Ascending - James Alan Gardner [82]
“I suppose you’ll be wanting a status report,” he said to Festina. “Well, Admiral…the status is that everything’s Gone Oh Shit.”
Many of the crew members looked confused at his words. I, however, knew that “Going Oh Shit” was an Explorer expression meaning dead, dead, dead. It derived from the fact that many Explorers blurt out, “Oh shit,” just before some terrible calamity befalls them. I suppose Kapoor used the phrase to show Festina he was familiar with Explorer vernacular…which means the captain was sucking up to the admiral, but I thought he did it most charmingly.
“Everything’s gone?” Festina asked. “What about communications?”
“Especially communications,” Kapoor answered. “Those systems have all kinds of top-secret crypto built into them: not just for encoding transmissions, but for switching bands a few hundred times a second, so we’re never broadcasting in one place very long. And then there’s the—” He stopped and threw a reproachful look at those of us who were not navy persons. “Ahem. I’m sure you know, Admiral, Hemlock has all kinds of gadgetry for keeping our messages secure, and one hundred percent of it is classified. Captain’s Last Act makes certain no such equipment can be salvaged. Nothing but melted plastic and defunct biomass.”
“But that can’t be your only broadcasting stuff,” Uclod said. “At the very least, you must have a Mayday signal, right? Something that runs off batteries and doesn’t get vaporized when everything else goes pfft. Civilian vessels have to carry at least three Mayday boxes in case of emergency. So a navy ship must surely…” He stopped; his eyes narrowed, glaring at Kapoor. “You don’t have a working Mayday?”
“Of course we do,” the captain replied defensively. “Just not a good one. The Outward Fleet doesn’t like distress calls that can be heard by absolutely anybody—it’s bad publicity to advertise how often navy ships break down. Even worse, the laws of salvage say the first person to find us gets to claim the whole cruiser. The Admiralty doesn’t want a civilian vessel, or even worse an alien, tracking us by our distress signal, taking our ship in tow, and dragging Royal Hemlock home to use as a lawn ornament. So…our Mayday only broadcasts to other navy ships.”
“Ouch,” Uclod said.
“Very ouch,” Festina agreed. “The last thing we want is to tell the Admiralty we’re stuck adrift. They’ll send one of their dirty-trick ships to pick us up, and that’s the last anyone will see of us.”
Uclod made a disgusted sound. “So you don’t have a single useful signaling device?”
Kapoor shrugged. “The ship’s escape modules are perfectly fine. They all have homing beacons…but they’re old-fashioned radio. From here, it would take five years for transmissions to reach the closest inhabited planet. As for using the escape modules for travel—they don’t have FTL capability. They can put you into stasis so you won’t feel time passing, but it’ll be almost a century before you get back to civilization.”
“Fat chance of that,” Uclod said. “With the Shaddill still in the neighborhood, we won’t get back to civilization at all…especially not in rinky-dink emergency capsules with their beacons blaring, Here I am!” He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “We are right royally fucked.”
Festina stared at him a moment, then turned her gaze to the captain. Kapoor only shrugged. “We can check all the systems to see if anything survived, but Captain’s Last Act is intended to be one hundred percent thorough. It even hits the storerooms that contain our spare parts. We can’t repair a thing.”
“So,” Festina said, “how long can we last without life support?”
“I don’t know,” the captain said. He turned to the crew members around him. “Anyone here ever calculated how long the oxygen in a heavy cruiser lasts with a half-crew breathing it?”
Nobody answered.
“Well, Admiral,” Kapoor turned back to Festina, “if this were a VR adventure, the captain would put on a somber face and say we’ve got twenty-four hours before the oxygen runs out. Damned if I know if that