Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [7]
“I’m putting the cork back in as soon as you go,” she said firmly. “We’ll drink it together.”
He didn’t take time to thank her as he jogged toward the transport tube, puzzling over the orders. Orders from Admiral Ballard he would have understood, even expected. But why would Carstairs be calling him back to the frigate?
He found out less than an hour later as he pulled himself through the air lock in the Pegasus. The ship and the docked shuttle drifted in zero-G condition—that is, the engines were neither accelerating nor decelerating—while the transfer was made.
“We’ve picked up a distress signal from a Shamani ship,” Captain Carstairs informed Jackson when the SEALS leader pulled himself by handrails into the frigate’s combat information center. The CIC, a windowless and well-armored compartment, was located on C Deck. Now the crowded room was abuzz with activity. A half-dozen sailors—four male and two female—sat at consoles, consulting an array of information gained from radar, energy, and radiation detection, real imagery—pictures captured by nanotechnology lenses capable of nearly 100,000-power magnification—and a host of other sensors. The frigate’s main weaponry also was controlled from there and included four turrets, two each for the rail guns and missile launchers, and, most recently, after the engineers had finished examining it, a tail gun assembly where the particle beam cannon was mounted. That unique, long-range, and powerful energy weapon had been salvaged from their Assarn ally’s, the pilot Olin Parvik, wrecked destroyer. Parvik had given it to Captain Carstairs and, by extension, the U.S. Navy as a token of appreciation and respect after the Assarn’s harrowing adventures with the SEALS.
Even as the lieutenant looked at the operations screen—the monitor that displayed significant features across the breadth of a single star system—Jackson heard the triple pinging of the klaxon. Knowing the ship was about to get under way, he swung his feet “downward” toward the deck. Carstairs and the two other officers in the CIC did the same thing; the sailors, strapped into chairs, continued to monitor their electronics.
Immediately the engines surged, causing a quiet hum to permeate the ship. As always, Jackson deemed it something one felt more than heard. At the same time, the gravitational effect occurred. His feet contacted the deck lightly, as if he were being lowered gently to the ground. Swiftly the pressure built until he was standing comfortably at the equivalent of Terran gravity.
Jackson looked at the chart of the star system. He correctly identified a flashing green blip as the location of the Shamani ship. The radiant swath of Alpha Centauri itself washed out the image at the top of the screen. To Jackson, it looked like the stricken vessel was about half the distance to the star from the current position of the Pegasus.
“What do you know about this SOS?” the SEALS officer asked.
“It was pretty cryptic,” Carstairs replied. “But I gathered that they were in bad shape. It was an emergency broadcast in their own language, but the translating program allowed us to pick up the coordinates. They went off the air right quick, though. No details as to the nature of the problem. It came from a ship called the Lotus.”
The captain pointed to an adjacent screen, where Jackson saw a schematic outline of a large spaceship. Six engines were mounted in two sets of three around the outside of the hull, and the interior seemed to include a mix of cargo holds and passenger compartments. “That’s her. At least, she’s listed as the Lotus in our ship identifier catalog.”
Jackson knew about the SIC: It was an encyclopedic database about the known types of spacefaring vessels, sort of a Jane’s Fighting Ships for space. Because humans had interacted with the Shamani for the last five years and maintained good trading and diplomatic relations with that exotic culture, the Shamani fleet was well represented in the SIC. The Eluoi, with their many classes of warships, had been analyzed and cataloged from Shamani sources.