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

by Mike Shepherd

  Ray was walking the floor a lot with a colicky baby in his arms.

  As for Rita, she was leaking milk more often than not and blood too much for Ray’s liking. One moment she’d be bright and happy to rival the sun, moon, and stars. The next dark, moody, and ready to snap his head off.

  Somewhere it was rumored that there were people working on a machine that would do what a woman did. It was supposed to be ready in twenty years. Had been for the last 300 years. It seemed that what a woman did naturally was a whole lot harder to do mechanically than anyone realized.

  Ray would have to look into their work. Maybe put a good top sergeant in charge.

  So, it was a relief to duck off to the office for brief respites. Although, there Andy was quick to point out that they had everything in hand, nothing was happening, and “You know, there’s a reason why we give parental leave.”

  “But I need leave from being a parent,” Ray had muttered, but to himself.

  Still, he was careful not to spend more than three or four hours at the office on any one day before heading home to face his duty. He was a fighter, not a coward.

  Well, he was a fighter, not a dad, it seemed.

  Still, he did what he could and stayed in the line as long as he could. It seemed to be paying off. Rita was getting more sunny every day and spent less time in the dark place she went. And Alex’s stomach was supposed to mature. Not steak and potatoes ready, but at least more able to digest his mother’s milk.

  Rita even admitted that Ray was earning a lot of husband brownie points.

  And then he blew it.

  The call came in during one of the short periods he was at his desk. The Second Chance had just jumped in system and was heading for High Wardhaven at two gees.

  “That can’t be good,” Ray mused, and sent them off an interrogatory message.

  Just as he was about to leave, he got a response.

  I PREFER TO DISCUSS THIS IN PERSON. MATT SENDS.

  General Ray Longknife studied the message flimsy. He’d been handed it as he was heading down the hall for his car. He studied it for a long minute, then turned back to his desk.

  “Andy, I need to talk to you,” he said to his commlink.

  “You got the message from Matt, too.”

  “Yep. Two gees. That’s a fast acceleration for someone in commercial space.”

  “Yeah, it can’t be good,” the retired captain said.

  “Get in here and let’s talk.”

  Three hours later, they hadn’t figured out anything more than they had in the first five minutes. Matt wouldn’t be racing through a commercial trade route with his hair on fire at two gees if he didn’t know something important. He also wouldn’t be refusing to radio in his findings if it wasn’t hot and likely to get very hot once he shared it.

  “This can’t be good,” Ray said, for about the hundred time.

  “Nope, it’s not good,” Andy agreed.

  They stared at each other for a long minute.

  “I guess I ought to be heading home,” Ray said.

  “You are going to be late,” the old sailorman agreed.

  Ray stood.

  There was a knock at the door and a messenger entered without waiting for Ray to say “Enter.”

  “Sir, this just came in from Savannah. I heard the two of you were still here and I thought you might want to see it now, rather than tomorrow.”

  The young lieutenant handed the flimsy across to Ray. She stood there, at a kind of attention that Ray was getting used to in the Exploration Service. Officially it wasn’t a military service. Still, they wore their own uniform and most were former military. They also knew they might have to fight their way out of any situation they got into. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  “Oh, God,” Ray said, and handed the message to Andy.

  He skimmed it quickly. “Oh, God,” was his response as well.

  “How the hell could Whitebred get twenty-five ships away from the yard?” he demanded of Andy. “I didn’t know they had twenty-five hulks docked there.”

  “It seems he did, and it seems he and his crew and passengers were desperate enough to risk anything that might keep space out and air in while rambling along at some speed.”

  “But where’s he going?”

  “Is Izzy trailing him?” Andy asked the officer messenger.

  “Sir, there’s a longer message in decoding, but I thought you’d want to see the short summary as soon as we got it ready to read.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant,” Andy said. “I’m grateful for this scrap. We’ll wait for you to get us more.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the young woman said, and, taking it for dismissal, quick marched for the door.

  “You going to wait for the rest of the message?” Andy asked.

  “I don’t see how I’ll get any sleep if I don’t.”

  “You might want to call Rita, then. Tell her you’ll be late.”

  “She’ll know I’m late when I don’t show up,” Ray said. What he really meant was that he only wanted to face her disappointment once, when he got home. No need to face it now as well as later.

  Ray settled back in his chair, stared at the ceiling of his office and mused. “What kind of fleet do we have here that we could send after Whitebred?”

  “Not much,” Andy answered. “What hasn’t been sold off for scrap or back to merchant service is spread pretty thin.”

  “Computer, what ships do we have at High Wardhaven?” Ray asked.

  “The exploration ship Rambling Star is in the final stages of fitting out,” the computer said. “The Rambling Road has its 6-inch lasers torn down and disassembled and in the yard for rebuilding and relining. The Rambling Guy and the Rambling Gal have just returned from exploration voyages of three months and have a long list of deficiencies that will need to be corrected before they sail again. The Second Chance has entered the system, but it has not reported its status.”

  “That’s the entire exploration fleet,” Andy said.

  Ray winced.

  “It could be worse. The Gal and Guy could still be out on their search swings.”

  “They find anything interesting?” Ray asked. Rita would be excited if they had. It might save him from the worst of her ire.

  “Not anything worth getting excited about,” Andy said. “They found a few planets that might be usable, but two of them looked like the Ancient Three Aliens had worked them over pretty well and someone had rocked them back to nothing when they left, or since.”

  “What was it with that bunch of super aliens? They build the highways across the stars, occupy quite a few planets, including one where they left an educational computer on when they left, but other places, all we find are ruins or wreckage.”

  Andy just shrugged.

  The lieutenant returned with several pages of message flimsy. She quickly handed a copy to Ray and another one to Andy, and left.

  “From the look on her face,” Andy said once the door closed, “I think she read the message and didn’t much care for it.”

  Ray was already on the second page. “I’m reading it and I don’t much care for it. Two bleeding Darings. Two General class light cruisers! What was that stuff doing alongside Milassi’s piers? I didn’t see anything like that!”

  “He didn’t want you to see any of them,” Andy said. “My question is about the other ships he took. How many of them still had someone else’s title locked away in their safe? I’ll bet you anything you care to risk that a whole batch of them were seized by pirates and taken to High Savannah’s yard so the serial numbers could be filed off.”

  “But what did they do with the crews?” Ray said, his voice a harsh whisper.

  “Damn the bastards,” was all Andy could say.

  “So, they took everything from the yard that they could,” Ray said when he finished. “They’ve headed off with a lot of people I’d never sign on with. What does he intend to do?”

  “Clearly, he intends to c
reate his own yard and maintain his own fleet,” Andy said.

  “Can he do that?”

  “I doubt it,” Andy said. “From what I heard, the man was just some business type that got a political appointment to the fleet. If there hadn’t been a war on, it would never have happened. I say he’s bit off more than he can chew.”

  “Then why try to chew it?” Ray said, half to himself.

  “Whoever sent him out to ride herd on Milassi can’t be happy with what you did to their affairs on Savannah,” Andy said. “Maybe Whitebred is trying to strike out on his own, or maybe he’s just trying to recoup something from the ashes you made of his boss’s projects on Savannah.”

  “If he is, he has no idea what he’s getting into,” Ray said, and discovered he was smiling. It would be nice to see Whitebred get himself into hot water way over his head. Ray would be glad to stand on the shore and watch him sink. Maybe he’d toss him a straw. Or a ton of bricks.

  “This is almost funny,” Andy said.

  “I could use a laugh.”

  “Not funny, ha ha, but funny as in I never expected to live to see this day. I do believe that Izzy has grown up. Or at least achieved mature judgement.”

  “Huh?”

  “You have to have known Izzy in her previous life. I’ve never had a better, more hard working subordinate, but when it came to thinking things through, Izzy thought with her balls, and despite rumors you may have head because of her gender, Izzy has a pair of large brass ones. See the enemy, charge the enemy.”

  “She kind of wrecked a few good plans of my mice and men, not to mention messing with my Navy support,” Ray admitted.

  “Yes, I will give you that. But the old Izzy I knew, confronted with a situation of one Patton and one escaping potential pirate fleet, would have been away from the pier and charging it. To hell with the four cruisers it had, and the odds that several of the other ships had lasers as well.”

  Andy paused as if seeing the battle. “It would have been a hell of a fight. Whitebred would definitely know he’d been in a brawl. Maybe even been too damaged to do anything more than return to the pier, but of the Patton, there would likely be very little left but glory.”

  Ray flipped back through the report on Whitebred’s ships, then remembered what he knew of a General class cruiser and nodded. “It would have been quite a fight.”

  “But a losing one. Now, don’t get me wrong. There may come a time when a desperate fight against overwhelming odds is the only choice Izzy has. But here, where she did have a choice, she chose to call for back up. Good gal, my tigress. Good gal.”

  “Speaking of a tigress, I’ve got one myself at home and I think that’s my cue to head there. Andy, see if you can do to speed up the yards working on the explorer ships. We need them ready to answer all bells. We’ve got to find out where Whitebred and his ships think they are going. Drop a line to the spy. Let him know what we know and see if he can add anything to the vastness of our ignorance.”

  Ray paused for a moment, then figured he’d better inform his boss about all this. “Oh, and see if you can get me an appointment with the prime minister for tomorrow. He doesn’t know it yet, but some of those heavy cruisers drifting along behind the space station are going to be reeled in and need crews to take them out. The next time one of our Navy officers faces four light cruisers, we need to have a heavy cruiser division backing her up. Maybe two.”

  “You’re setting yourself a busy schedule for tomorrow,” Andy said, leaving unsaid a thousand things.

  “Yep. I’ll go tell Rita my parental leave is over.”

  “She’s not going to like that.”

  “She’s a big girl. She can pull on her big girl panties and soldier like the rest of us.”

  “You and I both know she can. Ray, she has. But she’s also a new mother.”

  “And she can keep on being a new mother. She just can’t keep on having a husband twenty-four seven.”

  “Good luck.”

  Ray found that he needed it.

  He got home late to find Rita pacing the floor with a very cranky baby. As to which was the crankiest and noisiest, mother or baby, Ray would have taken no bets. When she paused for a breath, baby crying in her arms, he told her why he was late.

  She listened to him. Was it his imagination that little Al paused in his crying to listen as well. The kid was definitely happier when Ray took him, held him, and walked the floor with him, not even pausing in his story of the day’s troubles.

  “You’re going to see the prime minister tomorrow,” Rita said, scowling from where she’d settled into the rocker in the nursery.

  “Yes. We’ll need a fleet backing us up if we’re going to chase pirates with light cruisers.”

  “He won’t want you telling him that. He’s planning on spending every dime he’s got on this new space elevator to the station. He’s right, it will pay for itself in new business in twenty years.”

  “So, he can keep building it. He’ll just need a fleet to protect his commerce this year. And maybe the next.”

  “I guess I can take care of Alex tomorrow,” Rita said, not at all happy.

  “Honey, your dad has money. You have money. We have money. Spend some of it. There’s no reason why you and I should be walking the floor every night with Alex. We can hire a nanny. Hell, we can hire three or four of them and have them work shifts. No question, Al has run us ragged trying to work shift on, shift off for him. And you, honey, you need a nurse to help you. Hire one. There are temporary agencies that could have someone out here by eight tomorrow morning. I had my computer check on the drive home. Same for the nannies. Love, we’ve got to come at this thing smarter than Al.”

  Ray held the now sleeping child up. “Let’s face it, boy, if your mommy and daddy can’t outsmart you, we are in a hell of a mess.”

  Rita’s, “If you say so,” did not have a lot of give in it.

  Chapter 12

  Admiral Horatio Whitebred found the convoy to Far Pusan exactly where he expected it to be. He had sent a small boat through the jump to verify that the convoy of four ships and a prefabricated space station was on its way, decelerating at a steady .75 gee for the jump where he lurked on the other side.

  He’d expected two ships, not four, but the reports said they were all merchant ships, not that the small boat was all that well equipped with sensors.

  Still, he had four cruisers, lasers charged and waiting, on the other side of the jump. Even if one of them turned out to be an escorting warship, it would die before it got a shot off.

  Assuming he could trust the men standing by the guns. He’d tried a test shoot two jumps back. He had not been impressed.

  Now, he sat in his command chair on what he’d named his flag bridge. It was hardly more than a large room on the Queen Ann’s Revenge. He’d named her for Blackbeard’s flagship. One had to show one’s scholarship sometimes.

  With the ship in zero gee, stomachs were not happy. He’d sent two of his middle managers out to the head and upped the ventilation to keep the room from getting too rank.

  The screen on the wall showed blank space. It had for the last half hour.

  The first of the convoy was due through any time.

  And right on time, a ship popped through.

  “Stand and deliver,” Whitebred demanded in his most dramatic voice. “Four cruisers have you in the crosshairs of their lasers. Twitch and we’ll blow you to hell.”

  The captain who peered from a small window of Whitebred’s screen seemed more puzzled than surprised. “Are you for real?”

  “Very real. Move your ship away from the jump and prepare to be boarded. Do more than just goose your engines and we’ll blow you to hell.”

  “Right. You said that before. Who are you and what is this all about?”

  “You, sir, are my prisoners. That is what this is all about.”

  “Sir,” came from off screen, “I think the damn fool thinks he’s a pirate.”

  “If he’s g
ot four cruisers,” came from somewhere else off screen, “then he’s a damn sight more than just thinking he’s a pirate.”

  “I’ve got the cruisers,” Whitebred pointed out.

  “So you say,” had too much doubt in it for Whitebred’s liking.

  “Captain, give them a taste of our guns,” he ordered.

  “As you will, Admiral,” came back at him.

  For a long moment, nothing happened, and the face on the small screen was starting to get more skeptical than Whitebred wanted to see.

  Then the lights dimmed slightly as one or two lasers began to recharge their capacitors.

  “Sir, we’ve got a hull breach in hold seven,” came from off screen.

  “Damn, you do have guns!”

  “And if you don’t want our next shot to be through your bridge, get moving and prepare to be boarded.”

  “And then what?” the captain demanded. “I can still blow this ship to hell, myself.”

  “You will be taken care of. The planet we’re going to is a pleasant one. There will be plenty for you to enjoy in your retirement.”

  “Skipper, you wouldn’t really blow us up?” was also off screen.

  “I don’t know which fate is worse, dying now, or living under this SOB.”

  “But we’d still be living, sir. If you’re alive, things can change. If we’re all dead, that’s it.”

  The man on screen heaved a massive sigh. “Send your boarding party. We will not resist.”

  Whitebred had hand-chosen the men of his first boarding party from his most disciplined men and women. If one of the later ships got restive, he wanted to be able to call on this captain to say nice things about life under Admiral Horatio Whitebred.

  Of course, he didn’t have a lot of disciplined folks among his crew. No doubt the second and later ships might find their boarding parties more rowdy and fun-loving.

  One by one the ships came through the jump. One by one they found themselves under the guns and forced to make hard choices. The captains of the first ship loaded with sleeping farmers begged Whitebred not to shoot.

  “Every inch of my hull is full of humanity.”

  Whitebred didn’t tell the begging skippers how happy he was not to shoot. He didn’t tell them how much he wanted those sleeping workers for his own farms and drug plantations.