He swallowed the rest of his coffee, then jumped to his feet. “Come on,” he said. The XO stood up, looking confused. “We have an operation to plan.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
James followed the Captain, not to the bridge but down to the engineering compartment. It was heartening to see the confident looks many of the crew had as their commander passed, even though James knew just how close the Captain had come to betraying their trust. Maybe he should have chewed the Captain out more, James told himself, even if it cost him his career. But at least the Captain had an idea…
They stepped into Main Engineering, then straight into one of the side compartments. Anderson was sitting on a stool in front of a table, slowly dismantling one of the alien plasma guns. James wondered, angrily, why the Chief Engineer wasn't working on the drives or replacing destroyed weapons, then realised that those tasks could be passed to subordinates while unlocking the mysteries of alien tech was something for an older man.
“Interesting piece of technology,” Anderson said, as the hatch closed behind them. “Do you realise that an EMP-bomb wouldn't just disarm the aliens, it would cause their weapons to blow up in their faces?”
James smiled at the mental image. “Seems like an odd choice of weapons, then.”
“Not too odd, unfortunately,” Anderson said. “The Yanks issued a laser rifle for their troops a couple of decades ago. It turned out that the power packs couldn't hold a charge for longer than a few days, while localised interference and jammers could interfere with the weapon’s subsystems. Nor could they really be repaired in the field. Luckily, they didn't have to take them into combat before the weapons were withdrawn from service.”
He shrugged. “In this case, the weapons are devastating while they work,” he added. “Their plasma pulses can and do burn through our best personal armour. They could probably shoot through anything short of starship or tank armour. I wouldn't care to take a tank up against an infantry platoon armed with these weapons. But I suspect they have a very real danger of overheating if fired for more than a few minutes.”
“Good,” the Captain said. “What progress have you made with the rest of the recovered alien technology?”
“Most of it isn't that different from ours,” Anderson said. “I've got one of our supercomputers trying to hack the recovered alien computer, but all its producing is gibberish. We will need to ship it to a proper geek on Earth, sir, although in all honesty I think the aliens corrupted the files before we captured the system.”
James nodded. Standard human precautions called for wiping the files, then destroying the computers physically to render the date hopelessly beyond recovery. There was no reason to assume the aliens couldn’t or wouldn't do the same themselves. Indeed, he was mildly surprised that the Marines had managed to take the computer at all. Had the aliens been careless… or had the Marines captured alien civilians rather than military personnel?
The Captain sat down and rested his elbows on the table. “If we took the alien ship,” he said, “could you operate it?”
James and Anderson both stared at him. The Captain met their gaze evenly. James wondered, absurdly, if the Captain had drunk far too much… and then wondered if he should relieve him of command at once. No one had managed to board and capture a military starship in all of humanity’s exploration of space. But then, no one had really tried.
“…Maybe,” Anderson said. “If they had the time to purge and destroy the computer systems, it would probably become impossible.”
James hesitated, then looked at the engineer. “Could someone operate Ark Royal without the computers?”
Anderson smiled. “They’d have to run their own control systems through the drives,” he said, “but it might be possible. Our security protocols purge the local control networks too, sir. We didn't want to take the risk of the datanet collapsing at an inappropriate moment.”
“I see,” James said. Unlike more modern carriers, Ark Royal’s datanet was largely decentralised. Normally, it would prevent battle damage to one section taking down the entire system, but it might also regard a self-destruct command as a network failure and ignore it, particularly if the system was already damaged. It was why there were backup systems worked into the fusion cores as well as the main computer nodes. “Captain, do you seriously intend to capture the alien ship?”
The Captain smiled. “If we get past them, we go back to Alien-Two,” he reminded him, dryly. “But if we take the alien tramline…”
James swallowed. It sounded like a recipe for disaster. But the more he thought about it, the more he realised the Captain was right. They were trapped. Why not place gamble on one last throw of the dice?
“We know nothing about the interior of the alien ship,” Anderson warned. “The Marines have never gone into an alien ship.”
“No,” the Captain agreed. “But we have to try.”
“If nothing else,” James said slowly, “we can take out the alien ship and sneak back into Alien-Two. We might just avoid detection without that bastard chasing us.”
“We’d still have to crawl all the way to New Russia,” the Captain said. He shrugged. “But it’s workable as a backup plan.”
James sighed. “Then the sooner the better,” he said. “Before more alien ships arrive.”
The Captain nodded. “Call Major Parnell and the CAG,” he ordered. “And don’t say a word to the reporters. They don’t need to know the truth.”
“Understood,” James said. “I won’t say a word.”
He wondered, absently, just how many of the reporters knew that they were trapped. Yang probably understood the implications of only one tramline leaving the system — and the alien battlecruiser blocking their retreat — but how many of the others had guessed the truth? Perhaps, by now, they were so used to coming to the brink of disaster that they didn't really have the capacity to feel alarm any longer.
“Sir,” he said, “whatever happens, we know the aliens have been hurt.”
The Captain smiled. Ark Royal had inflicted colossal damage on the aliens, even though no one knew just how badly they’d weakened the alien navy. And the aliens had had to devote a vast amount of firepower to hunting the carrier down, buying time for Earth to organise her defences. Ark Royal might be lost, but she might have ensured that humanity won the war.
If we have time to build more armoured carriers and a few new battleships, he thought. But will the Admiralty have enough time?
“Yes,” the Captain said. The smile he gave James was the smile of a true predator. “We know we hurt the bastards.”
There had been no discussion when Rose came to his office, Kurt recalled, through a post-orgasmic haze. She’d pushed him to the deck and straddled him, her hands hastily unsnapping his uniform trousers and pushing them down to his knees. Moments later, she’d impaled herself on Kurt and ridden him savagely, panting out loud as she moved up and down on his cock. He came so quickly that, for a long moment, he thought he’d left her unsatisfied. But it was clear from the mewling noises she made that she’d come too.
“I’m sorry,” she said, afterwards. She lay on top of him, still clutching his penis within her. “I just wanted to…”
She shook her head. “I think Gladys and Tom went to find a private place of their own too,” she added. “How naughty of them.”