—Report, COMINT COMMUNICATIONS to Rannic Colby, Director COMINT, Cathandra, 22 Nov 6830
Kendric met Kathryn Ann MacDonald on the third day after the squadron re-entered T-space and left the Haven system. She was a pretty, dark haired woman in her late twenties, one of the Gael technicians who had elected to leave the VLCA in Alban orbit.
She had originally been a native of Stratham, which Kendric learned from her personnel records after Purcell informed him that she wanted an interview. What he'd read had interested him.
Stratham was a poor world whose inhabitants had only recently emerged from their long and bloody Dark Age in favor of industrialization when Alba's first interstellar ships found them. Stratham's ruling merchant lords had quickly recognized the benefits of trade and a growing technology and so had assimilated all they could of Alba's relatively advanced technology. This also meant that Stratham was assimilated, in turn, by Alba's growing Gael Cluster Confederation. With the population growth that inevitably followed Stratham's industrial revolution, the planet's single most important export became people. The poor soil of the small planet, never enriched by volcanic action or the effects of glaciers, could barely feed its original population. The excess went elsewhere within the Confederation, boosting the economies of the other Gael worlds by providing an endless supply of cheap labor.
Kathryn MacDonald's story was different from that of most Stratham emigrants, however. She had joined Alba's Confederation Militia four years before and been accepted for training in space communications. She had proven competent, and after cross-training in communications electronics, had been posted to the Naval Command base at Port Balmarin.
"It was two years ago that I met the man," she told Kendric in the rich and lilting burr that marked her as a native of the Stratham Highlands. "He approached me a' Balmarin, offering me a chance to train for deep-space communications."
She hesitated, glancing up at Kendric with something approaching fear in her dark eyes. "Go on," he encouraged her. "It's all right. You can tell me."
"Well, sir... it was a fantastic opportunity."
Her records showed that she had made the most of it, too. Kathryn had trained in phase polarization technology under Imperial instructors. Aided by the high recommendations of her instructors, she had been posted as maintenance technician aboard VLCA Alba.
"I'd served aboard the VLCA for about a year when the gentleman approached me again. On liberty at Port Balmarin, I was, when he came up tae me in a bar. And.. .and that's when he asked me if I could do him... favors."
"Is that when you decided he must be a spy?"
"I'm not sure when I guessed that, sir. What he asked was... Well, it did nae seem to be spyin'!"
Kathy had explained her duties to Kendric. The kilometer-wide antenna of a VLCA had to be aimed with incredible precision when beaming atemporal messages across the galaxy. Those messages were never handled by anyone with a security clearance of less than AA-Prime—TOG personnel, in other words. During those periods when no communications traffic was going out through the big dish, one of the tasks of maintenance personnel such as Kathy MacDonald was to test and calibrate the alignment tracking and target acquisition and the power modulation controls. This could only be done by actually linking with distant VLCA antennae, by transmitting null data "junk," meaningless lists of coded numbers that allowed technicians at either end of the network to adjust their controls with the precision necessary to ready the dishes for meaningful traffic when it came through.
"Wha' the gentleman asked me tae do, Captain, was slip things in among the junk. He gave me a list of certain specific TOG communications beacons. From time to time, he would hand me a coded tape, with instructions tae align wi' one of these special target stations next time I was calibratin' the dish. I would feed the tape through on the VLCA's transmission interface an' send it out mixed in wi' the junk."
"Very neat. Who were the recipients of these.. .transmissions... the KessRith?"
"No, Captain!" She looked as though he had just accused her of something starkly indecent. "The gentleman was as Human as you or me!" She leaned forward, lowering her voice. "He explained it a' to me once. He said it had tae do wi' the Underground an' the way they was smugglin' people out of TOG and into the Commonwealth.
"You have tae understand, Captain.. .1 was raised by a family wi' strong Jacobite leanings. We did nae care all that much for the Empire. My father always said, if people wanted tae leave and find a place for themselves in the Commonwealth, why shouldn't they? Anyway, the gentleman promised me there were no military secrets in what he was sending, nothing but freighter names and schedules and routes, approach codes and IDs, passwords, everything that was necessary for ships carrying people on the Freedom Road tae make it across the Commonwealth Frontier."
Kendric nodded encouragement. What Kathy said made sense and tied up some loose ends in the picture he had been forming of the Renegade Underground in recent weeks. An organization as vast and far-reaching as T.C. and Captain White had described—an underground capable of spiriting dissidents and political refugees off TOG-held worlds to safety within the Commonwealth—needed a sophisticated, fast, and secure communications network. It made sense that the Underground was, in fact, using TOG's own VLCA network by recruiting maintenance personnel and technicians like Kathy.
"I promise you, Captain, I did nae do it to hurt my ain people."
Kendric wondered momentarily whether Kathy's "ain people" were the Gaels or the natives of her own Stratham. After a moment's thought, he decided that the answer did not matter.
"So why did you come to me with this, Kathy?"
"Well, sir, you said over the intraship the other day tha' we were bound for the Commonwealth. It occurred to me that it was on the Freedom Road, so to speak."
"Yes."
"Well, Captain, I dinnae know what you have planned in the way of lettin' the Commonwealth Navy know we're comin'."
He grinned. "Let's just say that I was planning on letting the Teachdair live up to her name."
He had given considerable thought to just that question. TOG and the Commonwealth used radically different ship designs, and the problem of how the Gael Squadron was going to approach the Commonwealth without triggering an all-out defensive attack was a tricky one. Kendric had no desire to fend off waves of attacking Commonwealth fighters, while trying to explain that all they wanted to do was defect!
The Teachdair offered a possible solution. The Cingulum Class corvette's name translated as "messenger" in Gaelic, and it was Kendric's idea to use the patrol craft as a messenger of the squadron's intentions. A battleship suddenly dropping out of T-space into someone's star system was a definite threat and demanded retaliation. A lone corvette, however, would be unthreatening enough that the ships it approached should be willing to accept its surrender.
T.C. had told Kendric that TOG patrol craft frequently slipped across the Frontier, and so the Teachdair's defection would not seem unusual. The volunteers who manned her would explain the situation to their captors and arrange a meeting place—with safeguards for the Commonwealth force—where the Gael Squadron could approach. They would be suspicious, certainly, of a possible elaborate TOG trap to draw a Commonwealth squadron into battle, but Kendric thought that the possibility of capturing an Imperial battleship and light cruiser without a fight might be a rich enough prize to tempt the recipients of Teachdair's message.
"Oh, aye," Kathy said. "Well, Captain, it did occur to me tha' you might be able tae set somethin' up with the Commonwealth ahead of time."
"Such as?"
"Sir, if you could get me to an Imperial VLCA, I could transmit any message you wanted to give me to one of my auld beacon targets. It might'be tha' things would move a wee bit slicker tha' way."
"It looks damned big," Kendric said.
Kathy MacDonald leaned over his co-pilot's seat to peer out through the forward screen. "Well, sir, we know they cannae hae' more
than fifty or
sixty people aboard, a' told."
Kendric looked up at her. "Are you sure you can use a relay station for what you have in mind."
She grinned at him. "Wouldn't it be ae' a wee bit late now to discover tha' I was lyin'?"
He laughed. "I imagine so."
"Tha' instrumentation is exactly the same as VLCA Alba," she explained. "But all they do routinely is tae relay signals from one side ae th' Galaxy tae th' other."
They were in one of the Gael Warrior's cargo shuttles, approaching an Imperial VLCA. The work T.C. had done to catalogue information hidden away in the Warrior's data base had paid its richest dividend so far when the listing of TOG Galactic VLCAs had turned out to include codes keyed to the size of each station's crew complement. Though Kendric did not have the code to that list, he did have the list of communications stations within a thousand light years of Argrian, which they had taken from VLCA Alba when they'd fled the system. That list included a roster of crew complements and defensive forces on each station and each station's code. It had been a simple matter for the computer department to take both computer files, correlate them, and hand Kendric a list of certain VLCAs that probably would make easy targets for the squadron.
H-class arrays, for example, were found in out-of-the-way star systems off the main trade routes, in regions not threatened by enemy activity. Such stations had the usual complement of technicians, but fewer troops aboard, and were rarely protected by more than a flight or two of fighters stationed at a local base. For Kendric's purposes, R-class arrays were better still. These were relay stations set up at certain strategic points throughout the Galaxy, but especially above or below the galactic plane, "above" the Galaxy's central core. The Galactic hub was little understood even by the civilization that dominated most of ihe stars of the spiral arms around it. It was a place of complex and shifting gravity fields, of massed star clusters that warped the hyper-lopology of T-space, making travel difficult and communications impossible.
In their search, the Warrior's computer department had identified no fewer than seven R-class relays within the squadron's range. Range, here, was a vital consideration. There would be no source of reaction mass to refuel the squadron's ships at the relay point, so the station they chose had to be one that would allow the squadron to reach it, and still have enough reaction mass for it to jump back into the Galaxy to refuel. C )f the seven possible sites, one was close enough to make the scheme feasible: it was listed in the Warrior's code lists as VLCA XGALPOL-R/4.
A communicator signal chimed, and the shuttle's pilot seated to Kendric's left answered it. "Incoming TOG shuttle, VLCA-R/4 has you on final approach. You will be docking in Bay One. Standing by to take over shuttle control for docking."
"VLCA traffic control, this is shuttle. Ready to release control to you, at your command."
"Remote sequence initiated. We have you, shuttle."
The pilot hesitantly released his control yoke, then leaned back, looked at Kendric, and smiled. "They've got it from here on in."
The pilot was Sub-Lieutenant Randy Hays, the youngest shuttle-rated pilot Kendric could find in the Warrior's personnel files. This was a dangerous mission, one that required a shuttle pilot with a cool head and steady nerves. Kendric could not afford one who would become unnerved at the prospect of a sky empty of stars.
At Kendric's side, Kathy shivered.
"What's the matter?"
"N-nothing, Captain. It's just so...empty."
Gael's Bane.
Even Kendric felt the flutter of uneasiness in this place, as though he were about to fall into a great, vast deep. Here, high above the Galactic plane, space beyond the complex tangle of the relay station was utterly and completely empty. The brilliant navigational beacons and approach strobes on the VLCA's structure robbed men of night vision, rendering invisible the faint smudges of light that marked distant galaxies, even though Kendric knew they must be in the sky beyond the station somewhere. The sky visible aft was quite different, but Kendric didn't want to face that just now.
"Keep your eyes on the relay station," he advised. "It helps to have something to look at. Hays? How long?"
"We'll be docking in another five minutes, Captain."
"Good. I'm going below with the troops. Kathy, you stay put until I call for you." He raised his wrist and tapped the perscomp. "You'll hear me over this. You're our VLCA expert, and I don't want you getting shot by accident. Lieutenant, you have this buggy turned around and ready to boost."
"I'll be waiting, Captain!"
Kendric left the cockpit and descended a twisting, spiral ladder to the main cargo deck. Twenty men waited there on makeshift seats, armed and armored with weapons and gear taken from the Legionnaires who had stormed aboard the Warrior at Alba Port, just before their escape. They were under the command of Chief Trimble, a twenty-six-year veteran who had seen ground combat fighting bandits and rebels on Pomona and Uist.
"Set, Chief?"
"Just give the word, Captain. Are you sure you want to go out there first?"
"No sweat, Chief. " He drew a holstered Mark XXI power pistol from its locker and strapped it on. "Just like we planned it."
The squadron had broken out of T-space less than two light minutes from the relay station, broadcasting ID codes with the standard transponder signals that had been current at Trothas, but that might well be obsolete by now. Kendric's reasoning was that an organization as vast and far-flung as TOG's Imperial Navy was not going to get every ID code changed overnight. At a remote outpost such as VLCA XGALPOL-R/4, serviced by ships from equally remote, backwater worlds, the arrival of a squadron with up-to-date codes might be the exception rather than the rule.
Kendric had identified the squadron with the quite truthful statement that a renegade fleet unit had recently defeated an Imperial squadron at Gamma Sacculus and was believed to be en route to the Commonwealth. Battleship Squadron Caesar Rex, he said, had been dispatched to the vicinity of VLCA-R/4 to search for signs of the renegades and to guard the facility in the unlikely event that the renegades chose to strike here.
A cheerful voice had replied, "Haven't seen anybody since our last rotation, but you're more'n welcome! Haven't seen a new face in 247 days!"
"How big a crew do you have out here, anyway?"
"Fifty-two. Mostly our technical staff. Believe me, you start getting tired of hearing the same jokes real quick!"
"How many Marines?"
"Just ten. No need for more."
"Ten? Mmm...we might leave a few more, just in case."
"They're welcome. But we might want to raid your stores to help feed 'em. Say, you don't have any fresh fruit you could send across, do you? Lovalos, or, maybe some Terran oranges?"
Kendric had laughed. "I'll talk to my purser and see what we can do. I think I'd like to come across personally and inspect your facilities."
"Come on ahead. We'll dust off the red carpet for you."
Kendric had dressed in his best Imperial Navy full-dress uniform. It was black with silver trim, with a gold-edged scarlet half-cloak over his left shoulder. The Crimson Star rode at the throat against his stiff, high-necked collar, winking under the shuttle's overhead fluoros. The starkly utilitarian Mark XXI in its polished leather holster on his hip seemed out of place but was perfectly in keeping with his image as an Imperial Fleet Captain on a possibly dangerous mission. After all, it was distinctly possible that renegades had already captured the VLCA and were pretending to be isolated communications personnel in order to ambush a TOG fleet!
His plan was to show himself to the station staff, while taking a quick look to evaluate the shuttle's reception. If all appeared to be as advertised, he would give the word over his perscomp's transceiver, and his ad hoc assault team would storm the landing bay.
Otherwise, Kendric would improvise.
He checked the safety and power connections on his pistol one last time, then entered the shuttle's starboard airlock and sealed himself in. The plan called for him to
debark first. After all, it wouldn't do for someone standing on the landing bay deck to look into the shuttle's hold and see 20 armed and waiting men. The lock had no windows. He had to rely on Hays's occasional comments coming over the intraship to keep him posted.
"Almost there," Hays said. Kendric heard a whirr that he knew was the landing gear deploying. Then, came the words, "Entering the bay." There was a soft jar as the shuttle touched down, followed by the familiar fluttering feeling as the shuttle's artificial gravity died away in favor of the relay station's gravity. Minutes crawled then as the station closed the bay doors behind them and filled the landing bay with air.
A green light winked on above the lock. "Pressure's up, Captain," Hays said. "Reception committee is filing in. No surprises."
"Crack the lock then, Lieutenant."
"Right. Luck, Skipper."
The airlock swung open. A mobile boarding platform and ramp had been maneuvered up to the lock. As Kendric stepped carefully onto the platform, he saw his breath appear in cold, white puffs. This chamber had only moments ago been open to space, and the surfaces inside were still cold enough to chill the atmosphere and cause water to condense and freeze on metal surfaces. He stepped cautiously onto the ramp. If he slipped on an icy patch and fell flat on his back, it would not help the image of dignity and authority he was trying to project.
A trio of Imperial officers saluted as Kendric stepped on top of the deck, and a line of ten Marines in scarlet dress uniforms snapped to attention and presented arms. "Everything looks clear," he muttered, apparently to no one in particular. Behind him, the bow ramp on the shuttle began to cycle slowly open.
"Fleet Captain, welcome to our facility!" The small, balding Captain smiled broadly in greeting. "You are welcome, sir! I am Captain Ventura, commanding officer of this facility. This is my staff leader, Commander Halber, and my commandant of marines, Lieutenant Prost. If you'll come with me, we'll wander on down to the mess hall where..."
"Sorry, Captain," Kendric said with his biggest smile. He slipped the Mark XXI from its leather and centered it on Ventura's forehead. "There's been a change in the order of events. Now, if you'll come with me..."
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