The Santana Nexus (Junkyard Dogs Book 3) Read online

  With both cutters making two trips, the transfer of the wounded and the able-bodied from the Larkspur took just under fifteen minutes. The rapid evacuation was aided somewhat by the grim number of the Larkspur's personnel who no longer had reason to abandon ship. Even so, the thirty-nine survivors out of the original crew of sixty-five on the Federation destroyer were going to severely tax the resources of the Nasr. Making matters even more critical was the fact that eight of the survivors were severely injured, including several who had lost limbs and others with so far undetermined but obviously serious internal injuries.

  In spite of their best efforts, the Larkspur's engineering crew had been unable to shut down the destroyer's reactor. The chief engineer had managed to make a few rough adjustments that lengthened the time to containment failure, however. Surprisingly, during the rescue effort, the Nasr's cutters had also encountered two lifepods containing five survivors from the three ships that had attacked the Larkspur.

  One of the survivors was a bridge officer from the Asad.

  As the rescue effort wound down, Bishara ran the episode over and over in his head but could make little sense of the rationale behind the unprovoked attack. But then, everything seemed to be a bit out of kilter lately. The people on his home planet of Meridian had been embroiled in a civil war for almost a month now. What the final outcome would be was far from clear. The Meridian Imperial Space Navy had chosen not to take an active role in the conflict, with the overall commander of the Navy remaining resolutely neutral.

  Jasmine was another matter entirely, apparently. It looked as though the commander of Bishara's small force and the Captains of the other two ships had just decided to stake out a political position on their own volition. What was almost certainly, in Bishara's opinion, an unprovoked attack on a Federation ship was an extremely serious development.

  After the transfer of the Federation personnel to the Nasr was complete, Bishara moved his ship to a safe distance from the time bomb that the Larkspur had become and raised his shields. The two Captains met for the first time a few minutes later on the bridge of the Nasr.

  Captain Helmsford was a tall, athletic woman with dark hair and blue eyes. She came onto the Nasr's bridge with her left arm in a sling and an assortment of small cuts and bruises marring an otherwise rather attractive face.

  Her counterpart, Captain Bishara, was perhaps a half a head shorter than she was and had the black hair, dark eyes and olive skin typical of most Meridian subjects. He wore a neat mustache and while he had a reputation as a strict commander, he was also known to be fair.

  "Captain Helmsford, it is a pleasure to meet you, though I believe we both would have preferred that it be under different circumstances."

  Bishara had the viewscreens on his bridge set to display the dying Larkspur. The Federation ship was a sorry sight, with her stern portion bent about fifteen degrees to port and barely connected to the rest of the ship. Jagged rips and tears from multiple pulse beam strikes continued to vent atmosphere and fluids though not quite at the furious rate that they had been a few minutes earlier.

  "Likewise, Captain Bishara," said Helmsford, her face understandably grim as she observed the last moments of her dying ship.

  "How long until that reactor loses containment?" asked Bishara.

  "I can't believe it's lasted this long. It should be letting go any minute now..." There was bright flash on the viewscreen. The Federation Captain managed to maintain her composure but she had been unable to hide an involuntary wince and a clenching of her teeth as the Larkspur was converted to plasma. Both Captains watched in silence as the explosion flared brightly for a few seconds before immediately beginning to die down.

  "My sincere condolences upon the loss of your ship, Captain," said Bishara.

  Helmsford responded, her voice almost breaking, "Thank you, Captain Bishara. She was bravely fought but, under the circumstances, we really didn't have much of a chance."

  "Bravely fought, indeed," replied Bishara. He paused for a moment to take a more careful look at Helmsford, "Do you require medical attention yourself, Captain?"

  "Not right this minute," she replied, "I don't think I have any broken bones. I jammed my shoulder during the battle."

  "Please let me know if you need anything"

  Helmsford, realizing that she still had a crew to command, tore her attention away from the loss of her ship and forced herself to concentrate on the current situation. The implications of what Bishara had done, attacking ships from a government that was supposed to be allied with his, were not lost on her. Nor was there a clear course of action for the two of them.

  "What do you suppose we should do now?" she asked.

  Though they didn't exactly know what to do next, it was obvious to both captains that the personnel on the overloaded Meridian destroyer were going to have to find a refuge of some sort and they would have to find it fairly quickly.

  "I need to get a message back to Meridian," said Bishara, "but the situation there is in such turmoil that I don't know for sure how to go about it. Too bad these defected ships destroyed the communications platform, we could have made good use of it. We should be able to access a Stage two communicator at the Santana Nexus, though."

  "I don't know if that will work either, Captain Bishara, the last we heard was that the Santana Nexus had been captured and is now under the control of this Sheik of Barsoom."

  "That may be why Commander Salib was willing to declare his allegiance," said Bishara, "he was convinced that this renegade Sheik has gained the upper hand." He paused in thought for a moment. "I really wish we could contact Mohammad Saladin, the Meridian Ambassador to New Ceylon, he is next in line to head up the legitimate government of Meridian."

  "You might just be in luck on that account, Captain," said Helmsford, "we have it on good authority that the Ambassador escaped the attack that took over the Santana Nexus and has taken refuge in the floating spaceship junkyard out in the New Ceylon system. As far as I know, we have a decent chance of finding him and maybe some other friendly forces there."

  "It sounds like as reasonable a destination as any at this point."

  Bishara gave the order to microjump back to the hyperdrive zone. With his mind in turmoil over the possibility that he may have just committed some very serious crimes and unsure of what the eventual consequences of these actions might be, it seemed that the best course of action was to find Ambassador Saladin and report to him as soon as possible.

  Bishara himself had never been much of a political creature and had instead concentrated his energies on becoming the best ship commander he could be, leaving the politics to others. If there was anyone who represented the legal Meridian government, it was Ambassador Saladin. Hopefully, Helmsford's information was correct and the Ambassador was indeed in the New Ceylon System. Maybe he could help Bishara sort some kind of order out of the madness that seemed to have taken over the Santana Quadrant!

  Chapter 2

  "...The main facility at the Santana Nexus is probably the ultimate expression of what can be accomplished using the basic spindle and ring design for an orbital space station. The vast majority of stations of this type consist of only a single ring. Another ten percent or so have been constructed with two rings. Only a few of them have been built with more than two rings and the Santana Nexus station is one of only three that have ten of them...

  ...Another way in which the Nexus facility differs from most other stations of its type is that the station doesn't circle a planet in close orbit. Instead, the sprawling facility occupies the L-5 point in the orbit of a large gas giant in the Santana Star System. This arrangement places the station permanently within a very reasonable distance from the system's Whitney jump zones. The harmonics of the various gravitational influences in the system place the jump zones way above the plane of the ecliptic, about one astronomical unit above the North Pole of the star, in fact. The nearly circular orbit of the gas giant, and consequently that of the Nexus station, means
that the distance from the station to the jump zone area remains, for all intents and purposes, the same, no matter where the station happens to be in its orbit...

  ...There are no inhabitable planets in the Santana system but there are several very strategic and vital Whitney jump zones. Though a minor player compared to the Sol Terra Quadrant, the Santana Quadrant contains a great deal of important real estate including five major, inhabited Federation planets and another half-dozen minor planets, like New Ceylon, which have Federation ties. The Santana jump zones are also the gateways to some of the most important planets of the Islamic Alliance, including Meridian, Jasmine and New Saudi Arabia. This vital location means that the Santana Nexus is a bustling point for travel and trade and justifies the expense of supplying virtually everything needed to sustain a permanent population of some fifty thousand people with another two or three thousand temporaries who are in transit to or from the Quadrant and the various destinations that can be accessed through the hyperlink points..."

  Hartwell Wrist Comp reference highlighted for further review by Tamara Carlisle. Excerpt is from "The Santana Nexus Station: What Makes it so Special?" by Thomas Priebe.

  "...You simply won't believe how incredible this Santana Nexus station is! When we first caught sight of it, it was no more than a bright point of light. As we got closer, you could start to make out some details. Imagine a stack of ten wagon wheels on a long, thin barrel of a spindle. At each end of the spindle is a gigantic air curtain air lock. Now imagine that the entire construction is rotating majestically to create simulated gravity. Now surround it with ships and other constructs and put over fifty thousand people on it. As we got closer and closer the sheer size of the thing was almost overwhelming, the rings are each a full two kilometers in diameter and the central spindle itself is over a kilometer long!..".

  First impressions of the Santana Nexus Station recorded by reporter Rebecca Tyndall of The Intergalactic Digital Press upon her visit to the station in 2597.

  Onboard the heavy cruiser JRS Hercules, recently defected from the Jasmine Republic, on station near the hyperlink zone of the Santana Nexus system, January 2, 2599.

  On the bridge of his powerful ship, the JRS Hercules, Captain Gazwhan Kassab scowled at the image of the huge, complex construct that was the Santana Nexus Station rotating slowly on the main viewscreen of his cruiser. As one of the largest free-standing space stations in all of Human space, the Nexus was also the de facto Capital of the entire quadrant. The image was being relayed from monitor feeds that were located in the spaceship docking area near the huge construct. The Hercules was several astronomical units away where she was currently maintaining station out near one of the hyperlink zones for the Nexus system. She had been sitting there idle for almost a week, parked where she could observe the vital hyperlink zone while she supplied power to a mysterious module that had been brought on board and mounted in the front cargo hold up in the nose of his ship. Other than that, the ship and crew were essentially doing...nothing. His crew was becoming restless; Kassab knew that too much pointless waiting was very detrimental to morale and to discipline. Perhaps he had better schedule some drills and some practice exercises.

  The Captain's thoughts returned to a theme that had been nagging at him for some time. Perhaps this Sheik of Barsoom wasn't the leader they had all hoped he would be. Yes, things had pretty much gone his way during the early stages of this campaign but since then? Not so much. Losing an engagement and two destroyers to a bunch of refugees holed up in a floating junkyard had done little to boost Kassab's confidence. Kassab shook his head disgustedly. Who was this Sheik of Barsoom anyway?

  Kassab fervently believed that the restoration of the leadership of the Islamic Alliance to a Monarchy was necessary to restore order to the Universe but maybe there was someone else who was better suited to the task than this Sheik who, in Kassab's opinion, was little more than a blustering, bad-tempered old fool.

  Kassab himself was descended from royalty though his link to the throne of Jasmine was somewhat tenuous, having come through one of the former emperor's cousins and a distant one at that. On the other hand, he had rapidly climbed the ranks of the Jasmine Republican Navy through hard work and a natural talent for leadership. He nodded his head. Yes, perhaps there was someone better suited for the task. The Captain decided he would just have to be patient a bit longer and wait for the right opportunity to suggest a better option.

  ***

  Santana Nexus Station, somewhere on the tenth ring, January 2, 2599.

  On the Santana Nexus Station itself, Rahman Halabi, one of the Sheik of Barsoom's most trusted Lieutenants, and the chief interrogator for the Sheik's security forces, finished questioning another of what seemed like an endless supply of prisoners and others accused of wrongdoing. As the man was taken away, Halabi knew that he had few minutes to prepare for the next accused miscreant and he took a short rest break.

  The interrogator was very good at his job, being able to alternate between threats and persuasion with consummate skill. No one knew for sure, but it was rumored that he had been trained as a truthseer. Halabi did nothing to confirm or deny that rumor, knowing that it merely added to his mystique. So feared had his reputation become that many of those that he was asked to question blurted out the truth without Halabi having to resort to any unusual persuasion. As he grabbed himself a cup of coffee and sat down to savor it, he had a few moments to reflect.

  Halabi's family had been taken away in the middle of the night and executed on trumped-up charges and questionable evidence by soldiers of the Jasmine Republican Army when he was a young man. He had been a fervent monarchist ever since and had eagerly offered his services to the Sheik of Barsoom when the opportunity presented itself. Trained by one of the old masters in the craft of interrogation, he had been with the Sheik for more than twenty years now. Halabi had always been fully behind the Sheik's cause and he had rejoiced when the Glorious Revolution they had worked so hard for had finally begun in earnest a few weeks ago.

  Now...he was beginning to have doubts.

  It seemed as though the Sheik had been able to attract a few really competent, honest people who fervently believed in the goals of the Revolution. Unfortunately, it looked as though the Sheik had also recruited a large number of personnel who were anything but honorable. Halabi was discovering that far too many of the Sheik's new people were nothing but opportunists and bullies who had been able to find a perfect niche for themselves to further their own nefarious agendas by joining up with the Sheik and becoming his representatives. The interrogator was disturbingly reminded of the very people who had killed his parents and his older sister all those years ago. The consequences of this trend were reflected in the caliber of the people that Halabi was being asked to question recently. Lately, it seemed as though all too many of the interrogator's clients were simple, law-abiding citizens whose only crime had been to come to the attention of one or the other of the Sheik's hired thugs.

  Halabi didn't like what he was witnessing, but he didn't know what to do about it either. If he spoke up, he himself could wind up in serious trouble. He sighed. He would simply have to do his best to ferret out the really bad eggs and steer the innocents away from the Sheik's quite full jail cells while staying under the radar himself. This Glorious Revolution, for all of the promise it held when it began, was not turning out the way he had imagined it.

  Not at all...

  Chapter 3.

  "An army marches on its stomach." -- Napoleon Bonaparte.

  UTFN Reclamation Center, onboard Federation Auxiliary ship Greyhound, January 2, 2599.

  Commander Oskar Kresge scowled at the computer display in front of him. Kresge, a handsome, dark-haired man currently dressed in a Navy-issue khaki coverall, was on the bridge of the Greyhound. The Greyhound was an ancient Bombardier freighter which, due to circumstance and sheer necessity, had become the command center for the United Terran Federation Navy (UTFN) Reclamation Center, known to everyone by i
ts more familiar title of "the Scrapyard."

  Forced to take refuge in the huge, floating spaceship graveyard that occupied the L5 point in the orbit of the planet New Ceylon, Kresge and a ragtag team made up of a handful of Federation Naval personnel, a bunch of civilians who had volunteered to help out when they discovered they had little choice, and small contingent of Meridian Imperial Marines from the personal guard of the Meridian Ambassador had just fought off a determined attack by the forces of "The Glorious Revolution" being led by a fanatic who called himself the Sheik of Barsoom.

  Kresge was scowling because, according to the inventory figures that his fiancé, Irene Marshall, had just presented to him, he and his group of defenders had enough food to last them for about another two weeks. They could stretch it out some, but the Scrapyard survivors had already been on somewhat shortened rations for the last several weeks.

  He was going to have to send out one or two of the freighters that had also taken refuge in the Scrapyard to procure some more food. The scowl was him expressing his distaste for the idea and realizing that he didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. There simply was no other way. Things tended to go to hell in a hurry when people were undernourished. Nor was a successful foray for supplies going to solve any long term problems. Supply lines and communications were disrupted throughout the entire Santana Quadrant. Keeping the Scrapyard operating was going to require the constant attention of a lot of personnel.

  What was it going to take to get things back to normal?

  He pushed himself away from the computer terminal and came to a decision. Long term solutions were just going to have to wait. At least one of his precious cargo ships and one of his precious destroyers were going to have to team up and make a run for provisions.