“So they don’t use any nuclear power at all?”
“No need. Oil and gas is so cheap, there is no reason to.”
“Is it defended?”
“No. Who would attack it?”
“Who indeed? What is this long straight road that leads to nowhere?”
“There is a large natural gas pocket at the end of the road. The convoy you are using for cover includes drilling equipment and pipeline materials they will need to exploit the pocket.”
“At the start of the road, near the housing areas, is this a school?”
“Yes, that is the girls’ school. Perhaps two hundred students. Girls are not encouraged to get an education.”
“So close to the power plant and the natural gas field. What is the blast radius if the plant had a catastrophic failure?”
“The school and the residential area beyond would be completely destroyed. Ironically, that is where the military commander and his family live.”
“Really? Where?”
“This house. The one with the big lot and the fenced in yard. His wife and daughters work at the girls’ school.”
“Where does the son work?”
“He is a roustabout at the refinery. Not worth much from what I understand.” Saul studied the projection for a moment. “What is their wet navy like?”
“A few small search and rescue vessels. They have the equivalent of a couple of Coast Guard Cutters, but that is about it.”
“You said they had a decent sized fishing fleet. What type of fishing do they do?”
“Drift nets and long lines mostly.”
“No trawlers?”
“Not that we know of.”
“Where are they based?”
“The majority work out of this cove to the east of the main settlement.”
“Is it defended?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“How well do you know my grandfather?”
“Not very.”
“If you knew him better you would not ask me that question.” Saul fixed his gaze on the intelligence officer, but out of the corner of his eye totally saw the look of pride in Greg’s eyes. “I think I’m done, but I am sure I will have more tomorrow.”
Greg put his hand on Saul’s shoulder. “I think you missed one.” He turned to the intelligence officer. “When is fishing season?”
“As I understand the current plans, you will be arriving in the height of fishing season.”
“It only takes a single long line to destroy a good plan,” Greg said.
“I don’t understand the point of these questions,” the intelligence officer said.
Greg answered for his grandson, “Like the questions about the mountains yesterday. When something goes wrong, it will be too late to ask these questions so we have to ask them now.”
“What can go wrong? We have thought this operation through in the most intense detail.”
“Something always goes wrong,” Saul said. “That’s the only thing you can count on. Something will always go dreadfully wrong.”
The final mission briefing was two days later. A new person joined the group. The senior intelligence officer from Interstellar introduced him.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, pleas allow my to introduce Lt. Col. Ramon Gutierrez. He is with the Swordsman Office of the Judge Advocate General and will be joining the mission.”
The new man stood and smiled graciously. “Good Morning. I am Lt. Col. Ramon Gutierrez Senior Prosecutor with the Swordsman Judge Advocate General. I have a warrant for the arrest of Major Emerson Winthrop III on the charge of high treason against the Swordsman Church. Please accept the church’s gratitude in your assistance with this sensitive matter. You must recognize that this mission requires some cooperation from the inside. I will provide that cooperation. Once we reach the space port, I will enable you to pass directly through the guards to Major Winthrop’s office without being challenged. Your job is to get me to the space port undetected and to help me remove him since we know he will not go willingly. The Swordsman Church has agreed to defer his sentence if you take him with you to the next planet you will be colonizing. I will stay behind to oversee the transition of command. Thank you for your assistance in this very sensitive matter.”
There was dead silence in the room.
Greg finally asked, “Why does the church need us? Why can’t they do this on their own?”
“Major Winthrop has his share of followers. If we try to remove him by normal means, we will be faced with an armed insurrection. If we remove him secretly, we can ferret out the traitors and deal with them.”
“How do we know you are who you say you are?” Avi asked.
The intelligence officer from Stellar Interstellar said, “We have vetted him. We have verified his credentials.”
“I am not comfortable with this,” Rachel said. “I think we need to discuss this amongst ourselves. We will let you know our decision.”
The intelligence officer interceded. “Captain, it is not your decision. It is Mr. Rothschild’s decision. Mr. Gutierrez will accompany you on this mission. I don’t believe there is anything more to say.”
Rachel stared at the officer for a moment. “Well, then, I think we should review our plan for who goes on this trip. I think taking the colonists with us on the ship’s first operational mission is asking a lot of the ship and its crew. Maiden voyages are glorified test flights. I would rather not have to deal with frightened civilians if there is a problem.”
The shipyard’s chief engineer interrupted. “With all due respect, if I may offer an opinion, I agree. There are too many things that can go wrong on an unproven design like this. We should leave the colonists here. The ship can come back for them when the mission is complete.”
The officer scowled. “You may leave the colonists here.”
“While we’re at it, I want our personal cargo ship along as a rescue vehicle should we need to be evacuated in transit.”
“It’s your ship, you may do with it what you like.”
“Thank you.”
“I believe that wraps it up. You leave at 0900 the day after tomorrow.”
As they walked along the corridor to the ship, Rachel asked Faye Anne, “What do you know about this guy?”
Faye Anne answered through gritted teeth. “Nothing. He’s a surprise. This stinks like old fish.”
“See what you can find out,” Rachel ordered.
“Aye, Captain.”
After dinner that evening, the families gathered at the pool. This would be the last time for a long time that any of them would be able to go swimming, and they wanted to take advantage of the luxury one more time.
While the children were playing, Rachel asked Faye Anne, “What did you find out?”
“Nothing. I had Peter steal my Dad’s files before we left Eretz. There is no mention of this guy.”
“That’s what Peter wanted all the extra data storage for,” Rachel said.
“Yeah, my Dad kept excellent records. We thought we knew every Swordsman above the rank of Lieutenant. I don’t know how we could have missed a light colonel. It doesn’t make sense,” Faye Anne said.
“What about Interstellar? Do they have any background?”
“They won’t let me anywhere near their files.”
“Because they’re afraid you’d steal them?”
“Well, they’d be right. I would steal them, so I can’t say I blame them,” Faye Anne laughed.
“So we have this guy who comes from our enemy, but he’s working with us so he claims to be our friend, but we really don’t know who he is,” Rachel concluded.
“Yup.”
“Nice!”
At 0900, as scheduled, Elizabeth and Peter lifted off and headed for the Swordsman stronghold as part of a convoy carrying the sorts of personnel and material a growing colony would need to support itself.
Mimi, J T and their sons Brian and Keith flew with Peter accompanied by the girlfriends, Red and Rhonda an
d their mother. On a colonizing expedition, they would carry the farm animals. Carrying large numbers of people and farm animals on the same ship tended to not be healthy for either the animals or the people, so Peter would carry the animals and their human attendants. The rest of the combined Solomon and Abrams families, Sabrina, Fiona, Alina, her daughter, Sylvia, Ellie Mae and Elvira traveled on Elizabeth. To improve the mission’s similarity to a real colonization mission, Buddy, Daisy and Sabrina’s convoy escort ship were docked to three of Elizabeth’s external docking ports. A cargo tug like the one Greg had used to initially populate Homestead was docked to one of the smaller docking locations. The other two were empty. Three med-evac ships nestled in the holds. Peter carried the ship that Saul had used for practice and a med-evac ship.
Elizabeth’s battleship section held quarters for an entire ship’s company of engineers and fire control personnel, none of whom were present on this mission. The families spread out among the officers’ quarters. Gutierrez took the cabin that the chief fire control officer would have used. The twenty Marines assigned to the mission took the quarters traditionally assigned to the Marines. The ship was large enough for people to rattle around in, but Isaac and Joshua kept everyone busy doing medical drills against the day when they would be glad they had taken the time to train in advance.
Saul quickly tired of the medical training and requested permission to work combat simulations. Greg suggested that he and Avi take over that part of their training. Greg broke the kids into teams. Saul and Fiona were a team. Rebecca and Alina’s daughter, Sylvia, seemed to work well together, and they were paired. Moses had become attracted to Ambrosia, Reuben and Suwanee’s eldest daughter, and they became Elizabeth’s alternate bridge crew. Jasmine, Reuben and Suwanee’s second daughter, also demonstrated a talent for the games and often played the aggressor along with Greg and Avi. The combat teams drilled for long hours while Greg and Avi developed more and more diabolical challenges to throw at them. While Saul and Fiona had a giant head start, everyone was impressed with how quickly the others came up to speed.
While the crews on the giant freighters that made up the bulk of the convoy wiled away the two weeks in transit with a variety of entertainments, Elizabeth and her crew trained intensively knowing that some day they would be glad they did.
THIRD GENERATION CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE CONVOY PROCEEDED under heavy guard through the Stonebridge system’s defensive network. The planet Stonebridge was the third planet in the system. As the convoy passed by the system’s fourth planet, Elizabeth and Peter launched masking drones to hide their separation from the rest of the convoy. They parked on the smallest of the fourth planet’s three moons while the rest of the convoy headed to the freight marshaling area. As the convoy passed through the system’s perimeter, the entire Solomon family remained glued to the sensor displays.
Greg was the first to spot the interceptors. “They’re Light Saber 104’s,” he said.
One of the younger children asked, “What does that mean?”
Saul answered, “The Light Saber series is built by the Swordsmen for in system defense. It is small, lightly armed, lightly armored and easy to operate. In some ways it is like an old fighter airplane. Its dozen missiles are all mounted externally and only fire forward. It also carries four lasers mounted in the nose. The 104 is the latest in the series. It has been out for two years. I am surprised to see this many of them. They are not cheap.”
“Is it faster than our ships?”
“No, our ships are hyper capable. Theirs are not. They have an inertial compensator, but top out at five percent of light speed. I have been told that the reason they are not hyper capable is because the commanders fear the pilots would abandon their posts if they could. The ship’s mission is pretty suicidal. They race straight at an enemy until they get in range to fire their under powered missiles and then try to break away presenting the enemy the perfect target to shoot them down. When you use a lot of them, it works well enough against pirates and drug runners, but against a ship as well armed as Elizabeth, it would be suicide.”
When the convoy arrived at the freight area, one of the Swordsman technicians monitoring the convoy called his supervisor. “Sir, when the convoy entered the system, there were eighteen ships. Now there are only sixteen. What happened to the other two?”
“They have come. Just as the Major has foretold. We will find them. We will kill them. Jews and Infidels, we will kill them all.”
The freight transfer proceeded without incident. Normally, when the freight transfer is complete, the senior financial officer of the shipping fleet reports to their counterpart on the ground to compare manifests. When all parties are satisfied, the fleet departs. This time however, instead of the financial officer, the last ship to the surface would be the Solomon battle group and the contingent of Marines in a med-evac ship. The plan was that the Marines would stay out of sight unless the remainder of the party ran into trouble. Gutierrez would take them to Winthrop, and they would whisk him out to the ship for excommunication and banishment to exile. In order to not risk reprisals against the fleet, it would depart as soon as the med-evac ship hit the atmosphere leaving Elizabeth and Peter with their attendant support to finish the task. Theoretically, the fleet would be long gone before the shooting, if any, started.
The fleet departed on schedule. Rachel would have liked to have kept the three convoy escort ships, but she knew that the convoy needed them as much or more than she did. Moses and Saul monitored the med ship’s progress from Elizabeth’s bridge. All the combat trained adults except Mimi and J T were on the med ship. Mimi and J T remained on Peter’s bridge in case they needed to jump out for help. In the cold light of the predawn, the med ship landed at the spaceport in accordance with plan and taxied to the hangar where the financial people were to be waiting for them. Telemetry and tracking equipment traded digital information, but the only voice transmissions were between Greg and the air traffic control tower. A geosynchronous satellite stealthily parked next to an existing communications satellite relayed signals from the med ship to Elizabeth and Peter in their hiding places. Once having reached its parking place, the med ship shut down its engines.
The first warning that anything was amiss came when the hangar doors opened. A platoon of heavily armed Swordsman Marines stormed out of the doors and surrounded the ship. Four helicopter gunships appeared out of nowhere and hovered. Any one of the helicopters would have been sufficient to destroy the unarmed med ship, but clearly, someone was taking no chances.
Gutierrez turned to the others on the bridge and said, “I will be happy to accept your surrender. You are prisoners of the Swordsman Church.” He grinned broadly.
When the first Marine had barreled through the hangar door, Rachel had set the “screamer” signal to alert the ships in space that they were in danger on the ground. This “screamer” emitted a siren like sound on a range of frequencies. Moses picked it up immediately even as Swordsman defenses locked on the frequencies and attempted to jam them. The same signal that initiated the “scream” activated an ultraviolet communications laser mounted in the med ship’s rudder focused on the relay satellite. The children on Elizabeth’s bridge could hear everything that was going on down below.
“Elizabeth! Sound battle stations!” Moses shouted. He quickly switched the audio feed from the relay satellite so only he could hear it. He knew what Swordsmen did to female prisoners, and he did not want the younger children hearing their mothers tortured. It would be hard enough to deal with later. Right now, they had to be prepared to defend themselves. He turned to his brother, “What do we do?”
“We go get them,” Saul said more calmly than he felt.
“How?” Moses asked, on the verge of panic.
“I haven’t figured that out yet.” He thought for a moment. “Elizabeth, please download everything we know about this planet and its defenses to Buddy.”
“Roger that!”
“Buddy!” Saul
called out, knowing the little warship would be listening after a battle stations alert. “How soon can you be ready to depart?”
“Sooner than you could get here.”
“Daisy?” Saul called the other P I ship.
“Initiating pre-flight procedures!” Daisy sounded excited. All his life Saul had lived around these two sentient ships, but had never gotten used to the idea that a machine could express emotion.
Fiona had been on the bridge when things busted loose on the surface. Rebecca, Sylvia and Ambrosia came running. Turning to them, Saul said, “Fiona, you’re with me in Buddy. Rebecca, you and Sylvia go with Daisy. Ambrosia, stay here with Moses. Suit up everyone!”
Moses picked up the microphone. “All personnel will wear flight suits with helmets closed until further notice!”
Saul smiled. That was a trick out of their mother’s book. By suiting up everyone on board, if they had to gas the ship against an intruder, they would not be affected. It also improved the survival rate if the ship took a hit.
Moses said to Ambrosia, “Lets get some missiles in the tubes and get the lasers warmed up.”
Saul and his small expeditionary force headed for the P I ships. As soon as they had disconnected themselves from Elizabeth, Saul rattled off a set of coordinates and called for the hyper jump. By jumping at hyper speed, they could cover the distance faster than light without being detected. During the jump, Saul asked, “Buddy? Can we enter the atmosphere tail down?”
“I am designed to enter an atmosphere nose first so my heat shield can absorb the heat of reentry.”
“I know that, but if we do that, the missiles mounted on the external racks would be ripped off, and there is no way of knowing how much damage that would cause. Besides I don’t want to give away ordinance quite yet.”
“It’s never been done before. That doesn’t mean it can’t. It will take a tremendous amount of energy.” Buddy sounded anxious and uncertain.
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