All Enemies Foreign and Domestic (Kelly Blake series)

by Smith, Rodney

  Cheers rang out on the bridge when the word was passed to Captain M’Taso. Now she knew where the console was. How was she to retrieve it? The answer would come from Connie Cortez.

  * * * * *

  Mary Chen and her operations officer stepped onto the lower deck of the Orion and asked permission to come aboard. Connie reached forward to shake Mary’s hand and that of her operations officer and told her to come with her. They followed Connie to her cabin and stepped inside to see three K’Rang Shadow Warriors. Mary hesitated for only a second, but the K’Rang noticed.

  “Please excuse my hesitation, but I am slowly getting used to our alliance. It will not affect my carrying out my duty.”

  The female officer said, “Do not worry, Lieutenant Colonel Chen, we have the same difficulties at times, but we are getting used to it, and often wonder why we were so hostile before.”

  Connie introduced Mary to Captain M’Taso, Connie’s K’Rang liaison officer Shadow Leader J’Nol, and his translator Shadow Technician N’Tan. Mary introduced her operations officer, Major Wright.

  “Captain M’Taso, would you brief us on your search and discovery?”

  The K’Rang captain rose from her seat and moved to the main screen.

  “We have conducted numerous searches to try and locate our navigation and communication consoles taken from my ship by the T’Kab. On our last sensor run we turned at just the right place and our sensor was able to receive a reflection off of the specific alloys comprising the casing to our consoles. It seems the T’Kab have stored the consoles under a rock outcropping over a large cave scoured under the outcropping by the adjacent river in flood stage. There is a large flat open area next to the outcropping and we think the T’Kab plan to land a courier ship on the flat, load the consoles, and return with the consoles to their home world. That would be disastrous for all our people.”

  Mary stood, walked to the large screen display, and studied the image.

  “Have you seen any indications of guards or fortifications?”

  “No, and that has us worried. We don’t think the T’Kab have dismantled the consoles. Unhooking it and removing it was easy, but dismantling it requires special tools they don’t have access to. The console also has a self-destruct mechanism that blanks the memory if worked on without special tools only available at Shadow Fleet depots.”

  Mary stepped away from the image. “There may be guards or other measures to keep us from flying in there and snatching it back. How do we find those out before they blow up in our faces?”

  Captain M’Taso said, “I can find out. It may take me a few days, but I can find out. I crept and crawled around the T’Kab for days before I got my ship back. Across the riverbed is a continuation of the rock that the outcropping is made from. I will hide in and among the rocks and watch it for a couple of days, sneak out, and tell you.”

  “An admirable offer captain, but we can’t afford to lose you. I have recon specialists that can do it just as well. They can set up cameras to beam the signal up here. It will be virtually as if you were there. We have micro-drones we can send in and search for tripwires and booby traps, including inside the consoles. I see three days to sneak in and observe, put all our special sensors in place, and return. We’ll have continuous monitoring as we plan our raid and execute it. Have you plotted out the nearest burrows?”

  Captain M’Taso waved her paw before the display and the view switched to map mode, “The nearest burrows are here, here, and here.” She pointed to one burrow about 50 meters off, and two about 80 kilometers off to the south and southwest.

  “How fast are these T’Kab? If we hit this burrow here close by, how long will it take for them to reinforce?” asked Mary.

  Captain M’Taso replied, “They can move about ten to twenty kilometers per hour. So it would be four to eight hours before they could arrive, but unless you hit them at night, the T’Kab that are out foraging will hit you within minutes. There could be hundreds or thousands out looking for food.”

  The wheels turned in Mary’s head as she figured how to retrieve the consoles without taking heavy losses.

  * * * * *

  The Civilization’s fast courier ship cautiously boosted into the fifth world’s system. Nothing appeared on her sensor sweep of the system, but evidence of life on the designated planet was abundant and clouded her sensors. Sensors swept forward, looking for anything out of the ordinary and found nothing. The courier ship oriented for a sun synchronous orbit and started calling to the surface for a landing site.

  In a few minutes a transmission came back authorizing a landing and the coordinates for the landing. The courier ship pitched 180 degrees so that the rear of the ship was facing forward and fired thrusters to slow the ship and drop lower in the atmosphere. After a couple of thruster firings, the ship pitched so as to face forward again and made a controlled spiral glide down until a few thousand meters above ground level. As it leveled off at 10,000 meters altitude and 20 kilometers distance, prepared to line up and land at the designated spot, the S’Kauf appeared behind it, shot it out of the sky, and climbed up and away.

  The senior sentient queen knew nothing of this and waited along with twenty workers and the consoles for the ship to arrive. From her position under the outcropping she had no view of the sky, so thought nothing as she heard the whining of engines coming in for a landing. The thrusters of the settling ship blew up a dust cloud that completely obscured the landing site and the area under the outcropping. As the ship settled on its landing struts, the engines continued to blow up dust. When the dust finally settled, the queen found herself facing, not representatives from the civilization, but the S’Kauf and fifty bipedal creatures bristling with weapons. Their weapons made no sound and she saw the workers with her drop dead where they stood. She was not killed, but stunned with a ray and lost consciousness instantly. Gravity sleds slid under the two consoles and the queen, and were hurriedly loaded into the S’Kauf. The ship waited for the two Marines from across the water feature, loaded the fifty Marine raiding party, and blasted up into a high orbit, rendezvousing with the Orion.

  Upon docking with the Orion, the queen, still sedated and tied to a gravity sled, was spirited through the ring to the Human embassy and quickly out to a joint Human/K’Rang research facility.

  * * * * *

  With the help of K’Rang technicians sent through the Orion’s ring, the two consoles were inspected for sensors, damage, and tampering. No evidence was found of any attempt to disassemble or tamper with either system. In 48 hours the systems were reinstalled, calibrated, tested, and updated to the latest standard. Both ships departed orbit, docked together, and took up station one planet further away from the system’s star.

  Both ships employed their sensors to monitor the situation on the ground. The monitor beetles sewn by the recon team dug down into the dirt and waited for the T’Kab reaction. It was slow in coming, but when the workers and soldiers realized their nest mates were dead and their queen was missing, they mobilized every insectoid within a 60-kilometer radius. The monitor beetles recorded all this reaction within their field of view and beamed it to the Orion’s sensor section, where it was analyzed for strengths and weaknesses. The workers carried off the dead workers and could sense where the queen had stood, but then they lost the scent. Another sentient queen showed up the next day and couldn’t tell whether the courier ship had been there or not. Repeated calls to the ship went unanswered, but that could have been a result of it being out of range. The queen passed on a message to the Civilization that the furry bipeds had most likely retrieved the consoles and the queen had been captured.

  * * * * *

  The Supreme Queen was not happy with the loss of the navigation system. It set her plans back several years. Now they would have to go on launching colony pods blindly on the basis of astronomical exploration instead of hard data. This did not please her at all.

  She sent messages to the Conquest Fleet to make for the fifth planet and in
stall the standard infrastructure package, an observatory, and a colony pod launch facility. It was time to expand outward. She could sense combat with the furry bipeds was coming and wanted as many new colony starts as possible.

  * * * * *

  The sentient queen had come out of the ray-induced unconsciousness and was pacing her room from corner to corner. Her antennae reached out to touch every corner, crack, and feature. She was searching for something she could use to her advantage. She assumed she was on the furry biped’s ship and looked for a way to escape. She did notice her wings had been clipped off as if she were a normal breeder, so she thought maybe she needed to become one. She laid two eggs to provide worker attendants for her needs. She was knocked unconscious by the ray again and when she came to, the eggs were gone.

  So, they would not let her out, would not let her reproduce, what would they let her do? She tried to communicate with them by tapping her antenna on the walls, but they were too alien to understand. She released pheromones, but that didn’t work either. She continued her inspection of her cage.

  * * * * *

  The K’Rang and Human scientists monitored the T’Kab queen and discussed how to communicate. Writing was nonexistent. Communications through the antenna wouldn’t work, without a prosthetic antenna for the queen to communicate with. Researchers on Earth were working on just that, but they needed to know how the communication through the antenna worked and they had no clue, so they tried an experiment. They used the ray to knock the queen out, then immobilized her and hooked every kind of sensor they could fit onto her antenna. When she became conscious, she thrashed around for an hour to try and dislodge the sensors, but to no avail.

  They knocked her out again, removed all the devices, and set her free within the observation room. Hours of meticulous review of the data showed nothing in the visible, radio frequency, infrared, or thermal spectrums. Further review eliminated aural, tactile, and smell. In desperation, the K’Rang admitted to having sensitives that claimed to experience empathy, read minds, or communicate with those in comas. The K’Rang officers did not put much scientific credence in the claims, but were willing to give it a try.

  * * * * *

  The queen understood that the furry and bare-skinned bipeds were attempting to communicate with her, but they didn’t know how. She did not know how either, but she wanted to tell them of the glorious Civilization and how their fate had already been decided. It was only a matter of time before the Civilization became dominant and they either became food or were driven off. She wished she could find a way to communicate. She understood that they communicated with aural signals to each other, some short and simple, while others were quite long and complicated. She had no way to replicate the sounds they made. Her throat was not built that way. She did not breath out her throat, but through special pipes running through her body. She would have to find some other way.

  She also saw they used tablets to communicate, but could see no way to use one. They used symbols on special wall segments that must have meant something. If only she understood the symbols. Maybe if she could get someone’s attention.

  She tapped once on the reflective surface she knew they were on the other side of, to see if she could get someone’s attention. She tapped the surface once and waited and tapped it twice. Then she tapped it once, waited and tapped it twice and waited and tapped it three times. She kept this up, tapping the sequence over at one tap and adding another tap until starting over again at one. Eventually, she was up to twenty taps when she heard a single tap, followed by a double tap. Then she heard a single tap followed by a double tap followed by three taps. She heard a single tap followed by a double tap then three taps and silence. She waited, realized they hadn’t stopped, but were waiting for her to respond, and she tapped four times. Then she tapped the five-tap sequence stopping at four. They tapped five. It wasn’t much, but they were communicating.

  * * * * *

  The lead scientists were ecstatic. They had finally made a breakthrough and were communicating at a basic level with the queen. Then they tried some listings of prime numbers and the queen could tap in the missing number. They tapped out a simple 2x progression and the queen tapped in the missing number. Then they typed in a 2x+3 progression and the queen got the next number correct number. Now that they knew they had a sentient queen, how could they transform these taps into a language?

  The breakthrough came when an Earth scientist brought in a training disc on the Morse code. A section of the wall became a monitor screen and pictures of objects would be shown with their corresponding name spelled out in the taps of Morse code. Initially the objects were items that would have been familiar to the queen, such as rocks, trees, grass, fire, and so forth. Then after the queen associated the code sequence with the objects, they introduced the alphabet. The queen’s native intelligence allowed her to quickly make the connection between the code sequences to breaking out the component letters. Within a week a basic vocabulary had been taught and absorbed, then the scientists attempted to get the queen to name objects from the surveillance photos from M’Taso’s planet. The queen had difficulty translating their names into code because she didn’t know the sounds associated with the objects.

  They switched tactics and played phonics texts over the monitor and had someone tap in the Morse code equivalent. After two weeks of that, the scientists were trading vocabulary and sentence structure. The queen learned amazingly fast. By the time a month had passed, the queen and scientists were communicating at a basic level. A peculiar incident occurred when the scientists displayed an image of a male then a female K’Rang. The queen tapped back the same word, “Food,” twice. The scientists failed to understand the significance of this and put it down as a misunderstanding by the queen.

  Chapter Twelve

  The K’Rang liaison officer aboard the Orion developed a lung condition and had to be brought home to G’Durin for medical treatment and Kelly decided to escort his replacement through the gate to get a first-hand view of the situation. He cleared it with Connie well in advance, to ensure it would be okay with her.

  The new liaison officer was a female and quite uneasy about making the trip through the ring. Kelly did what he could to ease her mind and in the end wound up pulling her through by the paw. Once she had done it, her fears were allayed and she felt silly for making such a fuss.

  Shadow Leader K’Pon and Kelly saluted the flag and Connie, then requested permission to come aboard, an old Earth navy tradition whose meaning was lost in the mists of time. Connie returned their salute and welcomed K’Pon to the Orion and Kelly back. She escorted K‘Pon to operations and left Kelly to find his own way. Kelly wandered through the ship, meeting officers, chiefs, and ratings from his original crew, all Orion plank holders. “Plank holder” was another old Earth navy tradition, designating the members of the original crew of a new ship.

  He worked his way to the operations section and gave the operations officer a data cube on the progress with the captured queen. When Captain M’Taso docked with the Orion later and came aboard, he gave her a copy of the same data. Kelly asked for her and Connie’s assessment of the T’Kab threat.

  Both captains gave their assessment separately, but used almost the same words in describing the five worlds as a T’Kab stronghold in K’Rang space that would be used to spread their colonies further into the system. Connie showed an overhead shot of a facility being built that could be a colony pod launcher. Kelly looked at it and thought he could make out the component parts of what could have been a pod launcher facility.

  “Well,” he said, “we need to kill that facility before it goes into production.”

  He looked at the image of the T’Kab civilization fleet and asked, “Which ship had the pod facility come out of?”

  Connie pointed out a rectangular boxy looking ship with a girder box exterior. “It slid out the back through rollers and onto an awaiting lighter that took it to the surface.”

  Kelly looked
up at the two captains and asked, “ Have either of you seen any space defense other than the fleet in orbit around the planet?” Neither one spoke up until Connie told him, “We have been trying to provoke an attack to no success, so there doesn’t appear to be any planetary defenses.”

  Kelly looked up and asked, “Would either of you have any problem taking out the pod site and the ship that built it?”

  Captain M’Taso replied, “ I only have short-range cannon, so I will take out the facility.”

  Connie said, “I will take out the ship and a couple other ships while I’m at it, specifically the command ship, and disable the prison ship enough to force it to land.”

  Kelly said, “I’ll carry the recommendations back. Await orders through your respective headquarters. Connie, be careful with my ship,” then he walked down to the gate and back to the embassy.

  * * * * *

  The scientists were making enormous strides forward in communication with the queen. She was expressing complete sentences in Morse code and asking as well as answering questions. The scientist happily answered her questions. After a particularly grueling day of back and forth between the queen and the scientists that produced good results for both parties, a team of agents came in, pushed the scientists aside and took over security. The head scientist complained and swore he would go to the Chief Agent’s superior on this takeover, until the agent pointed out that if the queen ever escaped she would have a treasure trove of information to pass on about the two races.