by D. J. Holmes
“Are there any questions at this point?” James finished.
A number of hands shot up and James worked his way down them in order of seniority. When it came to Sub Lieutenant Davies, James was asked a question that hit on his main concern with the whole mission.
“What happens if the Indian authorities capture some of the people we send down to a planet? Or worse yet, they impound Innocence. What will we do from Endeavour?” Davis asked.
James knew what his gut reaction would be. He would bring Endeavour into orbit and land enough marines to break into whatever building his people were being held in. Especially if Gupta was involved, they had grown close after they had settled their differences back on Drake. Yet as a Captain in the Royal Space Navy he couldn’t. His mission parameters were very clear. Endeavour was not to reveal her presence at any time unless it would secure the capture of Chang.
Relations between Britain and India had been souring over the last two decades. After the war with Russia the French colonies had been devastated. Both Britain and the US had poured trillions of credits into rebuilding the colonies and helping France develop her empire. If the Russians decided they wanted to have another go at taking New France, Britain and the US wanted to make it as difficult for them as possible. Yet India and France were direct competitors. Their colonial empires shared a border and so they were both trying to outdo one another as they continued to expand into space. The limited planets that could be reached by the shift drive ensured that for every credit of support Britain gave France, India’s chance of increasing her wealth, power and prestige diminished. The Indian rulers had been making a fuss about the support for years. Both in the UN and through Earth’s news outlets, they did everything they could to disrupt Britain and portray her as a villain.
There was no doubt that if they found a British officer and RSNI agent operating in their space they would be quick to go public and cry foul. If they were caught, Bell and Gupta knew the British government would disown them. They would then look like common pirates who had stolen and armed their own freighter. Certainly there would be no way Innocence could be traced back to the Royal Space Navy, RSNI had made sure of that.
As those thoughts raced through James’ head an awkward silence enveloped the conference room. Recognizing that this was a question she should answer Agent Bell jumped to her feet. “That is a risk we are aware of. Everyone on board Innocence is a volunteer. If we get caught we are on our own. We all know this. The solution however is rather simple,” she said with a dazzling smile. “We won’t get caught.”
The chuckles that echoed around the room dissipated the tension that had crept into the meeting. Using the distraction to shake himself James addressed the meeting again. “If there are no further questions you may leave. Those of you who have updated assignments will find them on your personal datapad.” When no one raised their hand James closed the meeting, “you’re dismissed.”
*
Fourth Lieutenant Becket was making her way back from Endeavour’s Marine Barracks when her COM chirped. When she answered it the Captain’s voice addressed her, “Lieutenant, can I see you in my briefing room?”
“Yes Sir,” she replied.
“Have a seat,” James said as she entered the Captain’s conference room.
Commander Gupta was seated beside the Captain and as she sat Becket gave her a nod. “We want to discuss Innocence with you,” James began.
“Officially Agent Bell is her Second Lieutenant but she has no command experience so Gupta is going to need assistance running the freighter. Seeing as you two already know each other I thought you would be ideal. You were at the briefing though, you know the risks if Innocence or any of you get caught. I can’t come to your aid.
“What do you think?” James asked after a pause.
Becket took a second to consider the risks her Captain had mentioned. Then it hit her, Gupta would have to join the landing parties that would go down to the colonies they visited to ensure their ruse of being an independent Indian freighter held up. That meant she would be the one left in command, something that would look good on her record! “I would be delighted to join Innocence,” she said hastily.
“Very good,” Gupta said with a smile. “We’re also going to need a few extra crew members to make sure the freighter is fully manned when we send down a landing party. We’re going to need to be ready for anything. I want you to liaise with First Lieutenant Ferguson and organize ten crew members to transfer across with you.”
“Yes Sir,” Becket responded.
“Great,” Gupta said as she stood. Stretching out her hand to Becket she continued, “it will be a pleasure to work together again.”
“Thank you,” Becket said as she shook her superior’s hand.
As both women turned to leave his office James waved Becket back, “not so fast Lieutenant, I have one more thing for you.”
“Yes Sir?” she asked.
James made a point of waiting until Gupta left the office. As she went through the automatic doors she turned and raised a quizzical eyebrow at James but he only winked at her and motioned her to keep moving.
When the doors closed he turned his attention back to Becket. “I have one more request for you. You remember Major Johnston from his time on board Drake?”
“Certainly Sir,” Becket began, “the Major and his marines beat me black and blue as I trained with them for the boarding mission against that Chinese destroyer. I’m not going to forget any of them in a hurry.”
“Good,” James said, “I hope he hasn’t forgotten you either. I’m sure you know his wife was killed during the Chinese attack on the Cook system. To be frank, he hasn’t been the same since. Professionally, he is one mean marine. His record in the war was impeccable. In fact, his efficiency ratings improved after his wife’s death. But emotionally he seems to have switched off. He is cold, distant. In the long term he could be a liability. Especially as we’re going after Chang, the very man responsible for the war and for the attack on Cook.
“Our mission is to bring Chang home alive so that he can stand trial publicly. Given the anger and rage Johnston is dealing with I’m not sure he is operating under the same rules.”
As James was talking Becket kept nodding prompting James to ask, “You’ve noticed all this then?”
“Yes Sir,” she answered, “it’s hard to miss. I’ve only bumped into Major Johnston a couple of times since he was on board Drake but the change is unmistakable.”
“Good, then we’re in agreement. I’m actually surprised his superiors haven’t picked up on it,” James said. “In any case, the problem has now fallen on our shoulders to remedy, or I should say, on your shoulders.”
“Mine?” Becket said, raising her voice in surprise.
“Yes yours,” James said with a smile. “He took a liking to you during your combat training onboard Drake. I think he looked at you as a kind of daughter. I want you to try and rekindle those feelings. Ask him to continue to train you in hand-to-hand combat while you are both on the freighter. Talk to him, befriend him, get him to feel again. We need him at his best, especially if things go south during one of the landing missions. We can’t have Johnston putting his personal vendetta above the lives of those under his command. Do you think you can do that?”
Becket hesitated. She liked Major Johnston and she wanted to help him but she wasn’t sure she could break through the Major’s defenses and she didn’t want to let the Captain down.
James could sense Becket hesitate, but he didn’t have time to try to persuade her nicely. Johnston had him worried, in his current state he could very easily undo any plan they put into motion. “I’m making this suggestion because I want to help Johnston, but if you aren’t on board with this I will involve Gupta. She will have to monitor Johnston and remove him from command if she thinks he is a risk. I know neither of us wants that. If we can get the Major we met on Drake back, then it will be good for all of us. What do you say?”
&nb
sp; Becket felt trapped, she didn’t know if she could get through to the Major but she didn’t want to ruin his career either. “I’ll try,” she said with an obvious lack of enthusiasm.
“Thank you,” James said with a touch more energy. “In that case you can go talk to Lieutenant Ferguson about those extra crewmen for the freighter.”
“Yes Sir,” Becket said as she rose to leave.
“And good luck Lieutenant,” James called after her, “I know you will continue to do me proud.”
Once the door slid shut James leaned back in his office chair and sighed. The thought of having to leave Gupta and Becket behind was not a pleasant one. Yet if they were caught he would have no choice. Britain couldn’t afford to get into another shooting war so soon after the war with the Chinese. Many of the fleet’s heavy warships were still undergoing repairs. Ordinarily the Indian navy was only a mild concern for the Admiralty but if the Indian government wanted to make a point, their fleet could cause a real headache.
There was nothing he could do other than make sure everyone was as prepared as they could be. That wasn’t much of a comfort though. They would plan and run simulation after simulation on their way to Indian space, but when it came down to it, there would be no way to predict all the variables.
To distract himself he brought up the proposed route to New Delhi. Agent Bell believed India’s largest colony and she hoped there would be a trail there she could pick up. Yet it was over four weeks travel away and she had planned a number of stops. It would look suspicious if a trading freighter didn’t actually call into some of the ports it passed through to trade.
At New France they would be stopping to unload some mining equipment Bell had brought from Earth. Then the freighter would make a stop at Cartier to unload some fresh fruit for the fleets stationed there. That would be exciting James knew. Outside of the Sol system Cartier had the greatest concentration of warships in the entire Human Sphere.
Cartier was the only French colony that had a shift passage connecting French colonial space with the colonies owned by the Russian Star Federation. After the Russians had tried to invade and conquer the French colonies twenty years ago it was now heavily defended. The French stationed more than half of their fleet in the system and there were a number of flotillas from other nations as well.
James was especially looking forward to getting a glimpse of the American battleship stationed there. Boasting fifty eight missiles in each of her broadsides the Americans claimed the USS Freedom was the most powerful ship ever constructed. After seeing the British fleet go toe to toe with two smaller Chinese battleships he didn’t doubt it – at least as far as the rest of the other Earth nations went. No one quite knew what the Russians had been building for the last twenty years.
After their fleet had been beaten back in the last war the Russian government had abandoned Earth and fled to their colonies. At the time there hadn’t been the political will to invade their space and so they had been left alone. Very quickly relations had soured to the point that all communication had ceased. Now the Russians had become a great unknown and both America and Britain felt they needed to station some ships in the Cartier system to deter the Russians from any rash moves.
The combined fleets in Cartier were constantly on high alert and regularly carried out live fire mock fleet engagements. For a moment James entertained an idea that had popped into his head. It didn’t exactly fall in line with the spirit of the orders he had been given. Yet it wasn’t specifically forbidden.
With a nod he made up his mind. He was going to get as close a look at the American battleship as he could. Endeavour was meant to be the stealthiest ship the Admiralty had ever constructed. It would do his crew good to get some real experience avoiding detection. Plus it would be fun testing out the effectiveness of the American’s detection capabilities. They could take some close up visuals of the battleship and when they got back to Earth, they could send them to the US Space Navy headquarters as a gift. No doubt their intelligence division would love to know the British had snuck a ship close enough to picture the worn paint on their prized possession.
With a bit more excitement for this second leg of their journey he set down his datapad. Gupta would be heading back to the freighter soon and he wanted to go over a few ideas with her face to face. They probably wouldn’t get another chance to talk in person until they found Chang. After that he needed to tour the ship with Ferguson. Being fresh out of the shipyard meant there was always something needing their attention.
Chapter 4 – Childhood Memories
In the first Interstellar Expansion Era terraforming technologies were just in their infancy and so mankind was largely limited to Earth like worlds. Nevertheless, in the desperate race to claim new territory the human nations did settle some planets that today’s citizens wouldn’t even consider.
- Excerpt from Empire Rising, 3002 AD
15th March 2466, HMS Innocence, New Delhi System
Five weeks later Commander Gupta stood adjacent to the main docking hatch awaiting the freight inspectors. Innocence had entered the New Delhi System over eight hours ago and had slowly made her way to the colony of New Delhi itself. They had been ordered by the planet’s orbital traffic control to dock with one of the main trading stations in orbit over the colony. Now they were just waiting for the freight inspectors to give the go ahead for Innocence’s crew to begin unloading the cargo she had to trade.
Already Gupta had endured two such inspections in French colonial space but she doubted the procedures would be much different here. Thankfully their mission didn’t require the freighter to carry any illicit cargo and the inspection should be routine.
With a groan of frustration she checked the time again. The inspectors were almost twenty minutes late. This wasn’t something new either. It seemed the inspectors at New Delhi, as well as those in the French colonies, liked to make sure independent freighter captains knew who was in charge. Already they were a week behind schedule. The larger trading companies would never stand for these kinds of repeated delays for their ships. Independent captains didn’t have the same clout so Gupta had to work to their schedule.
Her frustration wasn’t helped by the fact that she knew James and the others on Endeavour had been having a much more stimulating cruise. While she had been enduring inspections and overseeing cargo manifests James had been testing Endeavour’s stealth technologies.
A combination of the latest stealth coating and improved heat sinks allowed the ship designers at HMS Vulcan to claim Endeavour was the stealthiest ship yet produced by the RSN. When her reactors and all non-essential systems were powered down, Endeavour became a dark hole in space. She couldn’t maintain it for more than a few hours but even then she had the same technologies all RSN ships had. By incorporating heat vents RSN ships could vent their waste electromagnetic radiation out into space along specific vectors. This allowed them to remain in stealth mode for prolonged periods of time. The vents weren’t nearly as effective as Endeavour’s heat sinks but the combination of the two put Endeavour in a class of her own.
James had certainly shown Endeavour was a new breed of warship. While she had been unloading a cargo of fruit for the warships in the Cartier system, James had snuck up on a flotilla of American ships carrying out some war simulations. Gupta had already seen the images James had taken and she knew that if they were ever shown to the Americans they would be less than happy. The level of detail was impressive; whoever had been manipulating the optical sensors had been able to find a small two-meter scrape in the armor of one of USS Freedom’s heavy plasma cannons. No doubt the Americans would think the image doctored but if they analyzed it they wouldn’t find any signs of manipulation.
At first Gupta had thought James was pulling her leg, there was no way Endeavour could have gotten so close. Granted, the Americans hadn’t been using their active sensors to scan the area of space Endeavour had used to approach them. Even so, their passive sensors should have been good en
ough to alert them to something unusual. That they hadn’t only served to bolster Gupta’s view of the scientists and engineers who had worked on Endeavour’s design.
As footsteps echoed down the trading station’s metallic floor her mind was brought back to the present. Finally, she thought, the inspectors are here.
Without waiting for permission to enter, four Indians in grey uniforms walked through the docking hatch. Gupta nodded to the tallest of the four, the decorations on his uniform seemed to suggest he was the senior inspector. Without showing any expression in return he stepped forward. “I presume you are the captain of this freighter?” he asked.
“Yes, this is my pride and joy,” Gupta answered as she tried her best to actually sound pleased about having to command a slow pondering freighter.
“Name and registration details,” the inspector said almost before Gupta finished speaking.