900… 1800… 1700… down to 1500.

  On the Nav-Con, the groups of lights had grown small. He only needed one to get through to each destroyer. They were close. He looked back to the counter 1100… 1000… 800. The fall accelerated as the Sthenos had fewer targets to focus on.

  Fifty years ago the Hammerheads had been described as a chain saw on wood. Now he knew how the Sthenos had felt, smaller numbers killing larger numbers to the man, but what the Sthenos had just done in five minutes, had taken the Hammerheads a year of bloody fighting.

  Jeffery had often wondered what the Sthenos’ intention had been fifty years before. They might be close to finally finding out… if they lived.

  Whole fighter groups had now disappeared from the Nav-Con. Sthenos destroyer 8 had no fighters on course to strike, nor Sthenos 17, or Sthenos 2. Those were now guaranteed to make it through the fight.

  Three healthy destroyers is already too many.

  Three green sparks very near Sthenos 12 caught his eye. One winked out. Two sparks. Now one.

  He said, “Nav-Con, create a small zoom field on Sthenos 12.”

  As a small circle zoomed in at the point of the Sthenos 12 destroyer, a green marker came into view, it’s distance displayed above… 8 miles… 7… 6… 5. A hoard of Sthenos fighters closed in on it, but the ship rolled and jigged and spun in an amazing, patternless chaos as it closed on the destroyer. In that chaos Jeffrey saw the hand of a brilliant pilot. 3 miles… 2.

  As the fighter, Lacedaemon 15, reached the nose of the Sthenos destroyer, Jeffrey said under his breath, “Fire it.”

  But the fighter did not initiate the singularity. The pilot continued down the ship, corkscrewing and jigging. The green light winked out. Jeffery’s heart sank.

  Yet, even as his hope died, the side of the Sthenos ship began to peel away. The metal rushed to where the fighter had been, compressing there in an impossibly small sphere, which continued to reduce in size. Metal rained away from the Sthenos ship in ribbons and sheets until the ship seemed to have been bitten almost completely through by a great, jagged-toothed maw.

  Jeffrey let out a relieved breath.

  The reaction stopped just as quickly as it had begun, leaving some metal sheeting and reinforcement to float past the point of singularity. A haze of metal and outgassed ice crystals vented from the side of the Sthenos destroyer as though it were bleeding to death. Having been cut nearly in half, at its thinnest point, the hull twisted and ripped apart as the ship separated into two monolithic sections, bow and stern.

  “Lacedaemon 15,” Jeffrey shouted into the room where almost all the pilot’s connection lights had turned red, “get your ass up here.” He looked back to the Nav-Con. A few green sparks remained, and one by one winked out.

  He scanned the Sthenos destroyers. “How many did we get Holloway?”

  Holloway looked up at him as the last green sparks of their fighters vanished from the screen. “Just the one, sir.”

  Jeffrey felt his heart sink as if burrowing down into his belly with hard claws. Nineteen Sthenos destroyers against fifty-seven of theirs.

  Not even close to enough.

  A young woman, with shockingly deep-blue eyes and short blonde hair, looking no more than nineteen, walked up the three steps of the command tower stairs and saluted Jeffrey. She couldn’t weigh more than 95 lbs and barely broke five feet tall.

  Jeffrey said, “Yes?”

  “I’m Lacedaemon 15 sir, the one you called for.”

  “Oh… yes… of course. Well flown pilot… very well flown.”

  “Thank you sir.”

  “What’s your call sign?”

  “Call sign sir?”

  “Holloway,” Jeffrey asked, looking to the commander, “You don’t have call signs?”

  Holloway spoke with a quiet tone, as if everything she’d done, every decision had been an error leading up to this catastrophe, “Too many pilots sir, no time for them.”

  “You,” he said pointing to the young pilot, “are pale.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Yes, sir?”

  “Your call sign is Whitetip now.”

  “Whitetip, sir?”

  “It’s a shark; as of this moment you’re the first fully-fledged member of the resurrected Hammerheads.”

  She stared at him, her mouth falling slightly open.

  “Now,” Jeffrey bowed his head to her, “I have to get up to the bridge, please forgive me.” He turned as a blast rocked the ship and smoke poured from the hatch to the exit corridor. Jeffrey looked back to the Nav-Con, but it had gone dark—now just a flat, dark disk. Beams from the emergency lights hung in the smoke.

  Someone yelled from behind him, “The corridor’s blocked, the entire thing buckled shut.”

  Jeffrey ran to the hatch where something large and dark blocked the corridor. He had to stare at it for a moment before he could understand it was the far wall, crushed down.

  “Commander Holloway, is there another way out of this area?”

  Holloway shook her head.

  Jeffrey closed the hatch and spun the locks. He touched its surface as he asked the sailor beside him, “This isn’t a sealed hatch is it?”

  “No sir,” the sailor said. “It’s good for only a few hours of fire control. If the ship loses pressure on the other side, that hatch will let our air right by.”

  “Let’s do what we can to keep that from happening.” Jeffrey turned back to the pilots and to Holloway. He pointed to the ceiling. “What’s up there?”

  “Air handling. Why?” Holloway asked, her expression bewildered. “There’s no way out of here. We’ll have to wait for…”

  Jeffrey stepped close, speaking into her ear so no one around them could hear. “Ma’am, I need you to change your mode of thinking and fast. You must accept this one thing, odds are this room is going to be ripped in half when those Sthenos destroyers get into range. We have to get out and get to escape pods on our own. No one is coming.”

  Holloway’s brow furrowed. “There’s been no command to abandon ship.”

  “True ma’am, but we need to prepare as if it has. We have 19 Sthenos destroyers bearing down on us, and,” he pointed to the closed hatch, “that is only from one of their fighters.”

  Holloway raised her voice to him now. “We don’t know—”

  “We don’t know what commander?”
He’d had enough. Until that moment he’d been uneasy with outranking key officers. He wasn’t used to it. When he was a Hammerhead, a commander had been well above him. Coming back, he’d fallen into old habits of deferral—sir’s and ma’ams. He knew too well his deferral categorized him in the minds of those like Donovan and Holloway at a lower social strata. He hadn’t cared, until now.

  “Commander Holloway, are you unsure of the hostility of their intent?”

  “No,” in the intensity of his tone, she faltered, “I—I wasn’t suggesting—

  “Are you suggesting they’re ineffective in their intent?”

  Holloway looked down.

  “I’ll no longer argue with you, commander. We must evacuate this area now if we are going to preserve pilots for the fight, and believe me that’s all we’re preserving them for.” He leaned in on her. “You find yourself in a new world Holloway. If we don’t work together, we all die. I don’t just mean the men and women in this room. Do you understand me?”

  Holloway lifted her chin and squared her shoulders, eyes professionally blank, “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ve got a lot of value Holloway, and I’m trying to offer you some respect, but I swear to God, if you don’t stop swinging machetes at my knees, I might start taking it personally. Is that clear?”

  “Yes sir, crystal clear sir.”

  Jeffrey let his tone quiet as he said, “Welcome to war Holloway, if you live through it, you’ll never be the same.”

  “Yes sir.”

  As Jeffrey looked up to the air duct grating, the ship shook again. A few of the pilots lost their footing as their mag-boots jerked free from the deck. Air hissed around the hatch seams, and Jeffrey’s ear drums strained against the depressurization. The hissing fell silent. With all eyes on the hatch, Jeffrey knew everyone in the room was thinking exactly what he was. Will they lose their air?

  Holloway said, “We lost pressure somewhere. Blast doors must have sealed off the affected area.”

  Jeffrey motioned for Whitetip to come over to him. “You’re small so you’ll make a good scout.” He looked to the rest of the pilots. “I need something to pry that grate off.” He heard the clank of a metal panel, and an object was passed toward him through the pilots. The pilot nearest him handed him a yellow and black crowbar.

  “Perfect,” Jeffrey said and handed it to Whitetip.

  She unlocked her boots and kicked off the floor, floating up to the grating. Jamming the end of the crowbar under its edge, she ripped it from the ceiling. It floated end over end, clattered to the deck, and rebounded toward the pilots. One caught it and jammed it into a gap between two stations.

  Reaching up into the duct, Whitetip pulled herself into the darkness.

  After a bit of shuffling and the crumpling of metal, she said, her voice sounding far away, “It appears to run parallel to the crushed corridor.” Her face appeared in the opening with a slight smile. “You’ll fit Captain… barely.” She moved out of view again.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “All but a small number of fighters have been destroyed,” the Nav-Con operator said.

  Cantwell turned to the communications officers. “Get me Captain Holt in flight control.”

  “Sir, we’ve lost communications with flight control. A Sthenos fighter struck the hull in close proximity to that area.”

  Vice President Delaney came up the ladder. “What’s going on? Was that a collision?”

  “Yes,” Cantwell said, “but with all due respect ma’am, I don’t need distraction right now.”

  “What are you planning?”

  Cantwell sighed hard, freely showing his exasperation with her. “We have to stick to our plan to land on Earth and disperse hardware.”

  She shook her head. “I know you think it’s the right choice, but the more I think on it, the more the thought of landing the destroyers troubles me. Their armaments will be useless. There must be another way.”

  “Madam Vice President, I appreciate your concern, but it’s based on an overly optimistic perspective. We have two options, stand or retreat.”

  “Have we tried to communicate—”

  “Are you still on that vein? Haven’t you been paying attention to what’s happening here?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of destruction, but no reason. Why haven’t we been trying to communicate?”

  “It won’t do any good.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Cantwell turned away from her to swear under his breath. He masked it by walking to his command seat.

  She followed him saying, “I’ve been discussing the conflict more with Gerard Schodt, and he feels if we can simply discover some of their basic language—.”

  “Gerard Schodt’s advice is useless.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He lacks a key understanding.”

  “Which is?”

  “What it means to kill a sentient being. It’s not a damn touchdown. Don’t make the mistake of thinking combatants are blood thirsty. We’re not. Yes, young soldiers may posture and run their mouths, but I’ve never known a single combatant who wasn’t scared shitless in the moment, nor one who didn’t want peace afterward. Let me make this clear, no one wants peace more than those who’ve lived through war. It is, by an extreme degree, the worst thing they’ll ever experience. When men like Gerard Schodt think we actually want to go to war, that we ignore other options, he can’t imagine what we’ve been through. When I say we must engage, I need you to believe that I absolutely see no other viable option for the best outcome in the long term. We either face the Sthenos or let them run us down.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she squared on him. “I refuse to accept that with fifty-seven destroyers to their twenty-three we only have running as an option.”

  Cantwell, not wanting to get into a shouting match, calmed himself as he said, “It’s the only way to generate possibilities in the future.”

  “I don’t believe that you can kno—”

  He fairly yelled, “I can and do,” and calmed his tone as he said, “We cannot face them head to head. We must retreat, but if we do so anywhere but Earth, we’ll leave it defenseless and put ourselves at greater risk. I will not allow either.”

  “But you’ve beaten them before out here.”

  “We won, if you want to call it that, due to far better odds and unique tactics. Currently we have a third the advantage, and our new tactics have proven useless. The old, successful tactics aren’t available to us.” With a sigh, he said, “I need you to appreciate what happened here. We’ve lost the first battle of the war. Not simply lost it… we’ve had our main method of fighting obliterated. If we face them out in the open 2 to 1, we’ll be cut to pieces just as those fighters were.”

  “But can’t these destroyers at least somewhat stand up—”

  “We’ve been through this, ma’am. In the past, when our destroyers went head to head with the Sthenos, not once did we come out ahead.”

  “What about the singularity warheads?”

  “Our only method of delivering the warheads has been destroyed.”

  “I can’t believe you won’t consider a better solution. I’m going to have to ask you to come up with some other options for my review.”

  “Other options for…?” Cantwell walked right up to her. “I’ve had enough. Get off my bridge.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re interfering with my command. Get off my bridge or be removed.”

  She opened her mouth as if to yell at him, but no sound came out as though she were so angry she couldn’t form words.

  “Nothing?”

  “How dare you,” she spit the words at him. “I’ll have you—”

  “Masters at Arms, remove the vice president from the bridge.”

  As six large sailors approached, she looked to her security detail. “You will allow no such thing.”

  Cantwell said to the two Marines, “You may assure her physical safety, but do not intervene
with my order.”

  “Sir,” one of the Marines said, “Our orders are—”

  “Your new orders,” Cantwell said with the confidence only decades of experience can bring, “are to stay out of my security team’s way. Is that clear?”

  The Marines looked to Delaney and the Masters at Arms. They moved aside.

  As the masters at arms took hold of her upper arms, she said, “This is treason.”

  “Ma’am,” Cantwell said, “You may feel free to throw me in the brig when this is over. However, until that time, you will stay out of my way.”

  She struggled for a moment against the Masters at Arms, but when she failed to stop them walking her toward the ladder, she relented and allowed herself to be taken off the bridge. Her security detail followed.

  “Navigation,” Cantwell said, “get the fleet decelerating for Earth orbit.”

  “Yes, sir,” the navigation officer said, but sounded unsure.

  “Concerns navigation?”

  “If we begin deceleration for Earth orbit now, the Sthenos will run right through us.”

  “I have a feeling,” Cantwell said, “their final attack isn’t coming right now. If so, when we begin deceleration, they’ll match us.” Cantwell looked out the latticework to where the Sthenos destroyers lay among the stars. “For whatever reason, they aren’t ready for us yet.”

  After a few moments the navigation officer said, “Sir, I have the fleet prepared for deceleration burn.”

  “Excellent. Begin.”

  The ship came alive again as the subtle vibration of the massive thrusters returned and Cantwell’s weight pressed into the deck. Beyond the glass, the thrusters of the visible ships glowed.

  The navigation officer said, “Deceleration burn begun.”

  “Nav-Con.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What is our estimated time to Earth arrival?”

  She looked at her display. “At current deceleration—two days, five hours, and ten minutes from orbit sir.”

  “Our distance to the Sthenos?”

  “They are decelerating at a higher rate. Distance is now over 4,000 miles, sir.” She stared at the display for some time before saying, “They’re now holding at 10,620 miles, sir.”