Tiger: Dark Space (Tiger Tales Book 2) Read online

  Tiger

  Dark Space

  By

  David P Smith

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 1

  Commander Dave Hollins sat on the Bridge with his head in his hands.

  Have faith, he told himself, they're a good crew and they will find a way to overcome these problems.

  These few problems. Well, dozens of problems actually. Dozens of big, ongoing, seemingly intractable problems. Dozens of big, ongoing, seemingly intractable problems that had been intractable for three months now, and remained so despite their best efforts.

  He sighed. It had all seemed so simple three months ago. USS Tiger had just come through a series of incredible misadventures, battered, largely dysfunctional, but miraculously intact. Given her track record of successive failures punctuated with occasional interstellar embarrassments and far-too-frequent total disasters, what was even more astounding was that she'd come out of the whole affair with some credit.

  Her crew, largely the dregs and rejects of the fleet, had actually won decorations, commendations, (several wagers) and even the odd promotion for the first time any of them could remember. No-one was more surprised than the Admiral who distributed the accolades, as he'd used the Tiger as his personal penitentiary for all the fleet's unwanted / incompetent / awkward personnel.

  As part of his gracious concession that the crew had proved themselves worthy, he'd planned to reallocate Tiger's crew throughout the fleet and scrap the Tiger herself as she was beyond economical repair. Dave had immediately objected. Having been through so much in such a short space of time with the ship and her crew, he couldn't bear the idea of scrapping "his" ship or breaking up "his" crew.

  He'd struck a deal in an effort to save the ship from the scrap-yard, but instead he seemed to have consigned his career to the scrap-yard as well. He'd promised to get the ship back to fully operational status and prove her at the Arcturus Test Ranges within six months.

  Three months down the line, Dave would have described the Tiger as a flying disaster area. If she was actually capable of flying at all.

  They'd had to face the ignominy of being towed back to their erstwhile home, the tiny mining colony of Hole, and Tiger had been stranded there ever since. The dilithium crystals that were the key focusing element of her warp-drive system had spontaneously re-configured themselves as dilithium dust, and no amount of effort from the Ship’s Engineering Officer, Commander Olga Romanov, her engine specialist, Lieutenant “Yon” Jonsen or their excellent Chief of Engineering, Deng Wa, had managed to persuade the dilithium to realign into a usable crystalline matrix.

  The replacement crystals they'd ordered still hadn't arrived at Hole and the strain of wrestling with the recalcitrant engines was definitely beginning to tell on the engineering staff.

  One morning Dave had bumped in the Engineering Officer in the Mess. He sat opposite her while PO Butler, the Steward of the Officer’s Mess, came over and poured coffee for both of them. Dave should have recognised the danger signs as he sat opposite the petite blonde Ukrainian. She looked dead tired and her eyes had an anger in them fuelled by too much work and too little success.

  “Good morning Commander, how’s the warp-drive looking?” Dave asked innocently.

  She fixed him with a hard stare and said through gritted teeth “It’s looking like a system that’s failed catastrophically after being repaired too many times with sub-standard parts and second-hand junk that doesn’t fit or connect properly.”

  Maybe it was too early in the morning, and he hadn’t properly woken up, or he was just overly optimistic. Either way, he still didn’t spot the rising storm in her voice and smiled and asked the same question a different way: “Sorry Commander, perhaps I phrased that badly. What I meant to say was how are the repairs to the warp-drive coming along?”

  In a barely concealed growl, the Engineer said ”We’re taking two steps forward, then three steps back, then wasting our time trying to dance a flamenco with or hands tied behind our backs and our legs amputated above the knees by a chain-saw.”

  Dave struggled for a moment to extract any useful or relevant information from her statement and it was only when he failed that he realised the Engineer was close to breaking point. Before he could say anything, she reached it in spectacular fashion:

  “IT’S SHIT! IT’S ALL SHIT!! IT’S ALWAYS BEEN SHIT, AND IT ALWAYS WILL BE SHIT!! IT’S THE BIGGEST, SMELLIEST PILE OF PUTREFYING SHIT THE UNIVERSE HAS EVER KNOWN!! IT’S A GIANT STINKING SHIT, SAILING ON AN OCEAN OF DIAHORREA, BLOWN BY GARGANTUAN FARTS AND FISHING FOR SHOALS OF FUCKING TURDS!!!” she screamed in his face, before spinning away and storming off, turning the air blue in English, Ukrainian, Russian and possibly several other languages too, whilst barging past anyone and everyone she met.

  The Steward of the Officer’s Mess was, as always, unassailably calm. “You’ll have to excuse Commander Romanov, sir. I understand that her valiant but unsuccessful efforts to repair the drive have induced a degree of stress upon her.”

  Dave still hadn’t recovered from the force of the Ukrainian explosion and all he could muster was “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  In a confidential whisper the Steward added “Her situation hasn’t been improved by the fact that she’s exhausted the ship’s supply of vodka.”

  “Oh” said Dave. “Perhaps I should direct my enquiries to Lieutenant Jonsen or Chief Deng for the foreseeable future?”

  “Probably for the best sir, especially if Commander Romanov has a hammer on her person”, smiled the Steward.

  Chief Deng was Romanov’s right hand woman, and an exceptional and inventive engineer but Dave struggled to track her down. She’d even managed to find a way to stop the ship’s computer from finding her, and Dave had to physically hunt her down on the lower Engineering Deck.

  When he finally caught up with her he said “Well Chief, you’re a hard woman to track down!”

  She looked very self-conscious and by way of explanation said “Sorry sir. Ancient Chinese proverb say “Wise man duck, when shit hits fan”.”

  “I appreciate it can’t be easy working for Commander Romanov at the moment, but I do need to keep up to date with progress …. or even the lack of it …. on repairs to the warp-drive.”

  Deng looked furtively around her before replying. “Sorry sir, she’s really lost it. We were all a bit concerned when the stores ran out of vodka, but she kept it together until she got desperate and tried to replicate some.”

  Dave winced.

  The replicators had recently started playing up again. For best part of a year the same issue that had crippled the transporter system had meant the ship’s replicators would only produce haggis, neeps and tatties, a traditional Scots meal hated and feared by almost everyone. They’d managed to remove the computer virus that caused the problem from the system, but had soon found that the ship’s computer was causing other problems.

  The ship’s computer held all replicator patterns in a central memory core, but seemed to be having problems retrieving the pattern for the requested meal. For some reason, replicated meals were now almost entirely random, and any crew
using their limited allocation of replicator requests were reluctant to waste them on a lucky-dip meal.

  A few days of eating at the ship’s galley had changed most people’s minds, and there was now an active bartering system in place, where people would ask the replicator for a particular meal and then try to trade what they got for additional replicator rations or someone else’s meal.

  A few of the more bizarre examples had been preserved by the Science Team, including a steak diane that arrived as a plate-full of deep-fried locusts, a moussaka that had arrived as a pair of novelty underpants and a spaghetti carbonara that manifested itself as a pair of battered and deep-fried sunglasses.

  Chief Deng and Ensign ARSE had been working with the ship’s computer but had so far failed to identify the cause of the problem.

  Deng continued “Commander Romanov went to the replicator in the galley to try and get a bottle of vodka, but it gave her white wine. She tried all the other replicators and eventually in desperation, she tried the industrial replicator in our workshop. It gave her a bottle of gin instead. That’s when she really lost it. She went absolutely BALLISTIC!!”

  Dave thought about it: “I suppose that explains why there’s broken glass around all the replicators in the galley …. and the smell of white wine too.”

  Deng voice dropped to a whisper. “It could have been worse sir.”

  “Did she take a hammer to the replicator in Engineering?” Dave had become familiar with the Engineering Officer’s predilection for “percussive maintenance”.

  “Did she ever!!! After beating the crap out of it, she went up to the galley, collected a packed lunch, came back down, picked up a selection of other hammers, chased everyone out of the workshop and locked the door behind her. Didn’t come out for six hours. I can tell you now, that replicator will never, ever, ever work again.”

  The little Chinese engineer sighed “We’ve all been keeping a low-profile since. On the quiet I’ve assigned an engineer to one of the replicators in the galley, twenty-four seven, just to pump in random requests in the hope that we’ll hit lucky and get a bottle of vodka out.”

  “Has that worked??” asked Dave, hopefully.

  “After a fashion …… “ said Deng peering glumly over her shoulder at a mountainous pile of bottles of every shape and size imaginable, none of which looked even remotely like vodka. “We’ve used up three weeks worth of replicator rations for every member of engineering to get four and a half bottles of vodka, and some peace of mind.”

  “The replicators are getting worse. We’ve been requesting a variety of drinks and beverages, but the more we’ve tried the weirder the results have been getting. I mean, why would the computer store a replicator pattern for a silica gel soufflé?? And who would have thought to create a pattern for a teriyaki infused panama hat???”

  Dave sighed “Probably someone who’s getting their own back after trying Chef Burn’s haggis crumble and custard.”

  In trying to avoid the Commander, at least Deng had spent some time casting an eye over some of the ships systems other than the warp-drive. Many of these were unreliable at best. They'd moved heaven and earth to repair many of the ships power relays, but these were prone to almost random breakdowns, especially the higher powered units. This left them unable to rely on the ship’s reaction drives either, and Tiger had drifted aimlessly in orbit around Hole as her engineers pulled more and more hair out of their heads.

  Power relays were a universal part of the ship’s systems and they were the main reason many other systems including the reaction thrust drives, the phasers and shields, and the main navigational deflector weren’t working. They took high-energy plasma from the warp-core and transformed into something tailored to the requirements of the given system. They were dotted around the ship and were backed-up to ensure that key systems had double or triple redundancy, but Tiger had blown hundreds of them when attempting to break the speed-record for the class over a year previously.

  However, they weren’t the sole source of concern. Most of Tiger’s fleet of shuttles were still inoperable which was more of a problem than it seemed, as nobody had yet plucked up the courage to use the transporter system.

  A practical joke that had got out of hand had turned the transporter from the preferred method of short range travel into a device that converted anything it touched into an equivalent mass of haggis.

  Apart from a few power relay failures that resulted in a completely safe shut down of their systems, the transporters had performed admirably since being purged and re-commissioned to clear the bizarre haggis-producing virus that had crippled the systems controls. However, most of the crew were understandably reluctant to risk a journey.

  The prankster who had created the virus in the first place (Transporter Chief Andy Carstairs) hadn’t helped by playing another practical joke when they’d first returned to Hole. He’d faked a message from the ship’s Liaison Officer to get the Security Chief to the Transporter Room to supposedly meet a Civic Dignitary. Faking panic, he’d transported eighty kilos of haggis from the galley and pretended the transporter had malfunctioned yet again.

  He’d kept a dead-straight face as the Security team panicked, but finally lost it when the Security Chief instructed members of her team to give the pile of haggis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and find a defibrillator and while she contacted sick-bay to request assistance.

  As well as two weeks in the Brig, Andy had earned a broken nose and two truly spectacular black-eyes from Security Chief Belle, who was not used to being made fun of. Although it was just a prank, the episode had served to make the crew even more reluctant to use the transporter.

  Hundreds of other defects still needed to be put right and everywhere Dave went in the ship, he saw the tags Romanov used to identify the equipment in need of repair. Each tag carried the same phrase:

  “Failed Under Calibration. Known Electronic Defect.” It was a bit odd that all of the equipment had failed the same way, but Dave had faith that Olga Romanov and her team knew what they were talking about.

  All the time the dead-line crept closer.

  Chapter 2

  There was very little that Dave or most of the Operational crew could do whilst Tiger was still immobilised. Mostly they occupied themselves in training and cross-training and then re-training, but it was dull and repetitive and seemingly pointless.

  In preparation for Tiger’s imminent return to service, Dave optimistically decided to undertake a full review of Health and Safety Issues aboard the ship. This was part of the First Officer’s formal duties and Dave started by pulling up the assessments undertaken by the previous First Officer, Commander Israel Joynes.

  Commander Joynes was the first Jamaican to achieve the rank of Commander within Starfleet, but his lack of interest in anything other than recreational drugs meant he would probably be the last. Unsure what to expect of reports from an officer who had a singular disinterest in anything related to working, Dave quickly discarded the whole document as it appeared to be nonsense.

  Dave had assumed that the most dangerous task any crew on a starship could face would be an away mission to an unknown planet or vessel. The potential risks from not knowing what you were dealing with had proven catastrophic and possibly even fatal time and time again on every ship Dave had ever read about.

  Bizarrely, for USS Tiger away missions into the unknown didn’t even make the top ten of most dangerous tasks. Number one on the list was actually eating in the ship’s galley. Having had his own close encounter with Chef Burns Haggis Tartare, Dave realised this actually made some sort of sense, and he retrieved the risk assessment prepared by Joynes and gave it a more thorough examination.

  It soon became clear to Dave that Joynes had done the risk assessment the easiest way he could: He’d simply called up the records from sickbay over the given period and undertaken a statistical analysis of what had resulted in most members of the crew being committed there.

  In light of that, over a hundred c
ases of “haggis-poisoning” in six months did indeed make eating in the galley statistically the most dangerous thing a member of Tiger’s crew could do.

  As Dave read down the list it made more and more sense, although none of it made comfortable reading. The second most dangerous activity was unarmed combat training with Security Chief Belle: Fifty-five incidents of sprains, concussions, dislocations and even broken bones in the same period spoke volumes about how seriously the Chief took her training regimes. Dave noted with some concern that none of the fifty-five injuries were to the Chief herself.

  Most bizarrely of all, the third most dangerous activity the crew could undertake (leap-frogging the holder of the previous risk-assessment: Consulting with the Ship’s Counsellor) was visiting the toilets on Deck 6.

  It appeared that as well as the flooding incident that Dave knew about that had nearly drowned a dozen of the crew, there’d been a similar incident where the fire-suppression systems had jammed on, nearly asphyxiating eight crewmen. Worse still was a horrific back-flushing malfunction where a junior engineer had connected a sewage pump in reverse. This had flooded the toilet compartment on Deck 6 with the entire contents of the sewage tank on Deck 23, resulting in the near drowning of nine crewmen in an ocean of urine, faeces and grey water as well as serious head and neck injuries to the unfortunate crewman who’d pulled the flush, only to be forcibly ejected from the toilet seat on a super-pressurised column of human waste.

  Dave noted that Commander Joynes assessment recommended that hard-hats and life-jackets should be worn at all times when using these toilets.

  Sadly, Dave knew that such things were almost a routine day-to-day event on the flying disaster that was USS Tiger.

  His mind numbed by the absurdness of what he was doing, Dave needed to take a break. He decided to visit the Main Engineering Deck to find out what progress, if any, Commander Romanov’s team had made.

  He called the duty engineers to the small office on the upper level. As well as the Commander, Lieutenant “Yon” Jonsen the drive specialist was on deck, with Chief Deng, and Crewmen Jane Doe and “Fingers” DuVall.