Ep.#6 - "Head of the Dragon" (The Frontiers Saga) (28 page)

“It still doesn’t seem right.”

The sensor suite beeped at Mister Willard. “New contact,” he stated. “It is the comm-drone. Transmitting message transfer challenge.”

“I would want to know,” Josh stated.

“I’ve heard that about you,” Mister Willard responded. “Message challenge accepted. Transmitting sender ID.”

“Heard what about me?” Josh wondered.

“That you are very curious.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Josh defended. “That’s how I learn things.”

“You can learn by observation as well,” Mister Willard told him. “Sender ID accepted. The drone believes we are the Yamaro. Transmitting messages.”

“Watching is boring,” Josh told him. “I like to do things or talk about things.”

“I’ve been told that as well.”

“By who? Tug?” Josh asked. “That old man does
not
want to talk much, except to tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

“Mister Tugwell is a very wise man. I am sure he only wishes to enlighten you and help you improve yourself.”

“I don’t know about wise. I mean, how wise is it to fight for over thirty years, and against the empire no less? It’s like banging your head against the side of a mountain, it is. You’re more likely to knock yourself silly before the mountain crumbles.”

“Yet we are all about to bang our heads against that very same mountain,” Mister Willard commented as he monitored the transmission of the message queue to the Savoy comm-drone.

“Yeah, good point.”

“Messages have been sent.”

“Messages?” Josh wondered. “I thought we were only sending one message.”

“I added the messages that were in the queue from the Yamaro’s comm-system prior to her surrender to make it look more legitimate. I even faked a few dozen comm-log entries to make it look more authentic. If we had transmitted a single message, it would have raised suspicion.”

“Good thinking, but won’t, ‘Hey, I know it has been awhile, but would you be willing to help us overthrow the empire and depose Caius?’ make them even more suspicious?”

“Challenge is closed,” Mister Willard announced. “I’m sure the message is more subtle than that.”

“Subtle? How does one ask something like that subtly?”

“I am sure the message appears routine on the surface, but some words or phrases within the message will alert the sender to look deeper. Is that not how such things usually work?”

“In the vid-flicks, maybe. I wouldn’t know how they do it in the real world.”

“I am sure that Mister Dumar knows what he is doing,” Mister Willard assured Josh.

“I hope so. The guy makes me nervous. He’s always looking at everyone, watching them and stuff.”

“I believe it is the nature of people in his occupation.” Mister Willard looked at his sensor screen. “The comm-drone is going back into FTL.”

“Maybe, but I still don’t trust him,” Josh said as he changed course. “Coming about.”

“You trust Mister Tugwell, do you not?”

“Of course, but he’s laid his ass on the line for us more than once.”

“Well he seems to trust Mister Dumar, as does Lieutenant Commander Nash and Captain Scott.”

“Lieutenant Commander Nash doesn’t trust anyone,” Josh snickered, “and as far as the captain goes, he doesn’t trust everyone as much as everybody thinks he does. He’s smarter than that.”

“He trusted me,” Mister Willard defended, “and I was not only a member of an enemy crew, but also the leader of a mutiny.”

“The captain likes to give people a little trust, you know, just to see if they’re worth it. That’s what he did with me and Loki.”

“I have read the combat logs,” Mister Willard told him. “In your case, he had little choice.”

“Maybe the first time, but he did trust us enough to let us play in his simulator beforehand.”

“The comm-drone has departed the area. It should arrive in Takara within a few hours. Our mission is complete.”

“Great,” Josh declared. “As soon as we get back, I’m getting cleaned up and locating some food. Me and Loki got two more systems to recon.” Josh yanked the flight control stick to the left, twisting it slightly as he did so. “Coming about.”

Mister Willard shut down the Yamaro’s transponder as well as their communications gear as the jump interceptor completed her turn.

“On course for Darvano,” Josh announced. “Running jump plot now.” Josh punched the new destination into the jump drive’s plotting system. “What are you going to do when you get back?”

“I must begin reprogramming the captured comm-drones,” Mister Willard said. “They must be converted into FTL kinetic kill vehicles.”

“That last one sure did a number on the Wallach,” Josh stated. He had seen the footage from the jump interceptor’s cameras. “Hey, can one of those things really crack a planet in half?”

“I do not believe so. However, when traveling faster than light, they carry staggering amounts of kinetic energy. At the very least, I expect that such an impact would end all life on the target world.”

“Even so, it sure would be something to see,” Josh mumbled. “Five seconds to jump.”

“I hope we never get such an opportunity,” Mister Willard responded as he flipped his auto-darkening visor down to protect his eyes from the jump flash.

“Yeah, let’s hope.” Josh lowered his auto-visor as the two jump fields surrounding the interceptor, one expanding and one contracting, received immense amounts of energy. The two fields intersected just as the additional energy was delivered to them, resulting in the blue-white flash that accompanied every jump. A moment later, the flash cleared. “Jump complete,” Josh announced as he raised his visor. “You know, they really need to come up with an auto-darkening visor that works better. I’m always afraid I’m going to forget to drop this thing in time, and it never gets light enough for me to see my flight displays.”

“Have you spoken to anyone about this problem?” Mister Willard asked.

“Position confirmed,” Josh announced routinely. “We’re back in the Darvano system, coming up fast on Karuzara. Beginning deceleration.” Josh reversed his thrust feed so that all four of his rotating thrust ports had flipped over and were pointing forward, then brought his throttles up to full power in order to avoid slamming into the Karuzara asteroid base. As usual, he was flying with his typical ‘full blast or full stop’ style, as Loki had nicknamed it long ago. “Like who?” Josh asked. “Normally I would ask Marcus, but he’s so busy being chief of the deck, he’s got no time for me.”

“I will speak to one of the Corinairan technicians about this on your behalf, if you’d like,” Mister Willard offered as he tried to hide his nervousness over the speed of their approach.

“Sure, thanks,” Josh answered, calm as could be. “You want to contact Karuzara so they don’t shoot us down first?”

“Of course,” Mister Willard responded as he keyed his comm-set. “Karuzara command, Falcon one. Request clearance to approach and enter Karuzara air space.”

“Falcon one, Karuzara Command,” the voice answered in Angla, which was fast becoming the common language of the Alliance, despite the many different tongues spoken by its various members. “You are cleared for Karuzara air space. Contact Aurora flight ops on seven one zero on approach. Welcome back.”

“Hey, Josh, I’ve been meaning to ask you; how did you come up with the name Falcon?”

“It was Captain Scott’s idea,” Josh explained as he flipped the interceptor over. He moved his throttles back to zero and swung his thrust nozzles aft once more, then began maneuvering the interceptor in order to line it up with the trench in the surface of the asteroid that led to the entry tunnel. “It’s some kind of bird back on Earth, supposed to be really fast. A bird of prey, I think. Swoops down out of the sky like lightning to strike its target. Kind of cool, don’t you think?”

“I suppose so.”

* * *

“All comm-drones are currently being reprogrammed with the same code that Mister Willard and I created to destroy the Wallach,” Vladimir announced. “Deliza and I have added some additional subroutines that will allow us to transmit targeting coordinates and conditions when the jump interceptor transmits a launch order.”

“Good,” Nathan remarked from his seat at the head of the briefing table. “That will give us some last second flexibility, which I suspect we will need.” Nathan looked over his last ship’s condition report. “How about our guns?” he asked Vladimir.

“We still have four rail guns down,” he admitted, “but to give us better overall coverage, we pulled parts from some and moved them to another. So instead of having four guns down all on the port side, there is nowhere along the ship’s perimeter where there are two guns out side by side.”

“So instead of one side being weak, all sides are weak?” Nathan wondered. “I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, Vlad.”

“We can alter the firing scripts to make the guns coverage zones wider,” Jessica suggested. “We can also run them at their maximum rate of fire when necessary. That should make up for the missing guns.”

“What about our four quad guns?” Nathan asked. “Did we ever get any ammunition for them?”

“We got a few thousand rounds at best,” Cameron reported. “The Yamaro asteroid started producing slugs a few hours ago. If we’re lucky, we might end up with about ten thousand rounds.”

“That’s about a fifteen second blast if we’re shooting all four quads,” Jessica pointed out.

“While the quads work, they will only work from their topside position,” Vladimir warned. “We had to pull the door motors from their bottom sides and use them to replace the burnt out motors on the doors for the secondary heat exchangers.”

“No sweat,” Nathan assured him. “For a fifteen second blast, I’m sure we can just roll over and bring them to bear. What about the hole in our port side?”

“There is nothing that can be done about that right now,” Vladimir told him. “It will take weeks to repair the damage.”

“Well, at least the port launch bay is still accessible,” Nathan stated.

“Are we still planning on running the flight deck all open?” Major Prechitt asked.

“Once we get all the staging stuff positioned, yes,” Nathan told him. “Expect to go to an open deck about an hour before mission zero.”

“We now have thirty-six deep space fighters and fifty atmospheric fighters, all manned and ready,” Major Prechitt added. “We’re topped off with aviation fuel, and we’ve got enough ordnance onboard for at least four full sorties.”

“What type of ordnance are we talking about?” Nathan wondered.

“Ship to ship, ship to surface, cruise missiles, rail gun rounds… you name it, we’ve got it, thanks to the Ancot raid. We wouldn’t have half that stuff without it.”

“Good to know,” Nathan answered. “How is the floating command center going?” he asked Cameron.

“We’ve put it into one of the cargo shuttles from the Aitkenna spaceport. It’s tight, but we were able to extend the bays completely. They’re hooking it up to the shuttle’s internal power and jacking its comm-array into the shuttle’s array. It’s not going to have much of a workable range, maybe a few hundred thousand kilometers, but that should be plenty for our needs. The whole thing should be up and running in about six hours.”

“Great. How many people do you need to staff it?”

“Besides the flight crew of two, I’ll need six people to man the data processing and comm stations, someone to backstop me, and people to man the staging platform as well.”

“Staging platform?” Nathan asked.

“We took five cargo containers from Aitkenna spaceport,” Master Chief Montrose explained. “They’ve each got their own power plant and environmental and gravity systems. We are docking them together to make enough space to hold the ground assault force. The whole cluster can sit on the flight apron and be jumped out to the staging point outside the Takaran system.”

“How are we going to move it off our deck?” Nathan asked.

“O-M-U,” Master Chief Montrose told him, “Orbital Maneuvering Unit. We use them to transfer cargo pods between interplanetary cargo haulers and the orbital transfer facility, where they wait to be shuttled down to Corinair.”

“Kind of like a space tug, then,” Nathan observed. “Will they be safe in those things?”

“They are heavily shielded to protect against the radiation from the Darvano sun for several days, and they will be considerably farther away from the Takaran sun. They should be fine, especially for the short amount of time that they will be in there.”

“We’d also like to include a few more cargo shuttles at the staging point, loaded with some Kalibri gunships as well as a couple of troop haulers,” Jessica added. “The extra air power could come in handy, especially if the ground battle drags out for long.”

“Can we carry all that stuff out there in a single jump?” Nathan asked.

“No, sir,” Cameron admitted. “In fact, it’s going to take us at least three jumps, maybe four.”

“Commander,” Nathan began, his tone souring, “Takara is four point six light years away. That means we’ll have to wait nearly ten hours between each round trip.”

“Plus a few more jumps around the Takaran system to place the FTL-KKV platforms, and then another eight hours at the staging point to make sure we start the battle with a fully charged jump drive.”

“How long is that going to delay the attack?” Nathan wondered.

“Just under fifty hours, sir,” Cameron admitted.

“That’s four days, Commander,” Nathan complained. “It has already been five days since that drone was sent, and two days since Ta’Akar command got the comm-drone from the Loranoi. If we have to wait four more days, they’ll not only have time to better prepare a defense against our jump drive, but they might even be able to get the Avendahl up and running. That is simply not acceptable.”

“If we start hauling out pieces now, instead of waiting until they’re all ready, we might be able to save a day or so in the delay,” Cameron suggested.

“That’s not enough,” Nathan argued.

“Captain, it’s going to have to be,” Jessica insisted. “We can’t go down there with anything less. The odds are bad enough as it is.”

“What if we just keep the ground assault units on board?” Nathan wondered. “That would save us at least another ten hours.”