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

by Mike Shepherd

  “Could you use them for patrolling around Wardhaven, keeping safe the next two jumps or so?”

  “That’s what I’m doing, but I don’t have the operating funds to keep more than half of my ships underway.”

  “Wardhaven can’t do all of this itself,” General Ray Longknife concluded.

  “Not even close,” the CNO admitted with a tight frown.

  “Do you know where I might find some spare light cruisers?”

  “Pitts Hope had a decent size Navy base in the war. Maybe they’ve got some ships in mothball.”

  So, Ray found himself leaving Andy with orders to find enough of a crew to get the Second Chance back in commission and out scouting. The Rambling Gal and Rambling Guy were to head back out as soon as they could be refit and resupplied. The scope of their scouting sweeps was to be coordinated and centered around Savannah.

  The self-styled Admiral Whitebred had departed from that planet. With any luck, the base he was setting up would not be too far from there.

  That done, Ray asking Admiral Zilko for the loan of the government yacht Oasis to take him to Pitt’s Hope.

  “No way, General,” the admiral said, emphasizing the rejection with a firm shake of the head. “There are pirates out there and you want to go gallivanting around space on an unarmed yacht. Are you crazy, man?”

  “No. I’m cheap.”

  “You get one of my heavy cruisers, or you keep your ass on the deck.”

  “But you don’t have money to run me around on a heavy cruiser.”

  The admiral was grinning. “You bet’cha I don’t, but I’m gonna, just as soon as I get the bill for your use of my cruiser and pass it along to the prime minister. Do you really think he’ll want the political shit storm when the story gets out that we weren’t willing to pay to keep safe the man who killed President Urm and saved Wardhaven?”

  “You know damn well that’s not true,” Ray spat, tired of the story, and not at all happy to see an officer throwing it in his face.”

  “You know that. And maybe I know that. Sometime over too many beers you must tell me how you pulled that off. But it’s in all the news and it’s the political reality that our dearly beloved prime minister must live with. No. If the hero of the nation needs to get to Pitt’s Hope, he will get there safely.”

  The admiral paused. “When do you want to leave?”

  “Soonest.”

  “The Concord is on alert for anti-piracy patrol. She’s due to seal locks tomorrow morning. Can you be there?”

  “I’m there already.”

  So it happened a few days later that war hero General Ray Longknife found himself seated across from Captain Etsy of the Society of Humanity Navy and commander of the Navy base on High Pitt’s Hope.

  “Pirates, you say,” he muttered, eyeing Ray like he might still be an enemy combatant.

  “Your Admiral Horatio Whitebred,” Ray pointed out.

  “That bastard wasn’t mine, anywhere or anytime,” the Navy man said, making a sour face. “I didn’t like the looks of him when he showed up here, and I definitely didn’t like the looks of what he took off to do to your planet. The man was a loose cannon then and if he’s gone pirating, it only goes to show that a bad apple is a bad apple.”

  “Do you have any ships that you can contribute to an anti-piracy campaign?”

  “Sorry, man, but the war’s over. Haven’t you heard? Hey, aren’t you the guy who did in the big man and ended the war in an afternoon.”

  “Yes,” Ray said, now making his own sour face. “It was in all the news.”

  “Yeah. How’d you manage to do it? Get a bomb through and blow the bastard to hell?”

  “And live to tell the tale?” Ray added.

  “Yeah. Most folks don’t walk a suicide bomb in and live to walk back out again.”

  “I didn’t plan on walking out,” Ray said. “Now, about the anti-piracy patrol.”

  “Sorry, General, but everything we’ve got is tied up to the pier with only a maintenance crew aboard, if that.”

  “Have you got any cruisers you could sell me, or otherwise make available to Wardhaven’s Ministry of Exploration?”

  “What’s the Ministry of Exploration?”

  “The Wardhaven government ministry that I’m in charge of.”

  “I thought you said you were chasing pirates. Now you’re the bloody Ministry of Exploration. Which is it?” That untrusting attitude towards an enemy, maybe former enemy, but enemy neither-the-less, was back.

  “I’m the Minister of Exploration for Wardhaven,” Ray said carefully. “Our exploration ships are also trying to chase down pirates. We’ve lost a liner between Santa Maria and Wardhaven, out in deep space, and we sent scout cruisers out hunting for it. Now this so-called Admiral Whitebred peeled out of Savanna with twenty or more ships, some armed cruisers, and a convoy to Far Pusan has gone missing. Since we can’t seem to find enough Society Navy cruisers to chase the pirates, I’m chasing them with my exploration ships. I’m not getting much exploring done at the moment.”

  The Society Navy officer at least had the good grace to look chagrined at the lack of his Navy doing its duty.

  “So, let me see if I’ve got this straight,” the Navy man said slowly, “you’re an official of a member planet of the Society of Humanity and you are asking me for assistance.”

  “I think that’s the gist of it.”

  The captain stared at the overhead for a moment, then sat forward, both elbows on his desk. “Then I think I can do something for you. Yes, I’ve got some old war surplus cruisers trailing the station. Most are good for nothing but scrapping, but there’s one, the Temür Khan. She didn’t see much action, but she’s a decent boat. If you want her, she’s yours.”

  “Can you hire a crew and get her to Wardhaven?” Ray asked.

  “I think I can. You’ll pay the bill I send you for fitting her out for that short trip, won’t you?”

  “I’ve got the funding for a few more scouts. If you’ve got the ship, I want it.”

  And Ray sent the Khan back to Andy with orders to fit her out as the Rambling Rose.

  Which left him with the question of where to go next. Savannah seemed the best choice. That was the center of the search for Whitebred and that was the most likely place Rita might drop in for fresh supplies.

  Besides, he wanted to have a look for himself at the mess Whitebred had left behind.

  The Concord’s skipper had no problems with orders to patrol the space lanes for pirates between Pitt’s Hope and Savannah, and a few days later, Ray was dropping in to see Izzy on the Society cruiser Patton.

  “Good God, man,” Izzy said, offering him her hand in her day quarters aboard ship, “if you’re here, there must be a war about to break out.”

  “Not even a minor police action this time,” Ray assured her.

  “I’ll believe that when I see the door hit your rear end on your way out. Hey, is that a heavy cruiser you got squiring you around?”

  “The Concord is as heavy as they come, and she’s not squiring me around, she’s looking for pirates. At least officially. What are you doing tied up to the pier with pirates afoot?”

  “Trying to get away from the pier,” the Society Navy captain said, with a scowl to beat all. “Someone thinks this planet still needs a bit of the Navy in its sky. As I see it, the peace is well kept and they don’t need me, or my Marine detachment to keep it so.”

  “I’d like to talk to that Marine of yours. Trouble? Have him take me through the yard. I can’t believe Whitebred didn’t leave any hint behind of where he was going.”

  “Believe it, General,” Izzy said. “He cleaned that place out to beat the band. Not so much as a cat or dog left. Not so much as a computer or data storage device to be found in a trash can. I think the fellow was looking to set up housekeeping for himself and knew it would be tight.”

  Still, a bit later, Trouble was walking Ray through a very empty shipyard.

  “Did you get back in
time for your wife?” Trouble asked since there was little in the yard to talk about.

  “I was there to hold my baby son, if that’s what you mean.”

  The Marine smiled. “We’ve got one on the way, Ruth and me. It’s going to be a girl, or so I’m told. They can tell you those sort of things real early these days.”

  “Yep,” Ray said, suddenly not at all interested in talking about a wife and son that were all to hell and gone.

  Disappointed to find that the place was just as uninformative as he’d been told, Ray got back to the Concord to discover he had an invitation to a political shindig that night. The acting ambassador Becky Graven seemed to have laid on something involving drinks and a music recital. Oh, and President Romali as well.

  Ray dressed for the affair and took the Concord’s captain’s gig down to Petersburg. The evening air was soft, and the affair had been arranged under lights in the gardens of the Presidential Palace. There seemed to be a thousand people, all the most intimate of friends. The talk was loud and had nothing to do with anything that interested Ray.

  He missed Rita and seemed subject to a terminal itch that he didn’t know how to scratch. He was on his second drink when Becky brought up the new president.

  “I understand that Whitebred has actually gone pirate,” Becky said.

  “There are ships missing and they seem to lead back to him,” Ray answered.

  “So, you need ships. And crews, no doubt,” President Romali said. From the looks of it, he was drinking water with a twist of lime.

  “Yes, we need lots of stuff we can’t afford,” Ray admitted.

  “We built cruisers during the war,” Romali pointed out. “Unity shipped them all away from here, and they came to grief or a scrap heap, but we built them, and we have men who crewed them. Men who are all out of work.”

  Ray put down his drink, and wished he’d stretched the first one. “What are you getting at?”

  “We have industry that is obsolete and needs to be rebuilt and brought up to modern standards. We have unemployment running at twenty percent. Maybe more. We need work for our people, and you need ships and crews for them. Is there a way to meet all of our needs?”

  Ray needed space, away from all the chatter of people sharing the most intimate facts of their life at the top of their lungs. He looked around. The president seemed to sense his need and took them off to a quieter corner of the garden.

  “Everyone is enjoying a post war boom,” Ray said.

  “But Wardhaven has money to invest and its industrial base has capacity it is not using,” the former university professor pointed out.

  “Yes. But your laws don’t allow foreign companies to own a controlling interest in your industry,” Ray said. “I was here when you passed that new law.”

  “Yes, we needed it then, to help us sort out all the off-planet fingers that Unity had left in our economy. It is done, and matters have been corrected. But a law passed yesterday can be repealed tomorrow. And does Ernie Nuu really want controlling interests in our plants. If we were to issue joint stock offerings, with say him having 45% and us having 55%, might we all be happy?”

  “And you’d get capital for your modernization,” Ray noted.

  “And you might find you could buy cruisers here at a quarter of the cost of those built on Wardhaven. Here, you wouldn’t be hiring from full employed workforce. Our crews could be had for a lot less than any you might recruit there as well.”

  “I’ll need to think about this,” Ray said.

  The president sipped his drink. “I hope you will on your way back to Wardhaven on the Concord. Back in the war, they had us building Daring class cruisers with 6-inch lasers. I understand that our industrialists would like to build 8-inch lasers for some larger cruisers.”

  Ray gave the president a smile that he knew had too much teeth in it. “Just what we need to talk to Admiral Whitebred.”

  Chapter 19

  Rita found herself with very mixed feelings. Was she actually sailing away and leaving Ray on the pier. Well, he was there, and she was here. So, yes, she was leaving him.

  I wonder how you like it, big boy. Turnabout, huh? Good for the goose and all that.

  She still wasn’t quite sure how it had happened. Yes, she’d known someone would have to keep the shop running back on Wardhaven, and yes, she was the ship driver and she’d demanded she command the heavy cruiser Exeter. But, she hadn’t really seen how this would play out until it was playing out and coming at her like a mountain in full retreat.

  So, here she was on the bridge of her own ship, sporting the four stripes of a real Navy captain, and there was Ray on the pier, kind of waving goodbye with a dazed look on his face.

  Rita tasted all the feelings running around in her gut and found that the pure joy of having her own command pretty much took precedence over all of them.

  Oh, and having her very own command with Alex in the care of his nannies. Now that had been a brilliant idea on Ray’s part, although she hadn’t thought much of it at the time. And it had taken her talking to sixteen different nannies before she had four she trusted and who were willing to pack up everything and take off on a warship on short notice.

  Who said you can’t have it all?

  Rita sat her command chair and studied her bridge. Hesper was on sensors, and had a much better suite to work with than she had had on the old Friendship. Ursel Jannson had taken the jump master’s chair, and doubled as helsmwoman as well, no need to have the jump master passing her course to the helms. Rita was going to apply the lighter staffing pattern of the attack transport fleet to her heavy cruiser where she saw fit.

  “Set course for Beta jump,” she ordered. “Let’s see how she does at 1.15 gees.”

  Actually, Rita was much more interested in how her overloaded mammaries took to the extra weight. Them and little Alex.

  “Course and speed set,” Ursel reported.

  “Cadow, you have the deck,” Rita said, standing. If her breast were any judge of matters, Alex was ready for some chow.

  Four days later, the Exeter lead the Northampton up to the jump that was two shy of Far Pusan. This was the jump that was missing its buoy. Rita had the conn, and watched as Matt’s cruiser overtook her and started sniffing around the jump.

  “Professor Qin can’t find much here,” he reported. “She suggests we jump through and asks that you not follow us immediately. She wants time to pick up the scent before we add too much more junk to the vacuum.”

  “As you will,” Rita replied, and watched as the Northampton gave itself a bit of a boost, then coasted, jets silent, through the jump.

  “Helm, set a timer for fifteen minutes.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.”

  A quarter hour never seemed so long. Well, yes, a quarter hour straight of Alex upset and bawling could be very long. But no quarter hour had lasted this long before she’d made the acquaintance of that tiny fellow with the well-developed lungs.

  She took the time to run a check on the ship’s systems. Weapons was locked and loaded. Reactors were all on line and green. Rita had worked her Sailors hard on the run out. They’d shaken down into a fighting crew and were as good as any in the fleet even if they were a bunch of girls. Well, not all women, but way more females than any Wardhaven fighting ship had ever been crewed by before the Exeter set sail.

  The timer ran down, and Rita ordered engineering to give the Exeter a bit of a boost. They coasted up to the jump point and through it . . . to find the Northampton a good fifty clicks past the jump.

  “Captain Abeeb, you want to tell me something?”

  “Something happened here,” the other captain reported. “We think we’ve found the wreckage from the jump buoy. Likely, one ship was hit, but only a glancing shot. Nothing like a full ship’s worth of wreckage here. Oh, and there’s a lot of reaction mass. No telling where it came from, not with the limited records we have of what the stuff was like on Earth, Eden and Savannah. Sorry, ma’am, we know things ha
ppened here, but not a lot more.”

  “And you’re fifty klicks out doing what?” Rita asked, not happy with the results of the vacuum sniffer. She knew the value of the thing. She’d paid for its construction. So far, it wasn’t earning its keep in her book.

  “We’re trying to figure out which jump they went for,” Matt answered.

  “And?”

  “There are four jumps out of this system. One leads to Far Pusan. It’s got some decent trails going there, but then it’s had a bit of business. The other three jumps all show evidence that some traffic headed their way. We’re trying to figure out which one got the most business, but it’s not easy.”

  “Keep working,” Rita said. She wanted to get her ship underway. Alex had taken to 1.15 gees with no trouble. He didn’t even mind one bit when she jacked the acceleration up to 1.25 gees. Zero gees, however, was the pits for his little tummy. Maybe she hadn’t thought this all the way through.

  “Nav, give me some idea what the Northampton is up to.”

  “Ma’am, right now, she’s drifting across the course toward the fourth jump. I think she’s about to . . . oh, there she goes, reversing course, and zigging a bit. She’s on a course to cover the third jump. I bet she’s already drifted across the courses at least once.”

  Together, Rita’s bridge crew watched as the Northampton zigged, zagged and drifted her way across the potential courses to the system’s jumps not once more but twice. It was an hour later before Matt hailed Rita again.

  “We’re showing traffic to all the jump points in this system. The problem with this sniffer is that it can tell you there was traffic, but it can’t tell you when. Our call is that the third jump, the one most distant, got the most traffic. We recommend that we see what’s on the other side of that jump.”

  “Helm, set a course for Jump Gamma at 1.25 gees,” Rita ordered, and with a kick in the pants, they took off running. And Rita dropped down to find a very unhappy Alex who was only too willing to lose his low opinion of the world on his mother’s breast.

  “I hope we won’t have to spend too much time with no gravity,” the woman who’d become the senior nanny, or at least the speaker for the other three, said to Rita.