Fleet Action (17 page)

Tolwyn had to be blocked. If the humans found out the truth, the peace would indeed be shattered, the timing of his own plans destroyed. Though he hated to do it, he would have to send a message to Thrakhath outlining his concerns for security and to recommend that it be doubled.

Tolwyn was a fascinating challenge, a worthy foe. Though he would not openly admit it even to himself, he was finding in his heart that the humans were a race he had almost come to like, and more importantly, a race he was even willing to spare in his own quest for power.

"Well look what the birds dragged in," Jason laughed, trying to conceal the fact that he had been sweating out the last twenty hours, increasingly convinced that his old friend had bought a permanent piece of space.

K'Kai, ignoring Jason's teasing remark, led Ian up to the bar. Ian looked around the room with a grin, though Jason could see that the rescued pilot had most definitely had the wits scared out of him.

"Yeah, I know, the drinks are an on me, "Ian announced, and a cheer went up from the pilots who swarmed up to the bar. Ian looked around a bit glumly, realizing that the old fleet tradition could be rather expensive.

"I'll have this thing Ian talks so much about, a single malt scotch," K'Kai announced

The bartender looked at Ian.

"For that kind of sippin' liquor it's ten dollars for a shot."

"Give it to her," Ian sighed, "the bird was the one that rescued me.

The bartender seemed to relax a bit, especially when Jason reached into his pocket and fished out a wad of bills, hard Confederation currency, and tossed them on the counter.

"I don't think you've got much change on you at the moment, Jason said looking over at Ian. "You can pay me back later."

Ian nodded his thanks and called for a Scotch as well, downing it in one gulp. He looked over at Jason and smiled weakly.

"I was scared out of my wits," Ian said quietly. "Maybe I might have been able to dodge that second missile, but it just kept boring in on me. When I popped out of there my ship was already blowing."

Jason could easily see that by the scorching on Ian's flightsuit.

"By popping up at the last second I had enough forward velocity to go into a low orbit around the moon. I looped over a mountain range not clearing it by a thousand meters. Every time I circled the moon my orbit kept degrading until finally the mountain range was straight ahead and I knew I was going to slam in. If K'Kai had gotten there thirty seconds later I'd have been splattered. Her tractor beam caught me just in time."

He raised his glass and Jason could see the trembling which Ian struggled to control. Everyone who flew experienced it sooner or later, especially with the life expectancy of pilots being what it was. There was a point though when one too many close brushes simply drained the well dry. If they were back with the Confed Fleet, Ian would have been in to the psych officer and most likely stood down for a couple of weeks of R&R before being sent back in. But there wasn't any time, and in this stripped down fleet a psych officer was a luxury that Kruger would have considered pure idiocy.

"Captain Bondarevsky, Captain St. John?"

The two looked over their shoulders at a colonial officer.

"You got us."

"You're wanted by Kruger."

"On our way," Hunter said, forcing a smile.

Jason looked around at the bar, fished into his pocket and pulled out what he had left and tossed it to the bartender.

"Keep it flowing on me till the money runs out"

The colonial pilots cheered a thanks, as Jason left. Hunter looked back at K'Kai, and silently nodded a thanks as he went out the door.

The bar was conveniently across the street from the entry into the command post. Following their guide they passed the security guards and went back down into the basement command post.

Kruger and Tolwyn looked up as Ian and Jason came into the room.

"Glad you're alive," Geoff said.

"So am I."

"But you lost a Sabre," Kruger interjected, "a first line ship in return for one Kilrathi Stealth, not a good trade in my book at all."

"Return with your shield or upon it, is that it?" Ian said dryly.

"Something like that," Kruger retorted. "You Confed boys might think it's all right to blow a ship apart or prang one up on a bad landing, get out, and then have another one handed to you, but out here it's different. We're at the butt end of any supplies. With your asinine Confed signing that article 23 of the armistice forbidding the resale of fighter aircraft, a Sabre is precious."

"Sorry," Ian replied, "next time I'll make sure to blow up with my ship."

"At least we know about their new missile," Tolwyn interjected, while pouring himself a cup of tea and motioning for Ian to come over and join him.

"You go too easy on your boys," Kruger said, looking over at Tolwyn. Jason found it hard to suppress a low chuckle.

"Something I say amusing to you, mister?" Kruger asked, looking back at Jason.

"As a matter of fact, yes, sir," Jason replied.

Kruger looked at him coldly and again Jason found himself wondering if his honesty would get him into hot water. Whether Kruger could really discipline him or not was problematic, he was after all a "volunteer" in the Landreich's Free Corp, not even officially sworn in, but he did suspect the gaunt one-eyed leader could make life difficult.

"We've got a little surprise for you two," Tolwyn said handing a cup of tea to Ian and moving to get between Jason and Kruger. Glad for the excuse to break eye contact Jason focused his attention on Tolwyn.

"What is it, sir?"

"The special equipment we were hoping to get made it out of the Confederation and will arrive here tomorrow. It's the real reason I wanted to get these carriers out here," and he looked over at a frowning Kruger and smiled "besides helping out our allies in the Landreich.

"Therefore Tarawa and Normandy aren't going out on forward patrol with the other three carriers."

"Why, sir?" and the disappointment in Jason's voice was evident.

"I couldn't let you in on it till now, but your ship has been selected for the real mission. Let's head up there now, Paladin's moved over from Normandy and he's already on board waiting for us."

"What is it, sir?" Jason asked, feeling like a child who was being held back from looking under the Christmas tree.

"Let's just say we've decided to add to Tarawa a little something special that just came in."

Hard docking completed, Jason followed Geoff Tolwyn to what usually served as the entry bay for his fighters and was now blocked by the side of the heavy transport which was almost as big as Tarawa.

The crew worked around him, extending the docking collar through the magnetic field which separated the pressurized flight deck from the vacuum of space. The collar snapped onto the side of the transport and the deck officer turned to Jason nodding that an airtight seal had been secured. The side of the transport popped open and a thin, nearly bald man, who Jason judged to be in his early sixties, came through.

"So the Cats have been snooping around?" the man asked, coming up to shake Tolwyn's hands.

"They know we're here."

"And they'll be back for a closer look. I think I managed to get here without their knowing and I can tell you what's inside my hold is secure."

Tolwyn looked back at his companions.

"Admiral Vance Richards, I'd like to introduce you to Captain Bondarevsky."

Jason came to attention and the Admiral motioned for him to stand at ease.

"Everyone here's retired at the moment, Captain, so let's cut all the saluting crap."

Jason took Richards' hand, surprised at the firmness of the grip. Tolwyn went down the line introducing him in turn to Hunter, Doomsday, Kevin, and finally Paladin.

"Ah, Vance, tis good to see ya again," Paladin said with a laugh, the two slapping each other on the shoulders. "Did you bring me my new toy?"

"That I did," Richards said, "it's tucked into the forward cargo bay."

Paladin grinned with delight

Jason watched the familiar greeting with surprise. Admiral Richards, until his retirement only days before the armistice, had been head of military intelligence for the entire Confederation. He was, to the members of the fleet, a shadowy figure, a name without a picture, an individual never seen — though it was often rumored that he traveled into more than one action, hidden away as a staff officer under an assumed name.

"Let's start unloading and get to work" Richards said with an almost boylike enthusiasm, and he motioned for the group to follow him off the deserted hangar bay.

The group started down the corridor back to the bridge and Jason looked back to see a team of black cover-alled personnel emerging from the transport ship, each of them saluting the lone Marine guard by the hatch and requesting permission to come aboard.

"Who are those people?" Jason asked, motioning back towards the stream of personnel filing off the transport.

"That's part of our surprise," Tolwyn said with a grin.

The new arrivals started to maneuver long black canisters from out of the transport, moving them with small hand-held null gravity units. They had a certain look to them, tech personnel he could almost guess out of hand, but beyond that a cold professional look as well.

"Since I am captain of this ship, sir," Jason said, looking over at Tolwyn, "can you finally let me in on what's going on? You've been looking like a cat that just swallowed the canary."

"We're installing a D 3S 5 on board your ship, Jason," Richards said, motioning for Jason to turn into the wardroom off the bridge and indicating that Ian, Doomsday, Paladin, Geoff, and Kevin were invited to join as well.

"Just what the hell is a D 3S 5?" Ian asked.

"Deep Space Surveillance System Five," Richards said quietly, closing the door behind them.

"Something then with signal intelligence, is that it?"

Richards smiled and sat down on the small table that filled most of the room, motioning for the rest of group to sit down. It suddenly caught Jason that Richards was awfully familiar with light escort design, having made it straight from the hangar to the bridge wardroom without a single false turn.

"The sig intel department's been working on this new design for years, in fact they were just getting set to deploy it when the armistice hit. This system was a black project. The only ones who knew about it were the chiefs of staff and several hundred design and research techs working on a base buried inside one of Neptune's moons, and that was it. Security was so tight that the techs were only allowed to bring their spouses and children with them and then were listed as killed in a transport accident."

Jason noticed that Richards had neglected to say if anyone inside the civilian government knew of the project. Chances were not even the president fully understood it, nor perhaps did he want to.

"I should add it is strictly a military project," Richards said, as if reading Jason's thoughts. I think it's fair to tell you that we've suspected a mole in the inner circle of government for some time now. The money for this project has therefore been buried, and no one else knows about it.

"So what's so important about all of this?" Ian asked.

"Since this war started, signal and photo intelligence has been crucial. From the little bits of information that we've been able to occasionally get, victory or defeat in some of the major battles of the war has often been decided. Vukar started because of a recon survey and in a lot of those missions good people died as a result.

"We ve even got picket ships specially designed for the work, and they've been hiding on the edge of the frontier for years, quietly parked in asteroid fields. Hell, some of them are camouflaged to look like asteroids. Gods, it must be boring work, but to the sig intel crowd it's like a giant game, figuring out one puzzle after another.

"The problem is that we're trying to listen in on everything from old sub light ship-to-ship radio communication, through newscasts, right up to fleet command high density translight burst signals. It comes down to hundreds of billions of signals floating around, made even more complicated by old radio waves, signals maybe five hundred years old, drifting by. The Kilrathi of course, assume we're listening in, so throw in language and coding and you see how complex it gets.

"D 3S 5 might be a partial answer. It's not only the detecting equipment, it's also the analysis software which can sort through these millions of signals, crack codes, figure out which ones have certain things we're looking for and then give them as hard copy to intelligence. When they started the design work twenty years ago, the antenna nets were twenty miles across, it took five hundred personnel to run it, and it needed a ship bigger than a carrier. The early models were, as result of these limitations, well inside Confed space for security reasons, trying to squeak out information from as much as five hundred or more light years and ten or more jump points from the front. Now we've finally got it down to something we can deploy inside the flight deck of a light escort carrier, with a fifty meter antenna array mounted outside."

"So that's why the other ships got the fighters, leaving us just four, and you wanted them moved to a corner of the hangar?" Jason asked, looking over at Tolwyn.

The Admiral smile.

"Tarawa's got a different job, in fact the real reason behind our moving out here to the Landreich. The Landreich needed the carriers, to be sure, and some of us wanted to keep a light strike force ready and available on the edge of the frontier. But it also served as a smoke screen for the real mission, the mission you and your carrier have been chosen for. We re going to take our new ears inside the Empire, and get the evidence we need to pull the mask off what they're doing. When we have the proof of what they're doing, believe me, things will hit the fan."