“Thank you, Helm,” Tolwyn said. He keyed the intercom pad at his arm. “Engineering, are you ready?”
“As ready as we’ll ever be, sir,” Commander Graham’s voice responded. “I think the generators will stay online this time.”
“Do your best, Commander,” the admiral told him. He touched another key. “Sindri, this is Karga. Shield test commences in thirty seconds.”
“Roger that” Sindri’s captain replied. “Thirty seconds.”
Tolwyn watched the event countdown roll by on his monitor. As it hit zero, the lights flickered in CIC for a moment, and the ship’s status board beside him came alive with multi-colored lights as Graham switched on the shield generators and a whole new part of the ship awakened from a year-long slumber. At first the lights were a mixture of red, green, and amber, but slowly the red lights went out as section after section adjusted to the new configuration of the power grid and the shielding subsystems.
They’d been through this before-three times, in fact. Each time the shields had gone down almost immediately. Tolwyn hoped they wouldn’t have to go through a fourth failure and another week or two of tracing connections and bridging weak spots in the shield emitter arrays.
Seconds crept by like hours, and the shielding held.
After two full minutes, Tolwyn activated his intercom again. “Sindri, my board shows green. Shields are nominal.”
“That’s confirmed, Karga. Looking good from here. I’m switching our shields to stand-by mode…now.”
And Karga was generating her own protective field at last, unaided by the tender still riding her superstructure like some kind of bizarre metallic symbiont.
“Engineering,” Tolwyn said. “Good work, Commander Graham. I think this time you’ve got it.”
Graham’s reply was pessimistic. “They’re holding, sir, but I’m not real happy with some of these readings. There’s still something wrong with the power flow to the upper superstructure emitters. I’ll need to do some more work before I can guarantee any kind of combat-rated shields.”
“But in the meantime we don’t have to depend on Sindri just to keep from frying,” Tolwyn said. “And that counts for a lot. Keep me appraised, Commander.”
“Aye aye, sir,” the engineer responded. “We’ll try to maintain shields through the ring transit, and see how they do. But don’t start thinking about cutting the cord just yet. We need Sindri to fall back on if a glitch develops.”
“Ten minutes to ring transit,” Clancy announced.
“Anything on sensors, Mr. Kittani?”
Karga’s First Officer, Captain Ismet Kittani, was peering over the shoulder of the technician on duty at the sensor panel. He straightened up slowly and turned toward Tolwyn with an aura of finicky precision Tolwyn found irritating. But the man had an impressive service record as CO of a destroyer, and although his personal style clashed with Tolwyn’s he’d done some good work in the refit project.
“We are still not getting reliable readings through the ring plane,” the swarthy Turk from Ilios said gravely. “We will have to do something to improve sensor performance before we attempt any sort of active operations.”
Tolwyn frowned. The sensors, like the shield generators, had become one of those on-going problems that seemed to take up increasing amounts of refit time that should have been going into less essential systems by now. “We’ll get them when we can.” He activated the intercom system again. “Flight Wing, from CIC. Captain Bondarevsky, we will be entering the ring system in nine minutes. What’s your status?”
“Four Hornets on patrol,” Bondarevsky replied. “Four Raptors on Alert Five.”
“Very good. Please have your fighter patrol take position ahead of us. They might not be able to help much, but I’d like some eyes out in front, just to avoid what happened last time.” On the ship’s previous ring transit two days earlier a particularly large chunk of ice had very nearly hit the ship, and Tolwyn didn’t want a repeat of the threat today. Not while Graham’s shields were still not fully reliable.
He checked the status board again, pleased to note that the shields were still holding steady despite the chief engineer’s concerns. Despite the problems that continued to crop up, he was still confident of success. With luck they’d soon have the shields permanently on-line, and maneuvering drives ready to lift them into a better orbit before the next time their present elliptical path brought them back through the rings again.
With luck….
Hornet 100, VF-12 “Flying Eyes”
Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System
1454 hours (CST)
“Watchdog, this is Kennel. Put a couple of your birds four minutes ahead, same orbital vector. And keep your eyes peeled for anything big enough to be a bother.”
“Kennel, Watchdog. Copy. Viking, we’ll take point. Lefty, Drifter, you two maintain your position.” Babe Babcock accelerated her fighter to the new vector, settling in ahead of Karga with her wingmate close by. She was feeling irritable today, the result of a whole string of petty frustrations that had started with the hot water heater in the squadron’s ready room showers going belly-up just when she wanted to use it that morning and culminated in the discovery that her regular Hornet had earned a down gripe from Lieutenant McCullough and had been pulled from the flight line to have a navicomp fault repaired. As a result she’d been forced to take out Hornet 100, the fighter normally reserved as a back-up craft and designated for use by the Wing Commander when he chose to fly a mission with the lesser mortals of his command.
She didn’t like Hornet 100. The target lock system was slower than it should have been-though it was still within acceptable tolerances, a good pilot knew the difference in a combat situation-and it was fitted with an APSP rather than the extra pair of missiles she would have preferred to mount. But it would have taken too long to reconfigure the fighter’s load, so she’d taken the fighter despite her preferences. After all, it was another routine patrol, more practice than anything else-for the carrier’s flight crews as much as for the Flying Eyes.
She was starting to regret her new assignment to the Karga. She’d liked duty aboard the Independence, and had regarded Kevin Tolwyn as the best kind of Wing Commander, a CO who was willing to delegate responsibility to his squadron leaders and let them have their own heads most of the time. Bondarevsky, her new Wing Commander, might have been a big-time war hero and an intelligent, capable officer, but he was a hands-on type of leader who wanted to have a part in anything and everything going on around him. It made Babcock uncomfortable to know that he might turn up to look over her shoulder any time, any place, always ready to offer an opinion or point out an alternative.
But more than the change in personalities, duty aboard Karga wasn’t exactly what she’d signed up for. The crew and officers’ quarters were still a long way from being refurbished, and recreational facilities were something between horrible and nonexistent. And the daily flight ops were becoming something of a joke. Vaku was a backwater even among backwaters, and Karga’s endless orbit was a study in monotony. The pilots who had come across from Independence weren’t even involved in much of the refit work, since they had to do flight duty, so they didn’t even have the technical challenges the rest of the crew faced to keep them fresh.