Fiction: The Girassian Debacle Chapter 18: Get Off the Table

Photo of Cape May Point beach, New Jersey by author

Previous Chapter 17           https://onthebeachatnightalone.com/2023/10/31/fiction-the-girassian-debacle-chapter-17-the-ghost-ship-quivered/

The London stood down to Condition Two and Captain Anthony Maureau decided to stop stressing the crew and ship. He ordered acceleration limited to just under one point two five G, rewarding Senator Mitchell and the crew with a lighter force than they had had in the previous eight hours.  They would add fourteen hours to the planned transit time to the Portal. But, regardless of Lieutenant Ahktar-Gatewood’s disappointment, the encounter with the ghost ship made Maureau no longer care whether they shattered the Earth-Mars transit time record. Beating it by a day and a half would be good enough. 

Maureau felt like the brooding Thinker in his captain’s chair, leaning on his right elbow, chin on fist, gaze fixed on the navigational holographic display. Sometimes he thought of nothing, awake but unable to focus. At other times,questions swirled in his mind.  Why didn’t I wait longer for a surface probe inspection? Why didn’t the Emissaries warn us away immediately? Will they reveal what they know? Will they meet with Senator Mitchell?

Sleep nearly came over him as he kept reviewing the decisions he had made and considered the rationale behind his orders. He shook his head trying to prevent nodding off. Unfortunately, shaking his head would not clear the gaps he found in his thought processes. Despite the dizzying fatigue, Maureau could not afford surrendering his watch. After the loss of Nansted and the recent Condition One, a captain retiring to his cabin to sleep inspired no confidence. The bridge officers and crew needed to see him. 

As captain, Maureau more than accepted responsibility for the loss of Nansted. He bore a deep sense it was an avoidable loss caused by his uncharacteristic decision making. He wanted to communicate that to Song, knowing she would feel guilty that she had not anticipated things for her team. But unburdening her would need to wait for the debriefing. 

In addition to sending her team forward before gathering optimal intelligence, he had taken the  London to the brink of oblivion by navigating her so close to the ghost ship. They were all fortunate to have remained in the Solar System, barely avoiding being dragged through a nil-void into an alternative universe.  

He had allowed himself to hurry without a justifiable reason. Out of this catastrophe, I will now  be wary of Gray’s recommendations. She’s aggressive and doesn’t step back to consider everything. But I cannot blame her. I’m the one who followed her recommendations! 

Yoshi had requested permission to “rest his eyes” to revitalize himself. Maureau did not want to disturb its revitalization. “AIC, can you tell me the medical status of everyone on board? Yoshi is offline.”

Yoshi’s eyes popped open. “Captain, your Yoshi can do this for you.”

“You were listening?”

“Your BDP can always respond to any reference to itself. Revitalization is not the same for a biodroid as it is for a human.”

“Good. What is your assessment of the crew being able to withstand going back to hard G again to Mars?”

Yoshi paused to review the data. “Fifteen star sailors, along with the Senator, need intravenous hydration and sleep for at least sixty-five minutes before they will withstand increased acceleration over two point zero G.” Maureau had the crew members who required intravenous fluid notified to report to Doctor Gladman.  

Maureau was going to meet with the Emissaries. This was nearly incomprehensible for him. That was the goal of his mission. Having glimpsed another universe and survived the hostile encounter with an alien force, he knew they would interrogate him over his experiences. He calmed down his speculations by contemplating the request he would make for a meeting with Senator Mitchell. 

Making rounds of the entire ship also took his mind off his self-reproach and anxiety.  He spent time with  Senator Mitchell in the Medical Bay, praising him for being one of the crew on their Condition One maneuvers. The Senator wanted to know what all of the maneuvering was about and became frustrated when Maureau answered that it was classified. He stopped and spoke with the Medical Bay staff and Doctor Gladman, making sure they would pay especial attention to the Senator. 

Anthony wandered into the galley looking for coffee. The coffee had turned into mud during the prolonged Condition One as the crew had been restricted to their battle posts. He could have gone to the officers’ amenities station with its single serving dispenser, but preparing a pot of coffee for the enlisted crew was a good relaxing task, needing no analysis or critical decision making. Maureau liked his coffee strong. He broke open a second pack and spilled half of it. So much for simple tasks.

“Sir, do you need some help?”

Maureau turned around. Chief Petty Officer Leo Ottermen stood in the kitchen hatchway.  A broad smile dominated his wide face. He genuinely looked happy to see the captain. 

“No. I’ll take responsibility for cleaning up this mess.”

“No way! You have better ways to spend your time. I thought I heard someone in here and wondered who would be allowed to get themselves coffee in Condition Two.”

Maureau stepped back. Ottermen ruled the galley and could not be argued with.“Thanks, Leo. We’re going to Condition Three soon and things will go back to normal.”

“Captain, does that mean gut wrenching acceleration? No one has an appetite on this trip, not to mention how impossible it is to cook.”

“No hard acceleration. We will be at the Portal in twelve hours,” Maureau said. Leo started to clean up the spilt coffee grounds. “A lot of star sailors will want to chow down when we get to the Portal. You will be busy, Chef.”

“I will be ready. What is this ‘star sailor’? We’re just spacemen and Petty Officers.”

“It’s a term our biodroid pilot used. I like it.”

The two of them inhaled the coffee aroma, eyes closed. “I like it too. How does a droid get poetic?” Ottermen said, looking at Maureau sideways with a grin.

“This biodroid is very odd, I have to tell you.”

“That is what I hear. Captain, you look like you could use an entire pot of coffee.”

#

Lieutenant Krista Song’s mind writhed in agony. She stared at the Red Planet as the London approached it. The forward four impulse rockets glowed blue, forming points of a square framing Mars. She waited impatiently for Commander Gray to finish reviewing her report. Song wondered what the delay was.

She radiated anger and confusion, a toxic mixture best to avoid. The marines kept a wide distance from her. Except for Hall. He approached and stood by her side to look out at Mars.

“Ma’am. Nansted’s loss wasn’t your fault. They could’ve taken any one of us. We had to leave him and get back to the London. She had to leave to save the entire crew.”

“There was no warning,” she said. “If we had a tighter formation…”

“Then you might have been the one taken. This ship needs you.”

Song’s face twisted in pain. “That’s supposed to make me feel better? I should’ve been in front. I was leading the team.”

“Yes, Ma’am. I know you set it up that way. You did what you could.”

“I just want to know what happened. Was his weapon a provocation as he feared it might be. Or should we all have carried arms? 

“Opening fire would not have saved Nansted. I think most of us being unarmed showed a sign of peace.” Hall spoke softly, firmly, calming her for a moment.

#

“We meet in Security for debriefing with Song” Maureau said. “I want Freihoff, Ahktar-Gatewood, and our BDP there. You read Song’s report. Find anything revealing?”

“Lots of questions,” Gray said. “Why were the life forms not detected earlier and what happened to the team’s service pack controls? What do we know about the attackers?”

Maureau and Gray left for Security together. They moved silently, wrapped up in their own thoughts. How do you admit to your officers you made a bad decision? Do you? Can you admit you were not at your best? I suspect Krista knows that.

Maureau studied the gathered officers. One would not be able to find a more somber gathering. To Maureau, Chief Freihoff appeared stunned, likely trying to process the paradoxes he had no science to explain. Ahktar-Gatewood exuded depression. Yoshi had established itself as a force, a BDP that assumed much of the navigation and control of the ship. The Chief of Navigation likely felt he had nothing to contribute to the London.

Yoshi had no expression, a blank visage disconcerting to Maureau because he had gotten used to an  animated enthusiasm in the biodroid. His reaction disturbed him. Why do I find myself expecting Yoshi to be a source of consolation?

Then there was Song. She appeared to be a prisoner awaiting a capital punishment sentencing. Sitting ramrod straight, her gaze at a faraway point beyond the ship, her jaw was set tight. Despite the tension in her posture, her eyes glinted with the life of a warm sea moved by a steady wind .

 The group awaited his address. The prolonged silence increasingly felt  like a growing weight on his shoulders. Song turned to look him in the eyes. A massive wave of determination rolled over him. It broke and jolted him out of his lethargy. Concentrating, a rush of thoughts came to him. “Commander Gray, we go into Condition Three. Immediately. Make it happen. We will wait for you.”

Gray nodded and stood up, moving away from the table and out into the bay off of the airlock. She spoke into her headset, giving orders. Maureau was pleased she interacted with the AIC, doing more than just giving the order for Condition Three. She was going over details that would set them up for the London’s approach to the Portal. He turned his gaze and was surprised to see everyone watching him watch Gray. He gave them a slight smile.

“Well, maybe we should stick to boarding pirate ships.” Maureau said. “This detour has been a disaster.”

“Aye, Captain,” Yoshi said. “The London encountered many unpredictable phenomena.” There it goes again. Essentially disobeying an order to not use the expression ”aye” while Gray is not here. We need to interrogate its system and see how it is able to do that. Maureau simply nodded to the biodroid.

“Made sense we went to explore the anomaly,” Song said. “It really wasn’t too far out of our way to Mars. We ended up discovering a very threatening alien entity.”

“Has anyone processed the fact that Yoshi identified a hole in our universe? A hole into an alternative universe.” Ahktar-Gatewood spoke quietly, with precision.

“Functionally, I think the nil-void is the same as the Portal’s gateway,” Chief Freihoff said. “It compresses space using fractal uncertainty.” 

“But we are talking about another universe! Is this a ‘parallel’ universe in time?” Ahktar-Gatewood implored. “What have we encountered?” 

Freihoff held his hands up off the table in surrender. “I’ve not had the time to review Yoshi’s data to understand how he determined we are looking into another universe. I can’t explain what we are dealing with. We might not be able to understand it.”

Commander Gray returned and surprised Maureau by staying quiet as the debrief continued. Song and Gray did not look at one another. Song leaned over the table towards Maureau while Gray sat back in her chair, establishing distance from them.

Everyone looked at Song. She sighed deeply. “Let’s get to the most immediate concern for our crew. An unknown alien force attacked the London and we lost a marine. The EVA team had no warning. What do we know?”

Chief Freihoff answered. “Yoshi and I analyzed all of the data that came in. During the EVA, the organometallic hull scattered reflected signals. But we accounted for this realtime while probing it. There were no life sign signatures before deployment of the EVA. Since then, we further cleaned up the data. On our review we found no life signatures until the ship powered up. ”

Gray sat up straight. “Chief, the BDP reported we were in a bubble of space unlike our own solar system. Wouldn’t all active signaling be interfered with, like our communications were?” 

Freihoff was at a loss for words. He appeared defensive while the biodroid pilot stayed silent. “Freihoff, can Yoshi answer this question?”

“Yes, Captain. He can.”

Yoshi did not look at the officers while speaking. “The active surveillance signals were not interfered with except on reflection from the hull. London’s radar is set at different electromagnetic frequencies than communication signals. Even after the bubble of interference with communications collapsed, review of the data reveals no change in our surveillance signals and no detectable life signatures.” Yoshi became silent. 

Freihoff spoke up again. “When the ship powered up, life signs seemed to be triggered. Before that, we did not detect anything at the lower limit of our sensors.”  Freihoff sounded like he was defending himself and Yoshi. “At the instant the ship powered up, we did detect life signals well above our lower limits of detection.”

“The ship was dead and then came alive,” Yoshi said solemnly.

Song needed more. “Still, we had no time to react to the entities that took Nansted. Why was control of our rocket packs taken from us?”  

“It’s because the ghost ship dragged some of its universe with it,” Freihoff said. “It wrapped the ship in an envelope of space that altered normal mechanical physics. While we expect rocket forces to move us away from an object, the effects of this alter universe require different vector forces for movement.”

“You’ve been quiet,” Maureau said to Ahktar-Gatewood.

He nodded to Maureau and cleared his throat. “The team experienced difficulty maneuvering because they were pulsing their rockets opposite the direction they needed to. The less refined their pulses, the more they found themselves going in the wrong direction. That’s what happened to Nansted.”

“And Yoshi recognized the aberration instantly!” Freihoff said. “We needed to generate impulses in a circular sequence to push us away from the ghost ship.  He took immediate control of the team’s pulse rockets because there was no time for explanation. There was no time to have the team learn how to navigate. I’m amazed with his response outside his primary logic algorithm.”

“The attackers were  invisible. Why did we not see them coming?” Song looked at Gray. “They were on Nansted immediately after we received the warning to turn back.”

Yoshi climbed up on the table and turned to look at Song. The biodroid cleared its throat, though it had nothing to clear, and looked down on Song. “The ghost ship quivered like an insect reacting to a stimulus. A nervous system signal flowed through a network branching from the hull. At the terminus of branches, heat signatures increased rapidly and then started moving away from their network branches.”

Song locked eyes with Yoshi. “You have not answered my question. They were on us with no warning. Why did we have so little warning?”

Yoshi cleared its throat again. “It was like a hornets nest had been kicked. The ghost ship spit out the life entities before they were even at their full energy level. Your BDP warned you immediately and took control of your rockets. Sadly, that did not give all of you enough time to escape. The individual creatures reflected no light making them invisible in space to the human eye. In an environment with more ambient light, they would manifest as shadow. ” Yoshi hung its head.  

“Would you say this organometallic ship is alive?” Maureau said, not looking up at Yoshi squatting directly above him.

“Affirmative, Captain. The ship is a life form as are the individuals that budded off its network. The ship and its crew came through the nil-void in stasis. It expelled tetrapod individual life units, three meters in length. They have large cranial vaults, seventy centimeters long.  They moved upright inside the ship. Once activated, the ship and its units give off heat at forty degrees Celsius.”

The meeting fell silent. Gray broke the silence. “Our Marine crew is beat up.”

“My tactical plan was for me to be out in front,” Song said.

“I know that” Gray said quietly. “Nansted was average in controlling impulse rockets.” Maureau tensed, waiting for the hammer to come down on Song. 

Gray spoke directly to Song. “Lieutenant Song, he was trained well-enough to keep in formation, but, apparently he used his rockets in a manner that the vector flip caused him to separate from the formation. I think a tighter formation might have given you a chance to react. But, we will never know.”

Maureau felt relieved. Gray does feel some responsibility for pushing the team to move out of the London.  

“Were we being pulled in?” Song said.

Yoshi answered. “The ship did exert one half G on you. Combined with errant rocket pulses, you experienced the sense of being pulled in.”

“A ship that size, able to generate significant gravitational forces?” Maureau had decided to take over the meeting. “And they can generate a nil-void. What other technology might they have?” 

“There are some limitations to their capabilities,” Yoshi said with a slight hop. “They had to come through the hole in suspension and it took them hours to activate.” 

The leaden weight of second guessing himself slid off Maureau. “I think the Emissaries knew what we encountered and did not admit it at first and I intend to find out why. The EVA team should have stayed inside.” Maureau looked from each officer to the next. Unable to peer around Yoshi at Song, he frowned. “Yoshi. Get off the table and do not do that again in a meeting.”

Yoshi swung its legs over the edge of the table and dropped down on its chair. Maureau said directly to Song, “I made decisions that put the London, her crew, and especially your EVA team into a trap. We discovered what seems to be a dangerous entity at a cost. We will make his loss of value by taking what we discovered forward to, first, the Emissaries, and then Star Force.”

The meeting lasted a half hour longer. Captain Maureau explained why Central Command had not been appraised of the attack. Maureau put Gray in charge to oversee leave once they docked at Portal City. 

They discussed the London’s armament and whether they needed to pick up more. “Do we have any armament effective against a ship like the ghost ship,” Gray said.

Everyone looked to Yoshi who still had its head down. “Yoshi, we need you to run an analysis of what you know about the organometallic hull.” Song smiled at the BDP.

Yoshi looked over at Song and seemed to  click alert. “The hull consists of a loose matrix resembling the structure of bone.  London’s C-5 torpedoes can breach the hull. Their charge would devastate the ship. The ghost ship’s countermeasure capability cannot be determined. The ghost’s capacity to generate protective fields cannot be determined. Assume they can produce a field given their ability to generate a nil-void.”

Maureau stayed quiet, waiting. After another awkward pause, Gray spoke up. “I believe we should maximize the number of torpedoes we can carry.” 

“Yes, Commander. I agree.”

Song narrowed her eyes, studying Yoshi. “Chief, why do you make Yoshi a ‘he’?” she asked.

Freihoff shrugged. “I spend a lot of time working on things with Yoshi. I guess I got in the habit of making Yoshi a ‘he’. ”

“Given we have just survived a crisis, I think we need to stay on task,” Maureau said. “The gender of our biodroid will not be explored here.”

 “If we have no more to discuss, you are dismissed, except for the Chief.  Yoshi stay with the Chief. Lieutenant Ahktar-Gatewood,  bring us into the Portal.” 

The Navigation officer smiled. “Yes, sir.” He sprung from his seat.  The officers left except for Yoshi and Freihoff. Maureau sat thinking. Yoshi and Freihoff stayed silent.

“Freihoff. Are you busy enough?”

Freihoff laughed. “Yoshi keeps me busy. When not working with the reactors, we have things to study, working to keep up with Yoshi’s calculations. Sir, I provide constant oversight, you can count on that!”

Maureau studied Freihoff. Satisfied he was all right, he said, “Well, I am counting on you two to figure out what we are dealing with. What this alter universe is. And this alien force that came through it. Two giant problems. “

As Maureau stood to leave he reached towards Yoshi but caught himself as he was about to put his hand on its shoulder. “Hmm. No climbing on the table during a meeting. Right?” 

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

Maureau moved slowly back to the bridge. The Emissary’s direction to not disclose the ghost ship to Central Command created a dilemma. Maureau’s duty lay with Star Force. He did not answer to the Emissaries.  But, he  decided he would wait for more information before reporting the encounter to Central Commend. He knew they would question him regarding a delay, but his summons by the Emissaries was so unusual he wanted to find out what they knew first. He did not know why, but he had a strong conviction that a ghost ship from another universe called for special handling. 

As they approached Mars, he had an idea for reassuring Central Command. He messaged the Emissary Portal Control Center requesting confirmation of a meeting time for Senator Mitchell. The response surprised him. “A meeting with the Senator will not be necessary after we meet with Captain Maureau.”

Oh shit. How do I explain the Senator is not needed? Am I now involved in affairs of state far deeper than I should be. And the Master Emissary advised I get some rest! Good luck, Anthony.  

After addressing the crew on the ghost ship attack and the loss of one Marine,Maureau finally retired to his quarters and tried to rest. His nerves buzzed.