“You can trust me,” the ship’s computer answered in Greg’s voice.
Lonnie jumped to her feet. “Greg? What? How? I thought?”
“I am the ship’s computer. I am programmed to respond in several voices. Would you be more comfortable if I used Avi’s voice?”
“Uh, no, uh, Greg’s is fine.”
“Lonnie, please sit, you will hurt yourself if you don’t.”
Lonnie sat back down. “What has happened?”
“We have been hijacked.”
“That much I figured out. What do we do now?”
“I don’t know. I have not been programmed for this situation. I have been programmed that when I am in a situation for which I have not been programmed to evaluate the humans on board to determine which one I can trust the most and seek their guidance. I can trust you, and you can trust me. That much I know.”
“So now what do we do?”
“I don’t know. That is why I seek your guidance.”
“Ah, I see. Where are we going?”
“We are going to the Swordsman base from which the attack was launched.”
“What will happen to us there?”
“I cannot say with any certainty except that it will not be pleasant.”
“Can you override their instructions and divert us?”
“No, they have manually disabled my connections to my drives.”
“How did they do that?”
“They unplugged the data links.”
“Don’t you have wireless back up?”
“Actually the wireless is primary and the wired is back-up and both have been disabled.”
“Can I reconnect them?”
“They are guarded. I doubt you could get to the connections.”
“Is there anything we can do to change our course?”
“Short of destroying the ship and killing everyone on it, no.”
“Can we escape once we drop out of hyper drive?”
“We will be met by an armed escort. Any attempt at escape could probably be fatal.”
“How do they know we are coming?”
“They sent a courier missile just before we jumped into hyper drive.”
“Can we send a missile the instant we drop out of hyper drive?”
“Yes, if we prepared it in advance.”
“Can you do that?”
“Yes. Where should I send it? What should it say?”
“Isn’t there a Sisters of Mercy convent near here?”
“Yes, I could get a courier there in three days. They could be here in two to three weeks depending on the level of preparedness of their fleet.”
“Would the missile be detected?”
“Yes, but not until it was too late to do anything about it.”
“Then, let’s do it. Let’s tell the Sisters that we have been hijacked, and that there has been a big battle at Homestead, and that we expect there to be lots of widows and orphans both there and here. While you are at it, send them the complete history of our settlement. It may be the only record when it comes time to write the history of our civilization.”
“Consider it done.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you. Lonnie, these are dangerous people. Do not let your guard down with any of them. Not all of them are what they seem.”
“That much I figured out.”
“I will do my best to figure out who can be trusted and who can’t and I will let you know. In the meantime don’t trust anyone. Especially don’t trust the children. They carry tales back to their mothers.”
“Thank you.”
An hour before the ship was due to drop out of hyper drive someone introduced a sedative gas into the ship’s ventilation system. Two women in EVA suits took control of the ship and piloted it to the planned meeting with the Swordsman Planetary Defense ships.
At the most opportune time, the ship dispatched the courier to the Sisters of Mercy and it sped away unnoticed.
Lonnie woke up alone and naked on the floor of a prison cell. The cell had concrete block walls and a concrete floor. The only light came through the bars on one end of the cell. A box of meals ready to eat sat on the floor. A jug of water sat beside it. There was no bed, no sink and only a hole in the end of the cell that stank enough to indicate its purpose. Lonnie resolved not to cry, but rather to sit quietly and wait for rescue.
A soft scraping sound as if from a boot on concrete brought her head around. A guard stood at the cell door fumbling with his keys. The leer on his face was not as terrifying as the fact that his pants were already unzipped.
HOMESTEAD - CHAPTER THIRTY
TEN SMALL SHIPS POWERED through space linked together by gossamer threads of fiber optic cable. The three weeks travel time gave the crews that had so recently defended their home time to sleep and recover. The professional Space Force crews monitored the group’s progress and took over navigation duties. The travelers agreed that this would be the opportune time to record their reports on the events that lead up to the battle as well as their experiences during the battle itself. By recording their experiences in Space Force data banks, their stories would be accessible to historians and therefore difficult for revisionists to modify later. Federation courts had long ago applied “deathbed testimony” principles to recordings made in anticipation of going into battle. Such recordings were admissible in any Federation court and were as well accepted as testimony given in person.
Each of the travelers took their turn giving their testimony of what had happened in the battle. Many of the speakers took the time to detail actions giving credit for the valor of others who had died in the battle. Story after story showed how hard these people had fought to save their homes and how costly the battle had been.
When everyone else was done, Rose took her turn. Deeply emotional and upset at what had happened, Rose started and stopped several times before she could put her thoughts together in a coherent narrative. After the attack started, she had decided not to hide in the shelter with the few noncombatants that had stayed behind. As it turned out, the shelter was one of the places the Swordsmen did not find. If she was going to die, she was going to die in the house that her daughter and granddaughters had made for her. The house was now truly her home and if it came to defending her home, she was going to defend it and that’s all there was to it. She rummaged through the cellar to find what weapons might have been left behind. Most of Greg’s large collection of antique weapons had been distributed and issued to the people defending the settlement except for two ancient Colt 45 revolvers and two M-1 carbines. The two pistols dated from the late eighteen hundreds. One of them had originally been issued to a Pony Express rider. The two carbines were originally used in World War One but Greg kept them in serviceable condition. Rose knew that if she had to use them to defend herself, they would be powerful weapons. In spite of the influence of her daughter, her son-in-law and her granddaughters, she had never fired a weapon. Never even in target practice. She had seen everyone else use them so she knew how but she had never done it herself.
Rose could hear the fighting as it approached her. She heard the helicopters flying overhead and resolved not to die needlessly. She decided that if she was to die, it would not be without having taken out her share of enemy soldiers. She strategized as to where the best place for her to hide would be, and she decided that the place to hide was in the lake right in front of the house. It was someplace that invaders would not look. She reasoned that her EVA suit, designed as it was to protect her against a vacuum could equally well protect her against being submerged in water. She strapped on extra air tanks and wrapped her pistols and carbines in plastic bags. She walked to the lake to wait. With only her head and neck sticking out of the water and her helmet floating beside her, she watched the battle rage around her.
One helicopter approached and she saw lasers, obviously from a craft in orbit, blanket the helicopter. The lasers hit the helicopter and forced it to crash land on the pasture
where the horses had been corralled. Greg had let the horses out and had shooed them into the forest but with all the noise and commotion of the battle they had become frightened and had returned to the corral. The helicopter crashed on the edge of the corral close enough that Rose could hear the voices of the two men inside. One of the men was clearly in pain and was screaming for his companion to help him. As she watched, the pilot got out of the helicopter, leveled his pistol at his copilot and shot his copilot in the head.
Rose was stunned with this. His idea of mercy was to shoot his copilot. This was not a human. This was an animal. Sebastian had warned them about this type of killer. The horses were panicking in the corral. The man walked over to the corral gate and closed it so with the horses could not escape. One by one he walked over to the horses and with a single bullet cleanly shot it through the head. He stood over each horse as it fell to the ground. Rose could hear him laugh from where she was as he shot each of the horses. It was a cackling laugh. The man took pleasure in killing the horses one in a time. He took pleasure in watching the other horses panic and try to escape after each loud pistol report.
Rose knew that this man would have no sympathy for an old lady hiding trying to stay out of view. She looked at the clear water of the lake and realized that merely hiding at the bottom of the lake would not be enough. The white EVA suit would be visible in the water so she hid underneath the bridge over the stream that fed the lake. The water was darker there and the bridge’s shadow would hide her from view. She put on her helmet and settled on the bottom of the lake.
The man approached the two houses and tossed incendiary grenades through the picture windows and set them ablaze. Rose started to cry as her beautiful house, the one that her son-in-law and granddaughters had built for her went up in flames and there was nothing she could do about it. Sebastian had told her about the body armor that these men wore. She could not shoot him from where he was even with the carbine. She had to be close enough to hit him somewhere the armor did not cover or from an angle that the shot could go underneath the armor. The man walked across the bridge and stood at the peak in the center of the bridge. He looked out at the houses as they burned. He laughed. Rose was furious but held her position under the bridge. She held a pistol in each hand. The pistols were still wrapped in their plastic bags to stay dry.
“You know,” Rose said, “men don’t look down when they pee. I don’t know why they don’t, but they don’t. That was a fatal mistake for this Swordsman. Because he didn’t look down, I was able to raise the two pistols in my hands under the bridge and shoot him from underneath. I was lying on my back under the water. I raised my arms straight up, and I shot him where he held his hands. I knew he was wearing body armor, and I knew that if I tried to shoot him in the chest or anywhere else the body armor would protect him but there was no body armor underneath, and so I shot him underneath with both pistols.”
“He folded over and cried like a baby. Blood was gushing down between his hands and along his legs. He knelt on the ground and he cried, ‘Why have you done this to me?’ I couldn’t hear him through the helmet but I could see his lips. I couldn’t answer him but he would’ve done that to me.”
“I stood up in the water and opened my face plate so he could see who shot him. The color had gone out of his face. There was a pool of blood on the bridge. He cried, ‘I’ll never see my son again,’ and I thought to myself ‘You should have thought of that before you joined the Marines.’ As I stood up in the water he started to raise his pistol at me. I knocked it out of his hand with the end of the carbine.”
“I stood there while he bled to death. I never hated anyone so much in my entire life as I hated him. He burned my house. He shot our pretty horses, and he cried when I killed him. He said he had a son, and I wanted his son to know what kind of inhuman animal his father was. I figured I should find out who this man was I shot and who now lay dying on the bridge. I took his wallet. In his wallet there’s a picture of his son. Rachel, someday he will seek you out or you will seek him out, and then when that happens you need to tell him what kind of man his father was. If you face him in battle, expect no quarter. If he is like his father, he will kill first, and ask questions after.”
“I heard more Marines come over the hill toward the lake. I hid under the bridge. They were running away in defeat. They were headed for the woods. Once they had crossed the bridge and I was sure no more were coming, I stood up again and fired the carbines at them until I ran out of shells. I think I winged some of them, but I couldn’t be sure. It took me a long time to get over my anger.” Rose paused before she continued, “Greg, do you hear music in your mind when you fight?”
Greg smiled, “Sometimes, why?”
“From the time I stepped into the water, I had the theme from the movie Exodus running through my mind. Is that normal?”
“It can be. It’s nothing to worry about. Sometimes the music gives you courage. Sometimes it gives you rhythm. Either way it’s a good thing. At any rate, Rose, welcome to the warrior clan. The rest of the family salutes you!” Several voices chimed in with agreement.
“But I didn’t want to be a warrior.”
HOMESTEAD - CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
TEN SMALL SHIPS TIED together by threads of fiber optic approached their destination. Lt. Washington called to the others, “Hey gang, let’s prepare for the transition into standard drive. I have programmed us to arrive at a point above the planetary plane roughly in line with the fourth planet in the system. This puts us inside and above the asteroid belt. The Swordsman base is on the fourth planet in the system. The planet is colder than Earth and its atmosphere is thinner. The base is in the tropics and the climate is not that dissimilar to the Himalayas on Earth. Your flight suits should be ample weather protection provided you keep your heaters on. We do not know what defenses await us. As soon as we transition, we should open and arm our weapons pods so we can react to whatever we may find. We don’t know what may be waiting for us. Is everyone ready?”
“Lieutenant, I don’t mean to be a contradictory, but we should open the pods before we transition,” Greg said.
“Can you do that?” the Lieutenant came back.
“Yes, when we make short jumps, we don’t lose the time to disarm and re-arm.”
“The manuals say to transition closed, but if you have been doing this as long as you have without incident, I’m game.”
The other pilots acknowledged their agreement.
“Then,” Greg continued. “I suggest that we open our weapons pods now. Once we check out what our opposition is, we can short jump behind them and take them out.”
“Um, sir,” Lt. Washington stammered, “we can’t make short jumps.”
“Really or just because the manual says so?”
“No, we can’t. I tried to program one and the navigation system gave me an error message.”
“How bizarre!” Avi commented, “We do it all the time.”
“Well, then,” Greg continued, thinking out loud. “How about Avi and I jump to wherever we need to be and the rest of you head straight for the base. We will meet you there.”
Transition to standard drive was only moderately turbulent. Once in standard drive, they dropped the fiber optic connections. Normal “speed of light” communications would be perfectly adequate from here on. Ten small ships suddenly appeared at a point in space above the system that held the Swordsmen’s base. The combined firepower of these ten ships was significantly less than the firepower of either of the two battleships that had left this system just a few weeks earlier. The ships from Homestead scanned the system for possible threats. Small picket ships were stationed in a textbook pattern around the system. The pickets rapidly probed the intruders for identification and rather than offer a challenge, turned and ran. A squadron of picket ships was no match for a single interdiction craft and six interdiction ships had just entered the system along with two destroyers. The pickets wisely withdrew and reformed as a group closer to
their base. The mother ship launched more picket ships, and soon the ten ships who had traveled from Homestead were opposed by two dozen pickets and a well armed mother ship.
Rachel spoke first, “Pipes on the mother ship?”
“Certainly would be an impressive first strike,” Greg answered.
“Shouldn’t we wait for them to make the first move?” Avi asked.
“They did that back at Homestead,” Rachel replied.
Washington spoke, “I have multiple targeting radars. At least one has a lock on us.”
“Well, there’s your answer.” Rachel said, “It’s time to go.”
“Rachel, you ready? Pipes it is.”
Greg could hear the servos closing Rachel’s display array around her.
“Let’s go. Arming missiles.”
Greg initiated the jump. They dropped out of hyper drive in exactly the right place for the shot into the mother ship’s propulsion system. Lasers sliced the space all around them. Rachel fired a single missile.
“Dad, let’s get out of here.”
Greg hyper jumped the ship away.
The propulsion and power pod of the mother ship exploded in a brilliant ball of white plasma. The rest of the ship was left mostly intact although it was now moving on a course that would have it fall into the system’s primary. Life boats popped out of the ship from all sides like fleas from a dog. The pickets moved in to pick up survivors. The battle for the mother ship was over. Rachel had won it with a single, well placed missile.
Finding Greg’s cargo ship was entirely too easy. The courier missile beacon had been left on. Greg and Rachel jumped to it while the others continued toward the Swordsman base in standard drive. When they arrived at the ship, they found it dead except for the beacon. The reactor was cold and the access hatches for the ship’s computer were opened. The computer had obviously been removed. Greg’s reaction was violent and laced with obscenities.
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