“How’s it going, Chief?”
“We’re welding a durasteel brace in on that cracked keel spar, sir. It’s a tough job getting at her though.”
Jason looked down into the hole torn into the deck flooring. Flood lamps illuminated the work crew who were squatting on either side of the cracked beam, maneuvering sections of durasteel into place using hand held null gravity units. The chief was hunched over a portable holo display, which was loaded with the ship’s blueprints, and pointed out the damaged section highlighted in red.
“Hell, sir, by the time we get home we’ll be able to skip the dry dock and just keep right on going.”
“Keep it up, Chief,” and Jason patted him on the shoulder and continued on.
It felt strange to order men like the chief around, old-line fleet lifers who were in the service before he was even born. The man was pulling off nothing short of a minor miracle. Tarawa, after the hit, in any normal situation, should have been sent back into a rear area dry dock to either be scrapped or taken apart and rebuilt. Such work usually went from the outside in. The chief was doing it backwards, taking apart sections of the ship to get at the damage. Areas of the ship not essential for survival, such as crew quarters, were being stripped for parts, especially the precious durasteel, and then were sealed off and pumped down to conserve on air. The chief was also adding in some modifications of his own, and now with O’Brian dead, he didn’t hesitate to point out criticisms in the ship’s design, spiced with a choice selection of expletives aimed at fleet headquarters. Yet if anyone dared to agree and denounce the Tarawa, the chief and most of his crew would have to be restrained from pummelling the person who dared to so insult “the old girl.”
Two days ago, on their sweep through the second system after Kilrah, they had encountered a minor Kilrathi orbital base and taken it out in a sharp attack led by Grierson, several Sabres, and a company of marines. Like carrion flies the damage control team had scrambled aboard the base, climbed over the still warm bodies of the Kilrathi and in under an hour stripped it of anything useful, pulling up sections of durasteel, emergency air canisters, a light shuttle craft, and then going so far as to cut out half a dozen of the base’s mass driver mini guns, which were now being welded to the ship just forward of the landing airlock for point defense. The volunteer gun crews would have to go EVA to get to the open turrets but their additional firepower might make the difference.
Jason stepped out of the corridor and went across the hangar bay. Sparks was directing a double team of ground crews that were taking apart three Rapiers which had been condemned as unfit for further service, stripping out the good parts from each, and attempting to get one flyable craft out of what was left.
Any armor left over was immediately sent to the repair crews which were now using it to reinforce the forward bulkheads just aft of the armored gun bow, a section which the chief had declared to be a weak point.
Jason gained the bridge and went over to the combat information officer on watch.
“Still the same, sir. Intrepid reports two cruisers and four destroyers six hours behind us. They’re scanning and have a lock on us,” she said quietly, without taking a second to look up from the screen.
“Our next jump point?”
“Still looks clean.”
He looked over at the nav officer on watch.
“Two hours and twenty eight minutes to jump point.”
Jason nodded and went into the wardroom.
The men in the room came to attention and Jason smiled.
He realized that technically Grierson should now be in charge of this fleet; he was after all the senior officer. After the heat of action at Kilrah he had offered to turn it all over to him, but Grierson refused, claiming that Jason was doing well enough, that he was after all in charge of the largest ship in the fleet, and that as a destroyer officer he had no experience whatsoever with carriers. Jason had laughed at that, since until Kilrah the biggest craft he had ever run was a Broadsword. Grierson was a rarity; there were far too many officers who, qualified or not, would have shouldered him aside and taken control. Though technically in control of the two-ship fleet, Jason knew that in a pinch he would defer to whatever this older officer had to say.
“Those buggers still behind us?” Merritt asked.
Jason nodded.
“Just shepherding us along,” Grierson replied.
“Making sure we go straight in to the next jump,” Jason replied.
He looked around the room.
“Any suggestions?”
“I still think we should come about, go back in, and have a show down with those scum,” Merritt stated.
Jason shook his head emphatically.
“Those are heavy cruisers. Each of them carries a squadron of fighters on board. That’ll be at least thirty to thirty-five against our twenty. Our torpedo supply is just about used up; we’ve got enough for one more action and then we’re out. Both of our ships are hurt. They’ll eat us alive.”
“At least we could take one cruiser down,” Merritt said. “We’re being run into the snare like rats trapped in an alleyway. I think it’s kind of obvious that they must be racing ahead through a parallel jump line to position themselves in the next system.”
Jason nodded and looked around the room.
“Look, our own nav information for this sector is sketchy at best,” Grierson said. “Maybe this is the shortest route out. We do know that there’s a jump point in the next system that will take us to the Jugara System. Once at Jugara we hook into that long jump which takes us damned near to Confederation lines. So let’s not get to pessimistic here.”
“Oh come on, Grierson,” Merritt said wearily. “Don’t you think they know that? Hell, it’s their damned system. It’ll be blocked by at least one carrier, maybe more. Here we’re worried about facing thirty-five fighters, and I tell you that if we push ahead we’ll be facing a major capital ship with a hundred and fifty fighters and bombers on board.”
“The key question is,” Jason interjected, “do the Kilrathi have a shorter route to the next jump point than the one we’ve taken?”
“I think we can assume so,” Grierson replied. “Otherwise that carrier we faced at Kilrah would be dogging our heels right now.”
“It’s also possible that those two ships we launched at Kilrah caught the carrier in the blast,” Grierson continued. “That’s something we don’t know since the planet masked our view.”
“That’s a long-shot assumption,” Jason replied. “Damn, it’d be nice to believe that, but in my old line of work we never were allowed to count a kill unless gun cameras got it, or we had a witness, and that’s the way I’m going to play it now.”
“So what’s the game plan, Jason?” Grierson asked, and Jason suppressed a smile of thanks.
“We head for the jump point, go through, and make a run to the Jugara jump point. We can’t go back towards Kilrah. Those cruisers would chew us apart. Even if we did defeat them, at best we’d come out crippled, with our ammunition supply depleted.”
“And if we find a carrier on the other side of this jump, we’re all dead meat,” Merritt said.
Jason nodded.
“But we’re not a hundred percent sure that the carriers will be there.”
“And your gut feeling?” Grierson asked.
There was no sense in lying.
“They’ll be waiting for us.”
Merritt threw up his hands in exasperation.
“Just great.”
Jason nodded slowly.
“Look, the moment we all heard about this mission we knew that we were dead meat, thrown away as a diversion. Damn it all, I’d give a couple of really important parts of my anatomy right now to know what really happened at Vukar. I guess we won’t. We’ve done a hell of a lot of butt kicking though in our own right, with six carriers smashed on the ground thanks to the marines.”