Status Quo: The Chronicle of Jane Doe Read online

  Huh.

  "Alicia," I said, "it's just..."

  "What the hell is a minimum engagement range?" she demanded. "I'm so stupid. I don't even know what it's asking me. How can I answer if I don't know what it's asking me?"

  "Oh," I said, and then a thought occurred to me. I didn't know how to phrase it delicately, so I didn't try. "Alicia," I asked, "Do you know what the M676 is?"

  "Chem guns," she informed me bitterly. "The guns that shoot at incoming missiles. I'm not that stupid."

  "I know," I said. "So listen... The question is asking how close things have to be to the ship before the chem guns don't shoot at them."

  "What?" She demanded.

  "Minimum... Engagement... Range," I said carefully. "The minimum distance from the ship at which the chem guns will target something."

  "That's stupid!" she informed me. "The closer something gets, the more you should try to shoot at it."

  "No." I said, shaking my head slowly. "Because..."

  I knew the answer, but that was the easy part.

  "Alright," I said, reaching for the whiskey. I held the bottle out to her. "We need to get inside the Navy's head a little bit. It's dangerous to do that when sober."

  She grinned a little, but did not take the whiskey.

  "So here's how this works," I said, holding the bottle sideways like a boat, moving my other hand like the jazz-hands-of-incoming-missiles. "The chem guns mostly shoot at missiles. Missiles are mean-spirited creatures. They want to hurt you. If you shoot at a missile and hit it in the engines, the missile will detonate where it is to try and hurt you as much as it can. That's okay if it's far away. But if it's really close, then that's bad. It's actually worse than if the missile just hits you."

  "You are so full of shit," she informed me.

  "Yes," I agreed, "but not about this. We have shields and armor. If a missile hits the armor,” I add, tapping the bottle with a clink, “there's probably going to be some damage. But the damage will be localized. It will all be in one spot, and all the important stuff on the ship is kind of distributed. It's hard to hurt us badly just with one hit. But if the missile detonates ten meters off the hull, then the shockwave will impact all up and down the ship, and it can hurt us in more places. And if it's only ten meters away, it won't be much less powerful then if it just hits us directly. It's the same reason that most bombs are set to detonate slightly above -"

  Alicia wasn't listening anymore. Her face was streaming tears as she stared at me silently.

  "Hey," I said to her. "It'll be okay."

  I glanced at the clock.

  Or not.

  "Alicia," I said carefully, "when are you supposed to work today? Because I thought you switched-"

  "Shit!" she yelled in horror, shoving herself off of the bed.

  She looked at the clock and the tears started forming again.

  "No, no, no, no!"

  She ran to the bathroom and I heard the sound of running water. I decided it was best to stay out of the way.

  Alicia ran back and forth to the bathroom a half dozen times, collecting various small objects on each trip. Finally, she came over to my bed, hugged me briefly while muttering something about love, and ran out of our quarters.

  I stared at the door for a minute, feeling more exhausted by the sudden silence, then plopped back down on my bunk. I dropped my head onto the pillow and stared up at the blue pouring into my room.

  I reached over and turned off the overhead light.

  ===========================================

  I'm not sure how long I slept, but I was awakened by the Pridemore's 1MC crackling to life.

  "Attention on the ship," it squawked. "All available reactor technicians, please contact Reactor Control."

  Perfect. I slapped the comm panel above my bed.

  "It's me." I snapped. "I'm off duty and sleeping, Coates." Coates's round face filled the entire screen, like he was leaning in too close for anyone else to hear him.

  "Look," he said, a nervous expression on his face, "There's some really goofy shit going on down here. We just lost a second coolant valve, and now I'm getting fluctuations in the mag field."

  "Did you notify our illustrious Chief of Maintenance?" I asked.

  "I tried." Coates said. "I can't get hold of him."

  "And Chief Abeen?" I prodded.

  "She's in some kind of meeting with the captain, and I can't convince any of the idiots on the bridge to interrupt them."

  "Look," I attempted sleepily. "Why don't you just have Johnson fix this crap? If he does a good job, he can have his burrito back."

  "I can't find that asshole anywhere," Coates snapped. "He didn't report for his shift, and I haven't exactly had time to hunt him down."

  He lowered his voice.

  "Look, I'm serious about this. Things are not good down here. I know Anna's saying everything is fine, but my local readings are scaring the shit out of me."

  I bit my lip, desperately wanting to care less than I did.

  Log 006: No rest for the wicked.

  Coates hadn't been joking.

  Anna was well above safe operating temperature by the time I got there, donned my suit, and climbed inside. It had only been a few hours - at most - since I'd been here last, but the coolant system had failed almost completely. Anna's core temps were dangerously close to the red line.

  Poor thing.

  Not bothering to ask permission this time, I yanked the control module from its rack and tossed it on the deck. Swapping in the spare, I turned the system back on and watched the temperature immediately start to drop.

  She was going to be okay.

  "Hey," I called over the radio. "How's it look on your end?"

  "Much better." Coates said, the relief obvious in his voice. "But the reaction efficiency is in the toilet."

  "Yeah, well." I offered. "That tends to happen when dumbass maintenance decisions get made. The rails probably warped from the extra heat, so I doubt the injectors are correctly aligned."

  "So..." Coates said carefully, "You're gonna fix it?"

  Shit.

  Swapping out the control module had been one thing - I hadn't been allowed to do it, but the actual risk had been minimal. Opening the reaction chamber was a whole different thing.

  It was also something that couldn't wait.

  A misaligned injector meant that the anti-helium wasn't being fired into the center of the reaction chamber. The mag fields would prevent it from escaping, and it would eventually get 'burned' up. But if the fields failed, a stream of anti-helium atoms would get shot directly through the chamber wall (vaporizing both it and anything else they touched).

  In the worst case scenario, the stream would fry the sensors that detected chamber breaches. Then we'd have an uncontrolled fountain of anti-helium to deal with. Eventually it would hit something, and the resulting explosion would destroy the back half of the Pridemore.

  If I recalled correctly, the ship needed both halves to maintain peak efficiency.

  "Alright," I said to Coates. "I'll take care of her. Here's what you need to do, though. You need to call up to the bridge and tell them what's going on. Make sure they understand that the ship needs to remain perfectly stable while I do this. Tell them that if the ship starts rocking, I'm going to take Anna offline to keep all of us alive. If I have to do that, it means they'll lose most of their primary systems, including Astrogation and Tactical. You got that?"

  "Got it," Coates said. He cut the link, presumably to contact the bridge.

  The next twenty minutes were less than fun.

  Anna's frame rails had been warped, just as I'd suspected. I had to shut down the injectors one at a time and swap out each individual rail. It was a nerve-wracking process. A single mistake could have resulted in something exploding, melting, or incinerating me. After what seemed like forever, I finally got to the last one.

  Then the 1MC crackled to life with Captain Wiley's voice.

  "General Quarters, G
eneral Quarters! All hands, brace for high-G maneuvering!"

  I slapped the comm panel with my free hand.

  "Bridge, reactor compartment," I said, bypassing both Coates and Byers, "Do not, I repeat, do not engage in high-G maneuvering!"

  Chief Abeen's voice came back instantly.

  "That's not your command to give, crewman!" she snapped.

  "Fine," I replied, suppressing my anger, "but I'm aligning the injectors right now or the reactor will blow. The ship has to be stable while I do that."

  "We're about to engage in combat," she said matter-of-factly. "I can't promise anything."

  Combat?

  "Then I'm shutting down the core," I informed her. "Prepare to lose railguns, FTL, and the orbital strike cannon!"

  "Understood," she said grimly. It wasn't good to be in combat without primary weapons. Of course, it also wasn't good to have the back half of your ship evaporate.

  I yanked the main breaker, and Anna went dark. The humming of the mag fields, such a constant presence in my occupational life, now faded to nothing. It felt a little creepy, and I had to smile at my reaction. I'd spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours with Anna, and now that she was offline -and thus perfectly safe- my brain had finally elected to freak out.

  Nice work, brain.

  Flicking the lights of my suit on, I began working my way back to the control room.

  I almost made it.

  The ship lurched hard to port as a resounding boom echoed in my ears. The impact knocked me off the catwalk and slammed me into the core's wall. I grabbed hold of a nearby coolant pipe so I didn't fall down into the bottom of the massive space.

  The ship rocked again, much harder this time, and I managed to crack my head against the same pipe I'd been clinging to. This wasn't the byproduct of maneuvering, I realized, grimacing through the pain; somebody was actually shooting at us.

  Shit.

  Killing the reactor had been the right move - the only move - but I'd crippled our offensive capabilities in the process.

  Maybe there was another option.

  Anna's power output was nearly constant (at least when she was turned on), but the demand for energy wasn't. The extra power was stored in a series of massive capacitors along the underside of the ship. They were meant to provide a few extra seconds of power to the FTL engines, should there be a reactor failure in transit. That would let us drop to sublight without ripping the ship apart, which was a nice feature to have. We weren't using FTL at the moment, though, so there was a chance I could do something useful with that energy.

  "Bridge, this is the reactor compartment," I said, triggering the comm circuit again. "I might be able to give you enough juice for a couple of orbital strike shots, but it would mean purging the drive caps. Any interest?"

  "Proceed immediately!" came the hurried response. "Advise when we're able to fire."

  "Aye," I said. I hated the term "aye", but there were better things to worry about. I released the coolant pipe, dropping myself all the way to the bottom of the reactor compartment. Just a few meters of hull now separated me from whatever the hell was going on out there. I moved to the appropriate access panel and started shunting power from the capacitors. It wasn't terribly difficult, but I had to do it one-handed to avoid being flung around as more impacts rattled the Pridemore. The impacts grew more frequent as I worked, which I found somewhat alarming. The Pridemore was a tough girl, but every contraption had its limits. The key to winning battles (as several naval historians had noted) was to actually shoot at the bad guys.

  I was working on it.

  I tapped the last sequence of keys, and heard the waveguide switches flip in the panel behind me.

  "Okay!" I called over the comm circuit, not bothering to identify myself this time. "Guns are up, but you've got two shots at most!"

  No response.

  "Bridge, reactor room," I said. "Power is now available to main weapons. Two shots."

  Nothing. There was complete silence on the radio. In fact, there was complete silence altogether - the weapons impacts had stopped and everything became uncomfortably quiet.

  "Coates," I tried instead. "What's going on out there?"

  He didn't respond, which freaked me out more than anything else.

  Time to get the hell out of here.

  I crawled up the narrow ladder to the catwalk. As I moved toward the tunnel, a frantic beeping sound filled the air. My eyes shot back to the reactor.

  Not good.

  The coolant temp had spiked back up, and it was well into the red now. I frowned. The reactor was offline. There should have been nothing to generate heat. Where is it coming from? I flipped through the various thermal sensors until I found the answer. The heat was coming from the reaction chamber itself.

  It made no sense.

  "What's wrong Anna?" I asked desperately. "Please talk to me."

  Apparently, Anna still didn't feel like sharing.

  Standing off to the side, I yanked open the door to the reaction chamber. I could see the heat waves move through the air, and the temperature in my suit went up a couple of degrees. I glanced at my readings - there was no EM radiation. Nothing. Just heat.

  It dissipated after a moment, and I turned to look at the chamber. All the injectors had fused to the rails. All the sensors had melted. Anna was dead. So were all the systems she powered. The Pridemore would have be towed home, and I had no idea why.

  Before I could process it, the lights blinked off on the anti-helium generator. I stabbed my finger at the control panel, requesting its status. I didn't get the normal series of readings and indicators. Instead, a cryptic message appeared.

  Remote lockout complete. Local operation not authorized.

  Okay, what the effin' fuck?

  I didn't know, but I desperately wanted out of there. I crawled through the tunnel as fast as I could, made my way to the exit hatch, and yanked open the door. As I stepped out into the control room, I saw Coates lying motionless on the deck.

  Damn. He'd probably been flung into a wall like I had, although I didn't see any obvious injuries.

  I stumbled over to him, my movement still hampered by the clumsy suit. First things first. I popped the helmet off and started to unbuckle my gloves.

  The dizziness hit me like a sledgehammer, and I fell to my knees. I realized that I was about to pass out and join Coates on the deck. With my last scrap of mental energy, I came to the obvious conclusion:

  Something's wrong with the air.

  I fumbled with my helmet until it snapped back into place. As my suit's ECU took over, I felt the fog lifting from my consciousness as oxygen was restored.

  Coates doesn't have a suit.

  Kneeling down next to him, I tried to determine his status. It was impossible to check his pulse with the gloves on, and I didn't really know how to do that anyway. I leaned over him instead, my faceplate inches from his mouth. The plate didn't fog up. Shit. There were spare suits in the adjacent tool room, but a helmet would be useless by itself. I'd have to get the whole thing on him for it to have any value, and there was no way I could wrestle Coates into a suit while still wearing one myself.

  Think!

  There were portable oxygenators onboard - devices you could stick on your face to make the air breathable. Where the hell was the nearest one? Sickbay. Too damn far. What about something simpler? Where was the nearest portable O2 supply? No clue. Even if I had one, I was vaguely aware that pure oxygen was bad for people. Besides, his lack of breathing meant there was no way to get the oxygen to his cells. Right? What if his heart was still pumping? Would it work then? Was that even possible if he wasn't breathing? Didn't the heart need oxygen like every other muscle? I wished like hell that I knew what I was talking about. How long could a person even survive without oxygen? Five minutes? Ten? I had no idea, and I didn't know long he'd been there before I'd found him.

  Maybe I can just fix the air.

  The room - like all compartments on the Pridemore - had a
computer console embedded in the wall. I dashed over and pulled up an environmental display for the compartment.

  All of the readings were normal.

  Oxygen, Nitrogen, CO2, and air pressure were all within tolerance.

  Okay.

  Was there some type of toxin in the air, then? A gas that wouldn't set off the alarms? It was possible, I supposed. As I stared at the screen, however, a more sinister explanation occurred to me.