All is Fair Ch. 04

"So he's a leader?" Crow tilted his head a little as he kept his eyes on her.

"Yeah, he is... as opposed to just their sergeant. People respond to him, even after the beach." Her eyes were still fixed on some invisible spot on the desk and that smile had pulled a little more at the corner of her lips. "He calmed the marines in the cell; he seemed to be the only one who arrived, having worked out exactly what had happened. And then he went back out again to convince the last group to surrender."

"You like him..." he smiled at her. He didn't need much more convincing than the times he had caught her looking at him during the meeting, but he was getting it anyway.

"It's hard not, too," she answered, not quite realizing what her father meant. "He's friendly, respectful, professional, committed, and when he gave me his answer, he asked that his squad not be told until they had made their own. And then..." Her eyes raised to meet his, and she caught the subtle smirk on his lips. "Dad!!" She buried her face in her hands and laughed.

He chuckled, letting the smirk spread into a full grin as he took another sip. Silvia was many things: she was brilliant, she was resourceful, she was dedicated, and he loved her more than anything else in the galaxy. He would die for her in a heartbeat. She was not now, however, nor would she ever be, a good poker player.

"Nope!" she finally said, sitting herself up straight and trying to hide the embarrassed smile on her face, an effort completely undermined by a crimson blush of her pale cheeks that almost matched the color of her hair. She shuffled comically in her seat, flushing a little more at his teasing smile. "I'm a grown woman and a soldier. I'm too old to be teased about boys by my dad." she laughed, taking the first sip of her own drink, settling back into her chair, and eyeing him with a playful challenge, practically daring him to push the matter. He was more than aware she could turn this to his embarrassment if she wanted to.

He laughed back but then let his smile gradually fade from his lips. "He's a soldier, Silvia."

"So am I, Dad," she nodded. "I know the risks."

"Do you?" he asked rhetorically. "Because he's not just any soldier, is he? He will be one under my command."

"Nobody knows about us," she frowned. "I know you think me having your name rather than mom's would put a target on my back, but..."

Crow held his hand up. "It would put a target on your back, but that isn't what I meant." He sighed and reached up to massage the bridge of his nose for a moment. "I know you have only just met and we are talking about a whole bunch of 'what ifs' here, but let's say he likes you too, you get together, you go the whole distance, have kids and everything..."

"... Dad..." she groaned.

"Listen, Silvia. It may not be him, but if it is any soldier... 'cause you will meet someone one day, even if it's not him. What if he's killed? And what if..."

"What if you gave the order that got him killed..." She finished for him with a sigh of her own. "You think it would hurt us."

"Family is the most important thing in the world, Silly," he nodded. "I know how much losing your mom hurt you; how much more would that have hurt if I was the one who got her killed? Now, level that up. How would it affect us if I got your husband killed, the father of your children? How would they cope knowing I killed their dad."

"But it wouldn't have been you who got them killed; it would have been the enemy."

"You haven't been around much fighting yet, love. You haven't lost anyone, and I am grateful for that. But that will change eventually, and that sort of grief can do things to you; there is no telling where the blame will fall, and it's even harder on children." He sighed and looked into her eyes. "Look, if you like him, I won't stand in your way, not with him or anyone else; I trust your judgment. Just... be careful, please."

"I will, Dad. Just don't go sending him on any suicide missions if you don't have to. I kinda like him." she finished with a wink and a smile, trying to ease the tension that had unexpectedly built from their conversation. She chuckled at his groan, hoping she would spare him the locker room banter she had inevitably picked up from a lifetime around soldiers. "So, what's the plan with the evacuation?"

Grateful for the change of subject, he turned to activate his holo-terminal and flicked through the interface until he found the manifest for the operation. "Three requisitioned passenger liners will be able to provide enough space to get all personnel off-world, and we have a fully stocked hospital ship to move the wounded," he said as he read. "A support fleet of three battleships, two carriers, twelve cruisers, and twenty destroyers will be able to keep the Imperium off our backs if they get here sooner than expected."

Silvia, completely back into 'Captain mode,' seemed to be doing the mental arithmetic but nodded after a few moments. "If we start gathering personnel from outlying regions now and start disassembling vital equipment immediately, that should cut a good chunk of time out of the loading process. Do you think the fleet will be able to hold if the Imperium gets here early?"

"It depends on the size of their fleets," he answered solemnly. "But no, is the short answer. Not for long, anyway. The Emperor will be looking to make a statement and get a big early 'W' to avenge the slaughter of the 381st. He won't be fucking around, so we can almost guarantee that those task forces will each be huge compared to our fleet. At least that is Valdek's take on it."

"Any idea how long we'll have?"

Crow shook his head. "None. But the task forces were already being assembled when the Marines left Port Fortitude. We don't know how much progress they had made at that point, though. They could have been good to go back then, or they could have been a week away from being ready. I would normally say that the Imperium would wait until the news broke to disembark the fleet from port, to make a big spectacle of it or something, but they also said there were three task forces, and they would only need to make a publicity stunt out of one of them. Once they leave, it's about a five-day trip to get here from Fortitude, and it's been three days since the attack. It's speculation; they could be arriving right now or may not be getting here for another fortnight." He huffed and looked down at his now-empty glass with a hint of longing. "To be safe, I want all our personnel and as much of our gear as you can ready to go as soon as humanly possible. Get the tech teams started on wiping the network systems, leave medical til last. Get the demolition squads to start on rigging the base to blow, and start pulling as much of our tech as possible out of here as you can. All hands on deck for this one, Captain; our fleet should be here by noon tomorrow, and I want loading operations to be underway by twelve-oh-five, understood?"

Silvia nodded, downing the rest of her glass, and then stood from her seat. "I'll see to it personally, Sir," she said with a sharp salute.

"Thank you, Captain," he smiled back. "I'm proud of you."

"Try to sleep, Dad," her posture softening as she turned to get to her tasks. "I love you."

"Love you, too, Silly," he smiled back. "And if you get all of our shit out of here, I'll make sure you and Sergeant Taylor are sitting next to each other on the bus out of here."

She rolled her eyes but grinned as she looked over her shoulder. "When I get us out of here, I will be expecting us to be sharing a cabin and one single bed," she smirked teasingly at him.

Cornelius groaned as she left the room, chuckling to himself for a moment before his eyes drifted back to the interface. Thousands of men and women were counting on him and his daughter to get this right.

He just hoped they had enough time.

********

Laura. 4

Never meet your heroes, they say; never search for the fountain of youth, and only the fool would be foolish enough to lose themselves to the fool's errand. That last one had been her Grandmother's favorite play on words, and the old timer had plenty. These were little nuggets of advice she had heard for most of her life, and the sentient was sound for a Mariner: don't get so lost in the pursuit of a goal or in the emulation of another that you lose your course along the way, There was, after all, nothing more frightening to a Mariner than finding yourself lost with no bearing home.

Well, Laura had seen those courageous and intrepid scientists who had first dared to step through the airlock and into the eons-old ghost ship that had been the Primis. They were explorers, pioneers, and visionaries, the likes of which had not been seen in human history since Uri Gargaran first left the bosom of earth's atmosphere or Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on an astronomical body that was not the cradle of humanity, or Loraine Lambert made the first transition into superluminal travel. The men and women of the Mariner ship Artemis may never go down in the vaunted annals of human achievement, but they were her heroes, and at this moment, Laura was following, almost literally, in their footprints.

In much the same way as the crew of the Artemis had been her heroes, the Primis itself had been her Shangri-La. It was a vision of the future so tantalizingly close to being made manifest yet was so infuriatingly out of reach. Those first tentative steps made by the Mariner scientists had been like stepping into an ancient tomb, except there were no bodies. The seemingly endless corridors - that would eventually take more than four months to map comprehensively - stretched out forever into the darkness. Running lights that had once illuminated the ancient crew lined each corner of every hallway but had been mercilessly dormant as those explorers first ventured into the crypt. Even as a child, even watching those recordings more than a century after the fact, and watching them in the safety of her own cabin, even knowing exactly how that expedition had ended, even being able to see the shadowed outline of the Primis out of her porthole window, she still felt the cold tendrils of fearful apprehension coax the hairs on the back of her neck to stand tall.

And now she was doing it herself... but she was doing it entirely alone.

That, however, was where the parallels ended. The corridors did indeed stretch out into the distance, as they had done on the Primis; one to the left, one to the right, and another leading straight on from the small anteroom on the other side of the hatch, but rather than blanketed in bleak, ominous and foreboding darkness, they were bathed in perpetual white light.

There was no dust cloud down here; now that she thought about it, there had been a drastic drop in the particulates in the air, even on the surface, while inside the radius of the shields from this ship. So there was none of that sickly, muting brown covering the floors and clinging to the walls. Mariners were clean; they kept their ships to as high a degree of cleanliness and maintenance as possible, but even by their high standards, this ship looked to be pristine. Even though a huge chunk of it was buried - or perhaps smashed - beneath the surface of the cavern, it looked like this ship had just rolled off the assembly line. There was not a speck of dust - brown or otherwise - anywhere.

Somehow, that made the nerves worse, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up to pay attention. Just as they had done as a child when she had watched those recordings.

She knew where she was. Or at least, she knew the layout of the Primis down to each corridor intersection and every bulkhead; she could navigate the hallowed hallways of that ancient ship with her eyes closed. So, assuming this ship was an exact classification match rather than just one that shared aesthetic similarities, she knew where she was. That meant that the corridor to the left would take her toward the bow of the ship, a few decks below the bridge. The hallway to the right was a little more complicated, but if she wanted to get to engineering, that would be the way to go, although it would take a pretty long time to get there. The hallway straight ahead led to this deck's complement of cargo bays, as well as the main large-bore cargo elevator system.

One thing that was common to all ships of all modern species, in one form or another, was that a ship's crew complement was measured not by the number of workstations or even the necessary manpower needed to operate the various systems but by the number of beds. That seemed to be an almost universal fact. Even for the species of the cosmos who didn't use beds and used, for example, viscous hibernation sacks like the Khuvakians, it was still the only accurate way to make a crew count. The ancients, as far as anyone could tell, didn't have beds or anything even comparable to one. Rooms on the Primis that had been determined to be living or crew quarters had a single, hectagonal platform in the center of the room, with an indentation on each side, enough for one person to sit on each. Yet every workstation, including the captain's post, had a normal-looking chair for the user to sit on. It made deciphering the use of these large, strange, foot high, platforms something of an impossibility.

Without the means to count the beds, nobody had the slightest idea of the crew complement of one of these ships. In theory, each room with one of those square platforms could be a sort of bed, and one hypothesis was that it was some sort of anti-grav field emitter that would hold an occupant upright. Another was that it was some sort of communal sitting system. It was true that the indentations on each edge were comfortable sitting places for any humanoid to use. But there had been no bodies on the Primis, meaning no remains to simply count. Deducing the number of crew from the number of rooms with these small platforms still gave a conservative estimation of over a hundred thousand members, but if the second theory was correct, it could have been six times that number. That was assuming that the crew didn't sleep by rotation and that there was no limit to how many people used those platforms, meaning the ship's complement could have numbered in the millions. So even though the ship was vast beyond ease of comprehension, a huge proportion of that space - entire decks in many cases - was filled with row upon row of these simple, platform-containing rooms.

For her though, her destination was the bridge. It was clear that the power was still on, and walking the entire astounding distance through the rabbit warren like hallways of the ship would eventually be necessary to confirm the power core was, indeed, still miraculously functional after god knew how many millions or billions of years - rather than some sort of emergency back up - the bridge would allow her to get a better overall picture of the ship's condition. Assuming the layout was the same, that was still more than a four-mile hike.

With a frown of realization, she checked the computer on her wrist. The cavern had been sealed off from the outside world since before most galactic civilizations had even evolved, yet if the power system was working, then maybe...

A smile pulled at her lips. The oxygen recycling plant was still operational, too; the atmosphere on the ship was almost exactly the same mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide as found on most other planets, and only a few bars of barometric pressure less the Earth.

"Oh, thank the lord of fucks!" she groaned to herself. "If I never see an atmospheric suit for the rest of my life, I will still have nightmares about this one!"

She started to pull it off and set it on the floor inside the anteroom. Sighing contentedly at her first breath of fresh, clean, recycled air. Mariner ships had been using reverse-engineered copies of ancient oxygen reclamation equipment for decades, but considering how crisp and sterile the air down here seemed, something had clearly been lost in the translation. That thought only clouded her mind for a few moments, though, as more and more excitement built behind her ribs.

The optimist in her was well and truly off its leash now, and all manner of possibilities were starting to occur to her. The Primis's power reactor had been silent for millions of years before the first Mariners tried to reactivate it, but with less than the first idea of how to do that and no way to translate the systems that would tell them, they had been unable to properly study, let alone use, the vast majority of the ship's systems. Some things, like individual computer terminals, had been able to be powered up using portable generators - that is how the indecipherable language had been found in the first place - and other systems, like the sensors and the oxygen recycling plant, could be stripped out and taken apart without any real risk to the crew. But the power core was different. With no idea how it worked and with the massive and unstable forces usually involved in starship power generation, taking it apart could have caused an accident on a truly biblical scale. Understandably, with the likelihood of something going "boom," nobody had been stupid enough to start taking things apart without knowing how they worked or - in many cases - what they even were.

There was, for example, a very large piece of equipment located almost at the very center of the Primis. It was connected through a network of conduits directly to the hull, and these connections were regularly spaced every few hundred meters or so along the inside of the astonishingly massive outer shell of the Primis. Nobody had a clue what it did. They had never been able to activate it, and - unlike, say, the engines - there was no modern equivalent to draw comparisons to. The engines, for example, were massive; they ran on a source of power that couldn't be replicated, and without turning them on, it was extremely difficult to be certain of the physics they manipulated to make the ship move. But you only had to look at them to know they were engines; their placement, the way they were hooked up to the main reactor, even the look of them, they were obviously engines. The thing in the center of the ship, on the other hand, was a complete fucking mystery.

There were theories, of course. Everything ranging from an inertia-canceling gyroscope of epically advanced design, through the idea that it was some sort of separate and enormous sensor array that used the hull itself as a receiver, right through to the theory that it was some sort of backup to the main shields. But nobody knew, and because nobody knew - and because of the dangerous levels of radiation coming from inside it - nobody was particularly keen to start taking it apart. Not only in case it blew up and spread that troublesome radiation everywhere but because there was no guarantee that it could be put back together again in working order. They would, after all, only have one shot at it.

Well, not anymore, at least not if this find turned out to be the gold mine she was starting to think it was. Not only was there a spare piece of this machinery to replace the old one if it was damaged, but - with the power on in this ship - there was a good chance that they may finally find out what the thing did.

That was the tip of an extraordinarily large iceberg, and her mind was going through a spontaneously constructed mental checklist of all the different systems that could finally be studied in their full working order. The power core, obviously; the shields were clearly still active, as was the oxygen plant, and both of those were functioning differently than the reverse-engineered counterparts - her shields didn't make her ship invisible to scanners, for example, nor could they stop the flow of water. If they hadn't been copied as faithfully as first assumed, then perhaps the sensors or laser-focusing lenses in the reverse-engineered weapons hadn't been either.