Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

“Not as bad as it could have been,” he admitted, finally. Colin wanted to shout at him, to demand answers, but they were both on the verge of collapse. His Flag Captain had urged him to get some sleep himself, yet he had refused, knowing that he had to oversee at least the preliminary repair work. “The main armour plating held up remarkably well.”

Colin nodded, impatiently. If the battle had gone on for a few more minutes, even without the enemy ships slipping into energy range, it would have been disastrous. The shields had been on the verge of complete collapse, rendering the hull vulnerable to enemy fire… even so, enough had leaked through the shields to leave parts of the hull scorched and blackened. The bombardment against the shields themselves had been almost as bad, leaving hundreds of components burned out or badly damaged. And seventeen crewmen were dead, killed by the enemy. After the number of loyalists Colin had killed, it seemed painful, almost as if he had killed them personally.

It was not a rational thought. But they’d followed him and now they were dead.

“So the structure is intact,” the Chief Engineer continued. “We have already begun swapping out compartments from the storage bins and replacing the burned-out systems. Given a few days, we should be back at roughly eighty percent, perhaps more if we manage to fabricate some new components here. If not, we will have to go back to base and complete the repairs there. The main priority is replacing the shield generators and we don’t have enough spares to replace them all.”

“And once they’re burned out, they can’t be repaired,” Colin said, in understanding. He had never been trained as an engineer — the Imperial Navy preferred to separate the various departments, mainly through invisible lines of command — but he knew the basics, if only through making himself the master of Shadow , back before the mutiny. Shield generators were built to withstand and contain vast levels of energy, redirecting it away from the ship or even into storage power cells, yet when they were overloaded they vaporised. Four of the deaths had occurred when shield generators had exploded and damaged the starship’s interior. “Can we fight?”

The Chief Engineer shrugged. “Depend what you want us to fight,” he said. “If we run into another squadron of enemy superdreadnaughts, one that is in top condition… we’re dead. The squadron we escaped might be able to kick our ass if they ran into us now, even though we did take out one of their ships and cripple another. Something smaller… a battlecruiser squadron, perhaps… I wouldn’t want to fight if we could avoid it. We are not in a good state right now.”

“Yeah,” Colin said. He’d been running through the entire battle in his mind. They’d been committed to a missile dual the moment the enemy superdreadnaughts arrived, ensuring that damage would be roughly even. The suicide of the Valiant and her crew had saved the lives of his crew — and saved the rebellion from coming to an abrupt end — yet he couldn’t order anyone to do that again. Guilt threatened to leech up and overwhelm him, even though he knew that he hadn’t ordered the suicidal tactic. “What about our drives?”

“The flicker drive is intact and usable, once we complete the first level of repairs,” the Chief Engineer said. Colin sighed in relief. Being stranded in interstellar space would have been disastrous. By the time they limped back to the nearest inhabited star — which was controlled by the Empire — the rebellion would be over. “We lost five drive nodes in the final moments of fighting and we need to replace them before we can power up the drive field to its fullest extent. I suggest that we don’t attempt any more high speed chases until we complete repairs.”

Colin snorted. The chances were good that he wouldn’t be the one making that decision. Or perhaps not; if they crawled back to Sanctuary, they could make repairs and return to the war as good as new, backed up by the arsenal ships and the other new designs the Geeks had produced. By now, the first squadron of arsenal ships should be ready for deployment. And, unless he missed his guess, some idiot was going to start second-guessing him and claiming that he should have waited for them to join his fleet before attacking Greenland.

“Get some sleep,” he ordered, finally. It was probably time to take his advice and get some rest himself. “We’ll stay here for two more days and then start flickering home.”

He’d considered the possibility of the enemy superdreadnaughts coming after them, but if they’d been able to track Colin through the jump they’d probably have been on top of him by now. It was a gamble, but with an overstressed squadron of starships Colin suspected that there was no other choice. If the drives and other systems were stressed much further, they might suffer a catastrophic failure, stranding the fleet. Or perhaps the enemy were just waiting for reinforcements. Colin hated being uncertain of what to do, or even second-guessing himself, and yet he couldn’t avoid it now. They’d come within a whisper of losing the battle and the entire rebellion. The Popular Front would be meaningless without his fleet.

The thought tormented him as he returned to his uncomfortably large cabin and settled down in the bed. Stacy Roosevelt hadn’t been content with a standard Navy-issue bed; no, she’d brought in a designer bed from some overpriced company on Earth and decorated it in her own frilly style. Colin had the bedding replaced, yet it was still too comfortable for his tastes, as keyed up as he was. He tossed and turned for nearly an hour before surrendering to the inevitable and injecting himself with a mild sedative. Even so, he was still tense when he awoke and climbed into the shower. The flow of hot water helped to calm his mood.

“I require an overall damage report,” he said, once he called his nine Captains and their Chief Engineers to a conference. Their holograms had materialised in his quarters, apart from his own Chief Engineer, who was busy working on replacing the damaged drive nodes. “How badly off are we?”

He kept his face expressionless as the damage reports rolled over him. Six superdreadnaughts were in the same condition as General Montgomery , with minor damage that would take time and effort to repair. Two more had suffered worse in the battle, including some structural damage that had been caused by warheads exploding against the hull. No smaller ship could have survived such an impact, yet even so Colin knew that repairing the superdreadnaughts was vital. They couldn’t operate without the squadron.

“We need to replace two of the main struts running through the ship,” the Chief Engineer of General Grant admitted. Given that the General Grant had been badly damaged during the Battle of Jackson’s Folly, Colin suspected that some of the damage was caused by the remains of earlier damage, including damage that had been supposed to be repaired. No matter how hard they worked at it, field repairs were not comparable to work done in a shipyard. “Without those…”

Colin could imagine. The superdreadnaught might, if it was lucky, survive… if it didn’t have to fight, or run. If one of the main struts broke, it wouldn’t a complete disaster, but two of them would require immediate repair before the ship started to shake itself apart. Colin had been a young Midshipman when the light cruiser Candy had suffered a structural failure and disintegrated while in flight. Her Captain had been lucky not to survive the incident, as his reports, studied by the Board of Inquiry convened after the disaster, had clearly shown that he had been aware of the danger and ignored it.

“We can shore it up for the trip back home” Colin smiled, for the Rim had become home for them now — “and then replace it, but I cannot recommend that we take the ship into battle,” the ship’s Chief Engineer concluded. “Any attempt to go to full military power will be disastrous.”