"Gravity is a bitch." Ensign Ilona Moldavsky muttered as she climbed up through the access hatch. The young officer was yet another crewmember raised on freight haulers where gravity was optional. Her tall, willowy frame indicated that she experienced gravity in doses only medically required to keep her healthy. Moldavsky stretched, as if trying to escape the unfamiliar forces by sheer willpower. "At least it's not doing any of that weather shit."
"For now." He did not point out the distant gray storm front far across the water.
"So what will I be looking for? Nefrim ships?" Moldavsky opened the case and took out an antique gun sight from her personal collection. Pulled from an orbital gun platform used in the colonial wars, the gun sight had a range that far exceeded any hand held optical device. With the bridge gone and the Tigertail still wedged in the hanger, it was their best option for studying distant terrain.
Mikhail nodded. "Nefrim ships. Human ships. Islands. Large menacing animals. Freak weather patterns. Basically anything that might be of interest out there. Even very large waves coming in our direction."
She paused to eye him, squinting against the bright sunlight. "But what do we want to find?"
"Foremost, we need an island with a safe harbor." Mikhail said. "Then our mission is to find the UCS Fenrir and ascertain if it's in enemy hands. Do a spiral search outward. Find out what's sitting in our laps before you scan farther out."
Moldavsky nodded as she pulled her makeshift sunglasses into place and settled behind her gun site. "Will do."
* * *
The only good news Mikhail had received since leaving normal space was that his warp engine was intact and theoretically capable of creating a warp field; theoretically because normally one didn't activate a warp field within a gravity well. The few that tried created a mess of themselves and the planet. The size and shape of the warp field generated by a ship's engine was carefully calibrated to the ship's maximum mass while in the vacuum of space. An atmosphere surrounding a space ship added mass occupying the envelope of the field, and as a result, changed the size and shape of it. In essence, air would shrink the field until it no longer encompassed all of the ship.
The denser the atmosphere, the greater the mass added to the ship. A spaceship without a payload, just skimming the edge of planet's atmosphere where it was thinning to nothing, could risk a jump with little consequences. A spaceship within a mile of the planet's surface would leave sections of the ship—often vital sections along with crewmembers—behind to rain down onto the planet. In addition, there was a powerful implosion as the warp field punched a hole into the sky.
All-in-all, activating their drive while in mid-air would be considered a bad thing, to be done only in emergency and with a great deal of thought, calculation, and prayer. Doing it half-buried in several acres of wet sand would be instant death. And Plymouth Station would have another mystery engine on its hands.
We should attach a record of our findings to our drive when we jump, Mikhail thought, just in case.
Mikhail wanted to go down into the Red pit, and find out for himself what Butcher had or had not done. The compartment, however, was still flooded and a low priority on the repair list. He resisted the urge to move it up the list. He'd already allocated their resources, a monster part of it dedicated to digging them out of the sand. Unless they made great strides in that project, the investigation of the Red pit would have to wait.
Mikhail went down to the beach to check on his Chief of Engineering, Yevgeny Tseytlin. They only had one small excavator, secured at the last moment from Paradise. He knew it had been running for hours, but there was little evidence of progress.
"This—this—this—" And not able to express more, Tseytlin turned and stomped a wide circle around Mihkail before returning. "We get a hole dug. The water goes up, and when it goes away, the hole is gone. Back to where we were. We're not digging fast enough."
Lieutenant Alexander Ufimtsev jogged up. "We're ready."
Tseytlin nodded and shouted. "Clear the beach! Clear the beach!"
"Ready with what?" Mikhail asked as they herded him toward the ramp.
"We're going to see if we can use a concussion grenade to move the sand," Tseytlin explained.
"A grenade next to the ship?" Mikhail asked.
"Armor plating should protect the ship." Tseytlin assured him. "But we're doing a test first, just to see the volume of sand moved. See if it's worth the risk."
"The grenade is buried in the sand over there." Ufimtsev pointed out a mound of sand that his footprints led to and back from. "It's wired with a remote trigger."
Said remote was handed to Tseytlin, who shouted, "firing test shot!" and pressed the trigger.
The spot erupted upwards in a column of sand which pelted down like heavy rain. A surprisingly small crater was created. Tseytlin swore and flung the remote toward the hole. Ufimtsev trotted toward the hole, saying, "I did just drop the grenade in and bury it. Maybe if I angle it."
"I can blast through duralloy bulkhead without breaching the hull. I can rig a load that will take out a nefrim torpedo ship. But I can't deal with sand. It's like blowing holes in water."
"What if we used one of the torpedoes?" Ufimstsev said.
"No!" Mikhail and Tseytlin said together.
Mikhail considered his ship. "Do the VTOL engines work?"
"We won't know until we dig them out."
"Can we dig out the intakes and fire up the VTOL engines and use them to fly the ship out of the sand?"
Tseytlin winced but slowly nodded. "We'd run a big risk that we'll just burn them out or rip the wings off the Svoboda. I would only recommend it as an emergency maneuver."
The entire mission was now an emergency maneuver. They still had the ability to signal for help using their shuttle, the Tigertail. He wanted to hold off on that until they knew more about where they were. Also he suspected that if signals could leave this abnormality, the crew of the Fenrir would have sent a message instead of their engine. The Svoboda had a full compliment of lifepods, but they had no jump capability. The Tigertail did, but by the nature of its design, it would be deadly to try. Sections of the Svoboda would remain airtight even if a misshaped warp field sheared off other parts of the ship; the Tigertail had only two areas: the cockpit and the red pit. Both would be compromised, killing everyone within them instantly.
Still, they could use the Tigertail to scout nearby islands and possibly pull the Svoboda off the sandbar.
"What condition is the Tigertail in?" Mikhail asked.
"It only suffered damage to its restraining clamps. I can't get them to release. We could just break them, but I'd rather not. The way we're going through repair supplies, I'm not sure we'll have what we need to rebuild the clamps."
It was heartening that Tseytlin assumed that they were taking off again, requiring the Tigertail to be secured. There was the small matter, though, of how they were gong to get to that point. Obviously Tseytlin was overwhelmed by their situation; he was applying brute force without thinking.
"Tseytlin, I want Ufimtsev to take over supervising here. Go back to engineering and run modeling programs. I want us making the best use of our resources."
His chief engineer looked slightly insulted, but he'd get over it.
"Also tap the Reds," Mikhail said. "It should be fairly simple to fabricate hand shovels for them. All the off-duty Reds digging should be able to make a fairly big hole."
9: Graveyard of Ships
Shelter had been rigged for Ensign Moldavsky; cargo tarps rustled overhead, casting a square of shadow on her. The equipment around Moldavsky had grown. The Red was also in place, one of the replacements. Mikhail was going to have to get to know all their names. Over the pounding of the surf, he could hear Inozemtsev struggling with his role as the new Red commander, shouting instructions to the off-duty Reds on how to use the newly forged hand shovels.
"I was only up here for a little while when I realized how difficult it was going to be to fin
d anything," Moldavsky said. "It's like finding an enemy ship against a star field. Eyeballing it was going to be least practical method. In space, we'd use IFF, so I set up a mobile array."
IFF stood for Identification Friend or Foe. All human ships, including lifepods, were equipped with transponders that, when queried, would transmit a code unique to their craft. "You sent out queries?"
"No. That just got me thinking of using passive means of finding the ships. I'm looking for EM." EM was electrical magnetic waves which was a side product of power units. "It means I can pick up the ships but without sending out queries, I can't identify them."
Ships. "You found more than one?"
"I've picked up twenty-six so far."
"Twenty-six?"
"So far. I've only done ten degrees of scanning. Some of them are quite small, life-pod size. Only a handful are on the scale of a military class ship. In theory we should be able to see anything out there but there are islands and weather in the way."
Twenty-six. The number rocked Mikhail. He could only nod to Moldavsky while the Ensign fiddled with her gun sight, discussing line of sight inside a sphere. On planets, where everything sat on the outside of the sphere, the curve of the world meant anything over the horizon was out of sight. Inside, however, there was nothing to obscure objects except of course weather and islands, both of the fixed and mobile variety.
Moldavsky checked the focus on her antique gun sight and stepped away to make room for Mikhail. "This is the only ship I've been able to visually confirm."
Far across the pane of water, the spaceship stood like a sudden mountain. Mikhail checked the range-finder; the wreck was nearly twenty thousand kilometers away. Mikhail's homeworld was only a fraction over forty thousand kilometers in circumference. If this was on his home planet, the ship would not only be over the horizon but on the other side of the world.
The muzzle of a railgun cannon jutting out of the bow marked the ship as a carrier-class. Mikhail was stunned that something that should never know a planet's gravity had survived landing in this ocean. The carrier, though, had been built to take a pounding from enemy weapons. The bracing to support and absorb the gun's recoil also protected the cannon's protruding muzzle from the planet-like gravity.
It wasn't the Fenrir though, because the engine housing was intact. Its power unit was still providing energy as a light blazed at the top of the housing like a great lighthouse. Just beyond the ship's stern, he could see that there was land with trees. The carrier had crashed onto a larger island than the Svoboda's little sandbar.
Overall, though, the spaceship looked like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. Pieces were missing—lost or taken. Had the carrier been damaged in its crash landing or had it been stripped afterwards? Mikhail considered what was intact and what was gone. What remained was enough to keep the weapons operational and the ship structurally sound. Everything else had been stripped. The carrier hadn't broken into pieces from the crash; it was being disassembled. Had the salvage teams been human or nefrim?
"Have you spotted any signs of life?" Mikhail asked.
"Here." Moldavsky took charge of the gun sight, increased the magnification, and shifted it slightly. "I'm thinking that the ship is protecting a harbor between itself and the island beyond."
Moldavsky stepped back from the gun sight. Mikhail peered through to see what the woman found. Nearly hidden by the bulk of the ship was a low stone dock lined with houses painted in bright colors. The buildings seemed reassuringly human; festive even. A sea-going boat glided into view, dwarfed by the massive spaceship looming over the harbor. Mikhail switched the finder to the craft and zoomed in. Nets and buoys marked it as a fishing boat. He found the bridge and focused on the figure at the wheel. It appeared human.
The carrier's crew survived and perhaps even thrived. But if it wasn't the Fenrir, which ship was it?
"It seems as if the ship crashed and the crew just settled around it. No signs of nefrims at that location at all."
Mikhail grunted in answer. The town might be evidence that there were no nefrim overlords supervising the world. Or there might not be a need to gather up new arrivals as the world itself would batter down the interlopers. Smash them out of the sky. Drown in the water. Pound them against the surf.
Moldavsky reclaimed her spot behind the gun site. "I'm starting to think that all these ships just misjumped to this place. This is the nowhere you go to when you don't go anywhere."
"Are there closer targets?"
"One is within eight hundred kilometers but I can't see the ship. There's an island in the way." Moldavsky bent to change her target.
In relative terms, eight hundred kilometers was nearly on their doorstep. Considering their condition, it could be a dangerous place for anyone to be. The IFF was an ancient system of distinguishing between allied and enemy human ships.
"This is the closest signal but I can't see any signs of a ship." Moldavsky moved back, giving him room.
The island was a huge rough-shaped rock, like someone had dropped a boulder out of the sky. Considering Mikhail's experience, it might have been. Even viewed from a distance, the island towered in the water, a massive wall of sheer gray cliffs. It could effectively screen any ship from view, but it should also block the EM emissions coming from said ship. He increased the magnification and scanned the foot of the island, looking for signs of human life.
He found one section, a jumble of rocks, bits of color, and blackness that suggested caves into the cliff side. Only after studying it for several minutes could he make sense of what he was looking at. There had been something built into the side of the island; only the occasional straight lines remained to denote where square rooms once stood. The rooms or buildings had been blasted into shapeless piles of rock, now half buried by landslides from the cliff above.
When a warp engine jumped out inside a gravity well, there was a violent implosion in its wake. If Fenrir's engine had been next to the village that the ship's surviving crew had built next to the crash site, the village would have been leveled when the engine warped out. And it made sense that Fenrir would be their nearest neighbors. They'd replicated Fenrir's jump. The deviation from their landing site was a combination of different momentum, mass, and the collision with the floating island.
"I think you've found Fenrir." Mikhail searched for signs of someone surviving the engine's departure.
"I did?" Moldavsky leaned down, pressing close as if she wanted another chance to study the wreckage. He wasn't done looking. "I didn't see anything that looked like a ship. I looked the Fenrir up; it was a Jupiter-classed carrier. Those things are like small moons."
A moon swallowed up and eaten whole with the exception of its engine.
It was easy to judge where the engine had sat prior to the blast; the resulting crater was obvious now that he knew what he was looking at. Unless the ship came down in pieces, the rest of it had to lie within a kilometer radius of the epicenter. The island and surrounding coral reefs eliminated most of that radius, leaving only one possible orientation of the ship's hull. But there was nothing visible—only water.
"It sank," Mikhail said. "Everything but the engine sank."
"It—It's like a hundred meters tall!"
"The water must be deeper." Mikhail moved back then, letting Moldavsky see as he considered their find.
Mikhail was sure that this had to be the remnants of the Fenrir. But this only raised more questions. If the engine was operable, why had the survivors settled on this bleak island? If it was just to repair the engine and warp back to Plymouth Station, why hadn't they taken the effort to send back information on this place? It could be that the survivors far outnumbered the available room on the engine, and those left behind would be left with nothing. A mutiny could have taken place but where had the unidentified Reds come from? And what did the modifications made to the engine indicate?
They were questions that could only be answered by investigating the wreckage and interrogating any sur
vivors. If the nefrim were involved, that could be a dangerous course of action.
"We need to know everything about that island. Feed images to the tactical computer and get a full rendering of it."
"Yes, sir. What about the other carrier? Should I query its IFF?"
"No. Maintain radio silence. Do a scan on it after the island and see if tactical can match its profile to known lost carriers. Make sure pre-United Colony ships are included; that ship has been there for a while."
Moldavsky nodded and then glanced beyond Mikhail at the Red who'd been standing guard. "Sir," she whispered. "Can you get me a different Red up here? One of our veterans? This one is . . .I'd rather not be alone with it."