BooksBarbecue
Back Ark Royal Save as PDF
Chapters (42)
  1. Cover Blurb
  2. Contents
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Chapter Six
  9. Chapter Seven
  10. Chapter Eight
  11. Chapter Nine
  12. Chapter Ten
  13. Chapter Eleven
  14. Chapter Twelve
  15. Chapter Thirteen
  16. Chapter Fourteen
  17. Chapter Fifteen
  18. Chapter Sixteen
  19. Chapter Seventeen
  20. Chapter Eighteen
  21. Chapter Nineteen
  22. Chapter Twenty
  23. Chapter Twenty-One
  24. Chapter Twenty-Two
  25. Chapter Twenty-Three
  26. Chapter Twenty-Four
  27. Chapter Twenty-Five
  28. Chapter Twenty-Six
  29. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  30. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  31. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  32. Chapter Thirty
  33. Chapter Thirty-One
  34. Chapter Thirty-Two
  35. Chapter Thirty-Three
  36. Chapter Thirty-Four
  37. Chapter Thirty-Five
  38. Chapter Thirty-Six
  39. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  40. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  41. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  42. Chapter Forty

Angrily, he lashed out.  The bottle plummeted from the desk and struck the deck, shattering on impact.  Glass and alcohol splashed everywhere.  Ted swore out loud, then stood upright and reached for a towel.  There was no point in ordering Midshipwomen Lopez or another junior crewman to clear up the mess.  Besides, he was more than a little ashamed of his own weakness.  It was something he had to tackle on his own.  Once the mess was cleared, he dumped the towel into the recycler, glass and all.  It would at least serve a useful purpose when it was broken down for raw material.

His intercom buzzed.  “Captain,” Fitzwilliam said.  For an absurd moment, Ted wondered if someone outside the cabin had heard the bottle break, or smelled the Scotch through the airlock.  “The Marines are ready to start sifting through the debris, while Primrose is ready to return to Earth.”

Ted grunted.  “Tell them to make best possible speed,” he ordered.  The frigate would carry the news of the victory to Earth.  “And tell them that we will return to Earth within four days unless they have other orders for us.”

He scowled up at the star chart.  The aliens definitely had a more advanced FTL drive than humanity’s.  That was a given, now.  If they used it aggressively, they might even be able to jump directly to Earth.  And there wouldn't be any real warning before they arrived.  Once Ark Royal returned to Earth, they might not be allowed to leave, even though they were ideally suited to raiding behind enemy lines.

Damn it, he thought, as he turned on the air conditioning to get rid of the smell.  We’ve won one battle, but not the war.  Not yet.

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

The remains of the alien craft were almost invisible in the darkness of interplanetary space.

“I'm not picking up very much, beyond chunks of molten metal,” Corporal Henderson reported.  “I don’t think we’re going to find anything we can reverse-engineer.”

“At least not immediately,” Charles said.  The Royal Marines had a multitude of roles when they weren't actually serving as ground or space troopers.  One of them was conducting the preliminary post-battle search for intelligence.  Marines, in theory, were trained to recognise danger, something that couldn't always be said of civilian researchers.  “The ship was smashed to rubble.”

He shrugged.  There were no shortage of stories where a piece of alien technology was captured the first day, reverse-engineered the second and then used to produce a vastly-improved human version the third.  It had never struck him as particularly realistic.  He knew it could take months to reverse-engineer something produced by the Russians or Chinese – and they were human.  How long might it take to deduce the operating principles of a piece of completely alien technology?