The Spectre of Oblivion by David Adams

Author:David Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David Adams
Published: 2012-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter VII

Plan A

*****

Operations

TFR Beijing

Meanwhile

LIAO FELT STRANGE TO BE in operations with another person in command, but in every other way, it was exactly as she had remembered it.

Commodore Vong had permitted her to stay in operations with the rest of the command staff despite her role as observer. It was a little gesture of solidarity that, she felt, helped make up for the harsh words Vong had for her during the briefing. She suspected that Vong had meant what he had said but also had a little bit of respect for her. It was a strange feeling and hard to articulate, but she did feel that, while he may have disagreed with her command style and with many of the decisions she made when she was in command of the Beijing, Commodore Vong meant her no ill will.

Being back in operations was nice.

The Beijing floated in the Lagrange point Cerberus guarded. The coordinates Avaran had programmed into their computer would take them to the L1 Lagrange point of Belthas IV, the same place the Alliance fleet had jumped to. Kamal removed the small key from his chest pocket, and Vong did the same. They inserted and turned the keys, a procedure she had performed dozens of times herself, and the ship jumped.

Normally, this was a completely imperceptible event that, apart from a few blinking lights lighting up on consoles scattered around the dimly lit operations room, passed by without incident.

Not this time.

There was a terrific scraping noise as though long fingernails were being dragged at high speed across a chalkboard. Immediately, proximity alarms and thermal warnings sounded. The crew reacted quickly.

“Jump complete, Captain!” called Lieutenant Dao, the navigator.

Instinctively, Liao turned her eyes towards the man and opened her mouth to reply but forced it to close.

“We have arrived at the Belthas system.” Dao continued.

The new chief of engineering, a short, stocky man with a completely shaved head named Au, called out as well. “Jump drive status nominal. The device is cooling. Hull temperature has increased by four hundred Kelvin but is falling.”

“What the hell happened?” asked Vong, leaning up against the command console in almost exactly the same manner Liao expected she had once done. Was this what it looked like to be one of the crew? Liao tried to imagine herself in that role, seeing it through another’s eyes.

“Captain?” Ling, the radar operator, stared at his radar screen. “Captain, we appear to be in the middle of a debris field. I’m reading almost… it must be ten million tonnes of debris spread out over a spherical region of approximately four thousand kilometres but very little beyond that. We appear to be in the exact epicentre of the debris field. Various metals and alloys, dense materials. It’s not rock or asteroids. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Ten million tonnes was a lot of material.

“It’s a graveyard,” Liao said to nobody, “the ruins of the Toralii ships. Whatever happened to that fleet, it happened fast. They were probably destroyed as they were jumping in, one by one, and it happened so quickly they couldn’t even jump away.

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