Duty, Honour, Love

The bridge was as she left it nothing had changed. She sat in the captain’s chair exhaustion taking it toll on her. Her head felt heavy and her eye lids drooped. Jane woke with a start she had fallen asleep. It was a hand on her shoulder that woke her otherwise she would be sleeping still. She recognised Mark standing there a knowing look in his eyes.

“Captain?” she stuttered rising from his chair.

Mark looked more alert after his sleep. She caught a whiff alcohol as she vacated the captain’s chair. She glanced at Mark worried that he had been drinking.

“You’ve been drinking,” Jane accused him.

Mark sighed. “If only. I used a very old bottle of whiskey to clean my face.”

Had she not been too tired to notice his face did look cleaner. “Sorry sir,” she whispered.

“I’m not the only one that could do with a wash.”

“I’m well aware of the sir,” she replied. “I gave my ration to Cadet Brock.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “How are they?”

“Not good Brock is barely holding on and Tupper there’s been no change.”

“If I had the choice I would have never had any of them aboard the Orinoco.”

Mark was the only one of the crew not to refer to the ship as the ‘Ori’.

“No one could have predicted what would happen.”

“You are right Number One,” it was the name he had coined for her from some old scifi vid show rerun.

“Yes sir.”

“We’ll get out of this it just a matter of faith.” He glanced at the chronometer above the main viewer. “We’ve been in this just under twelve hours this has gotta end soon.”

~~~

As if fate was listening to his words the ship juddered and the image of orange clouds and black and purple lightening faded. Jane was thrown to the floor.

“All stop!” Mark yelled.

The ship jerked to a stop.

“Ok Number One?” Mark asked Jane.

“Am now sir,” she said rising to her feet. “Where are we?”

“Helm, Nav plot our position.”

“Yes sir,” two voices said in unison.

A young man rushed in the chief petty officer or ‘PO’ as everyone called him. “Sir?”

Mark was glad to see him with comms down all over ship he had become a runner sending messages to the crew. “Find the gunnery team and get them to the bridge.”

“They’re already on their way sir.”

“Thanks PO. Find Chief Strong and get her up to the bridge.”

“Yes sir.” With that he was gone.

Several of the crew rushed in the remainder of the bridge crew.

“Gunners to your stations. Sensors help Nav and Helm plot our location?”

“Sir!”

Mark looked at the excited man at the sensor console. “What is it Ensign Donaldson?” he asked.

“Picking up a nav beacon on sensors!”

Mark thought quickly if there was a nav beacon then there was a possibility that they were in an inhabited system and that meant they could be rescued. The one thing he could not be sure of was their location the ‘wormhole’ as Jane had called it could have deposited them anywhere. Of any possible locations they couldn’t be in the Commonwealth. Beacons were an Imperial or Confederacy device to help navigate a system. He knew those Imperial systems without beacons were uninhabited. He took a decision hoping he was right. So far the aliens had not appeared one small thing he was thankful for. It seemed that they had been unable to follow them into Jane’s wormhole. “Comms activate the distress beacon,” he said to the young female ensign at the comms console. Not the youngest of the crew by far she was intelligent and fluent in both Terran and Galactic.

“Yes sir!” she replied her fingers tapping the console. “Damn it!” she cried out smoke and flame rose from her console.

“Jane put that fire out.” He turned his attention to the young ensign. “You ok Daisy?”

“I’ll be fine sir,” Daisy replied clearly sounding as if she wasn’t.

Jane put out the fire with a flame suppresser from the bridge fire station. “Ensign Barrett needs medical attention,” Jane said professionally. Putting the flame suppresser back she pulled a medical kit off the wall and proceeded to bandage Daisy’s hands. “You ok now?” she asked Daisy.

“Yes sir.” Daisy looked at Mark. “Sir you should know just before the console died I picked up a flash message from the nav beacon it was in Galactic.” She hesitated looking at the bridge crew. “It appears we are at war with the Confederacy and this beacon was a Confed one.”

Mark saw the crew looking at him. It wasn’t that he disbelieved Daisy it was the fact that they couldn’t have travelled all that distance in what appeared to be twelve hours. Somehow that had happened. He had no other explanation how they had ended up in Confed territory when they were thousands of light-years from the Confederacy border. It should have taken them months to reach the nearest Confed system. “Carry on as normal. We have no beef with the Confeds.” He wasn’t going to mince his words no matter how bitter the taste. “There’s a good chance we’ll wind up as POWs but we will be well treated.” He added that last bit to allay their fears. The Confederacy never took prisoners in their fights with the Commonwealth then neither had the Empire. “Stay calm act professionally and remember we are navy. Do your duty and we’ll see this through.”

Danielle hurried in she glanced at the burned out comms console and nodded thoughtfully. “PO said we’ve exited whatever that was. I can’t guarantee to get full power out of the FTL drives. The only thing I sure that is working to full capacity is the shields.”

Mark thought about what Danielle was saying. Just because there was a beacon here didn’t necessarily mean an inhabited world. He had to be prepared for any outcome. “Can we land this ship?”

“Land as in crash?” Danielle snorted. “If that’s the case just ram it into the ground. I can guarantee that no one will survive that.”

“Strong!” Mark barked at her. “Pull yourself together I asked you a serious question. Can we land this ship?”

“Yes but we’ll need a seriously large body of water to pull this off. We’ll need to come down at an angle to two to three degrees with the shields at max. We can glide in but you’re not going to take off again.”

“That’s the least of my worries,” Mark said to her.

“I’ll need time to prepare,” she replied.

“Do so.”

“Captain is this wise?” Jane felt it her duty to question Mark’s orders.

“Not really unless we encounter a ship on the way in I can see no other choice. Unless you have a better idea?”

“No sir.”

“I want you to formulate an evac plan.” Mark turned to the middle-aged woman with thumbnail length red hair at the weapons station. “Jaye what weapons do we have?”

“PD rail guns nine, eleven, fifteen and nineteen are out of action. We have three torpedoes and the main gun is full functional.”

“I meant how many crew individual weapons do we have?”

Jaye sucked in a deep breath. “Six, Seven Double M’s and that’s it. Sorry sir I wish it was better news.”

Mark felt his heart sink. It wasn’t good six pistols were nothing compared with what they might encounter. “It will have to do.” He turned to Danielle. “Strong see what you can do with that console.”

Danielle walked over to the damaged comms console and studied it for several minutes. “Not in this life time,” she said.

“Can you get the distress beacon working?” Mark asked her.

“That I can do, I’ll bypass the console.” She spent more minutes at the console, “It’s working again,” she sighed adding. “If you want me I’ll be in engineering keeping a close eye on the FTL drive. If that goes we got no chance unless we get rescued.” With the she walked out.

Mark sighed that was the best he was going to get out of her. “Sharon got our location yet?” he addressed his comments to the young woman at the nav console. She had a sunny pleasant character but that wasn’t in evidence at the moment.

“No sir, we don’t have anything in our databanks system.” She waved to comms console. “Normally we’d link and update but that’s out of the question.”

“Ok just nav to the habitable zone and we’ll take it from there?”

“On it sir.” Sharon turned back to her task.

Jane had other worries. She had already sent Daisy to see Olivia there wasn’t much she could do at the comms console anyway. She felt uneasy about the captain’s plan she could see too many holes in it. “Sir about your decision to land. What if we use the evac pods?”

“I considered it and rejected it,” he told her. “It would mean we would have to abandon the wounded and I can’t do that. Moving them to the evac pods could kill them.”

“Sorry sir it was just a suggestion.”

“Don’t be, in normal circumstances I would be the first to put forward the idea. But these are not normal circumstances. Since I have no idea as to where we are the ship is our only chance of keeping the crew together. Using the evac pods will scatter us all over the place. With luck we’ll be down in a few hours.”

He was wrong it took them five days to reach a habitable planet.