The explorer had three distinct compartments—a cockpit, a cabin for passengers, and a cargo area/engine room. The SEALs had moved to the cargo hold waiting to deploy, leaving the cabin empty.
One of the chief uses of this particular ship was space cartography. It had an all-glass cockpit. Looking at the view from the cockpit felt like floating in space. The only light in the pilot’s area came from the low glow of the instrumentation.
“It’s that one over there,” the pilot said, pointing at a huge wreck. The explorer moved very slowly past the wreckage of a Tomcat, nudging the crumpled fuselage out of its way.
Off to the right, I saw the target. At first it looked more like a shadow than a battleship. It was a black hole in the middle of a field of stars. Then I recognized the shape—the bulbous bow and the wide-diamond hull. I did not actually see the ship. I saw the shape of its silhouette against a backdrop of stars.
Illych asked, “How do we get in?”
“That’s your problem,” the pilot said. “My job is to bring you here. I’ve done my part.”
“We look for an open door,” I said.
Illych nodded. As he turned to leave the cockpit, he said, “I thought you would say something along those lines.”
We went back to the cargo hold and put on our helmets. The SEALs wore armor made specifically for them. My armor was green. Their armor had smart camouflage. As they maneuvered, sensors in their helmets would read the color and lighting in the environment, changing the color of their suits. There were limitations, the armor could only match basic coloration. It offered camouflage, not invisibility.
We stepped onto the cargo elevator at the very back of the ship. It lifted us into an air lock in the roof, where we boarded a ten-man space sled. There were only seven of us, and the SEALs were small. It might have held twelve of them.
“Are you ready, Colonel?” the pilot asked over the interLink connection in my helmet.
“Open the lock,” I said.
The metal dome that covered the air lock peeled back slowly to reveal the stars behind it. I hit the release button to retract the sleeves that clamped our sled in place. With a small burst of air, the sled dislodged from the explorer and lifted into open space.
Normally we would attach jetpacks to our armor before traversing open space. We did not on this occasion. Once we entered the derelict battleship, we would likely enter unstable areas with radiation and chemical contamination. Who could predict what we would find on that ship? We could not risk wearing jetpacks.
We had half a mile to traverse between the explorer and the battleship. As we covered the silent distance, some of the Boyd clones played their search beams along the hull of the derelict ship. The hull looked smooth and untouched from what I could see. Their lights cast yard-wide circles that bleached the ship’s armor gray. The circles of light stretched and deformed as they played over the various portholes, gun placements, and hatches.
“It doesn’t look like there are any open doors on the top side, sir,” Illych’s voice came over the interLink.
“Not that I can see,” I agreed. “Not that I can see.” I sighed. These things never came easy.
Something else was missing. Not only did I not see any breaks in the hull, I did not see scorch marks. That part of the battleship looked pristine, as if it had never been hit. We flew over the top of the diamond-shaped hull. Because of the curve of its fuselage, the battleship’s bulky wings seemed to dissolve into space.
We flew over the bridge. On a ship like this, the bridge more closely resembled government offices than the wheelhouses of the old seafaring ships. There was no wheel. The navigation was handled by a set of computers. Touring the bridge of any capital ship, you would find six large computer stations. One station handled navigation, another facilitated internal and external communications, another monitored radar and tracking, and another managed the weapons systems. Gone were the days when marksmanship mattered in ship-to-ship combat.
Gone, too, were the days when specialized technicians sat around the engine monitoring its performance. Modern ships had a set of computers that constantly checked every flange and dial.
The final computer sat in the command station. That computer lifted information from the other five and organized it. On working ships, you would find groups of sailors clustered around each of these stations. Looking into the viewport of this wreck as we flew by, I saw nothing but darkness.
We dropped down the front edge of the ship. In space, of course, down is a relative thing. With no gravity determining what was up and what was down, I set my bearings by focusing on the battleship. We had just flown across its top side, and now we dropped down to examine its underbelly.
“What happened here?” Illych asked.
An enormous gash ran half the length of the ship. It almost looked as if some giant had grabbed the battleship by its wings, stabbed a knife into its underside, then slashed it across its belly.
“Shit. Someone specked them over bad,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Illych said.
Illych’s voice had an offended tone to it. It took me a moment to decipher what might have bothered him. As I thought about it, I realized I had never heard Illych swear. None of the Special Operations clones did. They might slip up behind you and slit your throat, but they would not use bad language. Admirable…very specking admirable.
As we dropped under the battleship, its keel extended over us like a pitch-black sky. The breach across it looked like a gigantic crater. Four of the SEALs played their lights across it exposing a forty-foot-wide gash through which a careful pilot might successfully fly a small ship. From the look of things, the outer shell around these wounds had simply melted away. Bubbles, some popped and some whole, pocked the blackened edges of the gash.
As we flew toward the opening, one of the SEALs shined his light directly into it, illuminating the ship’s skeletal girders. The light uncovered torn wires and something that I first thought might be a ladder and later realized was the aluminum framing between the ceiling of one deck and the floor of the next. The gash through the hull extended up three decks of the ship.
So this is what it’s like when you die out in space, I thought to myself. “There’s our open door,” was what I said. I steered the sled into the gash.
Sitting in an enclosed spaceship, you develop misconceptions about how things work in space. In a ship, you get the feeling that you can simply cut the gas and coast to a stop. I always envisioned pilots stepping on the brakes to stop their ships the way I would in a car. When we studied space combat in boot camp, we trained in smaller vehicles than this sled; but those vehicles had armor plating to shield their works. I never appreciated everything that went into changing direction and coming to a stop.
On this sled, with its wide-open design, I saw how twenty different booster engines worked in concert to change our speed and direction as we flew. Before I could come to a stop, engines had to provide counterthrust to stop my forward momentum. A set of thrusters on the bottom of the sled fired forward. As we rose into that gash, several engines burst on and off as I fine-tuned the ascent to avoid jagged edges and debris.
“Stop!” one of the SEALs shouted.
The sled did not stop on a dime, but it stopped quickly enough. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’m picking up security sensors,” the SEAL said.
“Active sensors?” Illych asked.
“That’s what I’m reading,” the SEAL responded. “They’re ancient, and I mean ancient…electronic motion-tracking sensors.”
“This ship is fifty years old,” Illych reminded the other SEAL.
At first I thought their reconnaissance armor contained technology that my combat armor lacked. All six SEALs stood huddled together staring straight up like bird-watchers trying to spot some rare species. Then I saw that they each held some sort of remote in their hands.