Chapter 3
“A good commander doesn’t panic, no matter how dire the situation,” Captain Vincent had told Brett’s class at the Academy. “A good commander has to inspire confidence in his or her crew and that can’t happen if he or she panics in the face of a crisis.”
Brett put these words to good use now, looking around the engine room for another way to get out. The now-departed Smitty had left him the answer: the door to the access shaft lay on the floor where he’d left it. The shaft didn’t accommodate Brett as well as Smitty, but he was able to slide inside and slither along the tunnel into the bowels of the ship.
Making his way towards his quarters, he paused at the cargo hold. The Serparnians were opening up the crates, inspecting the contents. Their leader stomped in, his reptilian eyes narrowed with agitation. “Get these crates ready for transport. We have unfinished business,” he said.
There wasn’t much time left. Brett crawled along the maintenance tunnel faster, careful not to make any noise to alert the Serparnians. Their leader had done Brett a favor by fusing the door shut from the outside; there was no chance then of anyone coming back to check on him.
At the time of its construction, the Cassandra hadn’t been equipped with an escape pod. The original builders hadn’t felt crew survival worth the cost of outfitting the ship with one. And nothing motivated a crew to avoid danger than not being equipped with a safety net if they ran into trouble.
Only the paranoia of one captain in the ship’s long history saved Brett right now. Fifty years ago, one Lon Juergen had purchased the Cassandra. Always a demanding employer, Juergen didn’t make a lot of friends with the crew. He spent most of his free time locked in his quarters, conceiving plans of how the crew would eventually turn against him.
In preparation for that day, Juergen had secretly installed an escape pod in his quarters, an escape pod that could hold just one person. He kept the existence of the pod from everyone under his command. He kept its existence so secret, no one would have found it if Brett hadn’t run into the wall after one of his frequent sessions of binge drinking.
As well as to escape a mutinous crew, Juergen had also used the pod to store his valuables, including the diary detailing the pod’s construction. Doing some of his own research, Brett had determined Juergen never got to use his precious escape pod; he died of a mysterious ailment on Risa two years later. Brett would have to be the first to try it out.
Opening the door to his quarters, he felt his stomach churn at the thought of trusting his life to a paranoid crackpot like Juergen. But when he searched his mind for some other way of overpowering five Serparnian pirates and escaping from their warship, he didn’t see an alternative. If he survived, he should tell the boys at the Academy to program this as one of their no-win scenarios.
The wall protecting the escape pod opened by pressing down on a particular spot of the wall. If Juergen hadn’t been so cheap, he probably would have used a retinal scanner to keep anyone but him from using the thing. Pressing against the spot where he’d slammed his head into the wall that night, Brett opened the hidden wall to find the controls for the pod.
He strapped into the pod and then settled in to wait. If he tried to leave right away, the Serparnian ship would pick him up on their sensors and vaporize him like Smitty. He would have to wait until the Serparnians blew up the ship to eject the pod and then hope they lost him. In the meantime he hoped no one on the Cassandra looked in here or no one on the Serparnian ship was tracking him.
As someone distrustful of his employees, Juergen had also set up the escape pod as a secondary bridge, where he could monitor the crew’s activities. The sensors and all the other equipment were fried, but some of the exterior cameras were still functioning under their own power. This gave him a partial view of the Serparnian ship so he could determine when to launch the pod.
Captain Vincent’s words came back to Brett as he waited, sweat starting to drip into his eyes. There was a high probability he’d die from either the freighter exploding or the Serparnian ship tracking him, but this was his only chance. In the meantime, there was no sense panicking. A good commander kept his head—if only Brett had been a good commander.
Eight years ago, he’d been in the Serparnian system on Federation business as captain of the Icarus. Civil war on the Serparnian homeworld of Serpalal Prime was causing a flood of refugees to flee the system for Federation space. Command ordered the Icarus in to aid the refugees and begin negotiations with the warring sides.
“Captain, we have a ship approaching,” Lieutenant Kosin said from the ops station. “Approximately thirty life forms aboard. I think. There’s some kind of interference preventing me from getting a good reading.”
“Put it onscreen,” Brett said. The ship was a freighter, not much newer than the Cassandra. “Hail them.”
“No response,” Lieutenant Tulsob said from tactical.
“They’re on a collision course,” Kosin said.
“Hail them again.”
“Still no response.”
Days earlier, one of the warring parties had used a freighter like this one to massacre a flotilla of refugee vessels. The ship was loaded with explosives rigged to explode in the middle of the formation, taking out all the ships around it. Naturally each side blamed the other in an attempt to benefit politically from the tragedy.
“Lieutenant Kosin, can you detect any explosives aboard that ship?” Brett asked.
“I can’t be sure, Captain. There’s too much interference.”
The interference could be caused by a number of things—spatial anomalies, a radiation leak on the ship, or a glitch in the sensor array—or it could be the result of intentional jamming to keep them from finding the explosives inside. If they were willing to blow up their own people, he had little doubt they’d do the same to a Federation ship.
“Can you get a tractor beam on it?”
“No, sir. Too much interference.”
Brett looked around at his crew, all of them looking to him for an answer. “All right, Mr. Tulsob, give them a warning shot across the bow. We’ll try to scare them off.”
A single phaser bank fired, the orange beam slicing through empty space a meter over the freighter’s bow. The ship kept coming towards the Icarus, still on a collision course. That was all the proof he needed: there were no people aboard that ship; it was a trap.
“Disable their engines,” Brett ordered. “Fire.”
This time the phaser burst struck the freighter at the rear. In his testimony at the court-martial, Tulsob indicated he’d aimed for a power coupling. The Icarus’s sensor logs backed up this assertion. The shot shouldn’t have done anything more than disrupt the engines and bring the freighter to a stop.
Instead, the rear of the ship exploded, flaring in a fireball that engulfed the bow. The Icarus’s shields kept any of the debris from striking the ship, but the shockwave rattled the bridge. Brett grasped the arms of his command chair with white knuckles until the deck settled.
“Sir, I’m picking something up,” Kosin said. Bodies. Corpses among the debris.
A flash of green light returned Brett to the present. The Serparnian ship had opened fire. Upon impact, he pressed the button to launch the escape pod, crossing his fingers. The pod rocketed out of the Cassandra’s side just as the ship exploded.
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