Wing Commander #07 False Color by William Forstchen (best books to read in life .txt) 📕

sitting in the captain's chair were translated into instant action, for good or ill; an admiral's orders filtered through layers of subordinates and were never so immediate or so personal.

Even with the back-breaking work of refitting Karga, Tolwyn had found these past months among the most worthwhile he'd ever been through. For at least this brief period he had felt truly alive again, the pressures, the worries about other things secondary. Indeed, they were following their chosen course, the other things—that was a machine all ready running, just waiting for the moment to be unleashed. If anything, these weeks out here had been a final respite, a rekindling of older days before the events of things to come were finally shaped and unleashed. It was something special to see the battered derelict come alive again bit by bit, and to know that he had played a part in making it all happen. A decisive part, in fact, given the way he'd been forced to maneuver Richards and Bondarevsky into going ahead with the project.

Whole days had gone by in which he'd never even thought about the Confederation, or the conspiracy, or his career. He wished, sometimes, that it could always be like that, but tempting as it was to throw himself wholeheartedly into the service of the Landreich he was still committed to serving Terra any way he could. Getting Karga back into service was the only way he could help right now, but when the time came he'd leave Kruger's navy and go home to carry on his struggle over fresh battlefields.

"Ring System transit coming up in fifteen minutes, sir." Lieutenant Clancy, the helm officer from Sindri who'd been helping out with the refit had the conn today There were a whole series of tests scheduled for Karga to attempt, and Clancy knew the helm and navigation systems better than any of Karga's regular crew.

"Thank you, Helm," Tolwyn said. He keyed the intercom pad at his arm. "Engineering, are you ready?"

"As ready as we'll ever be, sir," Commander Graham's voice responded. "I think the generators will stay on-line this time."

"Do your best, Commander," the admiral told him. He touched another key. "Sindri, this is Karga. Shield test commences in thirty seconds."

"Roger that," Sindri's captain replied. "Thirty seconds."

Tolwyn watched the event countdown roll by on his monitor. As it hit zero, the lights flickered in CIC for a moment, and the ship's status board beside him came alive with multi-colored lights as Graham switched on the shield generators and a whole new part of the ship awakened from a year-long slumber. At first the lights were a mixture of red, green, and amber, but slowly the red lights went out as section after section adjusted to the new configuration of the power grid and the shielding subsystems.

They'd been through this before—three times, in fact. Each time the shields had gone down almost immediately. Tolwyn hoped they wouldn't have to go through a fourth failure and another week or two of tracing connections and bridging weak spots in the shield emitter arrays.

Seconds crept by like hours, and the shielding held.

After two full minutes, Tolwyn activated his intercom again. "Sindri, my board shows green. Shields are nominal."

"That's confirmed, Karp. Looking good from here. I'm switching our shields to stand-by mode . . . now." And Karga was generating her own protective field at last, unaided by the tender still riding her superstructure like some kind of bizarre metallic symbiotic. "Engineering," Tolwyn said. "Good work, Commander Graham. I think this time you've got it."

Graham's reply was pessimistic. "They're holding, sir, but I'm not real happy with some of these readings.

There's still something wrong with the power flow to the upper superstructure emitters. I'll need to do some more work before I can guarantee any kind of combat-rated shields."

"But in the meantime we don't have to depend on Sindri just to keep from frying," Tolwyn said. "And that counts for a lot. Keep me appraised, Commander."

"Aye aye, sir," the engineer responded. 'We'll try to maintain shields through the ring transit, and see how they do. But don't start thinking about cutting the cord just yet. We need Sindri to fall back on if a glitch develops."

"Ten minutes to ring transit," Clancy announced. "Anything on sensors, Mr. Kittani?"

Karga's First Officer, Captain Ismet Kittani, was peering over the shoulder of the technician on duty at the sensor panel. He straightened up slowly and turned toward Tolwyn with an aura of finicky precision Tolwyn found irritating. But the man had an impressive service record as CO of a destroyer, and although his personal style clashed with Tolwyn's he'd done some good work in the refit project.

"We are still not getting reliable readings through the ring plane," the swarthy Turk from Ilios said gravely. "We will have to do something to improve sensor performance before we attempt any sort of active operations."

Tolwyn frowned. The sensors, like the shield generators, had become one of those on-going problems that seemed to take up increasing amounts of refit time that should have been going into less essential systems by now "We'll get them when we can." He activated the intercom system again. "Flight Wing, from CIC. Captain Bondarevsky, we will be entering the ring system in nine minutes. What's your status?"

"Four Hornets on patrol," Bondarevsky replied. "Four Raptors on Alert Five."

"Very good. Please have your fighter patrol take position ahead of us. They might not be able to help much, but I'd like some eyes out in front, just to avoid what happened last time." On the ship's previous ring transit two days earlier a particularly large chunk of ice had very nearly hit the ship, and Tolwyn didn't want a repeat of the threat today. Not while Graham's shields were still not fully reliable.

He checked the status board again, pleased to note that the shields were still holding steady despite the chief engineer's concerns. Despite the problems that continued to crop up, he was still confident of success. With luck