It took him a second and quick twist of his wrist to free himself from her grasp as she yelped in pain. Commander Hutton rushed into the room with a Krager in hand. He was ready to shock dart her into submission but found it unnecessary. The Karduan Lady staggered back to her seat and sat down as she sobbed in sorrow. Mike wanted to approach her to check and see if she was all right but Hutton grabbed him by the arm and quickly dragged him out of the room.
“What the hell was that all about?” Gunny exclaimed as they entered the security center.
Mike shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me!”
“Talk about a dog in heat!” Bachman declared, downloading the interview’s recording and playing it back for them.
Everyone sat down and quietly watched the brief but strange encounter for a second time. After the vid was over, the questions started to fly.
“What do you think?” Hutton asked Bre-Nan, speaking over the chorus of voices.
The Blue looked pained. “I have never seen such behavior from a great lady of a noble House.”
“Why did she grab me?” Mike asked.
“She was trying to perform a deep probe on you but it looks as if she failed,” the Karduan said, pointing to the monitor as it showed Siel-Ca stumble back to her seat.
Doc Beilor had run a medical scanner over Collins while the vid was being replayed and she looked down at his readings. “You’re fine, practically in the same shape as when you went in there.”
“How can we be sure that she didn’t get past his block?” Bachman asked, looking from Mike to the Blue.
The Blue leaned down and looked into Mike’s gray eyes.
“Did you feel anything like a pain in your head or a dizziness?”
Collins shook his head, meeting his probing eyes with a steadfast stare. “Nope, I didn’t feel anything at all.”
“She was unable to break into his mind,” the Karduan declared, standing up. From such an experience as a deep probe, he knew there would have been great pain, paralysis, and at the very least increased eye movement maybe even broken blood vessels in his eyes.
He had never had a deep probe, but his childhood friend had and it had left him in a coma for two weeks. After that, he was never the same. What was truly sad was that it was over a missing container of food, which later turned up as simply being misplaced.
“What was that whole thing of how we smell about?” Officer Eric Wayne interjected.
“Pheromones,” Doc Beilor announced, drawing everyone’s attention to her image on the screen.
“Huh?” Mike said, making a face as the word registered with him.
“Smells and odors that our bodies emit to attract potential mates. In humans, they are very subtle whereas in animals they can be so strong they drive the opposite sex into a reproductive cycle,” she explained, sounding a little like a high-school biology teacher.
The room broke out into a small round of chuckles.
“So he smells good,” Hutton commented, joining the others in a good laugh at the young officer’s expense.
“What did she say?” Bachman asked.
“Like the flowers of her home planet,” Masters answered.
Mike liked a good laugh as well as the next man but this was getting out of hand and the last thing he need was a nickname like “Flower Boy” or “Smells Good Guy.”
“All right, knock it off! If I hear one comment from anyone outside of this room, there will be hell to pay!” Collins threatened, letting his Irish temper get the best of him.
“No harm done and we will all drop it,” Hutton agreed sounding serious and not wanting to push the joke too far or to upset the young man into taking action.
“So she might be attracted to Lt. Collins against her will?” Bre-Nan asked, having remained quiet as the others laughed. His mind was racing; if the males of his people had such a smell, then they would no longer be slaves to their own women.
Doc Beilor pointed to the view screen at the image of the great lady softly crying. “Possibly or she might be playing an elaborate game with us.”
This gave them all something to think about and even more bewilderment.
“What about the two guardswomen? They didn’t seem all that attracted to Mister Collins when he was in there with them,” Gunny pointed out.
A series of mumbled agreements answered his question but this time Commander Hutton spoke up first.
“The guardswomen don’t have telepathy. It could be that her instincts or even the same senses that gives her telepathy also sense something in Mister Collins. Perhaps the same thing that makes him a Psi Void makes him exceptionally attractive to her.”
“Great, a woman finally thinks I’m hot and she turns out to be an evil alien princess bent on enslaving all of mankind,” Mike joked, a little closer to the truth than he would have liked.
The meeting broke up on that final laugh with Hutton asking everyone present to keep quiet about their theories. They were each to come up with a written list of their impressions as well as a course of action for what they did know.
They were just days away from leaving the ‘Hole in the Wall’ when Mike left the Captain’s day cabin with a smile on his face. He had approached the old man with an idea, which he had spent countless hours working on to prepare for Hope’s scrutiny. His plan was to lash the three pirate derelicts together before they left and leave ten of the repair robots behind to work on them. They would also leave the Pay Dirt behind, which would serve as a base of operations.
They really hadn’t needed any parts from the old ships and had left them virtually alone. They had collected foodstuff, personal items, as well as salvaging small arms and missile stores from the various ships. They had also taken the torpedoes and the Wasp fighters from the sloops and a mini four-man shuttle from the freighter.
Both of the sloops had hull damage but were still structurally sound. The Cassidy had the worst breeches but it was nothing that couldn’t be patched up with enough time and a little effort. She also needed one of her atmosphere wings repaired along with her missing fuel scoop and her lost weapons’ turrets.
The Sundance’s hull was in overall better condition but she had a smashed bow and a large hull breech to her bridge. Her engines were already operational having been brought back to life by Chief Petty Officer Watts and Mister Cappilo. They had managed to restart the engines when they had first boarded the ship looking for supplies and had since restored the vessel’s life support systems to its undamaged sections. It was then that Mike first started thinking about his plan.
The Joseph Priestly was not likely to fly again. Her engines were totally shot and without a shipyard or a replacement engine she was, as they say, “dead in the water.” Mike believed that if he brought the three derelicts together, then the repair robots could strip off the hull plating from the Priestly and patch the hulls of the Cassidy and the Sundance.
They could use the Pay Dirt and the restored power plant of the Sundance to power the repair operations. The shuttle was too big to take along unless they put it in one of their cargo bays. They already had the Huge Sky Train shuttle, the four Wasps and two Saber fighters. They also had the frame of the third Saber that had been used as parts for the other two. Commander Hutton’s grav car was on board and of course, they had the Carronade armored grav carrier.
In addition, they had taken from the Joseph Priestly a four–man mini shuttle, which someone, “Mister Cappilo” had dubbed the Tom Thumb. Mike didn’t know if he named it after the folktale about the small boy or after the 1830 steam train built by American inventor Peter Cooper. Knowing Cappilo, he was sure that it was named after the former rather than the latter.
Mike’s plan included programming the robots to strip the hull plating from the Joseph Priestly to use to repair the sloops. They could also remove the Priestly’s defensive gun turrets consisting mostly of missile turrets and a pair of older fusion cannons. They had some leftover gauss cannon turrets in storage from their repairs of the Wolf
, which they would also leave behind. The robots could to varying degrees work on the interior of the ships, repair missing walls, flooring and even bulkheads. The big problem was fabricating a new nose for the Sundance as well as a ram scoop and wing for the Cassidy. Their repair robots couldn’t make these last two items.
Dover, Cappilo and Daley all thought it was a good idea for what amounted to little real cost. All three of his friends had agreed to help with manufacturing, ship moving or the reprogramming of the robots and computers. He had already run the idea past Richards who gave it his approval to take to the captain. His argument would be that having two more warships even though admittedly small and older ones could still be useful in the future.
Hope listened to his proposal without so much as a smile or any real facial expressions. When the young officer was finished, the Hawk simply nodded his gray head and said, “Proceed.”
For the next three days, they rushed to complete preparations. They kept CPO Watts and the base machine shop’s team busy constructing the plating for the wing and the bow sections. The intricate ram scoop would take the most time and the Wolf’s machine shop headed by CPO Bell would be in charge of its creation. Soon the base and ship teams were in a friendly if heated competition to see who could get their assignment done first.
While they readied for departure the Padre and the engineering team announced that the Wolf’s engines had passed all of their tests and were now deemed sound and fully operational. The spinal mount particle cannon had completed all of its diagnostic and systems checks and was waiting for a live fire test.
Mike was waiting to watch the testing from the bridge of the Cassidy. His team had managed to move the two sloops together and activate their magnetic docking clamps to hold them in place. Lt. Dover and a second team were even now towing the Joseph Priestly around the debris field.
They had attached towlines from the Pay Dirt and the Sky Train to the old freighter's bow and had placed directional thrusters on her stern. Once alongside they would magnetically clamp her to the sloops so that the repair robots could strip her of hull plating and gun turrets.
The repair teams had already restored life support to the Cassidy and a full engine startup was but a few hours away. The Wolf was on her way past the sloops and had dropped off the extra gauss cannons as well as the new ram scoop. Chief Watts' team had lost the race by only a few hours and they would be pulling Chief Bell's section's mess duties for the next month. Once the ram and nose were installed they would try hard to concentrate on systems that only a human operator could fix and leave the manual labor repairs to the robots.
The repair robots were busy cutting off the Sundance's blunted bow having already sealed her hull breeches to the bridge. Once it proved airtight, they would restore life support to the bridge and survey how bad her control systems were damaged.
Martin had been busy reprogramming the robots to work independently. They were given a long list of prioritized tasks to be accomplished without daily guidance. He also set up repair protocols for the robots to do self-diagnostics and routine maintenance on each other. Mike had picked his ten best robots to be left behind and could only hope they wouldn't run into unforeseen difficulties.
Sitting in the captain’s chair of the Cassidy didn't faze him as it once did. The first time he sat in the Wolf's center seat he felt the great weight of command and found that it was a lonely feeling. Now he sat coordinating various aspects of the operation without the burden of self-doubt he once had. Captain Hope and Commander Richards had drilled him and schooled him until he felt at ease being the commanding officer. It was no different than his small unit command training except he controlled not a squad or a platoon but an entire attack cruiser.
The sloop was no different, just a smaller ship. As he sat in the ship big chair, a damage control team was currently replacing burned-out relays apparently damaged by a system’s fire.
Mike sat and wondered, as people labored at the helm panel and as reports came in from the engine room, if he could talk Captain Hope into extending their stay another week. If he had ten or even seven days he was confident that the Cassidy might be made space-worthy. It was a nice thought, but the Hawk had made it clear that after the test-fire of the spinal cannon they would be leaving to hunt. The sloops were just a side project, one that would have to be completed at a later date.
"Captain," a voice said, which caused Mike to look to the door. "Captain, the Wolf is in position and is signaling that she is about to fire the spinal cannon," Chief Bell reported from the recently repaired communications station.
Mike looked to the glowing red eye of the old chief as he realized that he was calling him captain. Nodding, he said, "Acknowledge their message and wish them luck." With the life support restored he had taken his space suit's helmet off and had turned off his comm. link to focus on ship chatter of work going on around him. For external ship communications he had to rely on CPO Bell to monitor the command channel while he worked on the nearby fire control systems.
While looking at the view screen, Mike saw that the Cassidy's repair crew stopped their work on the bridge as they watched the Wolf angle into a better firing position. With both of her engines fully operational, the attack cruiser had enough power to finally attempt a live fire.
The target was a large asteroid at the far end of the expanse. Hope had chosen a spot that was closest to open space. His idea was to start an escape corridor in case they ever needed a quick way out of the asteroid field. During fighter-training missions they had scouted out the surrounding field and had found that this area had the narrowest distance to open space. By testing the spinal particle cannon here, not only were they at a safe distance from the base and the sloops, but they were also making a rabbit hole for future use.
The Wolf's fusion engines flared for a second and then a beam of barely visible energy surged from the cruiser’s bow and slammed into the asteroid. The resulting explosion sent a cloud of rocks and dust from the planetoid. Once the debris had sailed away the crews of both ships could see that the asteroid was completely destroyed.
"Now that's what I call a successful test," Admiral Kirkland said, stepping up and next to Mike's chair.
Collins looked to the old officer and saw the gleam in his eyes as he watched the dust cloud receded from what had once been a solid rock.
"I don't think we're going to be here too much longer."
Kirkland nodded, "No, I suppose we won't be finishing the sloops anytime soon." The admiral had volunteered to help with the ship’s repairs when word had spread of Mike's plan. He was currently in charge of replacing the damaged ram scoop with the newly made one.
“How's work going?" Mike asked, noting the disappointed expression that the old warrior's face was now displaying.
The admiral shook his head, forcing himself to answer, his mind seemed light-years away. "We're done, and she fits like a glove," he said with a friendly smile.
“Great! The shuttles have completed docking the Priestly on the other side of the Sundance. We'll be shutting up shop here in the next hour or so and transferring crew back to the Wolf as she passes."
“I'll be going back on the Sky Train," Kirkland said as he headed for the door.
Mike waved to him as he left and said that he'd see him later. He had flown one of the LN-28 Wasp fighters over to the sloops and it was docked in the Sundance's bay. The Tom Thumb was also being used and was docked with the Cassidy's port airlock. The bridge repair crew was scheduled to use it to return to the Wolf.
Activating his comm. link he made a quick call, "Collins to engineering, what's the word on restarting the engines?"
A moment later, Rufo Cappilo's voice responded to his call. "We're almost ready down here. Give us a couple more minutes and we'll give it a try."
"No rush, but the Wolf is starting her return run to the base and the Captain will want us to shut down our operations here."
"Roger that," Cappilo said, signifying that he underst
ood that they only had about a half-hour or so before they would have to leave.
Five minutes later, the signal came that they were ready. With fingers crossed they initiated the fusion reactor's startup sequence. Unlike the Sundance, the Cassidy's engines had needed some repairs before they could be brought online. They had been running the ship’s restored systems from a power coupling to the Sundance's engines. As the startup commenced the lights on the bridge went from full power back to emergency power, blinked out for a moment and then returned to full strength.
"Well?" Mike asked, unsure if the startup had been successful.
"Sir, engineering reports that they have eighty percent power from the engines,” Chief Bell said with a smile.
"Excellent!" Mike answered. "Pass on my compliments to the crew and have everyone prepare for departure. It will be up to the repair robots to finish the job."
Bell nodded as Collins watched the view screen and the approaching attack cruiser. Ten more days and he'd have this ship ready. It was a pity they didn't have more time.
Mike was the last to depart the sloops. He was the acting captain and project manager. It was his responsibility to make sure everything was ready and that the entire crew was accounted for. He had double-checked the power readings from the sloops and the docked Pay Dirt. The ships would have to depend on their own power for some time and he didn't want to come back to find out that they had been unable to finished their work because of a lack of power.
The ten repair robots were busily working as Mike headed towards the shuttle bay where his Wasp fighter was waiting for him. Starting his pre-fight checklist, he signaled the shuttles for an update and a headcount. Commander Hutton had once royally reamed him out for losing a man on a night patrol. The freshman had slipped off to take leak and failed to report in or even catch up to the squad. Mike had to walk guard for an entire week for that mistake.
Once, while he and his dad were on Earth they had gone scuba diving in Key Largo, Florida. The dive boat had taken them to Molasses Reef for a day of diving and snorkeling.
The Log of the Gray Wolf (Star Wolf Squadron Book 1) Page 23