Changing of the Guard (A Galaxy Unknown - Book 11)

by Thomas DePrima

  "We can't say with any surety. The almost imperceptible flutter in the vocal response could be suggestive of strong anger or could suggest he's lying. We've run the recordings through the computer repeatedly and the computer always says there's a seventy-eight percent chance he's telling the truth and twenty-two percent chance he's being less than honest whenever he talks about his work for the Denubbewa."

  "And you interpret that to mean…?" Admiral Woo said.

  "Well, he might have been involved in work he doesn't want us to know about, such as the extraction of brains for insertion into cyborg bodies, or perhaps he was charged with developing new weapons or defensive products, such as the Dakinium to clad their ships. The latter would have made it especially easy for him to steal a DS ship. He could have timed it so that as soon as the work was done, he collected his countrymen and absconded with the ship. It would have been much more difficult once the ship was fully manned and returned to active service. That would also support his claim that only a few of the cyborgs in the storage location were not his countrymen. They might have been security people or other drones whose minds had been so thoroughly wiped that they had no desire, or will, to escape."

  "So there's no way to ascertain that he's either lying or telling the truth about his work?" Admiral Burke, the head of SCI, asked.

  "No, sir, Admiral. Not from the tapes. Our next step is to begin interviewing the cyborgs we have in holding. And then we'll awaken the ones in the shipping containers and interview them. We don't know how they'll react to learning they're in our custody, so we'll be well armed when we activate them. If any resist, we'll do whatever we have to do to protect ourselves."

  "That goes without saying."

  "Yes, sir. I'm just saying that if we start shooting, it will only be because we believe it's necessary."

  "Yes, don't risk your lives. There are lots of cyborgs. If a few are destroyed in the process, no one will mourn the loss."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Captain," Admiral Burke said, "do you have a list of prepared questions, or are you going to wing it?"

  "We have a long list of prepared questions so we can compare answers afterward. But we may also ask questions that arise from the responses of the cyborgs. By the time we're done, we hope to have a complete picture of exactly what went down."

  "If all their testimonies match up?"

  "No, if all their testimonies are identical, we'll know they're lying because they rehearsed their answers."

  "But they're robots. Shouldn't the stories be identical?"

  "If they were robots, perhaps. But they're cyborgs. They have biological brains in those tin-can bodies. And biological brains usually record different impressions of the same events."

  * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  ~ May 6th, 2291 ~

  Knowing that the Denubbewa had Dakinium-sheathed ships kept the bridge crew of every ship in the three squadrons staring at the stars, expecting to see the lights from distant stars wink out occasionally as a Denubbewa ship passed between them and their ship. But everything appeared normal as they traversed new areas of their assigned territory day after day.

  Christa was working in her office when she received a message from the Com Chief.

  "Captain, you just received an encrypted message. It's from the Ottawa."

  "That's Commander Kalborne's ship. Send it to my queue."

  "You have it, Captain."

  Christa leaned back in her oh-gee chair to listen to the message.

  "Commander. We've arrived at our designated patrol area and begun searching. I'm sending notification messages to Commander Ashraf and Commander Fareman as well. Happy hunting. Burl Kalborne, Commander, Captain of the Ottawa. End of message."

  "Short and sweet," Christa muttered before returning to the log entry she had just started.

  ~ ~ ~

  Six days later, The Koshi received another message from the Ottawa. Christa was on the bridge but she went to her office to listen to the message.

  "Commander, we've picked up a Denubbewa warship with our sensors. It's under power and traveling at Light-480. We've been following it for a short time now, as per orders, and we've intercepted a message that we believe was sent by the Denubbewa. It's encrypted and we can't translate it, but we have a fix on the direction of the transmission. My orders state you're the senior officer among the four squadrons and have been officially designated as the mission coordinator, so I'm reporting the matter to you and requesting instructions. Do we continue to follow the Denubbewa ship or break off and try to determine if the message came from a mothership? Awaiting your orders. Burl Kalborne, Commander, Captain of the Ottawa. End of message."

  "Message to Commander Burl Kalborne of the GSC Ottawa in Region Three, from Commander Christa Carver aboard the GSC Koshi.

  "Do not break off contact with the Denubbewa ship. You're the first among us to locate a Denubbewa ship under power. We can't afford to lose it. Send a pair of your CPS-16s to see if the new information yields any results. Keep me apprised of any developments.

  "Good work.

  "Christa Marie Carver, Commander, Captain of the GSC Koshi. End of message."

  After telling the com chief to send the message, Christa sat back in her chair to think. A Denubbewa ship without Dakinium sheathing was a surprise after all the months spent searching for the Denubbewa without success, finally leading to the now erroneous conclusion that all of the Denubbewa ships were as invisible to normal sensors as were the Space Command ships. She wondered how many more might not be sheathed.

  ~ ~ ~

  The days passed slowly because the crew of the Koshi never spotted another ship of any sort. They were far from the most traveled trade routes, but this was where many of the sighting reports had come from a year earlier.

  ~ ~ ~

  Nine days after receiving the message from the Ottawa, another arrived. The single word 'JACKPOT' preceded a set of coordinates.

  Christa immediately sent a set of rendezvous coordinates to Ashraf, Kalborne, and Fareman. The RP she established was about a million kilometers from the coordinates Kalborne had sent, and she estimated it would take about eight days for all four squadrons to rendezvous.

  ~ ~ ~

  The Ottawa squadron and the Khatanga squadron were at the RP when the Koshi squadron arrived. The Seeker squadron was expected in a few hours. After ordering four CPS-16s to picket duty, Christa invited Fareman and Kalborne to join her aboard the Koshi.

  "Welcome aboard, gentlemen," Christa said as the two commanding officers stepped off the shuttle she had sent to pick them up.

  "Thank you, Commander," Commander Kalborne said.

  Fareman repeated the salutation.

  "Your message was most welcome, Burl. My crew is excited that we're finally going to see some action."

  "Christa, you're not going to believe what we've found. My people say they couldn't believe their eyes. It's a smorgasbord of Denubbewa ships. The reason we couldn't locate any is because they've all been here getting new outer skins of Dakinium applied. That must be why there were so many reported sightings. The Denubbewa leadership must have ordered all ships in the region to rendezvous here for the modifications. Some have been completed, many are partially completed, and on some the work hasn't begun yet and are simply sitting there waiting for their turn. My CPS-16 captains took a number of images when they first arrived at the location and then made several more passes because the assembled fleet is so enormous."

  "Were your ships spotted?"

  "Negative. They flew through at Marc-One, just as if they were planting bombs."

  "Did you bring the copies of the images?"

  "I sure did. And I can't wait to show them to you and Walt."

  "Wait until Lori gets here so she can share in the excitement. She shouldn't be too much longer. Let's go to my office and have some coffee while we wait."

  "We should be toasting with champagne."

  "Uh, let's wait until the fighting
is over and we know the final score."

  ~ ~ ~

  Commander Ashraf arrived about three hours later aboard a shuttle from her ship. The Koshi's first officer escorted her to the Captain's office and the officers spent a few minutes renewing old acquaintances before getting down to business. Christa invited her XO to remain.

  Kalborne set his viewpad so the images would be displayed on the large monitor facing Christa's desk. As the first images appeared, everyone's jaw dropped while Kalborne chuckled. There weren't dozens of ships in the images, and there weren't hundreds of ships. There were thousands of ships in the images.

  "I don't see any motherships," Christa said. "How can there be this many warships and no motherships?"

  "They're there," Kalborne said. "They're simply covered with Dakinium so the normal sensors don't show them and the imaging equipment doesn't pick them up. Give me just a second here."

  Half a minute later, after he had entered some data, Kalborne tapped a key on the viewpad and an off-color image showed a dozen motherships as a CPS-16 performed a flyby.

  "Good Lord," Fareman said. "Look at all of those motherships. They could almost form their own solar system. But how can we see them now if they're sheathed in Dakinium?"

  "A new gizmo developed by Admiral Plimley's people. They call it a Neutrino Measurement Sensor. I understand they nearly busted a gut getting it ready before we deployed. In the end, we actually had to delay our deployment by three weeks so they could install the new sensors in all our ships. The modifications are all internal and we brought enough for all our ships. But— it will probably take a few weeks for the engineers to install and test them. The question is: Do we wait until the new sensors are installed or start bombing the hell out of the Denubbewa tomorrow?"

  "We wait," Christa said, "and prepare ourselves properly." We all need to be able to see the ships that have already been sheathed, both motherships and warships, but the motherships must be our first attack priority. Each one of them is equal in importance to a hundred warships because they're the glue that holds the Denubbewa fleet together. We must make sure that none of those motherships ever leaves this location. Even limping away is unacceptable. They must be destroyed."

  "Okay. Should we remain here or move a bit further away to complete the installation work?"

  "Since we really should have the new device working in every ship before we attack and it's going to take several weeks to accomplish the installation, let's move to a different location. I'd say a light-year should be adequate to keep any stray Denubbewa patrols from spotting us."

  ~ ~ ~

  "This conversion is taking much too long," Christa said to her XO during their morning briefing.

  "I guess it takes as long as it takes, Captain. The engineers are doing the best they can. I've visited several of our ships where the captains expressed a similar sentiment. Commander Kalborne did say the installation delayed their deployment by several weeks. And that was with shipyard engineers who perform these repetitive activities every day. The experience of our engineers is a lot more general because they're responsible for everything in the ship, and they're sort of feeling their way along with this new equipment."

  "By the time they complete this conversion they'll be professionals at this task. And I really don't think a few extra weeks will make any difference. Based on the number of ships we saw waiting to be sheathed by the Denubbewa, they're going to be at it for a couple of years."

  "I know. I'm just afraid that every completed ship will be sent out on assignment. We could soon have hundreds of ships out there that no one except us can sense. And the instructions that came with the sensors say they're only effective up to ten kilometers."

  "That's not a whole lot of range. I wonder what we'll see beyond the ten kilometers."

  "Probably either static or nothing. Admiral Plimley's people aren't prone to exaggeration. If they say it's good up to ten kilometers, I wouldn't expect any useful information beyond the specified limit."

  ~ ~ ~

  "We're ready at last," Christa announced to the small fleet of CPS-16s via a teleconference using encrypted RF transmission to control the distribution of the message. "I'm sure no one expected it would take seven weeks to install the new sensors, but we'll all be able to see the Denubbewa ships now, especially the ones that have already been sheathed in Dakinium. Remember that the sensors are not effective beyond ten kilometers, so at the speeds we'll be traveling during the bombing runs, you won't see the target until the last second. Fortunately, those motherships are so enormous that they're hard to miss. We must take out the motherships first. Once they're destroyed, we'll concentrate on the warships that have already been sheathed. With our double envelopes in place, we don't have to worry about our ships hitting any of the enemy ships or each other. So just concentrate on sending those mothers to the scrap pile.

  "Since we've been away from the battle site for so long and the ships there may have shifted positions, one of my CPS-16s will make a surveillance run before we all go in. It will enable us to plan our attack runs on the targets before we actually get there. All ships will be able to view the images produced by the scout before they start their run.

  "We'll do this in four attack groups. Since we owe the find to the Ottawa squadron, they will have the honor of the first kills. After they complete their pass, the Khatanga squadron will make their run. Then the Seeker squadron, and lastly my Koshi squadron. Once my squadron is clear of the battle site, the Ottawa will commence its second run, and so on until either every Denubbewa ship is destroyed or we're out of bombs. Remember, the Dakinium-clad ships are the highest priority, with the motherships being the targets we most want to destroy.

  "We'll now move to the assembly area we occupied when we first arrived in the neighborhood seven weeks ago and the scout will perform the flyby to verify the motherships haven't altered their position.

  "Good luck and good shooting.

  "Carver out."

  The one hundred ships headed for the assembly area with the Ottawa squadron in the lead. The new Neutrino Measurement Systems worked great. Every ship was able to see every other ship that was within the ten-kilometer range so there would be little danger of collisions when they arrived at their destination if they dropped their envelopes. Upon arrival, Christa issued the order for the selected ship, the Karl Linne, to fly through the battle site with its cameras running. As it completed its run and prepared to return, the first images were arriving at the assembly area.

  "Where are the targets?" Christa muttered. There wasn't a single Denubbewa ship visible in any of the images.

  "Karl Linne, this is the Koshi. You must be at the wrong location. There are no ships in the images."

  "Our sensors say this is the right location, Commander. We don't see a single ship anywhere."

  "That can't be. There were thousands of enemy ships at the battle site. Check your navigation again."

  "My navigator has checked it and rechecked it. This is the site. And our eyes tell us there are no ships here."

  "Good grief," Christa mumbled to herself. "I've just lost the largest enemy fleet in history."

  ~

  After each of the other squadrons had sent a ship to the battle site to confirm the location information, the navigators got busy and used the stars to compute their position, just in case the installation of the new sensor equipment was disrupting the other equipment. The visual verification results from four navigators confirmed that the equipment was reporting the position correctly.

  "What now, Captain?" XO Mollago asked.

  "Now we separate into squadrons and each search a quadrant emanating out from this location. They can't have gotten too far. The non-DS-sheathed vessels are limited to Light-480."

  "But non-DS-sheathed vessels will probably move inside the DS sheathed motherships, which can travel at speeds up to Marc-One."

  "But the motherships can only attain Light-9790 if they haven't yet learned about Marc-One and learned ho
w to manipulate the power fluctuation."

  "Shouldn't we assume they have and start our search at the maximum range?"

  "You're just full of encouragement today," Christa said with a wry smile.

  "I'm sorry, Captain. I'm trying to be realistic."

  "I know. I'm trying to be optimistic, but I'm fighting an uphill battle. You're right, we should assume the worst. I keep berating myself for taking the time to install those new sensors."

  "You can't hit what you can't see."

  "Perhaps I should have allowed the Ottawa squadron to take out the motherships when we first got here."

  "But then the other ships would have scattered and we would have lost the opportunity to destroy the better part of that enormous fleet."

  "Yes, but as it is we've lost the chance to destroy any part of that enormous fleet."

  "It's too big to hide. We'll find them again."

  "I hope so. If the warships all enter the motherships to travel to a new location, we won't be able to pick up the warships that haven't been sheathed yet. And we can only sense the Dakinium-sheathed ships if they're within ten kilometers. In space, ten kilometers is like a grain of sand drifting in an ocean of black water."

  ~ ~ ~

  After several weeks of searching, not a single Denubbewa vessel had been spotted. Christa was about as depressed as she could ever remember being. She blamed herself for losing the Denubbewa fleet. She called the squadron commanders together for a meeting aboard the Koshi.

  "It seems pointless to keep searching here," Christa said. "The Denubbewa fleet escaped us this time. They could be hiding out there eleven kilometers away from the course we're following and we'd never spot them. So I've decided we'll resume searching the areas assigned to each of us by Second Fleet HQ. Perhaps one of us will get a lead like the Ottawa did if we're not all clustered in one small part of Region Three."

  "I wish I'd never mentioned the new sensors," Commander Kalborne said. "Then we might have attacked them when we first located them."