Sword: The Globur Incursion Book 5 by Rebbitt D

Author:Rebbitt, D. [Rebbitt, D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Karl Zenke sat in his quarters. He knew sooner or later he would get the call from Rear Admiral Jones. Jones will have to confer with Fleet HQ. Probably doing that now. I wonder what they’ll want us to do with the pilot.

TF15 was about ready to leave the Chard system, but no course had yet been set. Jones would definitely want to speak with him before the task force went into quantum drive where communications weren’t possible.

He had very little to provide in the way of any updates. The pilot was unconscious, and Phoenix’s pinnace slot had a heavy fighter jammed into it. The pinnace slot was for the very small ship the captain would normally use for the sake of convenience. It allowed the small pinnace to dock directly, flush with the ship instead of using a shuttle bay. A pinnace was a small delta craft, not a spherical armored fighter. A heavy fighter out-massed a pinnace by a factor of five. The heavy fighter looked like it had crashed into the side of Phoenix and stuck there.

When Zenke’s crew had found the fighter, the shuttles had been busy trying to find and rescue any crew from other ships or pilots that had ejected from their stricken fighters. The fighter might have fit in the shuttle bay, but during the battle, the bays had sustained significant damage, and there was no room.

The fighter simply sat in hard vacuum, anchored to Phoenix’s hull. Only the two people who had extricated the pilot had examined the fighter in any detail, and they had reported it was a standard heavy fighter. Zenke itched to go out and look himself, but he was certainly no expert in heavy fighters.

The good news in all this was that the doctor had told him he would be walking within a day. If limping was walking. Zenke would take what he could get. He longed to tour his ship, knowing he would see the wounds suffered in the recent battle. All the captains had logged it as the battle of the Markus Nebula in their after-action reports. It was humanity’s first victory over the Globur.

Worry creased Zenke’s brow. We got lucky. But next time we’ll really give them a good walloping. If we’d only had the four battleships of a standard task force—instead of two—we would have prevailed without the intervention of the mysterious fighter.

His comm pinged. It was Jones, and he didn’t look to be in a very good mood. “Well, Captain?” asked Jones. “Anything new from the pilot?”

“No, sir,” said Zenke. “Lieutenant Flint has attempted to speak to him. He could not provide any information and has slipped back into a coma. The doctor says trying to wake him again may kill him.

“Leave him in the coma,” Jones ordered. “No one will speak to him unless I have directly authorized it. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” confirmed Zenke, growing uneasy.

“In addition,” Jones continued, “we are seizing all telemetry from the remaining ships for analysis, including yours.

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