No one laughed.
Tough crowd, Pepper thought.
Java Sea ― on the cargo ship Hail Nucleus
Hail had reviewed a few hours of Eagles video when an instant message popped up on his screen.
The message was from Dallas Stone in the ship’s security center. It read, Hey Marshall, we have a security situation that may require your attention.
Hail checked the time on the corner of the monitor. It was about two in the afternoon. Hail’s stomach grumbled, reminding him that he had not eaten in the last twelve hours.
Hail typed a reply to the instant message, On my way. He hit send and logged off of his computer.
Hail left his little office and walked back to his bedroom. The first shirt his hand touched in his closet was a blue polo-shirt. He yanked it off the hanger, pulled it over his head and left his stateroom. It only took him about three minutes to walk the seven-hundred feet to the security center. He knew this because he was kind of a math guy and knew that the average person walked about four-feet per second and the security center was on the other end of the ship. Simple math yielded the solution — one-hundred and seventy-five seconds for a one-way pedestrian trip.
Seven-hundred feet later, Hail held up his proximity card to the scanner and the lock inside the bulkhead door to the security center clanged open.
Unlike the last time he had walked in and hardly anyone had payed attention to his arrival, this time six happy faces were all looking at him and they were all smiling.
Hail looked confused.
“What the heck is up and what’s so funny?” Hail asked.
Six laughs and then six smiles faded into six devious grins. Other than Pierce Mercier, who was sitting at one of the two analyst stations, no smile in the room was older than twenty-two years of age.
“Pirates,” Dallas Stone told Hail.
“What?” Hail heard himself say, but he already knew what Dallas was telling him. He simply didn’t believe him.
“That’s right,” Dallas said, laughing. “Some dumb-ass pirates are approaching us in a twenty-foot wooden fishing vessel. What are they thinking?” Dallas slapped himself on the side of his head.
The expressions didn’t change on any of his crew’s faces. His pilots and analysts just stared at Hail with big grins plastered across their animated faces. Working in the security center was a pretty boring job. Up to this point, the Nucleus had never been attacked, so this minor low-risk diversion from the monotony had his young crew excited.
“This should be interesting,” Hail laughed, clapping his hands together.
Tayler informed Hail.
“Oh, they also have a mother-boat sitting about a quarter-mile off our port side, but it looks like they only have a single fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on its bow.”
Dallas turned to look at his monitors and said, “Check it out.”
Hail squeezed in between Dallas and Tayler’s stations. Dallas pointed at a set of screens that had video playing on them. One screen showed a view from a camera on Prince shooting directly down on the small wooden boat. The small craft appeared to be powered by an outboard motor. A driver was muscling the tiller through four-foot waves. Hail saw five men on the boat, some with shirts, some without, but all of them had a rifle of some type slung over their shoulders. Stone’s other monitor displayed a video being shot from one of the Nucleus’s gun ports. The camera mounted in that particular port was sitting at an angle of forty-five degrees to the sea below. A crisp and clean image of the approaching vessel was being electronically streamed from the port camera to the security center. Hail estimated that the pirate’s wooden boat was about a thousand-yards off the Nucleus’s port side.
“Is our deck clear? No one is up top, are they?”
Dallas answered, “The deck has been cleared and we are locked down.”
Tayler said, “Queen has a close-up of the mother-boat and I have that video up on this monitor,” she told Hail, pointing at the screen closest to her boss.
Hail turned his attention to Tayler’s monitor. Her screen showed a white boat that was much larger than the wooden boat. It was newer in design and age. The mother-boat appeared to be made of fiberglass. It was white and shiny and sat low in the water. Only three men could be seen on its deck.
Hail realized that a fiberglass boat was not the best attack vessel, but then these dirt-poor Indonesian people didn’t have the luxury of being picky. They had probably liberated it from pleasure seekers or fishermen who had entered an area of the Java Sea that they now regretted. Hail thought how desperate these pirates must be to think they could pull up next to a massive cargo ship in a dinky wooden boat and try to take over. He actually admired them in a way. What balls.
“What do you want to do, Skipper?” Dallas asked.
Indecisiveness was not part of Hail’s character. He was raised by a decisive man in a decisive manner and indecision had been interpreted as a weakness by his father. But Hail had to think this situation over for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said to buy some time. “It doesn’t even seem fair…” and he let his sentence trail off.
He started again. “I mean; I really don’t want to vaporize these poor fools unless we have to. Does anyone have any thoughts?”
Lex Vaughn, one of the two weapon controllers suggested, “We could get close and personal and scare them away?” Vaughn had just graduated from high school and had recently joined Hail’s crew on the Nucleus. He had tested very high on the online flight simulator exercise that Hail’s team had developed, and so far Hail thought that Vaughn was fitting in nicely.
Titus Penn, the other weapon controller suggested, “Or we could just open up with one of our ship’s fifties in front of them. That would scare the hell out of me if I was a pirate in a crappy wooden boat.”
Penn’s addition to the crew had been much different than that of Vaughn. Titus Penn had been orphaned years ago in an atrocity that had taken his parents’ life. With no other living relatives, Hail had become Penn’s guardian, as he had for many of the other young people on board. Penn was only fourteen when his parents had left his life. For the last two years he had been schooled, fed, housed and nurtured aboard the Nucleus. The ship had become his home.
Hail considered both options for a moment.
He watched the small pirate boat bounce across the waves under full power. Water was shooting up from the sides of the boat as the pirates closed within five-hundred yards of the Nucleus.
Hail’s next question was directed toward both of his weapon controllers.
“What do we have in our medium class that is charged, armed and ready to fly?”
Both of the young men began to flip through screens on their monitors.
Penn was the first to report, “I have Ratt and Scorpion ready for launch.”
Vaughn said a moment later, “And I have Poison that’s good to go.”
“That sounds good,” Hail said, his tone balanced and assertive. “Hand off Ratt to Stone so each of you are flying singles. Open the hatch on the deck and get them airborne.”
“Yes, Sir,” Penn said, transferring the flight control of the weapon with the code name Ratt to Dallas Stone.
The assignment made sense, because Tayler was still controlling the inflight attack drone code named Queen. And Dallas’s drone Prince was static and clipped to the underside of blimp thousands of feet above the Nucleus.
Vaughn pressed an icon on a screen and reported, “The deck hatch is open and we are good to spin up.”
The three pilots, who had each been assigned a weapon, pulled in a bar from the sides of their stations that swiveled into place in front of them. The bar had a combination of joysticks and flight controls mounted to its stainless steel surface. Each of the young men placed their feet on control pedals under their stations.