“Sir, all communications off ship have to be approved by Captain Steiger.”
“Damn it, man, I need that channel now! The salvage team…”
“Wait one, sir, while I see if the Captain can talk to you.” The screen went blank, leaving Bondarevsky to curse furiously. Of course a transport ship that carried thousands of people at a time would require special regulations to handle access to the commlinks. Otherwise the outgoing traffic would be swamped with messages every time the ship passed a planet where some of the passengers had family or friends. They’d need to be especially strict given the casual attitude of the Landreichers to most matters of discipline. But this wasn’t the time for a bureaucratic screw-up!
Karga was a ticking time bomb, and if the survey crew tried to bring the mains on-line or bring the computer network back up as part of the damage assessment, the whole carrier could go up in one massive chain reaction. He might already be too late….
Combat Information Center, ex-KIS Karga
Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System
1838 hours (CST)
Geoff Tolwyn was annoyed.
He had strapped himself into the one seat that had somehow remained intact in the Karga’s Combat Information Center, the combat bridge where the Kilrathi captain would have been stationed when he took the supercarrier into battle. It had taken heavy damage in that last fight, evidently from a hit to the adjacent section by a Confederation missile that had blasted through the bulkhead where the main sensor displays were mounted and sent a deadly hail of fragments across the compartment. There were bodies everywhere, including the Kilrathi captain’s, and it was clear that none of them had lived long enough to suffer explosive decompression when the oxygen had rushed through the ruptured hull.
That hit had been devastating. Probably the loss of the fighting bridge had played a large part in the death of the Karga, he thought, feeling bitter at the Confederation’s success. CIC was an almost total write-off, and from all accounts so were the navigation bridge and several other crucial sections of the carrier. The prospects of getting her back into commission again weren’t looking good. Richards had already started talking as if the failure of the Goliath Project was a foregone conclusion.
Now Tolwyn watched his experts working at one of the few reasonably undamaged panels with a black scowl on his face. Damn it all! He raged inwardly. They had to make Goliath work. The alternative was unthinkable.
A spacesuited figure drifted through the rip in the bulkhead. Tolwyn recognized the markings on bis suit. It was Diaz, who had left his team in Engineering to join the admiral in CIC.
“What do you think?” Tolwyn asked him urgently. “Can we tap their computer? It looks like we’re going to need to get the net back on-line if we’re going to have any chance of doing a full damage assessment.”
“I think we can get access, at least to the ship’s records,” Diaz said, sounding abstracted. “That will give us schematics and maybe a picture of their damage control orders during the battle. I doubt we can get anything else yet, though. Certainly none of the automated repair systems, not until we get Engineering into some sort of shape. Even then…I don’t know. It’s not looking good.”
“How long?” Tolwyn insisted.
“We’ll try to reboot now, and see where it gets us. Even if it doesn’t work the first time, we might get a better idea of what’s needed just by watching how the system behaves.”
“Then let’s get moving,” Tolwyn said. “We’ve got to get something on this bloody boat working!”
Diaz looked at him for a long moment. “Admiral, I hope you’re not expecting miracles. My team’s damned good, but they can’t produce results to order if the ship is just too far gone to fix. And I believe that’s what you’ll find here. This carrier may not be salvageable. Period. No amount of wishing otherwise is going to make it so.”
“Just try it,” Tolwyn growled. “Do what you can, and spare me the bloody lectures!”
He tried to get a grip on his temper as the smaller man pushed off from the bulkhead and drifted over to the controls where the other technicians were hard at work. Tolwyn remembered how his temper had flared during the last stages of the Behemoth project, how he had pushed himself and everyone around him right up to the breaking point in his determination to finish the weapons platform and get it into service. Perhaps that had contributed to the disaster that had ended the operation before it had fairly begun. He had to regain something of his old equilibrium if he was going to avoid a repeat of those mistakes he’d made then. Was it almost a year now since Behemoth’s short and inglorious career? It seemed like only a few days had gone by, sometimes…and like an eternity other times.
“All right, people,” Diaz was saying. Tolwyn knew he was speaking not only to his technicians, but for the benefit of a recording being made back on Independence of every step they took in the salvage process which would be reviewed later to look for mistakes or missed possibilities. “First computer reboot test. Report readiness by the numbers, please.”
“Ready on panel one,” someone said.
“Ready, panel two.”
“Ready on the power grid,” another voice added.
“All ready, Mr. Diaz,” the team leader told his superior.
“Good. Then let’s get started. Power to the-”
“Karga, Karga, this is Bondarevsky on the City of Cashel.” Bondarevsky’s voice was as close to panic as Tolwyn had ever heard it, and he had seen the man fighting horrific odds time and again during the war. “Karga, cease all salvage operations immediately! Repeat, cease all operations and respond to this call immediately!“
“Hold test!” Diaz snapped. “What’s going on here, Admiral?”
“Let’s find out,” Tolwyn said. He switched comm frequencies to transmit by way of the relays aboard the shuttles that kept the survey team in contact with the rest of the battle group, the same channel they’d used earlier to monitor Babcock’s encounter with the survivors. “Jason, this is Tolwyn. What the hell are you playing at?”
“Admiral, I strongly recommend you get everyone off the Karga ASAP,” Bondarevsky responded, sounding relieved. “I’vejust learned that the computer self-destruct system was activated aboard the carrier, and never shut down. A computer failure kept her from going up as planned, but there could still be the potential for activating the system again if you try to activate power or computer systems.”
“Self-destruct? Are you sure, Jason?” Tolwyn was torn between incredulity and relief. “If the computer went down, wouldn’t that have purged the command from the system?”
“Not according to Commander Graham, sir,” Bondarevsky replied. “He worked closely with a Kilrathi engineer scavenging the carrier for parts and supplies. The Cats evidently back up their destruct system very thoroughly. Once the command is entered, it is embedded in the very deepest layers of the net. Without a deactivation code, there’s no way to be sure of taking it out again. So if the computers come back on-line, even for a few seconds, you could find yourself at the end of a self-destruct countdown.”
Tolwyn looked across the compartment at Diaz. “Does this sound right to you, Major?” he asked.
“Possible, certainly,” Diaz responded. “But I couldn’t tell you if it’s true or not. We haven’t worked on a Kilrathi ship before, Admiral. This is all new territory.”
“Wonderful,” Tolwyn said caustically. “All right, Jason, we’ll pull back until we can some up with a way to deal with this mess. Thanks for the call. You caught us in the nick of time.”
“I’m glad, Admiral,” Bondarevsky said.