Wallace sat calm for the few seconds as they passed. The enemy hauler pulled in closer to the Lincoln and opened fire on it. All of its missiles, DEGs, and railguns poured into the wounded supercarrier's sections that housed the jaunt system. The Seppy ship moved closer and closer to the Lincoln, and Wallace could see that there was nothing he could do for them.
"Goddamn those bastards!" He slammed his fist down against his chair arm. Just as the hyperspace vortex whirled around them and they blanked out of normal space, the Seppy kamikaze ship exploded. The Lincoln was vaporized instantly.
A few seconds later, as the Madira popped out of hyperspace, the admiral managed to relax long enough to breathe. His DTM dinged in the updated blue-force tracking signals showing that the Tyler and the Roosevelt had managed to jaunt away before the hauler had exploded. The three U.S. supercarriers were battered and badly outnumbered. Or at least they had been. His blue-force system showed four new U.S. supercarriers: the USS Ronald Reagan, the USS Barack Obama, the USS Zachary Taylor, and the USS Andrew Jackson. There were still eight Seppy ships, but only four of them were supercarriers, and one of those supercarriers had taken a good bit of damage. The other four Seppy ships were battle cruiser class—about two-thirds the size of a supercarrier. Seven supercarriers to eight Seppy ships; finally some decent odds.
"CO Madira, CO Obama!"
"Goddamn, I'm glad to hear from you, Johnny!" Wallace answered Captain Johnny Practice's hail. He opened a channel to all the fleet ship captains. "I'm glad to see all four of you. Be advised. We just lost the Lincoln. She was totally destroyed. Her pilots and groundpounders are on the surface of Arcadia near the governor's mansion in the center of Capitol City. Our intel has determined that is where the QMT controls are. So do not destroy that mansion! In the meantime, we're a bit surrounded over here and could use a hand. We also need to put a couple ships on the planet to support the fight there. Carla, you and Johnny take the Obama and the Jackson down. Felix, you and Kiana form up on us here and see if we can't keep the Seppies away from our attack long enough to get that QMT system under our control."
"Aye, Admiral!"
Now things are gonna get a little better, he thought.
Damn right, Admiral, Uncle Timmy agreed.
"Admiral, the Seppy fleet is forming up on us. Looks like they brought their fighters with them, sir," the XO said.
"Well, that will help out downstairs. All right, let's prepare to take incoming!"
"Admiral, with that in mind, do we want to continue our plan to jaunt in two minutes back to the planet?" Commander Penny Swain, the nav officer, asked.
"Good question, Penny." Wallace thought briefly. They were still outnumbered up here and in a ball. He still liked the idea of going to a bowl and being able to support the troops on the ground better. "Yes. Our men and women down there need us."
Timmy, DTM the plan to the rest of the fleet.
Aye, sir.
"Joe! The SIF generators on the aft of the ship are down. There just aren't any other cooling systems to bring them down," Lieutenant Mira Concepcion shouted. The noise in the Engineering Room was a little too loud to talk at normal tones, and the stress from the ship being rocked back and forth didn't help.
"Well, it sure as hell didn't take long for the Seppy mothers to find out where we jaunted to," Petty Officer Andy Sanchez added.
"If y'all wanted peace and quiet you shouldn't have joined the Navy!" Joe scanned the three-dimensional diagram of the ship, looking at all the systems at once in detail all the way down to the nuts and bolts, transistors and integrated circuits, and quantum-fluctuation exciters and spacetime limiters. His problem right now was the universal one, one that caused almost all systems to end up failing: thermal management. Waste heat was the hardest goddamned problem in all of physics and engineering to deal with. And now that one SIF generator was down, he was having to spread the structural integrity fields thin from the others to cover that section of the supercarrier. That meant that other SIF generators were now working even harder. It was an avalanche of disaster that only needed one or two more snowflakes to trigger it.
I should've taken up business or marketing, he thought.
Yeah, but then you'd be rich and would miss out on all this, his AIC, Debbie, replied in his mindvoice.
"Too bad we can't just jaunt over the ice cap of this planet and cool the thing off," Andy said sarcastically.
"I don't think that would work, Andy," the technology officer shouted over his shoulder. He had a flashlight between his teeth, power cabling draped across both shoulders, and a multitool in each hand, working away at an overloaded control circuit for the QMT power supply. The specialist warrant officers were the experts on the quantum-membrane teleportation technology, but those guys still needed good old-fashioned power, and all that came from Engineering. And, from what Joe could tell, the QMT had been working overtime since the battle started. That meant there were heavy casualties and/or a lot of troop movement.
"Why not, Lieutenant?"
"Well, you'd have to get the cold air in contact with the hot coolant somehow. Not sure how you'd do that. Oh shit!" A spark flew across the panel he had pulled out, discharging several thousand volts across his fingers. "That fucking hurt," he said, dropping the multitools and shaking his hands.
"Watch yourself, Lieutenant. Do I need to get Andy over there to show you how to handle high voltage?" Joe laughed. Then, as he panned the three-D image by the flow loops between the aft SIF generator heat exchangers and the main coolant reservoir one deck below Engineering, it hit him. "Son of bitch, Andy! That just might work."
"What will, Joe?"
"Cold air." Joe continued moving the mindview diagrams around rapidly, looking for the one that would work. Then he found it. "There it is! The main coolant lines of damned near everything flow through the exterior bulkheads that aren't pressurized. Any cooling along the flow lines is purely radiative. Hmm . . ."
Debbie, what if we pumped pressurized helium or air or something in there? he thought.
Well, the only thing we could do in a hurry is air, Joe.
Okay, let's do it. What about some water mist?
Yeah, we could do that.
Hell, we are about to jaunt into atmosphere. Let's just open up some panels and let it flow through.
That would work. With the flow speed, it would supercool the air as it was forced down the tube. My calculations show it would increase the cooling efficiency by ten percent.
That might be enough.
"CO! CHENG!"
"Go, CHENG!"
"Sir, we need to get into atmosphere. It might allow us to cool off the SIFs quicker. The sooner, the better."