The Madman's Clock

Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

The four of us left the security station, flanked by Senior Chief McGowan and his four men. With pistols on their hips, they escorted us toward the bridge. The crew kept clear of us, watching with confusion. The short walk from the station to the bridge felt more than a little like the walk we had taken from the carrier shuttle bay a few weeks ago, when we returned from Alpha Centauri. Marine guards had escorted us to the brig. It was a terrible feeling, though at least here, these people were only marginally on the same side as us. They weren't brother marines. They were the mission. Still, the similarity bothered me.

Now there were four security guards standing watch at the entrance to the bridge, and they held plasma rifles. Our appearance had, at the very least, unsettled the security officers. That was a start. Hopefully, if the Edra assaulted the bridge, which of course we knew would happen, then at least security wouldn't be caught off guard. They stopped us at the hatch, and McGowan nodded for them to let us enter. They unlocked the hatch and stepped aside.

McGowan led us through the narrow passageway, a short twenty paces, before ending in a dead-end and a hatch on the starboard wall. The hatch was open, and we stepped through. All the while, I made mental notes for what I knew would be the desperate firefight to come.

The bridge opened up before us. Oblong shaped, the long bridge was a series of banks of workstations. Each console had a crewman at it, the screens displaying data so rapidly, I could barely keep track of what they were looking at. The bulkheads were just as covered in displays, most of them showing outlines of the Saturnus, though beyond that I had no idea what they said. The very front of the bridge was covered by a massive display. The display showed the ship and surrounding area, and looked somewhat like the displays I had seen on other bridges, just before the opening of wormholes.

Without seeming too obvious, I counted the people here. There were at least thirty, with more coming and going, all working quietly. In fact, that was what struck me most of all; the quiet. Everything had a low hum to it. Nobody spoke above a whisper. Most of the crew sat very still, their hands the only things moving as they glided across their controls. At first, I couldn't figure out what was so odd about that, until I saw three techs at one bank of console all turn their heads slowly, in unison, to the left and then back again.

We were escorted to the center of the room, a raised platform two steps up, surrounded by rails of the most perfectly polished metal I had ever seen. The platform held a console bank, smooth touch screens which danced with lights.

There stood two people. One was a smaller yeoman, a young man who stood rigidly still, staring straight forward at the main display, but whose hands danced over the consoles as quickly as anyone else in the room, maybe faster. He had a standard headset on, but other odd gear, as well. One of his eyes was covered by a small display, and his free right eye shifted back and forth rapidly. A large set of wires came out from the left side of his face, though I couldn't see where they connected to from where I was standing. Still, they snaked across his shoulders, down his back, and into the console he worked on. He was wired directly into the console; Edra technology.

Beside him was his commanding officer, Captain Rachel Paetkau. We had been told very little about Paetkau before leaving Port 25. She was forty-three, very young for a captain. She was apparently some sort of genius, and that went all the way back to her grade school days in Geneva, where she lived with her traveling professor-parents. Her record included several citations for courage under fire, a rare thing for an engineering officer. She also had a reputation for a level of strictness that, as the joke went, would have made her more at home on a Royal Navy ship from the eighteenth century that a twenty-third century starship.