Sol (The Silver Ships Book 5)

by S. H. Jucha

  Needless to say, the women had three takers, and Marlene spent the needed time chatting and pretending to interview each man as to who would get the opportunity. When the time was up, Lydia whispered in Marlene’s ear and the trooper announced, “Sorry, boys, no winner today. My friend wants to try another crew.”

  Amid the crew’s angry shouts, the two women quickly exited the airlock. The moment they made the first turn in the corridor, Lydia leaned against a wall and hit the vac-releases to slide off her boots. “You made that look so easy, Marlene,” Lydia said.

  “Yeah,” Marlene acknowledged. “Too bad though. Two of them were cute, nice even, and they didn’t even get a good send-off.”

  While the shuttle crew was entranced by the women, a militia sergeant and ex-rebel engineer slipped off a fuel line leading to the primary engines, inserted a coupling device, and reattached the line. They were in and out of the aging shuttle in five minutes. This shuttle was chosen because it was designed with an antiquated fuel system, and as such it was only in use in the moons’ lighter gravities or for visits to stations.

  The disappointed crew returned to monitoring the shuttle’s loading and lifted off moments afterwards. Back aboard the destroyer, the shuttle engines were shut down and the small device, embedded in the line, was activated. It was a simple design. Once the engines were engaged and the fuel flowed on the moon base, a small plunger shifted forward. As long as the fuel flowed, the connection was secure. When the engine was shut down and the fuel stopped flowing, the plunger slid back and opened a hole in the device. Fuel began dripping from the line and formed a small puddle that wormed its way back toward the hot engines.

  Ten minutes after the crew left and while the shuttle was still being unloaded, the puddle of fuel was ignited by the hot engines, and flame raced back to the leaking line. A massive explosion blew the shuttle apart, which ignited the fuel of the other two shuttles in the bay. They in turn ignited one of the primary missile magazines, which spelled the destroyer’s doom.

  The two women sat on Marlene’s bunk. On her monitor, the moon’s local media announcer was talking over images of the destroyer’s destruction. Tears ran down Marlene’s face, and Lydia reached over to hold her hand. They sat in silence, guilt over their part in the war burning deep into their hearts.

  * * *

  There was no shortage of individuals who wanted to do their part to help the tribunes redirect the policies of the UE. Unfortunately, most of them did not have the wherewithal to compete against warships. Sabotage was difficult at best. It took the subtle collusion of many people to successfully execute a plan, and more than one location discovered the error of devising a faulty scheme when judiciary forces retaliated against them for their ill-conceived efforts.

  But, sometimes a simple plan combined with a dedicated individual was successful. One of Portland’s new squadrons was stationed over Saturn’s moon, Tethys. For weeks, the combined militia–rebel forces monitored the destroyers. Three captains were careful to constantly reposition their ships and kept their patrol craft providing screens. One captain was not so cautious.

  One of the moon’s young inhabitants was Weevil, a nickname given him due to the genetic disease that left the bones and muscles of his legs and arms atrophied but his joints swollen like an insect’s. Weevil was approaching his seventeenth birthday, and the doctor’s prognosis was that he wouldn’t see his eighteenth.

  Weevil sat on a heavy shelf to rest his limbs and listened to the discussion between a group of rebels and militia. Plan after plan designed to strike at the destroyer squadron stationed above was suggested, dissected, and discarded. The focus was on the errant captain, who hadn’t moved his ship in a week.

  “We need to be careful to choose an approach that can’t be construed as anything but an accident unless you want to end up like Ceres Station,” said a militia lieutenant, who was referring to a judiciary commodore, who chose to destroy the entire docking arm of the station simply because it was the location from where the saboteurs launched their small yacht.

  The discussion droned on for hours without success, but one concept captured Weevil’s imagination. It involved an abandoned mining grubber. The huge machine, used to scrape ore from the surface of large asteroids, was brought to the moon base for repair work, but was abandoned when the mining company went bankrupt.

  During the discussion, the bare bones of a plan was laid, citing how easy it would be to aim the grubber at the idle destroyer and warn its bridge officers of the imminent collision when it would be too late for the warship to escape. But the key objection was that an unmanned grubber would not, by any remote stretch of the imagination, launch under full power and coincidentally be directed straight at a destroyer.

  The plan to use the grubber wormed its way deep into Weevil’s mind for days, until it was all he could think of when awake. After a night of restless sleep, his muscles and bones aching furiously, Weevil decided it was time to act. He dressed, took one look around at his meager belongings strewn across his tiny, cramped, single-room quarters, a gift from the base, and left without taking a single item.

  Weevil made his way up to the landing bays, located just under the moon’s surface. Every level up was a slight increase in gravity that dragged on his weak limbs and sent pain lancing through his joints with every step. Locating the correct repair bay, Weevil found the huge space a hive of activity, but no one paid him any attention. If anything, his deformities kept people from looking too closely at him.

  The mining grubber sat abandoned on the bay’s far side like some forgotten monster. Weevil lurched across the intervening hundreds of meters, hoping his limbs didn’t fail him. They hadn’t been subjected to this much stress in more than a couple of years.

  Standing at the base of the grubber, Weevil stared up at the cab of the mining machine, some 15 meters in the air. Looking around, Weevil located a control system on the machine’s skirt that overlapped the giant treads. It gave him access to the cab operator’s conveyor. Weevil called the tiny car down from the cab, climbed in, and rode it back up.

  Once inside the cab, Weevil activated the operator’s panel, looked it over, and felt his hopes sink. He didn’t have a clue where to start. During the planning discussion, the people said it was as easy as a child’s toy to operate. Weevil smacked the panel, which sent a shock of pain up his arm and into his brain. “Stupid, useless machine,” he cried out in frustration.

  “Welcome, operator, the help menu is ready,” the machine replied. “Please state your name.”

  “Uh … Weevil,” the boy stammered in reply.

  “Welcome, Uh-Weevil, please state your help request.”

  Weevil could have hugged the panel in joy. “The help menu is not required,” Weevil intoned officially. “Prepare the machine for launch.”

  “Preparing for launch, Uh-Weevil,” the machine replied. A series of operational steps popped up on the panel, which the machine proceeded to perform: sealing the cab; activating the air scrubbers; bringing the fusion engines, which were never deactivated, online; checking power levels; and examining its exterior conditions.

  “Launch on hold, operator. Humans in proximity and ceiling detected overhead.”

  “Please recommend next steps for launch from the bay,” Weevil requested.

  “Announce launch conditions, enabling humans to clear the bay, and prepare the bay for exit.”

  “Execute the announcement of launch conditions,” Weevil requested.

  “The machine’s horns wailed for several moments, and in the following lull the bay’s speakers announced the departure of the grubber. The bay’s work crews looked around in confusion, but when the horns sounded a second time, they scrambled for the airlocks.

  “All humans have safely exited, depressurizing the bay, Uh-Weevil,” the machine announced. The boy glanced through the cab’s windows to watch the bay’s giant overhead doors slide aside. Parked in a corner of the bay, the grubber wasn’t going to be able to ex
ecute a vertical takeoff.

  “Can we liftoff safely?” Weevil asked nervously.

  “Affirmative, Uh-Weevil. Starting launch.”

  The increase in gravity from the shove of the engines came close to making Weevil pass out from the pain. He was saved from the engines’ maximum thrust as the machine was required to slide sideways to angle itself through the open bay doors.

  “Destination required,” the machine announced as it slowed its ascent a few hundred meters above the moon base and waited for instructions.

  “Display ships in close proximity,” Weevil requested.

  A monitor above the panel detailed over fifty ships in the machine’s 180-degree arc of visibility above the moon. Again Weevil was momentarily stumped until he had an idea and requested a display of only UE warships. Immediately, the monitor refreshed and only four ships remained, but Weevil was unsure which of the destroyers was supposed to be his target.

  “Visual call, line one, Uh-Weevil” the machine announced.

  “Accept,” Weevil said.

  “Who is this … Weevil?” the bay operations director began before he recognized the boy. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Choosing how I go out, Sir,” Weevil replied.

  “Weevil, I know it’s been hard on you with your … ailment, but this isn’t safe … this thing you’re doing.”

  “Sir, you need to talk to Lieutenant Provo now. I’ll wait for his call,” Weevil replied, reaching out to the panel to tap the call off. While Weevil waited, he peered at the monitor, wondering how to deduce the ship with the lazy captain. “No use getting blown into space debris before you even get to the target,” Weevil mumbled to himself and chuckled, his nerves getting the best of him.

  When the machine announced the next call, Weevil found the lieutenant’s face on his monitor.

  “Weevil, you heard us discussing this plan. It won’t work,” Provo said.

  “Yes, it will, Lieutenant. I’ve thought about it. We just need to do a few things first,” Weevil replied. For the next ten minutes, Weevil laid out his plan, unaware militia and rebels were gathering around Provo.

  The boy’s plan had heads nodding in the operation director’s control room, and finally even Lieutenant Provo was convinced. “Are you sure you want to do this, son? There’s no turning back. Those destroyers will either blow you out of space or —”

  “Or, I’ll die a year earlier than scheduled and in a lot less pain,” Weevil replied flatly.

  Provo reluctantly accepted Weevil’s answer, and set about executing the steps necessary to carry out the boy’s plan. Operations sent the grubber the coordinates for the target destroyer, an irregular set of flight vectors, and an order to override its safety protocols. Then the machine was requested to switch communications to an open channel and deliver a med-display of the operator. A rebel doctor looked at the med-display when it came online in operations and shook his head sadly at the boy’s weakened biometrics.

  “Activate the programmed flight path,” Weevil requested of the machine.

  With massive engines firing, the grubber launched itself away from the moon base. Immediately, Lieutenant Provo launched into the masquerade, hailing the unknown mining grubber and the rogue operator.

  A media announcer, sympathetic to the cause, was prepared to ride the story as breaking news. She colored the narrative as a joy-riding teenager, who desperately wanted to fly, before succumbing to an incurable illness. It wasn’t far from the truth.

  While the lieutenant seemingly attempted to convince the boy to return, the teenager’s anxious voice was heard to announce that the engines were stuck on full power, and he was unable to shut them down. The operation director’s voice was heard yelling in the background that the grubber was in for repairs to its control panel among other things. A cacophony of voices allowed the listeners on the moon and in the surrounding space to understand that bay operations was trying to wrestle control of the machine’s panel, and, barring that, change its course to protect shipping.

  The media announcer kept selling the tragedy of a lonely, ill boy in trouble aboard a rogue mining grubber. Relief flooded through her voice when operations told the boy, who was now identified as Weevil, that the trajectory of the grubber was now safely pointed away from surrounding ships.

  Actually, the preprogrammed vector change on the machine’s panel coincided with the announcement from operations. The grubber was now paralleling the line of judiciary destroyers.

  In the final moments before the grubber passed the last destroyer in line, Weevil knew it was crucial he sell the story to protect his people on the base, but the machine’s heavy acceleration and hard course changes had battered his weakened heart. He felt weak and lightheaded, but the panel was displaying an unobtrusive countdown to the final course change, and he struggled to play his part and present a reasonable excuse for the abrupt change.

  Over the media channel, the announcer switched to an image of Weevil’s med-display, pointing out the irregular and slowing heartbeat. She lamented over the grubber’s new direction, which would take it far out into open space, with rescue possibly coming too late for the boy. Switching back to the machine’s visual comm, it appeared to everyone watching that Weevil was near death.

  With the countdown to the course change only seconds away, Weevil summoned his last ounces of strength and lurched out of his seat to slump over the operator’s panel. In the operation control room and the media channel, Weevil’s med-display flatlined. The announcer’s plaintive whisper of, “Oh, no,” was heard by all.

  The lieutenant glanced at the operations director, who shrugged his shoulders. It was their plan to flatline the med-display at this critical point, only neither had done it.

  The huge grubber suddenly changed course, and the lieutenant broadcast an emergency request to the destroyer squadron to move their ships out of harm’s way. Three of the destroyers were immediately underway, their captains and bridge officers having been intently monitoring the unfolding event.

  A lieutenant was on bridge duty on the fourth destroyer, the last ship in the line, and he began issuing emergency orders. A steward ran to wake the captain, who preferred to turn off his comm when he went to sleep. The lieutenant punched the imminent collision icon on his panel, which began an insistent wail throughout the ship, and bridge officers scrambled to prepare the destroyer. Crew secured hatches against decompression. Engineers were yelling at one another in an effort to bring up emergency power on the primary engines. The lieutenant had enough presence of mind to use the docking jets to try to turn the warship aside. The jets’ meager efforts saved the ship from total disaster.

  At full speed, the giant ore excavator, several times larger than a shuttle, slammed into the top of the destroyer, about one-third back from the bow. The grubber glanced off the destroyer, and its fuel tanks ruptured and exploded moments after passing the warship. The impact crippled the destroyer, but, with emergency doors sealed around the ship, the loss of life was minimal. However, another of Portland’s destroyers was out of action.

  As for Weevil, the cab’s cam couldn’t get a view of the boy’s face after he slumped over the panel. His med-display indicated the boy died at that point. What the populace watching the newscast and those in the operation room couldn’t see was the smile on Weevil’s face. He did get to fly, and he got to leave the world on his terms.

  -25-

  Alex and the SADES were connected in conference with Tribunes Woo and Brennan and Admiral Chong.

  “Mr. President, I wonder if one of your SADEs could update us on ship status,” Chong requested. It was evidence of the small changes the Harakens’ war effort had wrought on the hard-edged admiral that he was politely requesting the SADEs’ help.

  “Every warship is now clearly in the pro-naval or judiciary category, Admiral. There are no more unknowns,” Cordelia said. “I have just dispatched the most recent code updates on the remaining warships to all militia stations and pro-n
aval warships.”

  “And where do our forces stand?” Woo asked.

  “Overall, the UE’s effective naval forces have been reduced by 38 percent,” Z summarized. “The pro-naval ships and crew represented by that percentage have been completely lost. The enemy is not offering surrender. On the other hand, many judiciary ships have been crippled either through battle or subterfuge and will require extensive repair. The combined militia–rebel sabotage has been quite effective, although the judiciary forces are becoming more vindictive in their reprisals.”

  “How have the numbers shifted?” Chong asked.

  “Favorably,” Julien replied. “At the start of the war, we identified the pro-naval forces at 53 percent, with a significant percentage of unknown vessels, either due to unknown commanders or commanders facing unknown situations. The pro-naval forces now compose 72 percent of the remaining ships. However, if you factor in armament power, the ratio comes closer to 50–50.

  “The situation is ever-evolving,” said Alex, which was an understatement. It was chaos. For the first time in their long lives, the SADEs were overwhelmed. It was all they could do to guide the war efforts of their side, much less help with the other communications the tribunes and admiral were constantly requesting.

  “It’s not as dire as it might sound, Sers,” Alex continued. “Our prime asset is our system of FTL probes, which allows us to strategically maneuver our greater number of smaller ships to take on the capital warships the high judges have under their control. An example of our success is Commodore Charnoose. Originally a captain, Charnoose was warned of his predicament and successfully abandoned his cruiser position to take charge of two destroyers, which Cordelia teamed with a squadron of four destroyers. The two squadron leaders with the help of Z and Cordelia ambushed a judiciary cruiser and two destroyers. After destroying the cruiser and one of its escorts, they added a seventh destroyer to their combined squadron.”