The Unscheduled Mission (26 page)

Captain Fizhbin was livid following his arrest. “It is the first duty of any prisoner of war to attempt escape,” he shouted repeatedly while his men were being chained together.

“No arguments here,” Park shrugged finally. “And it is our duty to see that it doesn’t happen.”

“What did you do to my ship?” Fizhbin growled.

“My ship,” Park corrected him. “We reprogrammed the access codes. It doesn’t really take all that much you know.” Fizhbin glared at him so he continued, “You didn’t really think we weren’t watching, did you?”

“So now you’ll parade us back to the camp?” Fizhbin asked. “We’ll only break out again and again.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” Park admitted. “Well you had your requisite two chances, more than fair, but I’ll tell you what. If you break out of the next place I put you, you may go free and take the ship to do so.”

“Why?” Fizhbin asked suspiciously. “Where are you putting us?”

Park merely chuckled wickedly and told him, “Follow me.”

“Where are we going?” the captain demanded even as one of James’ cops tugged on his chain to get him moving.

“You’ll see,” Park replied.

“I’m not taking another step until you tell me,” Fizhbin threatened.

“You don’t want me to drag you there by your hair,” Park pointed out.

“You wouldn’t!” Fizhbin told him.

“Keep standing there and you’ll find out,” Park told him with dreadful cheerfulness. “I’m a Pirate, remember? Arrr!”

Fizhbin glared for another few seconds, but as Park took a step forward he started walking again, although he did continue to demand to know where Park was taking them. Finally as they approached Van Winkle Base the Alliance captain asked, “In there?” He laughed. “You’re going to lock us up in one of the storage rooms? Fine, that suits me.”

“No,” Park shook his head. “The storage rooms are just a large warren of connecting rooms and galleries. It would take too much work to turn it into a jail and frankly you are not worth the time.”

Fizhbin complained and wheedled all the way in until he saw the inside of the first stasis room they reached. “You wouldn’t,” he gasped, showing signs of terror. “You can’t! That’s torture!”

“Oh hardly that,” Park told him. “You won’t feel a thing.”

The Alliance captain started to scream and Park suspected the man thought the stasis tubes were something else again, but he did not want to know what. Fizhbin struggled and fought as the police released him from his chains, but kept him securely handcuffed. Finally they pushed him with amazing gentleness into the first tube and Park closed the lid.

“Silence at last,” Park breathed. “I was getting ready to kill the bugger.” He looked at the rest of the prisoners and saw the confusion, so he explained, “These are stasis tubes. While inside you will not age so much as a second. I’m not sure how long you will be in them, but only until your ransoms are paid. You’ll then be released and sent on your ways. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t tickle, you feel absolutely nothing. The door will close and then it will open again.”

“That’s all?” one of the prisoners asked.

“That’s all,” Park confirmed.

“Then why was the captain screaming?”

“Darned if I know,” Park shrugged. “Maybe he’s claustrophobic? Afraid of closed in spaces?”

“I think I know,” another man told him. “There are stories of a sort of torture called a full sensory chamber. According to the stories one might look like this. They cause all your nerves to feel like they are exploding or worse. Are you sure this doesn’t hurt?”

Park reached over and opened Captain Fizhbin’s stasis tube again and the man picked up his screaming where he had left off and then abruptly stopped. “Is that it?” he asked. But Park closed the lid again.

“Good enough?” Park asked the others. It took three rooms of the tubes but within the hour all the prisoners were safely in stasis and no longer a threat to anyone.

“We should have thought of the stasis tubes straight off when they started making trouble,” Park told Arn when it was over.

“Probably,” Arn agreed. “Well next time we will. If there is a next time. That wasn’t all of the men in the camp, you know.”

“No?” Park asked. “How many are left?”

“Eleven including Captain Xeri,” Arn replied and added, “the somewhat statuesque woman with the green hair.”

“Right,” Park nodded, “She captained
Leontir
. She kept her parole?”

“Exactly,” Arn agreed. “I’ve spoken with her and she assures me there will be no more trouble now that we’ve dealt with Fizhbin. I got the feeling the two of them did not see eye-to-eye on a whole lot down here. I’m allowing her and the others to return to their accommodations in the base.”

“Fine with me,” Park replied. “I never liked the idea of the camp, not if they can be trusted to keep their parole. Are you sure of her and the remaining men?”

“Do you want to know what still works after all this time?” Arn asked.

“Huh?”

“Voice stress analysis,” Arn replied. “Oh I know it isn’t exactly fool proof, but these people have never even heard of it.”

“Arn, it’s about half a step above pseudo-science,” Park retorted. “Yes I know it regained some validity in the late 2070’s when the micro-tremors were shown to be quantifiable, but the technology in any desk unit is far from sensitive or smart enough to get better than fifty percent. You might as well be flipping a coin.”

“I’ve had good luck with it,” Arn pointed out.

“Have it your way, we’ll have an easier time keeping an eye on Captain Xeri and her crew with them back in town,” Park decided. “But right now it’s about an hour from dawn. I’d better get some sleep. I hear you have another early morning meeting scheduled.”

Park only managed one hour of sleep before Cousin ran into his room and start jumping up and down on the bed to get his attention. “Furry little alarm clock,” Park grumbled at her. He sat up and discovered Iris was already up and out of the room. “One hell of a way to start the day.”

The day, however, was not so bad. After Arn’s staff meeting, during which Park leaned back in his chair and napped, he found he had a note from Velvet Blaire asking to meet with him on
Turnabout.
When he got there he found Ronnie Sheetz as well, talking to Iris and Marisea.

“We have the two Alliance ships ready for flight, Park,” Velvet informed him. “That brings our fighting force up to four, counting
Defense
.”

“We just finished the stasis plating retrofits,” Ronnie informed him. “It wasn’t so hard since I didn’t try to keep the interior isolated from the effect in these two ships. I learned a lot about their weapons too once we got the manuals translated. And you know what else? These two ships have the star drive. We can take the fight back to the Alliance if we want.”

“In two ships?” Park laughed. “Even with stasis plating I wouldn’t want to fight a war with only two ships. How long before you can duplicate the stardrive?”

“I’m not sure,” Ronnie admitted. “The manuals we found on board explain the theory of how they work and the math is sound. They even explain how the drive works in practice, but they are not instructions on how to build one, but Vel and I are confident we can do it. Too bad we can’t retrofit it into
Phoenix Child
and
Defense
, but the workings are part of the construction. It’s not too late for the three ships we have in the yard though, so we’ve been there making the necessary changes so that when we can build the actual drive mechanism the ships will be ready.”

“Send me a copy of the ship’s manual, please,” Park requested. “I should at least have a spaceman’s knowledge of how it works.”

“All you need is to point where you want to go and have someone push the buttons,” Ronnie laughed.

“It’s better if I can push my own buttons,” Park replied. “So when can we take these two ships up and get used to them.”

“Anytime you like,” Iris told him. “That’s what they really called us here to say.”

“Okay,” Park nodded. “How about two days from now?”

“That long?” Iris asked.

“It should probably be longer,” Park told her. “We don’t have enough people to fully man four ships unless we use the Mer and Atackack cadets.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Marisea pointed out.

“Tina and Paul will both have to captain,” Iris added. “I need some practice with the weaponry systems on this ship. They use an entirely different system. Each gun has a separate gunner and no master console.”

“Until now,” Ronnie cut in, “But it’s a jury rigged board. “We’ll have to improve it on our return.”

“It’s the not system I was expecting. I thought they had only a single gunner on a ship,” Park commented.

“On a small ship like
Phoenix Child
or
Trenisi
,” Ronnie pointed out. “This is a larger ship.”

“Do we have enough ship’s engineers?” Park asked.

“We do with the Mer engineers,” Velvet replied.

“Good,” Park nodded. “Until now we’ve been rotating everyone around. Since we only had one ship at a time it was the only way to give everyone experience. Now we had better make more permanent assignments. Ronnie, do you want to handle that for the engineers.”

“Not me,” Ronnie laughed. “I’m the creative genius, but Velvet’s a better organizer.”

“Okay,” Park allowed. “Vel, this is yours. I wouldn’t know one good engineer from another. Iris, I’m going to rely on you to assign gunnery officers and I’ll meet with Tina and Paul to decide in other positions. Damn we’re still going to be badly stretched and using green cadets. Sorry, Marisea, but you know that’s the case.”

“I was a green cadet once myself,” Marisea reminded him. “That was last year. But why take up all three ships at once?”

“We need to practice multi-ship maneuvers,” Park told her.

“But wouldn’t we be vulnerable if attacked while all three were being prepped for their next launch?” Marisea argued.

“Good point,” Park admitted. “Wait a sec, don’t you have classes?”

“Yes,” Marisea nodded, “Of course I do. I’ve been doing homework on board, when I could, but the Van Winkle campus agrees to the need to suspend classes when so many of the students are needed for space missions.”

“Convenient,” Park commented.

“Not really,” Marisea shook her head. “We’ve been told to not expect much of a summer vacation this year.”

“Well, I think you’re right about being vulnerable,” Park told her. “Let’s just take up
Turnabout
this time and just for a one day orbital cruise, but let’s have the other ships manned as though we were all going up. Then we can do the same thing in a few days when we shake down… Um what did we decide to rename
Leontir
?”

“
Fairplay
,” Iris told him.

“I should have remembered that,” Park shook his head. “I must be getting old.”

“You’ve had a lot to deal with lately, dear,” Iris told him. “Now if you’re smart you’ll go right home and leave your torc in the living room while you sleep.”

Park awoke six hours later to the sounds of sirens yet again. “Now what?” he asked the empty room. He reached up to activate his torc and realized he’d left it in the other room as Iris had forced him to do.

A moment later, Marisea came bouncing in with the golden ring and handed it to him, adding, “We’re under attack.”

“What?” Park demanded, sitting up to slip the torc around his neck.

“Well, not immediately,” the mermaid admitted, “But a full battle group, including one of those big carrier ships has been spotted just beyond Uranian orbit.”

“That far out?” Park asked. Marisea just shrugged, but Park asked the same question of Arn while hastily getting dressed.

“We think they broke out of subspace or hyperspace or whatever they call it somewhere in the Oort cloud,” Arn explained. “Breaking out makes a fair amount of radio noise, you know.”

“I do,” Park replied, thinking of what he had learned about the electro-magnetic effects of tearing a small hole in creation and then pulling it through after you. “But we should still have heard them when they broke out plus the time it took for the signal to reach us. What happened?”

“We didn’t notice,” Arn admitted. “Ships come and go all the time that far out. We know there are Galactic factories and trading outposts on the edge of the system so Terius’ boys and girls haven’t been paying too much attention to anything breaking out much beyond Saturnian orbit. I can’t blame them, really. The Oort Cloud is a very long way off for traveling through conventional space. They must have been coming in for weeks.”

“Just after that ship got scared off from landing on Luna, you think?” Park asked.

“That sounds about right,” Arn agreed, “but they’re on their way now and it’s a really large force, twenty ships at least.”

“It’s sounding like a good news-bad news joke,” Park grumbled. He was dressed now and headed for the kitchen.

“Do I want to hear the punchline?” Arn asked.

“The good news is that they’re taking us seriously,” Park told him. “Do me a favor and have all our flight crews and cadets meet me in the big hanger and if possible have breakfast brought in.”

“We have a few days yet,” Arn pointed out. “There’s no need to rush.”

“I’m not waiting for them to start bombarding Earth,” Park retorted, “and that’s pretty likely you have to admit. We’ve been stinging them like gnats and they’ve finally decided to swat us.”

“We’ve done better than gnats,” Arn argued.

“Compared to a thousand and one worlds?” Park countered. “I’ll be there as soon as I can, but we’re going to need all four ships, even
Defense
from up on the Moon.”

Half an hour later Park found himself explaining the situation to nearly one hundred Humans, Mer and Atackack. Most of them already knew most of it, but no one knew which ships they were being assigned to.

“Tina, you’ll be captaining
Phoenix Child
,” Park told her. “Paul, I’m giving you
Fairplay
and I’ll take the
Turnabout
. We don’t have enough pilots yet, so we’ll all be piloting as well as captaining. But we do have cadets training as pilots, so have one serve as co-pilot. We only have one hundred of us for three ships so we will be stretched a bit thin. Weapons officers, Iris will be giving you your assignments. Engineers, talk to Velvet Blaire. The rest of you…” he paused. “Oh, this is going to sound like school kids picking up sides for a game of three-way kickball. The rest, hold on a bit while Tina, Paul and I divide you up.