Across the Great Rift Read online

  “On the warships, too?” The lad’s eyes goggled at him.

  “I-I’d have to think she’d give them priority. We have to fear the worst.”

  “Oh, God, that’s… that’s…”

  “Terrible,” said Greg VanVean. “Yeah, it sure is. But to make sure it doesn’t get any terrible-er we need to get moving and moving right quick.”

  “Right, will you help us?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said Frichette, his look of anxiety gave way to one of determination. “What do you want me to do?”

  “The first thing is to defrost the rest of the crew. They aren’t going to like this and they sure aren’t going to like taking orders from me. I need you to be the authority figure here, Ensign. Get out your best uniform and be there when the petty officers wake up. Like it or not, you are in command—at least for now. You have to make them believe and accept that.”

  “I-yes, sir, I’ll do my best.”

  “Good. Greg? Would you take him to his quarters and get him fancied up? Doctor? Let’s start the thawing process on the petty officers.”

  Twenty minutes later, Frichette and Greg arrived, just as the senior petty officer was shaking off the effects of revival. The ensign was looking quite official now in a very nicely tailored gray and black uniform. If he just didn’t look so damn young!

  “How are you feeling, Chief?” Crawford asked to the petty officer. His name was Duncan and he looked to have a good many years in space. He peered around at the small crowd of watchers and growled an obscenity.

  “Who are you? What the hell’s going on? Where’s the ship’s doctor?”

  Crawford winced, the ship’s doctor had been with the officers. “We’ve got a bit of an emergency, Chief. We are going to need your help in dealing with it. The other petty officers are reviving now. Once that’s done you need to get the rest of the crew defrosted and get the ship fully operational. We are also going to need at least one of the shuttles and then…”

  “Wait a minute! Wait just one damn minute! You’re part of the construction crew. I don’t take my orders from you! Where’s the first officer?”

  “The first officer is dead, Mr. Duncan,” said Frichette, suddenly pushing himself forward. “The captain and all the other officers, as well. That leaves me in temporary command.”

  “You?” Duncan stared with his face contorted in shock and amazement. “But you’re just… just…”

  “I’m the ranking officer, at the moment, and you will address me as ‘sir’. Is that clear?”

  The man stared at the boy for a long moment, but Frichette’s stare did not waver and eventually Duncan’s did. “Yes…sir,” he muttered at last.

  “Good. Now I want you to give Mr. Crawford your full cooperation. We have a lot of work to do. Let’s get cracking.”

  “Aye, sir. Where are my clothes?”

  While the chief was getting dressed, Greg VanVean nudged Crawford and nodded toward Frichette. “The kid’s not bad, huh?”

  “Not bad at all,” said Crawford with a smile. “But come on, we’ve got work to do.”

  * * * * *

  It took a moment for Carlina to recognize the proximity alert. She was awkwardly using a cutting torch to burn her way into the ship’s arms locker and the noise almost drowned out the alarm tone. She did not have the code to open the locker and she really wanted a weapon. She would have preferred to get something seriously lethal from the marines’ armory, but it would have taken her a week to cut through those bulkheads. She’d have to be content with a laser pistol. If she had time to even get that much.

  She hastily shut down the torch and sprinted for the bridge. She had figured out—after a few agonizing hours looking through instruction manuals—the sensor station sufficiently to set up the proximity radar and tie it into her com panel so it would alert her if anything was approaching the ship.

  Which, apparently, something now was.

  She skidded to a halt by the sensor station and clutched the back of the chair as a wave of dizziness washed over her. Her head did not hurt quite as much as it had, but her fatigue was like a person hanging on her back. She swallowed and focused her attention on the display. A small, flashing blip was approaching and it did not surprise her a bit that it was coming from the direction of Neshaminy. She punched a button and an external camera locked on to the bogey and transferred its image to a monitor. She sucked in her breath when she recognized a droid just like the one which had bashed her in the head. The sensor display told her that it was about four hundred meters away and closing.

  “All right, Crawford,” she snarled, “you wanted to play rough, did you? Well, I can be rough, too!”

  She dashed out of the compartment and through a maze of corridors. She reached a hatch and swung herself through and into a chair mounted to a bulkhead. In front of her was a transparent bubble and she could look out into space. She strapped herself into the chair, pulled a swivel-mounted control console around in front of her, and flipped a series of switches. Lights came on and a display lit up. There were a pair of joysticks attached to the sides of the console and she grasped them. Outside the bubble there was a point-defense laser mount and it began to move in response to the joysticks.

  Even though she did not have the access codes to activate the ship’s main weaponry from the bridge, she could at least use the smaller weapons in manual-override mode. She thought she had this laser figured out well enough to hit something. Like that stinking droid.

  One of the monitors was slaved to the sensor display and she quickly located her target; it was only about two hundred meters away now. Orienting herself, she swung the weapon around and brought it to bear. There was a coaxial camera which fed to another monitor. This had crosshairs to show the aiming point. She steadied the image in the crosshairs and pressed the firing button. Nothing happened. She cursed under her breath and remembered to press the safety on the other joystick. The crosshairs turned from green to red and then she squeezed the firing button again. But in struggling with the safety, she had drifted off-target and the shot missed. She continued to curse and brought the crosshairs back and fired again.

  The laser beam itself was invisible in the vacuum of hyperspace, but its effect could be clearly seen. The droid exploded into a cloud of tumbling fragments. The compressed gas cylinders, which powered its thrusters, ruptured and a fine mist engulfed the debris. One of them whooshed off crazily like a missile.

  “Ha! Take that, you son of a bitch!”

  * * * * *

  “Oops,” said Charles Crawford, staring at the suddenly blank control monitor. “That wasn’t very friendly.”

  “Right un-neighborly,” agreed Greg VanVean from beside him. “Doesn’t look like this dame wants any visitors.”

  “Yeah, but at least we know she’s there,” said Crawford. That had been the major objective of the reconnaissance. A half-hour of spirited debate between his foremen, the ship’s crew, and anyone else with an opinion had led to this attempt. Some people wanted to try and wake up the navy crews and dump the problem in their lap, but the difficulty of getting aboard the warships, along with the fact that all the officers were probably dead, and the nagging fear that they needed to act quickly had decided the issue: they needed to take out Citrone and do it soon. He frowned and hit another button. “Ensign? Did you see that? Looks like this could be trickier than I’d thought.” Ensign Frichette answered back immediately from the bridge.

  “Yes I did see, sir. It was one of the three-centimeter point-defense lasers. By the way, the first shot that missed your droid almost hit Neshaminy. I think it did hit one of the warships. You might want to be more careful about your approach vectors in the future, sir.”

  “Uh, sorry about that,” said Crawford sheepishly. “I hadn’t really thought about that…”

  “I think the critical thing to observe here is that her first shot did miss, sir. If that point defense laser had been on automatic control, there’s no way it would have missed a
n easy target like that. The laser was obviously being fired on manual control.”

  “Uh, so what?”

  “It’s important, sir,” continued Frichette. “If she had managed to activate the automatic systems, there’s no way we could hope to get close to that ship. But on manual, she can’t possibly cover every avenue of approach. If you would be willing to risk a few more droids to keep her occupied, I’m sure I can take a shuttle around to the other side—outside her field of fire—and get aboard.”

  “I’m willing. From what you are telling me, Ensign, if we keep them dodging, it will be even harder for her to hit them, is that right?”

  “It should be, Mr. Crawford. I can’t believe this woman has much experience as a gunner, or she would not have missed that first shot.”

  “All right, let’s give it a try. But, Ensign, I can’t let you lead the boarding party.”

  “Why not?” Crawford could hear the disappointment in his voice.

  “Because you are too valuable. You are our only officer, and if this goes wrong, there will be no one left in command. We can’t risk that.” There was a lengthy silence before Frichette responded.

  “I can see that, sir. But this is my command and I really should…”

  “Your place is on your ship, sir,” said Crawford with what he hoped was the right tone of respect and determination. There was another pause and then he heard Frichette sigh.

  “Very well, sir. I’ll have the shuttle prepared. How soon can you be ready?”

  “Oh, say a half-hour to prep the droids and get my controllers in place. Are you going to want some of my people for the boarding parties?”

  “If you can provide me a couple of people who are good with a torch in case we need to do any cutting, that would be excellent.”

  “Right, I’ll scare up some people and send them down to the shuttle bay.” He cut the connection.

  “Count me in on that, boss,” said VanVean after the circuit was closed.

  “You want to go, Greg?”

  “Sure. I still remember how to use a torch and I’ve got a hankering to meet this crazy broad.”

  “Okay, get your gear and an assistant and report to the shuttle bay.”

  “On my way.”

  The big man left and Crawford began gathering the people he would need for his end of things. Several hundred of his crew had been revived by this time. From where he sat in the control room, he could see small crowds scurrying about, prepping the droids he planned to use. He looked up as Sheila came in.

  “So, we’re going to do this, are we?” she said, looking over the activity.

  “Seems like it. I sure hope it works.”

  “With you pushing it, I’m sure it will, Chuck. You get things done. Lord help us if we had to depend on people like Beshar to make a decision.”

  “He’s just being cautious, and y’know, it’s just possible that he could be right on this one. We’re taking a considerable risk here. Maybe we should leave it to the navy.”

  “He’s not right and you know it. All of us have learned to trust your hunches, Chuck, maybe you should, too.”

  “I’m an engineer, Sheil, I don’t like acting on hunches.”

  “No one does in this business. We like to have detailed plans with every weld called out and all the loads and stresses calculated to the eighteenth decimal place. But sometimes we don’t have that luxury. Then we have to go on instinct, and you have the best instincts I’ve ever run across.”

  “For construction, maybe. But this isn’t a construction problem. I don’t know a damn thing about boarding a hostile warship.”

  “Which is why you are here, doing what you do know—running the droids—instead of trying to be a hero and lead the boarding party. You have sense as well as good instincts. That’s why your people follow you.”

  He eyed her carefully and hoped she wasn’t reading his mind again. “Is that why you followed me all the way here, Sheil?”

  “Partly.” Crawford stared at her, pondering whether he could risk asking her what the other part of her reason was. He’d known Sheila for a long time and they had flirted without resolution now and again, but he didn’t know how she really felt about him—or how he felt about her, for that matter. Still, she had agreed to spend ten years in cold-sleep…

  He hesitated for another few seconds; more people came bustling into the control room and the chance was lost. Sheila smiled and went over to her own control station and sat down. “All right, everyone, we ready for this show?” he asked loudly.

  “Sure thing, boss, all the droids are checked out, fueled up, and ready to raise some hell,” said one of his remote operators.

  “This is gonna be fun,” said another.

  “Not too much fun,” warned Crawford. “We have a job to do and I’d really prefer not to lose any more droids if we can avoid it. They’ll come out of the baron’s profit margin—and our bonuses. Understand?”

  “Sure, sure. It’s still gonna be fun.” That seemed to be the consensus and Crawford doubted he was going to be able to convince them otherwise.

  “All right then. Power up and shut down the gravity in the bay.” For all their banter, his operators were extremely professional and he knew that they would never let their horseplay compromise safety or getting the job done. In just a few minutes, a dozen droids were threading their way through the crowded equipment bay toward airlock four, which was the largest on the ship. The inner door slid shut behind them. While they were waiting for the air to be pumped out of the lock, Ensign Frichette commed, reporting the shuttle and crew were ready.

  “Okay, Ensign, we’re just about ready. Outer lock door is opening now. Let’s see how she reacts to this.”

  “Roger,” said Frichette. “We’ll standby until we see how this goes. I’m not going to expose the shuttle until we’re sure about her fields of fire.”

  “Understood. Here we go.”

  The lock was open now and Crawford put on his goggles. These transferred the images from the droid’s cameras right to his eyes and it was almost like he was actually inside the machine, instead of piloting it from a distance. His injured arm made working the controls a bit awkward, but he quickly adapted. He worked the joysticks and the machine smoothly moved out into the void. The fleet hung around him in all its splendor. Ninety-eight starships and fuel tanks, all held together in a web of girders and braces. To Crawford, it looked like a colossal bunch of grapes, although only a few of the vessels were spherical.

  Only a fraction of the other ships were visible, but by luck, Exeter was one of the ships which was in view. If it was luck; a more concealed avenue of approach might have been better. Still, we are here to draw fire, so let’s draw some.

  “Fred, Juan, Glendi, spread out left. Kurtz, Yvon, Dani, you go right. Tyron, Nan, and Di, you take the high road, the rest of us will go low. Try and stay close to the other ships until we get closer. Keep moving so you don’t make an easy target, but watch your fuel levels. Let’s go.”

  His crew gave a chorus of affirmatives and the droids spread out as they moved forward. Exeter was a little over a kilometer away, and unfortunately it was going to take a while to cover the distance. Built-in safety features would not let the droids go more than about ten meters per second relative to the surrounding ships.

  Crawford steered his droid ‘down’ and hugged one of the girders which held Neshaminy to another cargo carrier. He decided to duck under the other ship, even though it would significantly lengthen the distance he had to go. The navigational display overlaid on his vision showed that his people were taking similar evasive routes. Good, no point in bunching up.

  As he maneuvered along the ship’s hull, something darted past him. “Tag! You’re it!” said Sheila from the adjacent control station. He recognized the object as a Ferret, a much smaller droid equipped only with cameras and a few sensors. They were used for tight inspections and could move faster than the work droids. Sheila and some of her people were running them.


  “Go and tag Miss Citrone, Sheil.”

  “On the way.”

  A minute or so went by and Crawford came to the end of his cover. Exeter loomed in the distance and there was no choice but a direct approach. Well, actually, he had a few other choices. He could circle around and come in from the other side, but that was the direction they would eventually send the shuttle in from. His job was to draw Citrone’s attention in this direction.

  “Chuck, one of the smaller turrets is moving,” said Sheila, suddenly. “Looks like she’s spotted us.”

  “Okay, it’s show time, people. Let’s see what sort of teeth she’s got.” He twisted the joysticks and his droid jetted out into the open. The navigation display showed a cluster of other dots moving forward as his people followed his lead.

  “How are we gonna know if she shoots at us?” demanded one of the operators. “You can’t even see the laser beams.”

  “You’ll know when your droid gets blasted,” answered Fred Kimmal.

  “Only one turret, Sheil?” asked Crawford.

  “That’s all I can see from here. Gonna move in closer and see it I can spot anyone inside the gunner’s bubble.”

  “Be careful.”

  He heard Sheila laugh from beside him. “Chuck, you sound so serious. It’s not like it’s me out there!”

  Crawford muttered under his breath and concentrated on moving his droid. He used its thrusters to jink it up and down and right and left in what he hoped was a random pattern to throw off attempts to target it. Meter by meter he was closing on the cruiser.

  “Mr. Crawford, she’s fired on you,” came another voice on his headset. It was Frichette.

  “Are you sure? How can you tell?”

  “I can tell by the bits of debris she just blew off of Cornwells Heights when she missed.”