Prologue: Despair IV
Cryo chambers, INS Gift, Strunlek system
2966
I stood in front of the first cryo vat that I had decided to deactivate. In it was a sleeping Lieutenant Nias Gattiker, an engineer. He was one of the last to be put to sleep and now the first to wake up again. A competent engineer and the right hand of the late Alex.
I pressed a few buttons on the control unit of the chamber and the thawing process began. It took a few minutes for Lieutenant Gattiker to start to open his eyes. The vat’s door swung open and he collapsed on the ground puking and retching. I made sure to stand clear of any splashes. Waking up from cryo was always unpleasant. At least he didn’t need any medical attention. I had prepared equipment just in case his heart wouldn’t start on its own. I was happy, that no intervention from my side was needed.
It took a couple more minutes until Gattiker had struggled to his feet. The remaining nausea and headache will completely disperse in the next hours. A nasty side effect of cryo stasis, one that despite the scientific advances in cryo tech has never been really eliminated.
“Welcome back among the living, Lieutenant.” I greeted him. He tried to stand at attention and salute but was still to weak on his legs. I helped him to sit on a nearby chair. To pre-empt any questions I began to explain. “Lieutenant, you have been asleep for 22 days and 6 hours. We managed to get the reactor running and I made repairs to the life support. We are still in the Strunlek system and the Gift is still in a bad shape. At the moment we are the only ones awake. I will thaw up four more comrades soon.”
He looked at me with disbelieving eyes. “The reactor is online, Commander?” Which I confirmed with a nod. “Then there is hope…”
“Yes, there is hope. But large tasks lay ahead that will need your professional competence.” I grabbed in my pocket and revealed the insignia of a chief engineer. “Lieutenant, I want you to be my new chief engineer.”
He stared at the insignia for a moment. “What happened to Chief Dereumaux?”
“Dead.” I replied cold.
He nodded like he already knew what had happened. “For ship, crew and the empire, Commander.” He swore as I fixed the insignia to his uniform.
For ship, crew and survival I added in my mind.
---
I choose four more of the engineering crew with the help of the newly appointed Chief Gattiker for the wake up procedure. With the professional help I now got we were able to salvage more parts from the Will of the Emperor and improve the life support capabilities of the Gift further. This in turn allowed us to wake up more and more crew members. Over the next days and weeks we expanded our scavenging operations, now including water, food, fuel and munition.
Food was hard to come by. Any fresh produce has been destroyed by vacuum and the dead cold space. We were limited to MRE rations, but at least starving wasn’t a serious threat. Fuel and ammunition we found in abundance and the Gift’s arsenals were filled up in no time. We managed to weld the water tanks back together and scraped together what we could find. Normally the Gift had very effective water recycling systems but they were defective. We wouldn’t die of thirst, but the Gift stank like the carcass of a stranded whale. A fitting metaphor in my opinion.
Three weeks after I had promoted Gattiker nearly all of the remaining crew were back on its feet. Only severely wounded were still kept on ice. They would need medical attention that was only available on specialized ships and stations. Waking them now would only place them at risk needlessly.
It was also during these weeks that I finally got a report on losses. Out of the 283 men and woman under my command 87 perished. Another 39 were serious injured and still on ice. A third of my crew was dead. Killed in the battle or fallen victim to their wounds. And I didn’t even knew who or what had attacked us! As the situation became less dire and I no longer had to fight for survival every hour I regained enough power to really feel the hatred and desire for revenge in me. The desire to kill those, that did this to us, the desire to make them suffer. A desire to figure out what had happened exactly. Was this all a coincidence? Had someone in the empire betrayed us? The rage and desire for retaliation and retribution gave me new power to move on. For ship, crew and empire!
Despite all the losses and hardship some kind of euphoria seized the crew. There was hope. Things were turning to the better! They worked like mad to get the ship back into shape. Soon we had working showers and proper plumbing again! The smell was becoming weaker! Yet the repairs were mainly makeshift. Even with the major warehouse at our doorstep that was the debris field and with the engineers, we had to improvise more often then not. When we were back home the Gift would need a dry dock and a major overhaul. If she wasn't simply scrapped. Especially the damage to the load-bearing structure was near impossible to repair out here without the proper equipment. It would limit our maximum g considerably which would turn into a serious problem during any engagement.
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A bark that we found completely intact - the crew named the boat jokingly ‘little Gift’ for surviving the battle unscathed - allowed for scouting missions while the Gift stayed at the Will of the Emperor’s side. Carefully we started to explore further into the debris field, discovering new wreckage, but also discovering new spare parts and even survivors that had made it into their cryo vats. They were a welcome addition to the crew and we thawed them up wherever possible
Sad to say, they also found the wreckage of the INS Legion. The away crew brought back the dead body of Lord Admiral Briggs. His normally well-kept beard was now completely disheveled from the shrapnel that had also destroyed his face. We put him in cold storage with the other bodies. A Lord Admiral of the Terran Empire deserved a proper burial on Earth! And we would make sure of it!
The destroyed flagship and the body of Briggs were bad news. We all feared what we would find next. Our worst fears came true when we found the disabled INS Horizon. Understandably moral took a serious hit. What could we do now? Go back on ice and hope that another expedition fleet will find us in the next decades? The clocks at home would keep turning. People would continue to age. We would return to a world we wouldn’t recognize anymore. If we were found at all.
Not willing to give up I sent an engineering compliment to the Horizon. Surprisingly enough the damage to the ship appeared to be minor. The armor was compromised in some locations and a few less important compartments were damaged or completely lost. But most importantly the wormhole generator was intact. I couldn’t believe it. If I were the enemy I would have made sure to capture or destroy this invaluable technology! But it meant that there was a way home for us. We could go back, sound the alarm and get reinforcements here. Maybe a part of the fleet escaped and managed to hide? How many soldiers made it into cryo vats and survived the demise of their ship? Their batteries would be good for dozens of years.
Another mystery also remained unsolved. Where was the crew of the Horizon? The away team didn’t manage to find any surviving crew or even bodies. Sure, people went over board during battle, but no corpses at all? All the life rafts were present too. All the other ships we looted were strewn with disfigured corpses and body parts. What had happened on the Horizon? I pulled the ships log, but there were no useful entries. The last one being the clash between the fleets. I did not like that at all. Did she get boarded and did the attacker capture the crew? I couldn’t really imagine this happening. Even then there should be bodies and internal damage to the ship. Yet it was the only - at least slightly - logical possibility that came to my mind.
Another two weeks passed while we made the Gift as battle ready as we could. We filled munition stores to the brim, salvaged missiles and fixed additional armor plates to the Gifts hull where we could, since moving a large ship like the Horizon would not go unnoticed. We had to move both ships into a location suitable to open the wormhole. For security reasons wormholes were only opened as far outside of the system as possible to prevent any large mass from interfering. I gave a damn about jump security by now. There was a suitable mass free position only a few hours away that I intended to use for the transfer.
---
Finally the day had come. The remote connection that we had established with the Horizon triggered her thrusters and send her on its course, followed suite by the Gift. I decided to have all my crew on the Gift. We would need the extra hands in case of a fight and the Horizon wasn’t armed to begin with. The remote connection was sufficient for the simple maneuvers we had to do and the wormhole computer was prepared and could start its calculations for the near 60 lightyear jump as soon as the command was given.
The whole time during the transition I was sitting inside the CIC, waiting for the sensors to sound a detection alert. Surprisingly enough there weren’t any contacts popping up. Everything remained calm. If I were in command of the enemy fleet I would have used some time for scavenging. Some of the ships would be quite easy to get back into service.
I used the travel time to make plans for our arrival in the Sigdio system, half an eye always on the sensors. Sigdio was a frontier system, only recently added to the hyperlane network. It was the official start point of our trip, the first use of the Horizon’s wormhole drive. But other than being one of the systems furthest away from the imperial core worlds there isn’t anything special about Sigdio. A civilian station named Achenbach circled the third planet. The people lived almost exclusively from mining the resources found in the asteroids or on Sigdio III, an ice hell of a planet.
I knew that Achenbach had proper mooring and ship wharf facilities for the miners. Also, in unusually wise foresight the imperial navy high command had sat up a small supply depot on the station for the exploration fleet. I intend to repair and refit the Gift as far as possible with the equipment and resources present at Achenbach station before attempting to journey further towards the Sol system. Until then, the Gift was in as good a condition as we could get her.
“Commander, we are in position.” Reported Major De Muler from her station which tore me out of my thoughts. Her leg wound was all healed up and she had returned to duty as the navigation officer. She was the second officer of the ship, right below Colonel Tirso. Just like Gater she was new to the ship and me and only joined the crew shortly before departing from Sigdio. She did her duty well but I didn’t knew much about her. I preferred to keep a professional distance to most of the crew.
I looked at the CIC crew. “Time to go home, comrades. De Muler, signal the INS Horizon to begin calculation for jump to the Sigdio system. Colonel Costa, sound the alarm.”
|Attention. All hands. Jump stations. Prepare for wormhole transfer.|
I sat down in my chair and buckled up just in case.
“60 Seconds until jump.” Informed me De Mulder.
We did it. We really did it. We would go home.
“30 Seconds until jump. Buildup started.”
There was no going back now and I certainly didn’t want to. I couldn’t wait to see my family again.
“Sir, there is something wrong with the Horizon. Sensors report a fire in engineering.” Tirso called out. I swiveled my view over to the screen that showed the output of the optical sensors and I watched in horror as an explosion breached the Horizons hull from the inside near the engineering bay. Secondary explosions followed that ate their way through the hull all over the ship as they made their way to the wormhole generator
“Jump, Jump, Jump!” De Mulder called out. Something was wrong. Something was absolutely wrong. I felt like I touched the live cable on an outlet, jumped into ice water and burned myself on an oven all at the same time. This wasn’t normal. This was absolutely not normal. The pain turned worse and worse. My view distorted. Everything turned. I felt the nausea creeping and the worst headache of my life formed in my head. I thought the torment would never end. As my world started to turn black, I was glad that I wouldn’t feel the torture no more that my body still had to endure.