Solomon Family Warriors II

by Robert H. Cherny

  “Does everyone get their own check?”

  “Not exactly. Your local payroll office gets one big check and then gives you your money in your next paycheck.”

  The grin on the man’s face told her that he had figured out how to divert most of that money which should go to the slaves to his own accounts.

  “So, when can we begin?” Dr. Terrell asked.

  “We have to take you to the council. You tell them the story.”

  The story was repeated four more times for four more groups of men. The group got the distinct impression that none of the people they talked to were really in a position to decide anything and they were being toyed with. Finally one of the men said, “Set them up in Hangar One. Bring everyone.”

  “Even the prisoners?”

  “Even the prisoners. Under guard.”

  The testing began promptly. Dr. Terrell, “Tyrannosaurus Doc” lived up to her old reputation and terrorized the guards who escorted the people who came to be tested. Each sample was identified with a name and their Federation issued ID number. The tests ran from daylight to dark. The medical team returned to the ship each night with their reports and their samples. Rifka, the first of the missing sisters, processed through the late on the first day. It was all Ingrid could do to keep from reaching out to her. Her surgical mask and protective goggles kept her from revealing herself to the guards. The sisters’ eyes met and they acknowledged each other. Adena, the second sister, came through on the second day. Kenneth spotted her and they acknowledged each other. The women showed bruises from wrist and ankle restraints, but otherwise appeared in reasonably good health given the conditions.

  Under the guise of being a tough minded ex-military doctor, Dr. Terrell made sure that each of the subjects being tested had enough contact time with her staff for them to see that these were Federation personnel. She herded the guards and the subjects with bulldog like ferociousness.

  At the start of the third day, one of the original reception committee pulled “Inspector Terrell” aside and said, “We haven’t seen any of your military personnel. Would that be because you don’t have any?” The gleam in his eye spoke volumes. It was not hard to picture him coming to the conclusion that a big ship staffed only with civilians would be easy pickings for an aggressive boarding party.

  “They await your invitation,” Dr. Terrell said.

  The invitation was delivered at the end of the day. “How long before you know the results of the tests?” The man asked after relaying the formal request that the military personnel visit.

  “Day after tomorrow we should have initial results. I’ll send our military teams down tomorrow. I am sure they would like a tour of your facilities,” Dr. Terrell said.

  “Oh, I’m sure they would!”

  That evening the senior medical staff and military personnel gathered in the conference room.

  “What do we have?” Rachel asked.

  Isaac answered, “Dr. Terrell and I have reviewed the results and we are in agreement on the findings. We screened for a broad range of diseases and we found a host of endemic conditions as would be typical of this population.”

  “Any of it serious?” Wendy asked.

  “Some of it, if untreated, could be serious, yes. Nothing immediate. The real kicker, though, is everyone we tested has been exposed to trace amounts of a nerve gas.” Isaac sounded glum.

  “Nerve gas?” Hammersmith exclaimed.

  “We’re not sure which gas it is. We have it narrowed down to one of four possibilities. Dr. Terrell has more experience with this than I do and she is still in the lab trying to isolate the toxin. Elizabeth! Could we look at the scans of the industrial area to the east of the spaceport?” Isaac asked.

  The pictures appeared on the displays.

  “Elizabeth, please enhance the displays with temperature readings.” Numbers appeared on the top of each of the buildings.

  “Thank you, Elizabeth.”

  “You are welcome, Isaac.”

  Isaac and Joshua studied the displays. Joshua pointed to a large square metal building. “This one. We need to find out what is going on in this building.”

  “How did you know which building?” Hammersmith asked.

  Joshua pointed to the display. “The cooling tower was a clue. The chimneys were another. It’s one of three buildings large enough to contain the process. See how the temperature of the building changes from one side to the other. The first part of the process is done with heat. That means chimneys. The second part of the process is done at room temperature. We have higher roof temperatures on the north side next to those two silos. The chimneys are on the north side. The center area is close to the ambient air temperature. If we allow for the warming effect of the light of the system’s primary, we can explain the center area’s temperature exactly. The south side is noticeably cooler than the center area. The product must be stored at temperatures below freezing. At standard temperature and pressure, it has a shelf life of about a week. Ergo refrigeration and the cooling tower.”

  “What about these two buildings?” Hammersmith asked.

  Reuben pointed to one and said, “This may be a furniture manufacturing plant. Look at the raw materials stacked outside. Isn’t furniture in a kit one of their exports?”

  “Yes, it is.” Faye Anne replied. “That’s probably how they cover their real export product.”

  Reuben pointed to another building. “This last big one looks like a fabric mill based on what I see out in their parking lot.”

  Returning to Isaac, Rachel asked, “How many people will we need to evacuate?”

  “In round numbers, of a total population of ten thousand, two thousand are guards or civilian workers. One thousand are their dependents. Seven thousand are slaves. How many are we lifting?”

  “We need to lift all of them,” Joshua said.

  “Why is that?” Faye Anne asked.

  “We can’t leave the plant intact. Once the refrigeration stops working, the poisons will leak out. Any air breather within a thousand kilometers will die within hours of contact. Minute quantities can cause permanent respiratory damage. The good news is that the gas naturally breaks down on its own due to combination with oxygen and when it reacts with water it breaks apart into inert compounds.”

  “We can’t leave the product in any case,” Wendy said. “Pirates will steal it and sell it.”

  “We have to destroy it.” Rashi concluded.

  “How are we going to do that?” Reuben asked. “If we set the plant on fire with a conventional weapon, the fire will spread the poison across the face of the planet.”

  “Will a nuke do it?” Rachel asked.

  “Well, yeah,” Reuben stammered, “but we don’t have any nukes.” Rachel smiled.

  “We have two. I procured them when we were in New St. Louis.”

  “How did you do that?” Faye Anne exclaimed.

  Rachel smiled again. “You don’t want to know.” Rachel turned back to Rashi. “I have two class two tactical nuclear devices. We will load them in tubes nine and ten.”

  “Aye, Aye, Captain,” Rashi stammered.

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Hammersmith sounded thoughtful instead of belligerent for a change. “Throwing a nuke at someone even in battle is a serious action. We should not take this lightly.”

  “Do you have an alternative?”

  “No. What bothers me is that when we throw the nuke we destroy the evidence we need to justify throwing the nuke in the first place. How will we stand to the board of inquiry?”

  “Excellent point,” Rachel admitted. “Dale, would you and David please figure out what evidence we would need to justify the action and how we would go about gathering it?”

  “Aye, Captain!”

  Rachel turned back to the team. “I need all of you highly educated people to stop thinking like educated people for a moment. I need you to trust your emotions for me. Stop thinking and feel. Let the subtext of the day settle in to the place behind
your mind. Go to the place where you have sealed away your emotions and your feelings when you became the highly trained professionals that you are. Open the door that stays closed because if it didn’t you could not do your jobs.”

  She looked at the faces of the people around the table.

  “Now that you are there in that secret place, look around. I need to know what you felt being among the people today. What emotions, what actions, what reactions so subtle that you missed them in the race to process all these people did you almost notice? What did you feel that you did not trust yourself to think?”

  There was silence for a very long time. One of the most junior members of the medical team, a young man barely out of his teens, tentatively raised his hand. “Captain?”

  Rachel smiled at him. “Yes?”

  “I think I felt hope.” He looked like a rabbit ready jump back into his hole.

  “Good. Why do you think that?”

  “Some of the prisoners stood taller. They were less reluctant for me to see their bruises. I don’t know, really. There was like maybe a vibration in the air.”

  “Yes, there was a kind of electricity in the air,” a young woman commented. “It made the guards nervous.”

  “How many of you felt something was different today than the last two days?” Rachel asked.

  Half of the people at the table raised their hands.

  “Thank you,” Rachel said approvingly. “Dale, Faye Anne, Sonya, did you anticipate the possibility of a slave rebellion?”

  They looked at each other. They had not considered the possibility.

  “I did,” Rachel said.

  Several voices spoke at once as they assessed the impact a slave rebellion on their plans.

  Rachel continued, “Slave rebellions have been far more common than historians would have you believe. I suspect we are about to cause one. Suwanee, do you have riot gear?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Do you have the hydraulic stilt leg extenders?” Rachel asked.

  “For shooting over crowds?” Suwanee asked.

  “Yes,” Rachel replied.

  “We have them. But Captain, how will twenty-eight Marines handle ten thousand people?”

  “I’ll bet you’d like a couple of MMARV units right now,” Rachel smirked.

  “If wishes were horses, Captain,” Suwanee retorted.

  Rachel smiled. “Elizabeth, can you tell me the contents of container number seven?”

  “No, Captain, I do not have that information,” Elizabeth replied.

  “You didn’t peek?” Rachel asked.

  “No, Captain.”

  Rachel grinned. “In container number seven you will find a round dozen Marine Mobile Armed Remote Vehicles or MMARV for short.”

  “We’re not authorized MMARV’s!” Hammersmith shouted.

  “Be that as it may,” Rachel said calmly. “We have them. I suspect you will be surprised to find we have four of their airborne cousins in the adjacent container. AARV’s are wonderful toys.”

  “Where did they come from?” Hammersmith demanded.

  “You didn’t have a problem with your buddy Curra stealing things, but you get all high and mighty with me when I do?”

  Reuben stood and held out his hands for calm. “Now that we know we have them, how do we use them?”

  Rachel turned to address him. “The Marines are trained in the use of MMARV but they are going to be kind of busy. I’m sure they can train your engineers to run them.”

  J T raised his hand. Rachel looked at him. “C-Captain, I run three MMARV same time.”

  “Excellent! J T, please get with Reuben and pick eleven of your engineers for training. Suwanee, pick two of your staff to assist setting the machines up.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain!”

  “Faye Anne and David, you’re pilots so it shouldn’t take you very long to come up to speed on the AARV. It uses our standard simulators for its control suite. Rashi, please pick two of your team to interface the AARV with our simulators. Train Dale and Sonya Martini to fly the other two.”

  “Here’s the plan. Tomorrow we will send an all-female military contingent for the visit. I want engineers included. Make sure the engineers are briefed on how to determine positively what that plant is making. On the way in we will drop the MMARV units from the med-evac ships.”

  Rachel pointed to a picture of the planet’s surface. “This edge of this lake appears to have a sand bottom. Drop the MMARV units into this lake and have them stand by to roll out on command. The terrain looks relatively smooth between here and the spaceport. Everyone with me so far?”

  She looked around to make sure. She pointed to another part of the map.

  “This tidal flat looks large enough for the AARV’s to land. We will deploy them from the shuttles at the same time we deploy the MMARV’s. We will make our visit and return. Day after tomorrow we will start our inoculation program. At some point someone will contact us to tell us when the rebellion will start. The timing of what we do next is entirely dependent on the timing of the rebellion. It could happen while we are on the surface or any time thereafter. It might not happen at all, but I think it will. I expect it will be easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. The bad guys will be shooting at us. The good guys will be running from the guys shooting at us and many of them will have shackle marks. The Marines will attack from the ground. You will have full battle armor with helmets and riot gear. The MMARV units will be operated from the ship. Between now and the time we deploy, you need to work together so you can all operate as a team. Suwanee, you are in charge of the ground operation. Evaluate the ground positions and determine how best to deploy your personnel. Reuben and J T, you will support her team.”

  “Got it!”

  “The shuttles and med-evac ships will get as many people out as possible as quickly as possible. Medical personnel will stay on this ship. I expect that there will be many casualties. We won’t have time to deal with them on the ground. Remember that any person we bring down is one more we have to bring back up. Med-evac ships go in first. The shuttles will follow the med-evac ships once we are sure the space port is secure enough for them to land safely. All ships will fly as many missions as it takes to evacuate everyone who wants to come up.”

  Rachel scanned her crew to gauge their understanding of their missions.

  “Lt Chin, please contact Captain Darwin. I assume the ships are still parked in the asteroid belt. Alert them to the plan. The pickets will guard this ship. The P I’s will guard the shuttles and med-evac ships ferrying refugees. The destroyers will deal with system defenses. The AARV units will provide airborne close ground support. The biggest question now is when. That is up to them. We will be ready.”

  DEPLOYMENT - CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE WEATHER FOR THE PREVIOUS days had been mild and breezy. This day dawned rainy and misty. As the med-evac ships descended from space they dropped the MMARV units into the lake Rachel had spotted. The shuttles deployed the AARV units and took their positions circling vigilantly overhead.

  In something of a show of force, once the shuttles were in place, all four of the med-evac ships descended in formation to the planet’s surface. Flying in the military style “finger four” formation and executing military combat maneuvers, they circled the spaceport before landing. The ships landed in tight formation as a single group. They taxied to the hangar where the blood samples had been taken. The lead ship drove into the hangar and pivoted around before opening its aft bay doors and releasing the passengers. The four ships parked arrayed in front of the hangar facing the runway with their aft bay doors open for inspection. Two pilots stayed with each ship.

  Rachel led a contingent of thirty heavily armed women to the planet’s surface. The Marines wore battle armor and carried riot gear. The pneumatic leg extenders were hidden by the thickness of the flight suits. The fight crews and engineers wore their combat flight suits with laser weapons mounted in the fore arms of the suits and battery pa
cks on their backs. Rachel wore dress whites.

  “Pretty little girls playing dress up?” The man who had greeted the first landing party sneered. “Have you no real soldiers? Where are your men?”

  “I am Captain Rachel Solomon Cohen Federation Space Force and commander of the hospital ship Albert Schweitzer. To whom do I have the honor of speaking?”

  “You may call me the overseer, little lady. I don’t believe you are the commander. Where is your Commodore? A ship this size requires a Commodore. Don’t try to fool me. I know the regs.”

  “Regs or no regs, I am the commander and I have come to take you up on your offer of a tour of your settlement,” Rachel stated.

  The man grumbled, but motioned for them to follow. The tour started with the flight facilities at the spaceport. They proceeded to the living areas where the workers’ families lived. Rachel was impressed with the quality of the small school they had built for the workers’ children. From the blood tests, Rachel knew that of the thousand dependents at the settlement, there were a hundred children of school age and another hundred preschoolers many of whom were already showing effects of the poisons in their environment. The tour’s passage through the school caused quite an uproar and the teachers had difficulty regaining control after they left.

  Reuben was right about the two buildings. One was a furniture plant and the other was a fabric mill. The fabric and the furniture were produced from materials harvested locally. By mid-day they had seen everything except the slave quarters and the one building they were most interested in seeing.

  “Well, kind sir, that was a very nice tour, but I am most curious about that building.” Rachel pointed to the suspect building.

  “I can’t take you in there.”

  “Are you saying you have something to hide?” Rachel pressed.

  “No, I am saying I can’t take you in there. If you wish to see it, someone else has to take you.”

  “Aren’t you the overseer?” Rachel asked.