Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [87]
Nothing happened. A second attempt yielded an identical result, or rather a complete lack of same.
“What’s wrong, Ensign?” Chang said.
Mayweather shook his head. “I don’t know. But I can’t access the detonation controls remotely anymore. At least not from this far away.”
“But we’re only half a klick away from the bombs,” Chang protested.
Mayweather glowered at Chang, and spread his hands in a gesture of frustrated helplessness. You’re welcome to go back down there and light the match yourself, dear roommate, he thought. He refrained from vocalizing the thought, but only barely.
“Damned interference,” Guitierrez said. “Looks like I still have control down here.” Mayweather could see on his monitor that her control padd remained connected to the shuttlepod via her suit’s com system.
“Maybe putting the detonation interface back into ‘live’ mode will work better,” McCammon ventured. At Chang’s affirmative nod, he took the seat beside Mayweather’s and began accessing the system.
Mayweather wasn’t keen on watching anyone noodle around with a system like this in “live” mode—even if that person was a combat-scarred MACO who knew what he was doing. After all, under “live” protocols, the bombs could actually receive and act on the commands that would make them all detonate. As he watched McCammon’s large, ungainly fingers begin working the console, Mayweather found himself wishing fervently that Lieutenant Reed had come along on this junket rather than the one headed up by Captain Archer.
McCammon entered several commands with no obvious results. Then Mayweather noticed that something was going terribly wrong; he just wasn’t sure yet exactly what it was.
“Oh, boy,” McCammon said, quickly turning white all the way from the top of his shaved head to his stubble-speckled chin. “This is not good at all.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got the damned bombs locked into another countdown to detonation,” Chang said.
“No, but it’s almost that bad.”
Slaving the monitor screen on the pilot’s side of the console to McCammon’s, Mayweather studied the very readouts that had so evidently unnerved McCammon.
He could see immediately that the bombs were in fact in no immediate danger of premature detonation. But that fact gave him scant reassurance.
Because he suddenly understood that whatever happened next was certain to be a Very Bad Thing indeed.
“Why?” Guitierrez asked, her voice tremulous with shock. She kept herself from drifting away from the Xindi fuel tank entirely only by wrapping her gloved left hand around the tether line that still connected the tank to Shuttlepod Two. Eby stood nearby, the magnetic surfaces of his boots holding him in place.
Both the timbre and the pitch of Corporal Chang’s voice were badly distorted by waves of static and interference, but his meaning was unmistakable. “The Xindi depot is still interfering with some of our com frequencies—including the one our detonator network is using. Only your transmitters are close enough to the bombs to activate the countdown sequence.”
The thirty-second countdown sequence, she thought as she began to realize the full import of what her team leader was telling her.
“Thirty seconds is pretty slim timing for an evac,” she said with a coolness that surprised her. “If you keep the shuttlepod nearby long enough for a dust-off, there’s a pretty good chance everybody will get fried in the explosion.”
“Understood,” Chang said. “That’s why I’m prepared to reel you both in right now and get us all out of here.”
Without setting off the explosives the team has already risked so much to set? The idea deeply offended her MACO sensibilities, though she understood that Chang was merely taking what was, in his command judgment, the most responsible course of action now available to him. After all, deciding which hill to abandon to the enemy and which one was worth dying on was a CO’s prerogative.
“Corporal Chang,