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All characters in this book are fictitious. Names, places, characters, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
©2020 J. R. Handley
Nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw.
The alarm grated on Captain 2nd Rank Tatianna Sokolov’s nerves. She already knew that the Kiev was dangerously close to losing their FTL drive. She didn’t need the alert to tell her what was on her command screen. Being dropped out of warp space early was all the evidence she needed.
I’ll skin that longshoreman alive, she thought grimly as she skimmed through her interfaces. There’s no way this ship was ready to launch. Pulling up the wireframe schematics, she searched for the command function that would let her override the alarm.
“Senior Lieutenant Osin, how long until you fix that engine and get us back with the fleet?”
“Looking now, Captain,” he said. “The chief engineer says a few power junctions overloaded and blew up. We’ve got repair teams fixing them now.”
“I asked how long!” she snapped.
“Ten minutes?” he replied.
“Make it five,” she said, taking a deep, calming breath.
Picking up the comms headset, she activated the privacy shield around her chair and called the chief engineer’s direct line.
“Chang, can we safely jump back into warp space once you repair the blown junctions? Be straight with me, none of the politburo-approved nonsense. Am I risking my entire crew if I try to rejoin the fleet?”
“Yes, Captain, there’s some risk. In the void, life itself is a risk. The Kiev has the soul of a warrior. You can trust her. She’ll hold. This is just growing pains. We didn’t upgrade all the junctions when they replaced her engine. Shipyard engineers said we didn’t need to, so they wouldn’t authorize it. Trust me, we’ll be okay. We might sacrifice it all for the Motherland, but it won’t be today,” he replied. “I’ll have her right as rain in five minutes.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Tatianna said before disconnecting the line and deactivating the privacy shield.
The chief engineer was wrong. They weren’t ready to jump in five minutes. Their engines spooled up eight minutes later, and the once-mighty Kiev shuddered in defiance as her FTL engine shook the hull. Tatianna stood and paced the bridge, desperate to ensure that nothing went wrong. It was her first large command, and she wanted to get it right. Captaining a ship of the line was the culmination of a lifetime of preparation, and she wouldn’t blow it on her first cruise.
“Systems check,” she ordered her bridge crew.
“All systems are green,” came the reply from each station.
Nodding, she turned back to the main-bridge display screen. It showed the massive fleet spread out around her, materializing back into real space. This was their last micro jump before they began preparation for the Great Push. The People’s Republic of Proxima Centauri needed room to expand. In desperation, they’d formed a large colony fleet to seed deep space, diving into the unexplored territory light-years from their borders.
With resources low, they couldn’t risk losing a single ship, so the Admiralty had assigned the 4th Fleet to escort them. In a desperate gamble, the PRPC had pulled several ships out of the orbital fleet graveyard around their home system. Other ships, like hers, had had their retirement orders cancelled. Instead, they’d been sent for emergency retrofits in shipyards throughout their territorial space.
The rush job showed in a million different ways. Corners had been cut and safety protocols ignored, with all priority placed on speed. Around her, the Kiev was in a state of disarray, an older-generation destroyer that should have been mothballed decades ago. But the old girl had history and a name that went all the way back to the original ships of their ancestral home. This lineage had earned her a second chance and a few retrofits.
“Comms, I want a detailed scan of the system,” she ordered once they’d jumped into system.
She sent course corrections as she skimmed the plotting charts, maneuvering the Kiev into her place within the fleet. While the navigator and helmsmen got them into position, she read the sensor reports of the system. What she saw shocked her.
“Sensors indicate that there are four times more ships on the system plot than there should be. Verify those readings, now,” Tatianna ordered the comms officer.
“Aye, ma’am,” replied the mousy lieutenant. After a pause, she reported back. “The analysis is correct. Ships of an unknown origin are in the system opposite us.”
“Redo the scans, now! I want to know what we’re dealing with,” Tatianna ordered.
Every member of the bridge crew jumped, performing tasks that Tatianna recognized as busywork. They’re trying to look busy, she thought, even those whose jobs have nothing to do with the Kiev’s sensor arrays. She watched out of the corner of her eye as her command staff tapped away on their screens, rechecking their individual systems.
“Well!” Tatianna said.
“They’re jamming our ability to scan them, ma’am,” said Ensign Caldwell. “But by overlaying the jammed area with the rest of normal space, I was able to get a size reading for those ships. They’re massive, twice as big as our battle cruisers.”
“Good thinking, Ensign. Send everything you were able to deduce to the Minsk. The fleet commander needs to see it.” Turning her head, she addressed her comms officer again, “Get me on the horn with the Minsk’s skipper.”
“Right away, ma’am,” came the prompt reply. “Getting Captain Gorshkov on the line now.”