“Check,” Richards said. “That’s the way it would probably play out…unless we come up with something big. What about it, Max? Have we come up with something big?”
“The biggest…I hope. We’ve got a damned good lead, Vance. All that we have to do is see if it’s feasible.”
Tolwyn stirred beside Bondarevsky. “Would someone mind putting the visiting team in the picture here?” he demanded. “Or are you two going to talk in riddles all day?”
Richards grinned. “Sorry, Geoff. We’ve hardly dared say anything straight out about this even in private. Have either of you heard of the Karga?”
“It was one of the ships that raided Landreich late last year, wasn’t it?” Bondarevsky responded, remembering his talk with Harper. “A Kilrathi supercarrier. I understood it was driven off by the FRLN, and presumed destroyed in battle with a pair of pursuing Confederation cruisers.” He couldn’t help but put a slight emphasis on the word Confederation, just to remind Kruger that he owed Terra something despite all his present problems with the Confederation government.
“Still a man for doing homework, I see,” Kruger said. ‘That’s right, Mr. Bondarevsky. Karga was probably the best ship in the Cat fleet operating along this front…certainly the biggest and the most modern. Not one of those monsters Thrakhath deployed against Earth, but almost as big and probably as mean. The admiral assigned as battle group commander was a cousin of Thrakhath’s. But they threw her at us with precious little support and a battle plan a kid could have predicted. Nobody was entirely sure what happened to the carrier and her last surviving escort. We were afraid for a while that she’d managed to destroy the two confee pursuit ships and escape back to Baka Kar, but Vance’s intelligence net couldn’t discover anything about her, and one of our informers claimed to have picked up a fragment of a message that said she was getting ready to self-destruct.“
“She must’ve been hurting pretty bad,” Tolwyn said. “Not even the most fanatic Kilrathi captain orders a self-destruct unless he’s well and truly in the bag.”
“Right,” Richards said. “Well, the way we figured it, that was the last we’d seen of the Karga, and good riddance. The battle fleet the Cats have mustered out there has carriers and escort carriers enough to knock us out of action by themselves. If they had a supercarrier on top of everything else I’d just go ahead and start learning to speak Cat, because we wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance on Hellhole to fight Karga and all those other ships together.”
“That’s what we thought,” Kruger said, “until last month.”
“We got the news from a frontier scout looking for salvage out on the border,” Richards said. “We’ve been scrounging for anything we can find, and paying top dollar. This gal-her name’s Springweather or some such-was checking out the Vaku system when she registered one goddamned big source of magnetic readings…and an automated beacon.”
“Karga?” Tolwyn asked.
“We’re pretty sure of it,” Kruger responded. “The beacon was on a Kilrathi distress channel, but the coding was garbled by radiation. It was coming from orbit over a brown dwarf, so you can figure the kind of havoc that was screwing up the comm channels. The scout didn’t get close enough to eyeball it in case the Cats were active, but she got all the readings she could through that junk and brought ’em straight back here. And our people have been going over them in detail ever since.”
“You’ve had a report?” Richards asked.
Kruger nodded. “Mass about right for the Karga. Power signature low, but some of the harmonics match readings we got in the fights we had with her before she disappeared. Orbit is highly elliptical, and likely to decay before too long. No life signs, but we can’t be sure if that’s accurate with all the rads. And you have to figure that if the ship’s intact at least some of her crew could have survived. Somebody had to light off that distress call.”
“Unless her screens went down after a power failure,” Bondarevsky mused. “Radiation would’ve killed everybody aboard in a few days or weeks if the screens were down-hell, they’d‘ve run up lethal dosages in a few minutes, but it wouldn’t have been a fast death.”
“That’s what we’ve been thinking, too,” Richards said. “Think about it! That supercarrier’s just floating out there in space. If she can be put back into commission…”
“A damned tall order. Vance.” Tolwvn said. “You don’t know how badly damaged she is…and working with alien engineering’s bound to give us no end of problems.”
“But if it was possible,” Bondarevsky said softly, “we could sure as hell use a supercarrier when the bad guys come calling.”
“If we can put her back in service…and before Ragark rolls over us or the Confederation changes policies again and decides we’re a threat to the peace,” Richards said. “Geoff’s right, it is a tall order. But it’s something we have to try. And you gentlemen are going to be involved…under the leadership of your humble servant, of course.”
“What do you have in mind?” Tolwyn asked.
“We’ve been getting pretty good at salvage ops, Geoff. Have a whole team that can work miracles. We’re going to take a battle group out to the Vaku system and take a look at that wreck. If there are any Cats still out there, we’ll take them down. Then we’ll put the salvage team aboard and see what we can do. Assuming we can reactivate her, I’ll command Karga’s battle group as senior admiral. You’ll be skippering her, Geoff. It’s a step down from leading a fleet, but we need talented ship-captains a hell of a lot more than we need senior flag officers. Interested?”
Tolwyn leaned forward and gave a nod, more animated than Bondarevsky had seen him in a long time. “Just point me to the bridge,” he said. “If that thing’ll fly, I’ll take her anywhere you want to go!”
Richards chuckled. “Easy does it, Geoff. If this doesn’t pan out, you’re likely to end up commanding some outpost…Hellhole, maybe. And we still don’t know if we’ve really got any hope of making it work.”
“And me, Admiral?” Bondarevsky asked.
“You’ll have to take a cut in grade too, Jason,” Richards told him. “But I think it’s a job you’ll be able to sink your teeth into. Wing Commander, with an acting rank of captain and all the pilots we can scrape together to fly off that oversized tub.”
“Odds are she won’t be carrying much that’ll fly, sir,” he pointed out. “If she went down fighting, her squadrons would have been deployed.”
“We’ll shuttle in fighters if we have to,” Kruger said. “We’re sending you out in our one large carrier, the Independence. Once you’ve decided what you need, the carrier will bring in additional birds to fill out your complement just as fast as we can get them mobilized.”
Bondarevsky nodded slowly, his mind already racing ahead to grapple with the problems he knew would face them on the salvage mission. But while he was by no means confident of success on the venture, given everything that might go wrong, he realized that this was just the kind of challenge he’d been looking for. Win or lose, he’d put his best into it.
“That’s the plan in a nutshell, gentlemen,” Richards concluded. “Karga’s just waiting for us out there. She’s named for a Cat folk hero. His story reads something like David and Goliath, except Goliath’s the good guy and David gets beat to a bloody pulp. But in honor of it, we’ve designated this as Project Goliath. May it be successful!”