War Fleet: Resistance, стр. 37
Kota sprang into action, signaled Riley and Turgin forward, and let them run ahead of her. They took the space quickly, scanning the bulkheads and any nooks and crannies for automatic turrets or the like. Olsen waited a moment, and then strode forward. Novak kept pace beside him.
The next room looked like a supply module, with cans of food and electronics stacked on the shelves around the wall. A few Arstans sat slumped against the shelves, with the same white foam spouting out of their mouths. Olsen passed them quickly and went into the next room — a weapon module with two half cylinders raised out of the floor, leading out to space from the sides. The next was a lavish bedroom with a square double bed in the center, velvet sheets, and a curved bookcase stacked against the wall.
This was presumably Captain Kraic’s bedroom, but no one had placed themselves on the bed. Probably no Arstan other than Kraic would dare take it as their deathbed.
Olsen and the crew passed around the bed and into the CIC. A good few dozen Arstans were here, slumped over their computer screens. Kraic sat lifeless in the chair at the center of the room, facing his bedroom. Unlike the rest of the crew, his eyes were open. Above him, the circular viewscreen displayed a message in English. “Welcome to death, Captain Olsen,” it said. “You are already too late.”
And below it, a rectangle on the screen displayed the view from the camera on the warhead. The sun was in the center of the view, growing larger all the time.
The Arstans had already launched the spatial detonator towards its target, and soon it would engulf the Ripley sector in flames.
42
One by one, the former crew of the Tapper filed into the room and gathered around Olsen, but what they saw on the viewscreen stopped them dead in their tracks. Olsen wasn’t sure what to do. He felt sick.
They’d come all this way, and now they only had a few minutes before their ultimate doom. The star would turn supernova, and the nascent fleet of human super-dreadnoughts, not to mention billions of innocent lives, would get wiped out.
At least none of them would live to see the humans lose the war.
“Sir,” Novak said, “we need to do something.”
“It’s lost,” Olsen murmured.
“No, sir. We still have a chance, as long as we’re alive.”
It seemed ludicrous that Novak, of all people—Novak—was calling him out. The shock of it was like a slap in the face. Olsen suddenly realized how stupid he was being.
“Damn it. You’re right,” he said.
He stepped towards the command chair and shoved Kraic out of the way. He was much heavier than he looked. Admittedly, Olsen had never tried to shift the weight of an Arstan before now, but he managed it.
He sat down, and the chair reclined immediately as he leaned back in it, so Olsen edged forward and perched his elbows on his knees. The room was much larger than any human CIC Olsen was used to, and it looked more like an earthbound air-traffic command or space-control center. As a result, it had dozens of consoles and scanning stations arranged in a conical pattern around the room. The chair rested on a raised platform, so the captain of the ship could monitor everything.
“Chang, you clearly know their systems. Work on the computers,” Olsen said. “We need to get this ship operational. Rob, tell me, how can we get that warhead?”
“Without Admiralty AI—”
“Just use your internal databanks!”
The cyborg cocked his head. “I’m sorry, Captain. I can’t see how we could override it from here.”
Of course not.
“Santiago, get to the navigation screen and see if you can work the sensors somehow. Maybe we can use something out there.”
Olsen turned to Novak, expecting a face devoid of expression. Instead, she wore a pensive look. It caught him up short. “You’re thinking something, Commander.”
“An idea.”
“Spit it out.”
“How about an FTL-warp module, sir?” she asked. “Assuming the Tapper explosion didn’t damage it.”
“A warp module?”
Her clear eyes bore right into Olsen’s. “It’s not my idea. It’s yours, sir. It just didn’t work before because we needed the Extractor to evacuate the crew. But now…”
It suddenly snapped into place for Olsen. “Now we can ram that warhead with their own damn module! Novak, you’re a genius!” He spun around. “Chang? What about it? Is that module still out there?”
“On the screen,” Chang said excitedly. “Just to the left.”
Olsen traced the path of his gaze, and he could indeed see the characteristic design of the FTL-warp module — a bulky cube with what looked like a funnel sticking out of the back. “Chang, can you get control of that module?”
“I think so.”
“Rob, help him out, use whatever hacks you can.”
Olsen felt his heart racing. If they could just start up the engine and point it in the right direction, the subsequent collision might just knock the warhead off course better than the Extractor ever could have.
“Sir, we have incoming,” Santiago said, and the message on the viewscreen flicked away to reveal a panoramic view of space. A flock of weapons modules had surrounded the Okranti’s CIC, and they now loomed as if closing in for the kill.
“They must know we’re here,” Novak said.
“Maybe, but all their officers are in here. I think they don’t know what the hell to do with us.”
“I’m not sure I want to rely on that confusion lasting too long.”
“I agree. Chang, you’ve got another task ahead of you. You need to hack those weapons modules as well. If we can get them on our side, then we can get them firing upon each other.”
Chang sighed, but didn’t turn away from the computer screen that he sat behind, tapping frantically at the keyboard as foreign green text streamed across his black screen. “If push comes to shove,” he said while he typed