“And then hang them the next week,” came from somewhere in the back, but since it was spoken to the mud under their feet, it was hard to tell who said it.
“Yeah,” Whitebred chose to agree and then went on. “Or a couple of you could volunteer to see what you can do about getting a crop in and food growing that you can sell for a decent price.
“And if you work hard, we can even talk about getting your wives and girlfriends out of deep sleep.”
That many of them were already out of their pods and servicing the pirates on the station was something they didn’t need to know.
A man stepped forward. “So, if we can get a crop in, and growing, and sell it to you, you’ll get off our necks and let us be.”
“Something like that,” Whitebred said, diffidently. “I certainly won’t get off your neck if you don’t have anything to show for me treating you nice.”
“You keep those bastards out of our faces and we’ll see what we can do. There’s a lot of gear that was supposed to be on the ships. It hasn’t been brought down yet. We need it if you want us to get a crop in. Oh, and the weather isn’t all that pleasant for sleeping outdoors at night. We could use some cover. Some time to ourselves to make houses. Temples. Decent water. You know.”
Admiral Whitebred didn’t know, but Neva at his side nodded. “I think I can get that stuff flowing to you here on the ground,” she said.
“Then we’re willing to make this a second start,” the spokesman said.
“We’ll have to kill that one before too long,” Neva whispered in his ear. “But for now, he might be helpful.”
Whitebred laughed. That was what he liked about Neva. She saw the possibilities and didn’t flinch from the choices that others kept missing.
They found a nice quiet stream under things that might have been trees. Their clothes came off and they had a very pleasant afternoon.
Happy as he was, Whitebred still didn’t let the new farm boss cut down the swinging bodies when he asked as they were leaving that evening.
The local flying things were taking a liking to their eyes and tongues. It was ugly. But ugly was what Whitebred wanted them to think about when they thought about him.
Chapter 16
General Ray Longknife liked it when a plan came together, and with Rita, no, Captain Rita Nuu-Longknife, shoving from one end of the string, and Admiral Zilko pulling from the other, the fitting out of the Exeter and the Northampton moved along quickly.
Rita would skipper the Exeter with several of her old crew from the Friendship as well as a whole slew of newly commissioned officers from the ranks of the flight officers on the transport. By Ray’s count, fully one half of the crew of the Exeter and a quarter of those on Matt’s Northampton were from the ranks of the transport crews. When you added in another twenty to twenty five percent that had signed on as farm technicians, his heavy cruisers would have a near wartime complement in a fight.
Ray checked, Ursel Jannson was on the Exeter along with now Lieutenant Hesper from Rita’s old Friendship as sensor officer.
Ray made sure things were as ship shape as an Army type could make them for Rita’s first visit to her command.
She came, in the full-dress blues of a Navy captain with all the medals she’d earned herself in the war . . . and with little Alex on her hip right up until the time she was about to cross the brow of her ship.
Then Alex went into the ready arms of his nanny. Rita paused to adjust the fall of her dress blues, and crossed right over to salute the flag, then the OOD, and smartly said, “Permission to come aboard.”
“Permission granted, Captain,” Lieutenant Hesper said with a straight face, thought she must have been biting her lip to keep the biggest grin from sprouting until the full honors had been rendered.
Then the two of them most unNavy like clapped each other into a huge hug. “Oh, I wish Cadow had lived to see this day,” Hesper said. “He said we gals would never make it in the real Navy.”
“God rest his soul,” Rita said.
“Yes, God rest his soul,” Hesper answered as they broke from the hug.
“Well, Ray, you ready to show me to my bridge?”
“Yes, Captain, I am. Ah, about Alex?”
“I told you if you wanted to go gallivanting once the baby was born, that he and I were coming with you.”
“Yes, you did, Captain,” Ray admitted, though, until this moment, he’d quite forgotten the threat.
“Well, where you go, we go.”
“A kid on a ship?” Ray managed not to squeak.
“Ever heard the old saying, ‘son of a gun’?”
“Yes.” Ray said, with no comprehension but suspecting it wouldn’t be long in coming.
“Well, way back in the age of sail, chief gunner’s mates and captains got to bring their wives along. A real ‘son of a gun’ was the kid of a gunner’s mate, conceived and born on the gun deck of a ship of the line. Well, Alex may not qualify as a son of a gun, but he’s going to be the son of the skipper for as long as I’m nursing. Maybe longer.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ray said. He knew when a fight was lost before it was joined.
“Did you have the extra ice armor added around the bridge and officer’s country?”
“Yes, I did,” Ray said, the reason now dawning on him like a thunder clap. Light cruisers carried up to a meter of armor ice. Heavy cruisers had as much as a meter and a half over their vitals. Battleships laid it on as thick as three meters.
The Exeter now had two meters of ice over the work areas and quarters where Rita and baby Alex would spend their time. Ray had wondered at the work request. If he’d asked then, he would have been saved the dumb questions now.
An ensign took the nanny in tow and the trio disappeared while Ray took Rita on a tour of her new ship. It was quick; he’d seen his wife deep in the study of her ship’s schematic for much of the last week. They covered every centimeter of the distance from engineering aft to the forward laser batteries in less than an hour with her as much in the lead as Ray.
And along the way, Rita introducing Ray to the crew. If they hadn’t been on the old Friendship, they’d served in an attack transport in her old squadron and been under her command. As it turned out, quite a few of the ‘farmers’ were standing their watch for the captain’s visit. And not a few of them knew Rita from squadron parties.
The farm workers were, as often as not, the sweethearts of the female flight officers.
“What are we going to do about fraternization aboard ship?” Ray whispered as they found themselves alone on the way from one compartment to another.
“This is the exploration service, isn’t it?” Rita replied.
“I guess so.”
“So, what’s our policy on fraternization, my husband?”
Ray swallowed and decided to let the ship’s captain resolve that issue.
“Okay, everything appears to be ship shape,” Rita said. “Let’s see how she sails.”
An hour later, they were smartly away from the pier, with the Northampton holding to its station, fifty klicks behind and off set to their right. They made a quick, one gee run out to the moon and back again. There was a gunnery range on the moon, and they tested the lasers there.
No surprise, what with the priority the ships had been given at Nuu docks, everything worked just as advertised.
They were back at the dock by that afternoon.
“You ready to send us to space, Ray? We’re ready to go,” the captain of the Exeter said.
“As soon as we have some idea of our target.”
“Then get me some targets,” his wife ordered.
Waiting at the pier as they docked were a whole series of surprises. The other three nannies were there with full baby paraphernalia, as was Rita’s private nurse, now sporting the uniform of a Chief Corpsman.
Ray was kind of expecting them.
He hadn’t been expecting the two keeping their distance from that group.
Andy Ande
rson was standing next to the spy in his crumpled silk suit. They came aboard first.
“We’ve got a problem. Whitebred has broken out the black flag and is taking ships,” Andy reported.
Chapter 17
That was the end of going home for dinner. While Rita retired to nurse Alex, Ray and Andy arranged a full staff conference in the Exeter’s wardroom. Matt came over from the Northampton with Sandy, Mary and the new scientist they’d transferred from the Second Chance.
While Ray had been getting the Exeter up to Rita’s specs, Matt had not only gotten the Northampton back in commission, but transferred the sensor suite from his old scout cruiser. A heavy cruiser was a warship, and as such, specialized for fighting.
A war emergence merchant conversion to a light cruiser had more play in her hull and had easily taken on the larger sensor suite of a scout. How Matt had managed to bend the warship’s guns and armor around the expanded sensor suite he’d had on his scout was nothing short of a miracle, but he and his crew had done it.
Now, the wardroom filled up with officers from both ships, waiting to hear what they were hunting.
Once Rita came in, her blues immaculate and showing no evidence of an encounter with an infant’s choosy stomach, Andy stood up.
“Three weeks ago, a convoy of four ships and a prefab space station set sail from New Eden. Two of the ships had come to Eden from Earth, loaded with over twenty thousand colonists from Korea in deep sleep. The convoy left for Far Pusan, a new colony paid for largely by Korean financial interests. They should have been there by now. They have not arrived.”
“You say a convoy. Were any of the ships armed?” Rita asked.
“No. Haven’t you heard, we’re at peace. It’s in all the media,” Andy said dryly.
“Do we have any idea what happened to them?” Rita demanded, not at all happy with Andy’s dry humor.
“No,” the spy said, “but we have some idea where it happened. The jump buoys two jumps out from Far Pusan had been blown away. The ones on one side of the system show them entering. The jump out they intended to take has no buoys anymore.”
“It’s bad enough the bastard is stealing ships, but to leave jumps without their navigation buoys is an open invitation for ships to collide in a jump,” the retired Navy captain growled.
“Can we use the sniffer to track him?” Matt asked the small woman sitting stiffly at his side.”
“My ‘sniffer,’ as you insist on calling it, is good for sections of space that have had limited use. If there has been a lot of traffic, it becomes harder to pick up a trail.”
“Much like a bloodhound can’t track a scent through a lot of traffic, either,” the spy said.
“So, what do we do?” Ray asked, quite unhappy to be only hearing things that he couldn’t do. “Have you had any luck on tracking down where Whitebred went?”
The spy was shaking his head before the question was even on the table. “Our initial report from High Savannah was very complete. Your Marine there, I believe Trouble is his name, did a thorough job of a search and discovered that there was nothing left behind to find. Just about everything, including all computers and media, were taken. If they had a report on a new planet, they took it with them. I’m sorry, Ray, but I can’t find what is not there to find.”
“So, we need to duplicate the searches that were launched from Savannah during the time Milassi was in charge,” Ray said.
“What about finding the Prosperous Goose?” Matt asked.
“What are the chances that it was taken by a pirate ship that is one of Whitebred’s or might be operating out of Whitebred’s hideaway?”
“There’s no way to tell,” Rita said. “It seems to me that we have a hot datum on the way to Far Pusan. If we sniff around enough jumps from the jump where he killed the buoys, we might, just might, find his trail. It’s not a sure thing, but it looks like the only thing we’ve got going right now.”
“We could have someone go out to the jump where we know the Goose was taken and see if it leads us in?” Matt said.
“How many were on the Goose?” Ray asked.
“A couple of hundred,” Andy answered.
“There are twenty thousand colonists asleep on those two ships,” Ray said. “More on the other three ships. I care just as much as any man for that boy, David. He fought with me to save his world. But there are more people at risk off those ships than the Goose. We have to start from there. After all, we could be dealing with two different sets of pirates.”
Matt didn’t look happy about that call, but no one else looked willing to argue the point.
“How soon can we get away from the pier, loaded for three, maybe six months of hard cruising?” Ray asked, eyeing Rita.
She turned to her supply officer, who showed the two solid stripes of a lieutenant, although you could still see where the thin jagged stripe of a pilot officer had been removed.
The former transport flyer spoke without notes. “I placed an order with the Navy Supply Depot for a month’s worth of food and supplies, as well as a month more of dry goods. I’ll triple the order before I leave this room. It will be here in the morning.”
“Ray, see if we can borrow any free hands from the Navy base,” Rita said. “Help for both the cruisers in loading out.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Where was it written that an Army general outranked a Navy captain? Certainly not aboard her own ship when she was the wife and he was the husband.
“Engineering, I want full plasma by 0900 two days from now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then, people, you have your orders. We can sleep when we’re away from the dock,” she said, and her officers left quickly to assure that their captain’s orders were made so.
Eighteen 18
Three days later, General Ray Longknife found himself standing on the pier waving as Rita, Alex and the Exeter pulled away.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” he murmured to himself.
“I don’t know about you, Soldier,” retired captain Andy Anderson said, “but us Navy types always got the right one on the pier.”
“It’s not like I could captain the Exeter,” Ray said. “Rita’s the ship driver in the family, and I can’t nurse Alex.” he finished, sounding lame even to himself.
Did I really do that poor of d a job in that argument?
“I hear tell there’s a thing called baby formula. It’s sold in all the stores, I’m just saying I’ve heard about it,” Andy said, big grin getting bigger.
“Well, we really couldn’t leave you in charge of the Ministry of Exploration. You did fight on the wrong side in the last war.”
“Yeah, the winning side, if I may point out,” Andy said, “though I will give you that most of the folks I meet with that have a box of medals on their ‘I love me wall’ are showing Unity colors. That kind of explains why I’ve skipped displaying mine.”
“You don’t have an ‘I love me wall’ in your office?”
“I haven’t found the time to put one up,” the old Sailor said.
Ray took one last look at the departing heavy cruiser, and sighed. “Well, let’s get back to our offices. I need to take my beggar bowl out and shove it under the nose of a whole lot of busy people.”
“Start with your father-in-law,” the old Sailor said. “Once he finds out that his daughter and grandson are off chasing pirates, he’ll cough up the money to help her. He’ll also know just what trees to shake to get more.”
Andy was right. Before the end of the day, Ernie Nuu had Ray sitting in a meeting with half the corporate wealth of Wardhaven at his elbow.
“It’s not just the damn pirates,” Ernie said. “It’s the matter of the Whitebred fellow running off with 20,000 colonists from old Earth. It’s hard enough to find folks willing to leave Earth’s flesh pots, but to lose those willing to risk the uprooting. And, damn it, we need them out here. If this story gets back that we not only lost two shiploads of immigrants, but lost them to a slaver,
there won’t be a one of those nervous nellies willing to set foot off Earth, or any of those other overpopulated planets.”
“But Ernie, we’ve got one hell of a boom going on here on Wardhaven. We need our capital here,” pointed out a banker.
“But our markets are at the other end of a shipping lane,” an industrialist put in. “Yes, there’s plenty of demand here and now, but we’ll meet that demand soon enough. Out there is unlimited demand.”
That summed up the two sides. It took the better part of three hours of Ray’s life, which he would never get back, but in the end, the bankers coughed up money to crew and operate another half dozen exploration cruisers.
That left Ray going home that evening feeling both good about what he’d done . . . and strangely empty about where he was.
It was one thing to be several jumps away from home. When you were there, at least you knew home was here, waiting for you. Now he was home, in the familiar surroundings, but it was empty of the expected cheer, the usual noise, the smells and feel that he’d come to expect.
He missed Rita, and even little Alex’s toothless smile and late night squawking.
Ray explored this unfamiliar territory and found it wanting.
Next morning, Ray threw himself into the job of finding the hulls to convert to armed exploration ships and the crews to get them away from the pier.
It turned out not to be that easy at all.
Admiral Zilko took Ray down the list of ships laid up in ordinary and trailing High Wardhaven Station. Once they got past all the battleships and battlecruisers, the heavy cruisers and transports, there wasn’t a lot left. “There’s a half dozen light cruisers, but they were the merchant conversions for the war that nobody, and I do mean nobody, wants back in the peace time merchant fleet. The conversion was pretty much botched and restoring them to merchant bottoms will be a long, and likely unsuccessful job.”
“A heavy cruiser takes fifty percent more crew,” Ray said, mentioning what he’d just discovered.
“Yep, and I can’t let you have more of my Sailors. I’m down to the bare minimum for the few ships I’ve got.”
Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown Book I of the Iteeche War (Jump Point Universe 5) Page 9