Katadromiko 2, orbiting Dresse, Dresse system
‘That murdering bastard,’ spat Zaphir. ‘I’ll rip his flea-ridden head off and kick it out an airlock.’
Bache just sat there clenching his fists until his knuckles went white.
‘Now you know why I did what I did,’ mumbled Welt, from behind them.
‘You can just shut up,’ Zaphir hissed, turning and jabbing a finger at him.
Bache glanced over, realising Welt was about to say more and unseen by Zaphir, he shook his head at him. He knew only too well not to antagonise her when she was severely pissed and didn’t want her taking her frustration out on him.
Welt luckily took the hint, kept quiet and lay back on the bed again.
They turned back to the screens to see the bridge crew being escorted away. Bache counted twelve new un-uniformed Gatas filing onto the bridge and taking up positions behind some of the consoles.
‘They seem quite familiar with the layout,’ said Bache, watching as they immediately began tapping away at their relevant stations.
‘I told you that Gata flyer’s controls on the surface was of GDA design,’ said Zaphir. ‘Someone, somewhere has undertaken some espionage and given these grey bastards our technology.’
‘Well, let’s not worry about that for the moment,’ said Bache. ‘We need to help Mr Whippy get his ship back and find some way to counter that anti-jump thing.’
Zaphir nodded and glanced up at the ceiling.
‘Is there a holomap generator in this room?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, pressing a couple of icons and pointing at a screen in the centre of the group. ‘But we do have a three-dimensional map on there.’
An image of Dresse and the surrounding region appeared on the screen, slowly turning and showed the K2 still in orbit and surrounded by the twelve Gata warships.
‘At some point soon they’re going to want to go somewhere,’ said Bache. ‘These ships must have been built for a specific job, it’s taken them years to do this and when they go wherever they’re going, they’ll need to turn the anti-jump zone thing off.’
‘Does it affect them too?’ asked Zaphir.
‘It must do,’ said Bache. ‘The priden stated it impeded a jump envelope being generated, which has to affect them as well. What I need to do is quietly feel around with the main array and try and pinpoint what sort of beam or frequency they’re using to enable this.’
‘Won’t Whippy be doing the same?’
‘He may not know what we know. He won’t have spoken to anyone before retreating to his ROR and he certainly won’t know why his escape jump didn’t eventuate.’
‘Can’t we contact him and ask?’ questioned Zaphir.
‘Possibly, but I don’t want that piece of shit detecting the communication,’ Bache replied, pointing at the screen showing the priden strutting around the bridge.
‘Aren’t these rooms connected independently?’
‘I have no idea. I’d like to think so, but I can’t take the risk of him finding out about us. He’s already murdered one crew member for just asking a question.’
‘Mr Whippy must be doing his nut,’ she said. ‘I’d hate to be locked in one of these with him right now.’
Bache grimaced, knowing exactly what she meant. Putting that thought out of his mind, he began going through the camera feeds from the engineering decks.
‘Ah,’ he grunted, finally finding what he was looking for.
A screen had lit up with a scene from the main engineering deck and offices showing a contingent of Gata soldiers standing guard over Chief Engineer Catams and a handful of her staff. Bache had known Desme Catams for years as his father had trained her, an experienced officer and although quite a shy girl, her intimate knowledge of the ship’s systems was quite extraordinarily detailed and guaranteed to be accurate.
They were all sitting on the floor in her office with the door closed. The furniture and computers had been removed. Bache could see several Gata soldiers standing guard outside and again, the same as on the bridge, a few civilian grey Gatas in the background sitting at the main engineering stations.
‘Hmm, I was afraid of that,’ said Bache.
Zaphir looked across at him quizzically. He noticed her raised eyebrows and took it as a cue to explain his comment.
‘If you have complete control over the bridge and main engineering,’ he said, ‘then you pretty much have the vessel. They know what they’re doing, or at least they think they do.’
‘When d’you think Whippy will make a move?’
‘The earlier the better, it gives them less time to establish and fully infiltrate the ship. Although he can’t do anything until he can jump the ship away from that fleet and that’s where I can try to help.’
Zaphir watched as he brought up a screen that showed the standings of the various arrays. The main one and a couple of the secondary arrays were in use by the Gatas, so he chose not to use those in case it was noticed. A smaller array, normally used for geological surveys of planetary bodies, was sitting dormant.
Bache hoped the enemy crew were engrossed in their own tasks and not paying any attention to this peripheral piece of equipment stuck out on a spur at the stern of the vessel.
Delving into the arrays menu, he changed its function to a wide spectrum of frequencies and keeping the range local so the Gata fleet were less likely to detect his snooping, he scanned for anything anomalous.
After a few minutes, he sat back in his seat, rubbed the back of his neck and groaned with frustration.
‘Nothing?’ questioned Zaphir, her face mirroring his look of disappointment.
‘No—nothing,’ he said in almost a whisper. ‘I must be missing something.’
‘Perhaps it’s a field that only initiates as an envelope is developing,’ said a quiet voice from the other side of the room.
They both turned and stared at Welt lying on the small bunk with his back to them.
‘Didn’t I tell you to shut up?’ Zaphir snarled. ‘What would anyone from your primitive planet know about jump dynamics? You haven’t even got into spa…’
Bache put his hand up to silence Zaphir and spoke.
‘Actually, he has a point,’ he said. ‘It could be a dormant field.’
‘How d’you mean?’ Zaphir asked, giving the back of Welt’s head a penetrating sneer as she turned back to Bache.
‘Well, if you were to use your permanent array feedback to signal the development of an envelope in a designated zone, the anti-jump system could then flash something out to kill it.’
‘There’s enough time to do that as the envelope is developing is there?’
‘Oh, yes, definitely,’ he said, a little more enthusiastically now. ‘It takes over a hundred milliseconds to form…plenty of time.’
She shook her head and rolled her eyes.
‘Only you would know that shit,’ she replied.
‘Didn’t you cover the theory of jump dynamics in your pilot training?’
She shrugged.
‘I was probably asleep through all that nerdy crap.’
Bache gave her an exasperated gaze before sighing again and turning back to the console.
‘If there was some way of initiating an envelope and scanning as its forming, we might be able to detect what the hell we’re dealing with,’ he said, sitting back in his seat again and crossing his arms despondently.
‘Can’t we programme a drone to do that?’ Zaphir asked.
Bache stared straight ahead silently for a moment.
‘They’d detect it though and probably start torturing the crew to find out who did it,’ he said, eventually.
‘Not if it was made to look like an automated function,’ she said.
‘Hmm,’ he grunted, turning to look at her and then back at the console. ‘That could be done. The only drawback is someone would have to go to one of the drone hangars, pull one off the rack and retrieve its programming code.’
‘The drones are all automated though…aren’t they?’
‘Most are,’ he said. ‘But the jump-capable drones are expensive and apparently, years ago, when Mr Whippy was a chief engineer, he caught someone secretly trying to launch one to their home planet to wish her partner a happy birthday. The captain blamed him because they all come under the chief engineer’s remit. So ever since, on his ships, all the jump-capable drones have to be manually authorised from the bridge and they’re not left flight-ready.’
‘Shit,’ she mumbled. ‘Well, you need to be here to programme it, so it’d better be me that goes.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Welt, turning over to face them and sitting up.
‘No you fucking won’t,’ snapped Zaphir. ‘I’m not putting my life and the lives of this crew in your hands.’
‘How will I ever prove to you that I’m not your enemy?’ he whined.
‘With difficulty,’ said Bache. ‘And with an operation this critical, I need someone I can trust implicitly.
He turned to Zaphir.
‘I wish there was someone else trustworthy to send instead,’ he said. ‘But needs must. I want you to promise me you’ll take no unnecessary risks.’
‘I won’t,’ she said.