Too Far

“Do you hear me, Captain? You did good. Hang on—we’re coming.” I had the presence of mind to let off the transmit button, but I couldn’t manage to cradle the handheld. The image that formed of Allison bleeding out in the corridor wouldn’t subside, either.

Stratford had moved closer, expecting a whispered report. I knew he and Allison had history, but she and I did, too. She’d cut her teeth under my command – I’d watched her from the start as she learned what it was to be an officer.

“Sir?” Stratford asked after his patience elapsed.

“ETA to Ticonderoga, Mr. Slidel?” I asked finally.

“23 minutes.” The helm officer’s answer came quickly enough to make it obvious he’d anticipated the question.

“You’re at max thrust?”

“72 percent, sir.”

“Is that all you can get out of your panel?”

“Yes sir. The engines are safetied.” Slidel said.

I picked the handheld back up and pushed the toggle for engineering. The second-long wait felt like an hour.

“Engineering.”

“This is Admiral West. Take the locks off of the mains.”

“That’s not recommended,” the voice I couldn’t place predictably reported.

“Neither is countermanding an admiral, son. Throw the switches, now.”

“Yes sir.” The engineer’s voice didn’t exude the confidence I was looking for as I cradled the handheld again. 

I looked forward, as if I should be able to see a ship a few thousand miles away. “Watch your panel, Slidel. Put your foot in it as soon as she has more to give.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Captain?” Stratford asked gently.

“It sounds like Allison’s been shot,” I said bluntly. “There’s no one left to patch her up.”

“Helm now answers 109 percent thrust, sir,” Slidel interrupted.

“Very well, helm.”  I looked at Stratford. “Draft a security force and clear that ship, Stratford. I’ll get us linked up.”

“Aye sir,” Stratford’s eyes burned with a predatory fire I’d seldom encountered.

“ETA to Ticonderoga, helm?”

“Thirteen minutes, Captain.”

I took what I hoped would be a calming breath. “My friend’s bleeding out on the floor over there, Slidel. I need you to nail this rendezvous. Seconds count.”

“You’ll have my best, Captain.”

Any attempt I might have made to reassure him was interrupted by Stratford and his squad of operators passing through to assemble at the docking port on top of the con structure

“Where do you think she is, Admiral?” Stratford asked.

I knew that he’d take off after her if I told him I figured she was on the hab deck, between command and medical. “Your job is to secure the ship, Mr. Stratford. Start on the hab deck and fan out from there. I’ll see to Allison.”

The predator behind his eyes growled. “Yes sir.”

“On your way.” I said, turning to the handheld again. I keyed the 1MC. “This is Admiral West. I need a trauma team to the dorsal airlock in five minutes. Rig for a gunshot wound.”

The minutes ticked by slowly enough to allow me time to go through everything I was aware of that had contributed to our present circumstance. I’d walked on the edge a time or two, but nothing in my career or wildest dreams would have led me to believe I’d one day find myself aboard a spaceship hurtling toward another trying to save a life.

“Captain?”

“Yes, Mr. Slidel?”

“I’ve been in the simulator since this jumped off. I can shave 23 seconds off if you’ll authorize aggressive maneuvering.”

“How aggressive?”

“Anything not tied down’s going for a ride.”

I shook my head. “It’s not worth banging people up for that time, but I appreciate your diligence. Standard approach only, Mr. Slidel.”

“Yes sir.”

“Trauma team one, reporting as ordered,” the first of three medics said from the back of the con. All three had backpacks, while one carried a folding stretcher and a red plastic case labeled basic life support.

“Once you get onboard the ship, there will be a stairwell very near the docking latch. Go up one level to the habitation deck. Your patient is female and will likely be in the central corridor, I believe more or less forward. Probable gunshot wound.”

“Roger that, sir.”

“I’ll be behind you as soon as docking is complete. The operators have orders to sweep the ship for hostiles. They’ll stay out of your way.”

“Yes sir.” The man acknowledged his team. “Let’s go.”

I ran through the glitch list as I watched the medics move off to stage for the entry and realized I needed to man the mag grapple controls. The interface was simple, as the system only needed to be pre-charged, and then activated once the targeting reticle lined up. From there, a system of enormously powerful electromagnets pulled the ships together in the proper alignment for final docking.

“Call it out, Mr. Slidel,” I said as the reticle visibly zoomed out, looking for its target. An orange square appeared around the crosshairs that were always present on the display, indicating the system had found the target and confirmed we were closing on it, but still at extreme range. Had I started the system sooner, it might have been red. Eventually, I should see it turn yellow and then green as we closed.

“Thirty seconds, Captain.”

As if on cue, the block did, in fact, turn yellow. I stabbed at the com panel and triggered the 1MC. “All hands, brace for contact.”

“Fifteen seconds,” Slidel updated.

A bit disturbing to watch, my display twisted and zoomed as it continued to refine its focus on Ticonderoga’s mag grapple receiver. The square around the crosshair started blinking alternatively in yellow and green.

“Ten seconds,” Slidel announced. Under his breath, he added, “I got this.”

I counted down the last five seconds in my head as the square and crosshair turned bright green. The switch made a satisfying click as I engaged the system. “Mag grapple has it from here. Slidel, you have the bridge.”

*****

Ticonderoga wasn’t completely foreign to me. Mostly for the odd transit to Moonbase One, I’d been onboard often enough to get roughly acquainted with her layout. So, while Stratford and his team moved methodically from the keel both upward and forward, I pushed past them and ran up the aft stairwell as fast as sixty-three-year-old knees allowed.

Ignoring hushed orders from the operators to keep back and their cursing when I didn’t obey, I pushed forward down the central corridor toward ship’s command. The central corridor was nearly a quarter of a mile long. Even hurrying, it took a couple of minutes before we found her just outside of the command deck.

“Call the rest of your team,” I told the medic that followed me. “I think Medical is back behind us on the right. Have them meet us there.”

He managed to dig a field dressing from his bag and key his radio at the same time I scooped Allison up. I thought I felt her take a single huff of air, which was all the proof of life I needed to redouble my efforts. She squirmed again when the medic pressed his dressing into her side, and together we shuffled back toward Mebday.

The proper medics pushed past me the way I’d pushed past Stratford’s operators to get to Allison on the table. There wasn’t a word of explanation or apology, just professionals knowing that I didn’t belong. 

Rank didn’t have as many privileges as one might have expected.

I passed by one of the operators and told him I was leaving with Lexington. His orders were to spread the word that their team was to secure the ship and provide whatever support to the medics they could until we returned. 

I still had people in the field and I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to recover them. While I had a passing understanding of how Ticonderoga worked, I had no idea that one of her cargo pods could be ejected and used as a lifepod, or how to link back up to it, for that matter.

*****

“Mr. Slidel, please confirm that the docking port has closed and released.” I said after I’d assessed the status in command.

“I show a negative seal on all airlocks, sir.”

“Z-axis negative one hundred meters, please. Push us off.”

“Dorsal thrusters firing. Opening to one hundred meters,” Slidel said. “Main engines show green, captain.”

“Very well. Please re-establish the high-end limit at 72 percent, Mr. Slidel.” I turned to a young woman manning the tactical station to my right. “Is the Ticonderoga rescue beacon registering, Ms. Whitman?”

“Lima-Charlie, sir. I have it on a bearing of 219 relative, right along our present declination. Estimated intercept in 33 minutes at standard maximum cruise speed, sir.”

“Very well. Execute intercept. Communications—” The technician turned from her station expectantly. I ducked my head, embarrassed that her name had escaped me. “I apologize, technician. It’s bad form for a captain to forget a name, but. . .”

Her smile was gracious. “Crowe, sir.”

“Thank you,” I smiled. “I need to report in. Could you open coms to home and pipe it through to my handheld please, Ms. Crowe?”

“Of course, sir. Ready at your convenience,” she said.

I only noticed as I reached for the handheld that I still had Allison’s blood dried on my hands. It rattled me – I wasn’t afraid to admit it. It took a couple of deep breaths to push that back into the corner so I could take care of business.

My eyes closed in concentration as I depressed the handheld’s transmit button with my right index finger. “Command, this is Lexington Actual. Ticonderoga is now under control of special operations team. Lexington is enroute to Ticonderoga escape trunk, believed to be holding the bulk of Ticonderoga’s crew and at least some enemy combatants. Still assessing total casualties. All systems otherwise operational. Next update after return docking with Ticonderoga.”

Once I cradled the handheld, I asked, “We’re on course?”

“Thirty minutes out, sir,” Slidel reported.

“I’ll be back in fifteen. You have the con,” I said as I hustled toward the stairs.

“I have the con,” Slidel confirmed from behind me.

*****

“Hutch?” I called into the busy hangar. I looked around at people, fighters, equipment, and mayhem spread across the deck, but couldn’t readily see the grizzled crew chief. “Hutch!”

“I’m over here!” I recognized the voice as his but couldn’t localize it. “I’m. . . dammit, just wait a minute. I have to come out anyway.” 

My guess was he was below the flight operations control booth. I moved closer to the forward wall of the hangar, and sure enough, a set of boots one dress standard out of date appear in an access port set into the bulkhead below the ops compartment. Any vestiges of agility disappeared when the boots hit the deck and the spindly gray-haired man straightened. “What?”

I barely stifled a laugh at the sight of my choice for crew chief. He looked like a bit like a character from an ancient cartoon. “Hutch, what are you doing?”

“Chief Enning has his hands full keeping the engines working. I wasn’t doing much. I told him I’d have a go at the fighter elevators.”

“Any luck?” 

He waved his arms as if the answer was self-evident. “We’re still moving, aren’t we?”

“Then we can launch?”

“No.” He looked condescending. “You see the fighters lifting into the airlocks?”

I looked around reflexively. All of the fighters and all of the elevators were firmly on the floor of the hangar, just as they had been since we’d boarded Lexington. “No.”

“Then why would we be able to launch?”

“We can’t?”

“Not unless something’s changed that I’m not aware of.”

“But you said we were moving?” I couldn’t mask my confusion.

“The ship is, isn’t it?” Hutch said with a shrug. “Enning’s doing okay.”

I grabbed the edge of the rabbit hole I’d fallen down and pulled myself back up onto solid ground. It’d taken me a minute to remember that while there wasn’t anything Hutch Drummond didn’t know about anything that flew, he had all sorts of trouble keeping a simple conversation in the same perspective as most others. It was the mark of how complex his mind truly was.

I could work around it, as long as I was careful.

“Hutch, we have thirty minutes or so. We have a cargo container full of people that’s adrift as a lifepod. We need to snatch it somehow and haul it back to Ticonderoga. I need a plan.”

Hutch didn’t even stumble. “Snag it with the winches.”

“The winches?”

“They’re not particularly new technology, Captain. Winches uses electrical motors to—”

“Hutch, I know what a winch is for Pete’s sake.” I watched him shrug, unsure what the problem was. “I didn’t even know we had one. Will it work?”

“How in the hell do I know, Coleman? There’s only one way to find out.”

I shrugged, and then smiled. Like most times, he had a point.

*****

“Gently, Mr. Slidel. We only need to get close.” I was worried about my helmsman – he seemed like he was letting the stress get to him.

“Winches, sir?” Slidel asked.

As if on cue, four of the crew emerged onto the deck below us from launch airlocks one, two, seven, and eight wearing old-school manned-maneuvering units. The plan was simple – they would each run a cable from the airframe retrieval system built into each airlock elevator out to a corner of the lifepod. Once the winch was activated, it would pull its share of the load down to the deck. It gave us about fifty meters to work with. It would have been nice to use the mag-grapple, but there wasn’t a receiver built into the pod. It was, after all, nominally just a cargo container. 

“They’re from an airframe retrieval system, Mr. Slidel. Imagine a damaged fighter – you might need to get it onboard without flight systems control. Running a cable to it is a crude, but effective, way to get it back. The winch sucks the cable in, pulling the fighter back into the airlock and Bob’s your uncle.”

“I show range at 150 meters, sir.” Slidel reported.

“Come to stations-keeping, Mr. Slidel.” I watched him key the command into the system. Even as slow as we were going, we lost more distance as we closed. The pod was hanging askew over the deck.  “Ms. Whitman, are there some lights we can shoot at that thing?”

“Yes sir,” she said easily. “Here you go.”

The lights washed across the pod, revealing much more detail. “Very well, Ms. Whitman. Mr. Slidel, can you square us up?” 

“Two degrees of portside lateral tilt and 45 degrees of lateral rotation. Give me a second to do the math,” Slidel said.

“Very well.” In other circumstances, I would have loved to see what he was scribbling on the notepad at the side of his console. It didn’t take him long before he announced he was ready. “Go ahead then, Mr. Slidel.”

The motion of the ship could be best described as a ‘wiggle’. The orientation change felt like a wave on the ocean.

“Can you inch us ahead a bit, Captain?” Chase asked over the com. “We need to close about two thirds of the distance.” It had surprised me that he both was rated for a and wanted to participate in the external operation. The little guy had backbone. . . 

“Reaction control thrust, ventral and aft please, Mr. Slidel. Two second pulse on each.”

“Yes sir.”

I watched through the observation window as the pod slid closer.

“I think we’re there, sir,” Chase reported over the com.

“All stop, Mr. Slidel.” I keyed the com. “Roger that, Mr. Chase. You have the operation.”

“Capture team, move!” Chase said over the radio.

I moved closer to the observation portal pointed out across the launch deck and watched as the suited men pushed off the deck. 

“Cortez, Manheim, Suder, everyone okay?” Chase asked over the com.

Affirmations were clipped, but came nonetheless. It wasn’t long before they signaled that they’d made their connections and were beginning to return to the ship. The lifepod was solid enough that we weren’t concerned about its structural integrity, but I was worried what would happen if a cable designed to pull a few metric tons of fighter wasn’t equal to the task of pulling in the far heavier pod.

“We’re in, command,” Chase said over the com.

“Ms. Whitman, activate the ARS winches.”

The deck was washed in light – my view was as good as anyone could hope for from the portal. I was worried about the cable geometry – if we pulled to hard or from too odd of an angle, we’d risk pulling the attachment point out of the pod. A breach seemed unlikely, but it couldn’t be ruled out.

“That’s all you’re going to get,” Hutch said over the com.

“Shut them down, Ms. Whitman,” I said over my shoulder.

The pod was about two meters above the deck. The winch cables were triangulated with good geometry. The apparatus looked reasonably solid, but there was no way to judge the inertial forces it was about to face by eyeball. While we had some time, we needed to get moving – the environmental system wouldn’t hold out inside the lifepod forever, either.

“Mr. Slidel, point us back toward Ticonderoga. Reaction control trust only, please. Keep a mental note of how long it takes us to come to speed – we’ll need to leave at least that margin to slow down on the other side.”

I went back to my own console and keyed the com. “Mr. Chase, you and your team can remove helmets and gloves. Recharge your suit environmentals if possible, please, but stay on hot standby near the airlock.”

“Roger, Captain.”

My display gave the transit time at just under three hours at our given velocity. We’d speed up a little yet, but barring any problems, we’d have the pod back in place within five hours or so, the crew back in place, and everyone safe.

Given everything, it could definitely be worse. I acknowledged the fact that even if it did go wrong. . . We’d deal with that, too.

*****

“Mr. Stratford.”

 “Welcome back to Ticonderoga, sir.”

“Status?” I asked.

“The ship is secured. The pod’s back in place and should equalize in a minute or two.”

“I’m guessing any hostiles will see the handwriting on the walls, but I’d like your team at the door when the pod is opened. You will have operational control and can handle the situation as you see fit. Please see to it that their doctor is dispatched to medical as soon as is possible.”

“Roger that, sir,” Stratford said.

“Dismissed to action, Mr. Stratford.”

Speaking into his com as he stormed forward, I knew he was gathering his team. I had no doubt he would handle the situation well. While I was reasonably sure there were about to be more injuries, I was confident it would be the bastards that started this mess that were about to incur them. I wanted to get to medical to check on Allison.

 “How’s she doing?” I asked.

I recognized the lead medic I’d dispatched from Lexington hours earlier. He looked like those hours had not been kind to him. “We’ve done the best we can. She’s hanging on, but we need a real surgeon.”

“Assuming he was taken prisoner aboard the lifepod, he should be sprung here in a few minutes.”

“We’ll lose her if we don’t get help.”

“It will be here shortly,” I said with confidence I didn’t entirely feel. “I need a minute with her.”

The medic shrugged. “Don’t move anything, okay?”

I nodded and made my way to the only occupied bed in the bay. Accepting that no one in a medical facility ever looks their best, she still looked pretty rough. She was bandaged below her bra, and medical monitors as well as a double-bag IV surrounded the bedside. The most worrisome was the sheen of sweat she was covered in.

Taking her hand felt like it was out of the question, so I just spoke quietly enough that only she would have heard if she’d been conscious. “We got your crew back, Allison. I need you to know that you’ve done well. Try to hang in there, help is—”

“Move now!” Shouted a thundering baritone voice from across the bay. I didn’t recognize him specifically, but the hulking man’s demeanor told me he was the ship’s doctor. 

“Excuse us,” a nurse said more kindly as she came in front of me. “We need to get to work.”

“Of course,” I said as I turned and made my way back into the corridor. I gave myself a moment to slump against the corridor wall and face the fact that I was too old to deal with crap like this anymore. Then I went back to work. What must be done. . .