Solomon Family Warriors II

by Robert H. Cherny

  “Um, excuse me,” her fire control officer, Second Lieutenant Erika Bond, interrupted. “We have been instructed not to open the weapons pods unless we intend to use them.”

  “How bizarre,” Rachel replied. “Why is that?”

  “Because drain power from the reactor which can lead to early reactor failure,” Erika offered.

  “Is that the only reason?” Rachel asked.

  “Yes,” Erika replied.

  “Has anyone ever discussed the weapons pods being open during a short hyper jump?”

  “Short hyper jumps are not possible in these ships,” the flight engineer, Sergeant Consuelo Rodriquez replied from her invisible position in the heart of the ship.

  Rachel wished Reuben or Rashi was there to consult with. “We can extend the pods later. Prepare to jump to hyper drive. We will jump at one G to the coordinates I gave you.”

  “Coordinates locked!” Lieutenant Rivera responded.

  “All ships report when pre-hyper drive initiation is complete.”

  One small green icon for each ship appeared next to the first set.

  “Initiate hyper jump on my mark.”

  She paused for a few seconds. There was a brief moment of hesitation, almost indecision.

  “Engineering, make that a two G hyper drive.”

  “Two G hyper drive, aye, Ma’am”

  “Go for hyper drive.”

  Sixteen light attack destroyers jumped away from the fleet to their guard station on the far side of the central system.

  “We will establish a two hour watch rotation. Flight engineers take first watch. Fire control officers will take second watch. Navigators third and pilots fourth. At the end of the pilots’ shift, all crew report to their positions for the transition out of hyper drive. All personnel not on watch stand down and eat or rest. Flight engineers, I have been informed that these ships are not capable of short hyper jumps. I do not believe that to be true. We know that the model of P I ships the four of us flew with the larger reactors are capable of short jumps with their weapons pods extended. There are sixteen of you. You have sixteen networked computers at your disposal. The four of us will add the resources of our computers to assist in the analysis. Our computers contain complete flight characteristics of the P I ship. You have two hours to determine given what we know about short jumps in P I ships whether these destroyers will make the short jump.”

  Less than a minute later, Rachel received a message on her assistant in plain text Hebrew. “What’s up? Did you send the courier?”

  “No. I felt it go and wondered what it was,” Rachel typed in reply.

  “Are you talking about the courier?” Faye Anne joined in.

  “Yes. Did you see it go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you see which direction it went?”

  “It went straight ahead,” David offered. “I knew I didn’t need to worry about navigation so I was checking out the sensor capabilities. It’s on the same course we’re on.”

  “I think we can assume that one of the crew on my ship is a traitor. I hate to think that I have to start out my first command by disobeying orders.”

  “You did that when you ordered the two G jump. It’s only supposed to be a one G jump. Somebody is in for an ugly surprise,” Wendy transmitted. “Look, we’re known for disobeying orders and completing our missions because we did. Why do you think we’re here?”

  “Faye Anne, can you search the logs and figure out who my traitor is?”

  “Certainly.”

  The engineers spent most of their shift comparing the destroyer to the P I ship and concluded that given the relative power to mass ratios where the P I ship was capable of a ten G short hyper jump, the destroyers would probably only be capable of a four G jump due to their greater size and relatively smaller reactor capacity.

  The shift changed and the fire control officers came on duty. At the shift change, Rachel’s fire control officer, Erika, asked, “How do you like your coffee, Ma’am?”

  “Black, no sugar, please.”

  “Here you go, Ma’am.”

  “Thank you.”

  When the crews had stopped moving around the cabin, Rachel said, “I have reviewed our armaments and munitions. I really like the rear firing tubes.”

  David commented, “Rachel, have you noticed that you can’t move the munitions from the rear tubes to the front tubes?”

  “No, I hadn’t. We’ll need to keep that in mind,” Rachel replied.

  “I like having a stinger in my tail!” Wendy joked.

  “Makes someone hitting us from the pipes position that much riskier,” Faye Anne offered.

  “Does make one hell of a parting shot!” David added. “But, we could exhaust our forward firing munitions and have rear firing munitions we can’t use.”

  “Well, I guess we will have to turn that to our advantage,” Rachel mused.

  “Have you looked at these multiple warhead things?” David asked. “How many targets can they hit simultaneously?”

  David’s fire control officer answered, “Each missile carries six warheads, sir.”

  “Hey, can I call my fire control officers ‘Gunny’ like in the Marines?” David asked.

  The chuckles that followed seemed to indicate acceptance.

  “So, Gunny, tell me how these things work. How are they programmed?”

  Wendy’s “Gunny” answered, “They look for a variety of types of emissions like radar or the R F from guidance electronics. They use heat only as confirmation of their other data. These are smart missiles. Once they are within a forty five degree range of fire, they launch their warheads. The propulsion unit also carries a warhead and it finds the nearest target to slam into.”

  “So, one missile could theoretically take out seven targets,” David said.

  “That is correct.”

  “Sweet!”

  “What happens if they miss?”

  “They self destruct after two hours. We can override that if we need to.”

  David laughed, “I had to dodge one of my own missiles one time. Thank goodness it had run out of fuel and was on a ballistic trajectory.”

  “Let’s inventory of our munitions,” Rachel suggested. “We have three multiple warhead missiles forward and one aft. We have twelve heat seekers, twelve Disruptor missiles and ten counter-measures forward. We have four heat seekers and ten countermeasures aft. Is everyone equipped identically?”

  The fire control officers confirmed their inventories.

  “Do all the missiles fire from all the tubes?”

  “No, the multiples fire from a special tube. We have one forward and one aft.”

  “I was thinking we should load the multiples in both forward and aft tubes now while we have the time.”

  Sixteen “gunny’s” reported one at a time when their tubes were loaded.

  “Put counter measures in tubes one and three forward and one aft.”

  “Ma’am, begging your pardon, but we’ve been told that countermeasures are not much good and are a waste of a tube,” Erika said.

  “Don’t try to tell my father that,” Rachel said. “He loves countermeasures.”

  “Do they work?” Erika asked.

  “They won’t stop everything, but they will reduce a barrage to where your lasers can deal with the rest. Put heat seekers in tubes two and four forward and in the remaining tube aft. Put a Disruptor behind the countermeasures in tube three. All the other tubes will remain consistent.”

  Sixteen ships armed themselves per instructions. Fifteen minutes into the shift, the ships were armed to Rachel’s satisfaction. She released Wendy and Faye Anne to rest. For the remainder of the shift, they discussed the weapons and their uses. At the end of the shift, Erika asked Rachel, “Would you like something to eat?”

  “Do you have cinnamon rolls?”

  “Certainly do!”

  “That would be nice. Thank you.”

  After devouring the rolls, Rachel transferred com
mand to David, pulled the helmet on her flight suit closed and took a nap. At the end of the third shift, David transferred command to a revived Wendy so he could sleep. The fourth shift came and went with little conversation. Everyone who could do so slept through the deceleration. At the appointed time, the crews returned to their stations as directed and ran through their diagnostics. Rachel disabled the controls on her ship and transferred command to Wendy, She slid out of her seat and wandered to between the pilot and navigator. Erika gasped when she saw Rachel pull her knife from the back of her flight suit. Rachel motioned for silence.

  Rachel turned to the pilot still strapped in his seat. “Denny?” Rachel asked with exaggerated sweetness.

  “Yes, Captain?” He made the rank sound like an insult.

  “Denny, what are you afraid of?”

  “Me, Ma’am?”

  “Yes, you, Denny.”

  “I don’t know. Why do you ask?” He squirmed in his seat.

  “Everyone is afraid of something. Isn’t that right, Lieutenant?”

  Rachel looked at Lt. Rivera in the navigator seat who had his palms up and open on the arms of his seat. His helmet’s face shield was open. His eyes were wide with fear. His open palms were clearly a gesture of surrender. He wanted no part of whatever was about to happen.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Lt. Rivera replied with a quaver in his voice.

  Rachel turned back to the pilot. “Denny, what are you afraid of?”

  “I am afraid of failing in my mission.”

  “What mission is that?”

  “Defending the system against attack and allowing the personnel in my command to get killed.”

  Rachel gently slid the knife next to Denny’s throat. “Now, Denny, if that’s true, why did you launch a courier missile before we jumped into hyper drive?”

  “I didn’t launch a courier.”

  “No?” Rachel sniffed and sneezed. The involuntary jerk of her hand pulled the knife a short distance across Denny’s throat and drew a few drops of blood. “Sorry about that. If you didn’t launch the courier, why did you just wet your pants? Consuelo, do you have any of those large plastic ties you use for holding cable bundles together?”

  “What size do you need, Captain?”

  “I need four ties thirty to forty centimeters long.”

  “Yes, Ma’am, I’ll be right there.”

  When Consuelo arrived, Rachel had her bind Denny’s hands to the seat’s arms and his ankles to the foot rests.

  “Thank you,” Rachel said.

  Consuelo handed Rachel more ties and said, “Ma’am it is me who should be thanking you. You may need the spares.”

  Consuelo headed back into her compartment.

  “Now, Denny, should I kill you in front of your friends or turn you over to the cops when we get where we are going?”

  Denny sneered, “I am turning you over to my friends. The reward will be tremendous.”

  “I think not. Let me see, they told you that if you let them pass through the weak spot in the system’s defenses, they would treat you like some kind of hero instead of like the scum you are. Would Commodore Bradley have told you that?”

  “Bradley?” Erika asked, “What does he have to do with this?”

  “He went missing not long after he was arrested didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did,” Erika replied. “How did you know that?”

  “Faye Anne’s been reading Denny’s mail. My money says he’s in command of whatever is waiting to meet us. So, Denny, did he offer you safe passage?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Why not. He never lied to me before.”

  “Almost everything he told you is a lie. Now, sit and watch. We’ll see who’s telling the truth. I’m going to close the face shield on your helmet so we don’t have to listen to you scream. When we get back I am turning you in. Enjoy what little freedom you have left.”

  Rachel climbed into her seat. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have twenty minutes until we drop out of hyper. Immediately after dropping out of hyper we will spin so we are facing into the direction of travel. As soon as that maneuver is complete, without further instructions from me, you will immediately deploy your weapons pods and arm your first flight of missiles. We are a little early, but we should find the sentries we are relieving fairly easily. They know someone is coming to relieve them and should be waiting for us. Fire control, close and seal your shells, please.”

  Once the shells were closed, Rachel said, “Engineers, seal your compartments and strap yourselves in. Please verify that all systems are nominal.”

  “Navigators, please set your sensors to forward scan at maximum sensitivity. I would rather deal with false positives than false negatives.”

  The squadron of light attack destroyers dropped out of hyper drive and looked around. The squadron they were to meet was close to the designated rendezvous coordinates. Rachel remarked that using her docking lights as a semaphore seemed awkward, but it allowed them to communicate without breaking radio silence. One would have thought that Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph code would have faded into history by now, but that was how they were communicating. Once the recognition codes were passed and acknowledged, the departing captain signaled, “You’re early.”

  “Blame it on the exuberance of youth!”

  “Roger that! After this is all over, maybe we can meet at some spacer bar and tell each other lies about our valor in this campaign.”

  Rachel smiled. “Roger that!” She signaled back.

  Just before he turned to go, the departing captain signaled, “May the Force be with you!”

  “And you too my friend,” Rachel said aloud as her crew members chuckled quietly.

  ACADEMY - CHAPTER TEN

  RACHEL SET UP A PATROL PATTERN. They had been on patrol for an hour when White Three’s navigator called in, “Folks, I think I saw something in sector ten.”

  “What did it look like?” Rachel asked.

  “Like a shadow passing across a star.”

  “Did you get a feel for the direction of travel?”

  “No, not really.”

  “Fire control all ships, please review your sensor recordings for sector ten. We are looking for stars temporally obscured by something passing on front of them. I know it’s not much to go on but it’s all we have.”

  A few minutes later Blue Four’s fire control called in. “I think I found something. I am uploading readings to the pilot consoles.”

  A small cluster of stars winked out at regular intervals. From the pattern of the stars’ disappearance, it appeared to be a large formation of small vessels. Zooming in on the cluster revealed the direction of travel of the shadows as they passed.

  “We still don’t know where they are going,” Rachel said. “I think we can assume they are headed to Earth, but we don’t know how far away they are.”

  “They are far enough away that we can’t pick up their drives on our sensors,” David commented.

  “Unless they’re drones in a ballistic trajectory,” Wendy said. “In which case we have no real way to pinpoint their location.”

  David said, “You know, there should be a control ship in the midst of those drones. The fact that we can’t pick up its emissions gives us a minimum distance.”

  “That’s a start,” Rachel said, “but before we jump, we need better than that. We need to know where they originated. Given that, we can figure out the rest. Can we find a mother ship that launched the drones, assuming they are drones?”

  “I think someone knows,” Faye Anne offered. “In order to know where not to be, someone needed to know where the place not to be was. Therefore by not being in the wrong place, they could be in the right place.”

  “Faye Anne, brilliant! Isn’t that true, Denny?” Rachel said. “Denny? You do know, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I forgot, you can’t talk.” Rachel slid out of her seat and stood next to Denny. She opened his face plate. “Now you ca
n talk.” Denny scowled at her.

  Rachel looked him directly in the eyes. “Now, I wonder what it would take to make you talk?”

  Consuelo interrupted, “Um, Captain, I appear to be having a problem with the flight deck voice recorder. Data and navigation appear to be functioning normally.”

  Rachel smiled when she realized what Consuelo had just said. “Lieutenant Quail, we both know you know where those missiles are going. How about you tell me?”

  He sat in stony silence. Rachel slowly pulled her knife from its sheath.

  “If you kill me you’ll never find out in time,” he cried.

  “Oh, I had no intention of killing you. That would be too easy. Castrating you came to mind, but it’s all wet and nasty down there. I think I’ll pass. Slicing your fingers to the bone on the palm side one knuckle at a time occurred to me. Such delicate hands. That would hurt very much.”

  Raphael shuddered as he sat in the navigator’s chair where he could see every emotion on both Rachel’s and Denny’s faces. Rachel gently pressed the tip of her knife against the tip of Denny’s right middle finger. “Lieutenant Rivera, stand ready to copy.”

  “Aye, Ma’am, ready to copy.” Raphael turned away, sickened and pale.

  Rachel gently pulled the knife down Denny’s finger drawing a single drop of blood. Denny screamed. Raphael wavered between wanting to stop the torture and fearing if he did, they would die.

  “Denny, it’s just a little boo boo. Only one drop of blood. Think how much it would hurt if I did it for real.”

  Denny spit out numbers in rapid sequence. Raphael dutifully copied them down.

  “If you lied to me, I will castrate you, wet and nasty and all.”

  Rachel slid over to Raphael. “Are you okay? You look pale.”

  “I, I am a little nauseous, Ma’am.”

  “That’s understandable. You’re a good man. You have a right to be squeamish. I’d worry about you if you weren’t.”

  “Ma’am, I had nothing to do with any of this.” He looked at Denny.

  Rachel put her hand on Raphael’s shoulder. Raphael stiffened.

  “Relax,” Rachel said. “We’ll be fine. We still have a war to win. Plot our current trajectory and the trajectory of the missiles on your display.”