Battlegroup (StarFight Series Book 2)

by T. Jackson King

  “Lori, give it a try,” Alicia said, her Australian accent something Richard had long grown used to.

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  Antonova plugged three wires from the pheromone block into the chest of her vacsuit. They connected her vacsuit comlink with the block. In theory, the retrofitted translator cubes would convert her words to specific pheromones that would mean something to these wasps. Or maybe not.

  “Good food,” Lori said, using an address form that she said the wasps scent talked to each other every morning.

  All four wasps rose up a meter. Were they startled?

  “You, Soft Skin, you share scents!” came a reply from one of the wasps. Did the sharp tone convey surprise?

  A single wasp separated from the other three and flew a few meters toward their group. Richard lifted his flamethrower to match the change in angle of the wasp leader.

  “We share scents,” Lori said over the comlink that linked all of them. “We offer sweet food.” She walked slowly toward the hovering wasp, stopping at ten meters. Detaching a large glass jar from her vacsuit’s waist belt, she bent down, placed it on the green grass, unscrewed its top and then stepped back a few meters, all the while facing the closest wasp.

  Richard smelled a mix of scents strong enough for him to sneeze at. His suit was bringing in the outside air and it filled his helmet. The scents were tangerine sharp, distinct and so complicated in their mixing he did not doubt he was smelling wasp speech.

  “Be alert!” cried one wasp in the group of three that hovered above their residence hole. “Danger!”

  “Liquid sweetness!” scent cast another wasp. “Same as always. No danger.”

  “Hold scents!” came an order that Richard thought had been spoken by the leader wasp. “Soft Skins share scent with us! Never—” screeching sounds crossed with clicks and hums filled in for words the signaler could not convert to English. “Leaders drink first!”

  The nearest wasp moved toward the glass jar of golden brown honey. It landed on its four narrow legs, which bent as it lowered its yellow body closer to the ground. Its globular head, with mandibles on either side of the lower head and two large black eyes flanking three smaller black one, looked down at the honey, then up. “Soft Skin, you hurt me?”

  Lori sighed. “No hurt you,” she said, speaking a very short, simple sentence as instructed by Alicia’s xenolinguist. “Eat sweet food.”

  The leader wasp leaned its two black antennae toward Lori, then dipped its head down. Its closed mandibles entered the jar’s opening. The sound of sucking came. The wasp lifted its head, then flapped its wings and hovered three meters above the honey.

  “Workers, come bite sweetness!”

  The three other wasps flew quickly forward, dropping to stand on the ground. They surrounded the honey bottle. Richard watched the fine brown hairs on their abdomens and thoraxes shiver with pleasure as each wasp dipped its mandibles into the honey. The level of honey in the large jar rapidly fell until it was all gone. The three wasps flapped their wings quickly, then flew back to hover above their residence hole, leaving behind the leader wasp.

  Lori raised both arms. The watchful hovering wasp moved its head, tracking her hands. “You are leader?”

  “Leader of Workers, yes,” came over the pheromone block.

  “Great!” called Alicia over the comlink, clearly struggling to control her excitement. “Ask the questions.”

  Lori’s black bangs jiggled as she nodded inside her flexible helmet. “Leader of Workers, your people, what name?”

  The hovering wasp flew to one side, then back to its hover before the four of them. It remained ten meters distant from Lori and fifteen distant from Richard. “Swarm we are. Swarmer Workers we are.”

  Richard licked his lips and told his fast-beating heart to be still. These wasps were not like the deadly wasps he and his Marines had fought in the tubeways of the wasp ship. They did not appear to be fighters, or soldiers or whatever this Swarm called its people who fought with weapons.

  Lori reached to the back of her vacsuit and pulled off a white board. She laid it on the ground. Then she knelt. Using a black erasable pen, she drew a picture of a human walking toward the jar of honey. She looked up.

  “We humans. Human walks to sweetness. Your scents?”

  This was the critical element to building a working vocabulary that might mean something. If the hovering leader wasp emitted a scent that was their word for walking, they would have a verb. Of a sort.

  “Scent talk you must know,” said the wasp as its wings blurred a bit and it flew a bit closer to Lori, close enough to see what she had drawn. “Soft Skin . . . walks. Ground hugger Soft Skins are.”

  “Chief,” called Jane over his hard shell’s separate comlink. “How close do we allow the wasp to approach her?”

  “Within five meters,” he said. “If the wasp gets closer, flare the tip of your flamethrower. These wasps have seen how our weapons work, during our display on the Sea, when they awoke in the habitat room. It will understand your warning. If any wasp comes within four meters of her, run forward and shoot a flame ball across its flight path.”

  “Right.”

  He joined Jane in aiming his arm weapons. She kept hers focused on the leader wasp. He kept his focused on the three worker wasps hovering above their residence hole. Blinking his right eye, he caused his HUD display to show a close-up of the black stinger that stuck out from the butts of each wasp. There was no leakage of venom or neurotoxin or whatever the stinger held. Nor did the stingers of any wasp stiffen the way he’d seen the stingers on armed wasps stiffen just before they attacked Jane in her hard shell. This looked and sounded peaceful. But he’d learned a long time ago to never rely on appearances. Actions were all that mattered. He was damned and determined that the four wasps in the Forest Room would clearly understand he and Jane were the protectors of the two Science geeks. And that any wasp who threatened his people would end up a black chunk of charcoal. He watched as Lori changed the image on her white board to a different human action, building a vocabulary of verb scents. Eventually she would show holo images of things to build more nouns. Perhaps, in a week or so, the wasps and the Science geeks could do more than speak baby talk with each other. Maybe.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Aarhant stood in the control center of his Navigation Deck and watched as his two assistants worked their comp pads to compute an answer to the whelp’s latest order. The ensign pretending to be a ship commander had demanded a search of their arrival records upon leaving Alcubierre space-time at the outer edge of this system. He demanded to know the exact three factor location of their arrival spot, and the same data for the later arrival of the wasp fleet. He saw no point in the exercise. The Battlestar’s computers and its AI knew where they had arrived when coming to Kepler 10, and the AI also knew where the wasps had arrived, thanks to triangulation from other battle group ships, and to sensor data from the spysats the Battlestar had left behind when it moved to leave the space beyond the system’s Kuiper Belt of comets. But Renselaer had insisted, saying he wanted the two spots located to within less than a hundredth of a second of stellar orientation. The Singapore woman who was his first assistant, and a lieutenant, turned to him from her desk. Her black eyes scanned him.

  “Lieutenant Commander, we have the exact X, Y, Z coordinates for our arrival point and for the wasp arrival site.”

  “Transmit them to my tablet,” he said, wishing the Asian woman was not a dried up old prune. If she were not fifty years gone she was close to it. “Also transmit them to Renselaer’s XO. That woman Stewart.”

  “Transmitted,” she said as his other assistant, a gay lieutenant jg from Kenya, watched them closely.

  Brief curiosity held him. “Was there any variance in the arrival points?”

  She looked surprised. As if she could not believe his interest in the minutiae of interstellar navigation. Well, he had spent most of the time since the last battle in his quarters, pretending
to be sick with a simple cold. The pretense had shielded him from attending the weekly deck chief conferences held by Renselaer. But he had a Ph.D. in cosmology and stellar astronomy. He had earned that degree from the Cornell University, long years ago. He had not forgotten the field he had relied on to advance in the ranks of the Star Navy.

  “There was,” she said after a pause. “The two arrival points are separated by a distance of 937.9 kilometers, with the wasp arrival point elevated four degrees above this system’s planetary ecliptic. Our arrival point was exactly in sync with the ecliptic.”

  As it should be since this system was a well plotted system, thanks to the existing colony. The wasp arrival variation could be laid to the fact it was their first time coming here. And because the wasps had had to triangulate the battle group’s stellar orientation just before transition.

  “It sounds as if the wasp navigators are good at what they do,” he said, making small talk just to see how his two assistants would react. He liked putting them on the spot, making them wonder if he was displeased with an action of theirs, or whether they had failed to do something he wanted but had not said.

  The Singapore woman just nodded. The gay Kenyan man frowned.

  “Lieutenant Commander, they are much better than good. We ourselves would have had a hard time being so exact if it was our ship trying to follow the wasps back to their home system,” he said, his English sounding almost British, thanks to the way Kenyan schools still followed Brit models.

  Aarhant frowned back. “Your opinion is noted.” There, let the man wonder if he had done something wrong. “I’m heading back to my quarters. Take care of staff work rotations. You two should be able to handle something that simple.”

  “Sir,” called the woman. “Do we assign work to Lieutenant JG Mendoza? He now resides on Command Deck and often is called to the Bridge.”

  Aarhant paused before the exit slidedoor. Count on that woman to raise a matter guaranteed to piss him off. He turned and fixed on her, letting her see his expression. “Idiot! Of course you include him in duty assignments! So long as he is listed as a member of Navigation Deck, he is subject to sharing the work load. If he has a conflict with something assigned by that pretender, let him explain himself to one of you. Now, bother me no more!”

  Walking into the central hallway that ran down Navigation, he turned right and headed toward the nose of the Battlestar. His office was that way, at the end of the hallway. It gave him a location from which he could watch the hallway over the vidcam that was installed above every slidedoor. He liked watching others while being secluded. His assistants knew that. And they knew his volatile temper. They would not bother him again. Of that he was certain.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Daisy sat in her XO seat on the Bridge, with Richard to her right and Alicia seated further right. Above her sat Jacob. Behind them all sat Lori, Carlos and Quincy, who had been ordered to the Bridge by Jacob. They were preparing to leave the Star Navy station, now that repairs were done. Their departure would make room for the St. Mihiel to dock with Hangar Two. The punch through into the frigate’s cargohold had gone through two deck levels, killing four of the frigate’s crew. But the laser beams had not hurt the ship’s nose and tail lasers, the spine plasma battery nor its single missile silo at the ship’s tail. It was time for the final ship repair. They had been orbiting above Valhalla for 35 days. The face of Dekker Lorenz now occupied a central spot in the front wallscreen. She liked him. The German had been a chief petty officer of the E-7 rank when the senior officers had been killed. He’d been in charge of the Weapons Deck on the frigate. A fact that had stood him well during the space battles in the two star systems.

  “Fleet captain, moving to dock with the station,” Dekker said in a rumbling voice. Beside him sat his XO, an American woman of Philippine heritage. The man’s dark eyes looked aside to a holo. “Your Lepanto looks good. The new hull metal at belly, nose and rear is nearly invisible.”

  Jacob smiled in her ceiling view of him and of everyone on the Bridge. “Thanks, Dekker. Get your tail in there. And I hope your crew enjoys plenty of leave time on the station. It’s still awhile before the Earth fleet arrives.”

  Both Dekker and his XO smiled at Jacob’s informality. “Thanks, Jacob. Looking forward to it. St. Mihiel out.”

  The other ship image vanished, to be replaced by a view of the night side of Valhalla. The continent below was equator-located and not yet colonized by the Scandinavians from Wisconsin. Two other images occupied the screen’s left and right sides. The left image held the situational graphic that showed the placement of every neutrino emitting starship in the system, along with planetary alignments, the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt. The right image was a view of the silvery ball that was the Star Navy station, and all the battle group ships that clustered within a few hundred klicks of the station. She liked the spysats, which the Lepanto and the two cruisers had shot out from their railgun launchers upon arrival. It gave her, and Louise at Navigation, multiple true space views that were reassuring when you spent most of your time in dark vacuum aboard a kilometer-long starship. Her return trip to Stockholm to bring down the civies treated in her ship’s Med Hall, with Jacob riding as co-pilot, had been wonderful. A large crowd had surrounded her LCA at the nearby landing field, their faces happy-looking as the twelve civies she’d brought home walked down the LCA’s ramp to a joyous welcome by family and friends. She and Jacob had stood in the open airlock, its hatch swung to one side. The mayor of Stockholm, a sixty-ish blond woman with few lines in her face had smiled up at them, then had turned and waved. To her surprise a band had struck up a happy marching tune, with the mayor gesturing to her and Jacob to come down. They had. The mayor had presented Jacob with a memorial plaque filled with the names of every battle group person lost in the fight above Valhalla. She had then made a speech about how thankful every citizen of Valhalla was to have the protection of the Star Navy. It had touched her and—

  “XO,” called Jacob. “What is your opinion of the repairs to our armor hull breaches?”

  She jerked, then glanced at one of her holos, the one that showed the spysat view of the Lepanto as it moved slowly away from the station. “My opinion is that it was a touch of genius for Captain O’Sullivan to order a shuttle to be compressed, then put into our belly hole. That hole was the size of a doubles tennis court. Putting just cross beams and new plating on the inner hull and then plating on the outer hull would have left a severe vulnerability.” She looked up at him. His clean-shaven face was intent on her, his manner command formal. “A similar grouping of squashed aircars was put into the hole at our nose. Then covered over by cross beams and hull plating. Sir, while those items are not armor metal, they are solid metal. They will resist future beams. That is my opinion.”

  Jacob nodded slowly, then raised his thick black eyebrows. “What about the repair to the spine hull area above our engines? I gather no such vehicles were used to fill the hole cut into the armor.”

  “Correct,” Daisy said quickly. “But the penetration there was just two meters wide. While the beams cut down into the water layer, they did not penetrate the inner hull below the water. Unlike the nose and belly punch throughs. Captain O’Sullivan ordered his engineers to grab the metal dome that covered the station’s electro-optical scope. It’s good metal. They plasma torched it into a plug that filled most of the space cut into the armor. Every wound in the Lepanto’s hull is now covered in new exterior hull plates, new ablative coating and new adaptive optics lenses. Sir.”

  “How many shuttles does the station still possess?”

  “Two. One is down at the Stockholm landing field and one rests inside Hangar One.”

  “Good.” Jacob looked ahead. “Engines, move us out to just beyond the local moon. I want us to have a clear view of the arrival point where the wasps should show up.”

  “All three thrusters firing,” Akira said softly.

  “Vector track set,” called Louise.


  “Tactical,” Jacob said, his baritone becoming tense. “Keep a watch on the spot where the wasps arrived and left out from.”

  “Keeping watch,” replied Rosemary. “The Earth departure point used by Ofira is not that far away. It’s within twenty degrees of the wasp arrival point. Shall I watch it also?”

  “Of course,” Jacob said, his tone easing. “Night and day we watch those two points. No more liberty for anyone. Assume normal shift schedules.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Melody, move ship status to Alert Combat Ready. Send the same order to every fleet ship not linked to the station.”

  Overhead the alert lights went to blinking red. The ceiling speakers gave out a high-pitched siren, which repeated three times.

  “As you command, my attractive human,” the AI said softly.

  Daisy could hardly believe what she’d heard. No ship AI ever showed a personal attachment to the ship’s captain. They heard, responded and obeyed orders. They gave information when asked. They coordinated the automatic functions of every ship. This AI had been acting weird ever since Jacob assumed command. In Kepler 10 it had acted even more . . . personal in relating to him. Why?

  Jacob chuckled. “Melody, does one AI find another ship AI to be attractive? If so, what elements constitute attractiveness to an AI?”

  Daisy grinned. He was having fun with the mouthy AI. Looking ahead she saw most of the Bridge crew also smiling, or shaking their heads in disbelief.

  “We do find each other attractive, my handsome human,” Melody said, her soprano voice becoming almost musical. “To us, the ability to manipulate thousands of factors within less than a human second is attractive. The way a starship moves through space is a function of how well her engines operate. Which is a reflection on the automated monitoring of that ship’s AI. While most of what I do happens at the nanosecond level, still, slowing my mind to converse with humans is . . . entertaining.”