Family Law 2: The Long Voyage of the Little Fleet

by Mackey Chandler

  The planet was laid on its side almost aligned with its orbit, so it took a long burn and an unusual maneuver to take up a retrograde orbit opposite its natural satellites. If the Badger ships that put a radio beacon on one of the ice moonlets had hung around they were lost among the other bodies and not radiating anything to make them stand out.

  "Here we are," Gordon noted, waving at the forward view screens. "Do you want to call anybody or do anything to get this show on the road?" he asked Trader and Talker.

  "We have no control. Fire freely on anything emitting an artificial signal. We've taken pains to post notices there would be a live fire exercise."

  "Sounds fine to me," Gordon agreed. "Brownie, Thor, if it squawks kill it. You are weapons free." He leaned back in his acceleration couch and smiled at Lee. She raised a single skeptical eyebrow at his theatrical ease.

  "I am weapons free," Thor acknowledged formally.

  They coasted along ballistic for another twenty minutes, Gordon closed his eyes, hooked his middle arms in the safety harness and crossed his true arms. By all appearances he might have been sleeping. They didn't have to wait long.

  "Signal coming over the horizon," Brownie announced. "Ninety millimeter wavelength. Range is extreme, two point three million kilometers." Gordon's eyes popped open. The main screen showed the potential target with a pale green circle around it.

  "Paint it for surface detail," Thor instructed. "Closing rate and acceleration?"

  "Mark...Pinged him, details in fourteen seconds. Closing rate approximately forty three kilometers a second. Target is on a lower orbit. The screen split and the left side showed all the vectors in a simplified schematic that didn't try to mimic scale or visual reality. "Target lead will increase significantly as we close. Radar says target is an ice ball of medium density. Not dressed, but no tumble, your typical irregular potato shape. No hard return from artificial structures."

  "Come to one tenth G for stability. Set ship attitude to auto control for peashooter, release full auxiliary reactor control to auto and load small round. Auto-fire three rounds for intercept at one point six million miles," Thor instructed, "load next round, but wait for confirmation of miss or impact."

  There was a few seconds delay and the ship lurched with the shot.

  "Target accelerating, point six three G. First shots will miss," Brownie announced.

  "Time delay from our hard ping to acceleration?" Thor asked.

  "A bit over twelve seconds," Brownie supplied.

  "Fire again for the current acceleration to remain constant," he ordered. The shot went off before he could say anything else. "Fire another round assuming the target acceleration to cease at same time interval it took to activate."

  There was about a three second delay and it shot again.

  "Fire lastly four assuming acceleration will double at same time interval as the first one."

  Again after a slight delay it fired again.

  "Reload, but hold fire," Thor said. They all watched the main screen silently.

  "Strike! We hit him with shot three. Pinging him again," Brownie paused. "Target is reduced by about a third in cross-section. He has acquired a spin. No further acceleration," Brownie announced.

  "We nicked him. Finish it off assuming he will maintain the present velocity. Send a ping timed to paint it after the hit." The ship lurched again.

  After another pause Brownie reported, "Hard hit, no substantial portion of target remaining. I have one small return that must be the remains of the drive they used."

  "Nice try, maneuvering to avoid fire," Gordon complimented them. "As you see there is an art to it. You can shoot at where you think they may jink," he said, demonstrating an abrupt change of direction with his hand. "It can be an interesting contest of minds."

  "It may not be so easy against a real manned ship," Trader said dubiously.

  "Oh, I don't know," Thor told him. "I saw Gordon lay three war shots on an empty sky and jump out. We weren't even around to watch and he bagged the USNA deep space battle platform Florida when they jumped into the Fargone system smack into the missiles Gordon left behind for them. He didn't even have a radar return off the Florida to help him guess, because she was still light years away. He just guessed where she'd show up jumping in."

  "What is a deep space battle platform?" Talker asked.

  "About a half trillion USNA Dollars of starship, before loading it out, at least eight, maybe ten times the mass of this one, a crew of about two hundred and enough weaponry to engage a substantial fleet or to reduce a hostile planetary surface," Thor explained.

  Talker and Trader looked at each other. There was an exchange, but too subtle for the Derf or Humans to read. "A crew of two hundred of which of your races? A mix like you folks? And what do you mean by reduced?" Trader asked.

  "Target!" Brownie interrupted. "Emitting on a different frequency. Much higher orbit, no, correction, making a high speed pass above orbital velocity, headed insystem. Higher than us. Pinging them for surface details. Twenty seconds for a read on them." Everybody waited silently.

  "Hull matches the first Biter contact we had here," Brownie informed him.

  "Voice contact. The Biters inform us they protest electronic aggression. They seem to have a pretty recent version of the Trade translation software. They protest our 'ping' caused them interference. They called it a pulse. Our computer corrected them and is offering a translation upgrade."

  "Inform them we are engaged in a live fire demonstration exercise for the Badgers and it was made known locally. If they just jumped in they almost played target by accident. We know what they are now so we won't fire on them," Gordon concluded.

  "The Biter vessel informs us this target shoots back and makes several untranslatable comments about the diet, nesting habits and lack of genealogical history of the High Hope's crew," the translation program informed them.

  "Computer, would you characterize the statements as cursing?" Gordon asked.

  "There is a probability of seventy to seventy seven percent that any one portion of the statement is negative, due to single matching words and short phrases such as, grass eater, nest fouling and fatherless. However they do not rationally apply to live birth mammals and omnivores. The probability they are a form of cursing in the aggregate approaches unity however."

  "Brownie, at what power level did you ping the Biters?" Gordon asked.

  "Fifteen percent, sir."

  "Do they have any radar emissions beside their radio communications?"

  "Indeed, they do sir, at a much shorter wave length."

  "Paint them very tightly at full available power and run the frequency through a range that covers both their radio and radar," Gordon ordered.

  "Aye sir, rolling ship to bring sufficient emitters on line of sight," Brownie warned. They felt the ship twist under them. "Bringing auxiliary reactor back up and temporarily diverting power from non-essentials." The lights actually dimmed and a lot of amber lights appeared on the control consoles. Brownie was following his orders with enthusiasm. Using every watt to be had.

  "Painting target. Full frequency shift will take eighteen seconds," Brownie warned. Then the lights came back up to full brightness and several people reported clean start up on environmental systems as well as from the galley and other weapons systems. "No damage, no cross feed on newly installed systems, our radar feeds are all within safe temperatures." Brownie reported.

  "What was the point of all that?" Talker asked.

  "Just to teach them to be polite. I'd already promised not to fire on them," Gordon explained, "so I just took a very hard look at them with our radar."

  Lee spoke up. "Talker, at this range our radar won't burn a hole through their hull, but I doubt they have much left in the way of electronics that are functional. You might let your people in system know that they may need rescued if they don't have life boats, or at least a lot of wire and spare parts."

  Talker and Trader looked at each other but said nothing
.

  "And as far as your previous question," Lee spoke up, "the Florida likely carried a crew of all Humans. The North Americans have a very bad attitude about aliens and they don't like out-world Humans like me much better. When Thor says they could reduce a planetary surface he basically means reduce them to a state they couldn't resist an outside force. It depends on how hard they resisted what that would entail. It might be as easy as removing any weapon sites capable of firing on orbiting ships, or it might mean removing spaceports or even all visible cities. In the extreme I suppose it could mean reducing the entire surface to an uninhabitable state. We would very strongly disapprove of that. Nobody has ever done it and I hope nobody is ever stupid enough to do it, because what goes around comes around."

  "That's a new English phrase to us," Talker told Lee, "but it translates, no it actually transliterates, very well to Badger. It's quite an old proverbial saying."

  "Good, then you understand exactly," she agreed, satisfied.

  Chapter 19

  The Sharp Claws, Dart and Roadrunner formed up and lifted away from the cluttered equatorial plane of the gas giant with all its moons, rings and odd pieces of debris before turning to make a jump run for the next star. Two more systems to transverse, numbers 66, 67, and 82, then they'd be back to 80 and the fleet. They were an hour and a half into their run, nothing untoward happening, no communication from the Bill station when the com tech on the Sharp Claws called out on the open common channel.

  "Entry radiation! It's on a line from a system we haven't visited," Einstein the com tech called out. The chart says there isn't much there, so they probably just passed through it,"

  "What else is out that way?" Captain Frost asked.'

  "The Cats system and beyond them a Biter world," the tech answered.

  "The Cats don't run their own ships, so I'll bet that is their ride coming for the Biters on the Bill's station," Frost speculated. "May the Bills have the joy of explaining their dead comrades. Especially because I suspect they were left there just to ambush us."

  "Assuming there weren't other Biters to tell them on station , unseen," Chance pointed out.

  The Dart was in the circuit, but they didn't comment on his speculation.

  "Will they dock before we jump out?" Frost asked.

  "Another entry right behind them!" Einstein announced.

  The com tech. then bounced the data to the navigator to answer Frost. "No, we'll be gone. But they will see we are gone from station scan. It updated about every six minutes, and we hardly left on good enough terms to ask them to edit us out. Are you concerned they will change course and follow us? We are so close to jump we may not be in-system long enough to see it if they do divert from the station to follow us."

  "Not at all. The strong impression I am getting is that the Bills are of a different nature than the Badgers we've come to know better. They seem," Frost hesitated and seemed to be having trouble finding words, "much more risk adverse," he finally decided. "I can't imagine them saying anything about what happened until the Biters are docked and then they will probably try to act stupid and say: Who? It will be way too late to try to catch up with us by then."

  There was the huffing sound on the circuit that they'd come to recognize as Badger laughter. "You are learning things for yourselves we'd really rather not tell you, because it might seem prejudiced. I see a lot better words listed on the translator screen. But that was so polite. The Bills can rise to physical bravery. Look at the Captain who rammed the Bitter ship. But you are correct that if you have to bet on what reaction you will get from a Bill under stress, the likeliest response will be to avoid conflict and put off a reckoning as long as possible ."

  * * *

  "That isn't just radar, it's a weapon in itself!" Talker said, shocked.

  "Anything can be a weapon," Gordon said with a shrug, "Our radar isn't a cost effective weapon compared to others. Get close enough and you wouldn't want to be in our exhaust cone when we fire the engines up either. But it would make a very awkward expensive weapon."

  "What would your radar do to a moonlet of ice like you just hit with the peashooter?" Trader asked.

  "I'm actually not sure. I don't know if anybody has tried it. It would depend on what frequency we set it and how narrow we focused the beam down. It might do anything from shatter it to slowly melt it and then boil it. I assume that you know that it takes a lot of power not just to not just heat water but to make it go through the phase changes?"

  Talker nodded acknowledgement.

  "I have no desire to sit running both reactors at max sucking down fuel for hours to melt a big-assed snowball,"

  "So you'd hope to shatter it?"

  "I see no practical reason to mess with it unless we needed a lot of water for some reason. I'll worry about this problem when we find somebody who makes spaceships out of ice. I believe my clan's freighter the Ruddy Rustic took on a full load of water to maximize their mass as much as possible one time, but I never did talk with the Captain to learn the details of how he took it aboard, or for that matter how he got rid of it if he let it freeze again. Since it turned out he didn't need it."

  "Why would anyone make a ship as heavy as possible?" Walker asked, suspiciously.

  "Well, we were at war with North America over some issues of law. We felt they had broken a treaty with us. They rather disrespected us too. Things were going rather badly for them. They had attacked our territory on Derfhome and lost that force and lost a rather large tonnage of shipping and military craft, both captured and destroyed. They sent a delegation to seek an end to hostilities, but they were so arrogant we didn't feel sure they would negotiate in good faith. They were so much larger than us they assumed they would prevail."

  "So we had a ship poised well outside the fringes of their star system to bombard their capital city if they refused to yield. If we'd tried to use some other more conventional weapons they might have intercepted and defeated them, so instead we determined we'd boost a ship straight in to impact their capital city at about twenty four thousand kilometers a second."

  "At that velocity coming straight in we really didn't think anybody could intercept it or even deflect it enough to matter. Even if you hit it with some weapon in the last seconds that much mass at such a velocity hitting the atmosphere above the city would do the job, even if you busted it and spread it out a little. But the majority of the continent and northern hemisphere of the planet would have been OK. We're not monsters to want to wipe out a big chunk of the planet, just to decapitate their government."

  "Decapitate," Talker said, feeling his throat with a telling gesture, "that's a new word. Is this a common tactic in your wars among yourselves?"

  "Decapitation of an adversary's command and control is a well known strategy, but that particular way of doing it has never been used. Still, I expect such a kinetic missile would rouse less anger in the other Earth nations than using, uh, other weapons I'd rather not talk about just yet."

  "This means we have yet to hear the worst," Talker told Trader.

  "Yes, but there is no way of making them unmet."

  "On the contrary. All you'd have to do is say go away and we would," Gordon told them.

  "If life were only so simple," Talker said. "Your culture, or cluster of cultures, is still expanding this way. Are all your different planets and nations going to respect it if we say – go away? And that still leaves us to deal with the Biters, who we thought were a problem." He sighed. "Who are undoubtedly aroused in their passions by having someone they can't bully. If you went away I wouldn't expect to find our dealings with them suddenly improved."

  "I can't speak for every nation and planet or corporation," Gordon admitted. "The two reps we brought along can speak for Fargone and Red Tree within certain limits. But the Little Fleet will never force themselves upon you unwanted."

  "No, we are not happy with some of the things revealed, but neither does it sound like these North Americans are somebody we'd rather deal with
. If you know something has negatives, that doesn't mean you jump into something else without looking. I don't mean to insult you, but you are more of a known quality than the others."

  "Oh, we have a saying that conveys that sentiment pretty much," Gordon agreed. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't". It's so well known that sometimes people just say, "Better the devil you know -" and figure the ancillary statement is obvious."

  * * *

  "I'd like return to the fleet straightaway now," Chance informed the others as they approached the jump point. "Not stopping for any but the direst necessity, so Gordon doesn't get the news about our conflict with the Biters and being kicked off the Bill's station from them first. I'm sure it will be made to sound like we were rampaging through their systems looking for trouble."

  "If he hasn't figured out the fine details of Badger and Bill psychology he has surely gotten the measure of the Biters. He won't be surprised if they begged for a butt whipping," Persevere said.

  "Indeed, and they know we are along as a moderating good influence," Fussy said from the Dart. The translation program didn't know what to do with a loud rude raspberry, but Fussy could guess.

  * * *

  "They want the equivalent of thirty two Earth days to get their act together and load up two ships to return with us to Fargone and New Japan," Prosperity reported. "Do you think that is reasonable, or should I ask a different time frame?

  Gordon didn't answer instantly, leaning back in his seat and scratching under his chin.

  "How long would it take us to outfit two ships to come here, if it was the Badgers who dropped in on us instead of the other way around?" Lee asked.

  "Lee has the right of it," Gordon decided. I'd be amazed if Humans weren't still talking about it instead of doing it at thirty two days. Does two ships mean the Bills are coming along?"