Burn’s flight helmet poked in the open bridge hatch. When she saw the projection of Tipperary spinning slowly in the air above the Ops console, displaying the damage to the ship, she flew that way. "How long until we can move this thing?" she said.
"Raleigh’s almost done priming the engines," the Chief reported. "Then, we’ll make for the second planet to hide like Cozen planned."
"Good. I don't like going down into any planet's atmo, but if we can pull off the same stunt the Squidies did, then we’ll be a lot safer. Those clouds make LiDAR almost useless. Our IR sig isn't large. Hopefully that means the alien stalking us can’t sneak up without using active radar of some kind to find us."
Burn looked up at the stars outside the dome like she was getting her bearings before she flew around Raleigh at Ops and pointed to space off Algol’s limb. "We’ve got worse problems than the alien ship that killed Duer," she said. "I know your standard, Staas exosuit helmets can’t detect the high-energy stuff, but if you zoom in with what you’ve got, you can still pick out the infrared and visible light emissions."
Tig zoomed in. He didn’t see it at first. Far off, on the other side of the star system, a bright sphere grew from a point like a star to a sphere of hellfire. Before the transit opened, it gave off tremendous bursts of visible light and IR that flashed over the nearby space and revealed the forms of the enemy warships already assembling there.
Burn said. "Been opening every five minutes or so for the last fifteen. Too far away to see exactly what’s entered the system from here, not without painting them with radar or a laser."
Horcheese kept her voice flat. "I thought they were supposed to be thin in this sector."
"That’s what we all thought," Burn said. "And we all got fooled."
"There’s at least thirty enemy ships out there," Raleigh said. "And big ones."
"Why are they just waiting there? Why aren’t they chasing Hardway and the battlegroup?
"They’re going to intercept the convoy when it doubles back," Horcheese said. "Just like how we planned to rejoin the battlegroup after we fixed the breaching ship. Except they’ll want to transit one system ahead of Hardway so they can bushwhack the convoy."
"The battlegroup… Hardway…. They’ll be massacred."
"That’s right," Burn said. "Unless we get to Mizar first and warn them."
Horcheese shook her head. "Get there first? Get where? You mean rendezvous with Hardway and warn them? Did you read my damage report? Can you see this projection?" She kept her eyes on Burn, but pointed at the projection of Tipperary hanging over the console. Most of it flashed red. Those were all the systems that were offline. They included the NS191 particle emitters and after finally reading how they worked, even Tig agreed those couldn’t be fixed without replacement parts. Horcheese said, "Tig... Tell Burn about the CDCS, the capacitor discharge control systems."
"The CDCS controls the discharge. It's really important and it's melted...fused," Tig said. "The zap from the reactor surge melted it. And it did the same to the particle emitters."
"We can’t fix those," Raleigh said.
Burn still hadn’t got the first bit. "The CDCS…"
"We need the CDCS to coordinate the discharge from the capacitors to the five emitters. We also need 5 working NS191 emitters. We don’t have either one. Cozen bet on us being able to repair this ship and we can’t. It’s just a fact."
"Tipperary’s spare parts were packed aboard Luxor." Tig said it more quietly than he’d meant to, but the Chief still shot him a death stare.
Burn glanced up and out of the dome at the debris from the battle. The remnants of the hauler Luxor, her cargo, and her crew had joined with the wreckage of the dozen Squidy destroyers and frigates from the task force that attacked earlier. The whole debris field was less than a million Ks out.
Horcheese said, "Luxor is gone. Her cargo is gone."
"Not entirely." As Burn spoke, she kept her eyes on the sparkles of reflected light from the debris. "Now, Luxor is part of the debris field from the last battle with the Squidies. If those those NS191s were in standard Staas Company containers, then there’s a chance the parts are intact. She came apart clean."
"No. You don’t get it," the Chief said. "It’ll take us weeks to find the parts in that mess. Maybe more."
Raleigh said, "If what we want is intact, it’s somewhere inside a dense 200K cloud of debris."
"It’s so thick in there, you can only fly safely at maybe 20 m/s tops. You can’t fly through that stuff and not hit debris. We’d get pulverized by impacts before we ever got close to finding what we needed."
"I can find the emitters," Tig said. "We can tweak the comms system to signal like an inventory query and use the junk’s prospecting rig to hear the containers sound off. We can make a map." Raleigh actually laughed then, but it was more nervous than mocking. "I used to do this all the time," Tig said. "Believe it."
"What? How? Why?" Burn said.
"Because he used to steal from Staas Company warehouses, I’ll wager," Chief Horcheese told her.
"Just hit the right freq and protocol with the junk’s transmitters. Spoof a standard Staas Cargo Inventory Query. Hit ‘em with the right protocol and I guarantee they’ll respond with their contents. I can write a script to do it and map the contents of the containers in the debris."
"That’s like ringing the dinner bell for the Squidies," Raleigh said. "We gotta drift through that mess slow and quiet like we were a piece of debris ourselves. Otherwise, our alien friends out there are sure to take notice."
Horcheese said. "The Squidy that killed UNS Duer is still out there. You can bet he’s close."
"We won’t even have to fly through the debris field," Tig said. "We'll map it from a distance with the spoofed inventory protocol and find what we need. Then, we go in and get the NS191s with a knuckledragger. Quick trip."
"No," the Chief said. "My cherry is all wrong. If we go in there, we gotta do this slow and quiet."
Burn hadn’t said a word yet, but Tig already knew what she’d say. "Make me a map, Mr…Tig Meester." He noticed that she had to look at the patch on his exosuit before she knew his name. That would change soon. Someone was finally giving him a chance to show what he could do.