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

by Mike Shepherd

  “Why don’t you let him sleep on your chest, next to your heart,” the nurse suggested. “He’s been used to listening to Rita’s heart all his life. Maybe he just needs a little rhythm in his new world.”

  So, the man who all the media said killed President Urm. The commander who personally lead men into battle after battle . . . and only lost his last one. The general who pacified Savannah. Now lay on his back and let a tiny, helpless, defenseless bit of skin and bone and maybe a bit of uncontrolled muscle, huddle there, under a blanket, on his bare chest.

  It seemed to make the little fellow very happy. At least he’d gone back to sleep.

  And what’s strangest of all, I’m loving this, Ray thought to himself.

  Some rational portion of his mind was telling him that he was just on the receiving end of six million years of evolutionary biology. That he was responding to programming that had gotten the human race where it was today. That he was supposed to find that strange bit of flesh the most darling sight he’d ever seen.

  He chuckled, and his chest heaved with the effort. Al moved in his sleep, but seemed no more bothered by it than he had when Rita moved about with him on board.

  The miracle of life. Of love.

  Ray measured the distance he’d come from the broken old soldier trying to locate a quiet corner and a loaded gun so he could finish it all.

  He’d succumbed to the woman he loved when she stood above him and tossed her dress one way and settled down on him and proved he was still man enough for her.

  This little miracle had likely started with that big miracle, he mused.

  And now I’m walking and talking and commanding troops again, young fellow. We should get along just fine.

  On that thought, Ray found himself drifting off to sleep. He wouldn’t sleep very deeply. Not while he was on alert against rolling over.

  Still, he’d learned to take care of his minimum needs as a fighting man. He’d learn just as well to take care of what he needed for this job too.

  His last thought, as he drifted off, was not of Al or Rita.

  What would I do if I was Admiral Whitebred and trapped in a station yard?

  Did he have a ship? Ships?

  Could he ship out with enough goods and gear to set himself up with a new base?

  Had Milassi launched any scout ships out beyond the rim of known human space? Did Whitebred know of any good planets where he might put together a pirate base?

  Ray pulled back from the sleep that was about to take him. He had been on Santa Maria when Rita put together the plans that took down the pirate and drug base on Riddle. Still he’d read the reports. Had Whitebred?

  He’d have to look into that in the morning.

  Whitebred, you are not welcome in my space. Not mine or little Al’s space. Your time is over, you hear?

  Chapter 7

  Joey Edris studied the planet filling the forward screen. It was beautiful.

  Blue oceans covered a good three quarters of it. There was the white glare of ice caps at the poles, and spread out in nice continents were patches of green and yellow and brown.

  What was better, along the rim of the world was that thin haze that bespoke an atmosphere.

  “We have hit the jackpot,” the skipper said, beaming. He had a bottle in his hand. He was celebrating today. No spiked coffee for this. He was drinking it straight.

  No doubt, he’d have to be taken off to his cabin before too long, but he would be happy.

  Everyone on the Jackpot 27 was happy.

  Everyone but Joey.

  Joey, the erstwhile science officer, was devoting his entire attention to his board. Half of it showed the planet and told him more than the rest of the crew were getting from just gazing at the screen.

  Yes, the planet was just what a human might order up for paradise. They’d have to sample the soil, air and water to see what it held and how deadly it might be for humans, but, for now, it was lovely.

  It was what was on the other half of Joey’s board that worried him. Him and his friend Drugi Mälner, the ship’s 3rd officer.

  Drugi stood behind Joey and eyed the problem with him.

  There was another ship. It was closing fast and would make orbit within a half hour of them.

  The captain’s orders were to ignore it. They’d handle the problem when they made orbit before it did. Haru and her crew down in engineering had managed to keep the reactors from blowing, but they’d maintained a brutal 2.15 gee acceleration and deceleration for the whole approach.

  That might be one reason why the captain was getting drunk. Half the crew was laid up with sprained backs, ankles, and other ailments you got when you subjected out of shape men to a high gravity run. And more than half the crew were self-medicating their pain, as well as their joy, by stopping by the still.

  But we got here first!

  Drugi reached over Joey’s shoulder and hit reset on his sensor board. The board went blank, but when it had refreshed itself, it told the same old story.

  That ship was weird!

  The ship itself wasn’t where it was. Or was, depending on which sensor you believed. The mass detector put it one place. Radar agreed it was there. The laser ranger didn’t agree so much. And the optics showed it somewhere else entirely.

  Either the sensors were totally shit or something was really crazy about the ship on approach.

  And even if you chose to believe your eyes, what the visuals showed about the ship was all wrong.

  First off, it was one big round sphere. Nobody made ships that way, but this one seemed to be, although the visuals were none too good and the ship kept wavering, like something seen on a hot day from a great distance.

  Assuming you trusted what you saw, the ship had four somethings spaced evenly around the sphere. If you trusted your mass detector, they were where the reactors were. But the damn mass detector said it was a good five hundred klicks off to the left, so what did it know about the reactors.

  Joey glanced up at Drugi. Together the two of them silently mouthed, This is crazy.

  The 1st officer left the captain’s elbow and came over to stand beside Drugi. “Anything change?” he whispered.

  “No sir, it’s still there and it’s still weird,” Joey whispered back, and did his best to let worry drip from his words

  The 1st officer studied Joey’s board for a moment, shook his head, and returned to the captain. They were about to make their final insertion into orbit and the skipper was in no shape to give the orders.

  Five minutes later, the 1st officer had the Jackpot in orbit around their pot of gold and the ship was in microgee. The skipper looked green around the gills and about to upchuck all that fine hooch he’d been celebrating with. Under the careful ministrations of the 2nd officer and a female quartermaster hired just to aid and assist him, the skipper was towed off to bed.

  As the 1st officer took the command chair, he said, “Split the main screen. Lower half the planet. The upper half, that damn ship.”

  Joey did. The planet stayed just as beautiful, but he doubted anyone on the bridge was looking at it. The 1st officer leaned forward in his seat, rested his elbow on his knee, his chin on his fist and eyed the stranger.

  “Communications, tell them that it’s our planet, and they can just pick up their sticks and go away.”

  “Those words, sir?”

  “Exactly.”

  The comm officer did as she was told.

  “They aren’t responding, sir.”

  “Why am I not surprised? Joey, do they have lasers?”

  “Sir, I can’t tell,” was a very painful admission.”

  “Drugi, can you do any better?” the 1st said, scowling at his science officer.

  “No sir, Joey’s been trying and I’ve been helping. We’ve got the laser capacitors for our own forward and aft batteries, but we don’t have a damn thing from inside that damn ball of string.”

  “Who would make a ship like that, I say, I do say?” Paddy asked fr
om the helm.

  “It was a strange war,” the 1st officer muttered. “A whole lot of planets that had never made so much as a harsh look were beating plows into swords. Who knows what someone tried. I just don’t like that our sensors aren’t telling us any more than they are.”

  “They were bought surplus,” Drugi pointed out.

  “And the skipper was cheap for anything not having to do with planetary survey,” the 1st officer answered softly, distracted. “Yes, I know. I know what I know. Can anyone tell me what I don’t know about that damn ship?”

  The bridge was quiet.

  “Comm, they still giving us static?” the 1st asked.

  “Not a peep, sir.”

  “Master at Arms, are the lasers manned and ready?” the 1st asked.

  “Fur the last ha’ hour, since the skipper ordered it,” came in a thick brogue. The Master at Arms got very Scottish when he got nervous.

  “If I don’t do anything, we’ll swing around the planet and they’ll make orbit on the opposite side from us. I don’t like that. Let’s put a shot across their bow while we can.”

  “Across their bow, where?” Joey asked.

  The 1st officer waved his hand nervously. Vaguely. “Somewhere in between all of them.”

  Joey picked a spot in space that looked safe and fed it to the forward laser battery.

  “Fire one,” the First ordered.

  Apparently one of the lasers did fire, because the ship’s light dimmed as the capacitors began to soak up power to recharge.

  Nothing happened.

  “Do you think they even noticed we fired?” Patty asked. “I mean, you can’t see a laser in space unless it hits something.”

  “Damn,” the 1st officer muttered. He had spent the war in the transport fleet, carrying troopers from here to there.

  Then the air ahead of them on the planet heated up as a laser shot through it a few hundred klicks ahead of them.

  “I think he just shot back,” Paddy said.

  “Damn it all,” came from the bridge hatch. The skipper held on to the combing with one hand and bellowed, “Who’s shooting?”

  “They fired at us,” the First said. “We fired a warning shot and they shot back.”

  “Well, we will not have them firing at us,” the skipper yelled. “Give them a broadside.”

  “The skipper’s read way too many books about the old wet sailing Navy on Earth,” Drugi muttered to Joey, but the rest of the bridge was moving to obey.

  “Joey, give the lasers a firing solution,” the First ordered.

  Joey stared helplessly at his board, then stabbed a finger at the optical location and fed it to the guns. A moment later, the lights really dimmed as all the capacitors went empty and began to refill.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  “We’re hit, we’re hit,” Comm shouted, which was hardly necessary.

  “Hull breach. Hull breached,” the computer announced.

  And the air pressure began to plummet sickeningly verifying that somewhere or wheres the hull was open to space.

  “Seal all airtight doors,” the First ordered.

  Somewhere Joey heard doors slamming shut, but the sound was weak, failing to carry through the thinning air.

  Then a laser cut through the bridge, slicing the 1st officer in half where he sat.

  Joey took a deep breath, hoping to stave off the inevitable long enough to make a good act of contrition, but the next laser caught him and he hardly had time to finish “Oh my God.”

  Chapter 8

  Captain Mattim Abeeb liked having a working ship under his feet and space under his keel. Having his own ship on a mission to go just about anywhere to see anything and find anything had to be about the closest thing to heaven allowed.

  As a matter of fact, God’s heaven would have to work hard to beat this.

  The Second Chance had its Marine detachment back aboard; there was no telling what he’d find when he stuck his nose into something.

  He also had Jon of Santa Maria and along with him a rather interesting fellow, a red headed singer who played a lyre and saw to it that the boy ate his vegetables and that Matt and his crew respected that a young teenager needed things different.

  During the war, Matt had watched as his Maggie D was transformed from a merchant ship into the light cruiser Sheffield with a dozen 6-inch lasers. Now, with the war over and gone, he’d had the fine job of changing his ship again into something else, an armed merchant scout. He now commanded an exploration ship with a whole lot of smart tricks up its sleeve.

  At the moment, he had a science team aboard operating something that old Andy had called a space sniffer. Matt had invited to supper at his table the scientists who had invented it and given it a name hardly small enough to fit on the Second Chance. He was now calling it a space sniffer, too.

  They’d found way too much material in the vacuum at the jump point from Wardhaven to this first jump. There were three jumps in the system: the one everyone used to get about human space, the second one started you on the way to Santa Maria.

  The question for the moment involved the third.

  As Mattim observed his bridge crew, his ship cautiously sniffed its way through the last few kilometers this side of that jump.

  “They were here,” Liu Qin, the chief scientist reported. A quiet woman, small and delicate to look at, she sat at her station on the bridge, back rigid, fingers poised above the board, but touching nothing.

  “You’re sure of that?” Sandy O’Mally asked from her position as Jump Master. She was also navigation.

  “Quite sure,” the scientist said, with just a hint of disdain for being questioned. “There is very little here beside what you would expect in empty space. The reaction mass of the Prosperous Goose sticks out, how would you put it. Like a very sore thumb.”

  “Then let us see where this sore thumb will take us,” Matt said. “Sandy, take us through that jump.

  A minute later, they were in another system.

  Mattim waited for his bridge team to take the measure of this new star system before asking Sandy “How many jumps do we have here?”

  “If the map Ray gave us is to be trusted, there are three here,” she said cautiously, then spoke more confidently. “Surprise, surprise, I’m making out three myself.”

  “Professor, do you have a suggestion which way we go?”

  “Ms. O’Mally, could you feed me the coordinates of the three jumps?”

  “Coming at you, gal,” Sandy said.

  Matt would bet that Professor Qin was nobody’s gal. No doubt, the informality of his jump master and the stiff formality of his new science officer were going to lead to interesting times this voyage.

  Matt had survived worse in the war. He would survive this.

  “Captain, could you advance your ship a few kilometers toward the nearest jump?” Liu asked.

  “Helms, let’s have a bit of a push,” Matt ordered. Starship engines did not do a few kilometers, so this order would have to do.

  “No, that leads us to empty void,” Professor Qin said. “Please adjust your course to intersect a direct course to the next nearest jump.”

  “Sandy, if you will,” Matt said.

  His jump master worked her board for a moment, then gave the helm a slight adjustment to his course. He fed it in and, with a glance Matt’s way, gave the ship just a touch of acceleration from the direction motors.

  “We should cross the wake of any ship headed for that jump,” Sandy said, “in three, two, one, now.”

  “Only void again,” Liu said crisply. “Now, if you will, please follow a course to the most distant jump.

  In a moment, they had repeated the process. This time Matt was rewarded by a tight smile from Professor Qin. “Yes, we have a trail, captain. You may follow this one to the jump.”

  “All ahead helm, 1.5 gees if you will.

  Two weeks later they were one jump from Santa Maria and in need of a decision. The two earlier ships se
nt to track the Goose had proven she hadn’t used the usual jumps. There was just this jump to Santa Maria . . . and one other.

  Should they sniff around this jump to see if they’d used it to head for a different jump out on their return trip, or had the Goose’s skipper tried the fourth jump out of the Santa Maria system?

  Matt posed the question to Professor Qin.

  “I have no idea what your renegade captain may have done,” was her quiet and uninformative reply.

  “Could you use your sniffer around this jump to see if he used it a second time and then headed off for another jump rather than the one he used this time?”

  “Of course I can use what you insist on calling ‘my sniffer’ to see if he followed a second course away from this jump.”

  As it turned out, the Goose had come in the nearest jump on the way in, and used the farthest jump on its way out from Santa Maria.

  Matt ordered the Second Chance to head out that way.

  He could have had a near mutiny on his hands. Mary Rodrigo, the commander of his security team, and the former miners among her group, had formed an “Ours, by God,” mining consortium the first time the Second Chance visited Santa Maria.

  Mary had come by before they sailed with a request to ship several containers of mining nanos to their company on Santa Maria during this trip. He’d managed to dodge that delay by pointing out that four ships had brought cargo to Santa Maria, and mining nanos had been at the top of all their cargo lists.

  Mary made a face, “So we’ve lost the first wave and are behind the times now, huh?”

  “Maybe not. You got in on the ground floor to start with.”

  “Okay, so you don’t want to stop at Santa Maria.”

  “Ray Longknife wants to know what happened to David and the padre as soon as possible.”

  “Yeah, me and the crew do too.”

  It was Jon who was harder to turn down. He and his escort, Brennan the bard, showed up at Matt’s cabin after they sailed. “If we get to Santa Maria, can I stop by and see my aunt?” Jon asked plaintively. “I love being on your ship, and your crew is very nice to me, but I miss some of my family.”