Captain Ian Brooks accepted the cup of tea from the drone with a nod.
It floated off silently, and he took a sip. The tea was still too hot for his liking, and he blew on it.
“Really, Captain?” Jaya said quietly. “That’s barely tepid.”
“Yes, I know you drink boiling water each day to toughen up,” he replied, amused. “But I’ll take my tea at the temperature I prefer.”
“I imagine you’d be able to even drink it cold,” she commented.
“Why yes, I can,” he retorted. “That’s how everything is in Antarctica. What most people call room temperature we call too hot.”
“Captain,” Shomari Eboh called out. “We are receiving a priority distress signal!”
Brooks sat up, the humor dropping from him. “Who sent it?”
“The long-range cargo carrier Maria’s Cog. Timestamp indicates that it was sent only thirty-two minutes ago, bounced off a repeater, and came to us.”
“Are we the closest vessel with a zerodrive?” Jaya asked.
“Aye,” Eboh confirmed. “Two other vessels have been alerted, the long-range scout Huntington and a deep-space science vessel the Inquisitive Eye.”
“We’re the only real help for them, then,” Brooks said. “Begin charging the zerodrive. Prepare for a dive.”
“Do we know the nature of their emergency?” Jaya asked.
“Not yet,” Eboh replied. “We are still unpacking the detailed data. Give me a moment.”
Jaya and Brooks exchanged glances.
The feed connected to their systems, sending the decrypted data. It was brief.
SHIP TIME HOUR 04 MINUTE 27 SECOND 12 – UNKNOWN IMPACT EVENT
SHIP TIME HOUR 04 MINUTE 27 SECOND 12 – REACTOR 8 CRITICAL FAILURE
SHIP TIME HOUR 04 MINUTE 27 SECOND 12 – REACTOR 3 CRITICAL FAILURE
SHIP TIME HOUR 04 MINUTE 27 SECOND 14 – REACTOR 8 BREACH
SHIP TIME HOUR 04 MINUTE 27 SECOND 14 – REACTOR 3 BREACH
Brooks checked if there was any more on the first point, elaboration upon this impactor.
But there was nothing.
“They were attacked,” Jaya said.
Brooks was quiet a moment longer, going over the data again, as sparse as it was.
The ship took a hit that pierced two fusion reactors. It was unknown, which means it was moving so fast that they didn’t see it coming.
The hit was precise. Surgical.
The Maria’s Cog was not a military vessel. Without good reason they would not be blaring out active sensors and utilizing dense screens of high-quality drones.
Jaya had to be right. As much as he did not want to think that someone had just launched an unprovoked attack against a ship deep in Union space, it was the most likely explanation.
“It may be,” he said. “We’ll be prepared for all eventualities.” He raised his voice. “Awaken all command staff, prepare Response Teams and rescue drones. How soon until we can jump?”
“Capacitors were already near full,” Cutter said. “Enough power for jump in ten minutes.”
“I recommend we also prepare all combat drones, load the missile racks, and charge the coilguns, Captain,” Jaya said.
“Do it,” he ordered. “It’ll take us three hours to reach them. We have until then to prepare.”
Hopefully there would still be someone left alive to save by then.
----------------------------------------
Captain’s Log:
The Craton is an hour away from the last location of the Maria’s Cog. We do not know what to expect when we surface. Who would want to attack a cargo carrier?
Our records indicate a long service record for the vessel, extending back before zerodrives. Almost thirty kilometers long, she once carried millions of people at sublight speed – dropping off sufficient people and supplies in a system before moving on and letting natural growth replenish her numbers.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Now she operates with a skeleton crew of less than a thousand, serving to bring massive quantities of supplies to distant colonies and outposts.
What could threaten a vessel so large? Even a heavy battleship would have difficulty knocking out such a ship quickly.
The fear of a Leviathan is in many people’s minds, but I remain skeptical, until we arrive and see for ourselves.
----------------------------------------
“We have surfaced in normal space,” Ji-min Bin called.
Brooks rose from his chair, taking in the view of space around them as reality coalesced on the screens.
“Scanning for krahteon emissions . . .” Cenz said. “No krahteons detected.”
There was a slight exhalation of breath from many, Brooks included. “Keep up low-intensity scans – carefully. Just in case we have another sleeping giant.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Recording twelve minor impacts upon the frontal cone,” Bin called. “Very small pieces, likely debris.”
“Just a few new dents for the frontal armor,” Urle commented. “Nothing serious.”
“Automatic interception lasers are firing,” Jaya commented.
On the screen, brief, bright red lines appeared, the navigational lasers on the ship’s towers incinerating small objects flying at them.
“Filter infrared and find me our ship,” Brooks ordered.
A small speck highlighted on the screen, then magnified. It was the Maria’s Cog.
Glints of light from a million pieces of debris danced, glittering like fireflies on a summer’s night.
But the ship herself was a wreck.
She had broken up into at least three major pieces. Areas of the hull showed jagged damage, but other cuts appeared relatively straight, sliced cleanly.
“She definitely got hit by something with a lotta joules,” Ham Sulp messaged. He was not on the bridge, but he was observing all they saw. “Something deep into her.”
“It appears the impact came in through her nose shield and pierced at least seven kilometers through her superstructure,” Jaya said.
“If it pierced the nose cone then it was highly energetic, as Commander Sulp suggests,” Cenz said thoughtfully. “This would be consistent with a projectile launched from a heavy coilgun.”
“High-temperature plasma burns,” Urle noted, highlighting marks on the hull. “The reactor breaches released plasma rings and those are what ripped the ship apart. If not for that, she would have survived the impact, I bet.”
“But who attacked them?” Jaya said. “At the moment that is the most important thing to know. Every weapon leaves traces, and we must find them here. Other than directly IDing an enemy ship, that is our best bet to finding out who did this.”
“Do not jump to conclusions before further assessment of data,” Cutter said. “Deeper scans will reveal true cause of damage.”
Brooks found his eyes following the lines of the ship, feeling a hurt to see her so broken. Brooks knew her type well – the Maria’s Cog had never been a beautiful vessel in the traditional sense. But ships like her were the lifeblood of distant worlds and stations, the unrecognized heroes of a star-faring civilization.
Now cut apart like a carcass on a chopping block.
The glints of light from the debris hinted at the dangers lurking around her. They could be a piece of hull, radioactive waste, food, someone’s tablet. Or even a body itself, frozen solid in space. At high enough speed any one of those could cause catastrophic damage if it hit the right place.
They had to proceed with caution.
“What are our sensor sweeps finding?” Brooks asked.
“We are detecting no other large vessels,” Cenz said.
“Find all likely locations they could be hiding from our sensors,” Jaya said. “Behind astronomical objects, even in a star’s light.”
“This area contains seven long-term monitoring probes,” Cenz said. “I am querying them all, but the nearest two report that they have had no view of any vessel besides the Maria’s Cog in the last 248 days. Their view, while not complete, covers many nearby plausible objects that could be screening an enemy vessel. And to be quite honest; we are in interstellar space. There is not much around that could serve as cover.”
Jaya looked even more displeased by that; she did not speak, thinking.
Brooks understood why she’d be so disquieted. She had to view situations through the lens of how they might threaten the ship and her crew, and it did seem obvious that this was an intentional attack.
But the lack of enemy was strong evidence against. To hide from the sensors of the monitoring probes was not something that could be done easily; with the multiple reactors any zerospace-capable vessel must possess, the amount of IR they put out was like a beacon.
“Captain,” Cenz said. “There are nearly one hundred lifepods with active signals.”
“We need to begin recovery operations,” Kai said, turning her chair to face Brooks. “I have all Response Teams on standby. We await your orders, Captain.”
“Stars and rads, it’s going to be hard to extract them from that mess,” Sulp messaged.
“Begin deploying rescue drones first,” Brooks ordered.
Jaya frowned, but did not object. Prioritizing the rescue drones meant the Craton had much less protection or ability to detect incoming threats for a time. If an enemy had caused the destruction of the Maria’s Cog, they would be vulnerable.
But the evidence was still unclear, no enemy was near. If somehow they had learned to hide themselves so completely that they were not detectable by the probes or the Craton, then it hardly mattered what precautions they took. They would be outclassed to such a degree that resistance would be impossible.
Brooks continued. “Get signals on all lifepods and search for any that may have gone dark, just in case. Have secondary comm centers one and two begin actively pinging those that are signaling, I want to know their status so we can start rescue triage. And find out everything you can from them about what happened to the ship.”
He frowned, studying the separating parts of the Maria’s Cog again, still slowly drifting away from each other.
“I want Science using secondary sensors to find those pods – without an obvious current danger we want to close our window of vulnerability and get them out of there as soon as possible. Engineering, you have primary sensor arrays. Start your own investigation, see if you can ascertain what destroyed the vessel. Even more than rescue, we need to know if this was an attack or an accident – if there’s a threat, it goes beyond the fates of the Maria’s Cog‘s crew and even our ship. The Union needs to know if we’ve got an enemy in our midst. I want your preliminary answer in twenty minutes.”
He sighed. “And until we can rule out an attack, get the combat drones launching as soon as the rescue ones are out. At the very least we’ll need them to intercept that debris. Just . . .”
He hesitated, staring again.
“Try not to shoot the bodies unless you have to. I want to recover everyone we can. The living and the dead.”