Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown Book I of the Iteeche War (Jump Point Universe 5)

by Mike Shepherd

  Whitebred ceased his pacing to stare at a star map. It showed a nice round chunk of space, centered on old Earth. Inside that sphere, humans and their laws ruled. No need to go there. Fortunes had been made there. The men who held those fortunes held them in tight fists.

  No, now is no time to look inward.

  “What have we got out there?” Whitebred wondered out loud, staring at the simple, white dots that represented stars men had looked at since they first looked up from a cave.

  Only now, Whitebred knew the threads that linked them. What’s more, he knew what had been reported back from some of them. That was one of the minor sideshows Milassi had been running for Smythe-Peterwald. Plunking around in the dark, searching for some bit of land that might be sold to fools that wanted new mud between their toes.

  “Computer, what is the most pleasant planet we have located in the last three months?”

  “Shaw’s planet has the most similar conditions to Earth that we have found so far,” the computer reported.

  “Has the lab finished the analysis of the germs they brought back?”

  “The laboratories have finished the work up of the samples returned. The bacteria and viruses examined should not be a threat to human life. The analysis say the allergens among the few plants will not be a problem. Most of the planet is still virgin with just likens and simple fungi. We will need to create a biosphere.”

  “We’ll have no problem doing that,” Whitebred said with a smile. A whole, fresh world for mankind to put its stamp on and not one thing to stop him.

  “Computer, tell my subordinates that we will have a staff meeting in ten minutes.”

  “They have been notified, Admiral.”

  “Very good. Now, show me how many ships we have in the yard that can raise plasma and get away from the docks.”

  The ten minutes flew by. He barely had time to dress as a full admiral with all his medals from the last war.

  Soon enough, Whitebred stood in front of a conference table with twenty subordinates arranged around it. Most hardly knew him. He’d offered them a safe place to run for when Savannah, the planet below got too hot for them. They were also the slow ones who’d fled up here too late to get a bunk on the last ship out with Milassi.

  A last ship that was now just a warm ball of gas in space. Ship. Crew. Passengers. Milassi and all his pack.

  Whitebred didn’t leave loose ends dangling behind him.

  “I have decided to move our enterprise to a location where we will not be bothered by local political interests,” he began without mincing words.

  “We will move our fleet and its supporting elements to Horatio,” he said, pointing to the star map and specifically the planet that, until he’d made a quick change, had identified itself as Shaw’s Planet.

  “Can we do that?” someone asked. He was dressed in the black uniform of the former Secret Police.

  “We have enough ships. We have this yard and everything in it. Captains, I expect you to load everything in this yard onto your ships in the next week. Two at the most. Then, we will move our center of operations to Horatio.”

  “I think we can do that,” said one man, wearing the green uniform of the merchant marine with the four black stripes of a captain.

  “Then let’s do it. We need a base. This station is not secure, what with all the bleeding hearts running around dirtside. We have the ships to go exploring. The ships that can do other things if the law of Horatio is like minded, and I assure you, those laws will be. So, Horatio it is for us.”

  “We’ll need food, women. We ain’t got enough women in the yard. It’s starting to cause trouble. Why the girls are talking of forming their own union. Raising the price of a trick. You don’t dare hit one of them for the five johns they got waiting in line coming at you.”

  “We can find farmers and other necessities,” Whitebred said, staying intentionally vague. “We have the armed ships. No merchant ship dares stand against us, if you catch my drift?”

  “Yeah,” came back from twenty bright pairs of eyes. They’d walked into the room sullen and defeated. Now they saw a way to get back. Get back what they wanted. Get back at those that did this to them.

  That was Whitebred’s way. Don’t get even. Get revenge.

  And while he was at it, there was a certain General Ray Longknife that deserved a heaping cold dish of revenge.

  He better stay way the hell and gone on Wardhaven. If he comes back into my space, he’s going to regret it.

  Chapter 5

  “Rerun that report,” the Jackpot 27's 3rd officer ordered.

  Joey Edris hit clear, waited two breaths, long, slow breaths.

  No need to panic. Yet.

  Drugi himself reached over Joey’s shoulder and tapped the Generate Report button.

  A new report appeared. Identical to the first one.

  “There’s a ship in the system,” Drugi muttered. His voice was firm when he continued. “We got to get to that planet before they do.”

  “Drugi, didn’t you see the second report?” Joey demanded. “That ship is like nothing our computer has in its database!”

  “So what. There were a lot of ships knocked together during the war. This one is different, but it’s an explorer ship, just like us. And it’s not getting our planet. Not if it’s as sweet a planet as you say it is.”

  Joey check the planet readout. It was being refined as he glanced at it. “Yep, it’s as sweet as we want. Temperature’s right. Water is definitely identified. Maybe in all three states. I think this line means there’s methane. That might mean life. Still, all this data is still yellow. Preliminary.”

  The computer put its initial data in red. When it got more confident, it went to yellow. Then it went through various shades of turquoises before it locked into a bright Kelly green for “you can take this to the bank,” data.

  “I don’t care what color crayon the damn computer is using,” Drugi snapped. “That is our planet, and we are going to get it. Paddy, up our acceleration to 1.5 gees. Ask those pot boilers down in engineering if they think this tub can actually make two gees?”

  “The skipper ain’t gonna like burning reaction mass like that,” Paddy at helm pointed out. “Hell, he ain’t gonna like waking up and having his beer belly weigh twice what he’s used to.”

  “He can get a damn hernia for all I care. Find me out how fast this wreck can go if it pulls up its skirts and runs for it.”

  “Okay. Okay, be it on your head, me bucko,” Paddy said, and turned back to the helm.

  “Set me a course, Joey.”

  “To where?”

  “To your pot-of-gold planet, that’s where, assuming we can get two gees out of this tub.”

  “But I don’t know where it is!”

  “It’s there, damn it,” the 3rd officer said, stabbing at the screen showing the planet.

  “Yes, but where’s it going?” Joey said. “Is it going right or left of that position? Up or down? I don’t have enough data to project its orbit. Hell, I don’t have enough data to project any of the orbits of this damn system. I need time.”

  “We ain’t got time. We’re in a race for the pot-of-gold. Give me your best guess. If you’re wrong, we’ll adjust course, but if, no, when Paddy gets me two gees, maybe more, we’re heading sunward at all I can get out of this old wreck.”

  Joey studied his board. He had a pretty good lock on the closest planet inside the Goldilocks Zone. It was a fast mover and doing it counter clockwise. If he assumed all the planets held to that one plain around the star and that direction in their orbit . . ..”

  “I’ve got my best guess. I’ll have to refine it once we figure out the target planet’s orbital speed.”

  “Fine, old man, fine. Now feed it to Paddy. You drunken Irishman, have you got those lazy plasma junkies off their arses?”

  “Haru says she can work it up to 2.15 gees over the next hour, but she doesn’t know how long she can hold to it.”

  “Tell her I�
��ll kiss her if she does.”

  “She says she doesn’t swing that way, and you know it. Accelerating now.”

  Joey didn’t feel all that much added weight; that was someone else’s worry. He kept his eyes on his planet . . . and that damn other ship.

  “Should we hail it?” he asked.

  “Hell no. I don’t even want to let them know we know they’re in this system. When they make orbit around your pot-of-gold, I want to be able to tell them to go away, we don’t want anything they’re selling, and we never saw them before that moment.”

  “If you say so.” Joey was no whiz where math and science was concerned but he knew anyone with any kind of education would never accept that story.

  “Yes, I say so,” Drugi said, eyeing the screen as if it might show him the bridge of the other ship.

  “Have they tried to hail us?” Drugi asked.

  “If they have, it will be a long while before we hear anything.”

  “Yeah, right. Just keep telling me new things about that planet and get us there before they do.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  The rest of the watch went pretty much the same. In thirty minutes, they were feeling double their weight as Engineering brought the reactors up to a higher boil.

  Joey’s planet, as both Drugi and Paddy were calling it, kept getting better and better. The incoming data continued to support and expand on the good news the first reports had claimed. There was polar ice and very likely oceans. It was still too soon to make out an atmosphere on the tiny dot the visuals showed, but Joey and the bridge crew got more and more excited.

  With little to do but watch the reports come in and pass the good news along to Drugi, Joey took to spending most of his time watching the strange ship. It had four reactors instead of the two that the Jackpot sported. She’d been launched as a merchant freighter with a single teapot. The war, with its need for higher speed on a more massive ship, ice armor does something to a ship’s acceleration that has to be seen to be believed. All that extra weight meant a large second reactor had to be added for both speed and to charge the 6-inch lasers that were spotted around the hull.

  This second reactor had created problems. Several ships blew themselves up before folks learned that dirtside reactors had a bad habit of burping, going off line for a fraction of a second. It didn’t matter when the reactor was one of a half dozen in a huge power plant, but if you were in a ship depending on that one reactor to keep the fusion containment field up and holding the fusion demons in check, it did really bad things to a ship.

  Aboard the Jackpot 27, they kept the original reactor powering the superconducting magnetic containment field and left the other to power lasers and contribute what it could to the plasma that drove the ship’s rocket engines.

  It seemed to work. They were alive.

  That other ship appeared to have four smaller reactors.

  Joey reported that to Drugi. “You have any idea why someone would put four small reactors on one ship instead of one big one? Or two big ones?” Joey was paid to know science. Drugi as 3rd officer was supposed to know ships.

  The 3rd officer shook his head. “That’s not efficient. That’s not efficient at all.”

  “Well, this says they have four reactors. It can’t say who made them or how large they are, but it’s sure they got four reactors.”

  “Even battleships got only two or three reactors,” Paddy put in. He’d been in the Navy during the war. On a battleship. He didn’t let anyone forget he’d maneuvered one of those monster hundred-thousand-tonners around. “There any chance that thing you’re tracking has got four huge reactors?”

  “I don’t think so,” Joey said. He was pretty sure his sensors were reporting four small reactors. He knew it was four. He was pretty sure they were small. He hit reassess on the board. It came back again. FOUR REACTORS. SIZE SMALL.

  “But it don’t say anything else,” Drugi muttered. “It’s supposed to say something else, right?”

  “Yeah,” Joey said.

  “What in the name of God’s fallen arches is going on here?” thundered from the open hatch to the passageway. The skipper was awake and not in a good mood.

  “Uh oh,” Joey muttered.

  “I told you he wouldn’t care for this,” Paddy added in a whisper.

  “Let me handle this,” Drugi said.

  “With pleasure,” Paddy whispered.

  Joey thought it, but kept the thought to himself. He needed Drugi as a friend.

  “Why the hell are you wasting my over-priced reaction mass?” the skipper bellowed from the hatch. He stood, both hands clutching at his belly, looking for all the world like a woman eleven months pregnant. He was in yesterday’s shirt, last week’s pants and his bloodshot eyes might have looked good on a month-old corpse.

  Drugi stepped forward. “Joey’s found us the planet at the end of the rainbow,” he said, “and the pot-of-gold is filled to overflowing.”

  “You don’t say,” the captain said, and stomped his way to the command chair. There, he collapsed and adjusted himself for comfort. Then he moved his belly around some more, along with his balls when the first try didn’t work. Satisfied with the second try, he roared for his coffee.

  Joey made the call down to the galley, but Drugi was already offering the skipper his own mug. He drank, then took a deeper swallow before handing it back.

  “Damn good coffee. A bit too much water for my tastes, you know. And cold as a witch’s tit, man.”

  “Hot is coming, sir.”

  “So, don’t keep me waiting. Tell me about the jackpot you’ve found, me boy,” the skipper said, smiling at Joey. “I told them you’d work out just fine, didn’t I, Drugi?”

  “Yes sir, you did.”

  Which left Joey wondering who didn’t think he’d work out and where this conversation had taken place.

  On second thought, it’s better not to know.

  Joey filled the skipper in on the latest from the planet. The old man was smiling even before a steaming mug of coffee and a full thermos arrived, no doubt with a big dollop from the still.

  “Good boy. Good. Very good,” left the cook’s boy smiling. Joey hoped some of the skipper’s joy was aimed his way.

  “So, we’ve hit the jackpot,” the skipper said after two long sips of steaming coffee.

  “There is a problem,” Joey felt compelled to say.

  “Problem?” the skipper looked up from his mug with a scowl of worsening proportions.

  “Another ship jumped into the system after us,” Drugi put in.

  “Well, you just tell them to turn their nose around and get out of our system. It’s our planet. We found it first.” The skipper took several sips of his coffee while he was talking. He finished with a happy grin on his face.

  “We can’t talk to it,” Joey started.

  “It’s on the other side of the system,” Drugi slipped in quickly. “It seems to have used a different jump.”

  “It couldn’t have,” the skipper spat. “We’re using the most direct jump from human space.”

  “We’re just starting our search swing,” Drugi offered. “Maybe they’re finishing up theirs?”

  The captain made a nasty face. “They aren’t getting our planet, are they Jodie?”

  “Joey, sir,” Joey said.

  “That’s why we’re doing 2.15 gees,” Drugi said.

  “Good idea, boy. Capital idea. Get there ahead of them. Very good thinking.”

  “There’s another matter,” Joey said.

  “What other matter?” the skipper asked

  “Nothing, really,” Drugi said, cutting Joey off. “The ship isn’t in our recognition database, but the word on the street is that just about anything that can get away from the pier is going out exploring. Isn’t that so, sir?”

  “Damn right it is,” the skipper said, and offered his mug to Drugi for a refill. The 3rd officer did the honors.

  “I was lucky to get this tub. Had to pay a pretty bribe
to that Commander Uxbridge to get my hands on this one, I did. But I paid through the nose and got it, lasers and all. That other ship better turn tail and run, I tell you. If he don’t, why we’ll just charge up the lasers and let him have it. Space is dark and deep and many a sloppy-run ship will never come back and no one the wiser, I tell you.”

  “Yes, sir, you can tell us,” the 3rd officer said. The 1st officer showed up about that time and relieved Drugi of the deck, and provided the captain a new thermos of spiked coffee. Joey relieved himself from his sensors, with a promise to drop back after breakfast and see how things were developing, and, if necessary, adjust the course.

  The captain waved them happily off the bridge.

  “Is the ship safe?” Joey whispered to Drugi as they headed for the mess hall.

  “Safer than most, I assure you.” Drugi answered. “No, laddie, you and I have to start planning how we’ll be spending our finder’s fee. Ever considered running your own whore house? You can get a whole lot on the side.”

  Joey followed the 3rd officer, reminding himself that Drugi was his best friend on the ship and wondering how that had happened to Momma Edris’s good little boy.

  Chapter 6

  General Ray Longknife lay on his back in the maternity unit, his son sleeping . . . finally . . . on his chest, above his slowly beating heart.

  It had been touch and go. He’d got back just in time to watch Rita and Al try to nurse, and fail. Rita was getting uptight about being a good mom and Al might have caught some of the tension.

  Or maybe the nurse had it right, her milk just hadn’t come in or the little fellow was not up to eating just yet. Most likely, it was a bit of both.

  Exhausted, both mother and child had fallen back on a nap. Little Alex woke up first and the nurse had brought a tiny bit of formula, two ounces, to tide the tiny fellow over. The nurse had wrapped Al up like a burrito and laid him back down in the basinet.

  Al refused to go back to sleep. He fussed and fought and worked his way out of the blanket. Ray summoned the nurse when it looked like Al might give voice to his displeasure with this new world and wake Rita.