Olivia opened her eyes, all around her was chaos, the surviving marines were dusting themselves down having, with the crew, finally driven the invaders back from the quarterdeck and were re-establishing control of the ship. Some of the invaders she could see had retreated back to their boarding torpedoes and were preparing to launch. “Master of arms,” she called, “blow those boarding torpedoes out of the cosmos”.
“Yes Sir,” the Master of Arms replied from his console. Olivia realised she was still waving her sidearm about as she spoke and quickly holstered it. She pulled up the damage and casualty reports coming and wasn’t pleased. At least the without’s defence forces had arrived. The ship was crippled, it’s ionic drive taken out, the slip drive was down, god knows if Sparrow survived the assault on main engineering; although in theory her pod should protect her. The casualty reports weren’t much better. Medical was flooded with wounded sailors and marines and by all accounts forty percent of the ships company were dead or dying with another twenty percent in medical. She could limp in on thrusters she thought but there were large sections of the ship exposed to vacuum from the initial barrage that had taken them by surprise. Still she thought, the Whittington survives again, by the skin of her teeth!
“Engineering, who’s in charge down there,” she called through the intercom.
After a couple of minutes there was no response. That wasn't good. “Patch me through to the secondary systems unit,” she barked.
“CPO Willis here Captain,” came the eventual reply.
“CPO Willis, we’ve lost contact with the main engineering deck, drives are down - both ionic and slip. I need you to make sure you keep life support and power up - especially to medical and to the quarterdeck. Do you understand?”
“Yes Sir, it will be difficult without access to main engineering but we’ll manage.”
“Do what you can CPO,” she replied.
“Acknowledged.”
Christ, what a fiasco she thought, how had the ships threat detection systems not immediately alerted them of the enemy. There would be an inquiry into this for sure she thought and then she remembered the bloody mayor’s daughter; it would be a court martial at this rate. Where the hell was she, then she remembered, Mr Choudary had got her out in a shuttle. Well that might just save her neck if not her commission. She pulled up her comms unit from the ships and hailed the defence fighters.
“Captain Hernandez here,” she spoke into the comms unit, “who’s in command?”
“Squadron Leader Marshall here, what’s your situation?”
“Pretty bleak Squadron Leader,” she replied, “ we’re dead in the water, multiple breaches, our drives are down and large sections are exposed to vacuum. We’ve got 40% of the crew dead and another 20% in medical.”
“Acknowledged,” the gruff squadron leader replied, “I’ll request a tug and an escort for you and we’re despatching a medical sloop to you.”
“Much appreciated Squadron Leader but don’t bother with the tug - we’ll limp home or not at all,” she replied, “Do you know what happened to our shuttle? Our Captain of Marines was evacuating a high value strategic asset.”
“They safely entered the without’s defence zone at 06:27 station time,” Squadron Leader Marshall replied, “I spoke with your Captain of Marines, he had two wounded crewmen with him and the asset with him.” Two crewmen, that was strange, thought the Captain, Mr Choudary had only mentioned the chief hadn’t he. He must have picked up a wounded crewman on the way out. Curious, she got her tablet to connect to the ship’s interface and pull up the security footage on Mr Choudary. She saw him enter engineering with the mayor’s daughter and she saw the firefight that ensued and how he overcame the enemy fire team. The wrecked pod and the shocking state of the collapsed Sparrow sprawling out of it. Then to her horror she watched her Chief Engineer draw her gun on Mr Choudary and then make the mayor’s daughter pick up the pilot and drag her through the corridors and into shuttle 2.
What the hell were they doing, she thought. Quickly, she tapped her master code into the tablet and deleted all the footage and turned all the cameras in engineering off. It was all recoverable to the Navy’s systems techs she knew but they’d have to be looking for it first and she would give them no reason to look.
“Sixth Lieutenant, you have the ship, I need to get down to engineering and see how bad it is down there; my first specialism was engineering.”
“Yes Sir,” her Lieutenant replied; Asher she thought his name was. As she hurried off to the lift and down to engineering. When she got down there the carnage was even worse; outside, in fact a whole compartment away, sat in front of the still sealed blast doors, two system tech ratings and CPO Willis were busily tapping away at a tablet and trying to jimmy the door open without its override code. She looked over their shoulder and saw her chance. “It’s the deck 12 relay,” she said, surprising the three men, “look at the telemetry on line 42. She’s not shut down and we’re losing power output at quite a rate. You three need to get into vac suits and disable her before she causes a problem. I’ll take over here.”
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“Yes Sir!” the surprised CPO exclaimed pulling off an attempt at a salute before dragging his two ratings with him and out of engineering.
Olivia tapped into the interface again to check the security recordings were still turned off before she overrode the blast doors. She pulled out her side arm, checked it was set to atmospheric mode and shot out all the security cameras in engineering. There was nothing she could do about the corridor footage being missing but at least this would give her an explanation of why the footage from engineering was missing - taken out in the firefight. Thinking more clearly, she now restored most of the corridor footage from before Mr Chourdary entered engineering, after there was the problem with Sparrow being naked. She did her best trying to construct a corrupted video file, with just the odd section of viewable footage, all the angles where Sparrow was only just visible. She got the interface to tag them all, Mr Choudary and Ms Liu’s idents came up quickly, a heartbeat later the mayor’s daughter’s ident was recognised. Then finally to her surprise the interface pulled up a further ident for Sparrow or Warrant Officer Rita MacLeod as the interface was now displaying. Chloe Liu, what the hell have you done, what were you planning on doing? She thought knowing her chief engineer was the only one with the technical skills and the access to create a fake ident convincing enough for the interface not to pick up on it. Shit, she must have been planning something for months.
Olivia, hesitated. She knew she should report this immediately to the Admiralty but to do so would be a death sentence for the four of them and despite herself she held Ms Liu and Ms Sparrow in her affection. She knew she couldn’t hand them over and sleep at night afterwards, even if that put her head firmly back beneath the guillotine so to speak. Could she cover this up? She pulled up ‘Rita’s’ service record - an unremarkable work of fiction: conscripted as a system tech young due to exceptional compatibility to the role and shoved straight into a year at the Naval Academy’s technical school. First a 6 month training posting on the Mandela, a frigate of the fifth rate. Unexceptional service record initially but her performance improved on her first full posting on the Sevenoke, a first rate ship of the line, and she was promoted to able seaman and then petty officer over her three years on board. At which point she was transferred to the Whittington and promoted to CPO after a year and Warrant Officer Class 2 last month, leading the water recycling maintenance detail, a role of much importance usually given to the most able of the junior technical Warrant Officers. The timelines fitted, Sparrow’s own arrival on the Whittington, and she noted both the Sevenoke and the Mandela had been lost not long after ‘Rita’s’ postings had finished. Clever, no footage to cross reference. Only what was on the interface, which Ms Liu must have placed there.
Olivia, drawing up technical skills she hadn’t used in years, since the Admiralty transferred her to the command training programme back when she’d been a fifth Lieutenant, ostensibly in charge of comms systems, but from the Quarterdeck she had always known the Techs had always been in control. Still she had learnt enough technical skills to do what she intended, not a patch on Ms Liu’s but for this she didn’t need to be. She created a private operating space on her terminal, not perfect but most monitoring systems of the interface would now ignore her as she worked on it to create an avatar of Sparrow, as Ms MacLeod, and code a simple AI to animate the avatar and place dummy footage into the security feeds of the avatar over the last two years. Once the AI was initiated it would take a couple of hours to upload all the data, and there was always a risk the interface would alert itself to the intrusion but she was hopeful her skills were canny enough to go unnoticed to routine monitoring algorithms. After all there would be scores of techs now uploading questionable code onto the interface in a panic and she suspected the algorithms would prioritise tackling that. Finally, she checked the ship’s telemetry and saw the CPO obviously knew what he was doing as the faulty power relay was already flagged as disabled. Glancing through the telemetry she identified two other anomalous relay readings. Picking up the comms unit she spoke into it, “CPO, this is the Captain, there are faulty relays on deck 4 and deck 14. Units 9 and 34.”
“Acknowledged Captain,” came the CPOs voice back through the speakers in engineering and she immediately put down the comms unit. That should buy her the time she needed, she thought as she chucked her tablet into a recycling unit and headed back to the quarterdeck. She was surprised at herself, ever since both her and the pilot had been installed on the Whittington she had been pleasantly taken aback to find the pilot had a bit of personality, which she had indulged with the commissioning day parties and letting the pilot project her image on special occasions and interact with the crew. That had led to her friendship with Ms Liu, something she turned a blind eye to for a number of years now. Reflecting, she thought it had made her happy to see Sparrow make a friend and her personality continue to express itself. She had told herself it made a pleasant change to the automatons you usually got on naval ships, maybe merchantmen had a different experience, getting the second rate pilots by and large, but she had known all along it had gone too far when Sparrow’s avatar had changed from the default blonde aryan projection to the Gaelic form that must have echoed her true image. She’d accepted Sparrow’s carefully worded reply to her enquiries to her new form and now realised that Ms Liu must have found a way of showing Sparrow what she looked like and then coached her with a script to relay to anyone who challenged her. Oh well, she was in it as deep now as the four idiots who had taken off in the shuttle. The mayor’s daughter was going to get a mighty shock, she thought, she’d have to run with them if they thought they were being pursued, and pursued they would be although hopefully not now by the Corporation.
Mr Choudary had been right in his assessment that this had been a black flag military operation by a rival power. Looking back to the breached blast door, at the bodies of the enemy soldiers, she could see where their ident tattoos had been removed, fresh skin grafts still visible. They were equipped with commando rated gear and obviously their ship, which dove into the slip as soon as the fighter squadron began pursuing it, was technologically superior to the Whittington by some margin to be able to approach into effective weapons range without being noticed. Their target must have been the mayor’s daughter to risk incursion this deep into Corporation space. She doubted they’d give up and she knew that if Mr Choudary was as competent a marine as he seemed to be he’d be assuming that and a corporation pursuit as well. She expected more fireworks but not perhaps for a day or two and with that thought she headed back to the quarterdeck.